When I went into Grace’s bedroom to kiss her goodnight, it was already in darkness, but I quickly saw her silhouetted against the window, where she was peering at a moonlit sky through her telescope. I was just barely able to see that she had crudely wrapped masking tape around the scope where it was supported by the stand to hold it together.
“Sweetheart,” I said.
She twinkled some fingers but didn’t pry herself away from the telescope. As my eyes adjusted I could see her Cosmos book open on her bed.
“Whatcha see?” I asked.
“Not much,” she said.
“That’s too bad.”
“No, it’s not. If there’s nothing coming to destroy Earth, that’s a good thing.”
“Can’t argue with that.”
“I don’t want anything to happen to you and Mom. If an asteroid was going to hit our house by morning, I’d be able to see it coming by now, so you can rest easy.”
I touched her hair, ran my hand down to her shoulder.
“Dad, you’re bumping my eye,” Grace said.
“Oh, sorry,” I said.
“I think Aunt Tess is sick,” she said.
Oh no. She’d been listening. Instead of being down in the basement, she’d been hiding at the top of the stairs.
“Grace, were you-”
“She just didn’t seem very happy for her birthday,” she said. “I’m way happier than that on my birthday.”
“Sometimes when you get older, having a birthday isn’t quite such a big deal,” I said. “You’ve already had a lot of them. The novelty kind of wears off after a while.”
“What’s novelty?”
“You know how when something’s new, it’s exciting? But then after a while, it gets kind of boring? When it’s new, it’s a novelty.”
“Oh.” She moved her telescope a bit to the left. “The moon is really shiny tonight. You can see all the craters.”
“Get to bed,” I said.
“In a minute,” she protested. “Sleep tight, and don’t worry about asteroids tonight.”
I decided not to be heavy-handed and demand that she get under the covers immediately. Letting a kid stay up past her bedtime to study the solar system didn’t strike me as a crime worthy of intervention by the child welfare authorities. After giving her a gentle kiss on her ear, I slipped out of her room and back down the hall to our bedroom.
Cynthia, who’d already said goodnight to Grace, was sitting up in bed, looking at a magazine, just turning the pages, not paying any real attention to them.
“I have some errands to run at the mall tomorrow,” she said, not taking her eyes away from the pages. “I’ve got to find Grace some new running shoes.”
“Hers don’t look worn out.”
“They’re not, but her toes are jammed up in them. You joining us?”
“Sure,” I said. “I might cut the grass in the morning. We could grab some lunch there.”
“That was nice today,” she said. “We don’t see Tess enough.”
“Why don’t we make it a weekly thing?” I said.
“You think?” She smiled.
“Sure. Have her here for dinner, take her to Knickerbocker’s, maybe out to that seafood place along the Sound. She’d like that.”
“She’d love it. She seemed a bit preoccupied today. And I think she’s starting to get a bit absentminded. I mean, she already had ice cream.”
I took off my shirt, hung my pants over the back of a chair. “Oh well,” I said. “That’s not a big thing.”
Tess had held off telling Cynthia about her health problems. She wouldn’t have wanted to spoil her own birthday celebrations for Cynthia. And while it was certainly up to Tess to decide when to break the news to Cynthia, it felt wrong to know this while my wife was kept in the dark.
But an even greater burden was knowing, for the first time, about the money that had been sent anonymously to Tess over several years. What right did I have to keep that information to myself? Surely Cynthia was more entitled to know about it than I. But Tess had held back from telling because she thought Cynthia was fragile enough these days, and I couldn’t disagree. And yet.
I’d even liked to have asked Cynthia whether she knew her aunt had paid a couple of visits to Dr. Kinzler, but then she’d want to know why Tess had mentioned that to me and not her, so I left it alone.
“You okay?” Cynthia asked.
“Yeah, good. Just kind of beat, that’s all,” I said as I stripped down to my boxers. I brushed my teeth and got into bed, lying on my side, my back to her. Cynthia threw her magazine onto the floor and turned off the light, and a few seconds after that, her arm slipped around me, and she stroked my chest, and then she took me in her hand.
