Anna Pitoniak - Necessary People

“They think it’s my fault,” Jamie said, staring at his beer, at our usual place.

“Don’t say that.” I waved a hand. “They’re just gossiping idiots. They’re bored. Something new will happen tomorrow, and they’ll move on.”

“I don’t mean our coworkers. I mean the Bradleys.”

“Oh.”

“Well? Don’t they?” He was pale, and his face looked cramped with nausea. “And aren’t they kind of right? Stella would still be here if I hadn’t broken up with her. But—Jesus Christ. How was I supposed to know that this would happen?”

Jamie never said what he thought this was. He had, I was discovering, a squeamish side.

“Obviously you couldn’t know that,” I said.

“I thought I was doing the right thing! I was being honest with her! You see that, don’t you? You knew how bad things were between us. Right, Violet?”

He looked at me pleadingly, like an altar boy at confession. Jamie was so strident about his innocence. He wanted the world to know that his hands were clean, that it wasn’t his fault. This was part of what I found so refreshing about Oliver. “I was a terrible brother to her,” he’d said. “But to be fair, she was an even worse sister. Truly awful.”

And it’s not like Jamie was going to catch any real heat for this. His alibi was airtight. He’d been at the office that fateful weekend, his movements recorded by the security guards and cameras. None of it was Jamie’s fault—it would be cruel to think that. But when other people blamed themselves for what happened to Stella, I allowed myself to imagine an alternate universe where it wasn’t my fault, where it wasn’t my burden. Because, except for those moments, the weight of that knowledge was always there. Even when I wasn’t fully conscious of it—often the ambient anxiety arrived before the memory itself did. Rinsing the shampoo from my hair in the shower, standing in line at the coffee cart, riding the descending elevator late at night, I’d find myself thinking, I’m stressed, but what am I stressed about, again? Then I’d remember, and I’d remember that this problem was unfixable.

“Right,” I said finally, after a long beat. “Of course I see that. And so will everyone else, soon enough. Just let the police do their work.”

He laughed bitterly. “Yeah. Sure. Because they’ve been doing such a great job.”

After the press release, the police in Maine set up a tip line for anyone who might have seen her. The line was, predictably, flooded with crank calls and flimsy sightings, information from people with the most tenuous connections to Stella. The police weren’t making any progress. “God, these people are idiots,” Anne said, after hanging up the phone with the police one day in January. “Walter, I am so glad we have you on the case.”

Walter was what Anne called him, now that Detective Fazio was officially retired and working for the Bradleys. And it was true. Fazio caught things that the Maine police didn’t. He was the one who discovered Stella’s passport was missing. It could just be a coincidence—that’s what he emphasized. Maybe she’d lost it, at some earlier point. But Anne knew her daughter. Stella might be messy, but she wasn’t a scatterbrain. She wasn’t the type to lose her passport.

A turning point came when a dead body was discovered in a town about thirty miles away from the Maine compound. The police were elated to have something to work with. I was sure Anne would harass them for constant updates while they worked to identify the body. But instead, she became very still. She sat on the Bradleys’ porch, staring at Long Island Sound, with a tearless silence that was almost serene. It was like a superstition. If she didn’t turn around, if she didn’t look, Stella would remain alive.

Anne took it as a sign when the body wasn’t Stella. This, along with the missing passport, was proof to her that her daughter was alive. Anne had spent dozens of hours online, reading about similar disappearances. Women who vanished and returned alive, weeks or months later. There was something called a fugue state. Couldn’t this have happened to Stella? She had forgotten who she was. Now she was wandering the world, waiting to be found.

“Don’t you see?” Anne said, brandishing articles printed from the internet in the skeptical faces of her husband and son. “She’s lost. She could be anywhere. I have to go find her.”

It took me a long time to realize that I was witnessing the unraveling of a family. The brave front the Bradleys presented to the media was convincing. I even believed it myself, for a while. But when January turned to February, and there was no sign of Stella, the Bradleys started to crack. In all my years, I had failed to understand how tenuous their self-assurance was. A life that appeared solid in construction, laid with bricks of wealth and good manners and good genes, was as flimsy as a house of cards.

The Bradleys, it turned out, were just as screwed up as anyone else.

Thomas’s workaholism became pathological. Plus, he had decided that he was going to summit Mount Everest before the year’s end. He was pushing sixty, in mediocre shape, and had never once expressed an interest in mountain climbing. But ever since Stella disappeared, he had become obsessed with the idea. He would do it in her—not her memory, but her honor. He hired a trainer. He woke up early to go on runs with a weight-filled backpack. Thomas, once taciturn to the point of rudeness, now could not shut up about the best route up the Lhotse wall.

In different circumstances, Anne would have put a stop to this foolishness, but she was consumed by her own quest. There were so many places in the world that Stella might be. Anne packed a gigantic suitcase and bought an open-ended, around-the-world plane ticket. London, she’d start in London, because she had to start somewhere. Then to Barcelona, or Marrakech, or Santorini. She would find her daughter. She would be gone for as long as it took.

WHEN YOU’RE IN a relationship, life becomes easier in ways that seem small at first, and gradually become significant. Take the Monday-morning-in-the-office dance. When a colleague asks about your weekend, and you’re single, it’s a scramble to come up with the right answers. You have to look busy, with friends and meals and interesting activities, like rooftop yoga and wine tastings. It isn’t acceptable to do nothing multiple weekends in a row, unless there’s a hurricane or a blizzard. If you’re ambitious in New York, ambition doesn’t end when the week does.

But with Oliver, weekends took care of themselves. We went out to dinner, to museums, to Broadway and off-Broadway performances. Oliver was lobbying for a position on the board of Lincoln Center—at thirty he was young for it, but that didn’t stop him—and along with his sizable donations came a subscription to the ballet and the opera. His enthusiasm was both broad and intense, and it was easy to go along for the ride.

“Do you have plans on Tuesday night?” Oliver said, opening a bottle of wine while I cooked dinner. When he finished pouring the wine into my glass, he twisted the bottle so the liquid wouldn’t drip down the neck. I’d noticed that if a waiter failed to perform this maneuver, Oliver would frown, and leave a bad tip.

“Other than work, you mean?” I reached for the glass, but he stopped me.

“It needs to breathe,” he said. “There’s a new show opening at the Public. You can take the night off, can’t you?”

“I can’t. You know what my schedule is like.”

He laughed flatly. “You must really love your job.”

I looked up from the shallot, which was turning into a fine dice with the help of the expensive chef’s knife I’d bought after my most recent promotion and raise. “Once upon a time,” I said, “you thought my job was fascinating.”