SEVEN

I USED TO WONDER HOW PEOPLE DID IT.

You’d watch the news, and there’d be some couple who’d lost a child in a fire. The mother of that girl who went missing in Bermuda and was never found. A father whose son was killed in a bar fight. Once, there was a story about a girl whose class went on a skiing trip, and there was an avalanche and she was buried under several feet of snow and the rescue workers couldn’t find her. And there were her parents, weeping, holding out hope their daughter was still alive, and you knew there was simply no way.

How the hell do they do it? I’d say to the TV.

I figured, something like that happens to a loved one, everything just stops. How can it not?

But I was realizing that everyone does go on. You get up. You have breakfast. You go to work. You do your job. You come home, have some dinner, go to bed.

Just like everybody else.

But it’s always there. You go on, but you don’t go on. Because there’s this weight, and you can feel it all the time, like you’ve got a cinder block sitting on each shoulder, pushing you down, wearing you out, making you wonder whether you’ll be able to get up the next day.

And son of a bitch, you do get up. That day, and the day after, and the day after that. With those blocks on your shoulders.

Always there.

ON MY WAY OUT, I picked up, from reception, the photocopy of the driver’s license of Richard Fletcher, my manure delivery guy. I made a mental note of his address, on Coulter Drive. I folded the sheet and slid it down into my pocket.

Once in the car, I turned Syd’s iPod on again and listened to some Natasha Bedingfield (I’d heard Syd listening to her one night in her room and asked who it was), an Elton John number from my own youth, and, astonishingly, pianist Erroll Garner’s “Misty.” I’d mentioned him to Syd one weekend a few months back, and she’d gone and downloaded one of his songs.

“You’re something else, sweetheart,” I said, as though she were in the seat next to me.

I didn’t head home. Instead, I drove over to the original Bob’s Motors used-car dealership and pulled up by the office-a disguised forty-foot trailer with the wheels hidden behind decorative vinyl skirting.

As I went up the steps, the door opened and Evan came rushing out, his face red, his jaw set angrily. He looked ready to explode.

“Hey,” I said, but he brushed past without seeing me, charged off between the used cars, then stopped abruptly next to a red Jetta with a “One Owner!” banner in the windshield, and kicked the rear fender with everything he had.

“Fuck!” he shouted. “Fuck her! Fuck that bitch!”

And then he stormed off, heading down the sidewalk, away from the lot.

I went inside, where Susanne was posted at a desk just to the right of the door, the crutches she’d been managing without leaned up against the wall, the cane hanging from a coat hook. She was shaking her head, then looked up when she saw me.

“Jeez, perfect timing,” she said. She was obviously rattled. “Did he run into you?”

“He just beat up a Volkswagen,” I said. “What’s going on?”

“All I did was ask him about the petty cash,” she said.

“What petty cash?”

“In the desk here. I swear, there was two hundred dollars there yesterday, and today there’s forty. I asked him whether he’d had to go into it for something and he flies off the handle, says I’m calling him a thief. I never did any such thing. All I did was ask him whether he-”

She stopped herself, looked at me. “What’s happened?”

“They found Sydney’s car,” I said.

Her face didn’t move. She waited.

“In Derby. Left in a Wal-Mart lot. It may have been there since she vanished. There are traces of blood on the door handle and steering wheel.”

Her face still didn’t move. She took it in, waited a moment, and said, “She’s not dead. I refuse to believe she’s dead.”

“She’s not,” I said, because that’s what I had to believe, too. “They’ll have to do DNA tests to know whether it’s Syd’s blood.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Susanne said. “She’s not dead.” She raised her chin, as though defying unseen forces.

The door flung open and Bob walked in. Before he’d set eyes on either of us, he barked, “What the hell did you say to Evan?” Then, seeing me, he said, “Oh.”

To Susanne, I said, “I’ll go. I’ll keep in touch.” To Bob, I said, “Take care of her. And if I ever hear Evan call Susanne a bitch again, I’ll put his head through a windshield.”

I’M NOT SURE HOW I GOT HOME. I had no memory of driving there. Hot blood was clouding my vision.

There was a police vehicle parked out front when I got there. A van instead of a cruiser. A nattily dressed black man identified himself as a member of the city’s forensic investigations unit. He’d been sent by Detective Kip Jennings to retrieve a DNA sample of Sydney’s. I let him in, showed him Syd’s room and the bathroom she used to get ready for work in the morning. He zeroed in on the hairbrush.

While he was doing that, I went down to the kitchen. The light was flashing on the phone. I hit the button to hear the message.

“Hey.”

Kate Wood.

“I just wondered how you were doing. I don’t know whether you got my message at work. My offer still stands. I could bring something over. I know you probably don’t feel like cooking. You could even come over here if you want. Anyway, get back to me? Okay?” And then she rattled off her cell number, which I knew better than my own, she’d reminded me of it so many times.

I deleted the message.

I went upstairs to the spare bedroom where I keep my computer and pay the bills and went online to see if there’d been any action on the website.

Nothing.

I sat there for a while, stared at the screen.

The guy from the forensics department popped his head in, said he’d find his own way out.

“Sure,” I said. “Thanks.”

Finally, I went back down to the kitchen. I opened the fridge and stared into it for a good twenty seconds, thinking if I looked long enough something edible would magically appear. I hadn’t bought groceries in a couple of weeks, and-on the nights when Patty didn’t show up with fast food-was surviving mostly on a cache of microwavable dinners that had been collecting in the freezer over the last year or two.

I closed the door and put my palms on the kitchen counter, leaning into it. I took several deep breaths, letting each one out slowly.

If this was supposed to relax me, it wasn’t working, because suddenly I took the back of my arm and swept everything off the counter in front of me: toaster, salt and pepper shakers, a day-by-day New Yorker cartoon calendar I hadn’t turned the page on in three weeks, an electric can opener-all were sent crashing to the floor.

I was filled with all this pent-up rage and frustration. Where was Syd? What had happened to her? Why did she leave?

Why the hell couldn’t I find her?

I wanted to explode. I had so much anger and no place to direct it.

I’d only been home a few minutes, but I needed to go out again. Every moment I spent here, alone, reminded me that Syd was not here. I couldn’t sit around. I had to burn off some steam. Drive around. Keep looking.

The phone rang. I snatched the receiver off the cradle before the first ring was finished.

“What?” I shouted.

“Whoa.”

“I’m sorry,” bringing my voice down, not knowing who it was. “Hello.”

“I called earlier. Did you get my message?”

Then I knew. “I just got home, Kate.”

It had started about six months ago. I’d met her in a rather unconventional way. She was backing her Ford Focus out of a spot at Walgreens and hit my bumper on the other side of the aisle. I was behind the wheel, engine off, listening to the end of a newscast before I went into the store, and jumped out when I felt the jolt.