When She Was Gone
Authors: Gwendolen Gross
GWENDOLEN GROSS
“Her deceptively spare style glistens.”
â
Publishers Weekly
Praise for her lyrical, compulsively readable novels
WHEN SHE WAS GONE
“What happens behind the closed doors of a neighborhood, and beyond the facades of the people who live there? Gwendolen Gross has the sharp insight of the documentarian, turning her lens on each house of a frightened town after a college-bound girl goes missing. Full of heart but free of sentimentality,
When She Was Gone
shows the sinews of belonging and not-belonging that bind a community.”
âNichole Bernier, author of
The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D
“Gwendolen Gross uses the disappearance of a young woman to tell the story of a community in crisis, and her gaze is both unflinching and surprisingly tender. . . . A dark but elegantly crafted book, the tension building toward a climax that promises redemption to its wayward characters.”
âHolly Goddard Jones, author of
The Next Time You See Me
“Gwendolen Gross creates characters so familiar they could live next door.
When She Was Gone
reflects a perfect balance of darkness and intricate struggles, woven together with hope and redemption. . . . Some of the most powerful and beautiful language I've read in quite a while. Mix in a nail-biting plot and you have one outstanding read.”
âAnn Hite, award-winning author of
Ghost on Black Mountain
THE ORPHAN SISTER
“A trio of sisters navigates familial quirks and tragedy in Gross's emotionally charged fourth novel. . . . Gross brings abundant personality to the sisters' interactions.”
â
Publishers Weekly
“Engaging and sentence-perfect, wonderful in so many ways, but I love it best for its vibrant, emotionally complex main character Clementine. I felt so entirely with her, as she loves those around her with both devotion and complexity and as she struggles to achieve a delicate balance between belonging to others and being herself.”
â
New York Times
bestselling author Marisa de los Santos
“Breathtakingly original. A haunting exploration of love, loyalty, sisters, hope, and the ties that bind us togetherâand make the ground tremble beneath us when they break. I loved, loved, loved this novel.”
âCaroline Leavitt,
New York Times
bestselling
author of
Pictures of You
“This charming portrait of an impossibly gorgeous and gifted family is something rare: a delightful confection, filled with humor and warmth, that also probes the complex nature of identity, the vagaries of romantic and filial love, and the materialism inherent in contemporary American culture.”
âJoanna Smith Rakoff, author of
A Fortunate Age
“It's such a treat to find a great book. . . . A fun read that also has some weight to itâa perfect balance.”
â
Chick Lit Is Not Dead
“Gross presents emotional and divisive situations with a sort of objective reality that lets the story shine through. . . . The dramatic tension kept me turning page after page.”
â
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CONTENTS
TO DR. EDWARD S. GROSS, MY DAD
ONE DAY
24 SYCAMORE STREET
M
r. Leonard was the last person to see seventeen-year-old Linsey Hart before she vanished into the steamy blue of a late-summer morning. He was sitting on the black-lacquered piano bench in the bay window, practicing and singing, wordlessly, along with the Schumann
Kinderscenen
. The window was open only a crack, but Mr. Leonard could still detect the wormy smell of the sidewalk as the sun struck the puddles from last night's downpour. He held his fingers over the keys to listen to the silence between songs, the breath at the end of the poem lines. Mr. Leonard loved quiet as much as he loved sound.
The night before, he'd heard her whispering into the phone, stooped on the wicker rocker on the porch, her long legs awkwardly folded, so she looked like a strange sort of beetle in the sick orange light of the streetlamp.
“I can't,” she'd said. “They'd worry.”
Mr. Leonard wasn't a spy; he merely had insomnia. He followed all the rules: no alcohol, walking or bicycling for exercise, warm milk, reading, but not of troublesome materialsâbed for sleep only, though the book on sleep said
bed for
sleep and sex,
which wasn't something Mr. Leonard worried about as a possible pollutant these days. He kept his windows open. The cicadas rubbed a brisk rhythm; even in death they were insistent, even calling out their last hope for procreation they played
presto marcato
.
“I have it,” said Linsey, sweet sotto voce. “I'll bring it.”
Then she went inside, her hair a long loose tail behind her, leaving him alone to wander his house, looking for clues that might help him dream.
