Chapter 74

74

There was nothing to distinguish the slow stretch of time between when I lost Gemma and what happened next that tugged her back into my life. The year was unremarkable. Violet was going on thirteen, but I wasn’t with her much—you had somehow maneuvered things so that she came only once a week. At one point I emailed a lawyer, someone an acquaintance had used in her divorce. We set up a call and I watched my phone ring on the table when the date and time came. I had no fight in me, and besides, it seemed Violet was happier living without me.

So I was surprised when the teacher called me to ask if I would chaperone a field trip to a farm. It was the night before the trip—another mother who did this sort of thing regularly was sick and had to cancel. The thought of Violet treating me with her usual chill in front of her classmates filled me with dread. But I agreed to do it. I knocked on Violet’s door to tell her I’d be going. She had no reaction at all. She didn’t look up from the beaded bracelet she was stringing with patient fingers. Her hands looked so different from mine.

I sat somewhere in the middle of the bus, beside a father who mostly read emails on his phone while we bumped our way out of the city, listening to the cloud cover of teenage excitement. Violet was several rows behind me on the other side of the bus in the window seat. The girl she sat next to was tall with a burgeoning chest. Her back was turned to Violet as she leaned across the aisle to whisper with a pair of brunettes in matching French braids. Violet’s eyes tracked the rolling countryside.

She looked like she wasn’t paying attention to the whispers, but I knew she could hear every word: I saw the ball in her throat slowly slide up and then down. I remembered how that felt, to be excluded. I hadn’t thought Violet cared about fitting in with the cool crowd at school. She seemed to me far more comfortable on the periphery, and mostly on her own; she wasn’t like the other girls her age. She never had been.

When we got to the farm I dropped back behind the group and watched her. She walked in lockstep with the girls from the bus, but they didn’t speak much to her. When they stopped at the entrance to the apple orchard, Violet looked around to place me. I gave a small wave from the back of the group. She flipped her ponytail behind her shoulders and inserted herself stiffly into the small group of girls who were talking loudly over the farmer’s instructions about how to pick the apples properly so the bud wasn’t damaged for next year’s crop. The teacher handed out plastic bags.

We had one hour in the orchard before they were going to teach us how to make pies. I wandered away from the other parents, who mostly kept their distance as well, and found the McIntosh trees. Several rows over I saw the red of Violet’s jacket weaving between the narrow trunks. She was alone, holding her bag in one hand and reaching with her other arm up into the branches. There was a gracefulness in her movements that surprised me. She felt the skin of the apples, looking for imperfections. When she plucked one, she would smell it and turn it around in her fingers. She looked so mature, the plumpness in her cheeks gone, the line of her jaw more prominent. Despite the budding femininity that was beginning to define her, she moved just like you. I saw it in the way she shifted her weight and how she folded her arms behind her back. But she held her head just like me—tilted, with a tendency to glance upward when she was thinking of her response to something, finding the right word in a vocabulary that seemed to grow even faster than her long legs.

The breeze picked up every so often and distracted her, wisps of her dark hair whipping across her face. She placed the bag at her feet and pulled out a hair elastic, collected her ponytail again, and then ran her hand over the top of her head. She kept her eyes on the ground. I wondered what she was looking at, maybe a bird or a rotting apple. But as I walked closer, I realized she was staring at nothing; she was lost in thought and she looked sad.

Once she sensed my presence, she picked up her bag and walked toward a clump of students who had given up on collecting, eating their apples instead. I watched her sit down and cross her legs and bite into her own.

The teacher whistled with his fingers and started to wrangle the students. I watched Violet follow her class to the barn. As I made my way inside I lost track of her in the crowd of kids and scanned the benches as the students took their seats. I saw the girls from the bus sitting together at one of the tables.

“Has anyone seen Violet?”

One of them looked up at me and shook her head. The others were spelling their names on the table with the curls of apple peel. “You guys are friends with her, right?”

Another girl glanced around the table, looking for permission to speak. “Sure. I guess. I mean, kind of.”

Two of them giggled. The one who spoke nudged them to be quiet.

My heart was pounding by then. I looked around the barn but still couldn’t see her.

“Mr. Philips, do you know where Violet went?”

“She went to the bus to lie down. She has a headache—she said you were taking her.”

I jogged out to the parking lot, but the bus driver wasn’t there and the door was locked. The lot attendant said he hadn’t seen a student wandering around. I ran to the stables at the back and asked if anyone had seen a brunette girl. I checked the hay piles on the other side of the stables and then saw a roped-off corn maze in the distance.

