The Weight of Silence

by Gregg Olsen

  “Rich people only eat the best hot dogs too,” I say.

  She grins at me.

  It’s after eight, and though it’s still light outside, with Shelby trailing us we go upstairs, feeling every creaking floorboard as we get to the top. Emma’s bedroom is her mother’s old room. Some remnants of Stacy’s life before she escaped Hoquiam still remain. The walls are still Pepto-Bismol pink. The curtains are the same white lace. A bulletin board that Stacy once filled with photographs to help her visualize her future—a Mercedes, palm trees, a bottle of Dior perfume, Tori Spelling’s house—have been replaced by images Emma cut from magazines and coloring books. All are from Frozen, Emma’s favorite movie.

  It’s so warm, I tell her to sleep in a T-shirt and underwear.

  “That’s weird,” she tells me.

  “You’ll be cooler,” I say.

  She makes a face and gets undressed.

  “Carrie Anne says that the little girl’s dad should never have left her in the car.”

  Carrie Anne says a lot. Not only that, Emma has very good hearing.

  I sit on the edge of her bed while Emma climbs under the top sheet.

  “She’s right,” I say. “He shouldn’t have.”

  Emma adjusts her pillow. “You’re not supposed to leave a dog in the car without the window rolled all the way down,” she says.

  Frozen is the opposite of how the room feels.

  “Even that’s not a good idea,” I say.

  She snuggles deeper under the sheets. “Is she in heaven now?”

  She thinks that heaven is a place that someone can go to and visit. She wonders about her father and if she can see him in heaven.

  “Of course,” I say.

  I lie next to her and read a few pages from The Wind in the Willows. Before I finish, the love of my life is fast asleep. Shelby, who has planted herself on the cool wooden floor, whines a little. She wants up. I scoop up my dog and hold her. She’s a hot-water bottle on a day when no one wants one. Yet at that moment I don’t mind. Not in the least. I look around at these two. With Emma and Shelby, this place isn’t so terrible after all.

  The night ends with a surprise call from a supervisor at Ocean View. I’ve received late-night calls from my dad’s care center in the past, and each time one lights up my phone, I wonder if he has passed away during the night. I look at the time. It’s 11:00 p.m. This has to be bad. I brace myself for terrible, yet welcome news. I hate myself for thinking it. But he suffers in a fog that will never lift.

  “Is he all right?” I ask, sliding my feet to the floor and standing.

  “He fell out of bed this evening,” the caller says. “He’s going to be okay, but I’m afraid your father broke his wrist.”

  “How did that happen? I thought he was”—and I hated this more than just about any of the routine indignities my father endures—“restrained at bedtime.”

  The caller sighs. “I’m sorry. We have a new nurse, and she was unfamiliar with that part of our nighttime protocol.”

  I am angry, though not overly so. The nighttime protocol at Ocean View included cleaning his teeth, changing his diaper, getting him his meds, and turning on Beach Boys music very softly. Before I had the money, he suffered in a hellhole room next to the mill. The staff at Light of Day knew my routine and put on a show whenever I came from Kirkland to check on Dad.

  That all changed when a woman I went to school with, but didn’t know all that well, followed me out to the parking lot after a visit with my father.

  “Look,” Donna Totten had said, “I know you care about your dad. Most of the people here have no visitors. You come real regular. Here, no one does. Government checks come in. They cash ’em and do the minimum. I know you’re a cop and all. I don’t want to get in any trouble, but between you and me, your dad deserves better. I guess they all do. But no one else seems to give a rat’s ass about the other patients. If I had the money, I’d get him out.”

  I didn’t have the money. I’d lost every bit I’d had gambling. Sure, I won some. I lost even more. But a year after Donna told me to get Dad out, I found a source better than a casino.

  Stacy.

  My sister didn’t give a crap about Dad. But she did have the cash. The last time I saw her, I twisted the knife and she wired me $50,000. It was blackmail. I knew it. I just didn’t care. Everything about Stacy made me sick. I took her money. I never used one dime on myself. Everything was to help care for our father and Emma.

