Chapter 13 Hailey
Hailey
Nothing. Nothing. All day long, Hailey and her brothers were finding nothing and getting nowhere, for all the miles they drove,
all the stops they made. Each time the three of them went inside any place, Hailey took the lead, showing a photo she had
on her phone of the whole family, zooming in on David’s face. The first couple times, it was the weirdest thing to say the
words, “Our dad’s missing, and we were hoping you might’ve seen him in here?” After that, she got inured to it, almost, and
everyone was kind, asking concerned-sounding questions. When? Why? Really? Yesterday, his birthday party, traveling from Cranston, yes.
Every stop began with a soaring hope, camaraderie with her brothers. “This is the place!” Cody would say, jogging ahead to
open and hold the door for her and Eli, and Hailey would glide into the cool of the air-conditioning, the falseness of fluorescent
lights. She would tip her sunglasses up on top of her head, scanning for the person who looked like they might be in charge,
who might know something.
Each stop ended in the sinking feeling of fresh defeat, and she would exit to the shock of the burning sun, baking pavement, traffic noise, the heat of the black leather Jeep seat through the thin fabric of the sundress she’d grabbed out of her old closet in Cranston.
No one had seen him. Not at the state liquor store, Popovers on the Square in Portsmouth, or the six other places they tried
in New Hampshire. At the “Welcome to Maine” rest stop, she took one of the prescription pills in her purse for her pulsing
headache, and they grabbed maps showing the locations of all the Audubon trails and the state and local recreational trails.
Then they searched for his car at every trailhead in southern Maine, making stops in Kittery, South Berwick, York, Saco, and
on and on. At the Starbucks inside the Kennebunkport service plaza, where their dad often stopped, they were met with blank
stares.
Out on the road, they saw dozens of older-model green Subaru Outbacks. They even saw a couple at the trailheads. But none
of them had Rhode Island plates, and none of them was David’s.
Her headache had gotten worse and worse, causing stars in her vision, nausea.
“I can’t get it,” Eli snapped now, tossing their dad’s flip phone onto the back seat beside him. “I’ve tried all our birthdays,
Mom and Dad’s anniversary, everything! It locked me out now.” He leaned back, spread-eagled, and shut his eyes behind his
sunglasses, letting out a frustrated sigh.
“This sucks,” Cody said, and Hailey could think of nothing to add, and nothing to say to the contrary.
“I’m just heading to work, babe, what’s up?” Noah answered the phone sounding slightly out of breath. She guessed he was walking
the mile to work, which he did most days, citing both the environment and the cost of parking.
Aware of her brothers listening, and of the tire noise again as Cody barreled north on I-95, she rubbed her aching temple
and told Noah they were almost back to Portland, they’d found no trace of her dad, and she’d just talked to her mom, who,
searching with Emma and Reese, had found no trace of him north of Portland, either.
Then Hailey got to the point. “I don’t see how . . .” She stopped. Her head had hammers inside it. “I mean, Noah, we’re going to have to put the wedding on pause for now.”
“Pause? What does that mean?”
The tension—and his cluelessness—finally broke her. “It means I don’t know where my dad is! And I can’t go through the motions
of getting ready for our wedding when—”
“What do you mean, go through the motions? Is that all it is to you?”
He got this way sometimes. She knew how to handle it. You couldn’t blame him; he’d snap. “That’s not what I meant. It’s just—”
She had to get her bearings, remind herself of what was really going on, what was important. She had to remind Noah, too.
“I mean, it’s Dad’s birthday today! Something has to be really wrong for him to not show up, not be in touch with any of us.
He could be hurt! He could be dead, Noah!”
Noah sighed. Had he realized he was being unreasonable? “Okay, look. I’m tense, all right? I wish you were here.”
“Yeah. I wish everything was normal, too.”
Noah sounded like he was running now. Maybe crossing a street. “Look, he’s gonna turn up, okay? I’m sure it’s just some big
misunderstanding. I mean, I just think you’re gonna be sorry if you cancel the wedding for no reason. It’s still almost two
weeks away. Eight-seven-ten, right?”
She and Noah had made the planned date of their wedding, 8/7/10, into kind of a mantra, something they said when one or both
of them got overwhelmed or frustrated, and they joked that repeating it so often would make remembering their anniversary
easy, years from now. She let out a breath. “Yeah. Okay.”
“Okay, good. I gotta go, babe. I’ll talk to you later. Love you.”
“Okay. Love you, too.” She ended the call.
“Did you just agree to keep the wedding on?” Eli said from the back seat.
“Well . . . yeah. I mean . . . Dad could show up any minute!”
“Let’s hope so,” Cody said grimly, not sounding convinced.
Hailey bit her lip, squinting through her sunglasses at the hot concrete out ahead, twisting her ring around her finger. She couldn’t believe she’d said it, in front of her little brothers: that their dad could be dead. She was supposed to hold it together for them, take care of them, protect them.
At least, she’d always managed to before.
Back at Innisfree, Grandma was boiling lobsters as the sunset colored the sky pink and orange outside the windows. The kitchen
was full of steam, and Hailey’s mom was there telling Eli, Emma, and Reese to take some of the cooked lobsters over to the
yellow cottage for the cousins. “This is weird, Mom,” Cody snapped, gesturing to the steaming pot, Greta in her apron and
oven mitts, the big bucket of uncooked lobsters tumbling over each other inside it like bait worms.
