The Shortest Distance Between Two Women (14 page)

“I’m going over there,” Emma decides. “She could be lying on the floor dead or some damn thing.”

“I’m going along,” Debra announces, grabbing her purse, temporarily forgetting she hates Emma, and then yelling at the top of her lungs, “Chloe, did you see Grandma or not?”

And Kevin is left standing in the kitchen without having been able to say one more word while the front door slams and Emma backs out of the driveway so fast he can hear her tires screech.

Emma and Debra cannot shut up on the twelve-and-a-half-minute drive to their mother’s house. The two sisters are imagining everything from a massive heart attack, to terrorists, to some escaped sex offender. They ramble on about gas explosions, tripping on one of the rugs Marty has placed at precise intervals on almost every inch of her wooden floors, home invasions, a whacked-up dance partner following their mother home and cracking her head open during a wild tango. Debra speculates about broken hips, a long night of drinking turned deadly while Marty was laboring over how many hot dog buns to order for the reunion.

“There has to be some logical explanation,” Emma insists, trying to remain calm.

“Really, Emma, for crissakes, is there anything really
logical
about our mother?” Debra shouts.

“Debra, for once in your life can you not yell just to yell? Can you just shut up for once?”

Emma says these words before she even has time to think about the consequences. She watches her sister turn towards her, sees her take in a huge breath the same way a prizefighter sucks in a wad of air before he or she strikes a blow, and Emma freezes. She dreads what might come next.

“What the hell does that mean, Emma?”

“It means you yell all of the time and there is no reason to yell all of the time and it does not become you,” Emma manages to squeak out.

“I do not yell all of the time,” Debra yells. “Our lovely sister Joy is the one who yells all of the time.”

“So do you.”

“I do not!”

“Debra, you are yelling right now. I know you are frightened, so am I, but yelling doesn’t make it any better. It frightens people. I think your kids and Kevin have been scared half their lives.”

Debra turns away from Emma and slumps furiously into her seat as they pull into Marty’s dark driveway. Emma cannot believe she is still alive or that Debra has not ripped out her throat. Maybe she should have done this ten years ago. Then she realizes no one has heard from Marty in several days and she feels a stab of fear.

The porch light is not on.

Al, the town gossip, probably already has a senior Amber Alert flashing out on the interstate.

Emma and Debra look at each other without saying another word, shelve the shouting discussion, and let themselves in through the side door where they discover Marty’s car parked like a lone soldier standing guard over the empty garage.

The sisters say nothing. Emma peeks into the car to see if Marty’s keys are on the seat where she always keeps them even though Emma has told her a thousand times not to do that because anyone could break in and then steal the car. The keys, of
course, are right where they always are. Emma rushes to catch up with Debra, who has walked forward and turned on the lights as she does so.

They start in the kitchen. They move towards the back of the house, through the dining room, into the living room and through their old bedrooms as if they are detectives looking for clues. The spare bed in Emma’s old room is made. The hall bathroom off the kitchen is immaculate. Nothing is out of place in the hall or in the other two bedrooms. The two sisters walk together, lest they find something or someone, or in case they discover a bogeyman, which both of them silently believe may be totally possible.

“This is so weird,” Debra finally admits as they get to the door of Marty’s bedroom. “I don’t think I’ve ever been over here like this when Mom isn’t here. It’s spooky, isn’t it?”

“The house is
never
this quiet. There are either twenty people running around or Mom is yapping about something and it’s—Well, it’s never quiet. Especially this time of the year with all the crap she has to do for the reunion.”

The idea of that—of the quiet without Marty—paralyzes both of them. Emma suddenly realizes she’s going to cry. A long stream of emotion rides itself up past her heart. And when she looks at Debra she sees that she too is about to cry.

“What would it be like if she never came home?” Emma’s voice quivers. “Oh, Deb, I would die, wouldn’t you? I don’t know what I would do.”

“She is such a pain in my ass most of the time, but do you think we could even go on without her constant set of instructions?” Debra sniffs. “The idea of it all is too much, just too much.”

Before moving towards Marty’s bedroom Emma cannot stop herself from reaching for Debra. They embrace for just a few seconds in a way that seems to erase the snarly conversation in the car
and maybe every nasty thing either one of them has said about each other for the past fifteen years.

Or so Emma thinks.

The room is as silent as the rest of the house and they search again for clues, for anything—a ransom note, a message written in lipstick on the bathroom mirror, an SOS scrawled with soap inside the shower door.

The clues come in unexpected places.

“Do you recognize these slippers?” Debra asks as she crawls on her knees to grab at something she notices under the bed.

“Well, those are clearly men’s slippers. I’ve never seen them before.”

Emma and Debra look at each other and both raise their eyebrows.

“Shit,” Debra says first and then quickly adds, “Go look in the bathroom again. There’s so much stuff in there we probably missed something.”

