In the Blood (16 page)

“I am,” I said. “I saw her today.”

“Okay,” he said. “Good. This must be hard for you.”

Langdon knew more about me than almost anyone. I had told him part of my secret during a mini-breakdown I’d had in my sophomore
year. He almost never brought it up, knowing how painful it was for me to think about, let alone discuss.

“Elizabeth two years ago,” he said, musing. “Your difficult history. You can talk to me, too, you know. We’re friends, right?”

As we pulled away, I saw what I knew I couldn’t have seen. My mind was playing tricks on me—not a new thing. I thought I saw a small, slim form slip into the trees to avoid the roving beam of the headlights as Langdon shifted the car into drive. I stared at the night for a long moment, but there was nothing.

“I know,” I said. I tried for a smile. “Of course, I know that.”

He gave me a quick, awkward pat on the shoulder, very boyish, buddy-buddy. Totally chaste, no sexual charge at all. I’ve always been grateful for him. I think we draw people into our lives. It’s as though we broadcast our deepest needs, and certain people hear the signal somewhere in their own subconscious and heed the call. For better or worse, we attract our teachers, our allies, and sometimes even our nightmares. Some of us have louder signals. Some of us have more sensitive receptors.

That night my sleep was hard won and restless. I dreamed of Beck’s kiss and felt her hands on me, woke up thinking she was beside me. I drifted off to sleep again, only to be awakened once more.
Why are you doing this to me?
I heard a voice screaming. And it was my voice, and my mother’s and Beck’s—a chorus of misery and desperation. When I slept again, I went back to the night my mother died.

When’s the last time you saw your mother?
The cop had been a woman, and I remember thinking how mannish and rough she seemed. She
had a pockmarked face and orange-red hair, cut as short and square as any of her male colleagues. She was large, not overweight, but broad, with big shoulders and a deep voice.

In the morning before I left for school,
I said, just as my father had instructed me to say. The lie felt like cotton in my mouth, surely she could see the bulge. I wanted her to see.
Please,
I thought.
Please know that I’m lying. Please help me.

My father sat in a chair by the gray wall, watching, always watching me.
Don’t say any more than necessary. Answer their questions and offer nothing more.

And was everything all right? Did she seem strange to you, upset about anything?

No,
I said.
She was the same as she had always been.
What I didn’t say was that my mother suffered from chronic depression, although she had some manic episodes. That morning, her mania was in full throttle and she was cheerfully clutter-clearing and scrubbing the whole house.

Leave my room alone, okay?
I asked her.
Just don’t touch my stuff.

But she just kept singing and scrubbing and scrubbing the kitchen floor, which was spotless to begin with, and nothing was ever even remotely dirty or out of place.

Mom,
I said.
Okay?

A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down,
she sang gaily, her blond hair a sweaty mess, her face flushed. I remember really hating her in that moment.

The cop had her eyes on me, and there was no softness, no humor or kindness there. They were just two black lasers, boring in, seeing everything.
Was she afraid of anyone? Had she mentioned anyone wanting to hurt her, or anyone following her?

No,
I said.
Nothing like that.

She softened a little then, as if she remembered what she was dealing with here.
I’m sorry,
she said.
We have to ask questions, to do everything we can to find your mom. We’ll find her, okay?

Okay,
I said. They wouldn’t find her. I knew that.

My father was watching me so intently, I felt like he was trying to communicate with me telepathically. I put my head in my hand and started to sob.

But I woke up dry-eyed. I didn’t cry anymore. There was an unpleasant tightness in my chest. Why did everyone in my life disappear?

It was the flashing lights that woke me up in the dim light of sunrise. The police had begun a search of the campus, looking for signs of Beck. The news of the online post was just a rumor, I’d learned when I got back last night. I already knew that Beck didn’t have a Fakebook page, and never would.

But some of the other students on campus—you know
those
students, the ones who are always involved, jumping into the fray for Take Back the Night, or protesting against date rape, or a raise in tuition; those super-involved sorority sisters who are always raising money for Darfur, or running book drives for literacy, or baking for the hungry (let them eat cake!) —they had created a page for Beck (who had never spoken to any of them in all her years on campus):
Find Rebecca Miller!
There was a catalog of posts from the hundreds of friends Beck didn’t even know she had.

