True Blend

by DeMaio, Joanne

  She reaches for her glass and what’s left of her wine. “Maybe this is better. My nerves are so shot.” She takes a long swallow of the liquor. “I try to get through a normal routine every day. Cooking, working on my gown inventory, tending to Grace. But these flashbacks just derail me.”

  “Maybe you should see a doctor.”

  “I did. My friend babysat Grace and I went this morning. He explained it all to me, how what I’m seeing are actual glimpses of memory.”

  Which means glimpses of him. George folds his arms on the table and leans close. “What exactly are you seeing?”

  “My daughter, for one, in that monster’s arm. And then,” she pauses and reaches for the wine bottle, pouring a splash more into her glass. “Like this one, now. There was a struggle for Grace’s shoe in the parking lot. In a horrifying moment right before she was gone, it flew off her foot. We both reached for it, me and one of those men. In the flashback, I see his hand reaching quickly right over mine. Then when I look up and his masked face is right in front of me, well, I can’t even breathe.”

  So she sees his hand. His. A gentle breeze lifts the lace window curtain, letting the outside into the room to calm her, the air dew-laden this spring evening. And he knows now. Knows that while reaching over and quickly righting her spilled glass, his very hand had actually triggered her flashback tonight.

  Eight

  THE DUTCH COLONIAL NESTLED IN New Hampshire’s hills looks like a watercolor painting when they round the bend in the road. Deep green shrubs frame her parents’ house, and pink dogwoods and lavender lilacs hang heavy in bloom, their colors smudged beneath the late May blue sky.

  Amy indulges her senses. The scent of spring floats in the fragrance of new blossoms and damp lawns, misting the air like cologne. A twig and berry wreath hangs on the wood plank front door, and inside, just past the foyer, dark paneling and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves line the family room walls. A worn oriental rug covers the dining room floor and framed family photographs sit on lace runners on living room end tables. But Amy spends her time at the oak table in the kitchen, staying beneath the security blanket of sound and aroma, of food baking, of tea and coffee simmering, of the clink of silverware to mugs. This is why you come home again, as simple as that. On their first night there, her father lights a fire in the kitchen fireplace and that’s when she knows.

  This is her old home, not Grace’s. Which is exactly why her plan won’t work. She has run home and run away from her own life. Withdrawn, just like Dr. Berg had warned. Even the little kitten is at odds here. She spends hours hiding beneath the sofa, much to Grace’s dismay.

  But Amy doesn’t want to stay alone in Connecticut, either, so the next afternoon she takes Grace outside to her parents’ backyard. Grace’s legs step down the two deck stairs, coming to a full stop on each one. Cool weather flowers fill the deck planters. Pansies in yellows and purples tip their blossoms like happy faces.

  Amy leans on the deck railing, watching her daughter look at her reflection in the blue gazing ball before poking through the strawberry patch. She’d pulled Grace’s fine hair into two ponytails, just like on the day she was kidnapped. There’s no getting around those little reminders. The sun shines as bright as it did that morning, too. So every sunny day has that potential to remind her. She steps off the deck and moves closer to Grace, toying with sunflower seeds in her jacket pocket that they’ll plant together. Walking a few steps behind her in the garden, her ears strain to hear any words. This new radar runs between them as Grace continues to quiet. Her daughter’s small voice comes back to her, softly, stopping her in place. “Cripe,” she says.

  No, there’s no escaping that nightmare day. Not in New Hampshire, not in a beautiful garden on a May afternoon, not at home snuggled with stuffed animals and dolls and love. She hears Grace and thinks of the masked man walking away holding her shoe. His voice rings clear as she remembers his face, distorted beneath the hosiery. Cripe, give them the hour. He looked long at her. Be strong.

  Grace pulls a fat red strawberry from the plant. “Cripe,” she says again before putting the strawberry to her mouth. She licks it lightly before dropping it in her small basket. Where is she? Is she having her own flashback? Of what? How can Amy help her if she doesn’t know what visions trap Grace’s mind, visions from inside that armored truck? Her first instinct is to scold her daughter to not say that filthy word. Because that’s what it feels like, filth. It crawls over her skin and makes her cringe. Instead, she takes Grace by the hand and leads her to a sunny spot near the fence, beside a stone garden bench.

