Story 2 of Falling In: a collection of three short love stories about the abduction of a high school student

Lynne tilts her glass back and forth. Sunlight runs down its ridges, illuminating purple streaks of wine. It’s 2:30pm, and she’s been up for half an hour. Actually, she’s been awake since noon. But before that, she couldn’t sleep until 4am, and she went back to bed three more times at seven, nine, and ten, until noon, when she finally left her eyes open to stare at the ceiling, wishing she were dead, for two more hours. And now, Lynne’s drinking her second cup of wine from a table glass.

She swallows. A bitter tang sits in her mouth, and she’s angry with herself for having tasted some sweetness; she will not enjoy this.

Maybe, if she gets drunk enough, Lynne will stop remembering that her daughter’s dead. Maybe she’ll stop remembering that she had a daughter at all, that Ally ever existed, that Lynne still exists. But not remembering is the problem. The problem is forgetting, and dreaming of being reunited, and waking to an empty house, grasping to enough hope to keep looking, only to be knifed moments later by the memory that she’s been found. Dead. A body in a lake with no hair, no nails, no skin, when Ally’s fingernails, and toenails, and skin had grown inside of her. Lynne pours herself another. If only she could drown in it.

Mark’s at work. He has an escape. He has to work; to pay the bills, to pay the mortgage, to buy groceries, to run from this. Lynne doesn’t get an excuse. She hasn’t worked her shift at Macy’s since last month, and she stopped getting dressed eight days ago, when they found Ally’s body. Lynne’s here, forced to keep company with emptiness, while Mark occupies himself with memos, and legal documents, and other meaningless normalcies that the rest of the world has the privilege of taking part in.

She throws back her cup. Drinks it all at once.

When Lynne held Ally at the hospital, she thought she learned what love was: herself in another person; the fact that she’d made life, nurtured it inside of her for nine months—a breathing, living, human, with its own lungs and heart, and its own little toes and fingers and small, delicate strands of hair. Lynne had earned purpose: to prevent hurt from reaching her baby. And when Ally had colic, and Lynne accepted that life brings hurt, her purpose became to guide Ally through it, to love her when her daughter doubted whether the world did. Then, Ally grew. She took steps and named colors and told nonsense stories about hiding space apples in the “big pockmets” of her overalls, and she screamed at her mother for making her wear the ugly dresses that Lynne had spent hours shopping for. Ally became a person, who could make Lynne hurt. It was then, somewhere between infancy and kindergarten, that Lynne realized what true love was. And when Ally turned fourteen and stopped letting her mother see her naked, and when she turned sixteen and told her mother for the first time that she fucking hated her, Lynne thought then she had discovered how much she could hurt.

Now she’d give anything to hear her daughter yell, sternly telling her and Mark that they don’t even know her. She’d give anything to hear Ally slam her door, and know that she was inside. 

If Lynne believed in God, she’d ditch her spot in Heaven to see Ally’s smile again—to see the hidden snaggletooth that three-thousand-dollars-worth of braces couldn’t fix. But God wouldn’t want Lynne. She has neither love, nor even guilt. All she has is loss.

Mark has lost, too. He burrows in his work, but Lynne knows he hurts, just as much as she does, without a clue to how to cope. And their marriage is falling apart, spiraling, faster than before, because each has been bled dry.

Lynne faces the purple ring at the bottom of her fifth glass. She wants to sleep. If she wakes up, maybe she’ll make dinner tonight.