Nolan reached out and dug his fingers into the dog’s fur, kneading the sweet spot just behind his shoulder, pleased when Fred groaned in pleasure. Then he leaned back and closed his eyes, resting the beer on his thigh. The Saab that had blown past this afternoon had been the right color green and sported the ding in the driver’s-side door that she’d put in it at a gas station when she’d thrown open the door into a concrete post. The driver had Kate’s brown curls. He couldn’t see her face, but it was her. He’d been astonished at how he’d felt when he realized it—his whole body reacted as if he’d been using the jackhammer, and he was left juddering with a low and uncomfortable leftover buzz.
That Saab was the car that had driven Robin to most of his appointments. Robin had puked in the backseat more than once. Nolan had a vivid memory of switching on the radio, not caring what station was on, just wanting something to distract him while he mopped out the vomit and cleaned the leather seats. A Coldplay song had been on, definitely not one of his favorite things in the world, and now when that song played in his vicinity as he was grocery shopping or waited for an oil change, he’d feel his gag reflex jump as he swallowed back bile.
Nolan would have guessed she’d have sold the Saab by now. Put it out to pasture. Not that she’d ever mentioned the car in an e-mail one way or the other. That wasn’t part of what they wrote about. They e-mailed about Robin. Period. Not what car she might or might not have. It wasn’t like she didn’t have the money for a new one—he’d made sure she did. He’d left her everything, left her every cent they had in savings. He hadn’t taken a penny.
The car. Jesus. When Robin was five, seven years ago now, she’d complained so much about their station wagon that he’d bought her the convertible. It was sporty. Small. “Completely unreasonable. I’m trying to be more down-to-earth,” she said, which was exactly why he’d gotten it for her. She deserved unreasonable. And it could carry a car seat, so it made sense. The whole family, all three of them, could fit inside, and when she drove it, with him in the passenger seat and Robin tucked behind them, Nolan knew his whole life was inside those metal walls.
If she’d noticed him today, she wouldn’t have known it was him. Good god, he’d been a lawyer. Suits. Expensive haircuts. Kate would never think to recognize her ex-lawyer ex-convict ex-husband in a group of men wearing orange doing maintenance on the roadway.
Nolan killed the beer. He stepped over Fred Weasley and limped to the kitchen, cursing the foot he’d dropped a shovel on earlier in the day, and got another beer. Two was just right lately. Another thing he’d never had to think about before: drinking alone. When you drink with someone, you can drink a little faster, a little more sloppily. You can always blame the other person, even if it’s only in your mind, for finishing the bottle of wine, for making you open the next one.
When you lived alone, there was no one else making fallen soldiers. The empty bottles were all his.
Fine, it helped him keep it under control. Because, god knew, there was something so attractive about the idea of giving in. Did anyone ever set out to become an alcoholic? Plan it? When Nolan was twenty, he’d set out to become a smoker, which he’d accomplished with astonishing ease. He was a pack-a-day addict by the time he was twenty-one, at which point he couldn’t afford it anymore and made himself quit. That hadn’t been easy, either. Fucking brutal, actually. This was his last beer of the night, then.
Because he knew he had to, he finally dragged his laptop over and popped open the cover. It was a beater, the only one he could afford at the used-computer store on Telegraph. But it connected to the Internet, which was all he needed it for.
It dinged as it received e-mail. The notes populated into the box. An e-mail from Kate landed, the most important kind of e-mail. She’d been the one to initiate this kind of communication after he’d gotten out. Nolan had been astonished but so grateful. Not since that last moment in the courthouse had he had any kind of contact with her at all.
She’d laid down those first terse rules: only memories of Robin. He could feel the anger vibrating in the air between their computers. Only memories. Nothing more.
It was a fine rule. Her rage was justifiable in a way nothing else in the world was. He didn’t deserve more. He didn’t deserve the e-mails at all. So he was just grateful.
