Evidence of Life - By Barbara Taylor Sissel Page 0,39

to his grandmother and hugged her, and a moment later, Abby felt his hand on her shoulder, his light, firm touch. But before she could reach out to him, somehow hold on to him, she heard the back door close, and he was gone.

“Should I go after him?” Abby appealed to her mother. But her expression said if Abby had to ask, the opportunity had passed.

* * *

The next morning, Abby told her mother she was going home, and when her mother asked, “Why now?” Abby blamed Jake. The sting of his words, the truth in them had kept her up most of the night.

“Thanksgiving is coming,” Abby said. “I should cook, try to make it normal for him.”

“We could go out to Luby’s. My treat.”

Abby smiled. “You saved my life, Mama.”

Her mother cupped her cheek. “I miss Nick and Lindsey, too, you know. So much. But if they were here, they would say we should go on. They would say we should make a new life.”

“But I don’t want a new life, Mama. I want to know what happened to the old one.”

* * *

The house offered her nothing but its history, its record of what had been. She walked through the silent rooms and heard her family’s laughter in every creak of the floorboards. She startled at every shift of light. The past hung in every corner, a boogeyman waiting to crack her across her eyes. In the kitchen, the air seemed redolent with the smell of French toast and bacon, the last meal they’d shared. In her mind, Abby walked around the memory of herself from that morning. Her smiling, smug self with her silly plans, her belief—clearly naïve—in the sanctity of her home, her family.

But her memories were no longer the source of joy or comfort they had been, and this house was not her refuge. It was alien to her, a house of questions, of ghosts, mysteries. And she was the one who had disappeared, Alice down the rabbit hole. How could she stay here? What sort of life could she have?

Abruptly, she left the kitchen, swiftly making her way down the front hall, anxious to get outside. She was at the front door when she felt it, an odd ripple of unease that caused her to turn and look up the stairs, and when she saw the light spilling through the doorway of her and Nick’s bedroom, the hair on her scalp rose. She wasn’t sure why she was afraid, but she was. She had to make herself climb the stairs, hand gripped like a vice to the banister. As if she expected to be attacked...by what? Did ghosts turn on the lights in the houses they haunted? She remembered her brief sojourn here when she returned from Kate’s. After the flood...ATF....

That time she had found the light on in the dining room, a room that was seldom used, and a window had been cracked open in her and Nick’s bedroom. She had turned off the light and shut the window and hadn’t thought a thing of it. Why think anything of this? It was only her sense of the house, that it was so foreign, so unwelcoming of her now; it made her anxious. If its walls could talk, they would ask her to leave. To vanish without a trace like the rest of the Bennetts.

She paused in the bedroom doorway. The lamp on Nick’s nightstand glowed like a beacon. She hadn’t turned on that lamp. She hadn’t come into this room at all except out of necessity, to get a change of clothes, her toothbrush. The sense of the life she and Nick had shared, their most intimate marital moments, was strongest here and made it impossible to linger. She hadn’t once been able to bring herself to go near the bed. But now the soft blue duvet cover was rumpled, and Nick’s pillow was pulled out of place and scrunched as if it had cushioned someone’s cheek.

I didn’t do that. The thought whispered through Abby’s mind.

But she must have. Who else could it have been?

In her grief, she must have lain there and pushed her face into Nick’s pillow. She’d worn his shirts, hadn’t she? Put on his leather jacket...

She brought her fingertips to her eyes. “Where is my family?” she whispered.

Presumed drowned in some unknown location more than three hundred miles away.

Presumed...that word.

It left so much room for conjecture, for doubt.

Back downstairs, she fished the book of matches from her