What a Mother Knows

by Leslie Lehr

  “He pretends not to know, I think. See no evil. Truth is, I like to sneak a smoke when a director is up my ass. Gives me a minute to think.” Drew lit the candle, then sat down on the bed. “I never claimed to be as honest as you, Michelle.”

  She watched the flame flicker. “You used to make fun of my candles, too. You said if I had to set the scene to feel romantic, then I didn’t really want it.”

  “I was wrong. You should have what you want.” He hesitated, then turned to face her. “I mean it, honey. You don’t deserve this. Any of this.” His voice was husky as his arms wrapped gently around her.

  She clung to him until his arms tightened, then she pressed her lips against his, ignoring the sour taste of nicotine beneath his toothpaste. They exchanged a few shy kisses before she pulled away. “Do you remember this nightgown?” When he didn’t answer, she giggled. “It never stayed on long.” He laughed. She reached for him, but lost her balance and rolled back, triggering a spasm in her bad arm.

  Drew hesitated, so she pretended it was nothing and braved the rub of tender scar tissue as he pulled her back up. He held her and kissed her on the cheek, but she wanted more. She scooched back and bent her knees for balance to rest on her right side. He tilted his head to gaze at her as he lay on his side, then touched his fingertips to her temples. Slowly, they slid down her neck to her collarbone, then around the strap of her nightgown to her waist.

  “Don’t stop,” Michelle whispered.

  “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “You won’t. The doctor said it was okay.” Drew slid his hands between her legs, then stopped abruptly. “Please, honey, it’s just me.” Her voice had dropped to a whimper.

  “No, it’s just—it’s been a long time.”

  She inched closer. Her body was willing, but she could tell by his hesitation that it wasn’t the body he remembered. “Do you still love me?”

  “For better or worse.”

  “Can’t get much worse,” Michelle teased, but Drew didn’t laugh. Michelle ached for her husband. She laid her palm on his cheek and wobbled. He put his right arm on her side to steady her. She followed his smooth pelt with her fingers, down to where his ribs gave way to his belly, but she couldn’t reach any farther. She nudged him with her knee. Nothing. As if Drew was the one who’d been maimed in the accident. “Is your back hurting? What did you call it, the tall man’s curse?”

  “That’s not it. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s just me. Remember the bride who did you on the golf course in Maui? And behind the Hemingway House in Key West? And on top of the Empire State Building?”

  He quieted her with a kiss, rolled her back, and kissed her again with lips as tender as her memories. Then his eyes drifted shut, and all at once he was on her, kissing so hard her lips were bruising. She blinked up at him, but his eyes were still closed.

  Drew rubbed his hand down her side and cupped her bottom. He kissed her neck until her head fell back. There were cobwebs on the ceiling. She closed her eyes. Pressure grew against her thighs. His hand slipped between her legs until she could feel his fingertips. She startled, afraid for a moment, but then he kissed her again and shoved himself into her. He was panting now, pushing into her, raw and burning, until it hurt. She held on as the backboard hit the wall, then she was flipping over and upside down and inside out, tumbling inside the SUV, dark with the music still pounding. Steel was groaning and lights were flashing in the darkness and she heard a scream. Then it was over, and all was still.

  Michelle felt the pressure lift around her, like a seat belt unbuckling, an airbag deflating. She caught her breath and let it go. What she wanted was to feel alive, connected, but all she felt was alone. Drew pulled the covers over her and let his hand linger on her hip. Then he rolled over.

  She climbed out of bed slowly and went to the bathroom to clean up. The moon lit the room through the window so there was no need to turn on the light. In the silence, she heard the crickets sing. She wondered whether Drew could hear them from the bedroom, whether he recognized their call. When she got back to bed, he was snoring. She blew out the candle.

  3

  The aroma of strong coffee woke Michelle the next morning. Confused, she opened her eyes, expecting to see long tubes of fluorescent light above her hospital bed. Instead, there was a smooth white ceiling. She basked in the warm sunshine streaming in over the headboard and considered the empty trough in the mattress beside her. She was sore from their reunion, but that was to be expected, wasn’t it? Then she realized the bright room faced west. She must have slept late.

