No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [13]
We agreed that she’d been touchy, and that I had been an asshole, and somehow ended up having a coffee at a campus snack bar, and Cynthia told me that she lived with her aunt when she wasn’t attending the university.
“Tess is pretty decent,” Cynthia said. “She didn’t have a husband anymore, didn’t have any kids of her own, so my moving in, after the thing with my family, that kind of turned her world upside down, you know? But she was okay with it. I mean, what the hell was she going to do? And she was sort of going through a tragedy, too, her sister and brother-in-law and nephew just disappearing like that.”
“So what happened to your house? Where you lived with your parents and brother?”
That was me. Mr. Practical. Girl’s family vanishes and I come up with a real estate question.
“I couldn’t live there alone,” Cynthia said. “And like, there was no one to pay the mortgage or anything anyway, so when they couldn’t find my family the bank sort of took it back and these lawyers got involved, and whatever money my parents had put into the house went into this trust thing, but they’d hardly made a dent in the mortgage, you know? And now, it’s been so long, they figure everyone is dead, right? Legally, even if they aren’t.” She rolled her eyes and grimaced.
What could I say?
“So Aunt Tess, she’s putting me through school. Like, I’ve had summer jobs and stuff, but that doesn’t cover much. I don’t know how she’s managed it, really, raising me, paying for my education. She must be in debt up to her eyeballs, but she never complains about it.”
“Boy,” I said. I took a sip of coffee.
And Cynthia, for the first time, smiled. “‘Boy,’” she said. “That’s all you have to say, Terry? ‘Boy’?” As quickly as it had appeared, the smile vanished. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I expect people to say. I don’t know what the fuck I’d say if I was sitting across from me.”
“I don’t know how you handle it,” I said.
Cynthia took a sip of her tea. “Some days, I just want to kill myself, you know? And then I think, what if they showed up the day after?” She smiled again. “Wouldn’t that be a kick in the head?”
Again, the smile drifted away as though carried off by a gentle breeze.
A lock of her red hair fell forward across her eyes, and she tucked it back behind her ear. “The thing is,” she said, “they could be dead, and they never had a chance to say goodbye to me. Or they could still be alive, and couldn’t be bothered.” She looked out the window. “I can’t decide which is worse.”
We didn’t say anything for another minute or so. Finally, Cynthia said, “You’re nice. If I did go out with someone, I might go out with someone like you.”
“If you get desperate,” I said, “you know where to find me.”
She looked out the window, at other students strolling past, and for a moment, it was like she had slipped away.
“Sometimes,” she said, “I think I see one of them.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Like a ghost or something?”
“No no,” she said, still looking outside. “Like, I’ll see someone I think is my father, or my mother. From behind, say. There’s just something about them, the way they hold their head, the way they walk, it seems familiar somehow, and I’ll think it’s them. Or, you know, I’ll see a boy, maybe a year older than me, who looks like he could be my brother, seven years later. My parents, they’d still look pretty much the same, right? But my brother, he could look totally different, but there’d still be something about him that would be the same, wouldn’t there?”
“I guess,” I said.
“And I’ll see someone like that, and I’ll run after them, cut in front of them, maybe grab their arm or something and they turn around and I get a good look.” She turned away from the window, gazed down into her tea, as though searching for an answer there. “But it’s never them.”
“I guess, someday, you’ll stop doing that,” I said.
“If it’s them,” Cynthia said.
We started hanging out. We went to movies, we worked together in the library. She tried to interest me in playing tennis. It had never been my game, but I