“I actually introduced her to this guy,” she said. “Kurt. He’s older, sort of a family friend. He’d be forty-one now.”
“I have the photos,” Arnaud said, strawberry at his lips.
“I didn’t mean for them to get involved, it’s just that she was spending the summer in Colorado to wait tables and explore, and he was living there. This was 2011, right after her freshman year of college. And before I know it, she’s in love, and then she isn’t going back to school in the fall, she’s going to stay in Boulder and work on some kind of ranch. And then I don’t hear from her, and I don’t hear from her, there’s no phone there, no Internet, just mail, and finally I write and tell her I’m coming to visit, and she says I can’t. Which is when I panic.”
Not that it was the first time Claire had shut her out. For an entire semester of high school, she wouldn’t speak to either parent. And one day, back when Fiona and Damian first split—Claire was nine—she ran away to the church down the street. Claire hadn’t set foot in a church at that point outside of one wedding, but Fiona had always told her that if she ever needed help in an emergency, she could go to a church and ask. By the time Claire went missing, though, Fiona had forgotten she’d said it.
When the secretary at the Episcopal church finally called, Claire had been missing for five hours, and Fiona and Damian had been combing the streets with a police officer. It was a week after 9/11, and people still watched police cruisers from the sidewalks with concern. Oddly, it was a comfort—that her crisis was part of the general trauma. They found Claire in the church office, drinking chocolate milk and sitting with two women who positively glared at Fiona and Damian. What Claire had told these women about them, about the divorce, Fiona never knew. She handed the women a twenty and grabbed Claire’s arm and marched her out while the officer and Damian stayed behind to ask questions.
It was only when Claire was in bed that night that Fiona looked at Damian, sitting there on the sofa that used to be his, too, and said, “Why do you suppose she ran away?” She kept her voice pleasant, but really she already had an answer.
He laughed and said, “Maybe it’s genetic. I mean, why did you and your brother run away?”
“I left home,” she said, “when I was eighteen. And Nico was kicked out, and you don’t ever get to mention him again.”
Damian raised his hands in surrender, if not apology.
“And my parents,” she said, “my mom showed my brother’s sketchbook to the priest. It was—Okay, I’m not talking about this to you. Do you think it’s possible, Damian, that she overheard what you said?”
And Damian looked at the carpet instead of at her, because of course that’s what had happened. The night before, after he’d dropped Claire off, he’d stayed to talk—to fight, really—and Claire hadn’t been asleep yet when he shouted at Fiona, something he hardly ever did. It had been about the divorced man Fiona had been sleeping with, or, more specifically, about the fact that this man had two children, that Fiona had spent a weekend with them in Michigan that summer. About how it was bad enough that she’d cheated on him, but was she trying to replace their whole family?
“I’ll talk to her,” Damian said. And, stupidly, she’d let him be the one to go into Claire’s bedroom. Maybe because he was the only one who could take it back, being the one who’d said it. She should have gone in herself. Why hadn’t she?
Fiona didn’t relay this all to Arnaud, but she told him about her trip to Boulder in 2011. It was winter, long enough after Claire hadn’t returned to school that, in retrospect, her own delay was inexcusable. At the time it had seemed right, though—giving Claire her space. Damian was living in Portland by then, and she only spoke to him when they were in crisis mode over Claire. They finally talked in early January about how neither of them ever heard a word, how Claire had cashed the check Damian and his new wife had sent for Christmas, but never wrote to thank him. Worrying alone, Fiona had been able to tell herself this was just how Claire was, that she needed time, needed to realize on her own that she missed school. But listening to Damian, who never panicked, say that he didn’t like this, that something felt wrong, it suddenly became clear it was wrong. Fiona flew out the next week. She rented a car in Denver and drove past Boulder, following her GPS.
It clearly wasn’t the right address. This wasn’t a ranch. A narrow, uneven road wound through woods to some sort of discount campground—trailers and cottages around a rundown yellow house, no lake or other natural attraction to explain their convergence.
Fiona wanted to leave, look things up on a proper map, figure out where the ranch really was, but she couldn’t take off without knocking, without checking that her daughter wasn’t being held captive inside. She called Damian just so there would be a witness if something horrible happened, and—with him on the line, the phone clutched to her chest—she approached the door.
“The man who answered,” she told Arnaud now, “he was dressed like they do. I didn’t understand at the time. Beard, long hair, clogs. They look a lot like hippies, especially the men.” The men came off better than the poor women, who wore long sleeves, long dresses, no makeup.
“So even when it turned out Claire was there, when they called her to the door, that’s what I thought it was—a hippie commune. I guess they don’t really have those anymore.”
She told him how Claire first backed up when she saw her, then hugged her like you might hug an ex you’d run into when you were both on dates with other people. Damian was still on the line, but Fiona couldn’t stop to tell him everything that was happening. Claire grabbed a coat and came out to talk on the driveway, and soon Kurt joined, stood beside her like a bodyguard.
“He seemed so possessive,” she said, “his hand on her back.” How had Fiona forgotten his height? She’d been struck by it the first time she’d seen him grown, towering above his own mother. He must have been six foot five, and now he was paunchy too. His face was leathery from the sun and wind, and his blond hair brushed his shoulders.
“They didn’t lie about what the place was, exactly. They said it was a planned community, and they gave me the name Hosanna Collective, which—well, you can tell right away it’s not just an organic farm, right?”
Fiona didn’t remember the details of the conversation. It was confusing and she was upset, and although she asked them about these people they were living with, she was more concerned with Claire’s demeanor, her dull eyes and twitching foot, than with the answers. She remembered saying, lamely, “There are churches you can explore in Chicago too,” and Kurt shaking his head at her. “The modern Christian church is the Whore of Babylon,” he said.
Claire wouldn’t leave, wouldn’t even get in the car with her to have dinner in town, wouldn’t take the phone to speak to her father, wouldn’t step away from Kurt Pearce.