I am so lucky that you are mine and I am yours.
Love you forever,
Mommy
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Sunday, October 11
In the late evening of the same day that the rest of us returned from Montauk, Friday the ninth, Isabel was found in the brambles by the Hudson River, all the way up near 168th Street, by a married couple completing one of their last long training runs before the NYC Marathon. Isabel was dehydrated, disoriented, and had lost several pounds. （She confided in us that she’d lost the weight by eating practically nothing but fish the whole time she’d been in Montauk, with the exception of our postdecision pizza. “It didn’t even feel like a sacrifice,” she’d said, laughing. “Montauk seafood is the best!”）
She would tell the police that she’d cut her hand in the kitchen of their town house, and had cut it badly. She would tell them that she left the house to go to the hospital, sure she needed stitches. She hadn’t wanted to wake Connor, who had just returned from a work trip and needed his sleep. Naomi was sleeping in their room. When the police asked why she brought the dog, she would say that she was so disoriented from the injury, she didn’t even realize the dog had gotten out, but that she normally did walk him that time of night, so that’s probably why he scampered along with her. When the police asked why there was no blood in the kitchen, she would say that she immediately put a towel on the wound, that she was used to being careful, keeping an immaculately clean house. （She’d cut her own hand as soon as she arrived in Montauk so that she’d have a healing wound to show: “Vanessa showed me how to do it cleanly, but it still hurt! Though, after pushing a baby out, cutting my hand was pretty much nothing,” she’d added with a wry laugh.） When police asked why there was so much more blood on the sidewalk than could plausibly be produced by a cut hand, she simply shrugged, wide eyed, and said, “I don’t know. It seemed like a lot of blood to me, though. It was a pretty bad cut, like I said.”
She would tell police that she tried to hail a cab to take her to the hospital but she couldn’t find one, so she kept walking west toward Riverside Park, hoping she’d have more luck on Broadway. But the streets were quiet that night. Not a lot of pedestrians to ask for help and no available taxis that she could find. She kept trying. （A car had picked her up that night, of course; Vanessa had driven her to Montauk and made it back for work on Friday morning. Phoebe had come along for the ride so that Vanessa didn’t have to come up with an excuse for why she needed her nanny. It was simpler not to involve additional people, to avoid raising suspicion. Phoebe had slept for practically the entire ride, the angel.）
That’s the last thing she remembered, she said. Searching for a ride to the hospital to have her hand stitched up. When she came to, she was being taken to Mount Sinai West in a taxi by the runners who’d found her by the river and carried her up to the street through the park. She had no idea how much time had elapsed but was shocked to learn she’d been missing for a week.
She supposed, she said, that a combination of chronic exhaustion, postpartum depression, and excessive blood loss from her cut hand—hence, the stains on the sidewalk, and the bloody rings, which she had apparently removed at some point in her delirium and was so happy to get back, by the way, because they were so special to her—had induced her into a catatonic state. To her knowledge, she’d just been essentially sleeping by the river for the past week, though maybe she’d walked around and forgotten. She couldn’t remember eating, though that didn’t necessarily mean she hadn’t. She couldn’t remember anything. She was just grateful to be alive, grateful to the runners who had found her, grateful to her mother for keeping faith and taking amazing care of her baby daughter while she’d been gone. She was grateful to her husband for keeping the media circus at bay in order to protect their family’s safety and privacy, and allowing detectives to do their job unencumbered by the scrutiny or misinformation of the public. She was grateful to her friends who had offered their time and help to her family, and of course, she greatly appreciated the detectives’ hard work in pursuing a variety of leads and possibilities. She was so happy to be back and was feeling much, much better.
It wasn’t a particularly believable story—not in the least, actually. But what made it work was that people were usually willing to believe that a woman had been weak, crazy, had succumbed to some kind of psychotic episode. And that ultimately, she’d survived because of dumb luck. So maybe it was a story that everyone would be more than willing to believe, after all. Thank God she’s back, people would say, brows furrowed in confusion as to what the hell she could have been doing by the river for the past week, but not venturing so far as to call her a liar. What a miracle that she’s going to be okay.