Good as Gone: A dark and gripping thriller with a shocking twist. Amy Gentry

and walk in, I smell Jane’s favorite pasta dish: fettuccine Alfredo tossed with breaded shrimp and grilled asparagus, a ridiculously decadent recipe Tom got off the Food Network and makes only on special occasions. An expiatory salad of fresh greens is in a bowl next to the cutting board, ready to join the bright Fiestaware on the dining-room table.

      “Janie!” Tom opens his arms and steps forward, and Jane throws her arms around him, squeezing her eyes shut against his chest. I slip off to the bathroom, then to the bedroom to change out of my teaching outfit into more comfortable jeans, loitering for a few minutes to put away some laundry that’s been sitting, folded, in a basket at the foot of the bed. When I return, they are talking animatedly, Tom’s back to me as he chops heirloom tomatoes for the salad, Jane resting the tips of her fingers on the butcher block as if playing a piano.

      “Dad, you would not believe the names people were throwing around in this class,” she says. “Derrida, stuff like that. Everyone was so much smarter than me.”

      “Hey, she let you in, and she’s the MacArthur Genius lady.”

      “Every time I opened my mouth I sounded like an idiot.”

      “At least you opened your mouth,” he says, resting the knife to the side of the cutting board for a moment while he looks her in the eye. “I bet there were some people who were too scared to talk.”

      Jane’s grateful smile, just visible over Tom’s shoulder, curdles me like milk. As if he can sense it, Tom turns around and sees me standing there. He throws a handful of chopped tomatoes onto the pile of greens and picks up the salad bowl.

      “Everything’s ready!” he says. “Grab the pasta, Jane. Let’s sit down and eat our first family dinner in God knows how long.”

      And that, believe it or not, is when the doorbell rings.

2

      The first thing I see is her pale hair, all lit up in the rosy, polluted glow of the Houston sunset.

      Then her face — ashen skin stretched thin over wide cheekbones flushed red across the top so that the dark circles stand out under her sunken eyes. The face looks both young and old. She wears worn-out jeans with holes at the knees, a T-shirt. She opens her mouth to speak, and I see that her feet are bare.

      There’s something familiar about her, but it’s like my entire body has become fused with my surroundings, my brain rewired to resemble blind hands fumbling, the sensory data bumping uselessly around in search of something to latch onto: Hair. Eyes. Young. Bare.

      Her eyes widen, and the color drains from her face.

      My hands stretch out in front of me, palms out, fingers spread wide, ready to shield me from the nuclear sunset or as if I’m about to fall down, but it’s the girl on the porch who falls, her knees buckling so that she folds up neatly as she collapses onto the mat, blond hair catching lightly in the azalea bushes on her way down. I open my mouth and I think I must be yelling for Tom, although I can’t hear it because my brain is still blinded by the sunset glancing off her face. He comes running up behind me, stops, and then thunders through the doorway. When I look again, the girl has all but vanished into his arms, the loops and tangles of her hair crushed between his fingers as he hugs her to his chest, rocking back and forth. “Julie, Julie, Julie,” he is sobbing, like the chorus of the nightmares that I now know have never stopped but have been unreeling every night for eight years, and perhaps all day long as well, in a continuous stream I have simply chosen to deny.

      The sight of Jane standing stock-still in the hallway flips the light switch back on in my head. “Call 911,” I manage to say. “Tell them we need an ambulance.” To Tom, who is making strange, animal sounds of grief I have also heard in my dreams, I say, “Bring her in.”

      And just like that, the worst unhappens. Julie is home.

      The first twenty-four hours after Julie’s reappearance are oddly similar to the first twenty-four hours after her disappearance, a mirror symmetry that lends extra significance to every detail. There’s the humidity of the long, hot summer’s beginning, the crape myrtles that were already dropping their flowers when she was taken in early fall just now starting to put out blossoms like crumpled scraps of tissue paper. There are the sirens blaring their way through the neighborhood up to our house, just like last time, but bringing EMS rather than the police and at sunset rather than sunrise, so the neighbors who open their front doors to see what’s happening are wearing work clothes rather than bathrobes, holding oven mitts rather than newspapers. Everything is backward, like a photo negative of tragedy.

      Only one of us can ride in the ambulance with Julie, and Tom immediately steps forward, so Jane and I climb into the SUV and follow behind. When we pull up to the ED, they are unloading her gurney, now connected to a rolling IV, and she is wheeled inside and installed in a curtained-off room with that excruciating combination of slowness and urgency native to emergency departments.

      The next thirty minutes pass like hours under the fluorescent lights. Julie wakes, mumbles, sleeps again. Tom sits by the bedside, holding Julie’s hand and murmuring something unintelligible; I pace; Jane leans; nurses come in at odd intervals, never telling us anything but instead asking for details about insurance or Julie’s medical history, questions that seem so useless and redundant that I become convinced some of these people just want to see the famous Whitaker girl in the flesh. One nurse comes in to draw blood, and Julie starts awake at the cold wet cotton swab on her inner forearm, keeps her eyes open just long enough to nod vaguely at the nurse’s bright questions, then fades as soon as the needle is in. The curtain that separates us from the hall flutters as people rush by and does nothing to block out the cacophony of squeaking wheels, indecipherable PA announcements, and hallway conferences punctuated with loud sighs and occasional laughter.

      When the doctor finally comes, she sends everyone out of the room over Tom’s and my objections.

      “I just need her for two seconds,” she says. “You — Mom, Dad — don’t go anywhere.”

      Needless to say, we don’t, but Jane takes the opportunity to find a restroom. The doctor emerges from the curtained room after a hushed conversation I strain unsuccessfully to hear, and I glimpse Julie in the background, awake but flushed and disoriented, before she pulls the curtain shut behind her. Julie is dehydrated, the doctor tells us, suffering from exhaustion and exposure, and hasn’t eaten for a few days, but there don’t seem to be any injuries or illnesses, no substances in her bloodstream. “After the fluids take effect, most likely she’ll be right as rain,” she finishes, her use of the expression right as rain proving she cannot possibly have read the chart, or she has never watched the news, or she is so calloused by her job that she lacks the power to think past a stock phrase indelibly associated in her mind with the word fluids. “Just get her to the clinic for a follow-up after a few weeks. They’ll schedule her when she’s discharged.”

      As we file back into Julie’s room, there’s a knock on the wall, and a police detective steps in after us. Fortyish, with dark hair, looking not unlike a police detective from a TV show but far less attractive, he leaves the curtain open a foot and stares at Julie from the improvised doorway.

      “Julie Whitaker,” he says. “Unbelievable.”

      Julie doesn’t take any notice of him, but on seeing Tom and me again, she collapses back onto the pillow, crying tearlessly. Tom rushes to enfold her in his arms. Noting my expression, the doctor says they’ll move Julie to a room with a door as soon as one opens up, and then she hustles out. The cop introduces himself as Detective Overbey and starts asking me questions about the circumstances of Julie’s arrival, which I answer as best I can considering that, for all I know, she could have come straight out of the glowing orange sunset or a god’s forehead or the side of a man opened up while he was sleeping. The question of how she was delivered to us seems that unimportant.

      In the background, I hear Tom repeating the words “You’re safe now. It’s okay. The doctor says you’re going to be okay.” He is talking to himself as much as to her, and though