“Has anyone gone in there? I’m looking for my daughter.” I was yelling then. I sounded frantic. I was trying to catch my breath.

A young guy repainting the enter here! sign shook his head.

That was when I knew she had left. She was punishing me for coming. We had learned to walk wide circles around each other in order to coexist—that was our unspoken agreement. But being on the field trip violated that rule. I ran back to the barn. I found the teacher and told him she was missing, that I thought she’d left somehow. He said he’d check the premises and asked another parent to alert the manager of the farm.

He didn’t tell me not to worry—he didn’t say, She must be here somewhere.

I saw a table of boys looking around, aware that something was wrong. One of them walked over to me and asked what was happening.

“We can’t find Violet. Do you know where she might have gone?”

He was quiet. He shook his head and walked back to his friends, and they all looked over at me. I thought they knew something. I went to the table and leaned over the end and took a deep breath so my voice wouldn’t crack. “Does anyone know where Violet went?”

They all shook their heads, like the first boy, and one of them politely said, “Sorry, Mrs. Connor, we don’t know.”

I could see then they had fear in their eyes, too.

The dad I’d sat beside offered to circle the grounds with me again. By then my head was spinning. My legs were numb. I’d felt this way before, when Violet was two and had scampered too far away at an amusement park, only to be found minutes later at the cotton candy cart. That had been minutes. Minutes during which I knew she was probably safe, probably a hairline out of sight.

And then there was Sam. I tried not to think about him. I tried.

“I can’t breathe,” I said, and the dad sat me down on the pea gravel.

“Put your head between your legs.” He rubbed my back. “Does she have a cell phone?”

I shook my head.

“Have you checked your phone?”

I didn’t respond. He reached into my purse and found it.

“You’ve missed six calls.”

I grabbed it from him and put in my password. It was Gemma’s calls I had missed.

“Violet,” I said in a cracking voice when she answered. “She’s gone.”

“I got a call five minutes ago. From a truck driver.” She paused, as though she might not tell me more. “She’s at a rest stop on the side of the highway. I’m going to get her.” She hung up without saying good-bye. The dad helped me to my feet and we went to find the teacher to call off the search. I sat in the tiny gift shop with a bottle of water and tried calling you again and again, but you didn’t answer.

An hour later, we were back on the bus and took the same spots we’d had on the way there. The volume was noticeably lower now, the effect of the fresh air muffling the volcano of energy from before. Nobody said anything about Violet—it was as though she hadn’t ever been there. When we arrived back at the school parking lot, I crouched at my seat and watched the students make their way off the bus. I checked the back to make sure nothing had been left behind and found the bracelet on the seat where the braided girls had been. The purple and yellow and gold beads Violet had been diligently stringing the night before. She must have made it for one of them. It was untied, abandoned. I turned the beads back and forth between my fingers.

“Hey,” I called out to the three girls. They sat on the school steps waiting for their parents to pick them up. “Did you drop this?”

Two of them stared at the ground.

“I said, did one of you drop this?”

I held it out in the palm of my hand and they all shook their heads. I closed my hand around the bracelet and stared at the girls until a car pulled up. They looked straight ahead and didn’t say a word.

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•   •   •At home I put the bracelet deep in my bottom drawer where I knew Violet wouldn’t find it. Everything that had happened that day changed how I saw her. She was powerless among her friends, and she didn’t want me to see that. She was no longer the girl who could so easily intimidate others, who could effortlessly hurt people with what she said or did. They could see through her now, and for a moment, I almost felt bad for her.

I called Gemma that night, although I wasn’t sure she would answer. I straightened in the kitchen chair when she did.

“I just wanted to check on her. How’s she doing?”

“She’s been quiet. But fine.” I heard her cover the receiver and whisper something. She was silent. I imagined her turning to you and rolling her eyes. She doesn’t get it—she was running away from HER. SHE is the problem. I imagined you gesturing for her to hang up. I imagined the bottle of wine you would have opened now that the kids were in bed. I looked around my dim, quiet kitchen. I wanted to remind Gemma that I’d once been the mother she herself had turned to, before she had it all figured out. That she’d searched my face for the secrets of how to mother her own child. I had lied to her. But I was still the same woman she had called her best friend. I couldn’t help myself.

“How are you? How’s Jet?”

“Good-bye, Blythe.”