“I know,” Lindy said, “but we didn’t want to cancel the lobsters this morning in case he showed up, and then it was too late
to cancel them. So, we’ve got two dozen!”
“I’m not hungry,” Cody said, and it was probably the first time in his life he’d uttered that sentence. A fresh hammering
started up in Hailey’s head, and she exchanged looks with her mom as Cody grabbed a Sam Adams from the fridge. Not meeting
anybody’s eyes, he crossed the cottage in six long strides, went out the front door, and flopped into the Adirondack chair
beside Grandpa on the deck. The room felt suddenly empty, off-kilter. Emma, Reese, and Eli were walking out the back door,
each carrying a platter stacked with cooked lobsters.
Hailey rubbed her pounding temples again. She was sweaty, needed a shower. Badly. But could you just “go take a shower” when your dad was missing and your mom and grandma and maybe your brother were apparently losing
their minds? It didn’t seem like the right thing to do, but Hailey had no idea what she could do. The fishy smell of the lobster was making her nausea worse. She hoped the people at the yellow cottage were hungry, because
nobody at Innisfree was going to eat these things. Lindy was frowning at her, as if preparing to say something, but then just
turned back to Greta, who was telling her to set the timer for the new batch, which Lindy did.
Hailey knew her mom had planned on making a special birthday cake for tonight.
The store-bought one had been fine for yesterday’s party, but tonight’s was going to be a chocolate whiskey cake with ganache meant to replicate one that Lindy and David had had at some restaurant in New York years ago, which he often talked about as the best cake he’d ever tasted.
The restaurant was no longer in business, but Lindy had tracked down the former chef and convinced him to share the recipe.
It called for a special kind of Irish whiskey that cost $150 a bottle, and Lindy had sprung for it, saying the chef swore it made the difference between acceptable and sublime.
Hailey wondered where that bottle was now.
Her mom hadn’t actually made the cake, had she?
Hailey massaged the back of her neck, hoping to ease the pain in her head.
The steam from the lobsters was making the kitchen so hot, and she was seriously about to throw up, but she thought she should stay and try to do something to help.
She heard a knock at the door and went to answer it, wiping the sweat off her face, figuring it was some well-meaning neighbor
wanting an update.
When she saw who was standing on the other side of the screen, her breath caught. She recognized him instantly, though he’d
been gone from The Cove since they were seventeen. Seven summers ago.
“Jack?” She pushed open the door and stepped outside into the cool evening.
She had never imagined she would see him again. He looked like a grown man now, his jaw squared, his eyes narrower. He was
a couple inches taller than her, and his light brown hair was shaggy, bleached blond at the tips by the sun. In a blue Quiksilver
T-shirt, khaki shorts, and OluKai flip flops, he looked at ease, in shape—he must’ve kept up his surfing and tennis—and his
smile was bright even in the dusky light.
“Hey, Hailey! I just got in, and my grandma told me . . .” His smile faded. “She told me about your dad.”
Jack’s grandma, Marjorie Westfield, who was Hailey’s grandma’s least favorite person in The Cove, was from Connecticut and had been a driving force behind the SCPA for as long as Hailey could remember.
Her cottage, “Seabreeze,” had belonged to her family, the Tennysons, from the time she was a girl, and it sat on the cove side, four cottages down from the end of the point.
If you drew lines between Innisfree, the yellow cottage, and Seabreeze, you’d get a triangle that was just slightly askew.
Jack was from San Diego, and for three summers, when he was fifteen to seventeen, he’d come to stay with Marjorie—his father’s mother—at The Cove.
By the second summer, it had become obvious that his parents had shipped him, their only child, off because they were going through a nasty divorce.
By the third summer, he was estranged from his dad.
The fourth summer, Marjorie said that Jack had opted to stay on the West Coast. (Marjorie had a way of discouraging questions,
even as she invited you in for tea and perhaps a slice of her famous cookie cake, which she always seemed to have recently
baked, “just in case someone stopped by.” She would sit across from you in her spotless granite-and-glass kitchen, lean in
like you were all that mattered in the world, tuck her silver hair behind her ear, gaze at you with her soft blue eyes, and
gently pry out every secret. But she was nice, honestly. Hailey didn’t know what her grandma’s problem was with her.) After that, Hailey had learned through the grapevine
that Jack was in school at Stanford, and, much later, working in Silicon Valley. She’d been careful to pay only enough attention
to these reports to glean one thing for sure: He seemed destined never to return to The Cove.
She had thought once or twice, when she was younger, about friending him on Facebook, but finally decided sending a request could
seem pathetic. They had never stayed in touch over the winters, not even after what happened between them when they were seventeen.
Things that happened in the summer didn’t matter at all, that was what Hailey’s grandma always said, and, on the subject of Jack Westfield, Hailey tried to believe that was true.
But now he was standing on the steps of Innisfree, brow furrowed with concern, acting like no time had passed since they’d
last kissed goodbye seven years ago, and she wished she’d taken a shower, put on a better dress.
“I was wondering what I could do to help,” he said.