  Michelle spotted her bathrobe draped over the chair of her vanity, where the spring bouquet now rested. She stood up slowly and inhaled the fresh perfume of the daisies before slipping on her robe. She ignored the cane leaning against the chair and headed down the hall to the kitchen. Drew was reading a newspaper at the dinette. A plate of sandwich crusts lay in front of him. “Good morning! What time is it?”

  “Afternoon,” he said. “Would you like some French Roast?”

  “Definitely,” Michelle said, sitting carefully. Drew circled a trash bag full of party debris, then poured her a fresh cup with far too much milk. She took a sip, then noticed that the orchid plant was here on the dinette.

  “Looks like you’ve been busy. Sorry I wasn’t up to help.”

  “Tyler helped. He’s out walking the dog.”

  “Is Nikki with him?”

  Drew shook his head. “Can I make you some toast?”

  “No, thanks.” She looked back down the hallway to Nikki’s closed door. “Shall we wake her up? I can’t wait any longer.”

  He bit his lip, but didn’t answer.

  Michelle hurried back through the foyer. “Nikki! Rise and shine, honey! It’s me!” No answer. She knocked on the door.

  “Don’t, Michelle,” Drew warned.

  “Don’t what?” Michelle asked. “Nikki! Come on, I’m dying to see you!”

  She turned the doorknob. It was locked. She rattled it, then looked up. “Didn’t you pick her up this morning? Is her flight late?”

  “Not exactly.” She turned to see Drew with his arms crossed over his chest.

  “What’s going on?”

  He squeezed his eyes shut as if enduring unbearable pain. “She’s not here.”

  “Did something happen in Australia?”

  “She didn’t go to Australia. I didn’t want to upset you, so I made that up.”

  Michelle blanched as if she had been struck. “You what?” She rattled the knob again. “No. She told me about it last summer, right before she left.”

  “Her last visit was the December before that. After they induced the coma.”

  “No, I definitely saw her after I woke up.” She pounded on the door.

  “You must have imagined it.”

  Michelle stopped pounding. She imagined it? She envisioned her daughter’s brown eyes, sparkling as she described her upcoming trip. Lexi had warned her about confusing memories with imagination. Michelle tried to sort the swirling fragments in her mind. “Are you sure?”

  “You had plenty of visitors, Michelle—some you didn’t recognize at first. But Nikki wasn’t one of them.”

  “Then where is she?” She saw the dark look on Drew’s face and screamed at the locked door. “Nikki?” Michelle burst into tears. “Nikki!”

  “She’s gone.”

  “Where?” Michelle was shaking so hard she could barely stand. Had Nikki been in the accident? Had she been—Michelle couldn’t even say the word in her head. Maybe she was still asleep and this was a nightmare. Wake up, she told herself. But Drew was still there. And from the look on his face, she got the feeling that the nightmare was just beginning.

  He put his arm around her. “Calm down.”

  “Calm down? What are you not telling me?”

  “She ran away.”

  “No. Why are you saying that?” Michelle pressed her hand to the wall for support. He was making it up. And she had pr
oof! She hurried to the bedroom.

  Drew followed her. “It was after the accident,” he said, following her. “She just…disappeared.”

  “No, she didn’t!” Michelle yanked the drawer of her bedside table out so hard that it fell. Postcards went flying across the floor. She fell to her knees to collect them. “Look! The Sydney Opera House, the Harbour Bridge, Manly Beach…” She held one up to show him her handwriting in purple ink. “See? Thinking of you. Love, Nikki. She even made a flower dotting the i.”

  Drew reached to help her up, but she was too angry to accept his hand. He pointed at the smeared postmark.

  Michelle blinked back her tears. “What? I can’t read that tiny writing.”

  “It says Los Angeles. They all do. They were mailed from here.”

  Michelle squinted to decipher the print. It was true. She knocked it from his hand, then sunk to the edge of the bed while he gathered the rest. She glared at him through her tears. The liar. “Where is she, Drew? What are you doing to find her?”

