“Well, considering all the circumstances, all I can say is this: There are several people in this occurrence who made grave mistakes. You are one of them, Seth.”
“I know that, sir.”
“It seems this young lady, Laura, made several mistakes as well. One was to drink, which caused her to be impaired in her decision-making as well as her ability to drive herself home. The second mistake she made was to climb a rock with you. The third mistake she made was not to do as you said when she got into trouble. You offered her help. No matter how quickly it happened, she chose not to react when you needed her to.”
“I see that, too,” Seth said.
“There will be news tomorrow,” Vignaroli said.
Mulligan asked, “You will make your decision tomorrow?”
“No,” Vignaroli said. “I’ve made my decision today. But the news will be out tomorrow in the Sun-Times. The story will say that the DA has found no just cause to proceed. It will say that there are no additional charges filed.”
“What do you mean?” Seth asked. “I don’t understand.”
The DA lifted his brows just high enough so that he could peer at the boy over the top rims of his glasses. “It means, young man, that I hope you can salvage what’s left of your summer. It means that you are free to go.”
Chapter 24
Pam couldn’t help being exhausted. Even though she hadn’t gone with Eric to the DA meeting, she’d spent hours downtown in a city she didn’t know very well trying to keep the kids occupied. The outcome had been better than expected, but the emotional toll of the day had been punishing. Everyone needed a break. She and Eric had decided to entertain themselves at the hotel tonight.
Ben and Lily had been swimming in the hotel before supper. They’d made friends with other kids and played about a hundred rounds of Marco Polo before Pam called them out of the water. Lily looked like she was about to fall asleep standing up as Pam dried her off with a towel. Pam held her daughter just a little longer than it took to pat her dry. Ben’s eyes were so red from the chlorine, Pam felt ashamed she’d forgotten to pack his goggles.
As Pam rinsed out their bathing suits in the sink, she felt like she was the one being squeezed and twisted. She wrung out the suits and hung them to dry on the retractable clothesline over the tub.
The kids were hungry from swimming, although Pam knew if she tried to eat anything, it would taste like sand.
“How about the room service menu?” Eric asked. “Did you look at that?”
Pam shook her head. “Order whatever you think. I don’t care.”
“We could just get the kids some fries.”
“That’s fine, Eric. Whatever.”
The argument between Pam and Eric started simply enough. While they’d been waiting for the French fries, Pam had wandered down to the front desk to see if the hotel had any games or videos that would keep the kids occupied until they were ready for bed. The concierge had dug out a shredded Monopoly box that looked like it had been stacked beneath a row of books for at least a quarter century.
“You brought Monopoly!” Ben said when Pam carried the box into the room.
“Does this look like a good idea?”
Lily eyed the box dubiously. “I thought I was too little to play that game.”
“You and I can be partners,” Pam told her.
It took them fifteen minutes to organize the money and elect Eric banker. After they unfolded the game board, Lily found the houses and hotels and became immediately obsessed. She set out building a large town on the patterned bedspread.
“I’m taking the car,” Ben announced as he dug the little steel sportster out of the box.
“Something tells me that’s not going to be the last time we hear him say that,” Pam said, laughing.
But Eric didn’t catch the humor. He was examining Ben’s eyes. “Ben? Gosh, your eyes are red. Do they hurt?” Then, to Pam, “Maybe you shouldn’t have let him stay in the pool so long.”
“His goggles,” Pam said. “I forgot to put them in the suitcase.” It had been an aside for Eric, a quick comment when he’d noticed the boy’s bloodshot eyeballs. But Pam couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d been judged in some way. She was tired, she told herself. Shake it off. It had been a long day. But some of the fun had gone out of the game as Eric let Lily roll the dice.
It wasn’t long before Ben had managed to wheedle his way into three of the four railroads and the matching set of Mediterranean and Baltic avenues. He began to peel off hundred-dollar bills, improving his properties house by house. Lily, who had been drifting off to sleep in Eric’s lap, sprang awake to protect the town she’d built on the bed. “It’s just two, Lily,” Ben tried to explain. “It’s how you play Monopoly. I’m moving them from your town to my town. The same way Eric did when he married Mom.”
The most horrifying thing of all, Lily understood the analogy. Very seriously, she selected two plastic houses, not two sitting beside each other but one from one side of her arrangement, one from the other, and handed them to her brother.
Pam landed on Baltic Avenue the next time she passed “go.” Ben proudly read aloud the rental charge as Pam clucked at her son, pretending to be annoyed at the fee. Eric bought St. James Place and let Lily hold the card. Pam landed on Water Works. “You want to buy it, Mom?” Ben asked. “If you don’t, I do.”
When Eric made the fateful comment, he’d thrown a 10 and was already headed toward jail. “It’s good we’ll be headed home in a couple of days.”
“I know,” Pam said. “It’s been tough. I’m ready to have our lives back to ourselves.”