“How beat are you?” she whispered.
“Not that beat,” I said, and turned over.
“I want to be safe with you,” she said, pulling my mouth down to hers.
“No asteroids tonight,” I said, and if the lights had been on, I think I might have seen her smile.
Cynthia fell asleep quickly. I wasn’t so lucky.
I stared at the ceiling, turned over on to my side, glared at the digital clock. When it turned over to a new minute, I started counting to sixty, seeing how close I could come. Then I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling some more. Around three in the morning, Cynthia sensed my restlessness and said groggily to me, “You okay?”
“Fine,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”
It was her questions I couldn’t face. If I knew the answers to the questions Cynthia would have about the cash-stuffed envelopes that had been left for Tess to help pay for her upbringing, I might have told her about it right away.
No, that was not true. Having some of the answers would only spark more questions. Suppose I knew the money was being left by someone from her family. Suppose I even knew which one.
I wouldn’t be able to answer why.
Suppose I knew the money was being left by someone outside her family. But who? Who else would feel responsible enough for Cynthia, about what had happened to her mother and father and brother, to leave that kind of money to care for her?
And then I wondered whether I should tell the police. Get Tess to turn over the letter and the envelopes. Maybe, even after all these years, they still held some secrets that someone with the right kind of forensic equipment could unlock.
Assuming, of course, that there was anyone still in the police department who cared about this case. It had gone into the “cold” file a very long time ago.
When they were doing the TV show, they had a hard time even finding anyone still on the force who’d investigated the incident. Which was why they’d had to track down that guy in Arizona, sitting out front of his Airstream, so he could insinuate that Cynthia had had something to do with the disappearance of her brother and her parents, the prick.
And so I lay awake, haunted by the information I had that Cynthia did not, and how it only served to remind me of how much we still didn’t know.
I killed some time in the bookstore while Cynthia and Grace looked at shoes. I had an early Philip Roth, one that I’d never gotten around to reading, in my hand when Grace came running into the store. Cynthia trailed behind her, a shopping bag in hand.
“I’m starving,” Grace said, throwing her arms around me.
“You got some shoes?”
She took a step back and modeled for me, sticking out one foot and then the other. White sneakers with a pink swoosh.
“What’s in the bag?” I asked.
“Her old ones,” Cynthia said. “She had to wear them right away. You hungry?”
I was. I put the Roth book back and we took the escalator up to the food court level. Grace wanted McDonald’s, so I gave her enough money to buy herself something while Cynthia and I went to a different counter to get soup and a sandwich. Cynthia kept glancing back over to the McDonald’s, making sure she could see Grace. The mall was busy on this Sunday afternoon, as was the food court. There were still a few tables free, but they were filling up fast.
Cynthia was so occupied watching Grace that I moved both our plastic trays along, gathered together cutlery and napkins, loaded the sandwiches and soup as they became ready.
“She’s got us a table,” Cynthia said. I scanned the court, spotted Grace at a table for four, waving her arm back and forth long after we’d caught sight of her. She already had her Big Mac out of the box when we joined her, her fries dumped into the other side of the container.
“Eww,” she said when she saw my cream of broccoli soup. A kindly looking, fiftyish woman in a blue coat, sitting alone at the next table, glanced over, smiled, and then went back to her own lunch.
I sat across from Cynthia, Grace to my right. I noticed that Cynthia kept looking over my shoulder. I turned around once, looked where she was looking, turned back.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing,” she said, and took a bite of her chicken salad sandwich.
“What were you looking at?”
“Nothing,” she said again.
Grace pushed a fry into her mouth, biting it into quarter-inch segments at a furious rate.
Cynthia was looking over my shoulder again.
“Cyn,” I said, “what the hell are you looking at?”
She didn’t immediately deny this time that something had caught her eye. “There’s a man over there,” she said. I started to turn around and she said, “No, don’t look.”
“What’s so special about him?”
