Good as Gone: A dark and gripping thriller with a shocking twist. Amy Gentry

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      By the time we knew Julie was gone, her fate was sealed.

      The inevitability of it has spread like an infection or the smell of gasoline. To make myself know that Julie is dead, I tell myself she always was — before she was born, before I was born. Before Wordsworth was born. Passing the pines of Memorial Park, I picture her staring upward with sightless eyes under a blanket of reddish-gold needles. Driving by Crestview Apartments, I see her buried in the azalea bed. The strip mall with the SunRay Nail Salon and Spa yields visions of the dumpster behind the SunRay Nail Salon and Spa. That’s my visionary gleam.

      I used to want the world for Julie. Now I just want something to bury.

      My class — the last before summer break — passes in a blur. I could teach Wordsworth in my sleep, and although I’m not sleeping now, I am dreaming. I see the crystal blue of the pool, shining like a plastic gem, surrounded by a freshly sanded deck under the tall, spindly pines. The girls were so excited about the pool, and I remember asking Tom, the accountant, whether we could afford it. The Energy Corridor District, with its surplus of Starbucks and neighborhood country clubs, wasn’t really our style — especially not mine. But the girls loved the pool even more than they loved having their own rooms. They didn’t seem to notice that we were moving out of shabby university housing to a part of town with two-story houses and two-car garages and green lawns studded with signs supporting high-school football teams. There are several reasons why we did that, but the one you want to hear, of course, is that we thought it would be safer.

      “Class dismissed. Don’t forget, your final papers are due in my box on the twenty-eighth, no later than five o’clock.” By the time I get to “Have a nice summer,” most of them are out of the door already.

      As I walk down the hall to my office, I feel a light brr against my hip. It’s a text from Tom.

       Can you pick up Jane? IAH 4:05, United 1093.

      I put the phone down, turn to my computer, and look up the University of Washington academic calendar. Then I check the university directory and call up a University of Washington administrator I know from grad school. A brief conversation follows.

      I text Tom back. Should I get dinner too?

      A few minutes later: Nope. And that’s apparently all Tom and I are going to say to each other about Jane coming home early from her freshman year of college.

      It’s tricky picking Jane out of a crowd these days. You never know what color her hair is going to be. I stand close to baggage carousel 9 and wait until a tall girl with burgundy-black hair emerges from the crowd of passengers, a lock of faded-out green dangling in front of her eyes, having survived yet another dye job intact.

      “Hi, Mom,” she says.

      “Hi, Jane.” We hug, her heavy satchel thwacking my hip as she leans over, and then the empty baggage carousel utters a shuddering shriek and we both turn to look at it while I decide how best not to ask about her unexpected arrival.

      “You changed your hair again,” I observe.

      “Yep.”

      Everything Jane says and does is a variation on the slammed door that first became her calling card in middle school, a couple of years after Julie was taken. In high school, Jane added loud music, hair dye, and random piercings to her repertoire, but the slammed door remained the centerpiece of the performance. Tom used to follow her dutifully up the stairs, where he weathered the sobs and yells I heard only in muffled form. I figured she needed her privacy.

      “Did you have a good flight?”

      “It was okay.”

      It was long. I suspect Jane chose the University of Washington because of its distance from Houston. When she was a little girl she used to say she wanted to go to the university where I teach, but the pennants came down around the same time the door slamming began. She might have ended up in Alaska if she hadn’t insisted on going to a school that had quarters instead of semesters — every possible difference a crucial one. All typical teenage behavior, no doubt, but with Jane, it made a particular kind of perverse sense — as does the fact that, according to the registrar, she took incompletes in all her spring-quarter classes.

      This after she’d stayed in Seattle through the entire school year. I didn’t think much about her not coming home for Thanksgiving; it’s commonly skipped by students on the quarter system, since the fall quarter starts so late. But when she explained to us over the phone in mid-December that she was just settling in, that one of her professors had invited her to a holiday dinner, that our family never really celebrated Christmas anyway, did we?, and that she felt like it would be good for her sense of independence to stay, I could practically hear Tom’s heart breaking over the extension. I covered for his silence by saying the sensible thing, the only possible thing, really: “We’ll miss you, of course, but we understand.”

      Now it seems the whole holiday situation was yet another slammed door to which I’d failed to respond properly.

      “So,” I say, starting again. “You still enjoying U-Dub?”

      “Go Huskies,” she says with a limp fist-pump. “Yeah, Mom. Nothing’s really changed since last time we talked.” The bags start dropping onto the conveyor belt, and we both lean forward.

      “Was that coat warm enough for January up there? Winter stuff is on clearance, we could go shopping.”

      She picks self-consciously at the army jacket she’s worn since she was sixteen. “This is fine. I told you guys, it doesn’t get that cold.”

      “Classes going okay?”

      “Yeah,” she says. “Why?”

      “Just making small talk.”

      “Well, they’re going really well,” she says. “Actually, they’re going so well, my professors are letting me turn in papers in lieu of exams.”

      In lieu of exams! That sounds official. I wonder how she got them to agree to give her incompletes rather than failing her. My students usually just say “Family emergency” and hope I don’t press them for details.

      Carefully, I ask, “Is that something they do a lot at U-Dub?”

      “Mom,” she says. “Just say ‘University of Washington.’ ”

      I give her shoulder a quick squeeze. “We’re just glad you’re home.” I lower my arm and we stand there, side by side, staring at the shiny metal chute, until half the passengers on the flight have claimed their bags and wheeled them off, their absence making the juddering of the conveyor belt sound even louder. Finally, Jane’s rolling suitcase somersaults down the chute and thunks onto the belt in front of us. It was a graduation present — apple green and already dingy from its maiden voyage to Seattle and back, it almost matches her dyed-green streak. She grabs the suitcase before I can make a move but lets me take her satchel when she stops to peel off her army jacket in the blast of humid air that hits us outside the automatic sliding doors.

      “I see we’re in swamp mode already.”

      “No place like home,” I reply and am rewarded with a half smile of acknowledgment.

      The ride home is rocky, though. I’m shooting blanks on college life despite spending most СКАЧАТЬ