Лайза Джуэлл - Then She Was Gone

He is of average height, average build, around fifty. His hair is cut short, gray at the temples, receding, and darker on the top. He’s wearing good jeans with a nice shirt, lace-up shoes, tortoiseshell glasses: the sort of clothes that Paul would wear. And whatever her feelings are now about Paul—and they are conflicted and horribly confusing—she has to concede that he always looks lovely.

She finds, to her surprise, that she is almost admiring the man in the doorway. There is something about him: a low-key swagger and a certain—dare she say it?—twinkle in his eye. She watches as he queues at the counter, takes in more detail: a flat but soft stomach, good hands, one ear that protrudes slightly farther than the other. He’s not handsome in the traditional sense of the word but has the air of a man who has long ago accepted his physical limitations and shifted all the focus to his personality.

He orders a slice of carrot cake and a black coffee—his accent is hard to place, possibly American, or a foreigner who learned English from Americans—and then carries them to the table next to hers. Laurel’s breath catches. He didn’t appear to have noticed her staring at him yet he’s chosen the table closest to hers in a café full of empty tables. She panics, feeling as though maybe she’s subconsciously, inadvertently, invited his attentions. She doesn’t want his attentions. She doesn’t want any attention.

For a few moments they sit like that, side by side. He doesn’t look at her, not once, but Laurel can feel some kind of intent radiating from him. The man plays with a smartphone. Laurel finishes her cheese sandwich in smaller, slower mouthfuls. After a while she begins to think maybe she was imagining it. She drinks her coffee and starts to leave.

Then: “You have beautiful hair.”

She turns, shocked at his words, and says, “Oh.”

“Really pretty.”

“Thank you.” Her hand has gone to her hair, unthinkingly. “I just had it done. It doesn’t normally look this good.”

He smiles. “You ever had this carrot cake before?”

She shakes her head.

“It’s pretty amazing. Would you like to try some?”

She laughs nervously. “No, thank you, I . . .”

“Look, I have a clean spoon, right here.” He pushes it across his table toward her. “Go on. I’m never going to eat all this.”

A blade of light passes across the café at that moment, bright as torchlight. It touches the spoon and makes it glitter. The cake has the indents of his fork in it. The moment is curiously intimate and Laurel’s gut reaction is to back away, to leave. But as she watches the sparkles on the silver spoon she feels something inside her begin to open up. Something like hope.

She picks up the spoon and she scoops a small chunk of cake from the end that he has not touched.

His name is Floyd. Floyd Dunn. He offers her his hand and says, “Pleased to meet you, Laurel Mack.” His grip is firm and warm.

“What’s your accent?” she asks, pulling her chair closer to his table, feeling the blade of sunlight warming the back of her head.

“Ah,” he says, dabbing his mouth with a paper napkin. “What isn’t my accent would be a better question. I am the son of very ambitious Americans who chased jobs and money all around the world. Four years in the U.S. Two in Canada. Another four in the U.S. Four in Germany. A year in Singapore. Then three in the U.K. My parents went back to the States; I stayed here.”

“So you’ve been here for a long time?”

“I’ve been here for”—he scrunches closed his eyes as he calculates—“thirty-seven years. I have a British passport. British children. A British ex-wife. I listen to The Archers . I’m fully assimilated.”

He smiles and she laughs.

She catches herself for a moment. Sitting in a café in the middle of the afternoon, talking to a strange man, laughing at his jokes. How has this happened, this day? Of all the days, all the hundreds of dark days that have passed since Ellie went? Is this what closure does? Is this what happens when you finally bury your child?

“So, do you live around here?” he asks.

“No,” she says. “No. I live in Barnet. But I used to live around here. Until a few years ago. Hence the hairdresser.” She nods in the direction of the shop a few doors down. “Total phobia of letting anyone else touch my hair, so I trek down here every month.”

“Well . . .” He eyes her hair. “It looks like it’s worth it to me.”

His tone is flirtatious and she has to ask herself if he’s weird or not. Is he? Is there something odd about him, anything a bit off? Is she failing to read warning signs? Is he going to scam her, rape her, abduct her, stalk her? Is he mad? Is he bad?

She asks these silent internalized questions of everyone she meets. She was never a trusting person, even before her daughter vanished and then turned up dead ten years later. Paul always said he’d taken her on as a long-term project. She’d refused to marry him until Jake was a toddler, scared that he was just going through a phase and would stand her up at the register office. But she asks these questions even more these days. Because she knows that the worst-case scenario is not simply a terrible thing that isn’t likely to happen.

But she’s staring at this man, this man with gray eyes and gray hair and soft skin and nice shoes, and she cannot find one thing wrong with him. Apart from the fact that he is talking to her. “Thank you,” she says in reply to his compliment. And then she moves her chair back, toward her table, wanting to leave, but also wanting him to ask her to stay.

“You have to go?” he says.

“Well, yes,” she says, trying to think of something she needs to do. “I’m going to see my daughter.”

She is not going to see her daughter. She never sees her daughter.

“Oh, you have a daughter?”

“Yes. And a son.”

“One of each.”

“Yes,” she says, the pain of denying her gone daughter piercing her heart. “One of each.”

“I have two girls.”

She nods and hitches her bag on to her shoulder. “How old?”

“One of twenty-one. One of nine.”

“Do they live with you?”

“The nine-year-old does. The twenty-one-year-old lives with her mum.”

“Oh.”

He smiles. “It’s complicated.”

“Isn’t everything?” She smiles back.

And then he tears a corner off a newspaper left on the table next to his and finds a pen in his coat pocket and says, “Here. I’ve really enjoyed talking to you. But it hasn’t been for long enough. I’d really like to take you out for dinner.” He scribbles a number on the scrap of paper and passes it to her. “Call me.”

Call me.

So assured, so simple, so forward. She cannot imagine how a human could be that way.

She takes the piece of paper and rubs it between her fingertips. “Yes,” she says. Then: “Well, maybe.”

He laughs. He has a lot of fillings. “ ‘Maybe’ will do for me. ‘Maybe’ will do.”

She leaves the café quickly and without looking back.

That evening Laurel does something she’s never done before. She drops into Hanna’s unannounced. The expression on her older daughter’s face when she sees her mother standing on the doorstep is 90 percent appalled and 10 percent concerned.

“Mum?”

“Hello, love.”

Hanna looks behind her as though there might be a visible reason for her mother’s presence somewhere in her vicinity.

“Are you OK?”

“Yes. I’m fine. I just . . . I was just passing by and felt I hadn’t seen you in a while.”

“I saw you on Sunday.”

Hanna had popped by with an old laptop for her but hadn’t crossed the threshold.