Woman Who Could Not Forget Read Free Page A

where we live. She said she had become so sleepy after shopping that she had gone to the hotel and fallen asleep for several hours. We were extremely relieved, of course.
    So I thought that maybe she had checked into a hotel again. I opened the Yellow Pages with shaking hands and called the Crowne Plaza and other major hotels in the area, asking whether they had a guest named Iris Chang or Iris Douglas, her married name. They didn’t.
    I then looked up the phone numbers of spas in the seaside city of Santa Cruz and in the forested mountains west of San Jose. Iris liked getting massages and had often gone with Brett and her friends to spas there. But spa employees told me they didn’t have any guests named Iris, or anyone who matched her description. Still, I had some hope that she’d registered under a different name.
    My brain was fried, my body trembling. I kept calling Brett to ask if he had any new information. He didn’t. Brett had informed his parents in Illinois about her disappearance and was busy searching Iris’s home office for clues and sending all the information he could to the missing-persons detective assigned to Iris’s case.
    As Shau-Jin kept pacing back and forth in the family room, I suddenly envisioned Iris browsing in a bookstore, one of her favorite things to do since she was a child. I systematically called several big bookstores in the area. I asked them whether they had seen a thin, tall Asian woman with long black hair in the store. Again, no luck.
    I called Iris’s cell phone but, as usual, it was turned off. I also wrote her an e-mail, pleading with her to come home. I assumed she would be checking her e-mail periodically, even if she was hiding somewhere.
    By late afternoon, my throat was dry and coarse from talking on the phone. I was drained and devastated, and the police continued to tell us that there was nothing new. I told Shau-Jin that we needed to go look for her car, even though I figured the chances of finding her were slim. Still, I told Shau-Jin, we needed to search for her. I couldn’t just sit at home and do nothing.
    Shau-Jin drove up and down the rows of cars in the parking lots of several nearby hotels and places she liked to shop, as I scanned all the cars and license plate numbers. I was in a different world, oblivious to all the people around me. I concentrated only on scanning the parked cars and their license plates. But Iris’s car was not there.
    My heart was still pulsating with anxiety, and my hope faded as twilight turned into darkness. Under the dim yellow lights in the parking lot of the Crowne Plaza Hotel, we circled the lot one more time. Finally, we gave up and drove home.
    I felt as if I were on the edge of a cliff, about to fall down into a deep valley below. I became even more frightened as I peered out the windows of our townhouse into the night sky. If she had driven to a strange place, she could had been robbed or even killed by someone in the street because she was so mentally vulnerable. It had been eighteen hours since she’d printed out the note, and no one could tell us where she was.
    At about 8 P.M ., I called Iris’s most recent psychiatrist and told him that Iris had disappeared and left a suicide note. He asked me to read the note to him.
    Previously, the psychiatrist had always thought I was a neurotic mother and too protective of Iris. He hadn’t believed Iris was suicidal until we informed him that Iris was browsing suicide Web sites. But Iris never disclosed her innermost feelings to him.
    I once asked Iris what she talked about during her therapy sessions. She said she and the psychiatrist spent a lot of time talking about the philosophy of life. It seemed too abstract to me. I worried that she wasn’t getting the help she needed.
    Now the psychiatrist was telling us that Brett, Shau-Jin, and I should go to the Golden Gate Bridge, one of the most popular places in the world to commit suicide, because Iris had mentioned “drowning