The Road She Left Behind

by Nolfi, Christine

  “Sweetie, you have been gone a long time. You think I tiptoe around your mother? If she throws too many complaints my way, I stand up for myself. She never pushes me too far.”

  Darcy sensed the truth in the statement. As one of the most conservative judges in northeast Ohio, the Honorable Rosalind Goodridge made countless attorneys tremble in her presence—and sentenced many of their clients to long prison terms. Yet Rosalind wasn’t getting any younger, and she did have Emerson to raise. After decades working in the mansion, Latrice was probably back to nanny duty.

  Despite her dismal mood, Darcy chuckled. “Don’t mention we’ve been in touch, okay?”

  “What does it matter how your mother reacts? Once you come home, it’ll take her no time at all to figure out who called you. Are you coming or not?”

  “I’m still in South Carolina, but I’m on my way to the next job, in New Jersey. An eleven-hour detour to northeast Ohio is not on the agenda.”

  “Tell the company in New Jersey to find someone else. I’m serious, child. Emerson is lonely. This last year has been hard on him.”

  “In what way?”

  “I can’t go into the details long-distance. The point is, he’s not a baby anymore.”

  Apprehension wicked the moisture from Darcy’s mouth. “You mean he’s started asking the big questions?” she guessed.

  “It’s natural for a child to be curious about his background. Oh, your mother does her best to avoid the conversations about his mama’s death and why he doesn’t have a daddy. It cuts me to the quick, watching how she disappoints him with her lawyer’s dodges.” Distress layered the remark, and Latrice paused to take a few rapid breaths. “He’s been wondering why you never come around.”

  Darcy’s heart thumped out of rhythm. “He asks about me?” She’d assumed she never crossed his mind.

  A foolish assumption. She was his aunt.

  “Your mother stonewalls him whenever he mentions you.”

  Recalling her mother’s sharp tongue, she asked, “Do they argue?”

  “I’d call their interactions more like swordplay than all-out war. Nothing like the way you and your mother used to firebomb each other with insults. Heavens, I don’t miss those days. Your nephew is proper. He’s too much of a little man to stoop to anger. Emerson pelts her with so many questions, he’s sucking out what little gray matter Rosalind has left in her head.”

  “Doubtful. She can hold her own against an eight-year-old. I’ll bet half the lawyers in Geauga County take antianxiety meds before appearing in her court.”

  “They don’t know how to push her buttons like her grandson does. That boy latches on to a line of questioning like a terrier on to a bone.”

  “Well, he is eight. Old enough to expect real answers.”

  “Not getting any would explain his bad behavior.” Latrice expelled a weary breath. “Emerson takes off on his own. He just disappears. It began last year—he’d come home from school but then walk right off the estate.”

  As Latrice went into detail about Emerson’s habits, worry stole through Darcy.

  How could an eight-year-old walk off a fifteen-acre estate without detection?

  A landscape crew worked the grounds, and a cleaning service came in weekly to keep up the mansion. From the once-yearly phone calls, she knew that Latrice now spent most of her time in the kitchen. It was hard to imagine a boy slipping past so many adults.

  A stronger emotion edged past the worry. “Doesn’t anyone watch him?” She steered the car onto East Bay Street.

  “We’ve been through a dozen babysitters, and I usually stay into the evening. Makes no difference. Some nights, Emerson doesn’t come back until bedtime. There’s a hundred acres of Metro Park forest behind your mother’s place,” Latrice said, referring to the system of lush nature preserves surrounding the city of Cleveland, including the posh Chagrin Valley. “I’ll wager he’s roamed most of the forest by now. And there’s Nella’s spread next door.” She fell silent for an ominous beat. “That was before things got bad.”

  “You’re scaring me.”

  “If a little fear makes you drive faster, then good.”

  Latrice paused, and Darcy’s world shifted precariously. The traffic blurred. The sun felt too bright, like a spotlight trained on Darcy’s transgressions.

  Is Emerson in danger? How much of his troubling behavior is my responsibility?

  She’d walked out of his life when he was just a baby. She’d left him to spend his childhood inside a cold, sterile home. Just like she had.