  The funny thing was Stacy could have done it all along. She just didn’t care. I want to laugh about it now. I thought I’d really done a number on her. I thought Dad would die in less than a year. Better care at Ocean View had changed everything, but he still didn’t know who I was. Didn’t know Emma.

  The only person he knew was Stacy.

  Emma was Stacy as a little girl.

  I was Stacy as an adult.

  That he could even think that about me was crushing. I’d done everything I could to be the good daughter. Everything. And in the end, I could just stand there and wonder: Why had I bothered? What was it about my family that made me into the person who was always covering for others?

  No matter the cost to me.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Wednesday, August 16

  With Emma at Carrie Anne’s, and a coffee from the drive-through in hand, I meet Carter at Little Pal’s Day Care on Spruce Avenue just after 9:00 a.m. It’s a far cry from the tidy and homey appearance of Carrie Anne’s home day care. At first blush it gives me the vibe of one of those places that give in-home day care centers a black eye in the media from time to time. Rundown. A little unloved. It’s a pale blue house with white shutters and a chain-link fence that encircles the perimeter like a snake’s skeletal remains. Stuck between dozens of the holes in the chain link are cones gathered from an enormous Sitka spruce that likely was planted when the house was new, seventy years ago. Carter and I stand at the front door and look inside. Too many kids. Not enough staff. Kids crawling everywhere.

  “Hello?” I say as we stand at the glass door mottled with fingerprints.

  Carter knocks again, and the glass rattles.

  Finally, a little girl comes out. She’s about Emma’s age. She’s wearing blue shorts and a strawberry-jam-stained white tank top. Her hair is fashioned into floppy pigtails, and if her brown eyes were any larger, she’d be a ringer for a Margaret Keane painting.

  “Ms. Debbie is in the backyard,” she says.

  “Thanks, honey,” I say as we turn to go out back.

  “Glad my kids didn’t have to go to day care,” Carter says.

  I bristle a little. I am only me. I have no one to help raise my niece. No family. It was my best—my only—choice.

  “Emma’s in day care,” I say. “Sometimes that’s what you have to do.”

  “Right. Sorry.” He looks embarrassed. A little wounded even. Probably more than he should. Carter’s like that. He wants to be closer to me, and every now and then I find an innocuous way to push him away. Just enough.

  A sprinkler spins a spray of cooling water over a brittle brown lawn as a group of children work hard at turning the hardpan soil into a mudhole.

  Ms. Debbie is sitting in a lawn chair under an umbrella, talking to a teenage girl. She holds a stained mug of coffee in one hand.

  She looks familiar, and I hope that she’s not another girl that I knew in high school.

  Turns out she is.

  “God,” she says, meeting my eyes, “Nikki, is that you?”

  No one calls me that. Or hasn’t for the longest time.

  I smile. “Debbie Manning?” I ask, though I pretend to be a little hazy in my recollection. But I’m not. Debbie was completely memorable. She and I got into it one time, and she slammed a locker door in my face. It wasn’t over boys or anything important. It was over Starbursts, of all things. I’d eaten the last strawberry one from a bag that a bunch of us were sharing.

  “I wondered when our paths would cross,” she say
s, as though we are in the Denny’s bar after the class reunion. “Not that I wanted to all that much,” she adds, with a stilted laugh. “You being a cop and all.”

  I wonder if she’s going to say something about my past misfortune. I’d made it out of Hoquiam, but I’d been forced to come back.

  She doesn’t. Mostly because I don’t let her.

  “Debbie,” I say, “we’re here about what happened to Ally Tomlinson.”

  She sets down her mug. It isn’t coffee inside. It could be water. It could be vodka.

  “Oh God, what happened is just awful. Horrible. It breaks my heart into a thousand pieces just thinking about that poor little girl. And her parents. Oh God! It must be just awful for them. I can’t even imagine what they’re going through right now. Just terrible.”

  “It is,” I say, just to stop her from going on and on.

  Debbie informs me that she’s divorced. “SOB cheated on me and now look what I have to do.”

  The SOB was Justin Lancaster, a backup quarterback. Come to think of it, most of the guys claimed they were backup quarterbacks.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  Carter looks at me. I know he enjoys my mini-reunions more than I do.