  “Come on, Gracie.” All she can do is be a caring mother. And if that’s the good that comes from her trip home, then it was worth it. She’ll keep believing in this one way to help her daughter. Loving gestures and words versus flashbacks and memories. That’s what it comes down to. Simple and powerful. Good versus evil.

  “Want to plant sunflowers? They’ll grow so, so big. Taller than me.” She reaches a hand high above her head and prays that planting flowers will supplant whatever memory Grace relives right now. Kneeling in the afternoon’s sun-warmed soil, she scoops out small holes in the dirt. Grace drops one sunflower seed in each of the holes. “These will look so beautiful, Grace. At the end of summer, they’ll be like a wall of flowers!” Together they push the soil back on top of the seeds and very lightly tamp it down. The dirt is warm beneath their touch. Amy imagines the end of summer. September. Grace is a September baby. She will turn three and all the plans have changed. Nursery school might be put off. Summer is put off. Ease is put off. Her mother’s garden is filled with baby plants, tomato and eggplant seedlings reaching to the sky. How will they ever get past spring?

  * * *

  When the white eyelet curtain dropped back into place, Amy knew her mother stood behind it watching them in the garden. She goes upstairs to the bedroom and stands silently in the doorway, her mother unaware of her presence as she thumbs through Amy’s sketch pad.

  The visuals her mother is seeing are not easy to take. The pencil drawings on the first pages, though raw in talent, depict appalling violence. A crude sketch of a gun covers one page. It is mostly black shadow, with lighter shadows pulling in detail like the double barrel and the checkered pattern of the magazine. Her mother flips that page to another view of a gun, its barrel more prominent because Amy had been closer to it in the shoe struggle. When her mother turns away, toward the window framed with lacy fabric, Amy understands why. It’s hard to look at the reality of that day.

  “Mom?”

  Ellen jumps and turns to the doorway. “Where’s Grace?” she asks. When Amy nods to the open window, she looks to see Grace outside with her grandfather, cutting lilacs from the unwieldy shrubs.

  “Those are personal, Mom.”

  “I’m sorry. I only came in your room to open a window.” Ellen sits on the bed with the pad in her lap, her other palm rubbing a circle on the hand-pieced quilt, over and over again.

  How many stitches, tiny stitches of moments, hold our lives together? Amy thinks that every tiny stitch contributes to who we are. She sits beside her mother. This is one of them, now. The barrel of a gun is one.

  “Oh all right,” Ellen admits. “I was snooping, okay? What else can I do? You and Grace walk around shellshocked and there’s no way for me to help. There’s nothing I can do to fix it.” She gives the sketch pad back to Amy. “So I looked in here to see if everything was in order. To see if I could iron a blouse or polish a pair of shoes. I don’t know, something.”

  “You don’t have to explain,” Amy says. “I’ve learned some things can’t be explained. You just ended up here. I get it. I ended up here, too. Back home with you. I’m just here.”

  “What are those?” Ellen asks as she nods at the sketch pad.

  “Therapy.” Amy opens the pad on her lap.

  “Therapy? How can drawing horrible pictures help you?”

  “They’re more than pictures. They’re images from my flashbacks.�
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  “You’re having flashbacks?”

  “Sometimes. I didn’t want to worry you, Mom. Dr. Berg told me to note down details and memories that I remember. The mind blocks painful stuff, but a flashback shows it.” She turns to a sketch of Grace hanging in a man’s arms. “Like this. It’s a way to process the trauma, and I might see something that will help the investigation.”

  Ellen looks closely at the image, shaking her head.

  “Mom?” Amy takes a long breath. “I think I made a mistake. Grace and I have to go home.”

  “What?” Her mother reaches for her hand. “You’ve only been here a couple days. I promise, no more snooping.”

