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“What is it, Michael?” Angela called from the kitchen. “Chocolate? Magazines?”
“I’ve got it,” Michael said, his voice hollow and barely audible.
Michael moved onto the porch, pulling the door shut behind him. Erica stepped back, allowing Michael room. She started digging in the pocket of her jeans, which were dark and fitted, and brought out more cigarettes. While she shook one loose from the pack and flicked her thumb against the lighter, Michael took her in, observing the changes ten years had etched on his ex-wife. Some lines had formed around her eyes, some skin hung looser beneath her chin, but her shoulder-length hair showed no gray, and the cut looked more stylish and professional than the messy ponytail she had preferred in college. Michael noticed the gray Apple Watch on her wrist, the smartphone tucked in her pocket.
She looked like a grown-up. An adult. And the difference was striking.
She took a long drag on the cigarette and blew the smoke away from Michael. “You never liked this habit. I’d given it up until about twelve hours ago.”
“What do you mean, your daughter?” Michael asked. “You have a daughter? How old is she?”
Erica’s hand shook as she held the cigarette between her index and middle fingers. “Felicity. That’s her name. Felicity.”
“Your favorite show,” Michael said, remembering. Erica coming to his dorm room after class, sprawling across his bed, her shoes kicked off, catching reruns of Felicity . She loved to analyze and debate the character’s choices of men, wailed in distress when an episode played in which Keri Russell’s hair was cut short.
Michael remembered it all. The late nights with friends in college. The drinking and the partying. Their histrionic fighting and the ensuing make-up sex.
The day of their wedding. And also the day a year later when he left.
All of it so long ago. When he looked back on that time, he thought they had both acted like children.
“None of this makes sense, Erica. I haven’t seen you in ten years. I’m married.”
“I know.”
“You know? You can’t just show up at my door like this.”
“There’s a man.” She started pacing again, lifting the cigarette to her mouth, the tip glowing the same color as the sky while she dragged. “He’s a music teacher at her school. He’s odd. I think he liked her. Felicity. In an unhealthy way—you know? This man knows something.”
Her words became more and more clipped, her gestures more frantic as she spoke. Ash fell off the cigarette and hit the concrete porch. Even when things were at their best between them—many days in college, the early months of their marriage—Erica tended toward exaggeration. She always managed to turn even the smallest misunderstanding—either with him or with someone else—into an operatic blowup.
Michael reached out, placed a hand on her arm. “Stop, Erica. Just stop and slow down.”
She did. She looked at his hand where it held her arm near the crook of the elbow, his skin touching her skin for the first time in a decade.
Michael let go. But he said, “If someone you know is in trouble, you need to call the police. They can figure it out. I have to work tomorrow.”
Erica paused for a moment. She dropped the cigarette, ground it under her sneaker, a new running shoe, and scuffed her foot, leaving a smear of dark ash across the concrete. Erica ran cross-country in high school, jogged three to five miles a day in college, even on mornings after late nights of partying. She’d always been energetic, almost frantic when she did anything—walking, studying, talking, having sex. She looked at Michael as if he didn’t understand something fundamental. “The police are looking. They’ve been looking all day. Do you know what happens if they don’t find someone right away? Do you know what happens to the missing person? The child?”
“Erica—”
“I’ve been talking to the police constantly, answering questions about me and my finances and my personal life and everyone I’ve ever known. Including you.”
“Me?”
“Everyone. Everything about my life. They look into everything when a child disappears. I’ve had to answer the most embarrassing questions. The most personal questions.”
Michael took a step back. He reached behind him, his hand fumbling for the doorknob. Baseball, he thought. A good book . Michael craved those things. And needed to get back to them.
To his real life. Not somebody else’s.
He saw a wasp’s nest in the corner of the porch, where a support post met the roof. He was supposed to knock the nest down the weekend before, but he hadn’t, even though a wasp managed to get inside and zip around the kitchen, throwing itself against the window above the sink until Angela swatted it with a magazine. The nest was bigger now. More wasps stirred, floated above their honeycombed dwelling. The odor of the cooking meat grew stronger as the wind shifted. The sky was transitioning from the day’s blue to the evening’s purple.
“You should go talk to them,” he said. “The police. Go back to them. Listen to them. Tell them whatever they want to know. You were never one to keep secrets, so tell them anything that might help. I’m just a guy you don’t know anymore. I can’t help you.”
Erica stared him down. While she did, her eyes filled with tears. She bowed her head, an exaggerated gesture like she was praying. The movement took him right back to their college days, to times she was upset and times they fought. In both the past and the present, the gesture reached something in Michael, summoning empathy and concern for the person before him. Erica could look so vulnerable at times; she seemed always to feel more deeply than anyone else. It hurt to look at her when she was in pain or distress.
And then she glanced up again, the tear-filled eyes meeting his. Her chin quivered.
“You have to help me, Michael. You have no real choice.”
Her tone of voice had shifted. Gone was the manic edge, the revved-up energy. Erica sounded shaken, scared.
She spoke again, her voice just above a whisper.
“She’s yours, Michael. Felicity is your daughter, and I need your help getting her back.”