by A J Rivers
Going back to the footage from the camera, I rewind it a few seconds back and point to the screen as a flash of red and white moves across the very top and disappears into the parking lot.
“How can we be sure he always drives the same car?” Dean points out. “If he doesn’t want anyone knowing what he’s up to, would he actually bring his own car to the hospital? Or to a bombing?”
“Yes,” I nod without hesitation. “He chose a car that blends in with anything. As long as the plate isn’t visible, it could belong to anyone. So, he makes sure the plate isn’t seen. He parked so far out in that lot at the hospital; we barely caught sight of the car at all. And I haven’t seen it here. But the big thing that convinces me he doesn’t do that is that he wants to go unnoticed. When he’s not coming up with new and interesting ways to torture me, he presumably lives a normal life. It would seem suspicious to anyone who knows him if he was changing cars all the time. Staying in his own car is the most streamlined option.”
“Did you see that?” Sam asks.
“See what?”
He moves closer, leaning around me to point at the screen. “Right there. You can barely see it, but a white SUV with a red decal is parked right at the very edge of the lot, right there.”
I look closer and see the hint of red just beneath the branches of a tree behind the sign for the bus station.
“You’re right,” I tell him.
“Is there more footage?” Dean asks. “Another camera that shows that corner of the lot?”
“I have one more piece. It’s from the building across the side street. During the investigation, it was helpful because it showed how the explosion affected this part of the building and the direction of the blast.”
The last video only plays for a few seconds before we notice the red and white flash come around the corner. It’s not the whole thing, but enough to see its definitely Mary Preston’s car.
“There’s the car,” Sam points out.
“And there’s Mary,” I say as legs appear walking around to the back of the SUV. She steps to the side, and slightly more of her shows up on the screen. “She’s getting something out of her trunk.”
“Who’s that?” Dean asks.
The side of a figure approaches at a diagonal from the direction of the bus station.
“It’s a man,” I say. “It looks like he’s stopping to talk to Mary.”
My hands twitch with frustration, wanting to be able to reach into the image on the screen and move the camera so it will show more. As it is, I can only see that there is a man standing near Mary behind her car. He seems large enough to loom over her, but Mary doesn’t seem uncomfortable. Her body language is relaxed as she pulls her luggage out of her trunk. She makes a move toward the station, and the man shifts just enough for me to catch a glimpse of dark hair just touching the top of his shoulder. He disappears out of view, and Mary heads for the station.
I quickly close that footage and bring up the one from the baseball field again. The bottom half of a man walks into view, coming from the parking lot.
“Is that him?” Dean asks.
“The boots are the same,” I note. We keep watching. For a brief moment, he is fully in view as he walks onto the sidewalk heading down the main road. I quickly pause the feed. “There he is.”
“Where do you think he’s going?” Sam asks.
I shrug. “Any number of places. There’s a moving truck rental place next door. A convenience store. A bit down the road, there are neighborhoods.”
“And there’s no footage from any of those?”
“No. But maybe Eric can get some. A lot of these places use cloud-based cameras now, so the footage should still be accessible.”
I have no idea who the man is, but I want to find out. If nothing else, he talked to Mary before she went into the doomed building. I’d like to find out what they talked about and if he saw anything else.
Chapter Sixteen
“Tell me about your mother,” I ask Dean a little while later as I pull a slice of pizza out of the cardboard delivery box onto a plate.
We are waiting for Eric to get back to me about any footage that might be available from further down on the street. He didn’t seem terribly optimistic about the prospects when I asked him about it. It’s been several months now, and even if the footage was saved on the cloud, it’s possible the business owners deleted it or don’t pay for access to longer-term storage and retrieval. But he said he would try, and that’s as much as I can ask. Only now, it leaves us sitting around waiting, which hovers very close to the top of my list of least favorite things. I’m right on the edge, tense and sharply aware, just waiting for something to happen.
That’s not an unusual feeling here. After my father left, that was my predominant state of being for a long time. I constantly waited for something. I wasn’t even entirely sure what it was I was waiting for. At first, it was for him to show back up. Then it was just to get a phone call from him or a postcard, something to give me an indication that he was alive, and I would see him again. That turned into a simmering sense of anxiety and fear that came from wondering why he left, and if it wasn’t actually on his own volition. Maybe he was running from something, and whatever it was would show up here.
But all that eventually faded as the months turned into years. I learned how to make peace with the tension, to not let it rule my every waking moment. But now it’s back. The uncomfortable feeling of wondering and waiting and wanting to be ready but not knowing how is threatening to take over my mind.
I have to distract myself. There’s no telling how long the wait will be before Eric calls back or something changes, and the game starts up again. Ever since Dean first told me about his mother and we made the disturbing link to what I convinced myself was a recurring nightmare, I’ve wondered about his mother, and how deep that link actually is. He talked about my father, and now we know my mother was instrumental in the rescue of his mother, but all this is yet more confusing puzzle pieces I can’t quite fit. Yet more things my parents never told me about.
