Linwood Barclay - No Time For Goodbye

And so I lay awake, haunted by the information I had that Cynthia did not, and how it only served to remind me of how much we still didn’t know.

I killed some time in the bookstore while Cynthia and Grace looked at shoes. I had an early Philip Roth, one that I’d never gotten around to reading, in my hand when Grace came running into the store. Cynthia trailed behind her, a shopping bag in hand.

“I’m starving,” Grace said, throwing her arms around me.

“You got some shoes?”

She took a step back and modeled for me, sticking out one foot and then the other. White sneakers with a pink swoosh.

“What’s in the bag?” I asked.

“Her old ones,” Cynthia said. “She had to wear them right away. You hungry?”

I was. I put the Roth book back and we took the escalator up to the food court level. Grace wanted McDonald’s, so I gave her enough money to buy herself something while Cynthia and I went to a different counter to get soup and a sandwich. Cynthia kept glancing back over to the McDonald’s, making sure she could see Grace. The mall was busy on this Sunday afternoon, as was the food court. There were still a few tables free, but they were filling up fast.

Cynthia was so occupied watching Grace that I moved both our plastic trays along, gathered together cutlery and napkins, loaded the sandwiches and soup as they became ready.

“She’s got us a table,” Cynthia said. I scanned the court, spotted Grace at a table for four, waving her arm back and forth long after we’d caught sight of her. She already had her Big Mac out of the box when we joined her, her fries dumped into the other side of the container.

“Eww,” she said when she saw my cream of broccoli soup. A kindly looking, fiftyish woman in a blue coat, sitting alone at the next table, glanced over, smiled, and then went back to her own lunch.

I sat across from Cynthia, Grace to my right. I noticed that Cynthia kept looking over my shoulder. I turned around once, looked where she was looking, turned back.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing,” she said, and took a bite of her chicken salad sandwich.

“What were you looking at?”

“Nothing,” she said again.

Grace pushed a fry into her mouth, biting it into quarter-inch segments at a furious rate.

Cynthia was looking over my shoulder again.

“Cyn,” I said, “what the hell are you looking at?”

She didn’t immediately deny this time that something had caught her eye. “There’s a man over there,” she said. I started to turn around and she said, “No, don’t look.”

“What’s so special about him?”

“Nothing,” she said.

I sighed, and probably rolled my eyes, too. “For crying out loud, Cyn, you can’t just stare at the guy for-”

“He looks like Todd,” she said.

Okay, I thought. We’ve been here before. Just be cool. “Okay,” I said. “What is it about him that makes him look like your brother?”

“I don’t know. It’s just something about him. He just looks like Todd would probably look today.”

“What are you talking about?” Grace asked.

“Never mind,” I said. To Cynthia, I said, “Tell me what he looks like, and I’ll just casually turn around and get a look at him.”

“He’s got black hair, he’s wearing a brown jacket. He’s eating Chinese food. Right now, he’s eating an egg roll. He looks like a younger version of my dad, an older version of Todd, I’m telling you.”

I swiveled slowly on my backless chair, made like I was taking in the various food kiosks, thinking about going to get something to eat. I saw him, catching some sprouts with his tongue that were falling out of the half-eaten egg roll. I’d seen a few pictures of Todd from Cynthia’s shoebox of mementos, and I suppose it was possible that had he grown up to be in his late thirties, early forties, he might look a bit like this guy. Slightly overweight, a doughy face, black hair, maybe six foot, although it was hard to tell with him sitting down.

I turned back. “He looks like a million other people,” I said.

“I’m going to get a closer look,” Cynthia said.

She was on her feet before I could protest. “Honey,” I said as she walked by me, making a halfhearted attempt to grab her by the arm and failing.

“Where’s Mommy going?”

“To the washroom,” I said.

“I’m going to have to go, too,” Grace said, swinging her legs back and forth so she could catch glimpses of her new shoes.

“She can take you after,” I said.

I watched as Cynthia took the long way around the food court, heading in the opposite direction from where the man sat. She walked past all the fast-food outlets, approaching him from behind and to the side. As she came up alongside him, she walked straight ahead, went to the McDonald’s and joined the line, glancing occasionally, as casually as possible, at the man she felt bore an amazing resemblance to her brother Todd.

When she sat back down, she presented Grace with a small chocolate sundae in a clear plastic cup. Her hand was shaking as she put it on Grace’s tray.

“Wow!” said Grace.

Cynthia showed no reaction to her daughter’s expressions of gratitude. She looked at me and said, “It’s him.”

“Cyn.”

“It’s my brother.”

“Cyn, come on, it’s not Todd.”

“I got a good look at him. It’s him. I’m as sure that’s my brother as I am that that’s Grace sitting there.”

Grace looked up from her ice cream. “Your brother’s here?” She was genuinely curious. “Todd?”

“Just eat your ice cream,” Cynthia said.

“I know what his name is,” Grace said. “And your dad was Clayton, and your mother was Patricia.” She rattled off the names like it was a classroom exercise.

“Grace!” Cynthia snapped.

I felt my heart begin to pound. This could only get worse.

“I’m going to talk to him,” she said.

Bingo.

“You can’t,” I said. “Look, it doesn’t make any sense that it’s Todd. For Christ’s sake, if your brother was just out and about, going to the mall, eating Chinese food in public, you think he wouldn’t have gotten in touch with you? And he’d have spotted you, too. You were practically Inspector Clouseau there, wandering around him as obvious as all hell. It’s just some guy, he’s got some passing resemblance to your brother. You go over to him, start talking to him like he’s Todd, he’s going to freak-”

“He’s leaving,” Cynthia said, a hint of panic in her voice.

I whirled around. The man was on his feet, wiping his mouth one last time with a paper napkin, crumpling it in his hand and dropping it onto the paper plate. He left the tray sitting there, didn’t take it over to the wastebasket, and started walking in the direction of the washrooms.

“Who’s Inspector Cloozoo?” Grace asked.

“You can’t follow him into the can,” I cautioned Cynthia.

She sat there, frozen, watching the man as he wandered down the hall that led to the men’s and ladies’ rooms. He’d have to come back, and she could wait.

“Are you going into the men’s room?” Grace asked her mother.

“Eat your ice cream,” Cynthia said.

The woman in the blue coat at the table next to us was picking at her salad, trying to pretend she wasn’t listening to us.

I felt I only had a few seconds to talk Cynthia out of doing something we’d all regret. “Remember what you said to me, when I first met you, that you were always seeing people you thought might be your family?”

“He’s got to show up again soon. Unless there’s another way out. Is there another way out back there?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “It’s perfectly normal to feel this way. You’ve spent your whole life looking. I remember, years ago, I was watching Larry King, and they had that guy on, the one whose son was killed by O. J., Goldman I think it was, and he told Larry that he’d be out driving, and he’d see someone driving a car like his son used to drive, and he’d chase the car, check the driver, just to be sure it wasn’t his son, even though he knew he was dead, knew it didn’t make any sense-”