Live to Tell

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Anyway, Sadie could use some friends, too, after a summer hanging around in the house with just miserable mom for company.

  She looks around. A smattering of stay-at-home moms lounge in the adjacent grassy shade. There’s a cliquish air about them; Lauren can’t imagine going over and introducing herself.

  Another cluster of young, chatting mothers stand waist-deep in the water, keeping watchful eyes on babies napping in shady strollers and toddlers and preschoolers splashing in the shallow stairwell.

  If Sadie were here, Lauren might attempt to mingle. But Lucy, bored with the pool scene, took her little sister over to the playground—after asking if Lauren would pay her for “babysitting.”

  “Mom?”

  She looks up to see Ryan, dripping wet, standing over her. He’s growing up; he’s starting to look more and more like his father, she thinks, with a twinge of both affection and pain.

  “Where’s your towel?” she asks him automatically.

  “Dunno. Can I have money for the snack bar?”

  “Please?”

  He flashes a brief, rare grin. “Please?”

  “There are a couple of dollars in the pocket of my bag on the chair over there.” She points to the spot she staked out earlier, when it was beneath the shade of a tree. Now it’s in full sun. Time to move.

  “Can I have ten?”

  “Dollars?”

  “Please.”

  “You don’t need ten dollars for a bag of chips or an ice cream, Ry.”

  “I’m getting a burger and fries.”

  “But you ate lunch an hour ago.”

  Ryan shrugs. “I’m hungry again.”

  He’s been ravenous day and night since he got back from camp. All that fresh air, or maybe all the growing he did in the eight weeks he was gone. She’d sent away a little boy and gotten back a man. He’s going to need his father now more than ever.

  “Mom…money?”

  “My wallet is locked in the glove compartment,” she tells Ryan. “The car keys are in my bag. Go get the keys, get the money, put the wallet back in the glove compartment, and make sure no one sees you do that.”

  He rolls his eyes.

  “I’m serious, Ry.”

  “Where are we, Mom, the South Bronx? Do you really think I’m going to get mugged here?”

  “You never know. Bad things happen everywhere. And make sure you lock the car again. Okay?”

  He’s already heading toward her bag on the chair.

  “Ry! You need to reapply your sunscreen.”

  “After I eat.”

  “Make sure you lock the car!”

  “I heard you! Geez! I said okay!”

  Watching her son take her keys and stalk off toward the parking lot, Lauren makes vigorous circles in the water with her bare foot.

  Damn Nick. He left for the Vineyard the day after the kids got home, seeing them only briefly in between. He did send them a few text messages after he left—a form of communication both Ryan and Lucy relish. Lauren isn’t big on thumb typing, but Nick started getting into it right around the time he began his affair. Lauren suspects that it was Beth, and not his teenage kids, who prompted him to jump on the technology bandwagon.

  Poor Ryan. He’s been hoping his father will have time to take him on an overnight fishing trip before the summer’s over—a longtime summer father-son tradition. But Lauren doubts that’s going to happen. Next weekend is hers, and she’s planning to take all three kids to Rye Playland, another summer tradition.

  All too soon after that, it will be Labor Day; back to schedules and routines. Lauren might actually be looking forward to that. She isn’t sure.

  Why don’t I ever know what I want anymore?

  “Here.”

  She looks up to see Ryan standing over her again, holding out her keys. His fingernails are, she notices, bitten down to stubs.

  “Did you lock the car?”

  “You only told me to five times.”

  “So did you?”

  “Yes! Okay? Yes!”

  “Don’t speak to me in that tone. Did you find a ten?”

  “I found a twenty.”

  “You don’t need—”

  “I know, but you didn’t have a ten.”

  “Bring me the change, okay?”

  “Okay!” he says, as if he thinks she’s told him that five times, too. He looks over toward the snack bar. His friends are already at a picnic table, eating.

  “Mom—your keys.”

  “Put them back in my bag, Ry.”

  He huffs over, drops them in. She opens her mouth to tell him to push them down inside so they won’t fall out, but he’s already dashing toward the snack bar.

  The camp didn’t just send her back a man, she notes, climbing out of the pool; they sent her back a mercurial, derisive man, very much like…

  No. That’s not fair.

  Just because Ryan looks like Nick—that doesn’t mean he’s picked up on the way Nick treats her these days and is following suit. It’s just his age.

  Regardless of his new moodiness, Lauren reminds herself, sitting on her chair and toweling off, Ryan isn’t Nick.

  Her gaze falls on a nearby mom who is kneeling on a blanket, doling out Goldfish crackers and juice boxes to several look-alike children.

  Watching her, sensing her contentment, Lauren feels as though she knows her—knows her life, anyway.

  You’re married, and your husband works in the city, she guesses. You’re living happily ever after here in suburbia—or at least you think you are.

  I was you. I had your life. I took it for granted, just the way you are.

  There’s still a tiny part of her that would give anything to have those days back again, blinders and all.

  There’s another part of her, though, that would never go back, not even if she could have known what was coming. No, especially not knowing what was coming.

  Two summers ago, after her father-in-law died of cancer, she and Nick had discussed that very topic in the car on the way home from the funeral in Baltimore.