Remember when Robin was five? And how he loved the hydrangeas next to the outdoor tub so much he’d almost drown them by throwing water at them? There was never a dry towel left after all his baths. An hour after he got out of the indoor tub, he’d want back in, and we’d let him, thinking that when he was sixteen he’d be a normal stinky, dirty teenaged boy, thinking that we’d look back at his clean phase and laugh. We thought there would be time.
Kate
He read it twice, and a third time, wishing he could hear her voice reading it to him. He wrote back simply, “I remember.” There really wasn’t anything else he could say.
And then he found the e-mail he dreaded, lying in wait among the spam and solicitations. There was always at least one.
Please help. She’s dying, and she’s hurting. I’m too scared to do anything, and I’m too scared not to. Tell me what to do.
It was signed “Anonymous,” but the sender hadn’t changed the autofill signature, so he could see that it came from Jaime Cruz. A common enough name. Thank god. If it had been uncommon, he would have googled it to see if he could find out the situation, find some press on it.
Not that Nolan would help. Jesus, he wanted to, but every time he hit reply and moved his fingers to hover over the keyboard, he started sweating and shaking and felt like he was going to throw up.
He moved it into the “Saved” file. With the others.
That was the thing about the Internet, he decided as he brushed his teeth while leaning over the tiny enamel sink, thinking again about Jaime Cruz. Things stuck now, things that in the past would have hopefully just gone away, slunk off into the night to be forgotten. He wasn’t forgotten. People could find him. Maybe he should have changed his e-mail address, since it was listed on a million sites from before, but it was the only thing he’d been stubborn about keeping. And it had worked—it had been where Kate had reached him.
So he kept the e-mail address. A tiny punishment, but every one counted.
Once he was back on the couch, he did just one more thing before he closed the laptop for the night. Google Maps came up, and he typed in the address on Ronada Avenue. He switched to street view. For twenty, maybe thirty seconds he let his eyes rest on the house he still thought of as his sometimes, before he remembered he’d been removed from the deed. The front door, almost but not quite hidden by the deep garden, was antique solid-core mahogany, intricately carved. He’d found it at the overpriced salvage yard in the industrial west end of Berkeley, and Kate—only ever frugal on accident—had been shocked at the price.
“It’s just a door. It has to be able to stand up to a knock. Why on earth would we pay that for a door? Let’s take a trip or something instead.”
But for once, he hadn’t justified it. Kate had done the bulk of the interior design at their house, even though he was the one who maintained it, picking up behind her as she spun through the rooms as if she were the wind. He’d balked only once, when she wanted to paint the ceilings in the rooms different colors. Reds, oranges, yellows . . . It was one thing when they were on the walls—a green ceiling was where he drew the line. But everything else she could have. She could choose.
The door, though, was for him. It made the house sturdy. It stood as protection. Fortification. Not from anything, not really. Just sound. Safe. They were the only people on their street, probably in all of the East Bay, who didn’t have an iron security door. Why would he get one of those? It would take a battering ram to splinter theirs.
And it was still there. At least, in the most recent satellite images, it was. And Kate’s green Saab still sitting there in the driveway.
He zoomed in one more notch. Right now, Kate was in t
hat house. Ten miles away. Somewhere in there, maybe in the living room, reading . . . A second later, he felt like a stalker, as if at any moment he’d see Kate as she put the can on the curb—it was Sunday, trash was picked up on Monday. Nolan wondered idly how many times Kate had forgotten to take the trash out since he’d been gone. Twenty times? Thirty? Once he’d stopped putting the can out on the street entirely just to see if she’d notice. “This is so damn full. How can we have made so much trash in a week?” she’d said, trying to smash the kitchen bag into the big bin. She said it for three weeks in a row until a raccoon found its way in the open top. Nolan had spent an hour on the front lawn picking up old meat wrappers and used Kleenex as his penance. It was nice, to have that fight. To fight about something that, in the end, didn’t matter in the slightest.
He’d have sold the house if he were her. Apart from that door—and her—there was nothing at that address he needed anymore.
