I keep hoping I’ll get infected by his enthusiasm, come down with baby fever. But so far, I still react to my period each month as if it’s a miracle.
“Hey,” Eric says. “Bird.” He moves back a little to meet my eyes. “If you’re not into this, we don’t have to do it.”
For a moment, I think he’s talking about having a baby. Then he takes his hand off my breast.
“No, I am,” I say. “I’m just a little distracted.”
“Yeah? What’s going on?”
I want to make my husband happy. I don’t like to burden him with the lists that scroll through my mind. I know he’d be sweet, talk me through each anxiety until he’s sure his logic has tamed it. But I’d still feel it clawing inside me, still hear its nails skittering across my skull, and even Eric has a limit to his patience.
I could throw him off the scent, say that I’m dreading my trip to New Hampshire. He’d appreciate that. But the truth is, I’m looking forward to going home. Ted is retired now, and sometimes, I find myself mouthing that word—retired—because it feels as good as it does impossible. I had to stalk the Psychology Department’s Facebook page, scour the pictures labeled “Professor Brierley’s Farewell Reception,” to believe it was true. He finished up his final semester last month, and without the pressure to publish or perish—“jump through hoops or jump into the grave,” he always says—things might actually be different. That’s why I agreed to help him, even though Eric keeps saying he doesn’t deserve it. When Ted called last week to tell me he’s moving to Florida, he said, “Now that I’m free from the tyranny of academia, I want to be equally free from the tyranny of snow.” Then he said, “I need you, Fern.”
I had to ask him to repeat it. And when he did, I tried to savor it. Ted has never needed me, not outside the context of his Experiments, anyway, so it seems his retirement has already changed him, made him think twice about his daughter, see that she can offer him something his work cannot. Without Ted’s compulsive need to compete with the superstars of his field, this time won’t be like all the others. This time, he won’t keep typing his ideas as I clutch my stomach, suffering from what turns out to be appendicitis. He won’t retreat to his office as soon as I return from the hospital, wearing a bandage I’ll struggle to change on my own. He won’t imply that I’m wasting his time simply by wanting his care.
To Eric, stories like these are enough to warrant me never going home again. He calls what I went through child neglect. But I’ve seen true neglect, gone to fly-infested houses where parents are passed out with needles in their arms, a diapered five-year-old eating cat food while his sister cries in the nurse’s office at school. Whatever I endured with Ted and Mara—it’s miles away from that. No one from Cedar Public Schools or child services ever came to our house.
“Wow, you really are distracted,” Eric says now. “Is everything okay?”
I have to say something, but everything’s a minefield. I look at the Band-Aid on my wrist, and it’s as if I can hear my wound whispering beneath it. After Eric patched me up, I read the Wikipedia page for Astrid Sullivan. It did nothing to clarify where I’ve met her before, but I’ve added sedatives and blindfolds to my list.
“I keep thinking about that woman,” I finally say. “Astrid.”
Eric stretches out his arm so I can burrow into him. “Yeah, it’s crazy,” he says. “But I’m sure they’ll find her soon.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No. I don’t. But they found her last time.”
Only because whoever took her brought her back. Dragged her from the basement where he’d kept her. Tied a black sash around her eyes, plunged a syringe into her veins, left her on the side of the road like trash. I shiver against Eric, and he rubs the goose bumps flecking my arm.
“There weren’t any witnesses, right?” I ask. “Twenty years ago?”
“To her kidnapping? No. That was the whole problem.”
“And no one saw who brought her back?”
“No. She just—reappeared,” he says.
I shake my head against his chest. “I feel like…”
He tucks my hair behind my ear, then massages my scalp. “Feel like what?”
“Like I’ve seen her before. In person. Like I actually knew her.”
Eric’s hand goes still. “She lived almost fifty miles away, Bird. Have you ever even been to Foster?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe. But—”
“Don’t you think you’d remember if someone you knew was kidnapped?”
“Not if I didn’t know she got kidnapped.” When Eric doesn’t respond right away, I keep going. “I told you, I have no memory of that story. So if I knew her but didn’t—or even if I did—hear about the kidnapping, maybe it… I’ve had students who—you know, there’s some trauma or they find out about something—and they can’t even—”
“Fern.” He uses my real name because he wants to make sure I’m paying attention.
“What?”
“You’re spiraling.”
This is what he says whenever my thoughts get away from me. I picture a marble shooting through an endlessly curving slide, corkscrewing down and down along a tube so smooth there isn’t any friction to stop it. Dr. Lockwood has offered me another metaphor. “Think of your brain as a record,” she’s said. “Sometimes the needle gets stuck, and the record begins to skip. It keeps coming back to this one little nanosecond of a song, plays it over and over again. That, right there, is your anxiety. It’s telling you that you have to stay on this thought. But it’s a lie. You can actually train yourself to move the needle, set it on top of another thought altogether and keep on going.”
Sometimes these images help. Sometimes I can picture myself plucking the marble from the slide, the needle from the record, and I can carry on, calmer than before. Other times, like right now, my nerves still feel like wires buzzing with electricity.
“You’re right,” I say to Eric. It’s our last night together for at least a week. I don’t want to ruin it by spiraling. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry. I know the news kind of freaked you out. But like I said, her picture’s been everywhere. You must have seen it at some point.”
I tilt my face toward his, kiss his bottom lip. “I know. You’re right,” I say again. Girls who disappear. Girls who can’t remember. “Let’s get back to what we were doing before, okay?”
“Yeah?” He smiles a little, his fingers skimming my skin. “How much before?”
I put my hand on his cheek, feel the dark stubble he’ll shave off in the morning. Then I cup the back of his neck and pull him so close that, as we kiss, our bodies are practically seamless. I’m certain that if I leave even an inch of space, the woman from the news will slip between us.
* * *
The girl has no face.
Where her eyes and nose and mouth should be, there is only skin. A flat plane of flesh stretched tight as a mask.