  “Brooklyn, can you make the boys get along?” Debbie asks the teenager, who appears entranced by her phone. Her tone indicates that she is not making a request but a very firm demand. She was the demanding type in high school. When the yearbook came out at the end of our junior year, Debbie had a fit because Monica Alexander was featured in one more photo than she was. I was in the yearbook office when she stormed into the room to demand that we go back to press to correct the grievous oversight.

  I remember everything about that encounter. Debbie’s slight was marginal at best. Her reaction, not so much.

  Debbie’s lips and eyes were Max Factor red. “Monica wasn’t even a princess for the junior prom. I was.”

  “You’re in the group shot,” the yearbook adviser—an overly sweet and patient woman who just wanted to get to retirement—told her as she pointed to a photograph of Hoquiam High’s junior elite.

  Debbie fumed. “Group shots don’t count,” she said.

  I remember now that I couldn’t stand her.

  The day care helper, who probably can’t stand Debbie either, puts her phone away and goes over to where two little boys have pinned down a third and are blasting water into his nostrils with a hose with a broken nozzle. The kid is laughing, but it’s the kind of out-of-control laughter that comes just before screams for mercy.

  While we look on for a moment, Brooklyn untangles the hose from the boys and placates them with the offer of a Popsicle.

  “My twins have as much sense as their father,” Debbie says.

  There’s a lull in the summer air. The boys are gone. Brooklyn is gone. The sprinkler is silent. Debbie leans forward in her lawn chair and sips some more from that coffee cup. She looks up at me and Carter, her eyes now wet.

  “I just can’t get over it,” she says. “That poor child. That sweet little thing.”

  “I know,” I say, suddenly remembering how Debbie convincingly played Emily in Our Town.

  “You really don’t think it wasn’t an accident?” she asks.

  Carter speaks up. “We need to investigate every angle.”

  “Right,” she says. Sip. Sip. Sip.

  “Did you expect Ally in the morning the day she died?” I ask.

  Debbie has finished her cup of whatever it was. I can smell the alcohol now. I tell myself over and over that I’m the last person to judge anyone. I lied. I manipulated. I begged. I cried. I promised. I was addicted to gambling, and I know that alcoholism is a disease of equal magnitude.

  “She misses a day or so a week. Her mom’s a nurse’s aide and her shifts vary. Most of the time she keeps Ally on days when she’s able to. Mia’s one of the good ones. She’s on time. Pays on time. That’s important.”

  “Yesterday, Luke was expected with Ally, right?” I ask.

  Debbie stares into her empty cup as if it were a deepwater well and there has to be some liquid down there. Somewhere.

  “Right,” she finally says.

  “Did you phone the Tomlinsons when she didn’t arrive?” I ask.

  “You mean like a Sandy’s Law rule?” she asks. “Like schools are supposed to?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I know that day care providers aren’t bound by that. But did you?”

  “No,” she says. “No, I didn’t. Not because I don’t care. I do. I care about my kids. My clients’ kids,” she quickly adds, amending her circle of caring.

  “I can see that,” I say, thinking back to her out-of-control twins and the poor little victim of their taunting with the garden hose.

  Her eyes stay on mine while she reaches for her phone.

  “You know,” she says, “come to think of it, I did send an email blast to all the parents. I have fourteen kids here, you know. Five are mine. Nine others. I let them all know that the beach walk had been canceled. I couldn’t get the church van. Not that I tried so hard.”

  She holds up her phone. “Right there,” she says, tapping on her cracked iPhone screen. “That’s Luke’s email and that’s Mia’s.”

  I look at the time.

  The email went out at 10:23 a.m.

  Carter switches gears.

  “Tell us about Luke,” he says.

  “Typical young punk,” Debbie says. “Thinks he’s hot shit and the rest of the world should get out of his way. How he ended up with a sweetheart like Mia is a mystery to me. Of course, I’m living the same story. Justin’s just an older version of Luke. Better looking, smarter. But basically the same.”

  “That’s not much of an endorsement,” I say.

  “Not meant to be,” she says. “I’m nothing if I’m not truthful.”

  That’s not the Debbie Manning I remember. She once took all the money from the PTA bake sale cashbox and said that she’d seen a stranger with shaggy hair and a dark complexion hovering by the red-velvet cupcakes who must have stolen the money.

