“No. I mean it.”
“Okay… well… like I said. There are neighbors. The cops who investigated it.”
“I think I made a mistake in asking you to look at the file. I thought that I was ready to know more and to put this guy away, but I was wrong. I can’t sleep at night. I just keep dreaming about the assault. I can’t think about anything else. Grant wants to know what’s wrong. I just want to let it go. Put it back to bed.”
Zachary thought about holding Kenzie until she fell back asleep. About doing the same with his siblings when they had cried and had trouble sleeping. The dream of Vinny throwing up the night before and Rhys’s miming of Zachary having to take care of baby messes.
“Heather.” He interrupted her apologetic goodbyes, cutting right across her. “Maybe there’s another way. Did you keep anything from your hospital stay? A memento of the baby?”
“Why would I keep a memento when I was supposed to forget about him?”
“Maybe you didn’t want to completely forget. Did you take care of him at the hospital before they took him? Did you hold him and feed him?”
“Why?” she demanded, her voice irritated.
“It’s just that… if you have anything that the baby wore or spit up on… we might be able to retrieve his DNA from it.”
Heather gave a sharp intake of breath. She didn’t answer the question, breathing in his ear and considering the question.
19
He arrived at Heather’s house a couple of hours later. Zachary wasn’t sure what kind of shape he was going to find Heather in when he got there. Would she be angry at him? Would she break down? Would she be emotionless behind a mask? She had to be going through all kinds of turmoil he could only imagine.
He looked at her house for a moment before getting out of the car. A nondescript single-family bungalow in a nondescript, middle class neighborhood. A community where the adults came and went to work every day, the children came and went to school, each family with two cars in a heated garage, a basketball net mounted on the outside so the children could play in the driveway close to mom’s watchful eye, and everyone pretended that they were happy with their lives.
Maybe some of them were.
But for Heather, it was all just a masquerade. She pretended to live a normal, happy life while inside she was broken and bleeding. Years ago, not only had she been brutally assaulted, but the people who should have protected, comforted, and avenged her had failed to show any empathy for what she had gone through.
Eventually, he got out of the car and made his way up the sidewalk. He thought that she would open the door as he walked up to the house, having been watching for his arrival, but she didn’t. Nor did she open within seconds of his ringing the doorbell. Instead, Zachary was left standing on the front steps, waiting as the seconds ticked by, listening for her footsteps or some other sound from inside. He finally rang the bell again, and knocked hard for good measure. Maybe the doorbell didn’t work. Maybe she had been downstairs or had been flushing the toilet or some other sound had drowned it out.
He began to worry that something had happened to her during the time he had taken to get to her house. Had the despair gotten to be too much for her and she had done herself harm? Or had she gone into a dissociative fugue, unaware of the world around her, maybe even wandering off to end up on the street somewhere with no recollection of who she was or where she had come from? All sorts of scenarios ran through his mind.
“Heather?” He pounded on the door again. “Heather, are you there? I want to make sure you’re okay. Heather!”
Finally, he heard the sound of the locks being turned and the door made a little suctioning sound as the handle was turned, but it was still a few seconds before she gathered up her courage to open the door completely.
Her eyes were red and swollen, but her expression gave away nothing. She had been hiding behind a mask for decades, and that mask was firmly in place. She wasn’t going to let him see her distress. Maybe she felt she had already revealed too much to him. It hurt him to see his big sister in such bad shape. He wanted to give her a hug and comfort her, but he didn’t know her well enough. He didn’t know how she might respond.
“Do you want to do this?” he asked. “I’m sorry for pushing. If you’ve changed your mind, I’ll leave.”
She looked at him for a long moment, emotionless. Then she shook her head, stepped back, and motioned him in.
The house was as quiet as a mausoleum. Zachary imagined it when her children had still lived there, playing and fighting when they were home, coming and going to school, bringing friends home and playing loud music. All of the chaos covering up what Heather was feeling and giving her a sense of normality. Since they had gone, did she feel the silence pressing in on her every day when Grant went to work?
Or was it only oppressive to Zachary and his imagination, and she was actually quite happy with her quiet existence? She could have turned on music or the TV. She could have had friends over, coffee, sewing parties, book club, whatever it was she was into. She could have found a job, or volunteered at the school or some other facility. She didn’t have to stay home all day listening to the silence and reliving her assault, her confinement, and handing over the baby she had never planned and couldn’t care for.
She didn’t stop in the living room, but Zachary paused, not sure what he should do. She must expect him to stop and sit down there on the couch and wait for her return once she had calmed herself or retrieved whatever she had kept all of those years. But Heather looked back at him for an instant, clearly indicating that she expected him to follow.
All the way to the master bedroom. Zachary looked around uncomfortably, feeling like he was intruding on an intimate place. Like the rest of the house, the bedroom was tidy, neat as a pin, immaculately decorated with every picture straight, not a wrinkle in the bedspread, and each pillow artistically placed. It looked like a show home, not somewhere someone actually lived. What did she do with herself all day? He could picture her out in the garage sitting at a potter’s wheel as she formed one perfect clay pot after another, opera playing quietly in the background. She must have somewhere she could escape to. Some activity that gave her a sense of peace in the silent, artificial shell.
