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

blouses and plain, tissue-thin T-shirts at fifty bucks a pop. I buy her a purse, a wallet, a belt. A pair of brown calfskin loafers and some white sandals and three pairs of flats in different colors, all designer, but with the logo-print fabric tucked away on the inside, so you can’t tell how expensive they are. I’ll know, though.

      Julie will know too, although I do my best to keep the price tags away from her after I catch her checking the tag on a blouse and then trying unobtrusively to hang it back on the rack. “Julie,” I say firmly. She nods with a small smile, and I feel a rush of elation, strong, like the first sip of coffee after a good night’s rest.

      For the next two hours I stand outside the dressing room and hand her sizes and shades and styles of everything: bras, blazers, even swimsuits. While I am pondering which fancy restaurant we will take her out to first, she cracks the door open and holds out her hand for a smaller size of a fitted, knee-length dress in royal blue. Handing it to her, I glimpse, through the gaping sleeve openings of the too-big dress, a coin-size blob on her rib cage in a bluish-greenish shade of black that seems somehow wrong for a bruise. The door closes before I can ask her about it, and the dress doesn’t suit her, so we don’t end up buying it. We have plenty of other options.

      We walk out with four giant shopping bags stuffed to their tops, two bags apiece, like a scene in a movie about rich and powerful women. And I do feel powerful, almost if we’ve gotten away with something, though the four-figure total on the receipt shows otherwise. Julie is smiling too, unabashedly, wearing a knit top and jeans that we ripped the tags off, right at the register, while the long receipt was still whirring its way out of the printer. The sun came out from behind clouds while we were inside and is now steaming away the new puddles in the parking lot, high and bright. Everything sparkles. I think with a sharp thrill of Tom, at his computer, seeing the transaction come up in his linked accounting software. It’s more than our monthly house payment.

      Only late at night, just as I’m drifting off, does that precise shade of bluish-greenish black on her rib cage evoke the word tattoo.

      The next day, I drive her to a pebbled-concrete office complex off Memorial Drive, Tom’s phone call having yielded a referral to the dark and slightly down-at-heel office of Carol Morse, PsyD. Julie goes in, and in the waiting area, where the ficus trees are mysteriously flourishing in the absence of natural light, I pull out a book on Byron and landscape, then put it down and spend ninety minutes paging through magazines instead. I think about the many appointments in my future, all the waiting rooms in store for me, and hope they update the magazines regularly.

      On the way home, Julie asks if she can drive herself to her therapy appointments.

      Tom and I argue about it for three days straight.

      “She can’t drive without a license,” he says. “End of story.”

      “The therapist’s office isn’t that far away. She won’t have to go on the highway —”

      “Then we’ll get her a bike.”

      But in a city without sidewalks, a bike feels more dangerous to me than a car. “And have her get honked at, even hit? People get abducted off bikes, Tom. And the bus is just as bad.” Unprotected, I want to say. I think of Julie walking along the feeder road. “Of course she’ll get a license, but it takes months, and there are all those tests and forms and documents. What does she do until then? She’ll have to get a vision test —”

      “She should! There are reasons for those things,” Tom says, but I can tell he’s wavering, and so I keep fighting. It’s the first thing Julie has really asked me for, and she asked me, not Tom. I assume she wants to be alone in the car for the same reason I do: that sheltered, armored feeling of sitting high up behind the tinted windows in the recycled, air-conditioned air, the total privacy. It’s something I can give her that’s better than clothes.

      In the end, we compromise. I sign her up for the midsummer session of driver’s ed at the community college near our house, and Tom agrees to take Julie out for driving lessons now so she can get herself to therapy and back, carefully, using the neighborhood roads. The private lessons are what clinches it; his resolve crumbles in the face of her obvious delight at the prospect, and for the next week they wake up conspiratorially early and head off to various parking structures around town for a few hours. When they come back, we eat lunch together, and then Tom goes to work while Julie and I swim in the pool. In the afternoons, I take her out shopping — we buy all her bedroom furniture in one trip to IKEA, as if she’s a college student — or to her therapy appointment, when she has one, or, a few times, to an afternoon movie. After a family dinner, we watch TV with Jane curled up nearby, absorbed in her notebook. It’s a cozy routine, one where Julie is always accounted for and our time together is comfortably filled with tasks so no one has to reach far for things to talk about that aren’t Julie’s eight-year absence or find reasons to gently touch her forearm that aren’t, at least not obviously, about checking to make sure she’s still there.

      For the first few weeks, this routine feels like it could last forever, in spite of minor disturbances. Tom answers the phone sharply when he doesn’t recognize the caller ID, telling the reporters that we’re not interested in talking; “I don’t know when,” he snaps, “our family needs privacy right now.” Eventually he turns the ringer off, and I sink back into the bliss of knowing he is taking care of things, as he did in the days after it happened. In the back of my mind are certain topics I avoid thinking about — my job, Jane’s incompletes, the SANE, the SAFE — but then I send my department chair an e-mail telling him my grades will be late and decide that Jane, who has grown quieter in Julie’s presence, must be making progress on her late papers. What else could she be writing about in her notebook all the time? And when Julie starts driving after a few weeks of early-morning lessons with Tom, she gets to her appointments and back just fine, as I knew she would. This is our new normal, and it feels like something we are all learning together, as a family.

      Tom and I even start having sex again, something that hasn’t happened regularly for years. He touches me gingerly, as if he can sense that my skin feels almost raw. Julie has been in the house for a few weeks, and though I’m getting used to it, it still feels like someone has rubbed me all over with a rasp. Every pore seems to be open, every hair a fine filament ready to shoot me full of sensation at the slightest breeze. I have been fighting for so long to stifle sensation. I remember when the grief was so potent I would lie on the sofa with the television on drinking vodka gimlets, one after the other, just waiting to pass out, staying as still as possible, teaching myself the art of numbness. And now it is as if I’ve been dropped into scalding water and the numbness has peeled away and the skin underneath is affronted by air.

      If there is something missing — if I am afraid to love her quite as much as before — it is only because the potential for love feels so big and so intense that I fear I will disappear in the expression of it, that it will blow my skin away like clouds and I will be nothing.

      I wake up one morning with Jane standing over me, shaking my elbow. For a moment, caught in dreams I can’t remember, I think we’re doing the whole thing over again.

      “Mom,” she whispers urgently. “Mom, can you wake up?”

      I reach a hand instinctively over to Tom.

      “Don’t wake Dad. Just come quick, okay?”

      I’m naked under the covers, I realize in time to keep from pushing them off me. Jane sees. “I’ll wait outside. It’s Julie,” she adds unnecessarily, since even as I wake up completely I’m still reliving that day.

      I skip the bathrobe and pull on jeans and yesterday’s shirt in case we need to get right into the car. “Gone?” I ask when I’m out of the bedroom, my skin clamping shut under the air conditioning.

      Jane looks at me oddly and shakes her head. “No, nothing like that. I think she’s sick.”

      We’re still whispering as she leads me upstairs. Jane peers down the hall at the closed bathroom door.

      “It’s locked,” she says helplessly.

      “How