As she sat on the edge of Kelsey’s unmade bed, Claire could feel the tight fist in her chest loosen for the first time since she’d heard the news of Whitney’s disappearance. David had done his usual pulling away after she’d appeared at his office. She’d known better but had been unable to stop herself.
Sipping from her third drink since Janie left that morning, she fingered the pills in the pocket of her robe. She didn’t take them indiscriminately because it was getting harder and harder to find doctors who would prescribe them. Claire still recalled her shock and fury three years ago when her family doctor, Dr. Schultz, had refused to renew the prescription of antidepressants and sedatives he’d begun prescribing after Kelsey had been kidnapped.
His words had slashed like jagged little daggers, even cloaked as they’d been in a kindly manner. The upshot of that appointment had been that even the medical profession placed parameters on suffering. And apparently, she’d hit hers the fourth year after Kelsey was taken.
She squeezed the glass in a grip that made her knuckles ache. Before this, she hadn’t known that grief came with an unwritten statute of limitations. There should be a handbook documenting them for families of victims, so they wouldn’t be blindsided when hit with one. A one-year maximum for a messy divorce, maybe two for the passing of a spouse. Surely the death of a child deserved an extra year or so. No matter. She’d out-grieved the limits, and then she’d been cut off. Claire had been reduced to doctor shopping, like some common junkie desperate for a script. She resented that almost as much as she had Dr. Schultz’s final words.
Claire, you need help that you aren’t going to get from the pills. Why not try therapy again?
She’d listened to enough psychologists jabbering about the seven stages of grief to know that David had worked his way through them all, moving along to acceptance and hope at what medical professionals would approvingly call a healthy pace. Claire brought the glass to her lips and drank deeply. She also knew that David had left her at a distant stage four—depression, reflection, and loneliness—while he’d made his laps. That was, perhaps, the greatest betrayal of all.
“Mrs. Willard, I’m leaving for the day. Unless there’s anything else?”
Claire looked up, summoned a smile. Marta stood framed in the doorway, wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and a concerned expression. Her apparel was a vast improvement over the ridiculous gray dress and apron their former cleaning service had required of their employees. David frowned whenever he saw the maid—he was a stickler about appearances. But he was rarely here during the day, so Claire had ignored his objections.
After years together, she thought the maid knew her better than her husband did.
“Nothing, Marta, thank you. I’ll see you on Monday. But if your daughter isn’t better by then, give me a call, and we’ll adjust your hours.” For a moment, she wondered why they clung to the outdated notion that their home still required a maid twice a week. David spent more time at the office than he did in the oversize house he’d insisted they buy a decade ago in the ritzy neighborhood. Janie had always been relatively neat, and it wasn’t like Claire didn’t have the time to clean.
But in the next instant, it occurred to her that without Marta, some weeks she would go days on end without anyone other than family to talk to. Mostly because making the effort with others seemed just that. With David away so much and Janie well ensconced in her high school world, the other woman’s presence was sometimes a welcome distraction from her own moods.
It wasn’t that Marta was or had ever been a confidant, but it was impossible to keep the family dynamics from the help. And after all these years, she and Marta had developed a sort of verbal shorthand.
“I’ve got your recyclables. We’ve got pickup tomorrow.” The other woman lifted a white trash bag clutched in her hand that Claire knew would contain vodka bottles. She kept them beneath the bathroom sink in the guest bathroom, behind the cleaning supplies. Without it ever being mentioned, every week Marta disposed of the empties.
There had been a time when the unspoken knowledge inherent in the exchange would have shamed Claire, but she’d come to embrace it with a weary sort of gratitude. “Thank you, Marta. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“You won’t have to find out. See you next week.” She disappeared down the hallway, and Claire sat silently, listening to the sound of the maid’s receding footsteps.
The house phone rang in their bedroom. She ignored it, lying down on the bed, cradling the glass against her chest, her face pressed into Kelsey’s pillow. She could no longer smell her daughter’s shampoo on it, but she drew some small comfort in curling up on the mattress the way Kelsey used to, her eyes on the room that had stayed precisely the same since the day her daughter had left it.
Janie had always been the tidier of the two girls. She never needed reminding to hang up her things, to put her shoes in the closet, or to put her book bag away. Even now that she’d taken up smoking—she thought Claire didn’t know—there were no signs of her habit in her room. Kelsey had been a dervish, rushing from one activity to the next. The blue sweater she’d worn on her last night home still lay on the floor. A pair of scruffy sneakers sat exactly where Kelsey had toed them off. A couple of books were carelessly tossed on the bed. Marta replaced each item precisely in the same spot when she cleaned.