“Nothing,” she said.
I sighed, and probably rolled my eyes, too. “For crying out loud, Cyn, you can’t just stare at the guy for-”
“He looks like Todd,” she said.
Okay, I thought. We’ve been here before. Just be cool. “Okay,” I said. “What is it about him that makes him look like your brother?”
“I don’t know. It’s just something about him. He just looks like Todd would probably look today.”
“What are you talking about?” Grace asked.
“Never mind,” I said. To Cynthia, I said, “Tell me what he looks like, and I’ll just casually turn around and get a look at him.”
“He’s got black hair, he’s wearing a brown jacket. He’s eating Chinese food. Right now, he’s eating an egg roll. He looks like a younger version of my dad, an older version of Todd, I’m telling you.”
I swiveled slowly on my backless chair, made like I was taking in the various food kiosks, thinking about going to get something to eat. I saw him, catching some sprouts with his tongue that were falling out of the half-eaten egg roll. I’d seen a few pictures of Todd from Cynthia’s shoebox of mementos, and I suppose it was possible that had he grown up to be in his late thirties, early forties, he might look a bit like this guy. Slightly overweight, a doughy face, black hair, maybe six foot, although it was hard to tell with him sitting down.
I turned back. “He looks like a million other people,” I said.
“I’m going to get a closer look,” Cynthia said.
She was on her feet before I could protest. “Honey,” I said as she walked by me, making a halfhearted attempt to grab her by the arm and failing.
“Where’s Mommy going?”
“To the washroom,” I said.
“I’m going to have to go, too,” Grace said, swinging her legs back and forth so she could catch glimpses of her new shoes.
“She can take you after,” I said.
I watched as Cynthia took the long way around the food court, heading in the opposite direction from where the man sat. She walked past all the fast-food outlets, approaching him from behind and to the side. As she came up alongside him, she walked straight ahead, went to the McDonald’s and joined the line, glancing occasionally, as casually as possible, at the man she felt bore an amazing resemblance to her brother Todd.
When she sat back down, she presented Grace with a small chocolate sundae in a clear plastic cup. Her hand was shaking as she put it on Grace’s tray.
“Wow!” said Grace.
Cynthia showed no reaction to her daughter’s expressions of gratitude. She looked at me and said, “It’s him.”
“Cyn.”
“It’s my brother.”
“Cyn, come on, it’s not Todd.”
“I got a good look at him. It’s him. I’m as sure that’s my brother as I am that that’s Grace sitting there.”
Grace looked up from her ice cream. “Your brother’s here?” She was genuinely curious. “Todd?”
“Just eat your ice cream,” Cynthia said.
“I know what his name is,” Grace said. “And your dad was Clayton, and your mother was Patricia.” She rattled off the names like it was a classroom exercise.
“Grace!” Cynthia snapped.
I felt my heart begin to pound. This could only get worse.
“I’m going to talk to him,” she said.
Bingo.
“You can’t,” I said. “Look, it doesn’t make any sense that it’s Todd. For Christ’s sake, if your brother was just out and about, going to the mall, eating Chinese food in public, you think he wouldn’t have gotten in touch with you? And he’d have spotted you, too. You were practically Inspector Clouseau there, wandering around him as obvious as all hell. It’s just some guy, he’s got some passing resemblance to your brother. You go over to him, start talking to him like he’s Todd, he’s going to freak-”
“He’s leaving,” Cynthia said, a hint of panic in her voice.
I whirled around. The man was on his feet, wiping his mouth one last time with a paper napkin, crumpling it in his hand and dropping it onto the paper plate. He left the tray sitting there, didn’t take it over to the wastebasket, and started walking in the direction of the washrooms.
“Who’s Inspector Cloozoo?” Grace asked.
“You can’t follow him into the can,” I cautioned Cynthia.
She sat there, frozen, watching the man as he wandered down the hall that led to the men’s and ladies’ rooms. He’d have to come back, and she could wait.
“Are you going into the men’s room?” Grace asked her mother.
