Lippman, Laura (16 page)

“Prajapataye Svaha,” he said, making the second offering. “Prajapataye Idam Na Mama.”

Now he must meditate until the fire was out.

THE REPORTERS HAD come in threes—three newspapers, three television stations, three radio stations, three wire services. In each group there had been one reporter who pushed for an exclusive, a private chat with Dave and Miriam, but those young comers professed to understand when Chet told them that the Bethanys preferred to tell the story only so many times, once to each medium. The reporters were uniformly polite and kind, wiping their feet on the welcome mat, expressing admiration for the remodeled farmhouse, not that any work had been done in the past year. Their voices were gentle, their questions circumspect. One young woman, from Channel 13, teared up prettily while looking at the girls’ photos. These were not the school photos, the head shots against the sky-blue background. The television types explained to Dave and Miriam that these photos had been shown so many times that they had “lost their impact,” and it would be helpful to use new ones. They chose candid snapshots that Dave kept in his study, souvenirs of a trip to the Enchanted Forest on Route 40. Heather was sitting on a toadstool, cross-legged, while Sunny stood with arms akimbo, trying to pretend she wasn’t having a good time. But it had been a wonderful day, as Dave remembered it, with Sunny’s adolescent moodiness barely in evidence, everyone tender and sweet with each other.

The newspaper reporters, the last to troop through that day, had no qualms about using the school photos that had been circulating since the girls disappeared. Yet they insisted on a new photo of Dave and Miriam, sitting with the framed school photos on the coffee table in front of them. How Dave dreaded seeing that tableau in tomorrow’s newspaper—the awkward lie of his arm across Miriam’s shoulders, the distance between their bodies, their faces turned away from each other.

“I know that there was one ransom demand, in the first week,” said the reporter for the
Beacon
, the morning newspaper. “And it turned out to be a hoax. Have there been any similar dead ends over the past year?”

“I don’t know—” Dave looked to Miriam, but she would not speak unless pressed directly.

“I wouldn’t expect you to tell me anything that could hurt the investigation.”

“There were other calls. Not ransom demands. More like…taunts. Obscene phone calls, although not in the traditional sense.” He stroked his chin, where he was growing a beard, or trying to, and glanced at Chet, who was frowning. “You know, maybe you shouldn’t put that in? The police determined it was just some sick kid. He didn’t know us, or the girls. It didn’t mean anything.”

“Of course,” the
Beacon
reporter said, nodding in robust sympathy. Forty or so, he had been a war correspondent in Vietnam and spent time in the
Beacon
’s foreign bureaus—London, Tokyo, São Paulo. He had arrived first and managed to convey this information about himself in the flurry of introductions at the beginning. His credentials were supposed to be a comfort, Dave supposed, an assurance that the assignment had been given to an accomplished professional. But Dave couldn’t help feeling that the man was trying to console himself, too. Two missing girls were not on a par with wars and foreign policy. He looked liked a drinker, his nose sprouting with broken blood vessels, his cheeks an unhealthy red.

“The one ransom demand—the one down at War Memorial Plaza—did they ever figure out who called that in?” This was the
Light
reporter, tiny and feisty. With her short pixie cut and miniskirt, she looked to be barely out of college. A jogger, Dave thought, eyeing the hard calves pressed into the lower rung of her straight-backed chair. He had started running after the first of the year, although it wasn’t the result of a New Year’s resolution. Like someone summoned by unseen voices, he had gotten up one day, put on sneakers and headed to Leakin Park, circling the tennis courts and the miniature train track. He had run to Crimea, the summer mansion built by the family that founded the B & O Railroad, passing the old church that his girls had believed was haunted. He was up to five miles a day now, but he had liked jogging better in the beginning, when it was hard and he had to focus on every rasping breath. Now that he reached the so-called runner’s high within minutes, his mind was free to roam again, and it always ended up in the same place.

“No…I…no—Look, there’s nothing new. I’m sorry. It’s been a year, and there’s nothing new. I’m sorry. We’re talking to you because we’re hopeful that your articles might prompt someone’s memory, might reach that one person who knows something…. I’m sorry.”

