Evidence of Life. Barbara Sissel Taylor
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kept her gaze, and her face heated as she took his meaning, the nature of the “something else” that would suffice. “We didn’t.” She caught her upper arms in a tight clasp.
Dennis was quiet. Abby stared at the floor. An awkward silence was measured in heartbeats, then Abby had an idea. “Nick cut himself shaving that morning badly enough that he put a bit of tissue on it. I couldn’t find a Band-Aid. He was annoyed.”
“You think you still have it? The tissue?”
“Downstairs.” Abby led the way back to the kitchen. “I emptied the wastebaskets from up here into a bag, but I didn’t take it out yet.”
The scrap wasn’t much, and it was weeks old, but Dennis said it was fine. He said, “We have dental records, too.” He repacked his case and they walked to the front door and out onto the porch. Abby thought of telling him about the phone call. She thought of saying that she believed it came from her daughter, but he would only think of her what everyone else did, that she was losing it, and maybe they were right. Maybe she was.
He paused at the foot of the front steps. “You have a real pretty place here,” he said, “a nice home.”
Abby nodded, and in his quiet presence, she felt somehow comforted. It was almost as if he held her within an embrace.
* * *
After Dennis Henderson left, Abby went upstairs and made herself go through Nick’s closet and his dresser drawers. She wasn’t certain what she was looking for. A confession of lies? A map to his destination with his reason for going there clearly stated? A diary exposing his thoughts? Given his penchant for privacy, she had little hope of finding anything, and she didn’t. Not on his closet shelves, nor tucked into the pockets of his suit coats or slacks. There was nothing in his bureau drawers but the socks and underwear she herself had washed and folded dozens of times.
Back downstairs, she opened the coat closet in the front hall, and her knees weakened slightly at the smell of stale sunshine and wind; the too-familiar scent of her family seemed pressed into the very fibers of their assorted coats and jackets. There were gloves and scarves pushed into cubbyholes—Jake and Nick’s ball caps, an old fishing hat. There were the knitted caps Lindsey favored, a riot of color. Her letter jacket. Abby ran her fingertips down the wool sleeve, swallowing the ache of her tears. She touched the cuff of Nick’s leather bomber jacket, the one she had bought him for Christmas last year, and before she could stop herself, she pulled it off the hanger and slipped into it, shivering slightly at the sensation of the silk lining against her bare arms.
Closing her eyes, she gathered fistfuls of the leather in her hands and brought them to her face, and breathing in, she could smell him, feel him there with her, just waiting for her to open her eyes. He would be there; he would materialize. She leaned against the wall, willing it to be so, willing her mind to let her believe, struggling not to cry when it didn’t happen. It was when she took off the jacket that she felt something in the inside pocket, and her heart stalled, but it was only his checkbook. Nick wouldn’t have missed it; they seldom used checks anymore.
Returning it to the pocket, she rehung the jacket and went back upstairs and into Nick’s study, where she sat behind his desk feeling sick at heart and weird. He wouldn’t like her going through his things. Once, a few months after they married, she had been gathering clothes from their bedroom to do a load of wash, and when Nick had found her emptying the pockets of his jeans, he’d been upset. It had startled her to have him pull the pants out of her grasp, to have him say he would wash his own damn jeans and stomp out of the room. Within a minute or two, he’d come back.
His mother had done it to him, he’d said. She’d been furious when Nick’s father, Philip, had disappeared, and she had taken out her anger on Nick. He was no more trustworthy than his father or any other man, and as long as he lived in her house, she’d felt she had a right to search his belongings and pry into his personal business whenever she felt like it. If Nick had objected, she’d cut off his privileges, made his life hell. Abby had already known by the time Nick shared this with her that Louise was a strong-willed, difficult woman with impossible expectations. She had known Nick’s relationship with his mother was complicated, and that he was conflicted about it. She’d sensed it was a source of pain, even resentment. That day she’d gone to sit beside him on the edge of their bed. He’d taken her hand, and it had been as if he was grateful she was there. Abby remembered telling him she couldn’t imagine the kind of pressure he was raised under. He hadn’t answered, and she hadn’t pressed him about it. It just wasn’t in her nature to pry.
Now Abby pulled open the top middle drawer of Nick’s desk and passed a shaky hand over the contents. Even with so much at stake, she felt somehow disloyal.
“Mom?”
Her glance bounced as if on a string, finally settling on Jake in the doorway.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I didn’t know you were coming home.”
“You sounded pretty freaked the other day when you called about the DNA.”
“Dennis just left.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, honey. You didn’t have to come home. I don’t want you worrying about me.”
“I’m not. I’ve got a chemistry final tomorrow; I came here to study. It’s too loud in the dorm.” He sat in one of the wing chairs. “What are you looking for anyway?”
Abby ducked her chin. She thought of saying it was none of his business.
“Mom?”
“Just there might be something, you know? To say where they were going exactly.”
Jake dropped his keys onto a small table between the chairs.
Neither of them spoke. Morning sunshine from the window behind Abby heated her shoulders. On an ordinary morning in May in her old life, she would have been out in the vegetable garden, maybe with Lindsey, maybe weeding around the tomato plants she’d set out. How long ago was that? March? There wouldn’t be much of anything left of them now.
Jake propped his ankle on his knee, picked at his sock. “I doubt Dad would leave evidence where you could find it.”
“Evidence?” She looked sharply at him. “What do you mean?”
“Nothing, except if somebody’s up to something and they don’t want you finding out, they aren’t going to leave stuff lying around so you can.”
“What could he have been up to?”
Jake stood up, flinging his hands. “How do I know? It’s not like he ever discussed anything with me.”
Abby leaned back and crossed her arms. “I’ll be glad when you and Dad iron out your differences.”
“There’s not much chance of that now, is there?” Jake said.
Abby swiveled the chair around and stared out the window. “I guess you can give up if you want to. I can’t stop you.”
“Mom, Sheriff Henderson didn’t take DNA samples so he could match them to somebody alive.”
“I know that, Jake.”
“Do you? Because it sure doesn’t seem like it to me.”
* * *
Abby began losing time. She would waken on the sofa assuming it was morning only to discover it was three o’clock in the afternoon, or she would find herself in the barn with no memory of having gone there. Every day she would try to follow a routine, but then she would come to and find herself balled up in a corner of Lindsey’s room or standing outside the door of Nick’s study, and her face would be wet with tears and she would not know how long she had been there.
One morning in the first week of June, two months after the flood, she was huddled on the kitchen floor by the stove clutching a wooden spoon when her mother appeared.