  She was still assessing whether she was to blame when Latrice spoke again.

  “I’m sure the anniversary has Emerson upset too,” she confided. “Last night, he disappeared after dinner.”

  “But today is the anniversary,” Darcy cut in. “Not yesterday.”

  “Yes, and your nephew has been feeling blue for days now. I assumed he was in his bedroom, reading. He hasn’t come back.”

  “Call the police!”

  “They’re searching the forest now. One of the officers has a scent dog. Last I checked, they were walking the Chagrin River. Emerson likes to fish—he might be near the water. You should be here when the police find him. He needs you. Aside from Rosalind, you’re the only family he’s got.”

  Protective feelings for the boy collided with a thousand reservations. “He also has you.”

  “Yes, he does. Your mother wears through my patience on a regular basis, but that boy is special. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for him. But I can’t replace the mama he lost. You can.”

  Darcy wasn’t sure how to respond. The possibility of becoming part of her nephew’s life spun unexpected joy through her.

  Unfortunately, there was a problem in the form of an unforgiving judge. She couldn’t become part of Emerson’s life with her mother standing in the way.

  She appraised the traffic rising toward the Ravenel Bridge and the beach communities to the north. The answer was depressingly obvious. And clear as the blue sky above Charleston.

  “Promise you’ll text an update the minute Emerson is found,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m not coming back.”

  She hung up on a very upset Latrice. Within seconds, her smartphone rang again.

  Groaning, she punched her Bluetooth and put Samson on speaker.

  How long had it been, two hours since she’d last seen him? The close monitoring dredged up memories of high school and Principal Helmsley stalking her whenever she cut trigonometry class.

  Dragging her emotions from the cellar, she greeted her young friend with a hearty dose of false cheer.

  He mimicked her upbeat tone. “How’s the drive going? You must be halfway to Charlotte by now.” Barring a reply, he rushed on. “I shouldn’t have laid on the guilt this morning. I ruined your going-away party.”

  “Relax. You didn’t ruin anything.”

  “I swear I didn’t realize you’d fall apart when I asked to come with you.” Faltering, he filled the air with silence for a moment. “After you got off the boat and went out to the parking lot, you were a mess. Pitiful, really. If someone had told me, ‘Darcy Goodridge acts like the ice queen, but she’s the most pathetic soul you’ll ever meet,’ I would not have believed it. Now I feel like Grade A shit.”

  “Don’t swear.” She pressed a tissue to her running nose. “Respectable people don’t use foul language.”

  “You sure are something,” he said, chuckling. “Shouldn’t you get a hold on your own behavior before you start fussing over mine? I’m not the one who was bawling like a baby in the parking lot.”

  “You saw me crying in the parking lot?” She’d marooned him on the gangplank after jumping ship.

  “Everyone saw, Darcy.”

  “The whole staff?” Talk about a violation of the first order. Like discovering she wore nothing but her faded, sad-day panties while choreographing a dignified exit.

  “We should’ve made popcorn. The redhead you talked to on the Irma? She squashed her f
ace so tight to Miz Irma’s picture window, I thought she’d suffocate. Big Bud tried to shoo everyone back to give you some privacy. Irma did too—she said it was rude for all of us to stare, even if a cool cucumber like Darcy Goodridge was drowning the parking lot in ugly tears. No one listened to her, though. With all the pushing and shoving, Irma nearly went down in the stampede. Bud got to her in time.”

  “Damn it.”

  “Don’t swear.” Samson released a breath layered with sympathy. “You did put on a show. Out there blubbering in the dirt, scrabbling around for the car keys you’d dropped. We were casting votes on who ought to perform the rescue mission when you finally hurled yourself into your car.”

  Humiliated, she prayed she’d misheard. “I was blubbering in the dirt?” She did recall dropping her keys. Repeatedly.

  “Doesn’t matter. You’re on your way now. Off on a new adventure with nothing but good times ahead. How’s the traffic? Google Maps says there’s an accident near Columbia. I hope you’re not stuck behind a row of fender benders.”