Then it was morning. Mr. Leonard had fallen asleep in an armchair that smelled of linseed oil and Murphy's. He went to the piano, because it was always the first person he spoke to after sleep. He played the Chopin
Barcarolle
and the first movement of the Tchaikovsky no. 1 in B-flat Minor, and it was only just past five; Mr. Leonard could tell by the soft wash of the light and the hissing of dew just lit on the lawns. He started the second movement of the Tchaikovsky, then he paused.
Mr. Leonard resumed playing as Linsey stepped out onto her front porch in the hard blue light of the early morning, tucking her long hairâsandy blond, she called it, but it held mica glints, almost silverâbehind her ears. She pressed against the piston slide of the screen door to prevent the usual sigh and thunk as it closed. It was five thirty in the morning. Mr. Leonard could see her without looking up. This was something people didn't know about him. There were many things, speculative and real, that people knew about Mr. Leonard. They knew he was single and agedâsixty-two,
actually, though the children had simply slipped him into that category of old person, slightly scary, who gave excessive amounts of candy at Halloween and therefore was to be tolerated. They knew he lived in the house his parents had lived and died in; that his aunt had lived and died in; that a series of small dogs, shelties, usually, or West Highland whites, had lived and died in, except for the last, Moonlight. Moonlight was named after a sonata, though most neighbors thought it was just an overly romantic appellation bequeathed by a lonely old man to a runny-eyed dog who was poisoned and died in the Hopsmiths' garden. His death caused great speculation about a number of teens, but the mystery was never solved.
They knew he was a music teacher for some years at the middle school, for a single year at the high school before a combination of budget cuts and the secret of his colon cancer decided his retirement. He had the first surgery, and couldn't play for a week; never mind that eating became even less of a pleasure than it had been. But he was still alive, despite the dire suggestions of Dr. Meade, who called him personally after Mr. Leonard told the receptionist, then the nurse, then the nurse again in consecutive phone calls that he would not take radiation. He'd rather let it grow back, the way death always grew, slow consumption of the cells, whole organs, the eventual, beautiful collapse. It wasn't a fight he could win, and he didn't want the battle wounds. He rarely ever hurt unbearably, except when digesting, and that was a dull pain, a squeezing, a roughhousing of his insides. As long as he
could play, as long as he had enough money and jasmine tea in the afternoons and could tote new books from the libraryâalternating fiction and nonfiction like an assignmentâevery Wednesday on his old upright bicycle with a basket. Old-lady bicycleâit had been his aunt's, his father's sister's, though she rarely rode it, so the chain had been a seizure of rust when he first wheeled it out of the shed.
Mr. Leonard had taken private piano students for some years, children whose parents evidently were not suspicious of his linty cardigans or the way he looked just sideways at almost everyone. They deposited their sleek-haired charges inside the foyer of the grand Victorian for innocuous training in culture. Then the students stopped. Mr. Leonard played his piano, sometimes early in the morning, sometimes passionately and late at night, sometimes with a languor that swept across the neighborhood like a wind-borne cloud of pollen and perfume. Once or twice, new people with money who had moved in and updated their kitchens with walk-in Sub-Zeros and ten-burner Viking stoves called the police to complain about the noise. Rachmaninoff. Brahms. Liszt was never a problem; Liszt caused children to dance on the sidewalks, or sway pleasantly in their dreams after bedtime. Generally, the police did nothing. Or they rang the doorbell and asked Mr. Leonard to please close his window, to please play
pianissimo
at least (a joke with Beau, the cop who lived around the corner on Pine. It was Beau's one “music word”âhe'd been one of Mr. L.'s students in middle school), to keep it down. Mr. Leonard offered them French-press coffee. They
often stopped by the following afternoon for more coffee, and sat on Mr. Leonard's wide brown front steps as if he needed protection.
Linsey knew something about Mr. Leonard, something she had shared with her boyfriend, Timmy, who was supposedly her former boyfriend since Abigail had convinced her daughter to break up with him before going to collegeâthat since he was going to Berkeley, California, and she to Cornell they shouldn't torture themselves with distance.
You're too young to be so serious,
he'd overheard from their porch.