Chapter 4 Lindy #2
No answer.
Eight o’clock.
The sunset was painting the sky over the cove in swaths of orange and purple, the air was cooling, and the crowd was drifting
away. The garbage can was full of paper plates with remnants of white frosting. Everyone said the cake, despite its appearance,
had been delicious. Lindy hadn’t wanted any. She’d gone into the kitchen, tried to focus on tidying up. The kids must’ve been
keeping an eye on her, because they followed her in.
“I bet he stopped for a hike, then got hungry and stopped to eat,” Cody said, as he grabbed a leftover slider from the platter
nearby.
“That doesn’t even make sense,” Hailey argued, with a toss of her long blonde hair. “He wouldn’t do that.”
“He might,” Emma said, tugging at a thread at the hem of her black miniskirt.
“But even if he did, he would call,” Hailey insisted.
“That’s true,” Eli said. He ran a hand through his dark curls.
“Yeah, why hasn’t he called?” Cody said, through a mouthful of slider.
In that moment, Lindy wanted to kill David. How dare he do this to their children? Not show up, leave them all to worry!
But Hailey was right. He wouldn’t do that.
Oh, God. He’d been in an accident.
That was the only explanation. Incapacitated, unconscious, he wouldn’t be able to call.
(Dead? No. Lindy would not allow herself to think that.)
Yes. He had to be at some hospital somewhere between here and Cranston—Providence, Boston, Portsmouth, Portland?—unconscious! Hurt! And she was here serving cake?
She needed to check her cell phone for messages. A hospital might have been able to find her number in his cell. Or access
his medical records, where she was listed as his emergency contact. (Though, God, probably with just the Cranston phone number!)
“I’ve got to check my cell phone,” she told her kids.
“He wouldn’t call your cell phone,” Cody said, folding his big arms. “He knows you don’t get signal here.”
“I know, but—”
Understanding dawned on Hailey’s face. “Oh!” Her eyes filled with sudden tears.
Lindy hugged her tightly. “I know we don’t want to think the worst.”
“Crap,” Emma said. Then she said the word five more times. Lindy saw Eli take a step closer to his twin, and it wasn’t clear
which of them needed comfort more.
“I’ll drive you to town, Mom,” Cody said. When she looked up at him, his jaw was square, and he seemed more grown-up—like
a man, not a boy—than she’d ever seen him. “So you can check your phone.”
Everyone wanted to come along and check their own phones, too, just in case. Kate and her husband, Matt, and Josh and his
wife, Marielle, all wide-eyed now that they were coming to terms with the idea that this might not just be “David being David,”
said they’d hold down the fort, see the dwindling party through. Cody ran over to get his Jeep from Innisfree, and within
five minutes they were on the road, Lindy riding shotgun, Hailey and Eli in the back. Emma, not wanting to leave Reese behind
in a crowd of strangers, had given Eli her phone and passcode. They drove in silence in the twilight through the woods, windows
down, wind whipping their hair, phones in their hands. Fifteen minutes later, as they drove into signal range, the phones
started to ding, ding, ding, ding. Each of them dove into retrieving their messages—there were voicemails, texts!
Lindy had two voicemails, and she dialed in.
Both were spam. Goddamn it.
“I don’t have anything from him, Mom,” said Hailey.
“Me, either,” said Eli. “Neither does Emma.”
“Hold on,” said Cody, and he pulled off onto a side street and stopped the Jeep. (Lindy couldn’t contain a flare of pride
at what seemed uncharacteristic behavior for her youngest: So safety-minded!) In the lowering darkness, his phone lit up in his hand as he activated it and scrolled through. Then he let out a sigh.
“Nope.”
They all sat in silence a moment, then Eli’s voice came from the back seat. “What do we do now, Mom?” he said, sounding small.
She had no idea.
She heard Hailey sniff back tears. Felt the tension of Cody and Eli, too.
She had to think of something.
She told Hailey and Eli to take turns calling David’s cell phone. He would answer for them, if he could. Somehow, she thought
there was still a chance: He just hadn’t wanted the party, he’d decided not to come, he was avoiding her calls because he
knew she’d be mad at him. It was certainly preferable to thinking he was dead in a ditch somewhere. And, yes, she would be
furious.
She told Cody to drive to the hospital.
“He’s not answering, Mom,” said Hailey from the back, and Lindy straightened her spine to keep from starting to cry.
She didn’t expect to find him there—at the small local hospital ER—but somehow her heart was still in her throat as she ran
inside the whooshing double glass doors and up to the glassed-in reception desk, asking breathlessly if by any chance they’d
had a David Kauffman come in.
And somehow her heart still sank when the answer was no.
The helpful lady behind the desk, after a painfully slow search through an old-fashioned filing cabinet, handed over a printed list of all the ERs in New England.
The kids had parked the car and come inside, and, as they gathered around, Lindy shaking her head gently to tell them, No, not here, she noted vaguely that this was the quietest ER waiting room she’d ever been in.
It was empty, in fact. Just further proof,
as far as she was concerned, that Midcoast Maine was heaven; just another reason why she couldn’t wait to retire to Innisfree
year-round with David someday—God, she hoped, hoped, hoped. They’d been talking about it for years. He just had to be okay.
“I have a list!” she told the kids, holding it up, and they huddled together to look.
“That’s a lot of hospitals,” Cody said.
“Here,” Eli said, grabbing the pages out of Lindy’s hand. He borrowed a highlighter from the receptionist and sat down. It
took him one minute flat to highlight all the hospitals along the route from Cranston and tear the list into four pieces.
Mechanically, they called every highlighted number, one by one by one, the beeps of their dialing and their voices filling
the waiting room. “David Kauffman? . . . No?”
“No?”
“Are you sure?”
“No? Okay, thank you.”
Finally, they sat there, defeated, and looked at one another.
“Well, this is good news, right?” Lindy managed to say, but the truth was reflected in her children’s eyes. No matter how
perturbed David might’ve been with Lindy, he would not have just not shown up for his own party, knowing that everyone was
waiting for him. Especially knowing that his kids were waiting for him.
Even if he wasn’t lying in an ER anywhere between here and Cranston that they could find, something had gone terribly wrong.
And now the man Lindy had loved since she was fourteen years old was missing. And they had not the first idea of what might
have happened, or where to start looking for him.