Page 121 of The Quiet Tenant

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FINDING THE ADDRESSwasn’t easy. The media was barred from giving it away. Ditto the cops. But a friend of the family stopped for dinner one night on their way to delivering a care package. Yuwanda overheard enough. She relayed the information to me the next morning.

“Do with it what you want,” she said. “I just thought you might want to know. Apparently her parents moved there after she went missing. It’s close to where she was last seen. They never stopped looking for her.”

It’s only in the next town over—restaurants and convenience stores and coffee shops, the kind of place you visit only if you know people there. The house is nice enough. It sits at the bottom of a hill, modern, with floor-to-ceiling windows, the kind of porch furniture you can’t get at Walmart. A house inhabited by loss and tragedy, yet so tasteful.

What was it like for them to learn they’d been just a few miles apart? So close, this entire time?

I park around the corner and walk to the end of the driveway. It’s lined with pebbles, carefully raked.

One step, then two. I force myself to keep walking until I reach the front door. It’s now. It has to be.

My fingers hover over the doorbell. Before I can press it, the door cracks open. A woman, old enough to be my mother, peers at me.

“Can I help you?”

In the background, a flash of colors, jeans and a black sweaterand that hair, long and clean and streaked with white. Her round eyes catch mine even from a distance.

“It’s okay, Mom,” she says. “Let her in.”

The woman glances back behind her shoulder, then reluctantly does as she’s told. I step in with an apologetic smile, to which she doesn’t respond.

“I’m so sorry to come by unannounced,” I say. “I’m on my way out. Of town, I mean. I’m leaving.”

What am I doing here? Bothering these strangers with my little life plans when they have so much healing to do, so much to rebuild?

I search for the gaze of the person I came to see.

“I think I wanted to say goodbye.” My words, heavy and uncertain. “And sorry.”

My voice quavers. I hate it, the sound of it. What right do I have to be the traumatized one? I’m fine. He didn’t hurt me. He liked me, maybe, in the strange way he might have been capable of.

She steps toward me. The memory of our last moments together hangs in the air. The urgency of the situation, her in his house, on her way out, and me, blind as Oedipus jabbing golden brooches into his eyes.

“You didn’t know,” she says. “You had no idea.”

It’s not entirely exculpatory in her mouth. Just a truth: I didn’t know, and I acted like it.

“I’m so sorry,” I repeat.

Something glistens in her eyes. I wish we had more time. I wish it were just the two of us and we could talk for hours. I wish she could tell me all her stuff and I could tell her mine. I wish we could combine our powers, mesh into one unstoppable force.

“I don’t suppose—” I stand at the edge of stupidity. What do I have to lose? What credibility do I have left? What dignity, what privacy? And if I’ve been stripped of all that, then isn’t it fair to at least try to wrap myself in something else? “I don’t suppose you’d let me…hug you goodbye?”

There’s a silence. The echo of my words, grotesque, crashing against the walls of the vestibule. A console to my left, a mirror, a ceramic bowl of odds and ends, keys, buttons, folded pieces of paper.

“It’s fine if not,” I tell her. “I completely understand. I know it’s weird. I just…”

Then the woman speaks, the older one who can only be her mother. “My daughter,” she says. She speaks with difficulty, like she doesn’t know exactly how to explain. “My daughter doesn’t—”

But she cuts her off. May. I read her name in the paper. It rang a vague bell—distant memories from news reports, maybe a missing-person poster at the gas station. Hard to tell how much I actually remember, and how much of it is my brain filling in the blanks.

May leans against the console next to me. Her eyes, ringed with shadows, piercing in the daylight. Searching for something in me. If I knew what it was, I’d give it to her instantly.

“Mom,” she says. “It’s fine.”

CHAPTER 84

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