Never Saw It Coming

Five

“So, what are you telling me, that there’s been nothing, nothing at all?” Wendell Garfield said into the phone. “I thought, I really thought someone… well, if you hear anything, anything at all, I expect to hear from somebody, goddamn it. Do you have any idea what we’re going through, what my daughter is going through? You tell Detective Wedmore I called. I want to hear from her. I want to hear from her the moment she gets this message.”

He slammed the phone down. He’d decided, when he got up that morning, that he was going to be all over the police today, call them every hour if he had to. It had been a full day since the news conference. Half a dozen stations had aired the story. There was a clip on YouTube. It had made that morning’s papers. If anyone was going to call in with a tip, it would be now. Wendell needed the police to know just how impatient he was. How he was expecting some action on this.

He’d called demanding to speak to the lead detective, a woman named Rona Wedmore. But she was out, and Wendell was transferred to someone else who claimed to be more or less up to speed on the investigation, and what sort of response the news conference had produced. There had been half a dozen calls to the hotline police had set up. None had been considered useful. At least one was from an outright lunatic-a woman who claimed to have seen an actress on an Italian soap opera who looked just like the picture of Ellie Garfield. Had the police checked to see whether the woman had run off to pursue an acting career?

After hanging up, Garfield decided to make himself some tea, thinking it would help calm him. He hadn’t slept more than a few minutes overnight. He was trying to think, since Thursday, when this had all started, just how much sleep he’d had. Five, six hours maybe? His daughter Melissa had probably had a little more than that, if only because the pregnancy so exhausted her.

Garfield hadn’t wanted Melissa to go before the cameras. He’d told the police he wasn’t sure she could handle the stress. She was seven months pregnant, her mother was missing, and now they wanted her to be on the six o’clock news?

“I don’t want to put her through that,” he’d told the police.

But it was Melissa herself who’d insisted she appear alongside her father. “We’ll do it together, Dad,” she told him. “Everyone needs to know we want Mom to be found, that we want her to come home.”

With some reluctance, he agreed, but only on the condition that he would do all the talking. Once the lights were on and the cameras in their faces, Melissa went to pieces. She managed only to splutter, “Mommy, please come back to us” before she dissolved into tears and put her face into her father’s chest. Even he wasn’t able to say very much, just that they loved Ellie and wanted her back.

He could hear murmurs among the news people, all indistinct save for one: “Good stuff.”

Leeches.

He took Melissa home with him, tried to get her to eat something. “It’s going to be okay,” he told her. “We’re going to get through this. We will, I promise you. But you have to eat. You have to take care of yourself. You have to think about the baby. You’re going to have this baby, and you’re going to take care of it, and everything’s going to be okay.”

She sat there at the kitchen table, looking as though she would crumble. “Oh, Daddy…”

“Trust me,” he said. “Everything will turn out fine.”

“How can you say that?” Melissa asked, her eyes red from crying.

“Because it has to,” he said.

Melissa spent the night at her parents’ home, but around six in the morning she walked into her father’s bedroom to say she wanted to go back to her apartment across town. Garfield was still under the covers, but he was awake, and had been all night. He was reluctant to let her out of his sight, but Melissa said she could handle it. She wasn’t going to stay at her place. She’d return and stay overnight in the room she lived in before moving out. But she needed to pick up some things, clothes mostly, and wanted a moment or two by herself. Melissa shared the apartment with her friend Olivia, but Olivia was away right now, visiting her parents in Denver. She didn’t know anything about Melissa’s mother.

Garfield said, hesitantly, “You’re not going to do anything I should be worried about, are you? I mean, your state of mind and all.”

She said no.

So he drove his daughter back to her place. Parked out front of the apartment, which was actually the top floor of an old house with a separate entrance. “Why don’t I just wait here while you grab a few things?” he said. “Then you can come back with me.”

Melissa told him to drive home, that she would call him when she was ready for him to pick her up.

Even though she was only nineteen, Melissa had been living away from home for three years. She was willing to admit, on the eve of becoming twenty, that she had been a difficult teen. She’d been a handful even before that. She’d gotten drunk the first time when she was eleven, lost her virginity at thirteen, and was dumb enough to leave marijuana in her room where her mother would find it a year after that. She openly ignored the limits her parents tried to set. Curfews were for breaking. Groundings meant nothing when you could open a bedroom window.

When she was sixteen, she dropped out of school. Ellie and Wendell decided they could take no more. They gave her an ultimatum. Get an education and live by the rules of this house, or move out.

The second option appealed to her more.

Melissa found a place to live with a friend from school. Olivia, two years older, was also young to be living on her own, but when you had a father who liked to crawl under the covers with you at night and a mother who refused to see what was going on right in front of her, you only had so many choices. You could stay and put up with it, kill the bastard with a frying pan upside the head, or get the hell out. Olivia got out. But as difficult as her home life was, she did well at school, wasn’t into drugs, and held down a part-time job at Pancake Castle. She introduced Melissa to the manager, who gave her a stint waiting tables three nights a week. It turned out that getting kicked out of her parents’ house was the best thing that had ever happened to Melissa. She looked up to Olivia, who was becoming a role model. Melissa was getting her act together. Without her parents to catch her when she fell, she had to stop falling so much.