  “I know,” I say.

  She nods.

  “How was he with Ally?” Carter asks, righting the sinking ship of the interview. I’m grateful. All I can think of is Ally, and every time Debbie speaks, I feel like she’s more concerned with proving something about herself than telling us what she knows about the Tomlinsons.

  “Surprisingly, he doted on her,” she says. “Some dads come in here stressed out because they feel like they’ve been forced into a Mr. Mom scenario, and they can’t tell a sippy cup from a teething ring. Luke was annoying in his puffed-up self-importance, but he was a calm presence around here. Got along with me. Probably no surprise there. I get along with everyone.”

  “The natives are restless, Debbie,” Brooklyn says, as she emerges from inside and glides over the sun-scorched lawn.

  “Did you give Jack and Mack a Popsicle?”

  Brooklyn nods. “Yes. The others too.”

  Debbie makes an irritated face. “What’s the problem, then?”

  “It’s hot, Debbie. The kids are hot. It’s, like, a thousand degrees inside.”

  “Okay, fine,” Debbie says. “I’ll be right in.” She gets up and taps on her cup. “Need a refill too.”

  Now I know it wasn’t coffee for sure. Even though it’s practically one hundred degrees, I gave Debbie the benefit of the doubt.

  Debbie turns back to me. “This is Brooklyn Marinucci. She’s my superstar helper.”

  I smile. It must be wonderful to be a superstar anything.

  “Did you know the Tomlinsons?” I ask Brooklyn.

  She pulls her hair to one side, holding it away from her sweating neck.

  “Kind of, sort of,” she says.

  “Any insight into the family?” Carter asks.

  “Mia’s one of those moms who thinks she’s better than the rest of us because she’s got a nursing degree.” She looks at Debbie. “Community college. Big deal.”

&nbs
p; Debbie nods and disappears inside. I can hear the freezer open and close.

  “Did she put you down?” I ask. “Is that what you mean?”

  “No,” she says. “No. Not me. Debbie. She thought Debbie had made a big mistake having those five kids. Mia said she was getting her tubes tied. Twins ran in her family too. She had other things to do. I get it. We all do.”

  Brooklyn makes a face as we all hear Debbie call out to the kids to settle down. “So Debbie’s coping skills aren’t the best. She copes. And I’m here all the time.”

  It isn’t easy, but I hold my tongue about Debbie’s drinking during the day. If she’d been driving, I’d have gladly pulled her over. I can tell by Brooklyn’s response that she knows Debbie’s choices are far from desirable.

  I focus on the reason we are there. “What about Luke?” I ask. “What’s your take on Ally’s dad?”

  “Brooklyn!” Debbie calls out from the kitchen. “I need you.”

  She sighs. “He’s, like, totally fine,” she says.

  “Fine?” I ask. “Like how?”

  “Some dads are total creepers here,” she says looking sideways. “Like Debbie’s ex, for sure.”

  “Not Luke,” Carter says.

  “Brooklyn, get your skinny butt in here! I’m paying you above minimum wage for a reason.”

  Brooklyn mouths What a bitch and then heads toward the door. I’m thirty-seven, but I remember what it’s like to be a teenager, so I smile at Carter. I also agree with her about Debbie.

  “Luke is fine,” Brooklyn adds over her shoulder. “Boring but nice enough.” Her hair, now in a ponytail off her neck, sways as she walks away. I wonder if she understands that boring can also be cunning. Cunning and evil.

  Carter and I stand there a second before heading to our cars.

  “Piece of work,” he tells me.

  No argument from me on that. “She’s been that way since high school,” I say.

  “Not her,” he says. “Brooklyn. She’s, what, sixteen? Seventeen? Got everything figured out.”

  “Didn’t you?” I ask.

  Carter stands there and smiles. Despite the whisper of cigarette smoke that clings to him, he’s attractive in that way that is hard to describe. Nothing about his face is spectacular. His eyes. His smile. His nose. All of it is average. Symmetrical but ordinary. And yet, taken as a whole, his averageness adds up to very good-looking. A little wear and tear on his face, lines etching into his skin, makes him handsome.