  “It’s not that. It’s me. It’s Grace. It’s even Angel. You know how she hides under the sofa? That’s kind of how I feel. Like we’re hiding way under the big country house, far away where no one can reach us. And you know what good it’s doing Angel?”

  “None?”

  “Right. And it’s the same for me. I have to be home. And in my shop with all the gowns and brides and wedding plans. And well, home.”

  “But this is home, too.”

  Amy pats her mother’s hand. “Not for Grace. Some bastard grabbed her from me, forced her on that truck and God knows where else. Then she comes home, home, and what do I do? I take her away? It’s not good, Mom. I want her at home. Her home.”

  “I’ll come with you then.”

  Amy shakes her head and sees the tears in her mother’s eyes. “Dad needs you. And coming here did help me. I had time to think, and plan ways to help Grace. I’m rested. It helped me to go back alone. It’s something I have to do.”

  “Well I’ll make dinners for you to bring back and freeze. A meatloaf maybe? And some sauce and meatballs?”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “Yes, I do.” Her mother hugs her then, her fingers toying with wisps of Amy’s hair.

  * * *

  Because one perfectly normal day had been upended by a crime, Amy pays close attention to normal now. Things like the key clicking properly in the deadbolt lock when she arrives home the next day, as it should, give her a moment’s peace.

  And that the house feels a little stuffy, as it should, with the windows securely closed for the past few days, feels right. Her mailbox, too, is empty, thanks to Celia picking up her mail.

  Once she has unpacked, fed the kitten and put Grace down for a nap, she checks her answering machine.

  “Huh.” There was a message blinking on it when she left, one saved until she could jot down the phone number. The light holds steady now. She taps the button.

  “You have no messages,” the electronic voice says.

  “That’s funny.” She taps it again. Nothing. So she presses the Announcement button. The machine hums silently. Mark’s voice, which she had left on it as a form of security leading callers to believe a man lived there, is gone. Then come two beeps alerting her to record a new announcement. “Come on,” she insists, giving the machine a little tap before checking that the plug is secure and the volume turned on. But it doesn’t matter; the Announcement plays only silence, then two beeps, again and again. So she tries turning on a lamp, wondering if a power outage messed up the recording while she was gone, her eyes first, imperceptibly, scanning the window locks.

  Nine

  NATE, YOU EVER TRY KNOCKING before you let yourself in?” George walks into the kitchen finding tools spread out on the island countertop and his brother holding a three-foot level to the wall. George pours himself a cup of coffee from the pot Nate made before he started working. Nate does that, drinks coffee on the job all day. Now he studies the newly tiled wall without responding to George.

  “Nate,” George says again. His brother glances at him, gives a quick handshake, then presses the level back up against the wall. George doubts there are any flaws in the craftsmanship, just like there were none with the heist. Nate planned it, created it, built it up, perfected it, completed it, sewed up any loose ends and is wrapping it up now. Nothing out of line, no cracks.

  “If this wall’s not exactly vertical, I’m screwed,” Nate says. “The slightest deviation will ruin the visual effect of the tile.” He scrutinizes the bubble in the level.

  “We have to talk,” George continues. “It’s been almost two weeks and I want answers, God damn it. I’m tired of you holding out on me.”

  “You see this crazing here?” Nate runs an open hand over the top three rows of stone tile.

  “Crazing?”

  “Fine cracks. Like a web in the glaze.”

  George looks closer, seeing tiny veins mapping some of the tile. “I see it.”

  “Damn, I’ll have to replace them.”

  “The hell with the tiles. I’ll break them all down if you don’t start talking.”

  “Hey.” Nate sets the level on the breakfast bar, swings a leg over one of the stools and faces George. “What’s eating you?”

  George leans against the counter. “What’s eating me? You’re kidding, right?”

  “No.”

  “Except for the card game at Craig’s, you’ve been keeping yourself scarce, and I want to know how it all happened. How you got involved, why the hell I’m involved, who those other guys are, what you’re doing with the money, when this is going to end. Because I can’t even think straight anymore.” He shows Nate a nasty gash running across the side of his palm. “My hand practically went through the slicer yesterday.”