  Would you rather die a slow death and have the chance to say good-bye, or would you prefer to die in an accident and never know what hit you?

  Nick took the latter option. She couldn’t understand it. Not back then.

  “One minute you’re here, the next you’re not?” she shuddered. “I’d rather know what was coming, even if it was horrible, so that I could prepare myself and the kids.”

  “You mean if you were the one who was going to die, or if I were?”

  “If I were. Or if you were. Either way, I’d rather know.”

  “Not me. Either way, I think it’s better not to know,” Nick told her. “That way, you get to go about your daily life, same as always, until the very last second.”

  Oh, the irony.

  Nick, after all, was the one who got to know—probably a mere few months after that conversation—that their marriage was doomed.

  Lauren was the one who got to go about her daily life, same as always, until the very last second.

  She grasped, the moment she found out about Beth, that her own life as she knew it was over. Just like that. Just like being hit by a truck.

  Yes, she forced Nick through the motions—counseling, talking, dating, sex—but she really had no illusions about saving their marriage. Maybe she was trying to make it harder on him.

  Or maybe she was just trying to do it her way, after all. Trying to buy time, to prepare to say good-bye.

  Across the grass, the young mom packs away the extra Goldfish crackers and juice boxes, probably looking ahead to more of the same tomorrow. Probably thinking about heading home, and getting the kids cleaned up, and making dinner in time for her husband to get off the train from the city.

  Probably never dreaming that one night, he might get off that train with another woman and want to kiss her.

  Lauren wishes she’d never pressed Nick for the gritty details of his relationship with Beth. At the time, she’d
thought hearing them would make it easier to hate him—and thus, easier to let go.

  She was probably right about both of those things, but now she carries the added burden of all those memories that aren’t even her own. Every time she glimpses Beth from afar, she imagines her in Nick’s arms during one of their countless intimate moments stolen while Lauren was shuttling the kids to tournaments or away with her sister on a spa weekend Nick gave her for Mother’s Day.

  “You need a break,” he’d told Lauren on that sunny May day over a year ago. “Go to Red Door with Alyssa. The kids and I will hold down the fort here.”

  Bastard.

  And now he’s off on a permanent vacation while she holds down the fort forever.

  Lauren forces herself to lean back in her chair, tilt her face to the sun, and close her eyes.

  In a perfect world, Nick would get what’s coming to him.

  But the world is far from perfect, and he’s most likely lounging on an Atlantic beach somewhere at this very moment, without a care in the world.

  “Next!”

  Byron Gregson steps forward, glad there’s no one in line behind him. The fewer witnesses, the better.

  “Hi. I’m looking for my daughter’s toy. She dropped it here in the station when we were here a few weeks ago—I can tell you the exact day.”

  “Can you now.” The woman behind the counter doesn’t seem particularly impressed. “All I need to know is the month.”

  “July. It was a pink—”

  “Toy. Right. July. Be right back.”

  Byron watches her step away. So far, so good.

  For three weeks, he’s been waiting for this opportunity. Three weeks spent in a hellhole prison cell for mugging a tourist over by Penn Station, stealing the guy’s wallet.

  Even now, despite everything else that’s happened to him—despite everything else he’s done—he’s incredulous that he, Byron Gregson, is a common street thief.

  The other stuff—it kind of goes with the territory when you work in this field.

  But pickpocketing?

  Desperate to get out of town, he had few options—and all of them demanded cash. He didn’t dare use his ATM card or a credit card—he couldn’t risk a trail.

  So he did what he had to do: ran up behind some old guy and grabbed the wallet he’d foolishly tucked into the back pocket of his baggy Wranglers.

  Never in a million years would he have imagined that the guy’s wife—a puffy, florid-faced woman in a track suit—would fight back, grabbing on to him and screaming bloody murder.

  He wrenched himself from her clutches and shoved her. Hard. Again, he had to. All that commotion—it was the last thing he needed.

  Naturally, a couple of cops spotted him and gave chase.

  All those blocks in the hot Manhattan sun, knowing he wasn’t going to make it, knowing he needed to come up with a perfect, brilliant plan…

  And I did.

  Naturally, he couldn’t make bail. As he told the court-appointed lawyer, if he’d had access to money, he wouldn’t have robbed the poor schmuck in the first place.

  “How does someone like you wind up robbing innocent people on the street?”

  “Hard times,” he said with a shrug.

  The lawyer shrugged, too. Plenty of people were out of work. The papers were full of dire headlines about former middle-class people who were now homeless, white-collar executives working in factories, even a former executive turned bank robber. A reporter-turned-thief? No big deal, in the grand scheme of things.

  He’d done the crime; he’d done the time—gladly. Far preferable to the potential sentencing for extortion.

  Now it’s time to pick up where he left off.

  “Here we go.” The clerk is back, plunking a big plastic tub on the counter between them. It’s marked “July: Misc.” “Have at it.”

  Peering in, his heart pounding in anticipation, Byron sees that it’s about half-full.

  He pokes around, trying to act as casual as any dad might if his daughter lost a regular old toy.