“Sit down,” Heather advised.
Like in Rhys’s room, there was no chair. Nowhere to sit besides the bed. And again he felt that feeling of intruding on her space, of being somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be. He had pushed past her defenses and into a private place, a violation. When he didn’t move, she motioned to the bed.
Eventually, Zachary sat at the end, barely perched on the bed, his feet on the floor, in a position of readiness. He imagined her husband coming home and wondering what the hell this man was doing in his bedroom. Or maybe he and Heather slept separately, Grant in a spare room or a man cave, to give each other their own space. Maybe Grant snored, so they used it as an excuse for their distance, and they lived separate lives, side-by-side in the fake happy home.
Heather went to the closet. She glanced at Zachary. Not nervous about him being there, just checking to make sure that he was settled, that he was watching her. She didn’t attempt any conversation. It wasn’t the time for small-talk. He was surprised, as he watched her slow, robotic movements, that she wasn’t crying anymore. He had expected the tears to start again.
She reached into the closet and pulled out a box. Everything in the closet matched. It wasn’t filled with odds and ends of cardboard boxes like Zachary’s closet. Instead, they were all in graduated sizes with matching decorative print exteriors. Small flowers on a medium smoky blue background. All the same, lined up on the upper shelves, the whole closet furnished with wire shelves and rods of enamel white.
She placed the one box, larger than a shoebox, but maybe the size of one that would be used for snow boots, and removed the lid.
It was a time capsule of her childhood. There was a bedraggled teddy bear, no bigger than her hand, the backpack that h
ad served her as she had moved between group homes and shelters before she aged out of foster care, a worn shirt that might have had a rock band logo on it, folded so that he couldn’t see it. A couple of other trinkets and bits of costume jewelry that looked like Cracker Jack prizes.
“I don’t believe it,” he said, looking at the teddy bear, “it’s George the Bunny.”
He couldn’t remember why it had been George the Bunny. One of the younger kids must have named it. Maybe Tyrrell. Zachary had never imagined any of their possessions escaping the fire. Heather had slept with George the Bunny clutched to her every night, even as a twelve-year-old, and she must have been holding on to him tightly when the firefighters had rescued her that fateful night.
Heather smoothed one of the bear’s round ears with her index finger. “Bunnies have long ears, Zachy,” she said softly. He heard the echo of her words over the intervening years. He must have been the one who had named the bear decades before. He hadn’t remembered that.
“Joss held on to Mindy and got her out of the house,” Heather said. “I held on to my teddy bear. That tells you what kind of mother instinct I have. Rescuing my bear instead of my sister.”
“Joss already had Mindy. You couldn’t both take her. And the boys were in the other bedroom.”
“It was so hot and there was so much smoke. I wanted to go out the door, but it was hot. When we used to have safety presentations at school, and the emergency responders would come and hand out coloring books, they always said to feel the door and if it’s hot, you’re not supposed to open it. You’re supposed to stay low and go out another way.”
Zachary breathed shallowly. He stared at the bear, focusing on not sliding back into the memories. His experience hadn’t been the same as hers. He hadn’t been in a bedroom, away from the fire. He’d been right in the midst of the blaze.
Heather must have noticed a shift in his body language, because she reached over and grabbed his hand, squeezing it. Trying to hold him in the present.
“I was so relieved when they brought you out. You had been screaming, waking everybody up and telling us to get out of the house. We couldn’t get the window open, but the firefighters broke it and got us out. Mom and Dad were out. The firemen brought out everybody except you. I couldn’t hear you screaming anymore and I thought you were dead.” She swallowed. Her eyes were distant, focused on the memories of that day. “I was so relieved when one of them finally brought you out. We couldn’t see you. They took you straight to the ambulance stretcher and the paramedics, so we never got to see if you were okay. But I knew they wouldn’t be working on you and giving you oxygen if you were dead.”
Zachary nodded. He hadn’t seen any of them that night. When the fireman had carried him out of the burning living room, his eyes had been shut, blinded by the smoke, and after they laid him down and started to treat him, he had been surrounded by a wall of people and had never seen his family watching from a distance. He hadn’t seen any of them again until the day that he opened Mr. Peterson’s door and saw Tyrrell on the doorstep.
“Tyrrell said that you have scars,” Heather said. “The social worker told us you were okay. She never said how badly you were burned. You don’t have scars on your face.”
He had scars on his face, but no burn scars from that fire. Nothing that was too grotesque. “I covered my face,” he explained. “Tried to protect it and to breathe…”
With reluctance, he took off his jacket, pushed his sleeves back and displayed his arms to her, turning them to show her the worst of the burn scars on his arms.
“On my legs too, and some on my back.”
She studied them, integrating their experiences. She had escaped with George the Bunny and no injuries, and he had been burned badly enough to require skin grafts and still have scars. But most of the time he didn’t even think of the burns. Thanks to plenty of PT, there had been no permanent physical disability. The emotional scars ran much deeper.
