Page 31 of All These Beautiful Strangers
I didn’t say anything. I remembered the night after my mother left. My father had gone to the police station to file a report. Grandma Fairchild came over to stay with us. She fell asleep in the upstairs guest bedroom. Late in the night, Seraphina climbed into my bed crying, and I didn’t want to wake our grandma. I was seven, and I was the big sister, and I wanted to help.
“Don’t cry,” I told Seraphina. “We’ll build a fort and we’ll crawl into it, away from it all.”
We stripped the sheets and pillows from our beds, pulled the cushions from the couches in the downstairs living room. We raided the linen closet, collected fluffy bath towels and thick down comforters and kitchen tablecloths. We draped them over chairs and lamps and tables, Scotch-taped their ends to the walls, and secured them in the edges of doorways—through the living room, the dining room, the upstairs hall. With a flashlight, we crawled through the labyrinth of passageways we had created, naming the rooms and their purposes, and we fell asleep tucked into the space between the coffee table and the couch in the downstairs study.
Sometime in the night, our father came home. I heard the creak of the front door opening, and I saw, through the thin curtain of the sheet draped overhead, a light turn on. I heard my father’s expletives from the front hall, heard him call our names, heard the ripping of tape from the walls, the sharp edges of chairs biting into the hardwood floor as they were overturned.
“Go,” I whispered to my sister. “Go, go, go.”
Go where, I didn’t know. But we crawled, one after another, through the living room, as the soft ceilings of our fortress fell around us. The wood floor was hard and unforgiving under the bare knobs of our knees, the heels of our hands. I led the way into the dining room, took refuge under the big oak table.
He found Seraphina first. Pulled her from underneath the dining room table by her ankle—I saw it all. He sat down not four feet from me, pulled her onto his lap, tugged her pajama bottoms down to her thighs. I heard the sharp slap of his hand against her bare bottom. Once, twice, a third time. My sister was staring right at me, her face red and puckered, her eyes dripping and wet. She wailed, but she didn’t call out my name, didn’t give me away.
I scooted back farther under the depths of the dining room table. I covered my mouth with both hands, tucked my fingers into my lips so that he couldn’t hear me breathe, couldn’t hear my dry gasps for air.
Now I looked up at the portrait of my father, tall and smiling, his arm around my mother.
“I guess he wasn’t around that much, right?” Greyson said.
“He was around,” I said.
“Huh,” Greyson said. “I just don’t remember seeing him that much, is all.”
“Well, it’s not like you were here all the time,” I said.
“Sure, I guess,” Greyson said.
When we reached the second-floor landing, I didn’t turn right and go to my old bedroom. I knew what I would find there; I could navigate it with my eyes closed even after all these years: the giant bay window looking out onto the lake, the pale pink walls, the twin canopied beds where Seraphina and I slept, my old dollhouse in the corner. Instead, I turned left and headed to my parents’ room on the other end of the house. The door was closed but not locked. It was dark inside, the dying light of the day filtering in through the cracks in the curtains. I threw the curtains open and coughed at the waves of dust that unfurled themselves from the window dressings.
My mother’s vanity was draped in sheets, but I brushed them off and sat in her chair, just as I had when I was a little girl and I would play with her makeup. I opened her jewelry box and started going through the velvet cases. There were so many—all gifts from my father, I presumed. A pearl necklace for her birthday, diamond earrings for an anniversary, a sapphire ring on the day of my birth, a platinum tennis bracelet for Valentine’s Day.
I wondered why my mother hadn’t taken any of her jewelry with her. When she left, her SUV was still parked in the front driveway; her purse with her keys, wallet, and phone was sitting on her bedroom bureau. It took days before anybody noticed her luggage was missing—two paisley-print suitcases that she normally used to cart her belongings back and forth between the city and the lake house. Some of her things were missing too—her toothbrush, her comb, her favorite summer dresses, a pair of sandals. It bothered me at first, trying to figure out the importance of what she had left behind and what she had chosen to take with her. And then the investigator found the bank tapes and it all made sense: my mother hadn’t wanted to take anything that would be missed, anything remotely traceable. She didn’t want to be found.
I remembered there was a rip in the inner lining of one of the suitcases. Seraphina and I had found it once while packing, and we thought it was special, like a secret compartment. We used to keep little things in there when we were traveling, our most prized possessions. That summer, Seraphina had stored one of her horse figurines in there, and I had stowed away the bracelet my father had gotten me on a business trip to Barcelona. As a little girl, I would sometimes lie in bed awake at night and imagine my mother, wherever she was, unpacking her things and discovering the treasures that Seraphina and I had hidden there. A part of me liked knowing that my mother carried a piece of us with her. I wondered if they brought her some small comfort.
In the bottom drawer of the jewelry box, I came across a worn drawstring pouch. Inside I found a cheap gold necklace with a crab pendant. The body of the crab was a fake ruby and the claws were clutching artificial diamonds. I remembered my mother wearing this necklace often. It had been one of her favorites; she wore it almost every day. I had always assumed my father had given it to her, but under closer inspection, I realized how inexpensive it was, the gold chain faded, the fake ruby cloudy and plastic. This definitely was not a gift from my father. I wondered why she had worn it so often, and why she kept it in her jewelry box with all her good jewelry. I didn’t know why, but something made me take it. I slipped the pouch into my pocket.
“Hey, what are you doing in here?”
I turned around on the vanity seat and saw a man in coveralls standing in the doorway, a flashlight in his hand. Greyson froze where he was in my parents’ walk-in closet.
“This is my house,” I said. “What are you doing in here?”
“I’m calling the police,” the man said as he took a phone out of his pocket and started dialing. He pointed a finger at me. “I saw you take something from that jewelry box. You better put it back.”
“Hey, man, this is Charlotte Calloway, all right?” Greyson said as he stepped out of the closet and came to stand by my side. “Her dad owns this place. He’s the one who pays your bills. It’s probably best not to piss him off by calling the police on his daughter.”
The man hesitated. “You’re Mr. Calloway’s daughter?”
“Yes,” I said. “And I can prove it.”
I fished my driver’s license out of my purse and held it out to him. He came toward me and picked it up, squinting at the name and the picture and then back at me.
“Your turn,” I said when he handed my license back. “Who are you?”
“Frankie Martin,” he said, running a hand along the back of his neck. “I’ve been keeping up the grounds here for half a decade. The first time I’ve ever actually been inside, though. No one told me anyone was coming up to the house today.”
He was still squinting at me like he wasn’t sure I should be there.