“Eat your ice cream,” Cynthia said.
The woman in the blue coat at the table next to us was picking at her salad, trying to pretend she wasn’t listening to us.
I felt I only had a few seconds to talk Cynthia out of doing something we’d all regret. “Remember what you said to me, when I first met you, that you were always seeing people you thought might be your family?”
“He’s got to show up again soon. Unless there’s another way out. Is there another way out back there?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “It’s perfectly normal to feel this way. You’ve spent your whole life looking. I remember, years ago, I was watching Larry King, and they had that guy on, the one whose son was killed by O. J., Goldman I think it was, and he told Larry that he’d be out driving, and he’d see someone driving a car like his son used to drive, and he’d chase the car, check the driver, just to be sure it wasn’t his son, even though he knew he was dead, knew it didn’t make any sense-”
“You don’t know that Todd is dead,” Cynthia said.
“I know. I didn’t mean it to come out that way. All I’m saying is-”
“There he is. He’s heading for the escalator.” She was on her feet and moving.
“For fuck’s sake,” I said.
“Daddy!” Grace said.
I turned to her. “You stay right here and do not move, you understand?” She nodded, a spoonful of ice cream stopped frozen en route to her mouth. The woman at the next table glanced over again and I caught her eye. “Excuse me,” I said, “but would you mind keeping an eye on my daughter, just for a moment?”
She stared at me, unsure what to say.
“Just a couple of minutes,” I said, trying to reassure her, then got up, not giving her a chance to say no.
I went after Cynthia. I managed to spot the head of the man she was after disappearing, descending the escalator. The food court was so crowded it had slowed Cynthia down, and there were half a dozen people between her, as she got onto the top step of the escalator, and the man, and another half dozen between Cynthia and me.
When the man got off at the bottom, he started walking briskly in the direction of the exit. Cynthia was straining to get around a couple ahead of her, but they were balancing a stroller on the precarious steps, and she couldn’t get past them.
When she hit the bottom, she broke into a run after the man, who was nearly to the doors.
“Todd!” she shouted.
The man was oblivious. He shoved open the first door, let it swing shut behind him, threw open the second, proceeded on to the parking lot. I’d nearly caught up to Cynthia as she went through the first door.
“Cynthia!” I said.
But she was giving me no more attention than the man was giving her. Once she was out the door, she called “Todd!” again to no effect, then caught up to the man, grabbing him by the elbow.
He turned around, startled by this out-of-breath, wild-eyed woman.
“Yes?” he said.
“Excuse me,” Cynthia said, taking a second to catch her breath. “But I think I know you.”
I was at her side now, and the man looked at me, as if to ask, “What the hell’s going on?”
“I don’t think so,” the man said slowly.
“You’re Todd,” Cynthia said.
“Todd?” He shook his head. “Lady, I’m sorry, but I don’t know-”
“I know who you are,” Cynthia said. “I can see my father in you. In your eyes.”
“I’m sorry,” I said to the man. “My wife thinks you look like her brother. She hasn’t seen him in a very long time.”
Cynthia turned angrily on me. “I’m not losing my mind,” she said. To the man, she said, “Okay, who are you then? Tell me who you are.”
“Lady, I don’t know what the fuck your problem is, but keep me out of it, okay?”
I tried to position myself between the two of them, and using as calm a voice as possible, said to the man, “This is a lot to ask, believe me, I understand, but maybe, if you could tell us who you are, it would help put my wife’s mind at ease.”
“This is crazy,” he said. “I don’t have to do that.”
“You see?” Cynthia said. “It’s you, but for some reason, you can’t admit it.”
I took Cynthia aside and said, “Give me a minute.” Then I turned back to the man and said, “My wife’s family went missing many years ago. She hasn’t seen her brother in years and you, evidently, bear a resemblance. I’ll understand if you say no, but if you were to show me some ID, a driver’s license, something like that, it would be a tremendous help to me, and it would put my wife’s mind at ease. It would settle this once and for all.”
