Perfect Tunes - Emily Gould Page 0,89
talk on the phone and drive and no one should ever do it.”
“Your sister is missing! What did she say?” She was pulling over, preparing to call Daisy back.
“She said she looked around in the yard but didn’t find her, that her tracks in the snow led into the woods, but that she’s not worried because the path in the woods leads into town, and she’s probably at the Dunkin’ Donuts or something.”
“So is Daisy going to the Dunkin’ Donuts?”
Kayla rolled her eyes and handed the phone over. They were parked on the shoulder, slightly too close to a bend in the highway for comfort, but Laura ignored her claustrophobia as she waited for Daisy to pick up the phone again. She was letting it ring for a ridiculous amount of time considering that she’d just put it down. Finally, she picked up.
“I’m going to go look there now,” she said, anticipating Laura’s question. She sounded drunk.
“Are you sure you should be driving?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Laura felt a convulsion of rage pass through her. Now she knew that she couldn’t ask Daisy to keep looking for her daughter. If Daisy fell in the woods or crashed her car, it would be Laura’s fault. Maybe it was time to get the cops involved, though they probably wouldn’t do anything; Marie had been missing for only a few hours, and she was likely, as Daisy suggested, just hanging out somewhere indoors and safe with a dead phone.
Except, what if she wasn’t? Laura had a visceral flash of Marie’s face during her first depressive episode: the horror of looking into her daughter’s eyes and seeing the glazed blankness there. She remembered what it had been like to realize that she was talking to someone who didn’t just not want to be talking to her but who didn’t want to be, period.
Marie had been fine for so long now; Laura had almost forgotten that she hadn’t always been. The latest iteration of teenage-rebel Marie had been alarming but full of spunk. She hadn’t seemed like someone who would hurt herself, but Laura also knew that those moods could change on a dime. Maybe the drugs she’d taken the other night had set off some chemical reaction. She thought about calling the doctor who’d prescribed Lexapro and Abilify for Marie, but it didn’t seem like there was time for anything now except to keep driving, as quickly as possible, to try to get to Daisy’s before nightfall. If Marie hadn’t come back home or made contact with Kayla or Laura by then, that would be the time to call the doctors and cops and freak out. Right now she was still probably just overreacting. Right now she could still imagine that everything would turn out to be fine.
* * *
It was still light out by the time they arrived, but barely; dusk was gathering at the edges of the woods, and it was already hard to see the tracks that Marie’s borrowed boots had made in the snow. “There are two paths; the one into town veers off to the right about ten feet into the woods,” Daisy said from the yard. She was holding her dog’s leash as he strained at the end of it. She didn’t seem drunk, just tired and wary and unfriendly. Laura wanted to punch her in the face.
Instead she willed herself to make eye contact, to ask her civilly if they could take the dog. “She’s not going to help you track the girl, she’s not trained like that,” Daisy said, but she still handed over the leash.
The dog bounded forward down the path, obscuring the tracks as she rushed through the snow, heading straight in, away from the town path. Kayla and Laura followed after her without another word to Daisy.
The dog seemed thrilled to be outside, and Laura wondered how often Daisy took her on long walks; she was a young dog, not the one she’d met the last time she’d visited this house. It didn’t seem quite real that she’d been there before; she never thought about this place, though it was such an important one, in a way. It was where Marie’s father had been a child and an unhappy teenager, and where Marie herself had likely been conceived. No wonder Marie had felt some kind of pull toward it.
Laura shouldn’t have left this part of her daughter’s existence shrouded in secrecy just because it was inconvenient for her to acknowledge it. She had