The Choice by Jason Mott Page B

And, a few years after that, the two of them fumbled over one another clumsily in the back of his father’s car and lost their virginity together.
    It was one year later, when Peter had just turned seventeen and was certain that he would spend the rest of his life with Tracy, that she disappeared.
    The entire town searched for her, and the police worked around the clock. Hours rolled into days, days into weeks, weeks into months. And she was never heard from again. She left behind two devastated parents—parents condemned to spend years searching the faces of others for their daughter—and one confused, guilt-ridden boy who loved her.
    But that was over fifteen years ago. Closer to twenty when Peter really stopped to think about it. And, over the years, he had learned to forget. Learned not to think about her. Learned not to remember the way things had been, the way the two of them had imagined things would eventually be.
    He stayed in touch with her parents. He had been as close with them as he had been with his own parents, and when Tracy disappeared, they’d clung to him as a way of clinging to her. They came to his high school graduation, then his college graduation. They sent him Christmas cards and, once in a while, he would visit them. Their faces would light up as he came through the door and the two of them would put their arms around him and Tracy’s mother would hold his face in her hands and kiss his cheeks and ask him to tell her all about his life.
    Deep down inside, Peter knew that it was not him they were welcoming home but Tracy. His life was her life now. His successes her successes. His stories her stories.
    But all of that had been manageable. All of that Peter had gotten used to. It didn’t bother him anymore. Didn’t keep him awake at night. Not until now, at least.
    * * *
    “Why didn’t I check here first?” Samantha asked herself as she entered Lisa’s bedroom. In the corner, next to Lisa’s stuffed animals, was the bottle of aloe. She couldn’t imagine what Lisa was doing with it—probably salving some imaginary burn to Paddington Bear. She rubbed the lotion on her finger and sighed as it began to cool. “Why does this keep happening?” she asked herself. She wasn’t the clumsy type. But now she and Peter were arguing all the time and it was infecting everything else and she wasn’t quite sure what was causing it.
    She sat down on Lisa’s bed and thought about her husband. She replayed their arguments over the past few weeks, looking for patterns. He was distracted, that much she could identify, but by what, she couldn’t nail down. She didn’t think it was another woman—he never seemed like that type of guy—but she was getting close to being able to believe anything.
    As she sat thinking, suddenly she felt one of Lisa’s stuffed animals begin vibrating. Samantha moved the animal aside and found Peter’s phone. The display on the incoming call read “Evelyn.”
    Evelyn was the mother of the girl Peter had dated in high school. The girl he’d grown up with. The girl who disappeared all those years ago.
    She called from time to time, and Peter usually took the calls in private. Mostly it was just catching up, talking about what he was up to these days. Samantha had never wanted to intrude, feeling, somehow, that this was something sacred to the woman, so she left Peter to his conversations.
    Samantha couldn’t have said what caused her to answer the phone just then. She could have just as well let it go to voice mail, but some part of her forced her hand.
    “Hi, Mrs. Whitland,” Samantha said. “This is Sam.” She felt a kick of adrenaline, but she wasn’t sure why. She had spoken to Evelyn before, but this time it seemed different.
    “Oh, hello, darling,” Mrs. Whitland replied after a pause. She had obviously expected Peter to answer the call. “How have you been?”
    “Busy,” Samantha replied. “Struggling to keep pace with a six-year-old. Children are a