Little Girl Gone: The can’t-put-it-down psychological thriller. Alexandra Burt

eyes every time he looked at me. I weighed about as much as I did in high school, maybe even less. My facial features seemed to have corroded and I had aged a decade in the past two months. Before Mia, I had a haircut every couple of months. I used to go to the gym, yoga, Pilates, you name it. Now, I never seemed to have any energy anymore.

      ‘You said you’d be back in a couple of hours.’

      ‘What the hell, really?’ Jack said. ‘Can you tell me what you want from me? I just want to understand because I can’t see how making money is not the right thing.’

      I tried to work out what to say. How could I explain when my head felt so cluttered and fragile? For a fraction of a second he looked like a little boy about to listen to a parent preach, and I saw how afraid he was that I was going to say something else, would question him further, something neither one of us had the energy for. Even if there was another woman, I didn’t have the energy to even entertain the thought for long periods of time. What else could it be? I wanted to ask him why he’d tell me he took a cab when he got out of a town car, and if he was having an affair, but I wasn’t sure I really cared. His distance paled in comparison to whatever crazy I had living inside of me.

       Hey, honey, welcome home! Guess what, there’s a demon trapped inside of our daughter’s head and with every passing minute it’s getting harder to resist the temptation of jamming a sharp object into her fontanel.

      ‘She cried all day, Jack. I don’t know what to do anymore.’

      It’s because of the demon.

      ‘Did you take her out?’

       You haven’t left the house in days.

      ‘All she does is cry. Why would I take her out?’

       The demon is making her cry. If I can get to the demon, everything will be okay.

      ‘Well, what did you do?’

      I didn’t answer.

       Help me Jack, help me. I’m afraid of hurting her.

      ‘She doesn’t cry all the time, Estelle. She’s not crying right now, is she? She cries sometimes, all babies do, that’s how they communicate.’ He plopped on the couch and opened his briefcase. ‘I have work to do, let’s talk later, okay?’ Jack absentmindedly jabbed chopsticks at Chinese leftovers while hacking away on his BlackBerry.

      ‘It’s okay,’ I said more to myself than Jack. I stared out the window, my reflection nothing but a distorted body in a sea of darkness.

      Jack’s mood tended to improve the sleepier he became. Later, in bed, he caught me staring at the ceiling. He asked, his voice now soft and gentle, what I was thinking about.

      ‘Dark, horrible thoughts,’ I answered but kept my voice light and cheerful. ‘Demons. Blood. Murder. That kind of stuff.’

      He brushed my words off with a half-hearted smile. ‘Well then … as long as it’s nothing serious. You can always get a sitter a couple of times a week. I’ll help out as much as I can.’

       Which means what? You hold her while I get a bottle?

      ‘Sure,’ I said. Our conversations had turned into a distorted reality we both liked to believe in. There was nothing he could do for me.

      ‘Well, then let’s not dwell on it.’

      ‘Yeah, let’s not,’ I said and felt a cold fist tightening around my heart.

      ‘I’m sorry about earlier, how was your day?’ Jack said, flipped over and pulled the blanket over his shoulders.

      ‘Just the usual.’

       Let me see. I haven’t slept longer than one hour continuously for the past five months. I use wet wipes more often than I shower. The thought of tomorrow being just like today makes me want to jump off a bridge. Any moment I’ll hit rock-bottom which I imagine to be similar to the bottom of a dark well. Murky ankle-deep water, toad cadavers floating atop the slimy water’s surface, spider webs full of dried-up cocooned bugs and beetles. And that’s before I light a match and look closely.

      Jack’s breathing was slow and steady. I didn’t have to look at him to know that he was asleep.

      But it really didn’t matter because even if he was awake, he couldn’t bear half of what I had living inside of me.

       Chapter 8

      The very next night – Jack again phoned me telling me he’d be late – I parked in front of his office building and kept an eye on the front desk behind the glass doors. Was Jack hiding something? A thought had grown, slowly at first and I was reluctant to listen to it, but lately the voice had become louder. I wanted to see for myself, after all, had I not asked for it? Was I not incapable as a mother and just as incapable as his wife? I couldn’t blame him, looking in the rearview mirror seeing myself, couldn’t blame him at all. Even I didn’t recognize the woman staring back at me, pale and haggard.

      I sat in my car, watched the traffic lights change and cars float by, and I waited until the security guard made his rounds. I took the elevator up to the fifth floor and found all the offices dark, except Jack’s.

      I couldn’t make sense of the contorted voices drifting towards me through Jack’s office door, and so I imagined what hands were doing, where tongues slithered like snakes, what pieces of clothing were draped over office chairs or bunched around ankles like turtlenecks, what the room smelled like. As I listened to the voices and the laughter, I observed myself in the glass door panel, and I was dumbfounded by the woman I had become. No longer a woman, really, but a crone, in baggy clothes and stringy hair with a chilly triumphant cackle. I knew I was helpless, for the crone’s powers were infinite.

      Seconds after I began pounding the door with my fists, Jack ripped open the door, looked at me, with surprise at first, then his eyes turned into rage. I didn’t speak, just turned and ran. I reached my car, shaking, unable to think, but I managed to drive home. When I pulled into the driveway, I was surprised I had made it there.

      Aashi, the sitter, was asleep on the couch in Mia’s room. A medical student from India, chronically sleep-deprived yet easy-going and patient with Mia’s colicky behavior, she smelled of cardamom and anise and her upper lip appeared darker than the rest of her face.

      My hand still hovered over her shoulder when she opened her eyes.

      ‘Ms Paradise, she didn’t wake up at all. I fed her around ten, and she fell back asleep right away,’ she whispered and brushed a blanket of black hair from her face, her colorful bangles dancing on her wrist.

      ‘She must have been really tired,’ I said. ‘We spent all day at the park, all that fresh air …’ What sounded like a pleasant outing had been nothing more but a screaming baby in a stroller until she fell asleep out of sheer exhaustion.

      I looked over at Mia, picture perfect in her crib, her face angelic and placid while earlier she had thrashed her hands towards my face, her mouth a gaping wound.

      Aashi left and I wandered around the house, unable to settle. I found myself in front of Jack’s office. I didn’t want to snoop; the trip to his office earlier, now nothing more than a moment of lunacy – but Jack was going to demand an explanation and I had nothing to give him. Nothing but a sea of irrationality. He was going to ask questions, he’d want to know what had possessed me to do what I had done. I needed a logical reason, proof of his infidelity, proof that he couldn’t be trusted any longer. I had to find a picture, a letter, a photograph, anything that would justify my outburst.

      I stood in the doorway, taking in the shelves and filing cabinets. I had no idea what I was even looking for. Jack had started paying all the bills after Mia was born, handled all the paperwork, and I was glad he did. There wasn’t another