Lost by Joy Fielding Read Free Book Online

head, fiddled girlishly with her hair, before dropping her arm self-consciously back to her side, massaging the flesh above her elbow.
    “Is your arm hurt?” Heather asked.
    “Let me try Julia one more time.” Again Cindy retrieved her phone from her purse, quickly punching in Julia’s cell phone number. Again she heard the breathy voice, the fake regret.
I’m so sorry I can’t answer your call at the moment
. Where are you, Julia? she wondered, feeling her sister’s angry eyes burning holes in the back of her blue blouse. “Julia, it’s almost five o’clock,” Cindy said evenly. “Where the hell are you?”

FOUR
    T HE first time Julia disappeared, she was four years old. Cindy had taken the girls to a nearby park and was busy pushing Heather on a swing when she realized that Julia was no longer among the children playing in the sandbox. She’d spent the next twenty minutes running around in increasingly frantic circles, accosting strangers, and shouting at hapless passersby: “I’ve lost my little girl. Please, has anyone seen my daughter?”
    Cindy had run home to call the police, Heather slung across her shoulder like an old purse, only to find Julia sitting on the front steps. “What took you so long?” the child demanded. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
    Was Julia somewhere waiting for her now? Cindy wondered, entering her bedroom and walking past her younger daughter, who lay sprawled across Cindy’s king-size bed, watching television, Elvis beside her. “What on earth are you watching?” Cindy asked, mesmerized by the sight of a staggeringly well-endowed young woman with big hair and a tiny white bikini rubbing great gobs of green fingerpaint over the expansive chest of a muscular young man. The young man was grinning so hard, hisface looked as if it might explode. Cindy inched back, picturing white teeth spraying toward the pale blue walls of her bedroom, like confetti.
    “It’s called
Blind Date.”
    How appropriate, Cindy thought, sitting down on the end of her bed, trying not to think of the night ahead. “What are they doing?”
    “Getting to know each other,” Heather deadpanned.
    “I guess some people will do anything to get on TV.” Cindy found herself thinking of Julia despite her best efforts not to. She was still angry that her older daughter hadn’t shown up for her fitting, that she hadn’t so much as called to offer an excuse. “Get down, Elvis,” Cindy said sharply, transferring her anger at her daughter to her daughter’s dog. Elvis looked at her with sleepy brown eyes, sighed deeply, and rolled over on his side.
    The second time Julia had disappeared was less than a year after the first. This time Cindy had put Heather in bed for her afternoon nap and come downstairs to find the front door open and Julia gone. Cindy had torn the house apart looking for her, then raced up and down the block, screaming out her daughter’s name. When she’d returned to the house, her phone was ringing. It was Tom. “Julia’s here,” he’d said simply, a smile lurking behind his words. Apparently, Julia had grown impatient with her mother, and walked the twelve blocks to her father’s office. “You took too long with Heather,” Julia scolded her mother when Tom brought her home.
    Had Julia grown impatient with her mother yet again? Cindy wondered, pushing herself to her feet and walking toward her closet.
    “You see, the premise of this show,” Heather wasexplaining, “is that they fix two people up and then send them off to the beach, or rock climbing, or something like that, for the afternoon, and then later, they go out for an intimate dinner …”
    Where
was
Julia? Why hadn’t she phoned?
    “… and at the end of the date,” Heather continued, “they each tell the camera whether or not they’d go out with that person a second time.”
    “Based on a deep spiritual connection, no doubt,” Cindy said, snapping back into the present, her eyes scanning the line of