  Barking drowned out her voice as Bella dragged Tyler into the house. Michelle pushed herself up from the bed and shuffled to the doorway. “Tyler?” He peered down the hall, but looked past her to his father. He led the dog out of sight. The back door slammed shut and the barking grew faint.

  Michelle started after him, but Drew caught her shoulders. He spun her around like a lifeguard saving a drowning swimmer, then steered her back to the bed. He shut the door, then went into the bathroom. She heard the faucet gurgle, then he returned holding a cup of water out to her left hand.

  She took it, but she wasn’t thirsty. “What did the police say? Could she have been kidnapped?”

  “No. There was no ransom note. Hundreds of kids run away every month.”

  “Not my kids!” Michelle slammed the cup down. Water spilled on the quilt.

  “Our kids,” Drew said.

  “You know what I meant. I read to her every night, took her to every checkup, scheduled extra driving lessons for freeways and canyons—”

  “You’re a good mother.”

  “Then why would she run away?” She felt as if someone had carved out her insides. And that someone was standing right in front of her. “How could you let this happen?”

  Drew crossed his arms. “Don’t put this on me.”

  “Did you put up fliers and freeway signs and post a reward on Facebook and everything? Are the police still looking?”

  “Everyone is looking,” Drew said.

  Michelle pushed herself up. “So why are you just standing there!”

  “I’m doing everything I can.”

  “What do you mean, everything? Nikki’s not here! She could be lying in an alley off Hollywood Boulevard, for all we know, shooting up heroin on some urine-stained mattress. She could be selling her body for food!” She punched his shoulder, then felt a shooting pain across her shoulders, rippling down her back. She squeezed her eyes shut and shuddered, her whole body collapsing, until Drew caught her. She whispered her worst fear. “What if she’s dead?”

  Drew brushed the tears from her cheeks. “She’s fine, Michelle.”

  “How do you know that?” She opened her eyes and looked up at him. Drew’s face settled into deep lines of pain. She clutched his pocket and pleaded. “Drew, talk to me. How can you say she’s fine if you don’t know where she is?”

  “Because she calls. Every couple of months, I get a message. Short and sweet, like the ones you got.”

  The relief she felt wasn’t enough to make her chest stop aching. “Call her now, tell her I’m home.”

  “I did. I left a message, but she hasn’t called back. It’s an Internet number, untraceable.”

  “Then how can you be sure she’s all right?”

  “Because I can’t bear to think of her any other way!” Drew pulled free of her and pounded down the hallway.

  Michelle looked back at the postcards, then spied the get well card half hidden by the bed. The front showed a bunny carrying a basket of daisies. She picked it up and pressed it to her chest. Please, don’t let it be a trick, she prayed. She opened it and listened closely to the familiar recording.

  “Hello, Mother. I feel awful about what happened.

  But I can’t see you like this. I hope you understand.

  Love, me.”

  Michelle sighed. That was Nikki’s voice, all right. Who else called their mom such a formal name—besides Michelle? It had started as a joke and then it stuck.

  The message was simple, but maybe it explained why she left. Michelle had looked awful after her surgeries, with all the tubes and machines that kept her alive. Nikki must have been so traumatized by the sight of her mother as a vegetable that she couldn’t bear to see her. Michelle shut the card quickly, as if to keep her daughter safe.

  She wondered about the postmark and went to ask Drew, but was winded by the time she reached the foyer. She leaned against the corner to catch her breath.

  The afternoon sun blasted through the French doors, casting a harsh light across the living room. Without the crepe paper and cake, the room looked bigger than she remembered. She looked around, then realized that it wasn’t bigger, it was emptier. The leather couch was gone, and the rest of the furniture had been rearranged so that the plaid armchairs flanked the fireplace. The coffee table was also missing, leaving faded squares of green carpet. Only the bookshelves looked the same, stuffed with files and photo albums and parenting books. Except, now there was a film of dust on them. The sight was upsetting.

  She crossed the hall to the kitchen where Drew sat with his head in his hands. Her voice trembled. “Is that why the furniture is gone—the police are dusting for prints?”

