The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell
12
June 2017
Kim leaves Kerryanne’s apartment and walks across the common with Ryan to Megs’s house to collect Noah.
He’s asleep in his car seat when Megs brings him to the front door. Kim swallows a surge of annoyance. She specifically told Megs that Noah needed to stay awake because otherwise he wouldn’t be tired at bedtime and now she’ll have to wake him up to get him out of his clothes and ready for bed and he’ll be grouchy and miserable and then won’t want to sleep when she puts him down at bedtime but Megs just smiles indulgently at him in his car seat, his dark hair damp with sweat, and says, ‘Bless his little soul, he was exhausted, I couldn’t bear to keep him awake.’
Kim smiles grimly and takes the handle of the car seat. ‘Never mind,’ she says tightly.
‘And I take it …?’ Megs begins. ‘Nothing about the kids?’
‘No,’ says Kim. ‘Nothing about the kids. Although – did Zach happen to say anything to you about what he had planned for last night?’
‘No. I mean, I didn’t even know they were going to the pub until you told me about it. Haven’t really spoken to him the last few days.’
‘So, you didn’t know anything about …’ Kim pauses, wondering whether to spoil the surprise or not, then decides that, no, getting to the bottom of the whereabouts of Zach and Tallulah is more important than surprises right now. ‘… a ring?’ she finishes.
‘A ring?’
‘Yes. An engagement ring. Did Zach say anything to you about proposing to Tallulah?’
Megs laughs. ‘God,’ she says, ‘no!’
Kim narrows her eyes at her. She has no idea why Megs should find this concept funny.
‘Is there anyone else that Zach might have talked it through with? A friend? His dad?’
‘His friends, I suppose, but I’ve already spoken to all of them and none of them knows anything about what happened last night. And no, he wouldn’t talk to his dad about it. His dad’s not that sort of man. Not much emotional intelligence, you know.’
Kim stifles a wry smile. She’s rarely met anyone with less emotional intelligence than Megs. She sighs. ‘Fine,’ she says, ‘OK, well, I’d better get this little man home and try and persuade him to wake up and then try and persuade him to go back to sleep again.’
Megs smiles at her blankly. She has no clue.
‘Please, let me know if you hear anything, won’t you?’ Kim asks. ‘I’m going to call the police about Tallulah if she’s not back by the time Noah’s asleep. You might want to do the same.’
Megs shrugs. ‘Still reckon the two of them have run away somewhere for a break from it all. But yes. Maybe I should be worried. You might be right.’
Kim turns then and heads to her car, shaking her head almost imperceptibly as she walks, her eyes closing against the impossibility of understanding how a mother and a grandmother could have so little engagement with their roles.
The first half of the evening passes quickly as she goes through the process of readying a year-old child for bed. Noah, as she predicted, won’t settle and it’s almost 9 p.m. by the time he finally drops off.
Kim craves wine but she needs to remain clear-headed and sober because her evening is far from over. She sits in the living room. There’s something on the TV; she doesn’t really know what: some loud Saturday-night fare. Ryan sits in the armchair scrolling through his phone, his foot bouncing up and down the only thing betraying his anxiety.
She calls Tallulah’s number yet again. It goes through to voicemail, yet again.
She looks at Ryan. ‘Did Zach say anything to you?’ she says. ‘About proposing to Tallulah?’
She immediately knows that he has by the slight jerk of Ryan’s head, the immediate cessation of the foot bouncing. ‘Why?’ he says.
‘I just wondered. I found a ring in his coat pocket yesterday. I thought maybe he’d been planning to propose last night. It made sense, you know, given he was taking her out for the night.’
‘Well, yeah, he did kind of say he was thinking about it. But he didn’t say when he was planning on doing it.’
‘What did he say exactly?’
‘Just asked me what I thought. Said, did I think she’d say yes if he asked her.’
‘And what did you say?’
‘I said I didn’t have a clue. Because I didn’t.’
She nods.
Then she looks at the time. It’s nine o’clock. It’s enough she thinks, enough. It’s time.
