Linwood Barclay: Clouded Vision

Keisha Ceylon took a deep breath, took one last look at her lipstick in the rearview mirror, and opened the car door.

Showtime.

Wendell

“So, what are you telling me, that there’s been nothing, nothing at all?” Wendell Garfield said into the phone. “I thought, I really thought someone… Well, if you hear anything, anything at all, please, please call me. I’m desperate for any kind of news.”

He replaced the receiver in its cradle. He had decided when he got up that morning that he would call the police first thing, see whether the news conference he and his daughter had done yesterday had produced any valuable tips.

The detective he’d just spoken to was not the one in charge of the investigation, but he claimed to be up to speed on what was happening. There had been only about half a dozen calls to the special hotline police had set up. None of them had been considered useful.

Wendell decided to make himself some tea, thinking it would help calm him. He hadn’t slept more than a few minutes all night. He was trying to remember, since Thursday, when this had all started, just how much sleep he’d had. Five, six hours maybe. Melissa had probably had a little more than that, if only because the pregnancy made her so tired.

Garfield hadn’t wanted his daughter to be part of the press conference. He’d told the police he wasn’t sure she could handle the stress. Melissa was seven months pregnant, her mother was missing, and now they wanted her to be on the six o’clock news?

“I don’t want to put her through that,” he’d told the police.

But it was Melissa herself who insisted she appear alongside her father. “We’ll do it together, Dad,” she told him. “Everyone needs to know we want Mom to be found, that we want her to come home.”

With some reluctance, he agreed, but only if he did all the talking. As it turned out, once the lights were on and the cameras in their faces, Melissa went to pieces. She tried to splutter “Mommy, please come back to us” but dissolved into tears and pressed her face into her father’s chest. Even he wasn’t able to say very much, just that they loved Ellie very much and wanted her to come home.

Then he made his appeal to anyone out there who might have anything to do with his wife’s disappearance. Please, tell us what’s happened. Send Ellie home to us.

And then he lost it, too.

He could hear murmurs among some of the newspeople, phrases like “good stuff” and “perfect” and “awesome.”

What despicable pieces of humanity, Wendell Garfield thought.

He took Melissa home with him, tried to get her to eat something. “It’s going to be okay,” he soothed her. “Everything’s going to be okay. We’ll get through this.”

She sat slumped at the kitchen table, her head nearly on the table. “Oh, Daddy…”

“Trust me,” Wendell said.

She stayed overnight, but around dawn said she wanted to go back to her apartment across town. Wendell wasn’t so sure that was a good idea, but Melissa insisted she could handle it. She wasn’t going to stay there. She’d come back and stay overnight in the room she used to live in. But she needed some time by herself, to think. Melissa shared the apartment with her friend Olivia, but Olivia was away right now, visiting her parents in Denver.

Wendell was awake at five-he’d never been asleep-and said he would drive his daughter back to her place.

Parked out front of her apartment, which was actually the top floor of an old house with a separate entrance, Wendell asked, “Are you sure you’re going to be okay? Do you want me to wait?”

Melissa said no.

Even though she was only nineteen, Melissa had been living away from home three years. She was the first to admit she’d been a difficult teen from the beginning. She drank, used drugs, slept around. She ignored the limits her parents attempted to set for her.

When she was sixteen, Ellie and Wendell decided they could take no more. They gave her an ultimatum. Live by the rules of this house, or get out.

She chose to get out.

Melissa found a place to live with Olivia. She dropped of school and got a job waiting tables at Denny’s. It turned out that getting kicked out of her parents’ house was the best thing that had ever happened to her. It forced her to get her act together. She didn’t have anyone else to take care of her, so she had to take care of herself.

She started to become responsible. Who would have guessed?

Ellie and Wendell were cautiously optimistic. Once Melissa got her head screwed on right, they figured, she could go back and finish school. If she did well enough, she might even have a chance at college, Ellie mused one evening. Maybe she’d even think about becoming a veterinarian. Remember, when she was little, how she said one day she’d loved to work with animals and “For God’s sake, Ellie, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Wendell had said.

Melissa would come over for dinner. Some of these get-togethers went better than others. One night, Melissa would tell them about how she was getting her life back on track and her parents would nod and try to be encouraging. But another night, Ellie, anxious to see her daughter’s rehabilitation move with more speed, would start pushing. She’d tell her daughter it was time — now — to stop being nothing more than a waitress and get back to school and make something of herself. Did Melissa have any idea just how embarrassing it was for her mother, an employee of the board of education, to have a daughter who was a dropout? Who hadn’t even completed the eleventh grade? How long was she expected to wait to see her daughter get on a path where she would amount to something?

Then they’d start fighting and Melissa would storm out, but not before asking out loud how she’d managed to live in this house as long as she had without blowing her brains out.

It always took a few days for the dust to settle.

Ellie and Wendell still kept their fingers crossed that Melissa was growing up. She held on to her waitressing job. She was saving some money. Not a lot. About twenty-five dollars a week. But it was something. And one day, talking to her mother on the phone, Melissa happened to mention that she’d been on a college website, looking at what qualifications you needed to enroll in the veterinary program.

Ellie was beside herself with joy when she told Wendell the news.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” she asked. “She’s growing up, that’s what she’s doing. She’s growing up and thinking about the future.”

What neither Ellie or Wendell had counted on was that the immediate future would include a baby.

Melissa was already three months along when she broke the news to her parents. They did not, to say the least, take it well, but Wendell tried to find the silver lining. Maybe this meant Melissa would get married. She’d be a very young mother, but at least if she had a man in her life, a man who could look after her and the baby, wouldn’t that take some of the pressure off Ellie and him?

Then they found out about the man. It soon became clear that the only thing that might be worse than Melissa having this baby with no father on the scene would be having this baby with the father on the scene.

His name was Lester Cody. Thirty years old. A regular at Denny’s. He’d never hung on to a job longer than three months, and none of those had ever paid a penny more than minimum wage. Always ended up injured. Hurt his back. Threw out his shoulder. Sprained his ankle. But luckily, no matter how badly he might have gotten hurt, he could still play his Nintendo Wii. Lester lived in his parents’ basement, still had Spider-Man posters on his bedroom wall. His favorite hat was adorned with a plastic dog turd.