And where was Terri? She was at the next table over, being entertained by an old woman in a bleached straw hat who must have been a retired elementary school teacher or a grandmother or something of the like because she took right to Terri as if she’d been waiting for her all her life. The two of them were playing word games, playing patty-cake, the woman had her on her lap. Pamela said it was cute. The drinks went down. The conversation jumped and sparked, longtime friends spinning out jokes and routines and gossiping about every soul they knew in common who didn’t happen to be sitting at the table in that moment. And then, at some point, Pamela glanced up and saw that the old woman in the straw hat was gone. Along with Terri. The little girl. Her daughter.
It took a minute for Carey to grasp the situation — and when he did, when he got up dazedly from his chair, the first stirrings of alarm beating in him, he went methodically through the place, jerking out chairs to look under the tables, going down on his hands and knees, startling people, Pamela right behind him and Jim and Francie right behind her. Then it was the restrooms, the kitchen, then out the door to where the river, cold and muscular, framed the shore. He saw a maze of bare limbs, people spread out on mats and blankets, huddled beneath beach umbrellas in bruised puddles of shade, radios going, kids shouting, dogs shaking themselves dry. But he didn’t see Terri. And now it began to build in him, the shock and fear and hate — hate of the old woman, of all these people, these oblivious people, and of Pamela too, for doing this to him, for giving him this daughter he loved in that moment more than anything in the world. He began shouting his daughter’s name, his voice high and tight, as if he were onstage howling into the microphone at the climax of one his concerts, and here were Pamela and Jim and Francie, their faces shrinking away from his like stones dropped down a well. “Terri!” he called. “Terri!”
But wasn’t that the old woman? Wasn’t that her, laid out on her back like a corpse, her flabby legs spread in a V and the straw hat pulled down over her face? He was on her in the next instant, snatching the hat away. “Where is she?” he demanded. “My daughter. What did you do with her?”
The old lady blinked under the harshness of the sun. It was hot. Mid-afternoon. She was glazed in sweat. “Who?”
“My daughter. Terri. The little girl you had in your lap. Terri!”
Something like recognition slid across the woman’s face, the faintest spark, and he realized she was drunk, no grandmother, no schoolteacher, just a drunken fat old slut he could have choked to death right there on the beach and nobody would have blamed him. And what did he get out of her? Blinking, holding up a hand to shield her eyes, her voice cracked and the fat of her arms shining like grease, she came up on one elbow and gave him a grimace. “I thought she was with you.”
He was making promises to himself as he ran up and down the beach, wading now, calling out his daughter’s name over and over — he’d been wrong, he’d sinned, he’d been selfish, stupid, stupid, stupid, and if they found her, if she was all right, saved, fine, whole, he would change his ways, he swore it. If only—
That was when Pamela let out a cry from the far end of the beach where the trail wound through a scrub of bushes and low trees and he ran toward the sound of it, people jerking their heads around, Jim just behind him and Francie too, the sand burning under his feet and the sun knifing at him. In the next moment, Pamela was stepping out of the shadows as if out of an old photograph, and he saw the smaller figure there beside her, Terri, in her pink playsuit and with her face clownishly smeared with the juice of the huckleberries she’d been picking all by herself.
—
What happened next? I didn’t know. Curiously, there were no entries after that, the year drawn down in a succession of blank white pages. It happened that I had to go back east again on business in any case (not with the first group — I had no patience with them — but for another investment opportunity, which ultimately turned a nice little profit for Chrissie and me), and when I got back I treated her to a week at a resort in Cabo we like to use as a getaway. Time passed. I forgot about the journal, forgot about Carey Fortunoff and his unplumbed life. And then one day Mary Ellen stopped by to pick up Chrissie for their afternoon walk just as I was coming in the door, and it all came back to me.
“So what’s new?” I asked. “Anything interesting out there?”
“Well, duh,” she said. “Haven’t you been reading the paper? Things are going through the roof — my last two listings sold the day they came on the market. For above asking.” She was wearing a yellow sun visor and a white cotton tennis dress. Her eyes jumped out at me as if they held more than they could contain. She wasn’t aggressive, or not exactly, but she never seemed far off message.
“What about that place on Runyon?” I asked. “That ever sell?”
“Why? You interested?” She was giving me a coy look, dropping one hand to tug at the hem of her skirt as if to draw my attention there. She had great legs, her best asset, tanned and honed by countless hours of tennis and power-walking. I realized I’d never seen her in a pair of pants, but then why would I? Her standard outfit was a skirt and heels and a blouse cut just low enough to keep the husbands interested while the wives paced off the living room to determine where the hutch was going to go.
She held the look just a beat too long. “Because Chrissie never said a word. But that’s a prime piece of property, two blocks closer to the beach than your place, and with better views — or potential views. I’ll tell you, that’s where I’d build my dream house if I had the wherewithal. Or the peace of mind.” This was a reference to the fact that her life was unsettled now that she’d separated from her husband and moved into a condo with views of nothing.
I shrugged. “Just curious.”
“I’ll show it to you if you want.” A door eased shut upstairs and here was Chrissie coming down the staircase in her walking shorts, her own legs long and bare and shining like tapered candles in the light from the open doorway. Mary Ellen shot me a look. “Tomorrow? Say, four?”
—
I went in the front door this time, Mary Ellen Stovall leading the way. The first room we entered, just off the hallway, was a den, wood-paneled, with floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled not with books but CDs, thousands of them, and on the bottom two shelves, running along all four walls, records — old-fashioned vinyl records in their original jackets. Mary Ellen flicked on an overhead light and the spines leapt out at me, dazzling slashes of color in every shade conceivable. There were speakers, an amp, turntable and CD player, and a single ergonomic chair covered in black velvet. This was his sanctum, I realized, the place where he came to listen.