He studied my face a moment. “She needs help, you know that,” he said.
I said nothing.
Finally, he sighed and shook his head and took his wallet from his back pocket, flipped it open, and withdrew a plastic card. “There,” he said, handing it to me.
It was a New York State license for Jeremy Sloan. An address up in Youngstown. It had his picture right on it.
“May I have this for one moment?” I asked. He nodded. I moved over to Cynthia and handed it to her. “Look at this.”
She took the license tentatively between her thumb and index finger, examined it through the start of tears. Her eyes went from the picture on the license to the man in person. Quietly, she handed the license back to him.
“I’m very sorry,” she said. “I’m, I’m so sorry.”
The man took the license back, slid it into his wallet, shook his head again disgustedly, muttered something under his breath although the only word I caught was “loony,” and headed off into the parking lot.
“Come on, Cyn,” I said. “Let’s get Grace.”
“Grace?” she said. “You left Grace?”
“She’s with someone,” I said. “It’s okay.”
But she was running back into the mall, across the main court, up the escalator. I was right behind her, and we threaded our way back through the maze of busy tables to where we’d had our lunch. There were the three trays. Our unfinished Styrofoam bowls of soup and sandwiches, Grace’s McDonald’s trash.
Grace was not there.
The woman in the blue coat was not there.
“Where the hell…”
“Oh my God,” Cynthia said. “You left her here? You left her here alone?”
“I’m telling you I left her with this woman, she was sitting right here.” What I wanted to tell her was that if she hadn’t run off on a wild-goose chase, I wouldn’t have been faced with the choice of leaving Grace on her own. “She must be around somewhere,” I said.
“Who was she?” Cynthia asked. “What did she look like?”
“I don’t know. I mean, she was an older woman. She had on a blue coat. She was just this woman sitting here.”
She had left her unfinished salad sitting on her tray, along with a paper cup half filled with Pepsi or Coke. It was like she’d left in a hurry.
“Mall security,” I said, trying to keep panic from taking over. “They can watch for a woman, blue coat, with a little girl-”
I was scanning the food court, looking for anyone official.
“Did you see our little girl?” Cynthia asked people at surrounding tables. They looked back, their faces blank, shrugging. “Eight years old? She was sitting right here?”
I felt overwhelmed with helplessness. I looked back toward the McDonald’s counter, thinking maybe the woman lured her away with the promise of another ice cream. But surely Grace was too smart for that. She was only eight, but she’d been through the whole street-proofing thing and-
Cynthia, standing in the middle of the crowded food court, started to shout our daughter’s name. “Grace!” she said. “Grace!”
And then, behind me, a voice.
“Hi, Dad.”
I whirled around. “Why’s Mom screaming?” Grace asked.
“Where the hell were you?” I asked. Cynthia had spotted us and was running over. “What happened to that woman?”
“Her cell rang, and she said she had to go,” Grace said matter-of-factly. “And then I had to go to the bathroom. I told you I had to go to the bathroom. Don’t everybody freak out.”
Cynthia grabbed Grace, held her close enough to smother her. If I’d been having qualms about keeping to myself the information about those secret payments to Tess, I was over them now. This family did not need any more chaos.
No one spoke the whole way home.
When we got there, the message light on the phone was flashing. It was one of the producers from Deadline. The three of us stood in the kitchen and listened to her say that someone had gotten in touch with them. Someone who claimed to know what might have happened to Cynthia’s parents and brother.
Cynthia phoned back immediately, waited while someone tracked down the producer, who’d slipped out for a coffee. Finally, the producer was on the line. “Who is it?” Cynthia asked, breathless. “Is it my brother?”
She was convinced, after all, that she had just seen him. It would have made sense.
No, the producer said. Not her brother. It was this woman, a clairvoyant or something. But very credible, as far as they could tell.
Cynthia hung up and said, “Some psychic says she knows what happened.”
“Cool!” said Grace.
Yeah, terrific, I thought. A psychic. Absolutely fucking terrific.