She started to become responsible. Who could have guessed?

Ellie and Wendell were cautiously optimistic. Once Melissa got her head screwed on right, they figured, she could go back and finish school. If she did well enough, she might have a chance at college, Ellie mused one evening. Maybe she’d even think about becoming a veterinarian. Remember, she’d say to her husband, how when she was little, she said one day she’d love to work with animals and “For God’s sake, Ellie, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Wendell said.

Melissa would come over for dinner. Some of these get-togethers went better than others. One night, Melissa would tell them about how she was getting her life back on track, and her parents would nod and try to be encouraging. But another night, Ellie, anxious to see her daughter’s rehabilitation move with more speed, would start pushing. She’d tell her daughter it was time- now — to stop being nothing more than a waitress and get back to school and make something of herself. Did Melissa have any idea just how embarrassing it was for her mother, an employee of the board of education, to have a daughter who was a dropout? Who hadn’t even completed the eleventh grade? How long was she expected to wait to see her daughter get on a path where she would amount to something?

Then they’d start fighting and Melissa would storm out, but not before asking out loud how she’d managed to live in this house as long as she had without blowing her brains out.

It always took a few days for the dust to settle after a night like that.

Ellie and Wendell still kept their fingers crossed that Melissa, despite these occasional blowups, was growing up. She held on to her waitressing job. She was saving some money, mostly from tips. Fifty to sixty dollars a week, which was at least something. And one day, talking to her mother on the phone, she happened to mention that she’d been on a college website, looking at what qualifications you needed to enroll in the veterinary program.

Ellie was beside herself with joy when she told Wendell the news.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” she asked. “She’s growing up, that’s what she’s doing. She’s growing up and thinking about the future.”

What neither Ellie or Wendell had counted on was that the immediate future would include a baby.

Melissa was already three months along when she broke the news to her parents. They did not, to say the least, take it well, but Wendell searched for a silver lining. Maybe this meant Melissa would get married. She was young to be a mother, but at least if she had a man in her life, a man who could look after her, wouldn’t that take some of the pressure off Ellie and him?

The man’s name was Lester Cody, and he was thirty years old. A Pancake Castle regular. Always ordered four frisbee-sized chocolate-chip pancakes with double syrup and a side of sausage, only 1,400 calories. (Melissa had ceased to be amazed at how many people liked to eat this stuff for dinner.) He was, not surprisingly, somewhat heftier than the average man, at two hundred and eighty, but there was encouraging news. He was a dentist. He drove a Lexus. He had his own clinic. He pulled down a hundred grand a year. And-best of all-he was not married.

Ellie felt herself coming unraveled. One day she’d tell Wendell their daughter was ruining her life, having a child so young, but the next she’d confess how excited she was at becoming a grandmother. “At my age, who’d believe I’m a granny?” she’d say. She’d have long discussions with her husband about whether it would be a boy or a girl, to which her husband would grumble, “One of those two, I suspect.” Then the next day she’d ramble on about Lester Cody, how he was really too old for Melissa, though he had a good job and could provide for their girl and their grandchild. But then Melissa dropped the bombshell that she really didn’t have any feelings for Lester, that he was nice enough and all, but she never imagined that she’d be married to a dentist. She’d met another man, who worked at the Cinnabon in the mall, and he was pretty cute, and not as fat as Lester, even though he could sneak as many frosted buns as he wanted. Ellie tried talking some sense into her daughter, telling her that if Lester Cody was interested in her, and could provide for her, then she’d be out of her mind not to invest in that relationship. Because, let’s face it, even if she wanted to go to veterinary college, she was going to have to complete her high school first, and how long was that going to take? Lester could probably get her a part-time job at the dental clinic after the baby came, answering phones and booking appointments and taking X-rays.

Melissa would scream at her mother to stay out of her life. And the next day, she’d call her up, asking for a lift to the doctor’s office for her ultrasound appointment.

In between all the hand-wringing and exorcising, Ellie Garfield resumed her knitting.

“This child is coming one way or another, and it’s going to need something to wear,” she said, and she would hold up half a sleeve and ask her husband what he thought of it.

It was more than Wendell Garfield could stand. Most times, in fact.

All this tension between his wife and daughter, the relentless discussions Ellie wanted to have with him about what their girl was going to do with her life. All this talk about the baby. How would Melissa manage? Would she marry Lester? Would he provide for the child even if Melissa didn’t want to share her life with him? Would Melissa keep her waitressing job at Pancake Castle after the baby was born?

Sometimes Ellie would do a one-eighty, and lash into Lester Cody as though he were in the house with them. “Thirty years old! Sleeping with a teenager! He took advantage of her, that’s what he did.”

The discussions. They never stopped.

Wendell Garfield wondered if it was all this that had driven him into the arms of Laci Harmon, or if it would have happened anyway.