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It’s as I’m about to accelerate onto Newcomb, that I see it.
“Fuck,” I exhale, seeing Jake’s car before Lily does. It’s parked on the street, which is for overflow parking. It’s also for people who come to the forest preserve early, before it opens. When Langley Woods is closed, barricades stop people from pulling into the lot, but that doesn’t deter them from using the trails. There is nothing that says you can’t park in the street.
“What?” Lily asks.
“It’s there,” I say.
She leans forward, looking out the window, but she doesn’t know what she’s looking for. “What’s there?”
“His car.” I point at it.
Jake’s BMW isn’t alone on the street. Far from it. There are at least eight other cars there.
It takes a second for the realization to hit Lily, and then her hand goes to her mouth and she falls back in the seat, quiet, deathly still.
“It doesn’t mean anything, Lily,” I say, but it does, because Jake never would have spent the night—two nights now—at the forest preserve by choice. I bring my hand to her thigh. It’s been cold these last few nights. The temperatures get down to about fifty or fifty-five degrees at night, but it doesn’t have to freeze for a person to become hypothermic. If Jake was bleeding, if he’d lost a significant amount of blood, if he was wet or if it was windy outside, it would have made him more susceptible to hypothermia.
I pull out onto Newcomb and pass by Jake’s car on the way back to the expressway.
“What are you doing?” Lily asks.
I tell her, “Going home.”
“Why? No.”
“What are we supposed to do here?”
“We have to look for him,” she says. “We can’t just leave him here.”
Yes, I think,we can.
It isn’t that I don’t want to help. But if Jake Hayes is here, then he’s beyond helping. This place is huge and he or his body could be anywhere. We already know he wasn’t following the main trail. He’d gone off it, with Lily.
There are plenty of places to hide, plenty of places to go to die.
If he’s here, we’ll never find him.
And yes, there is a small part of me that says he did this to himself. That he had it coming to him. That none of this would have happened if he hadn’t done what he did.
“Please, Christian,” Lily begs. “Please can we go back and look for him?”
I do it for Lily and maybe to assuage my own guilt. I make a U-turn, go back to the parking lot and park. Together Lily and I walk the ten miles of trails. It takes hours. When we come to a bench, I make her sit down and catch her breath and rest. She shouldn’t be exerting this much energy, and again I worry about the baby. I worry that this will be the thing that makes her miscarry. If that happens, I will kill Jake Hayes myself if he isn’t already dead.
We look for any sign of Jake, so that later, when we leave solemn, empty-handed and alone, we can at least say that we tried.
NINA
Iwake up Thursday morning groggy and with a headache. I shower and even as I step out of the shower, I feel warm, sweaty, feverish. I’m not myself because I drank too much last night and because, despite a bottle of wine, despite being unconscious for six hours, it didn’t translate to a good night’s sleep. I’m not rested. I feel like shit. I don’t bother with breakfast because my stomach is off and my nerves are completely frayed. I run through a drive-through on the way into work to get coffee because in my fraught state, I left mine at home, and I won’t get through the day without caffeine.
Where is Jake?
It’s all I can think about. Where the hell is Jake?
Another day and night have passed and still he isn’t home. I tried calling him. Texting. The calls go to voice mail. The phone doesn’t even ring. Around midnight, drunk, I left another message for him, which must be something like the fifth or the sixth voice mail I’ve left for him now. The message must have been completely incoherent too. I don’t know what I said exactly. I don’t know why I keep calling, but, more importantly, I don’t know why he won’t call me back. The only text I received all night came from my friend Lily, asking if I was okay and if Jake was home yet.No and no, I’d typed back with the sad face emoji, and she replied,
I’m so sorry. I’m thinking about you, Nina. Please let me know if there is anything you need or anything I can do. Anything at all. xo
I drive to school. I just happen to pull in at the same time as Ryan Schroeder, the teacher whose classroom is next door to mine. Years ago, Ryan and I were first-year teachers together. We’ve come up through the ranks together, getting tenure at the same time. I follow him around the lot, to where we usually park. Ryan pulls in first and I slide into the spot next to him. He steps out of his car, waiting on the curb for me to gather my things and get out. I wave, but he can’t wave back because he’s holding two coffees.