“I’ve already told you pretty much everything,” he says.
“What was her name?” I asked.
“Natalia,” he tells me.
“That’s pretty,” I say.
“I never liked it much,” he admits.
“Why not?”
“It sounds too young if that makes sense. I wanted her to sound more like a mother. To sound more nurturing and… I don’t know, more like other mothers. Maybe because most of the time she didn’t act very motherly. I thought maybe if she sounded more like a mother, it would help. Now that I’m an adult, that sounds ridiculous and selfish.”
“No, it doesn’t,” I reassure him. “I think all of us have things we come up with about our parents when we’re young and they don’t always make sense to other people. Why do you say she wasn’t very motherly? You seem to adore her.”
“I do,” Dean says. “Her death ripped me apart. I love my mother. But everything she went through when she was younger really messed her up. Growing up in Russia wasn’t easy. She came here with the hopes of having a better life and being able to help her family. But she, like far too many other women, got wrapped up with the wrong man, and he made her life a living hell. When she escaped, the only thing she took with her was her life. And she barely had that.”
“How long was that before you were born?” I ask.
“About two years,” he says. He gives me a knowing look over the slice of pizza he’s bringing to his lips. “He wasn’t my father.”
Savoring the indulgent combination of spicy pepperoni and sweet pineapple against the richness of a thick layer of cheese, I finish my first bite and swallow it as I nod.
“I figured as much. You said you didn’t know your father. I assumed your mother wouldn’t escape from a man only to go back to him long enough to have a baby,” I tell him.
I realize after I say it how judgmental it sounds, but he doesn’t acknowledge
it.
“What happened to your mother’s ex-husband?” Sam asks.
He’s already made it through a slice and is reaching for another. It doesn’t surprise me. I’ve seen the man eat pizza before and it’s always an impressive endeavor. He can lap me by a couple of slices and still be eating when I’m stuffed full. My working theory is he doesn’t even taste the first slice.
“He was arrested,” Dean tells him. “Thanks to you, Emma.”
I have another bite in my mouth, and I swallow it so quickly I nearly choke.
“Me?” I ask. “What did I have to do with anything? I wasn’t even born when my mother helped yours.”
“I know, but my mother once told me she was strong enough to get away from her husband because someone was there to help her and strong enough to stay away because that person stayed around. I can only imagine she was talking about your mother. But the one thing she didn’t immediately do was submit a police report and press charges. She didn’t even want to file for divorce. Not that she wanted to stay married to him, obviously. But the idea of getting the police and the government and everything else tangled up in it was completely overwhelming to her. But then she said her friend got pregnant.”
“My mother got pregnant with me,” I say.
Dean nods.
“Watching your mother go through pregnancy and seeing how happy your father was waiting for you showed Mom what being in a relationship is really supposed to be like. It made her have hope that maybe one day she’d find someone, and we could all have a family together. That’s when she had your mother help her file for divorce. She convinced Mom to ask for an emergency divorce without the necessity for her ex-husband to be in the same room at any point. She told the judge how he treated her, and he not only granted the emergency divorce but advised her to file criminal charges. She did and he ended up in prison with an eighteen-year sentence. And soon after, she met someone and ended up pregnant.”
“Was she in a relationship with him? Your father?” I ask. “I’m sorry. Is that too personal?”
“No,” he says. “It’s fine. I honestly don’t know if she thought she was in a relationship with him or not. It’s possible they just went on a date or two. But the few times I heard her talk about him, she always said he was so charming and made her feel beautiful. But then he was gone. Just like that. It really sent her spiraling. During a particularly difficult time when I was younger, she told me him leaving her was almost worse than the end of her relationship with her husband, because it was so sudden and unexpected. It left her feeling worthless and broken. It reminded her of how much her husband tore her down, and every time he told her no man would ever love her the way he did. It led her to drinking, and even when she wasn’t drinking, she had PTSD from the abuse. She’d go into these phases.”
His voice trails off, and I lean toward him slightly to encourage him to keep going.
“What kind of phases?” I ask.
“She wouldn’t want to leave the house. Sometimes she wouldn’t want to leave her bed. Sometimes she cried and shook for hours. Other times it was like she wasn’t there at all. Her eyes were open, but she didn’t react to anything or anyone. She just stared at the wall. I had to learn very young not only to take care of myself but of her, too.”
“I don’t understand why no one was there to help you. If my mother did help get Natalia away from her ex, why would she just abandon you?” I ask. “You said Murdock didn’t come to help you until after your mother died.”
