No Time for Goodbye Read Free

questions.
    “You’re sure they never mentioned anything about going anyplace?” asked a man who said he was a detective and didn’t wear a uniform like all the other police. Named Findley, or Finlay.
    Did he think she’d forget something like that? That she’d suddenly go, “Oh yeah, now I remember! They went to visit my mom’s sister, Aunt Tess!”
    “You see,” the detective said, “it doesn’t look like your mom and dad and brother packed to go away or anything. Their clothes are still here, there are suitcases in the basement.”
    There were a lot of questions. When did she last see her parents? When had she gone to bed? Who was this boy she was with? She tried to tell the detective everything, even admitted she and her parents had had a fight, although she’d left out how bad it was, that she’d gotten drunk, told them she wished they were dead.
    This detective seemed nice enough, but he wasn’t asking the questions Cynthia was wondering. Why would her mom and dad and brother just disappear? Where would they go? Why wouldn’t they take her with them?
    Suddenly, in a frenzy, she began to tear the kitchen apart. Lifting up and tossing placemats, moving the toaster, looking under the chairs, peering down into the crack between the stove and the wall, tears streaming down her face.
    “What is it, sweetheart?” the detective asked. “What are you doing?”
    “Where’s the note?” Cynthia asked, her eyes pleading. “There has to be a note. My mom never goes away without leaving a note.”

1
    Cynthia stood out front of the two-story house on Hickory. It wasn’t as though she was seeing her childhood home for the first time in nearly twenty-five years. She still lived in Milford. She’d driven by here once in a while. She showed me the house once before we got married, a quick drive-by. “There it is,” she said, and kept on going. She rarely stopped. And if she did, she didn’t get out. She’d never stood on the sidewalk and stared at the place.
    And it had certainly been a very long time since she’d stepped through that front door.
    She was rooted to the sidewalk, seemingly unable to take even one step toward the place. I wanted to go to her side, walk her to the door. It was only a thirty-foot driveway, but it stretched a quarter century into the past. I was guessing, to Cynthia, it must have been like looking through the wrong end of some binoculars. You could walk all day and never get there.
    But I stayed where I was, on the other side of the street, looking at her back, at her short red hair. I had my orders.
    Cynthia stood there, as though waiting for permission to approach. And then it came.
    “Okay, Mrs. Archer? Start walking toward the house. Not too fast. Kind of hesitant, you know, like it’s the first time you’ve gone inside since you were fourteen years old.”
    Cynthia glanced over her shoulder at a woman in jeans and sneakers, her ponytail pulled down and through the opening at the back of her ball cap. She was one of three assistant producers. “This
is
the first time,” Cynthia said.
    “Yeah yeah, don’t look at me,” Ponytail Girl said. “Just look at the house and start walking up the drive, thinking back to that time, twenty-five years ago, when it all happened, okay?”
    Cynthia glanced across the street at me, made a face, and I smiled back weakly, a kind of mutual
what-are-you-gonna-do?
And so she started up the driveway, slowly. If the camera hadn’t been on, is this how she would have approached? With this mixture of deliberation and apprehension? Probably. But now it felt false, forced.
    But as she mounted the steps to the door, reached out with her hand, I could just make out the trembling. An honest emotion, which meant, I guessed, that the camera would fail to catch it.
    She had her hand on the knob, turned it, was about to push the door open, when Ponytail Girl shouted, “Okay! Good! Just hold it there!” Then, to her cameraman, “Okay, let’s set up