  “Whoa. You’ve got to be careful, George. All the time.” Nate looks back at the tile wall as though it’s still bothering him. “That’s why we haven’t talked. I’m being careful. It’s part of the plan. Everything is. Even me laying low and not seeing you. Every minute is part of the plan.”

  “Listen, Nate.” George swats a tile trowel off the granite countertop onto the floor. “I’ve about had it.”

  “No, you listen. The authorities are going to question you again once their leads get cold. And what you don’t know can’t hurt you. If I tell you how all this came about, you’d have to lie to them. This way, there’s not much you can leak. You’re home free.” He leans over and picks up the trowel. “And rich, to boot.”

  “You think you’re doing me a favor by not talking?”

  “Pretty much.” Nate stands and pours himself another mug of coffee, then puts a take-out egg and sausage sandwich into the microwave.

  “You don’t get it, do you? I want my life back, Nate.” George holds out his hand, his thumb and finger spaced just so, rigid with resolve. “I’m this close to turning everybody in. I can’t live like this.”

  “Calm down, George, and just think about it. If you talk, A—the feds will never believe you weren’t in on it. So you’ll do time because any participation is guilt. And B—Reid won’t stand for it.”

  “Those two are a piece of work. You trust them with all this?”

  “Reid? And Elliott? They got what they wanted. They’re happy. Now we just have to keep it that way, understand? And you’re the only one the cops are going to tap into, so you’re better off unaware of the details.”

  “What about Amy? They’ll talk to her, too.”

  “She doesn’t know shit.” Nate pulls his sandwich from the microwave and sets it on the island. “All she wanted was her baby back, and we did that.”

  “You did more than that. She can barely leave the house now on account of the flashbacks she’s been having.”

  “Flashbacks? Now how would you know that?” He lifts the top off his steaming sandwich roll. “And give me your ketchup.”

  “I was there for dinner. She had me over to thank me for getting her daughter back to her.”

  “No shit.”

  George hands him the ketchup bottle from the fridge, then empties the rest of his coffee down the sink and checks his watch. “You staying here?”

  “For a couple hours. I’ve got to fix that crazing.” Nate eyes George’s outfit, jeans and an old college tee. “You going in to work look
ing like that?”

  “I’m actually stopping by Amy’s house on the way.”

  “Again? For what?”

  “I’m doing her a favor, helping out with something in the yard.” From over a chair, he lifts a hanger holding black trousers topped with a white button-down shirt. “I’ll change when I get to work.”

  “Jesus. All dressed up to cut meat,” Nate says around a mouthful of egg sandwich. “Just like the old man. Always worried about your image.”

  “Don’t even start about Dad, okay?”

  “Fine. But it’s not a good idea, George, seeing that woman. You’ll slip up. I hope this isn’t going to be a regular thing with you two now.”

  “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. What’s it to you?”

  “You’ve got to leave her alone before she figures out you were there that day, somehow. Or her kid will. Just get back to your old life. I thought I told you that already.”

  “Do me a favor, will you? Quit thinking about me.”

  * * *

  From the dark cloud that descended on Amy’s life, the silver lining starts to emerge. It is the good that comes with the bad. The good is George stopping by to hang the tire swing on his way to work. The good is in Grace’s bright smile as Amy pushes the swing gently beneath the shade of the tall maple tree. The good is in knowing she can swing her daughter every single day of the summer now, morning, noon and night, gently swaying her in the warm air, serenaded by robins and chickadees.

  “I’m so glad you called yesterday. Grace loves the swing.”

  “Well when you didn’t return my call, I worried.”

  “I don’t know what happened to those messages while I was at my parents’. I guess that answering machine is so old, I really need a new one.” Tiny yellow wildflowers spread through cracks in the old patio stones beside the maple tree. Red geraniums, vinca vines and spikes spill from two stone urns. George sits in an Adirondack chair there, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. “So thanks for checking up on us. I appreciate that.” She gives the tire swing a very slow spin.