Emma spins around and almost trips as she lunges towards the very room she thought she had just examined.

“Good Lord!” she yells out to Debra in less than a minute.

“What?”

“Come look at
this
.”

A very large matching male thong.

“Whoever wears this must be huge,” Debra squeals. “Jesus.

“Keep going,” she demands. “Holy shit, sister.”

“I don’t want to keep looking, Debra. I’m not sure I want to know what’s behind this … this stuff,” Emma stammers as she gingerly rehangs the nightie.

“What could it be, for crying out loud?”

“How do you know about that stuff?”

“It’s my part-time job as a dominatrix, what do you think? I’m forty-three, do you think I live in a cave?”

Debra has this sudden image of half her family in red stilettos, whipping naked men in tight thongs who are begging to be hurt.

She laughs. Not just a little laugh but a very loud snort that makes Emma snap.

“You’re laughing and our mother is
missing?”

“My God, Emma, look what we just found. Come on, I’m dying to keep looking. Can you
imagine
what’s in the dresser drawers?”

“We are not going through Mom’s drawers. This is an invasion of privacy, for God’s sake. I can’t do it. And I sure as heck wouldn’t want anyone to do it to me.”

“She’s missing,” Debra fires back, wondering what could possibly be in Emma’s drawers that she doesn’t want anyone to find. “We’re looking for clues, remember?”

“There’s a difference between looking for clues and just being darn
nosy
.

“No,” Emma says, hastily putting the skimpy nightie back on top of the thong and then washing her hands as she yells at Debra to stop looking.

“This doesn’t locate our missing mother,” Debra whines.

“Maybe she doesn’t want to be found.”

“It’s just not like her,” her sister persists. “She’s never done this before.”

“Maybe we don’t really know everything about her. I mean, really, look what we just found, for crying out loud.”

Debra stops, waves her hand back and forth in front of her
face as if she is fanning herself or trying to shoo a bug away from her mouth, then tells Emma that if she thinks any more about sexy nightwear or chains and whips or whether or not they actually know their mother, she will have a nervous breakdown.

Emma and Debra stand at the edge of their mother’s bed in silence for a long time, trying not to think. Averting her eyes from the bed, from the bathroom door and from the unopened dresser drawers, Emma decides they should go to her house and see if maybe Marty has left her a note like she often does on the kitchen counter. There is simply nothing else to do. Plan B will be designed on the way to Emma’s house, which is about the same twelve-and-a-half-minute drive in the opposite direction.

The drive is a blur of conversation that neither of them could remember if they were ever to testify in court. The Gilford sisters’ brains have suddenly turned into a wild pinball machine game where the balls seem to have developed minds of their own.

At Emma’s garage, Debra grabs Emma’s house keys from her and lurches for the back door, saying, “I need a frigging glass of wine.”

God, she’s sweet. What in the world happened to her? When did this sister and the other one who lives way too close to me get to be bitter, overbearing, curt, only occasionally kind women? Kevin, Emma imagines, must have had his little penis yanked off about ten years ago. It’s a wonder he’s not the drinker in the family, but it’s also a wonder he hasn’t smothered Debra in her sleep. Except he seems to genuinely love her. Go figure, Emma laments.
No wonder I’m not in a successful relationship. I clearly know nothing about having one.

There is no note on the counter from Marty and lest she fall any further into the mysteries of her increasingly nasty sister’s life, Emma decides to check her own cell phone for messages while Debra uncorks the only bottle of wine in the house.

There is a parade of messages from work, one sweet voicemail from Stephie telling her that when Emma gets old and can’t take care of herself she can count on Stephie as long as she takes her to some more cool places and can forgive her.

Zip from Grandma.

Zero from the Higgins sex slave.

Not a thing from the Gilford Family Matriarch.

Then there is a panicked lunge for the old phone machine when Debra reaches for it because Emma suddenly comes out of her lost-mother coma and remembers what is on the machine. Amazingly, Debra does not spill one drop of wine as she reaches the machine first, pushes the New Messages button and stands back with one hand on her hip. Emma pours herself a glass of wine that she realizes she is going to need because of what is coming next.

There are three telemarketer calls, which piss off Emma who has tried without success to understand how you can be on the Do Not Call list and still get calls for everything from life insurance to refinance offers.

You would think that the call from Marty would be the most important one the two sisters discover. The call that sort of explains everything. The call that goes like this:

But this was not the biggest news. The biggest bombshell on Emma’s answering machine was not the message that their mother had taken off suddenly to an island in the middle of the ocean with some guy that they either didn’t know or did know and who had not revealed his true intentions.

The biggest bombshells were the other two phone messages. The ones Emma has not been able to bring herself to erase.

Both Emma and Debra listen to them without moving. Their wineglasses are glued to their lips. Emma for sure is not breathing. Debra is trying to remember how to breathe. They are both staring at the phone machine as if there is a chance it may spontaneously burst into flames.