  “There are no accidents to report.” Still embarrassed, she veered toward the Coleman exit with the awareness that the tremor in her hands was increasing. Continuing the journey before she pulled herself together wasn’t prudent. “It took longer to finish up at the apartment than expected. I found stuff crammed in the back of the foyer closet.”

  “A careful woman like you doesn’t usually forget anything. Good thing you checked twice.”

  “I walked back through the whole apartment. Even rechecked the shelves in the kitchen cupboards.”

  “Why is your voice shaky?”

  “Good question.” She decided to answer truthfully in yet another impetuous move. It was easier to confide in Samson now, with the endless highway ahead and her stay in Charleston over. “I got an unexpected call from an old friend. Well, not a friend exactly. More like a family member forced to wear a stupid gray uniform.”

  “You’ve got family in the military? I thought you were an orphan like me.”

  “I am, in all the ways that count.” The disclosure lanced her with distress. “Latrice is a housekeeper. She’s got a spicy side to her personality. Probably a defense mechanism to deal with her frosty employer. I’ve known her forever.”

  “She’s here in South Carolina? How come you’ve never made introductions? I’d like to meet her.”

  “Latrice doesn’t live here. She’s in Ohio. She works for my mother.”

  “Slow down. You’ve got a mother too?”

  The revelation seemed too much for Samson. He clucked into the conversational void, like he needed to reboot his brain.

  Darcy was about to end the call when his brain powered back up.

  “Why are you just telling me this now? Friends don’t keep secrets, at least not the big kind. How many times did you invite me over to raid your fridge or watch Netflix? I know the walls of your apartment like the back of my hand. You don’t have one measly photo of kin.”

  A public shaming wasn’t necessary. Her late sister deserved a photo in any digs she occupied. As did her father, even though they’d never been close. Latrice and Emerson did too. It occurred to her that she’d never owned a photo of Emerson—a child now missing and presumably roaming the forest.

  Keeping a photo of her mother was out of the question. Chewing glass was preferable to hanging a picture of the unforgiving judge anywhere Darcy might live.

  “I move around a lot,” she reminded him. “Do you expect me to haul family portraits from one city to the next? There isn’t room in my luggage.”

  “What about your wallet?”

  “What about it?”

  “Don’t you have photos of Latrice and your mama? You know, smashed in between the credit cards?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It does if you want to get inside the pearly gates when you’re called to meet your Maker.” More clucking. She sensed his disapproval thickening like cement curing around her abundant regrets and mistakes. Confirming her suspicions, he added, “You’re taking the wind right out of my sails. Maybe it isn’t a big sin, Darcy, not keeping photos of your kin—not like stealing or doing murder. But you ought to show more respect.”

  Highlighting her faults managed to firm up her defenses. A situation unreliable at best. Continue chatting, and she knew she’d spout more ugly tears.

  “Can we debate the finer points of family respect later?” she asked. “I promise to call you once I’m in New Jersey. I won’t forget.”

  “Oh, sure. You’re going to fill in the details now that you’ve left Charleston. According to Google, you’re stuck in a bumper-to-bumper mess outside Columbia. Why not tell me about your family now?”

  The traffic opened up. She took a side street toward the beach. Beyond the rasping fronds of the palm trees, the ribbon of ocean shimmered a deep blue.

  “Stop worrying about accidents. While you’re at it, log off Google.” Zooming into a parking lot, she brought the car to a jerky halt. “Since I’m ridiculously off schedule, I’m going to take a walk. The conversation with Latrice didn’t go well. Actually, it went badly. I need to blow off steam.”

  “You’re at Isle of Palms?” Samson knew the beach was her favorite place to decompress. “You haven’t left Charleston?”

  The hope in his voice made her cringe. “I’m still here.” She yanked the key from the ignition. “But only for an hour.”

  Tugging off her sandals, Darcy wove through the patchwork of colorful towels and lounging tourists. Seagulls screeched overhead. Heading into the surf, she walked north, away from the crowds. Walking fast, as if to outpace thoughts of Samson. She needed to focus on the more pressing concerns. With quick strides, she splashed through the surf.