“I don’t think she abandoned us. I think it was the other way around,” he tells me.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“I have some memories of being much younger. She would make me go to my room when people came over. It happened pretty regularly, a few times a month. It never seemed like they were just coming over to hang out or it was a party. They were there for a reason, but I was never allowed to meet them or see them. Things were always a little better after those visits. Mom was calmer and we had a little more money. When I was about six, she told me to go to my room, but it wasn’t like the other times. She’d just gotten off the phone, and it was like she was surprised. I listened at the door, and when the person got there, she greeted them, there was a little bit of a muffled conversation, then she shouted ‘no’. I heard a struggle and was scared. After a few seconds, I opened the door to go help her, but she had already slammed the door and was putting the chain lock on. That night, we started packing and moved. We didn’t have any more of those visitors.”
“And you didn’t see who the person was?”
“No. Things got a little bit better after your mother died, but I still didn’t see or hear about any of them. It wasn’t until those four days she disappeared that there was anyone actually there to help,” he says. “Then, about a year before her death, we moved into the apartment.”
“In the same complex where I was staying with my father,” I say.
“I had no idea,” he tells me.
I lean back against the couch to think through what he just told me.
“When your mother was gone for those four days, you said she left a note.”
“Right, she said she would be back.”
“So, you didn’t call the police,” I confirm.
Dean shakes his head and pries a piece of pepperoni off his slice of pizza.
“No.”
“I still can’t believe your mother disappeared, and you didn’t think it would be a good idea to let the police know,” Sam says.
“The police never helped my mother.”
“Not until they put her scumbag ex into jail,” Sam snaps.
“After he almost killed her, and she had to run. I grew up knowing if the police ever knew about Mom’s problems; the only thing they would do is take me from her. There was no way I was going to let that happen,” Dean retorts.
“I don’t think she disappeared,” I say. “It was planned. Strategic. She left you a note, that’s part of it but think about it. You didn’t call the police or let anyone know she was missing. But then Murdock showed up. You didn’t know him, but he was able to convince you your mother trusted him enough to watch out for you. Natalia didn’t just walk away. She went on a mission.”
Chapter Seventeen
Mariya
Thirty years ago…
When she was young, dreaming of the life that waited for her at the end of childhood, this was what she imagined. Everyone had their dreams for her. Their expectations and demands. From her parents it was love and aspiration. They wanted better for their little girl. They wanted more.
From others, it was arrogance. They weren’t dreaming for her. When they thought of her, she wasn’t a person, but a commodity. They thought only of what she could do for them and how it could benefit their own lives. They believed in their superiority in their entitlement to her. They wrapped it in a pretty bow, draped it in satin, and surrounded it with music, but the intention was still lurking underneath. They only wanted her for the body she was born with. They could mold her into their perfect vision. Train her from the time she was able to stand to become exactly what they wanted her to be.
People would come from everywhere to see her, they told her. They would adore her. But it was never about her. Her name was little more than the label on a product. No one sitting up in the velvet seats carrying on in applause truly cared about the blood pumping through her heart or the thoughts in her mind. They didn’t care about her eyes or her fingerprints. The only thing that kept her apart from others that mattered to them was the way the music formed itself in her bones and muscles and moved her across the well-worn wood.
It was a proud tradition. Those were some of the earliest words she ever knew. She was taught in the old ways. Ways honored so they wouldn’t be lost. When anyone in the world thought of ballet, they thought of Russia, she was told. That was something to be proud of.
She wanted to be proud. She wanted to feel that rush of excitement and devotion she saw in
the men and women who taught her. They had a passion she never had. It was what made the men leap so high it looked like they were flying. What made the women float like rose petals in their partners’ hands. They were born with that. It was in them from before their first breath. Those dancers inherited their passion through the generations, the same way she inherited the blond of her hair and the length of her legs.
But she did not inherit that passion. She didn’t love what she did. She wanted to. She wanted to be proud of the heritage that made her name known. She wanted more than anything to look out over the audience and find joy and fulfillment in their adulation. She wanted to lose herself under the lights, the stage, the rising curtain, the delicate precision, the joyous frenzy, the twirls, and tiptoes, and leaps, and lifts. The low curtsy to welcome cheers and applause washing over her.
It was her place to be a dream shared by all of them; a painting brought to life. She was a confection of softness and light when they looked at her. She tried to remember that. But she knew the blood in her shoes, the bruises from falls. She knew the tiny pinprick pains from her hair combed sharply back and pinned in place. The rigorous hours of practice. The tragedy of her companions, her friends, suffering from injuries that ruined their lives forever. They would never dance again. They were simply discarded.
It wasn’t for her. She did it for her parents for as long as she could. But it wasn’t what she wanted. There was so much more in the world, and she knew it. She could feel what else existed beyond the studio and stage. That’s what she dreamed of moonlight on her skin rather than stage lights. Bare feet rather than pointe shoes. The gaze of one man rather than a sea of eyes.
When she met Ian he showed her that type of life could exist for her. The possibility was there. All she had to do was chase after it. He brought her into his world and gave her what her parents truly wanted for her. And what she wanted for herself. A life that was better. A life that was hers.