Nolan shut the computer and closed his eyes. When they’d had Robin, after he’d realized the depth of the love he possessed for his beautiful blue-eyed boy, he’d forgotten the first rule of corporate finance, the mantra he’d repeated to his clients: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. When it smashes, it’s a fucking nightmare.
Chapter Four
Sunday, May 11, 2014
11 p.m.
Kate filled the bathtub on the side of the hill below the house, using the hose that ran out the kitchen window. She used all the hot water in the tank and shut it off at the sink when the faucet went cold to the touch. Her cell beeped as Vanessa left text after text. Kate had checked a few of them, even starting the return text, but she hadn’t been able to send one yet. Apparently, according to Vanessa’s accounting of the sales, being the mother of a dead child and running away from your own opening were extremely good for a show. Who knew?
Pree. The sweetness within the sound of the name startled Kate every time she mouthed it.
Under the cover of darkness, the stars winking at her overhead through the oak leaves, she walked through the yard and down the hill. Even in daylight, neighbors couldn’t see into their yard, surrounded as it was by hydrangea, oaks, and oleander bushes that rose high and thick around it. She winced as the oak leaves pricked the bottoms of her feet. She shucked her clothes, slipped into the water, and released a long, shaky breath.
Bathing outside felt better at night. More soothing. Her neck and left shoulder had ached so badly on the drive home from the city that she wondered briefly if she was having a heart attack. But no. She’d just been clenching her jaw too tightly as she’d sat with Pree, trying to keep herself from leaning too far forward, too close to her daughter.
Pree.
Pree had found Kate on her birthday. On the anniversary of the day Kate gave her away.
The beginning of May always snuck up on her, as if April were followed by June in her personal calendar. One day she was okay, and the next she woke up on the day of her daughter’s birth. She knew without thinking, without doing the math, how old she was. Three. Was she learning her letters? Seven. Were her eyes still as blue as the day she was born, or had they darkened? Thirteen. Had she gotten her period yet? Was it as painful as Kate’s was at that age? Twenty. Was she in college? Did she smoke pot? Had she fallen in love?
This morning when she’d opened her eyes, she’d known it was her daughter’s twenty-second birthday before thinking about anything else. Before thinking about her opening later in the day. Before thinking about cold cereal and hot coffee. Before thinking about the commission she had to get working on soon if she didn’t want to blow it. She thought of her daughter.
It was the only day she let herself think of her the way she usually thought about Robin. The only day.
Kate linked her fingers behind her neck and let herself float in the water. Her ears filled and the world went silent, covered by the whooshing of her blood. An oak leaf, its points needle sharp, fell out of the dark sky onto her breast. She ducked farther under the water, and the leaf bobbed on the surface.
This tub was where she’d run to back then. When things got too hard, when she didn’t think she could take another minute of tests or results or needles or seeing the pain in Robin’s eyes. Nolan had always known to look for her out here. Sometimes, when Robin was doped to the gills and sound asleep, Nolan would climb in with her, the water sloshing out onto the dry leaves beneath the cast iron. They wouldn’t make love—the tub hadn’t been for that, not then. It hadn’t been for Robin to splash in anymore, either. It had been Kate’s place to breathe. She would rest in Nolan’s arms, and he’d put his cheek alongside hers, and that was enough.
P is for Pree. Kate smiled again up into the leaves overhead and then touched the corner of her lips. It felt good to smile.
This year, for the first time, Kate had felt her daughter’s birthday sneaking up on her. The day before, while grocery shopping, she’d been compelled to turn around and go back to the bakery case. There, at the end, were the gorgeous cakes under cooled glass. Big white puffy confections covered in raspberries and slivers of kiwi fruit. Smaller chocolate ones gleaming like precious metal.
Then Kate saw it. The perfect birthday cake. Lemon yellow frosting, a spray of colorful pansies falling over the side. Happy Birthday! written in joyful grass green script. Kate had never seen such a happy exclamation mark, but there it was, just after the y.
