Chapter 8
744 Words
She drove north.
She didn't plan to. She got in her car after leaving Castello's and she just drove, because driving was the one thing she knew how to do without thinking, and her body needed something it didn't have to think about. The city fell away behind her. The highway opened up. She drove for two hours in the dark with the heat on low and the radio off.
She wasn't going to do anything. She wanted to be clear about that, at least to herself. She was not in that kind of dark. She was in a different kind the kind that feels less like falling and more like suddenly being too tired to stand. The kind that just wants somewhere quiet to sit down.
The cliff road was called Merrow's Edge. She had been there once, years ago, on a road trip with a college friend. She had stood at the railing and looked out at the water and felt, for the first and only time she could remember, completely and totally at peace. No performance. No family. No competing. Just water and wind and space.
She parked the car. She sat inside for a while, watching the darkness. Then she got out and stood at the railing and looked at the water far below.
She thought about a lot of things. She thought about the birthday dinner and the lemon tart and the grocery-store flowers she had bought herself. She thought about Daniel's face when she put the ring on the bar. She thought about her mother redirecting a phone call to Selene's hard week in under thirty seconds. She thought about the woman in the elevator you are disappearing and she thought: I don't want to disappear. I want to be found.
She wasn't sure how long she stood there.
She drove home eventually. She parked in her building's lot. She went upstairs. She fed Milo, her gray tabby cat, who wound around her ankles and didn't ask her any questions.
That was the last thing she did in that apartment.
In the morning, Lydia was gone.
Not dramatically. No note, no message, no final dramatic phone call. She took a bag. Her passport. The emergency cash she kept in an envelope in her underwear drawer for reasons she had never been able to articulate until now. She took Milo to the neighbor downstairs who had always liked him. She left her phone on the kitchen counter.
She just left.
The abandoned car at Merrow's Edge was found two days later by a woman walking her dog. The doors were unlocked. Her purse was on the passenger seat. Her phone was not there — which confused the investigators — but everything else was, including her coat, folded on the back seat with a neatness that later struck everyone as very Lydia.
The call came to Patricia first. Then Gerald. Then Daniel, who drove to the cliff in twenty-five minutes and stood at the railing for a long time and didn't say anything.
No body was found. The water below Merrow's Edge was deep and tidal and the search teams went out twice and found nothing. In the absence of a body, in the presence of an abandoned car and a deserted engagement and a family that had, when pressed by investigators, to admit that Lydia had not seemed okay at her celebration two nights before — people drew conclusions.
The Mercer family fell apart quietly, the way they did everything.
Patricia stopped going to her book club. Gerald started working longer hours. Daniel sat in his apartment and held the ring she had left on the bar and tried to count how many times in the past year he had reached for his phone to text Selene instead of talking to his fiancée.
He lost count.
Selene said very little.
Selene sat in the family living room on a Tuesday evening, three weeks after the abandoned car, while Patricia cried on the sofa across from her, and something passed across her face that no one in the family had ever seen there before. Something that was not warmth or charm or easy reassurance.
Something like guilt.
"She told me," Selene said quietly, almost to herself.
"What?" Patricia looked up.
"She told me. She told all of us." Selene looked at her hands. "We just didn't listen."
Patricia opened her mouth. Closed it.
"She told us for years," Selene said.
- Writer
