Last Seen Leaving by Kelly Braffet
272 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $23.00
Reviewed by Mark Dundas Wood
As the old song has it, “Knowing when to leave may be the smartest thing that anyone can learn.” Or, for that matter, knowing when to stay put.
In Last Seen Leaving, Kelly Braffet’s slim but satisfying second novel, characters are so very eager to escape that they don’t stop to consider whether running away is the smartest course of action. Anne Cassidy, for instance, fled from Pennsylvania to Arizona with her young daughter Miranda in the early 1980s—after her husband Nick’s death. (Nick, a pilot, had disappeared while executing secret missions in Central America for an organization called Western Mountain.) Anne’s uprooting of herself and her daughter helped widen the gulf between them. It’s no surprise that when Miranda is an adult, she becomes, like both her parents, a specialist in vanishing acts.
As the novel opens, Anne and Miranda are, for all purposes, estranged from each other. Mother is still in sun-drenched Sedona, living among crystal-consulting New Agers. Daughter has returned to the East Coast, to the dreary town of Ratchetsburg, near Pittsburgh. When Anne repeatedly tries and fails to contact her daughter, she suspects that Miranda is missing. Panicked, Anne journeys back to Pennsylvania to find her, unaware that Miranda was involved in a car crash, after which her rescuer took her from Ratchetsburg, an inscrutable middle-aged man known as George.
By alternating scenes depicting the sleuthing Anne with those showing the drifting Miranda, Braffet seems to be deliberately subverting the detective-story elements of the book. The reader after all, knows that Miranda is alive—though Anne does not.
Such subversion doesn’t mean that the novel lacks suspense. Sixty pages into the story, the setting shifts to the seaside resort of Lawrence Beach, Virginia in the waning days of summer. There, a serial killer has been terrorizing the town and its pretty young women. Braffet deftly evokes a menacing, shadowy carnival ambience that calls to mind Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. The half-deserted beach town seems to be running on alcohol and fumes of sexy fear. Easy summer liaisons become tinged with danger when each handsome stranger is a potential Ted Bundy. Soon the days shorten, the knife-jugglers play to diminishing crowds, the vendors discount their souvenirs: The party becomes a wake.
Miranda has shortened her name to Randa in order to make a fresh start, but the clean break soon becomes messy. She has taken a job as a chambermaid in a tawdry motel named the Pink Pearl (what better name to evoke the idea of self-erasure than that of the stubby appliance used by first graders to rub out their mistakes in spelling and arithmetic?) and the increasingly creepy George frequently visits, popping up at unlikely moments. His intense interest in Randa is suspect for the very reason that it seems to be platonic. The reader is left to wonder, Is George the serial killer? Is he someone who had some connection to Western Mountain and Nick Cassidy’s disappearance? Or is he a wholly altruistic presence? Red herrings are flopping in the Lawrence Beach tide pools.
As the novel progresses, we learn the details of Anne and Miranda’s past life together, from each of their perspectives. The flashbacks are presented in present tense, the present narrative in past. It’s a subtle but effective way to present the vagaries of time. The minds of both women return always to a single, crucial moment in their shared history: the tipping point of their relationship. When Nick perished, Anne had lashed out in fury at the young Miranda. This incident altered their bond permanently, and by the time of Miranda’s disappearance, the mother-daughter relationship had settled into an uncomfortable mix of indifference and contempt. It became a chore for Anne even to speak with Miranda on the phone.
But things shift again when Anne begins the search for her missing girl. Thrashing about for answers in Pennsylvania—far from Lawrence Beach—Anne discards any remaining fantasies about reconciliation with a changed Miranda. And yet, she keeps up the search. The real questions that Braffet investigates—in unassuming but elegant prose—are deeper than “whodunit” or “whytheydunit”: How much loss can anyone shoulder? Just how far can a parent’s fierce love for her child carry her, even when the child doesn’t reciprocate that love? How can the course of one’s life change so dramatically in an instant?
“When you woke up and toasted your English muffin or grilled your daughter’s cheese sandwich,” Anne ponders early in the book, “there was no rash, no telltale whir, no suddenly ominous background music to let you know that this was going to be the worst day of your life, the last day of your life, the last day of someone else’s life. There was no way to know but to know. And Anne would not be able to sleep until she knew.”
There aren’t many moments of shrieking terror in the novel. But Braffet certainly knows how to do dread. And her acute (but never heavy-handed) search for solutions to unsolvable puzzles renders Last Seen Leaving a satisfying thrill.