With a racing heart and a sickening swirl in the pit of her stomach, she calls the police and she files a missing persons case.
A very attractive man is at her door the following morning. He wears a grey suit and a cream open-necked shirt, ID on a lanyard.
He pulls a badge from his jacket pocket and flashes it at her. ‘Detective Inspector Dominic McCoy,’ he says. ‘You called about some missing persons last night?’
Kim nods, hard. ‘Yes, yes. God, yes. Please, come in.’
She has barely slept. She brought Noah into her bed eventually because he wouldn’t settle in his cot after his night-time wake-up and the two of them had lain there, in the dark, blinking up at the ceiling.
At one point he’d turned to her, grabbed her cheek with one hot hand and said umma. He said it three more times before she realised that he was trying to say Mumma. That he was trying to speak his first full word.
‘Come through,’ Kim says now, leading Dominic McCoy into her living room. ‘Can I get you anything?’
‘No. I’ve just had a coffee so I’m good. Thank you.’
They sit facing each other across the coffee table and Kim passes Noah a packet of rice cakes to keep him quiet for a while.
‘So, my colleague tells me that your daughter failed to come home on Friday night? Is that correct?’
Kim nods. ‘My daughter, and her boyfriend – he lives with us. They both failed to come home.’
‘And they’re how old?’
‘They’re both nineteen. They turned nineteen in March.’
DI McCoy looks at her strangely, as if she shouldn’t be worried about a couple of nineteen-year-olds.
‘But they’re parents,’ she continues. ‘Noah – he’s their son. So it’s not as if they’re likely to just take off on a whim. They’re good parents. Responsible.’
He nods, thoughtfully. ‘I see.’
She wonders what it is that he thinks he sees. But then she answers his questions about the events of Friday and of Saturday. She gives him Scarlett’s address, Lexie’s address, Megs’s address. She almost mentions the engagement ring, but then decides against it at the last minute; she’s not sure why.
Half an hour later he stands to leave.
‘So, what do you think, then?’ Kim asks. ‘What do you think might have happened to them?’
‘Well, there’s no real reason to believe that anything has happened to them. Two youngsters, a lot of responsibility, their first night out in a long time, maybe they just made a break for freedom.’
‘No,’ she replies immediately. ‘Absolutely not. They’re devoted to their son. Both of them. Particularly my daughter. Absolutely devoted to him.’
He nods thoughtfully. ‘And the boyfriend, Zach? Was he in any way controlling? Would you say? Were there any signs of abuse going on?’
‘No,’ she replies again, almost too fast, as she tries to override the uncomfortable little doubts she’s starting to have. ‘He adores Tallulah. Dotes on her. Almost too much.’
‘Too much?’
She realises what she’s said and retreats. ‘No. Not too much. But, you know, it gets on her nerves sometimes, I guess.’
‘I wouldn’t mind being doted on like that,’ he says with a smile.
Kim closes her eyes and nods. Men don’t know, she thinks, they don’t know how having a baby makes you protective of your skin, your body, your space. When you spend all day giving yourself to a baby in every way that it’s possible to give yourself to another human being, the last thing you want at the end of the day is a grown man wanting you to give him things too. Men don’t know how the touch of a hand against the back of your neck can feel like a request, not a gesture of love, how emotional issues become too cumbersome to deal with, how their love for you is too much sometimes, just too much. Kim sometimes thinks that women practise being mothers on men until they become actual mothers, leaving behind a kind of vacancy.
DI McCoy leaves a minute later. He promises that he will open an investigation. He doesn’t say when or how. Kim watches him from her front window, climbing into his unmarked vehicle, adjusting his rear-view mirror, adjusting his lanyard and his suit jacket and his hair, turning on the engine and leaving.
She turns to Noah, who is in his bouncy chair, a mushed-up rice cake in the palm of his hand, and she forces a sad smile designed to distract him from the tears running down the sides of her nose and says, ‘Where’s Umma, Noah? Where is she?’