CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
I place the postcard with the German shepherd back on Aunt Charlotte’s desk. I have missed so much work. I can’t be late again. I tuck the letter to Emma in my purse. I will deliver it after my shift. I imagine I can feel its weight pulling down the strap on my shoulder as I begin my walk to Midtown.
I’m halfway there when my phone rings. For a brief moment, I think, Richard. But when I look down, the number flashing is Saks.
I hesitate, then answer and blurt out, “I’m almost there. Another fifteen minutes, tops.” I pick up my pace.
“Vanessa, I hate to have to do this,” Lucille says.
“I’m so sorry. I lost my cell phone, and then . . .” She clears her throat and I fall silent.
“But we need to let you go.”
“Give me one more chance,” I say desperately. With Aunt Charlotte’s condition, I need to work now more than ever. “I was going through a rough time, but I promise, I won’t— Things are turning around.”
“Being late is one matter. Repeated absences are another. But concealing merchandise? What were you planning to do with those dresses?”
I’m going to deny it, but something in her voice tells me not to bother. Maybe someone saw me remove the three black-and-white floral knit Alexander McQueen dresses and hide them in the stockroom.
It’s futile. I have no defense.
“I have your final check. I’ll mail it to you.”
“Actually, can I come in to pick it up?” I hope I can convince Lucille to give me another chance in person.
Lucille hesitates. “Fine. We’re a little busy at the moment. Stop by in an hour.”
“Thank you. That’s perfect.”
Now I have time to deliver the letter to Emma’s office instead of waiting until after work and leaving it at her home. It’s only been twenty-four hours since I last saw Richard’s fiancée, but that means it’s a day closer to her wedding.
I should be using this time to plan my speech to Lucille. But all I can think of is how I can linger outside in the courtyard and see if Emma steps out for a coffee or to run an errand. Maybe I’ll be able to discern from her expression if Richard told her about his visit.
The last time I entered this sleek high-rise building was for Richard’s office party. The night it all began.
But I have so many other memories of this place: coming here from the Learning Ladder to meet Richard and watching him conclude a business call, his voice so intent it was almost stern, while he made goofy faces at me above the phone receiver; commuting in from Westchester to join Richard and his colleagues for dinner; stopping by to surprise Richard and having him lift me off my feet into a joyful hug.
I push through the revolving door and approach the security guard’s desk. At ten o’clock, the lobby isn’t busy, for which I’m grateful. I don’t want to bump into anyone I know.
I vaguely recognize the guard, so I keep my sunglasses on. I hand over the envelope with Emma’s name printed on it. “Can you deliver this to the thirty-second floor?”
“Just a moment.” He touches a screen on his desk and types in her name. Then he looks up at me. “She no longer works here.” He pushes the envelope back to me across the desk.
“What? When did she—did she quit?”
“I don’t have that information, ma’am.”
A UPS deliverywoman walks up behind me, and the guard shifts his attention.
I take the envelope and walk back through the revolving door. In the nearby courtyard is a little bench where I planned to wait for Emma. Now I collapse onto it.
I shouldn’t be so surprised. After all, Richard wouldn’t want his wife working, particularly not for him. I briefly wonder if she has taken another job, but I know she wouldn’t do that right before her wedding. I am equally certain she won’t return to work after she is married, either.
Her world is beginning to shrink.
I need to get to her right away. She threatened to call the police if I approached her apartment again, but those are not consequences I can focus on now.
I stand up and go to put the letter in my purse. My fingers graze my wallet. The one containing Duke’s picture.
I pull the small color photograph out from its protective plastic covering. Rage descends over me; if Richard were here now, I would fly at him, clawing his face, screaming obscenities.
But I force myself to return, yet again, to the security guard’s desk.
“Excuse me,” I say politely. “Do you have an envelope?”
He hands me one without comment. I put Duke’s photo inside, then I search my purse for a pen. I come up with a gray eyeliner and use it to write Richard Thompson on the envelope. The blunt-tipped, soft liner leaves a trail of progressively messier letters, but I don’t care.
“Thirty-second floor. I know he still works there.”
The guard raises an eyebrow but otherwise remains impassive, at least until I leave.
I need to go to Saks, but as soon as I am through there, I intend to walk directly to Emma’s apartment. I wonder what she is doing at this precise moment. Packing up her things in preparation for the move? Buying a sexy nightgown for her honeymoon? Having a final coffee with her city friends, promising she’ll be back all the time to see them?
My left foot hits the pavement. Save. My right foot comes down. Her. I walk faster and faster, the words echoing in my brain. Savehersavehersaveher.
I was too late once before, when I was in my final year in Florida at the sorority. That will not happen again.
On the night Maggie vanished, I came home from Daniel’s just as the pledges were returning to the house, wet and giggling, smelling like the sea.
“I thought you were sick!” Leslie yelled.
I pushed through the cluster of pledges and headed upstairs to my room. I was shattered, unable to think straight. I don’t know what made me look back at the girls, who were by then drying themselves with the towels someone was throwing over the top of the staircase.
I spun around. “Maggie.”
“She’s right—she’s right—” Leslie spluttered. Those two syllables echoing as my sorority sisters scanned the room, their laughter fading as they checked faces, searching for the one who wasn’t there.
The story of what happened on the beach emerged in frantic shards and fragments; memories distorted by alcohol and exuberance that had turned to fear. Some fraternity boys had crept along behind the girls as they’d marched to the beach, perhaps galvanized by the flash of that hot-pink bra. The pledges had all stripped, as instructed, then run into the ocean.
“Check her room!” I shouted to our sorority president. “I’ll go to the beach.”
“I saw her come out of the water,” Leslie kept saying as we ran back to the ocean.
But so had the guys. By then the boys had run onto the sand, hooting and laughing, scooping up the discarded clothing and dangling it just out of reach of the naked girls. It was a prank; not one we’d planned, though.
“Maggie!” I screamed as we sprinted now onto the beach.
The girls had been screaming, too, with some of the clothed sisters chasing the boys. The pledges tried to cover themselves with shirts or dresses the guys dropped as they withdrew farther back onto the sand. The girls had eventually gotten back the clothing and had run to the house.
“She isn’t here!” Leslie yelled. “Let’s go back to the house in case we missed her on the way.”
Then I saw the white cotton top with little cherries and matching shorts strewn on the sand.
Blue and red lights churning. Divers searching the ocean, dragging nets through the water. A spotlight dancing across the waves.
And the high, drawn-out scream when a body was pulled from the ocean. It came from me.
The police questioned us one by one, methodically forming a narrative. The local newspaper filled four pages with articles and sidebars and photographs of Maggie. A news station from Miami filmed footage of our sorority house and aired a special report about the dangers of pledge-week drinking. I was the social director; I was Maggie’s big sister. These details were reported. My name was printed. So was my photo.
In my mind, I always see skinny, freckled Maggie retreating into the ocean, trying to hide her body. I see her going out too far, losing her footing in the unsteady sand. A wave breaks over her head. Maybe she cries out, but her voice blends into the other shrieks. She gulps salt water. She spins around, disoriented, in the inky black. She can’t see. She can’t breathe. Another wave drags her under.
Maggie vanished. But maybe she wouldn’t have if I hadn’t disappeared first.
Emma will disappear, too, if she marries Richard. She will lose her friends. She will become estranged from her family. She will disconnect from herself, just as I did. And then it will get so much worse.
Save her, my mind chants.