Leaving Time(25)

Today, when I get to Hartwick House, my father isn’t in the lounge. I find him sitting in his room, in front of the window. In his hands is a bright rainbow of embroidery floss, twisted into knots—and not for the first time I think that someone’s enterprising idea of therapy is another person’s frustrated hell. He glances up at me when I walk in, and he doesn’t go ballistic—which is a good sign that today, he’s not too agitated. I decide to use this to my advantage, and broach the topic of my mother.

I kneel in front of him, stilling his hands as they tug at the floss, tangling it even worse. “Dad,” I say, as I draw the orange thread through the loops of the other colors and drape it over his left knee. “What do you think would happen, if we found her?”

He doesn’t answer me.

I tug free the candy-apple-red thread. “I mean, what if she’s the only reason we’re broken?”

I let my hands grasp his, where they are clasped around two more strands of floss. “Why did you let her go?” I whisper, holding his gaze. “Why didn’t you ever tell the police she was missing?”

My father had a breakdown, sure, but he’s had moments of lucidity in the past ten years. Maybe no one would have taken him seriously if he said my mother was lost. But then again, maybe they would have.

Then, maybe, there would be a missing persons case to reopen. Then I wouldn’t have to start from scratch, trying to get the police to investigate a disappearance that they didn’t even know was a disappearance ten years ago, when it happened.

Suddenly the expression on my father’s face changes. The frustration melts like foam where the ocean hits sand, and his eyes light up. They are the same color as mine, a too-green that makes people uneasy. “Alice?” he says. “Do you know how to do this?” He lifts the handful of thread.

“I’m not Alice,” I tell him.

He shakes his head, confused.

I bite my lip, untangle the strands, and weave them to make a bracelet, a simple series of knots any day camper would know by heart. His hands flutter over mine like hummingbirds as I work. When I’m done, I unclip it from the safety pin that is fastened to his pants and tie it around his wrist, a bright bangle.

My father admires it. “You were always so good at this kind of thing,” he says, smiling up at me.

That’s when I realize why my father did not report my mother as a missing person. Maybe she wasn’t missing, not to him. He’s always been able to find her, in my face and my voice and my presence.

I wish it were that easy for me.


When I get home, my grandmother is watching Wheel of Fortune on television, calling out the answers before the contestants, and giving Vanna White fashion advice. “That belt makes you look like a tramp,” she tells Vanna, and then she sees me in the doorway. “How did it go today?”

I falter a moment before realizing she is talking about babysitting, which of course I didn’t really do. “It was okay,” I lie.

“There are stuffed shells in the fridge if you want to reheat them,” she says, and her gaze flits back to the screen. “Try an F, you stupid cow,” she shouts.

I take advantage of this distraction and run upstairs with Gertie at my heels. She makes herself a nest on my bed out of pillows and turns in circles to get comfortable.

I don’t know what to do. I’ve got information, and nowhere to go with it.

Reaching into my pocket, I take out the wad of bills I brought and peel one of the dollars off. I start folding it mindlessly, seamlessly, into an elephant, but I keep screwing up and finally crumple it into a ball and throw it on the floor. I keep seeing my father’s hands making angry knots in the embroidery floss.

One of the original detectives who investigated the elephant sanctuary has Alzheimer’s. The other is dead. But maybe it’s not the end of the road. I’ll just have to find a way to get the current detectives in the department to see that the department screwed up ten years ago, and should have considered my mother a missing person.

That should go over really well.

I turn on my laptop, and with a buzzy chord, it comes alive. I type in my password and open a search engine. “Virgil Stanhope,” I type. “Death.”

The first article that pops up is a notice about the ceremony where he was going to be made detective. There is a picture of him, too—sandy hair swept to the side, a big, fat, toothy grin, an Adam’s apple that looks like the knob on a door. He looks goofy, young, but I guess ten years ago, that’s just what he was.

I open a new window, log in to a public records database (which costs me $49.95 a year, FYI), and find the death notice of Virgil Stanhope. Tragically, it’s dated the same day as his detective ceremony. I wonder if he got his badge and crashed in a car accident on the way home or, worse, on the way there. A life interrupted.