  But he doesn’t have a daughter—and this wasn’t a regular toy—and, Jesus, where is it?

  “It was pink,” he tells the woman, as panic rapidly begins to set in.

  How can it not be here?

  “Maybe you lost it somewhere else.”

  “No, I… I know it was here, and I know someone turned it into the lost and found, because… I had a friend come down and check, right after we lost it, and she saw it here.”

  “Why didn’t she pick it up for you?”

  “I… wanted to do it myself.” That makes no sense, of course. But he can barely think straight.

  Could someone have seen what he’d done that day?

  No. Absolutely no way.

  He’d been careful.

  “Maybe someone else took it by mistake?” the woman suggests. “That could happen.”

  His head snaps up. “You just hand things out to anyone who wants them?”

  “No, we don’t just hand them out,” she retorts, suddenly a lot less friendly. “We take down the contact information for every single person who comes in here—and they all have to specifically identify whatever it is that they lost.”

  “I’m sorry.” He shifts gears, and it takes every ounce of self-control for him to muster a calm smile. “I don’t mean to get all worked up, but my daughter will freak out if I come home empty-handed because she thinks Mrs. Slappydoodle is here.”

  Mrs. Slappydoodle? Give me a break.

  But the woman is smiling, softening.

  “You know how kids are,” he adds for good measure.

  “I sure do.”

  “Do you have yourself?”

  “Four. And grandkids.”

  “What! How can you possibly have grandkids at your age?”

  She all but pats her hair.

  “My baby girl is thinking she’s going to be tucked in tonight with Mrs. Snapdoodle.”

  Snapdoodle?

  Was that it?

  Snappydoodle? Slappydoodle?

  Slappydoodle. Right.

  Oops.

  “You know…” The lost and found woman looks thoughtful. “I do remember a dad who came in here one night awhile back, looking for some toy his daughter had lost in the station—just like you. He was in a real hurry, talking about his ex-wife…anyway, I could tell he had no clue what he was even looking for, other than that it was a pink stuffed toy.”

  “Really.”

  “Now, that doesn’t mean—”

  “Did he take a pink stuffed toy with him?” he cuts in anxiously.

  She nods, and her gaze flicks past his shoulder. A quick sidewise glance tells him someone else is waiting to be helped. Fine. Byron will make this quick, and be on his way…to God knows where. At this point, does it really matter? He’d travel across the world to get his hands on that file again: his ticket to financial freedom. But with any luck, he’ll just be a subway ride away from whoever snatched his file out from under him.

  No unsuspecting stranger—or kid—would ever stumble across the memory stick concealed in the stuffing. No way. The file is still safe—for the time being.

  “Listen, if you can just check the records and give me the contact information, I’d really appreciate it,” he tells his friend behind the counter.

  “That, I can’t do.”

  His heart sinks. “Please?” He offers her the charming smile that has wheedled plenty of forbidden information from reluctant sources over the years.

  “Sorry,” she says firmly, “not allowed to hand out information like that.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “I’m dead serious.” And she looks it now.

  “All I really need is his name.”

  “No.”

  “Come on. Please.” Gone is the pretense of nonchalance. He’s begging, and she knows it, and she couldn’t care less, shaking her head.

  “Check back with us,” she advises. “If that other dad got the wrong
toy, you can be sure his ex-wife and his daughter are going to let him know about it.” She gives a maddening chuckle. “He’ll be back.”

  “But he hasn’t brought it back yet, and it’s been weeks, you said.”

  She shrugs.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “Dead serious,” she repeats.

  Forgetting the seasoned reporter charm, he snaps, “Since you refuse to give me his name, the least you—”

  “I refuse to because I can’t.”

  “Well, the least you can do is call him for me and ask him if he has my daughter’s toy.”

  Her eyes have hardened. “No,” she says simply.

  “You can’t? Or you won’t?”

  She shrugs.

  This is ridiculous. Should he ask for a supervisor?

  No. If he learned anything in all those years as an investigative journalist, it’s to know when to persist and when to quit—for the time being, anyway.

  “Now if you’ll please just…” She tilts her head, indicating for him to step aside.

  He spins on his heel, fists clenched at his side in fury, nearly crashing into the person behind him, who stands holding an open newspaper.

  “Sorry,” he mutters as he brushes past, thoughts already careening ahead toward his next move.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Okay, Daddy, we’ll see you then… I love you, too… Here’s Ry.”

  Watching Lucy hand the receiver over to her brother, Lauren notes that for all the growing up her oldest daughter did over the summer, she hasn’t reverted to calling Nick “Dad.”

  It’s been years since she started fifth grade and informed her parents that she would no longer be referring to them as “Daddy” and “Mommy.” She went back to “Daddy” last spring, when Nick left.

  Lauren isn’t quite sure what to make of it, and she hasn’t commented on it.

  “’S’up, Dad?” Ryan heads out of the kitchen with the phone.

  That Nick actually called the house—instead of texting the kids’ cells—was somewhat surprising. Lucy jumped on the phone when she recognized his number on the caller ID, and Ryan hovered beside her waiting for his turn.

  “Make sure you let Sadie talk to Dad before you hang up,” Lauren calls after Ryan.