People were bored. That was the problem with our culture. Life, real life, is essentially dull. Even unhappiness is mundane, lacks texture, the hills and valleys of true drama. People love a mystery, a tragedy, a shooting, a disappearance, a gruesome murder. They love to think about dead pregnant women floating in pools, children
down wells, a subway bombing, husbands strangling wives and hiding their bodies in the woods. It titillates, excites, makes them a little grateful for their own boring workaday world. Even those that feign compassion, who rain tears and bring teddy bears and bouquets of flowers, sit vigils, are secretly thrilled to be involved in something bigger and more interesting than themselves. And the media just chums the water, but don’t get me started. Let’s come up with a logo and jingle for disaster! Twenty-four-hour coverage, a
Dateline
special, a made-for-television movie, an instant book! Okay, I’m done.

After I took my shower, I noticed that my prescriptions were running low. Dr. Cooper is a psychologist but not a psychiatrist. She has a colleague, though, who prescribes for me. So before I headed to class, I called the office and told them I needed refills.

“Oh,” said the assistant. I heard her clicking on her keyboard. “Miss Granger, I see here that you should have enough pills left for fifteen more days.”

“No,” I said. “Just five.”

There was silence on the other line. “Let me talk to the doctor,” she said. “And I’ll call you back.”

I tried to figure in my head when I’d gotten the last refill. But I was extremely tired, tired to my core. I was really careful about taking my exact dose of medications. I knew what happened when I went off and it wasn’t pretty. I never messed with the dosage. Some people did, I knew. But not me. If pills were missing, it was because someone had taken them. And I bet I knew who. That would be a serious problem for me. Doctors and insurance companies were very, very strict with the kind of pills I was taking.

But I didn’t have to worry about it with five days to go. I locked the rest of the pills in my desk and headed to class.

The white noise in my head was so loud that I could hardly focus on what Langdon was saying at the lectern. There were a lot of people missing from class. As I had left the suite that morning, Ainsley told me that people were turning out to volunteer for the search. But she wasn’t and neither was I. We’d both been through it with Elizabeth, walking the grid in a cold drizzle. It had been like wading through a mire of fear and dread, hoping that someone would find a sign of her, praying that they wouldn’t. It was too much to go through again.

The media circus had not yet begun. Outside our dorm there had been one local news van, and I’d heard there were a couple of reporters wandering around, asking questions. But Beck was no Elizabeth. She was not the all-American beauty, homecoming queen with straight As and a good relationship with her parents as Elizabeth had been. She was a tattooed, body-pierced, three-time runaway. Her picture, with spiky hair, lots of dark eyeliner, and exuding bad attitude, wasn’t going to arouse the requisite amount of empathy and envy to be truly titillating. The missing or murdered beautiful girl brought up so much emotion. Like the pretty and pure Snow White with the poison apple at her candy lips, or Sleeping Beauty, pale and virginal in her glass vessel, it was innocence fallen into the hands of evil that really brought up the ratings. No one gave a shit about the ugly stepsisters or the wicked queen.

Not that Beck was ugly. In fact, beneath all that dark makeup and wild hair, she was one of the prettiest girls I’d ever known. Her skin was milk, her eyes almond-shaped and glittery green like the sea in summer. She was pretty in the truest sense and beautiful to her core, sensitive and kind (most of the time). But it was almost as if she didn’t want anyone to know it. She was angry, rough around
the edges, always looking to make a statement with her appearance and actions, quick to rise to an argument. She didn’t always wash; her nails were bitten to the quick. No one likes a girl like that, a girl who doesn’t mold herself to expectations, who doesn’t work hard to please and attract. And so the national news teams weren’t buzzing around, waiting for things to get interesting. Beck was right to hide her truest self inside. The world didn’t deserve her.

My mother had been a truly beautiful woman. Beautiful and sad, long-suffering, her life ended by the man she loved and to whom she had devoted her life. She came from violence, too, but to all outward appearances, she’d escaped the horror of her past. Until she was condemned to repeat it. Naturally, the narrative of her story was irresistible to news-magazine shows, producers of made-for-TV movies, feature writers, and true-crime authors. There was little that the world didn’t know about my poor mother, her tragic life, and her fucked-up family. The only thing they didn’t know was the truth.

The other students were suddenly gathering their things, getting up, and leaving class. The movement jolted me from my reverie. I stayed seated in my place near the back and waited until Langdon and I were the only ones left.