Listening to the now sporadic traffic.
Nuns?
Or her ex?
More memories. These of her daughter.
Hannah at five. Disney for the first time, the Florida palms swaying, the heat, the 4 p.m. downpour, lasting exactly fifteen minutes. Goofy scared her to tears.
At seven, her face glowing as she sat under the Christmas tree and ripped open the package containing the American Girl doll.
At ten, returning shyly from school, clutching an envelope from the principal. As the girl ate her after-school snack of mozzarella sticks and Goldfish, Parker tore it open, worried that her daughter had gotten into trouble. Later that night, she and Jon framed the Certificate of Mathematics Achievement, for getting the highest score in the history of Benjamin Harris School.
At twelve, her face glowing as she sat under the Christmas tree and ripped open the BB gun her father had bought and wrapped himself. Parker was unsure about the gift, which Jon hadn’t told her about. Still, she smiled at Hannah’s happy enthusiasm as the girl plinked away at empty Sprite cans that tumbled into the snow, where they lay green and contrasty in the monotone December morn.
At thirteen, asking her mother about girls kissing girls. Casually.Like she was asking: Would it rain today? Her carefully constructed answer, which had been composed about a year earlier, was simple and contained not a hint of judgment. A month later the girl was “dating,” that is, hanging with, none other than Luke Shepherd, yes, that’s the one, the school’s star quarterback.
At fourteen, watching with cautious eyes her father weaving through the living room, stumbling over a chair and struggling to get up.
At fifteen, racked by uncontrolled sobs, flinging herself at her parents as Jon, inches from Parker’s face, screamed obscenities and accusations. He was numb to his daughter’s grip, trying to pull him away. Oblivious too to his wife’s cries of “Stop it, stop it, stop it!”
And then, November of last year, sitting on her bed, lost in texting and whatever music was coursing loudly and directly into her brain through the Beats headphones, while the bloody drama unfolded under the seahorse outside.
Sleep wasn’t happening. Parker rolled onto her back, staring at the popcorned ceiling. A faint pink glow from the sign out front made it into the room. She wished she could shut it off, superstitiously thinking it might somehow tell Jon Merritt where they were.
Motion from the other bed. Hannah had stirred. She was sleeping the way she used to when she and Jon would check in during the night: on her side, hugging a second pillow.
“Love you, Han.”
A moment later, she heard the girl’s voice. Though distorted, layered into the girl’s soft breathing and muted by institutional cotton, the words could very well have been a reciprocating “Love you too.”
For the next fifteen minutes, until sleep unspooled within her, she tried to analyze the meaning—not of the words themselves, if they were in fact what she hoped—but of the tone with which her daughter had spoken them: sincere, a space filler, an obligation, an attempt to keep an enemy at bay, sardonic? Allison Parker, the engineer mother, approached this question as if she were facing amathematical problem that was aggressively difficult, involving limits and sine waves and integrals and differentials and sequences and variables...
But her analytical skills failed her, and the only conclusion she could draw was that the calculus of the heart was both infinitely complex and absurdly simple and, therefore, wholly insoluble.
34
At 11 p.m....
Jon Merritt was sitting propped up in bed.
Outside, he heard the lonesome horn of a tug pulling or pushing barges on the Kenoah.
Beside him were the whisky bottle, a soda can, the remains of one of the sandwiches from earlier and hundreds upon hundreds of pieces of intelligence that he’d collected from his ex’s home.
He was angry.
The lawyer had been unhelpful, tearfully reporting that he knew nothing about her whereabouts. In the end, Merritt believed him.
Under other circumstances he might have felt bad for what happened to the unfortunate man—and what his family would be going through. Not tonight.
No luck with Attorney Stein.
No luck at the women’s shelters either.
So, it was down to doing what detectives did: excavating.
Post-its, scraps of paper, cards, clippings, annotated pages ripped from engineering journals, reports about Hannah from teachers.