No Second Chance
Page 3“Are you telling me you don’t know where Tara is?”
There was no hesitation this time. “Yes, that’s correct.”
It felt as if a giant hand were pushing down on my chest. I squeezed my eyes shut and fell back. “How long?” I asked.
“Has she been missing?”
“Yes.”
Dr. Heller started speaking too quickly. “You have to understand. You were very seriously injured. We were not optimistic you would survive. You were on a respirator. A lung collapsed. You also contracted sepsis. You’re a doctor, so I know I don’t have to explain to you how serious that is. We tried to slow down the meds, help you wake up—”
“How long?” I asked again.
She and Regan exchanged another glance, and then Heller said something that ripped the air out of me all over again. “You’ve been out for twelve days.”
Chapter 2
“We’re doing allwe can,” Regan said in a voice that sounded too rehearsed, as if he’d been standing over my bed while I was unconscious, working on his delivery. “As I told you, we were not sure we had a missing child at first. We lost valuable time there, but we’ve recovered now. Tara’s photo has been sent out to every police station, airport, tollbooth plaza, bus and train station—anything like that within a hundred-mile radius. We’ve run background profiles on similar abduction cases, see if we can find a pattern or a suspect.”
“Twelve days,” I repeated.
“We have a trace on your various phones—home, business, cell—”
“In case someone calls in a ransom demand,” he said.
“Have there been any calls?”
“Not yet, no.”
My head dropped back to the pillow. Twelve days. I’d been lying in this bed for twelve days while my baby girl was . . . I pushed the thought away.
Regan scratched at his beard. “Do you remember what Tara was wearing that morning?”
I did. I had developed something of a morning routine—wake up early, tiptoe toward Tara’s crib, stare down. A baby is not all joy. I know that. I know that there are moments of mind-numbing boredom. I know that there are nights when her screams work on my nerve endings like a cheese grater. I don’t want to glorify life with an infant. But I liked my new morning routine. Looking down at Tara’s tiny form fortified me somehow. More than that, this act was, I guess, a form of rapture. Some people find rapture in a house of worship. Me—and yeah, I know how corny this sounds—I found rapture in that crib.
“A pink one-piece with black penguins,” I said. “Monica got it at Baby Gap.”
He jotted it down. “And Monica?”
“What about her?”
His face was back in the pad. “What was she wearing?”
“Jeans,” I said, remembering the way they slid over Monica’s hips, “and a red blouse.”
I said, “Are there—I mean, do you have any leads?”
“We’re still investigating all avenues.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Regan just looked at me. There was too much weight in that stare.
My daughter. Out there. Alone. For twelve days. I thought of her eyes, the warm light only a parent sees, and I said something stupid. “She’s alive.”
Regan tilted his head like a puppy hearing a new sound.
“Don’t give up,” I said.
“We won’t.” He continued with the curious look.
“It’s just that . . . are you a parent, Detective Regan?”
“Two girls,” he said.
“It’s stupid, but I’d know.” The same way I knew the world would never be the same when Tara was born. “I’d know,” I said again.
“We’ll need some more information from you,” Regan said. “About you, your wife, friends, finances—”
“Later.” It was Dr. Heller again. She moved forward as if to block me from his gaze. Her voice was firm. “He needs to rest.”
“No, now,” I said to her, upping the firm-o-meter a notch past hers. “We need to find my daughter.”
Monica had been buried at the Portman family plot on her father’s estate. I missed her funeral, of course. I don’t know how I felt about that, but then again, my feelings for my wife, in those stark moments when I was honest with myself, have always been muddled. Monica had that beauty of privilege, what with the too-fine cheekbones, straight silk-black hair, and that country-club lockjaw that both annoyed and aroused. Our marriage was an old-fashioned one—shotgun. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. Monica was pregnant. I was fence-sitting. The upcoming arrival tilted me into the matrimonial pasture.
I heard the funeral details from Carson Portman, Monica’s uncle and the only member of her family who kept in touch with us. Monica had loved him dearly. Carson sat at my hospital bedside with his hands folded in his lap. He looked very much like your favorite college professor—the thick-lensed spectacles, the nearly shedding tweed coat, and the overgrown shock of Albert Einstein-meets-Don King hair. But his brown eyes glistened as he told me in his sad baritone that Edgar, Monica’s father, had made sure that my wife’s funeral was a “small, tasteful affair.”
Of that, I had no doubt. The small part, at least.
Over the next few days I had my share of visitors at the hospital. My mother—everyone called her Honey—exploded into my room every morning as if fuel propelled. She wore Reebok sneakers of pure white. Her sweatsuit was blue with gold trim, as if she coached the St. Louis Rams. Her hair, though neatly coifed, had the brittle of too many colorings, and there was the whiff of a last cigarette about her. Mom’s makeup did little to disguise the anguish of losing her only grandchild. She had amazing energy, staying by my bedside day after day and managing to exude a steady stream of hysteria. This was good. It was as though she was, in part, being hysterical for me, and thus, in a strange way, her eruptions kept me calm.
Despite the room’s nearly supernova heat—and my constant protestations—Mom would put an extra blanket over me when I was asleep. I woke up one time—my body drenched in sweat, naturally—to hear my mother telling the black nurse with the formal hat about my previous stay at St. Elizabeth’s when I was only seven.