Chapter 61
What happened next exists in a fog. I remember the ice in my limbs. How my head shook from side to side as I wailed like the disabled people in the factory town where my mother had taken me as a girl, who shuffled along the sidewalk making noises I didn’t want to associate with human beings.
When at last I’d quieted, Tom spoke with new gentleness, perhaps frightened of me. “One of us should go home to Henry. You stay, you have your cell phone. Call me as soon as they come back.”
I felt a tide of indignation, wanting to scold him—Tom, of all people!—Don’t be stupid, she’s gone, she might as well be dead.
Still, after he’d gone, I stared feverishly up and down the road as if to conjure their two figures out of the darkness.
I banged again on the neighbor’s door, repeating my questions more urgently, demanding she get the boy who had played with Ida on the day Louise cut her hair—I didn’t know if he was her son or grandson—asking him, had he seen Ida or Louise, noticed anything at all?
No, I gathered from something other than words, no longer able to articulate reality to myself. I went back inside Louise’s.
I lay shivering on the daybed until Tom returned the next morning.
It was five o’clock, he said, seeming confused at finding me still alone, time to come home; Henry needed to wake up and get ready for school.
We went home. In a stupor, I performed those tasks, leaning into their dull regularity.
Henry was eating cereal when he suddenly asked where Ida was.
“She stayed overnight at Louise’s,” I said, smiling, astonished at my ability to pretend this to Henry, how calm I sounded. “Louise is taking her to school.”
But when we reached the courtyard, seeing Henry start across the grass amid all the other children, I was suddenly afraid. “We have to call him back,” I whispered wild-eyed to Tom.
“No, school’s the best place for him,” Tom said. “It’ll give us time to sort things out.”
We drove back to Louise’s. Finding it empty, Tom announced we would drive to the police station. He must have looked up the location the night before. His foresight unsettled me; that, despite assurances to the contrary, he had anticipated this need.
A woman in a gray-and-white uniform greeted us. She remained emotionless as we explained our purpose, afterward showing us into a room where we repeated in greater detail to a police officer, an officious man with fat lips who had introduced himself as Díaz, that a woman had kidnapped our daughter.
“Excuse me, this woman is known to you?”
“Only casually,” Tom said.
He cocked his head in a show of confusion. “And has she ever had the child in her care before?”
Tom looked to me. “She’s watched our children a few times,” I said.
“Then… surely.” He spread his hands, smiling knowingly at Tom as if sharing a private joke, Mothers.
The affront cut me, that I should be grouped with women who fussed over their children with no true sense of danger, and I looked quickly at Tom, pleading for him to intervene, be a man in this country of men.
And for once, when he began to talk in his pedantic way, in the language men share, stacking sentences like heavy blocks into an incontestable meaning, “Our daughter has been taken without permission,” I found it wonderful, gloried in him, thinking, He’s succeeding; they’re going to find Ida now; order will be restored.
It seemed to me it already had when, the instant Tom stopped speaking, Officer Díaz pressed a button and the woman we’d first spoken to entered in her gray pencil skirt and starched white blouse, holding several pages of forms. With a new formality, seating herself at an electric typewriter in order to record our answers, she asked us Ida’s full name; her age; her hair and eye color; her height, which we didn’t know, Tom turning to me with a cowed expression, as though being asked to describe a ghost, “Would you say four foot six, four foot seven,” lifting his hand in approximation.
Next I gave Louise’s address, the names of her acquaintances I knew and of the gallery where she worked.
When the questions were done, I stayed seated as everyone else stood, wanting for there to be more, to prolong the illusion that steps were being taken to restore Ida to me.
We must have gotten Henry from school. Turned on the television for him.
Eaten comida, made conversation. Since the night before, I had been waiting for Tom to demand I explain how I could have let this happen, say definitively it was my fault, break something, yell at me.
I had longed for him to be the kind of husband who would hit me, and taken his withholding of anger as a demonstration of his superiority: He was a good man; I was an animal unfit for life among human beings.
It was what I had long suspected, after all, only intermittently considering I might be the person he’d thought I was.
I hadn’t slept in nearly forty-eight hours.
I sat inside time in a fog. At some point, a knock came at the front door.
Seeing Officer Díaz alone in the stark sunlight, I grew panicked.
Where was Ida? Why wasn’t it dark; wasn’t it the middle of the night?
I had the impulse to keep him from coming inside.
But María had already held open the door for him to pass, Tom asking him to please sit, would he care for anything to drink, some coffee?
No, he shook his head, saying affably, “But you didn’t tell me that the alleged kidnapper is your wife’s mother.”
Tom’s first reaction was to laugh. “Mother? We hardly know her.”
“Really?” He looked to me. “You are Mia, are you not?”
I shook my head slightly, no.
“Senora, please.” He made a show of smiling, as though he’d indulged me long enough.
“I’ve made some inquiries at the school, with some of the parents, and at the art gallery where the old woman works.
” Tom was objecting—it’s not true, there must be some misunderstanding—and Díaz raised his hand to silence him, saying, “If the senora could please clarify.”
Cringing, I tried to reason what to say. “They think that’s my name, yes.”
“And the woman?”
Tom had gone silent, stiffening beside me.
“This woman is your mother,” he pressed, “the girl’s grandmother?”
