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twelve days missing
chapter 25
alex
‘You don’t have to do this,’ Mum says. ‘It’s not too late to change your mind.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ I say.
Mum presses her lips together, holding back the words with a visible effort as she tucks a stray strand of hair behind my ear. ‘You look lovely, darling. Good luck.’
I look far from lovely: my face is shadowed and drawn, and this olive linen shirt drains my skin of colour. But that’s the point.Let your pain show, Marc said.You have to look the part.
People aren’t interested in how I really feel. My grief is so intense it’s settled in my heart like permafrost and I realise that makes me come across as unfeeling. But I can’t help it. It’s so intolerable to be me, even for a moment, that I’ve walled myself off from my own feelings, because it’s the only way I can survive. Half the time, it feels like I’m outside my own body, watching myself from a distance. And yet, even second-hand, the pain still takes my breath away.
I have grave reservations about giving this interview but, as Marc pointed out yesterday, I don’t have much choice now.
‘We’ve got to change the narrative,’ he said. ‘This is the only way. And it has to be television. It’s much harder to misrepresent you on TV than if you did a newspaper interview. Thisway, no one will be able to misquote you. You’ve got to connect with people, get them on your side again.’
Dad and Zealy both agree with him. Mum’s the only holdout. I don’t need to explain myself, she says. Every mother out there understands what it’s like to make a mistake, to drop the ball:there but for the grace of God. She says it’s only chance this terrible thing happened to me and not them. Any one of us could have fallen asleep in bed during a night feed and smothered our baby, or left a second-floor window fatally unlocked, or forgotten our daughter was sleeping in the back of the car.
I don’t care if people think I’m a bad mother. I only need them to believe I had nothing to do with Lottie’s kidnap. I have to get everyone looking for her again.
The backlash over Kirkwood Place has dominated the news cycle for four days now. Every aspect of my parenting is being viewed through its lens: the day I forgot to pack Lottie lunch for nursery; the time I left her in the supermarket trolley while I nipped into an adjacent aisle and returned to find her in the arms of a concerned shopper. People are crawling out of the woodwork with their stories, hungry for vicarious celebrity.
A woman who was on the plane when Lottie and I flew out two weeks ago has come forward, claiming I hit my daughter when she spilled her drink. She even has phone footage of me shaking Lottie’s shoulder as she lies crumpled in the aisle.
It plays on every channel. Again and again, I watch myself yank my daughter to her feet, and I don’t see a fraught, exhausted mother struggling to match wills with her stubborn child, and be a good parent. I see what everyone else sees: an angry, violent woman who looks as if she can’t wait to be rid of her child – a child who is now missing.
DidI mean to leave her in the hot car that day on KirkwoodPlace? I honestly don’t know any more. Maybe I abandoned Lottie in that car because Iwantedher to be taken from me.
Maybe all those people who think I’m wicked are right.
It feels as if no one is searching for my daughter any more, including the police.
The case is still officially open, of course, but there’s no more talk about the thin man. No one stops to ask why on earth I’d cut off my daughter’s hair. I’m now the prime suspect. The Florida tourist board must be thrilled.
This TV interview is the very last thing I want to do, but Marc is right: I have to change the narrative.
‘Turn that up,’ Dad says suddenly, pointing at the muted television screen in my hotel room.
Zealy reaches for the remote. A sweating, overweight man in a white suit is standing at the top of a flight of steps in front of a municipal-looking building, facing a bank of microphones. A ticker-tape runs along the bottom of the screen:Mayor accuses mom in Lottie Martini case.
‘Mayor Eagleton, is Mrs Martini gonna be arrested?’ a reporter calls, off-camera.
‘That’s a matter for the police,’ says the mayor.
‘But doyoubelieve she’s guilty?’
‘This is a beautiful city,’ the mayor says, spreading his arms. ‘It’s a real safe place. A real safe place. We have thousands of families visit our city every year and enjoy our beautiful beaches, and I’m tellin’ you, it’s a safe place.’
Another voice calls out: ‘So do you think Mrs Martini killed her daughter?’
‘Listen. All I’m saying is, we have a little girl disappeared in the middle of a weddin’, and none of the folks there saw or heard a thing, which seems mighty strange to me.’ He shakes his head. ‘Mighty strange. My little girl, she’d holler like all get-out if somebody she don’t know tried to take her someplace she don’t want to go.’ He jabs a pudgy finger in the air. ‘And we have a lady left her baby in a hot car, aworkin’woman off takin’ herimportantLondon meetings and who knows what all, while her babybaked in the sun. Y’all seen the film of her assaultin’ that innocent child on the airplane. We’re gonna find the truth and we’re gonna find that poor baby. Now if y’all will excuse me …’
Zealy turns off the television with an exclamation of disgust. ‘Jesus Christ. What is this?’
‘Thisis small-town America,’ Marc says. ‘Which is why you’ve got to do this interview, Alex.’