He saw Heather’s eyes shift to his scarred wrists, and he pulled his jacket back on. She made no comment. Zachary looked back at the box from the closet, wondering why she had brought him there. He didn’t see any mementos of the baby she had borne.
Heather turned back to it. She gently lifted George the bunny out of the box and laid him on the bed. She lifted out the backpack and felt inside its various pockets. On the third attempt, she grasped something and pulled it out. She opened her hand and displayed it to Zachary. A pacifier in a zipped plastic bag. It was so small he wondered whether it was for a preemie baby. There was a little Donald Duck painted on the front.
She had kept it all those years. He knew how hard it was to hang on to personal items in foster care and group homes. He had kept his camera strapped around his neck all the time, even when he was sleeping. He still lost specialty lenses, even when nobody else in the home had a camera to put them on. Somehow Heather had kept the small memento all of those years, hiding it and guarding it carefully. If any other children had found her hanging on to a baby soother, she would have been teased mercilessly about it. Worse than for a teddy bear.
Zachary didn’t take it from her. He wanted it to be her own decision and her own initiative. She could take her time. She’d been pushed around enough by everyone else who had ever touched the case.
20
Heather sat down on the bed beside him. She didn’t look at him, but stared down at the pacifier held in her lap.
“I don’t really know why I kept it. Everyone kept telling me that I needed to make a clean break. I had to have the baby, but then I had to give him up. I couldn’t raise him. A fourteen-year-old didn’t have the resources to keep a baby back then. I would have been on the street. They said that I shouldn’t look at him, or hold him, or name him. The doctor would just pass him to the nurses, and they would take him to the nursery, and that would be the end of that. The adoptive parents would get him when he was released from the hospital.”
“Things were different back then. But you had other ideas?”
Heather nodded. “I thought at the beginning that I was just going to do what they said. But in the delivery room, after he was born… I couldn’t. I couldn’t hear him cry and not hold him. I had to see him, to touch him and know that he was real and that he existed. I was so young, Zachary, and I knew I couldn’t raise him, but I wanted to see him.”
Zachary nodded. He put his hand on her back, then rubbed it when she didn’t object to his touch. “None of it was your fault. Not getting attacked and not getting pregnant. And not having to give him up for adoption.”
“I told them to give him to me, even though Mrs. Astor said no, and the doctor listened to me.” She shook her head. “I’m lucky he did. I’ve heard of other cases where they wouldn’t listen to anything the teen mom said. Like she didn’t matter. Like she didn’t even exist. But he overrode Mrs. Astor and told the nurses to let me hold him when he was cleaned up.”
They were both silent for a few minutes. Zachary let her decide where she wanted to go with the conversation.
“Do you remember what it was like, Zachary? When Vinny was born? Or Mindy? You remember what it’s like to look into a brand-new baby’s face and hold him in your arms?”
Zachary nodded. They had all been responsible for the children younger than they were. They had taken as much of the load as they had been able to, feeding and changing the babies, taking them for walks in the afternoon after school, going to the park. Trying to keep all of the children out of the house as much as possible. There had still been too much of a burden on their mother. Six children were just too many, especially with their poverty, and when you threw into the mix a child who couldn’t moderate his behavior, who was always getting into trouble at school and raising havoc at home… no woman could have been expected to handle it.
“Yes,” he whispered to Heather. “New and innocent and… like angels from heaven.” He didn’t believe in God or heaven. Not really. But he couldn’t think of any other way to describe th
e awe that he felt on holding one of his newborn siblings. He ached to have children of his own and to feel that again. To be responsible for them and to be a good father and raise them to a happier life than he had enjoyed.
Heather looked at him briefly, and nodded. “And he was. Even with everything that came before… I didn’t blame him. He was innocent. I imagined him growing up and the things he would do with his life and how lovely he would be.”
There was another period of silence.
“I held him as much as I could for the next couple of days. I gave him bottles and changed his diapers and just held him and rocked him and told him how perfect he was. I didn’t nurse him. I was afraid it would hurt too much when they had to take him away. They gave me drugs to help to dry up my milk. Then it was time for me to go home and for him to go to his. But I kept this.” She looked down at the soother. “Nobody knew. I hid it. I never let anybody see.”
Zachary nodded. She looked at him for a moment, pushed her hand into the backpack again, and pulled out another little bag with teeny tiny flannel mittens in it.
“And these.” She smoothed the plastic over the mittens, flattening them out. “I was always afraid that someone would find them and take them. So for a long time, I kept them inside my bra.” She gave a laugh at Zachary’s expression. “In the bag. But that way… I knew no one could see them or get them while I was away from the house. The binky was too awkward to keep with me all the time. I kept it in my school bag, but if I was somewhere else… I couldn’t always carry a backpack with me.”
Zachary looked down at the two treasures. “That’s amazing. I can’t believe you managed to hang on to them and keep them a secret for that long. And… were they always in the plastic bag? Did you ever take them out to touch them or wash them or anything?”
He Was Not There Page 12
