When She Was Gone Read Free Page B

and their bus wasn’t back until suppertime. Motherhood had transformed Abigail from a reasonably round object (though she was a slender woman, with softly brown, short-cropped hair, and a childlike sweetness in her rounded knees and shoulders), a red rubber ball perhaps, firm sided and elastic, into an accordion. She was always flexing out and squashing in, accommodating the music of their breath. She was always becoming smaller and larger, always folding and expanding. She turned off the coffeemaker, which still held its daily wasted half cup—her husband, Frank, wanted enough of everything, so sometimes there was too much, sometimes there was waste. Better, she thought. Better to live within his wide margins. She tipped the hot brown liquid into the garbage disposal, smelled the decay as it hit thecantaloupe rinds; she missed her husband, the boys, and Linsey.
    Linsey came and went at will—she would already be at work by now with no need for a mother’s breakfast or kisses good-bye. It was entirely appropriate, of course, but still startling that her once-infant could make it through days without any sort of parental support or intervention. She had named Linsey for her Scottish grandmother, Leslie, who had given Abigail a pocket-size book of fairy stories with gold paint on the edges of the pages. She didn’t like the spelling with the D ; it seemed too syllabic, too hard. Her mother wasn’t fond of Leslie, her father’s mother, and she hadn’t wanted to hear anything about the name; she’d wanted it to be her own gift to her daughter. Soon enough, Linsey would be gone, really gone. Abigail was doing her best to let go without hysteria, but some requisite fanfare. She thought of her own departure from Highland Park, Illinois, for Wellesley—her mother’s tight-faced refusal to go along for the car trip. Mrs. Cardinal hated long car trips; she’d even borne a paper bag for the fifteen-minute ride to the high school for graduation, breathing in and out while Abigail’s father drove, his arm on his wife’s leg, half comfort, half possession. So her mother stayed home with her laundry and alphabetical coupons, and Abigail’s father and brother took her to Massachusetts, and there was hilarity along the way, ordering too much food at Waffle House (her mother insisted on cleaned plates); letting her brother, age twelve, take the steering wheel and loop eights in an empty rest area parking lot somewhere inPennsylvania. Roadside stands, pies they ate with their fingers. It was a wild last hurrah. Her mother never went to college, and both expected it of Abigail and never forgave her.
    They would all ride together for Linsey. Her ex-husband, Joe, had wanted to take his daughter, but Linsey had asked him if he’d meet her there instead. Linsey intervened more than she should; Abigail was grateful and ashamed, as she had been all along. She knew the divorce had wrapped her daughter in grief, but she had been too lost then to peel it off, to help her enough. It was going to be awkward, the handover, the letting Linsey go to him before really letting her go. Abigail had imagined the scene, the boys playing in the stairwell of the dorm, which she could smell already, old beer and hot linoleum, and Joe would be waiting in the room like a suitor. But then he had a conference he had to go to, or perhaps it had been invented, bless him, and he said he’d just take Parents’ Weekend. Which he might miss; Abigail was prepared to take over if he did.
    â€œHe won’t, Abby,” Frank had said, soothing her, perhaps, or riling her, she wasn’t sure which. One week ago. They were in their bedroom at night; Linsey’s music, Coldplay, made the walls vibrate softly.
    â€œHe might,” she said. “You never know with Joe. And I don’t want Linsey to expect someone and then have no one. It wouldn’t be fair. The twins will have their last game that