“They think so, yes.”
“And why would they think so?”
“Because I let them,” I whispered.
“I’m sorry? Can you speak louder?”
“Excuse me,” Tom interrupted, “have you found our daughter or not?”
“I have not,” the policeman said without concern. “But I will be very surprised if she does not return soon. The woman is known here, she has no car, she cannot have gone very far.”
The two of them locked eyes. As if agreeing silently to continue without me, they took several steps away, speaking in lowered tones.
As he listened, Tom leveled his gaze at me and gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head that I first read as This guy’s a complete incompetent, and then understood to mean I know what you’ve been doing, and you are so fucked.
When the policeman left, Tom called down to the courtyard where Henry was playing, telling him to go to his room.
Next he went into the kitchen and told María she could leave for the day; he needed a private word with me.
When she came to the top of the steps, her apron off, I was too ashamed to look at her, knowing I had lost her esteem, that I was an unworthy wife, mother, mistress.
“Todo va a estar bien, senora,” she said when she passed me, lifting her clasped hands before her heart, and I began to weep, hearing as if for the last time her footfalls on the stairs, the overhead light in the laundry room being switched off, the front door closing.
Once she was gone, Tom’s questions began: What, when, how could I? There was a cruelty to his tone I found gratifying, that I believed I deserved.
“I warned you. I told you not to get involved. What did you think?” he sneered. “You would have a life here, with Louise as your mother? We would all move out to the campo, one big happy family?”
I lowered my head.
“Was that your fucked-up little fantasy?”
“Yes.”
He exploded. “You know what? It’s true what you said. You’re damaged. You’re just a fucked-up little girl who wants a mommy, and because of that we’ve lost our daughter.”
“I know, I—Where are you going, Tom?”
He had stepped past me. I stood glued to the spot, watching him cross the living room, pass through the tall glass doors and onto the patio.
At the gardener’s closet, he stopped, fumbling with the padlock, rummaging around inside.
He emerged carrying a crowbar. A sharp jolt of fear struck through me.
Still, I waited at the foot of the three steps leading to the dining area.
Tom strode purposely back inside. At the coffee table, he paused, his mouth twisted.
For what seemed long seconds he stared down at it, the beautiful walnut table that Bill had designed specifically for this space, which Tom and I had always admired.
Calmly he lifted the crowbar above his head, then brought it down.
Again. Again. At the sounds of the vase falling and shattering, the wood splitting, shouts rose from Henry’s bedroom.
Several more blows brought it heavily to the floor, like an animal with a broken back.
“Mommy! What’s happening?”
“Don’t come up,” I begged, darting to the top of the staircase.
“I’m scared!”
Tom was still hacking at it, occasionally heaving the shattered pieces aside.
“It’s all right, Henry. It’s only Daddy.”
At that phrase, in the sudden shrill silence, our eyes met. There were tears all down Tom’s face. His shirt was soaked through with sweat. It occurred to me he might have a heart attack, like Bill. Because of me. Because he’d tried to love someone who couldn’t be loved.
“Tom,” I said.
He shook his head. He had begun to cry in earnest, the way children cry, ugly and uncontained.
“Please, Tom, it’s going to be all right. We’ll find her. We’ll get Ida back.” I was speaking very quietly, words I didn’t believe.
“Why did you do this?”
Meaning the name, I supposed, the charade of being her daughter, and I began gropingly to explain the things that had led me here, my forays into another life—only I couldn’t put them in order. Couldn’t find the beginning, which I sensed was further back, before Mexico or Louise.
When I began again, reaching to him, he brushed my hand away. “Go comfort Henry. He’s frightened. He needs his mother.” The words like a book being shut.
I found Henry crying on his bed, curled sideways beneath his covers, hiding himself. I climbed in behind him and held him tightly, patting his back, caressing his head, repeating over and over the phrase that had become my faithless prayer, It will be okay, it will be okay.
Somehow, with his stuffed animals piled around me, his small back heaving rhythmically, hotly pressed against my belly, I slept.
Not for long. Maybe fifteen minutes, in which I dreamed of the day my mother took me to the cottage to meet her lover.
We were driving along the dirt road. She was looking into the mirror, adjusting her expression, arranging her hair with her hands, just as she actually had.
Except the trees were in full leaf, and the branches met above the car forming a tunnel of green, and she said, “You’re going to be a good girl, aren’t you?
” And then we were outside the cottage door and it had become fall.
I wanted to run, but where? From within and beyond the dream, I thought, This is your only mother.
And so, when the lover answered the door, I gave him my hand, and when he took it, his hand was as cold as a dead man’s.
With a start, I awoke. For a few blissful seconds, I glanced happily at Henry’s things, his stuffed animals, the rug littered with toys between his and Ida’s beds, all of it filling me with joy—Mexico!
We’re still here! Then, all at once, oblivion left me, displaced by a nullifying grief. I ran upstairs, searching for Tom.
“Is she back?”
He was sitting on the couch. The remains of the coffee table had been cleared away. I could tell by the light it was late afternoon.
I flung myself at him. “Is Ida here?”
He only put his hand on my shoulder. It was cold, like the hand in the dream. As soon as it touched me, I knew about Louise. I knew before I fully understood the scope of what she had done. I stared into Tom’s eyes and said simply, “There’s a man.”