  “Not exactly,” he said. “Remember the apartment I rented in New York for that miniseries? I’ve been working as a local for the past year.”

  “In New York?” Michelle tried to understand. “You’re telling me that Nikki hasn’t been here in over a year—and you’re living it up in New York?”

  Drew’s voice rose in anger. “She’s not the only one I have to take care of, Michelle. I need union hours to qualify for benefits. Your insurance was tapped out long ago. You’ve had the best care possible and I flew back to visit as often as I could. Should I have put you in a cheap convalescent center to waste away?”

  “I just find it hard to believe there are no jobs in LA.”

  “There aren’t enough that pay union,” he explained. “Reality shows pay shit. You can’t count on a series like you used to, the state film commission is broke, and locations are cheaper in Canada. Half the guys I know are on unemployment.”

  There was a knock on the French door. Michelle backed up and spied Tyler through the glass. “Is that the real reason why Tyler is in boarding school? To be close to you?”

  “It wouldn’t have done him any good to be close to you,” Drew said, rising to go speak with Tyler.

  Michelle sputtered from all the swear words that came to mind. She took deep breaths to calm down, but it was no use—she was furious. To think she’d felt so grateful that he’d taken such good care of things, when he hadn’t at all. He had abandoned her. “Drew!”

  He came back inside the living room.

  She held up the get well card. “Where was this mailed from?”

  He shrugged. “Someone at the hospital opened it. Every time we visited, there were more cards in your room. Clients and friends—”

  Michelle remembered Nikki’s words about feeling awful. “Oh my god, was it Nikki’s fault? Was she driving?”

  “No, honey. You were.”

  Michelle blinked, trying to remember. Her anger began to cool from the effort. “Right, that’s what the lawyers kept asking about. Car insurance or something.” She looked through the glass at her son playing with Bella, as if nothing had happened. Michelle had always feared that something would happen, as soon as they left her sight. Nikki would fall off the swing set onto cement, or Tyler would be struck in the head by a baseball, or
a bomb would go off on a field trip. And sure enough, that time had come. How could she not have felt it, deep inside? “Does Tyler know?”

  “Let’s get you back to bed. Let Tyler be—this has been hard on him, too.”

  She pulled her hand away. “I can imagine. He had to lie to his mother for—oh, I don’t know—almost a year?” She spied a napkin left on the floor beneath the dining room table. The thought of her friends at the party last night made her stomach clench. “Tyler wasn’t the only one pretending, was he? Is that why Julie didn’t know about Australia—because you forgot to tell her? Cathy was acting strangely, too.”

  “I’m sorry, honey. I really am.”

  “I don’t understand. Why pretend at all?”

  “You were already overwhelmed. Lexi dragged you from one rehabilitation room to the next all day long. I wanted to tell you, but every time I visited, you were too exhausted to have a serious conversation. And to be honest, I didn’t want Lexi to know.”

  Michelle was relieved that at least one person hadn’t betrayed her. “Why? Because she would have told me?”

  “That, or she’d ask to be reassigned to avoid saying something that might hamper your progress. The doctors were adamant that we were not to let anything upset you. Anything.”

  Michelle heard Tyler coughing. Drew swore under his breath and stood up. “I need to run out and get him a new asthma inhaler. I’ll fill your prescription while I’m there,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

  “Like I woke up in the Twilight Zone.”

  “You need rest. Let’s get you back to bed.”

  Michelle let him help her back down the hall and into the bedroom. But one thing was certain. She was not staying in bed.

  4

  Michelle had learned to pick door locks with bobby pins long ago, but opening Nikki’s lock was tricky using only one hand. She was tempted to ask Tyler to let her go through the adjoining bathroom, but his father had expressly ordered him to make sure Michelle got some rest. He had been caught between loyalties for long enough. Finally, Michelle felt the lock surrender. She dropped the flayed bobby pin into the pocket of her bathrobe, pushed the door open, and stepped inside Nikki’s bedroom. It felt like a forgotten world.