And just like that, on the heels of the sudden, irrational hope, a scalding flash of pain hit her so hard it was almost physical. She hated this part: she’d gotten so good at maintaining numbness that when she wasn’t numb, she felt more than pain. She felt actually ill. For a terrifying second, Kate was sure she was about to vomit in the middle of the cake aisle, right in front of the nicely shod, well-mannered shoppers who would never fall apart the way she was about to. One woman looked at her kindly and opened her mouth, as if about to ask if she was okay, but in her fear, Kate turned away, instantly regretting the moment she broke eye contact. She could have used that hug the stranger might have given her, had she been braver.
Kate had breathed through the moment in front of the bakery case. The nausea had abated. She’d bought her frozen peas and a bottle of nice wine and had made her escape, cakeless.
She turned in the tub and water trickled over the edge, splashing over the rocks, watering the hydrangea that Robin had loved so much. While it bloomed, she’d always tried to make sure one huge purple flower stood in his room. It was one of the hardest things for her to get used to—not picking the prettiest bloom and bringing it inside anymore.
More water splashed as she folded her knees to her chest and screwed her eyes shut against the stars.
She’d met her daughter tonight, and she’d bought her a piece of cake. A piece of goddamned birthday cake. She’d wanted to die as soon as she set it on the table in front of Pree, when she’d seen Pree’s expression transform into one of surprise mixed with amusement. She’d blown it, for sure. The fantasy that she’d know exactly what to do if she ever met her daughter was just that: an unrealistic, unrealized dream.
Pree with the nose that had come directly to her from her grandmother, who would never get to see it. Pree with the pale green voice Kate knew as if she’d heard it every day for years.
Pree.
Kate knew her name. Her joyful, round, liquid name.
She slipped farther down until the water rose up to her chin, her nose, her eyes (she kept them open, ignoring the burn of the water). Silently, the water zipped close over her head. She held her breath as long as possible, counting in her head—one child, two child—and when she finally burst upward, splashing and coughing, the air she sucked into her lungs felt sweet and cold. Like a miracle she hadn’t expected.
Chapter Five
Sunday, May 11, 2014
11 p.m.
Athol House was, apparently, having a party they’d forgotten to tell Pree about. When she pushed open the front door, a cloud of sweet-scented smoke drifted onto the porc
h.
“We’re hotboxing! Shut the door!” yelled a girl Pree had never seen before. She wore a short batik skirt and a glittery-sequined blue bra. She looked like a Vegas hippie.
“You’re hotboxing in a room the size of the grand canyon?” Pree muttered.
“What?” said the girl brightly as she was picked up and thrown over the shoulder of a punk Pree recognized from the co-op down the street.
“Nothing. Good luck.” Pree pushed past five people she didn’t know and raised her hand in semigreeting at a cluster of people sitting on the floor behind the piano. It looked like they were working on pulling together a drum circle, but only one guy tapped his bongo desultorily as they laughed at a joke Pieter had just made. The smell of nag champa was mixed with the scent of weed and curried lentils. Pree felt her stomach churn.
“Pree! Get over here, girl,” said Jamón, one of the housemates whose nickname came from his huge hamlike hands and feet. He waved a joint the size of a Cuban cigar at her. He was a good guy, one of her favorites in the house. Usually he trailed two or three girlfriends behind him, somehow managing to make the women okay with it. Sometimes the women became friends in their own right, and even though Pree was California born and bred, it was still something else to see three or four people wandering off to bed together night after night. One night she’d fought with Flynn badly, and she’d ended up sleeping—nothing else—with Jamón on the couch (the women had ousted him that night in favor of each other, and he was okay with that). He’d held her tightly as they slept, and it had felt wonderful to be in his thick, heavy arms. His breathing was hot, rasping on the back of her neck, and he snored, something Flynn never did. Pree had liked the sound and feel of it, the shaking she felt in her chest as he breathed. In the early morning, as his cock hardened in his sleep—she hoped it was in his sleep—she’d sneaked away and into the bathroom, where she got ready for work, ignoring her disappointment.
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