Eric could have said anything here. Anything. He could have said, I know it’ll feel great to get to your office, Pam. He could have said, I want you to take care of yourself. I’m glad you’ll be able to keep your checkups with your OB-GYN. He could have said something, anything, to give his wife the idea that he was out to protect her. But, instead, Eric said, “You being here this long has been too hard on Hilary.”
Pam’s eyes darkened. “What did you say?”
Eric paused with the metal shoe in his hand. Regret briefly flickered across his features. Too late, he’d realized what he’d started.
“Why does it always have to be about Hilary, Eric? I don’t understand.”
Ben found something interesting in the corner of his thumbnail. Lily climbed down from her dad’s lap and huddled next to Ben. She started to count her brother’s five-hundred-dollar bills with one hand while she sucked on a knuckle.
“Pam,” Eric said. “Not now. Not here.”
“Why not here?” Pam asked. “You started it here. Why can’t we finish it here?”
Without speaking, Eric looked pointedly at the two children.
“Outside then,” Pam said, defying him. “You want to have this friendly family discussion out in the hall?”
Eric took Pam’s shoulder and propelled her out the door. “We’ll be back,” he said over his shoulder.
They squared off in the hallway with industrial carpet that looked like it had been designed by someone color-blind and a row of doors that seemed to stretch into oblivion. Two doors down, a DO NOT DISTURB card had been propped inside the lock.
“I meant what I said, Eric.” Pam crossed her arms. “Why does it always have to be about her?”
“Why does it make you so angry when I talk about her? Why can’t you understand that she’s a part of my life, that she always will be because of Seth?”
“I’m trying, Eric. Can’t you see that? I’m here because I’m supporting you. But it’s not my fault that it isn’t the best time hanging out with your ex-wife.”
“It’s your fault that you just keep harping on her about Seth going to that party. You have to stop. I just want a little unity.”
“So it’s you we have to please!” Pam lifted her chin. “And harping? Did you really use that word?”
Eric propped an elbow against the wall, leaning against it resolutely. “Look,
Hilary’s the one who’s being hurt here. I don’t like to see her this run-down by all this with Seth. It’s my duty to support —”
“You don’t make it look like that, Eric. You don’t make it look like duty. You make it look like you care about her more than me.”
“That’s just you, Pam. It’s how your dad pushed you when you were a girl. It doesn’t always have to be about who gets top prize.”
“You should have seen Lily with her at the doll place the other day. Even Lily likes her better than me.”
“You can’t be serious to think that. Lily was being kind. You’re Lily’s mother.”
“Do you know what it’s been like being married to you? Ever since the beginning? From the minute we first met each other, you started telling me about Hilary.”
“I don’t do that.”
“ ‘Hilary would do it this way.’ You say it all the time; are you aware of that, Eric? ‘Hilary doesn’t grill chicken like that.’ Or, ‘Hilary always helped Seth do his homework right after he got home from school.’ ”
“Not true.”
“You take every occasion to make sure I think it’s true.”
“Is that what all this is about? I’m a guy, Pam. Sometimes I say insensitive things. You want me to measure every word that comes out of my mouth?”
“You could try.”
“I’m trying to balance two lives.”
“Oh?” Her fists knotted at her sides. “So that makes you a hero?”
The door with the DO NOT DISTURB sign opened a crack. A muffled voice asked, “Do you mind? Everyone can hear you.”
Inside the adjoining rooms, it took forever to get all the money and the game pieces stuffed back into the box. Ben sorted everything by color and stacked the bills into their proper compartments, pretending he couldn’t hear. Lily lined the tiny hotels in a row on the floor. She kept at that as long as her parents’ dull voices volleyed outside the door. Until she told her brother that the town she was building was a stupid town, that she didn’t like it anymore, and she swept the pile of buildings away with her hand.
Laura Moore’s funeral was as pretty and bittersweet as a summertime funeral can be. Thirty minutes before the service, the church that the Moores had selected had already filled. Since then, people had started parking on the grass. A guest book was open on a table outside the heavy double doors. Lines of solemn attendees waited to sign.
It seemed the order of the day not to speak. Church visitors recognized one another, met one another’s eyes grimly, and nodded. A few whispered and hugged; others saved seats or milled around the foyer. Most had already saved a pew in the overflowing sanctuary. The sound system played a quiet worship song. Pictures of Laura when she was a little girl, some the very same shots that the boys had used in the senior video, faded in and out on an overhead screen. Members of the senior class each carried a yellow daisy, tied with a blue ribbon.
It had been Emily who’d convinced Seth he needed to be there, Emily who had been with Seth since early morning, repeating the same words that encouraged him when they appeared on the Web site this week: “Keep your head up. We’re in this together. Stay strong.”
Emily said, “We both have to let her go, Seth. We have to tell her good-bye.”
“I can’t,” he said, his voice tortured.
“You don’t have any choice.” Tears leaked from Emily’s eyes. “Neither of us do.”
