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

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      “You still like your roommate?”

      “She’s fine. We stay out of each other’s way.”

      “Are you going to room with her next year?”

      “Probably not.”

      Finally I resort to a subject I’m sure will get results, although it pains me. “So, tell me about this English professor you ate Christmas dinner with.”

      “Her name is Caitlyn, and actually she’s a professor of semiotics.”

      Caitlyn. “I didn’t know they still taught semiotics in English departments.”

      “The course is called Intersectionalities. It’s an English class, but it’s cross-listed with linguistics, gender studies, and anthro. There are supposed to be all these prerequisites, but I went to Caitlyn’s office hours on the first day and convinced her to let me in.”

      I can’t help but feel a glow of pride. A true professor’s kid, Jane knows all the angles. Moreover, this is the longest string of consecutive words she’s spoken to me without Tom around for ages. “Tell me more about it, what did you read?”

      “I think I’d rather wait and talk about it with Dad too,” she says.

      “Of course,” I say.

      “I don’t want to say it all twice.”

      “Sure, sweetie.”

      I turn on NPR, and the measured, comforting sound of rush-hour news commentary fills the car as we inch past a firing range and a gym where an Olympian gymnastics coach is probably even now yelling at ponytailed girls in formation. Jane stares out her window. I assume she is wondering why Tom didn’t come to pick her up instead of me. I’m wondering too.

      A few minutes later we both find out. Pulling into the driveway, the sky just starting to glow with dusk, I spot Tom through the kitchen window, making dinner. As I open the door and walk in, I smell Jane’s favorite pasta dish: fettuccine Alfredo tossed with breaded shrimp and grilled asparagus, a ridiculously decadent recipe Tom got off the Food Network and makes only on special occasions. An expiatory salad of fresh greens is in a bowl next to the cutting board, ready to join the bright Fiestaware on the dining-room table.

      “Janie!” Tom opens his arms and steps forward, and Jane throws her arms around him, squeezing her eyes shut against his chest. I slip off to the bathroom, then to the bedroom to change out of my teaching outfit into more comfortable jeans, loitering for a few minutes to put away some laundry that’s been sitting, folded, in a basket at the foot of the bed. When I return, they are talking animatedly, Tom’s back to me as he chops heirloom tomatoes for the salad, Jane resting the tips of her fingers on the butcher block as if playing a piano.

      “Dad, you would not believe the names people were throwing around in this class,” she says. “Derrida, stuff like that. Everyone was so much smarter than me.”

      “Hey, she let you in, and she’s the MacArthur Genius lady.”

      “Every time I opened my mouth I sounded like an idiot.”

      “At least you opened your mouth,” he says, resting the knife to the side of the cutting board for a moment while he looks her in the eye. “I bet there were some people who were too scared to talk.”

      Jane’s grateful smile, just visible over Tom’s shoulder, curdles me like milk. As if he can sense it, Tom turns around and sees me standing there. He throws a handful of chopped tomatoes onto the pile of greens and picks up the salad bowl.

      “Everything’s ready!” he says. “Grab the pasta, Jane. Let’s sit down and eat our first family dinner in God knows how long.”

      And that, believe it or not, is when the doorbell rings.

2

      The first thing I see is her pale hair, all lit up in the rosy, polluted glow of the Houston sunset.

      Then her face — ashen skin stretched thin over wide cheekbones flushed red across the top so that the dark circles stand out under her sunken eyes. The face looks both young and old. She wears worn-out jeans with holes at the knees, a T-shirt. She opens her mouth to speak, and I see that her feet are bare.

      There’s something familiar about her, but it’s like my entire body has become fused with my surroundings, my brain rewired to resemble blind hands fumbling, the sensory data bumping uselessly around in search of something to latch onto: Hair. Eyes. Young. Bare.

      Her eyes widen, and the color drains from her face.

      My hands stretch out in front of me, palms out, fingers spread wide, ready to shield me from the nuclear sunset or as if I’m about to fall down, but it’s the girl on the porch who falls, her knees buckling so that she folds up neatly as she collapses onto the mat, blond hair catching lightly in the azalea bushes on her way down. I open my mouth and I think I must be yelling for Tom, although I can’t hear it because my brain is still blinded by the sunset glancing off her face. He comes running up behind me, stops, and then thunders through the doorway. When I look again, the girl has all but vanished into his arms, the loops and tangles of her hair crushed between his fingers as he hugs her to his chest, rocking back and forth. “Julie, Julie, Julie,” he is sobbing, like the chorus of the nightmares that I now know have never stopped but have been unreeling every night for eight years, and perhaps all day long as well, in a continuous stream I have simply chosen to deny.

      The sight of Jane standing stock-still in the hallway flips the light switch back on in my head. “Call 911,” I manage to say. “Tell them we need an ambulance.” To Tom, who is making strange, animal sounds of grief I have also heard in my dreams, I say, “Bring her in.”

      And just like that, the worst unhappens. Julie is home.

      The first twenty-four hours after Julie’s reappearance are oddly similar to the first twenty-four hours after her disappearance, a mirror symmetry that lends extra significance to every detail. There’s the humidity of the long, hot summer’s beginning, the crape myrtles that were already dropping their flowers when she was taken in early fall just now starting to put out blossoms like crumpled scraps of tissue paper. There are the sirens blaring their way through the neighborhood up to our house, just like last time, but bringing EMS rather than the police and at sunset rather than sunrise, so the neighbors who open their front doors to see what’s happening are wearing work clothes rather than bathrobes, holding oven mitts rather than newspapers. Everything is backward, like a photo negative of tragedy.

      Only one of us can ride in the ambulance with Julie, and Tom immediately steps forward, so Jane and I climb into the SUV and follow behind. When we pull up to the ED, they are unloading her gurney, now connected to a rolling IV, and she is wheeled inside and installed in a curtained-off room with that excruciating combination of slowness and urgency native to emergency departments.

      The next thirty minutes pass like hours under the fluorescent lights. Julie wakes, mumbles, sleeps again. Tom sits by the bedside, holding Julie’s hand and murmuring something unintelligible; I pace; Jane leans; nurses come in at odd intervals, never telling us anything but instead asking for details about insurance or Julie’s medical history, questions that seem so useless and redundant that I become convinced some of these people just want to see СКАЧАТЬ