  Once her legs grew weary and she escaped the smell of suntan lotion, Darcy plunked down on an empty patch of sand to consider the upsetting facts Latrice had shared.

  According to Latrice, Emerson had begun running away last year, near the end of the school year. He only returned home when hunger drove him back to the estate. Each time he reappeared, he had refused to provide an explanation. He would simply unpack his camping gear and trudge to his room on the mansion’s second floor.

  Yesterday was the first time he’d stayed out all night.

  The reasons why he preferred spending hours alone in the forest were obvious. There wasn’t a father listed on Emerson’s birth certificate. He lived beneath the critical eye of his strong-willed grandmother, a busy county judge. The demands of the court meant Rosalind was surely absent too often. The deaths years ago of Darcy’s father and her sister, Elizabeth—the mother Emerson had never known—also factored in.

  During her once-yearly conversations with Latrice, the subject of Emerson rarely came up. The housekeeper never offered many details. A kindness, really. Judge Rosalind Goodridge had lost both of her daughters, one due to tragedy and the other due to her understandable rage. She didn’t want her surviving daughter anywhere near the grandson she cherished.

  Rosalind had made her opinion clear during their last painful quarrel. Darcy wasn’t welcome in her nephew’s life. The less she knew about Emerson, the better.

  Digging her toes into the sand, she wondered if her nephew resembled the mother he’d lost. Had he inherited Elizabeth’s freckles or her long, oval face? Did he play a musical instrument, or have a knack for art?

  During her own childhood, Darcy spent idyllic days in the large swath of forest encircling her parents’ estate with Michael Varano, her closest childhood friend. Together they’d climbed the steep banks of the Chagrin River in search of salamanders. Perched high in the massive, hundred-year-old oak behind the Varanos’ acreage next door, they surveyed the Chagrin’s churning waters, the fierce struggle between the stubborn boulders and the ever-moving river, the race between immovable objects and sharp currents.

  Much as Elizabeth liked shadowing her older sister, she rarely agreed to explore the forest whenever Michael appeared at the front doo
r. Happier indoors, Elizabeth dutifully practiced the piano at Rosalind’s urging. On Saturdays she suffered through private lessons with a grim-faced tutor, a woman with dull gray hair and a fixed expression of faint impatience. Darcy, in faded cut-offs, would pad across the living room toward the outdoors.

  Will the police find Elizabeth’s son quickly?

  Unsure, Darcy pressed her toes deeper into the damp sand. Her refusal to aid in the search left her sick-hearted, ashamed.

  She hated disappointing Latrice.

  On a sigh, Darcy recalled the last time she’d seen Emerson. A soft-fleshed newborn with a bad case of colic. The months after his birth had been complicated, but Darcy never complained. She shared responsibility for the newborn’s care with her sister, Latrice, and her floundering parents. The Honorable Rosalind Goodridge and Dr. Jack Goodridge were embarrassed by their grandson’s illegitimacy. The complication in their unblemished lives resulted in more arguments than Darcy cared to remember.

  Having a newborn installed in the mansion seemed incongruous, like setting a tornado loose in a once-serene world. Or perhaps Emerson’s furious bawling convinced Darcy the mansion was suffering a strange invasion. In her more self-centered moments, she had viewed Emerson as an imposition standing in the way of her own happiness.

  Standing in the way of the unexpected and consuming romance she had sparked with Michael during her last spring in college. Like so many aspects of the life she’d once led, Darcy rarely contemplated the love affair that had ended on the night Elizabeth and her father died.

  The emotions Darcy once harbored were still a source of shame. Emerson had been a defenseless baby; he was now a defenseless child. A boy wandering the backwoods of Geauga County unprotected.

  He was out there with a backpack, a toothbrush, and a lightweight polyester tent. Emerson used his smartphone’s GPS to travel the dense forest. Latrice assumed he’d learned basic survival skills in his Cub Scout troop—before he’d dropped out because the other boys picked on him. Emerson never ran off without bringing a flashlight and extra batteries. He never forgot to pack dental floss.