Miriam shot him a look that only a spouse could interpret:
Stop apologizing
. His eyes replied,
I’ll stop when you start
.

The reporters didn’t seem to notice. Did they know? Had Chet told them—off the record, of course—all the family’s secrets, then persuaded them that they were irrelevant to the girls’ disappearance? Dave almost wished now that the whole story had come out. On his best days, he knew it wasn’t Miriam’s fault. Wherever Miriam had been that day—at an open house, here on Algonquin Lane, in a motel, in a motel,
in a fucking motel
—she couldn’t have saved the girls. Besides, he’d been in a bar for much of the afternoon, although he had managed to pull himself together and arrive at the mall to fetch the girls, no more than five minutes late. His chest still hurt, thinking about how he had felt that afternoon.
Anger
, assuming that the girls were late, inconsiderate.
Panic
, but a safe, this-will-soon-pass-and-I-can-be-angry-again panic. When forty-five minutes had passed, he checked with the mall security, and he still remembered with great affection the overweight security guard who had walked the corridors with him, his voice a rumbling bass of benign possibilities. “Maybe they took the bus home. Maybe they decided to take one of those shopper surveys, back in the offices. Maybe they got a ride home with a friend’s mother or father and thought they could get home in time to call you at your work.”

Dave had seized on the security guard’s words as if they were a promise, racing home in his VW bus, certain that the girls would be there, finding only Miriam. It had been so strange, seeing her, wanting to confront her, yet having to put aside the suddenly minor fact of her infidelity. Miriam had been marvelously calm, calling the police, agreeing that Dave should go back to the mall and continue searching while she stayed at the house in case they showed up. At 7:00 P.M., they still assumed the girls would show up. It was hard to describe how slowly that expectation, that hope—what had once seemed their
right
—had slipped away. Yet emotion was not linear, and the absence of a definitive answer still made Dave’s imagination jump and lurch, concocting far-fetched endings. This was the stuff of soap operas, so why shouldn’t it have a soap-opera ending? Simultaneous amnesia, an eccentric Greek billionaire whisking Dave’s children away, unharmed, to live in a Bavarian castle. Why not?

Whatever Miriam’s sins, Dave had been the one to give permission for the mall trip, and although Miriam had assured him again and again that he had not erred, he still blamed…
her
. He’d been distracted, anxious. At the time he’d thought he was worried about the business, but he saw in hindsight that he’d known that something was wrong in their marriage, that his subconscious was picking up signals it didn’t know how to translate. If he’d been more
present
that day, if he’d been focused on his daughters, he might have realized they were too young to be given that much freedom. Miriam had set him up.

He felt no guilt over Jeff Baumgarten or his wife, who had been subjected to repeated police interviews after Miriam volunteered the truth. After all, Thelma Baumgarten had been in Dave’s store at 3:00 P.M., and the store wasn’t more than three miles from the mall. The motel was even closer, as it turned out. But Dave hated Mrs. Baumgarten more than he hated Jeff. Jeff had fucked his wife, but Mrs. Baumgarten…Well, Mrs. Baumgarten, with her stupid little note, had tried to project all this on Dave. Fat little hausfrau. If she’d kept her husband happy, maybe he would have left Miriam alone.

“Were there any strong suspects along the way?” Dave looked at Chet, longing for permission, for encouragement, to tell everything about the Baumgartens. Chet shook his head, ever so slightly.
It would only muddy the waters
, he’d told Dave whenever he lobbied to make everything—
everything
—public on the grounds that every bit of truth mattered, that it was not only a virtue in and of itself, but essential to learning what had happened to his daughters. The more the public knew, the better equipped people were to help them. Maybe Mrs. Baumgarten had hired someone. Maybe Jeff Baumgarten had arranged for the children to be kidnapped to force Miriam to continue their illicit affair. Maybe something had gone wrong with his plan. Candor was liberating, Dave argued, and it would be rewarded. They should put everything out there and let the chips fall where they may.

Maybe that was why Chet had decided he should be here for the interviews. Dave couldn’t see any other reason. Very little had been held back in the early weeks of the investigation—the discovery of Heather’s purse, the calls that placed the girls in various states (South Carolina, West Virginia, Virginia, Vermont) and various states (alive and laughing, swimming and playing, eating hamburgers, bound and gagged). Funny, but those delusional types were worse than the pranksters in their own way. They thought their fantasies were helpful, but all they brought was pain.

