Chevy Stevens - Still Missing

Luke called a week after our last session—he used to leave messages asking me to give him a call if I felt like it, but I didn’t return them. He stopped leaving the messages but he still called at least once every couple of weeks even though I never picked up the phone. It’s been about a month since the last call, just before I saw him with that girl, and I didn’t think he’d try again.

When the phone rang, I was down in my laundry room and I had to run around to find the cordless. As soon as I saw his number, my already racing heart hit overdrive, and I almost set the receiver back down in the cradle, but my finger was on the talk button and he was saying, “Hello?” before I realized what I’d done. Then I didn’t realize I hadn’t responded until he said, “Annie?”

“Hey.”

“You answered. I didn’t know if you would…” He paused and I knew I should say something, something that sounded friendly, something that said, I’m glad you called.

“I was doing laundry.” Jesus, I might as well have told him I was in the bathroom.

“Did I interrupt?”

“No, I mean yeah, but it’s okay. It can wait.”

“I saw you a few weeks ago and I wanted to call then, but I didn’t know if you’d want me to.”

“You saw me?”

“You were just leaving the grocery store, I tried to catch up to you but you were moving too fast.” My face burned. Shit, he did see me leave the store.

I waited for him to say something about the girl but when he didn’t, I said, “Really? I didn’t notice you. I just stopped to get something in a hurry, but the store didn’t have it.”

We were both silent for a few beats, and then he said, “So what are you doing these days? I keep expecting to see your signs in someone’s yard.” I fought the urge to be mean and say the last sign I ever had in someone’s lawn was at the open house where I was abducted. I knew he hadn’t meant to hurt.

“You might have a long wait.”

“I miss driving by them—your four-leaf clovers always made me smile.” I’d thought I was so clever when I put four-leaf clovers on my signs, business cards, and car door. My logo was, “Annie O’Sullivan has the luck of the Irish.” Luck was my whole damn marketing campaign. Now, that’s irony for you.

“Maybe one day—or maybe I’ll do something else.” Like throw myself off a bridge.

“You’ll be successful whatever you do, but if you ever get back into it, you’ll be right up there again in no time. You were so good at it.”

Not as good as I’d wanted to be, not as good as my mom thought I should have been—the entire time I was in real estate she showed me the ads for every other Realtor in town and asked why I didn’t get that listing. And I wasn’t as good as Christina, who was one of the main reasons I got into real estate in the first place. After high school I had a series of shitty jobs—waitress, cashier, secretary—but then I got one I liked, working in the back room of a newspaper creating ad layouts. There wasn’t any money in it, though, and by the time I was in my later twenties I was tired of being broke. Especially when Christina and Tamara made killer money, which Mom kept pointing out, and hell, I wanted to drive a nice car too.

“I’ve been seeing a shrink.” Man, first the laundry, now my therapy—all I’d wanted to do was stop talking about real estate.

“That’s great!” Yeah, now I can pee more during the day, I can actually eat when I’m hungry, and up until I had to talk about my dead daughter, I’d gotten that whole closet-sleeping thing down to a couple of times a week. Wasn’t that great ? But I choked back my bitter words—he was just trying to be nice, and who the hell was I kidding? I did need a shrink.

“You still there?” And then with a sigh he said, “Crap, I’m sorry, Annie. I’m saying all the wrong things, aren’t I?”

“No, no, it’s not you, it’s just, well, you know… stuff. So how are things going at the restaurant?”

“We have a new menu. You should come in sometime? Customers seem to like it.”

We talked for a while about the restaurant, but it felt like having one of our old conversations through a fun-house mirror—everything was distorted and neither of us knew which door was the safe one. I opened an unsafe one.

“Luke, I never said—and I know I should have before now—but I’m really sorry about the way I was to you when you first came to the hospital. It’s just that—”

“Annie.”

“The guy who took me, he’d told me things, and…”

“Annie—”

“I didn’t find the truth out until later.” When I kept refusing to see Luke, Mom wanted to know why. Then she told me not only did Luke not have a girlfriend, he actually held fund-raisers for searches at his restaurant with Christina right up until a week before I came home. Mom also told me the police questioned him for a few days, but he proved he was at the restaurant when I was abducted. She said that even after they let him go, a lot of people still treated him like he had something to do with it.

I remembered my reaction when The Freak told me Luke had moved on with another girl—while he’d actually been accused of hurting me and then kept trying and trying to find me. The least I could do was agree to see him.

I said, “But then I made such a mess of the visit.”

“ Annie! Sshhhhh, it’s okay—you don’t have to do this.” But I did.

“And then when you saw me at Mom’s…” I didn’t even know how to begin to explain what happened there. Only out of the hospital for two weeks, I was napping in my old room at my mom’s when I heard voices in the kitchen and stumbled out to ask her and Wayne to keep it down.

Mom’s back was to me as she stood at the stove with a big pot of something in front of her and a man next to her. The man, whose back was also to me, bent down as she fed him something from a spoon. I began to back out of the room, but the floor squeaked. Luke turned around.

Distantly I heard Mom say, “Good, you’re up just in time! Luke was just tasting some of my Spaghetti Surprise, and he wants the recipe for his restaurant. But I told him, if he wants it, he’s going to have to name the dish after me.” Her husky laugh filled the air already heavy with oregano, basil, tomato sauce, and tension.

Luke’s honest face had been one of the things I’d loved about him, and now it paled with shock. He’d seen me in the hospital, and I’m sure he’d seen my photo in the paper, but I’d lost more weight and in Wayne’s old tracksuit I probably looked even thinner than I was. My eyes were ringed by dark circles and I hadn’t washed or brushed my hair in days. Of course, Luke looked even better than I remembered. His white T-shirt set off the tan on his forearms and the muscles in his chest. His dark hair, longer than when I was abducted and perfectly tousled, shone in the kitchen’s bright lights.

“I brought you flowers, Annie.” He waved a hand toward a vase on the counter full of roses. Pink roses.

“I put them in water for you, Annie Bear.” Mom was looking at the roses, eyes narrowed—slightly, not enough for anyone else to see, but I know my mother. They had been measured against her own roses and found wanting.

I said, “Thanks, Luke. They’re pretty.”

For a few seconds that felt like hours, the only sound in the kitchen was the bubbling of the sauce on the stove, then Wayne swaggered in and thumped Luke on the shoulder.

“Luke! Great to see you, boy. You staying for dinner?”

Mom, Wayne, and I looked at Luke as a flush rose in his face. He looked at me and said, “If Annie—”

“Of course Annie wants you to stay,” Wayne said. “Shit. Do the girl good to have some friends over.” Before I could say anything one way or another, Wayne had his arm around Luke’s shoulders and was leading him out of the kitchen. “Let me get your opinion on something….”