She went upstairs. There was a ring dish on a shelf in her walk-in closet where she put the engagement ring and matching platinum wedding band, also studded with diamonds, when her hands were swelling. She didn’t think she’d taken it off, usually took off both when she did. The dish was empty.
The world came to a grinding halt, dinner stalled, homework interrupted.
“Guys, can you help me?”
She was shaky, had tears in her eyes. The three of them—Bailey, Ellie, and Mom—moved through the house, the car, the garden, looking in all the nooks and crannies, under the mat in the car, between the couch cushions. Ellie looked through Mom’s purse, her drawers. In the garden, Bailey took the rake and scraped through the soil his mother had just turned and aerated. About an hour in, Mom started to cry. Just sat on the couch and wept. Both Bailey and Ellie stopped to sit beside her and wrap her up in their arms, the way she had done for them so many times over lost friendships, or bullies, or homework frustration.
“Don’t worry,” Bailey said. “I’ll find it.”
And it was that day, that moment, where he discovered an obsession for finding things that had been lost. There were only so many places where the ring could have gone. They didn’t have cleaning people; he and Ellie were too old for sitters. Their older brother, who might have been a suspect in darker days, hadn’t been home in almost two years. There were no strangers moving through the house that day—plumbers or electricians or whatever. So, it hadn’t been stolen. The ring was loose, but not that loose. So, Bailey deduced that there were only so many conditions under which it might have fallen from her finger without her noticing.
Matthew was handy, and he’d taught Bailey how to do things—like change a tire, fix a running toilet, unclog a drain. Bailey didn’t always pay attention, his mind on other things like video games and soccer and the weird feelings he had about certain girls who used to be his friends with whom he’d played hide-and-seek and caught toads in the creek behind his house, but who now smelled like flowers and wore lip gloss. But sometimes he did pay attention to his dad’s instruction, because he liked to understand how things worked, little everyday mysteries solved.
He got his father’s toolbox and went to the kitchen. The pipe under the sink had a dip. If the ring went down the drain while his mother was doing the dishes that morning, there was a chance it was still sitting there. He turned off the water to the sink, got the wrench, and removed the pipe. He dumped the contents into his hand, while Ellie and Mom looked on hopefully. There, in a revolting glob of soapy grime, was his mother’s diamond ring.
She sobbed as he handed it back to her. It wasn’t the ring. It wasn’t its cost or its value. It was her husband, his father, and her love for him, and their history and their memories, and the way she cherished that glittering symbol of Matthew’s love. His father could have bought her another ring, but there was no way to replace that one, how it held all the energy of their life together. Bailey was a kid, just sixteen years old, and he was confused about the world and people and himself a vast majority of the time. But he saw that, what the ring meant, and understood it with a shining clarity. Some things were not just things, not just dead material items with a dollar value and nothing more. Some things were like people. And everything, everyone, had to be somewhere.
And ever since that day, Bailey Kirk didn’t like questions without answers. He didn’t like items that were lost and could not be found. Because whether you were aware of it or not, there was always an answer. One indisputable truth about what happened and why. And the lost, they were always somewhere. There was no sucking vortex in the world where rings and watches and keys and people fell through and were removed from existence. The world, and the spaces contained within, were finite. There were only so many places to go. Only so many things that might have happened.
People weren’t things, and when they went missing, there were more layers, more possibilities. Inanimate objects didn’t conspire to stay gone or hide from those searching for them. An object didn’t have a reason for leaving its life behind. But still, the number of possibilities were finite.
He kept a picture of Mia Thorpe in the visor over the drivers’ seat of his truck, and he reached for it now.
There were other missing women that he was concerned about. But Henry Thorpe was his client. And Mia was the precious child that he had lost. And there was a certain energy to that. Bailey was connected to Mia through Henry’s grief. There was a gossamer strand from her being to his, a spider-silk tether that he could shorten millimeter by millimeter until they were face-to-face.