“Do you—can you—” The
Star
reporter, an absolute throwback, with a hat on the back of his head and a narrow tie, groped for words in a way that Dave knew could end up in only one place. “Do you continue to hope that your daughters will be found alive?”

“Of course. Hope is essential.”
Mutual amnesia, a castle in Bavaria, a gentle eccentric who wanted two golden-haired daughters, but would never, ever harm them
.

“No,” Miriam said.

In the corner of the room, Chet tensed, as if he thought he might have to intercede. Had the detective finally detected something? Could he know that it was Dave’s instinct, at that very moment, to slap his wife? It wouldn’t be the first time that he had fought down that impulse in the past year. The reporters seemed shocked, too, as if Miriam had broken some unwritten protocol of the mourning parent.

“You’ll have to excuse my wife,” Dave said. “She’s very emotional, and this is such a difficult time—”

“I’m not a child who didn’t get my nap today,” Miriam said. “And I’m no more emotional today than I was yesterday or I’ll be tomorrow. I would love to be wrong about this. But if I don’t accept the
probability
of their deaths at this point, how do I live? How do I go on?”

The reporters did not take notes during this outburst, Dave noticed. Their instinct, like everyone else’s, always, was to protect Miriam, to assume that her inappropriate comments had come out of grief. Reporters were supposed to be cynical, and maybe they were, when they were covering stories of Watergate-like intrigue and conspiracy. But in Dave’s experience they were among the most naïve and optimistic people he had ever met.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and even he didn’t know why he was apologizing this time.

After a beat, Miriam nodded as well, rounding her shoulders in a way that invited Dave to put his arm around her. “It’s hard,” she said. “Remaining open to hope, yet needing to grieve. Whatever I do or say, I feel as if I’m betraying my daughters. We just want to
know
.”

“Is there a moment in the day when you’re not thinking about this?” asked the
Light
reporter.

The question caught Dave off guard, in part because it was new.
How do you go on, how do you not think about this
? Those he knew. But was he ever
not
thinking about the girls? Rationally, there must be such moments, but he couldn’t identify them now that he was trying. When he made preparations for dinner, he still reviewed the girls’ likes and dislikes.
Meat loaf again
? Stopped at a red light in afternoon traffic, he would relive the conversations they once had about the nearby Social Security Administration and why it had so many employees who clogged the streets every day at 4:00 P.M.
They’ll give us money when we’re old? Cool
! If he started thinking about how much he hated Jeff Baumgarten, how he wanted to wait outside his Pikesville home and run over him with the VW bus when he came out to pick up the morning newspaper from the circular driveway—even that was really about the girls, wasn’t it? When he opened the mailbox and found his copy of
New York
magazine, he would see the Ronrico rum ad on the back and be reminded of how fascinated Heather was by its campy re-creations, while Sunny had giggled over the weekly word contests. Every object in the world—the collapsed lean-to that the girls had built in the backyard, the glittering green of a Genesee ale can in the gutter, Miriam’s ratty blue bathrobe—brought him back to his daughters. Conventional wisdom held that he could not continue at this level of intensity forever, that all pain fades, but he
wanted
to keep it going. The dull fury he felt was like a lamp lighted in the window, waiting for the girls to find their way home.

Even now his mind would not stop racing, which defeated the purpose of the Agnihotra. He had tried, delicately, to bring this up with the others who followed the Fivefold Path. Estelle Turner was long dead, of course, and Herb had wandered out to Northern California after she was gone, saying he had to cut all ties in order to go on. Dave had called him about the girls, but Herb had seemed vaguely resentful to be reminded of his prior life in Baltimore and had turned the conversation inside out so it ended up being about
him
, his various disillusionments and losses. “I just can’t find the
way
, buddy,” he said repeatedly. But then everything had been an abstraction to Herb—except for Estelle. Even the death of Herb’s own daughter had been shrugged off as some kind of spiritual test, part of his goddamn
journey
.