“Are you saying that running away from a good life is genetic, Nolan?”
“No, Ly.” The reply is so quiet, she can barely hear it. “I’m just saying that it’s possible.”
Day Four
It’s Nolan’s idea to see the psychic, but Lyla is on board. Nolan is Southern California born and bred, the son of a holistic doctor and a yoga teacher, and so he’s always been the woo-woo one in their relationship. But while Lyla has rolled her eyes more than once over her husband’s regular visits to astrologers and crystal healers and Reiki masters, she’s willing to try anything to find Fidelity. At this point, she believes in psychics more than in the growing team of state police detectives, feds, and hired private investigators who have now joined Shelby Martin and company in not finding their daughter.
Lyla wakes up from an Ambien-induced half sleep just before sunrise, her phone alarm chirping furiously in the midst of a wispy dream about a crystal ball floating in space.
Without speaking, barely making a sound, she and Nolan throw on their incognito clothes—baseball caps; sunglasses; dark, baggy sweats—and leave the house while their staff is still sleeping. They slip into their most nondescript SUV in the chill of early dawn and drive four and a half miles to the storefront in Woodstock where the psychic resides—a one-story cement eyesore that looks like someone plucked it out of some Florida strip mall and dropped it into arty, picturesque Woodstock, halfway up a forgotten side street, between a vacant lot and a cemetery.
“Nice.” Lyla is standing outside the building, staring at the plastic bead curtains, the yellow letters on the faded purple sign:
PSYCHIC READINGS, TEA LEAVES, PAST LIFE REGRESSION.
There’s something off about the sign, something not entirely trustworthy, like a bottle of pills that’s slightly past its expiration date. Just before they ring the bell, Lyla turns to Nolan.
“How did you hear about this psychic?”
“Aziz.”
“Your bodyguard.”
He nods.
“Since when did Aziz get into that stuff?”
“Keep an open mind, Lyla.”
“I’m trying.”
“Listen, I spoke to the psychic over the phone. Before I even said my name, he knew I was looking for my daughter.”
“He?”
“Yeah?”
“I was picturing a woman. Aren’t psychics usually women?”
“Only in movies, Lyla.”
A man opens the door before anyone knocks, maybe as a display of his gift. He’s short and frail, with stringy gray hair, a beak-like nose, and bashed-in-looking cheeks. “I’m Carl,” he says.
Lyla frowns. A psychic named Carl.
Nolan says, “Thank you for meeting us. I know it’s early—”
“It’s never too early for the truth.” Carl speaks in a cigarette rasp. If he dressed better, he could pass for an aging rock star. But in tattered drawstring pants, bare feet, and an inside-out T-shirt with a faded Nike logo, he looks more like an escaped patient of some sort—most likely mental, though he could have walked out of any hospital ward. “I dreamed of you last night.” He says this to Lyla.
“You did?”
“You’re in a lot of pain.”
Lyla levels her eyes at him, thinking, Of course I am. My kid is missing. Is this supposed to be impressive?
He holds her gaze. His eyes are watery and bright and strangely riveting. The longer Lyla looks into them, the more uncomfortable she feels—as though he’s trying to page through her brain. “Being Fidelity’s mother,” he says. “Protecting her. It’s why you’re alive.”
Lyla swallows hard. She’s had this exact thought more than once within the past four days, though she’s never dared say it aloud. Before her lost year, Lyla used to believe she was born to be an actress, that it was the only truly good thing about her, her talent. But then Fidelity came into her life, and the veil lifted, and she could finally see what she was put on this earth to do.
All the acclaim she’s gotten since then—the plum roles, the magazine covers, the Oscar, even . . . Without Fidelity, it’s meaningless. Without Fidelity, she has no business being alive.
Carl says, “Why do you feel so guilty, Lyla?”
“Excuse me?”
He smiles, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “Don’t mean to pry,” he says. “Occupational hazard.”
“I don’t feel guilty.”
“You don’t?”
“No. Why would I?”
Carl shrugs. “Sometimes my senses fail me.”
He turns and lets them inside, Lyla staring hard at his back. Who are you? She can feel Nolan watching her, but she pretends not to notice.
“Excuse the look of the place,” Carl says. “I only returned to town a few days ago after being gone for more than a year. I haven’t had the chance to clean. My clients don’t even know I’m back . . . that is, if I still have any clients.”
The psychic’s workspace is small and gloomy and smells of cigarettes and stale incense. It’s mostly empty, save for a few folding chairs and a metal table that looks as though it were stolen from an interrogation room, a lineup of multicolored crystals at its center.
Lyla says, “Where does a psychic go for more than a year?”
“Here and there. I move a lot. Places don’t matter to me.”
“What does matter to you? Friends? Family?”
His gaze burns on Lyla’s face. “I don’t have friends or family,” he says.
Carl takes one of the folding chairs, Nolan and Lyla two others. Lyla finds herself drawn to the dust motes floating on the light that oozes through the purple-and-gold beaded curtain. She feels as though she’s in a movie, lit by a kind cinematographer. “So what brought you back to Woodstock?”
“Same thing that’s brought me anywhere. I felt a call.”
Sunlight strokes the side of Lyla’s face, and she can almost hear the soundtrack swelling. She knows what Carl means. She’s felt that call. It took her out of her life nine years ago, and then it brought her back. Maybe it really is genetic. Maybe Fidelity felt it, too, and that was why she left school, and all they need to bring her back is another call. The right call.
Carl says, “Did you bring something of hers?”
Nolan opens his messenger bag and pulls out one of Fidelity’s T-shirts—pale pink, with a glittery Hello Kitty riding a bicycle on the front. Lyla bought it for her in Japan last year. It’s one of Fidelity’s favorites, and seeing it now, the shirt without Fidelity in it, takes Lyla out of the movie.
It’s been four days. Four days without a ransom note or a reliable sighting or a single lead that’s panned out. Four days without Fidelity. How many times has Lyla gone into her room, praying to find her there scribbling in her diary or playing games on her laptop? How many times has she stood in Fidelity’s closet, inhaling the fading scent of her daughter’s clothes and feeling only the lack of her, a black hole at the center of her chest, swallowing everything else?
Fidelity’s pink laptop. Her fuzzy diary. The police have taken both of them, and Lyla may not ever get them back. Her daughter. Her only child . . . Why do you feel so guilty, Lyla?