“You know, Em,” Seth said with the voice of someone who’d finally lost patience with a young, pesky child. “I wish you’d stop telling me what you think I should do. I already have a perfectly good mother.”
“Seth.” The tears started rolling down Emily’s face. “I have these dreams, you know? Sometimes they’re daydreams and sometimes I’m asleep. I see Laura standing in front of me with those leaves in her hair.”
“It’s okay,” he said, fishing in his pocket for a tissue. He’d jammed a whole wad in there when he’d gone into the bathroom. “You go ahead and cry.”
“She looks at me with this smile on her face. Like we never went camping that night, like she never fell. But still, there are all those leaves in her hair. She’s just standing there.”
“How do you feel when you wake up?”
“I don’t know. Not scared really. Just…breathless. Because I wake up thinking she’s here. And then I remember she isn’t. It’s like she’s playing a joke on me.”
Seth knew what he had to say next. “Em. I was such a jerk. I had to go away from everybody. And that meant going away from you, too. I had to figure out on my own how to come to terms with it.”
She sniffed and blew her nose. For a long time, she stared at the shredded tissue as she folded and unfolded it in her hand.
“Sometimes I think you were lucky because you got to go back to the courthouse. Because they had to talk about what happened and if they were going to charge you. And then they didn’t.”
“Maybe you’re right,” he said.
“Do you think about that sometimes? Now, when you try to blame yourself, do you realize that they didn’t?”
“Yeah,” he told her. “I guess I do.”
“Well,” Emily said. “I didn’t have that.”
He gripped her shoulders. “Em.”
“You know that when I tell you what to do, when I tell you to grieve, when I tell you not to worry, that you have to do things, it’s because it’s easier to tell you, Seth. It’s easier to tell you than it is to tell myself.”
“You were just doing what you and Laura always do. You were encouraging her. You were telling her everything would be okay.”
“But it wasn’t okay.”
“But Emily, of course you thought it would be okay. It’s always been okay. Always.” He found another tissue in his pocket. He dabbed at a tear that had frozen on her cheek.
“I was at our favorite shop yesterday. I found a skirt on the sale rack Laura would have really liked. It looked like her, blue and white striped, the turquoise blue that matched her eyes. I pulled it off the rack. I turned around with it in my hand. I was going to turn around and show her.”
Seth pulled her against his chest.
“The color of the ribbons on the daisies,” she said, sobbing. “That was the color of that skirt.”
“Em.”
“We have to be there for each other, Seth. Even after we break up at the end of summer. We share this. I need to know you’re there.”
“I’m here, Emily,” he said.
Seth knew he couldn’t hide anymore. He needed to be there to support the Moores. Who knew how many times he and Emily would need to talk before they could go forward with their lives? Who knew?
Chapter 25
Laura Moore’s memorial service lasted over an hour. Many of the girl’s classmates stood and spoke. Various aunts, uncles, and cousins had anecdotes to tell. A family friend read a eulogy. Laura’s senior picture was framed, displayed on an easel at the altar. Roses, daylilies, and ferns stood in featherlike fans in their vases. With a few variations, everyone repeated the same thing: “Such a lovely young woman. Such a loss.” Emily reached across Seth’s leg and grabbed his hand. Their fingers braided together. Seth was bouncing his knee and his jaw was clenched and he didn’t move. Tears dripped from his chin.
Eric and Pam sat on the other side of Emily. The concierge at the hotel had found a babysitter for them, so they could be here for Seth. After the service ended, the minister invited everyone to gather in the fellowship hall for a meal. And Hilary did what she always did when she found herself in a big crowd and she wasn’t in the mood to talk to anyone. She headed straight to the kitchen and asked what she could do to help.
“Oh, thank you!” a dear frazzled lady said, then promptly sent Hilary on her way with two huge salads for the buffet table. After that, she restocked dinner rolls and those little gold packets of sweet-cream butter, which were being kept cool in a bowl of ice. She gathered up used glasses on a tray. She had never been much of a dishwa
sher; she’d managed to skip that particular duty during her odd-job college days. Someone who was more familiar with the industrial kitchen showed her how to organize the glasses in the rack.
As Hilary removed glassware from the machine, steam enveloped her face. She shoved her hair from her eyes and looked around for a spare towel. That’s when Hilary noticed Pam doing very much the same thing that Hilary was doing. Pam was carrying dirty plates to the counter and setting them beside the sink. Hilary glanced at her, made herself glance away.
Hilary found a towel and began to polish glasses. She wiped stray water droplets from them and loaded them on the cart. Just as she pushed the cart toward the double doors, another kitchen volunteer shoved her way past. She balanced two empty platters on one hand and headed for the stove.
She opened the oven door and yanked out a pan of fried chicken. The pan clattered to the counter. She slammed the oven shut. “I can’t believe that boy has the guts to show up here,” she said as she brandished a pair of tongs. As she reloaded the platters with chicken, she was so angry that her hands were shaking. “If that boy hadn’t talked her into it, if that drunk kid hadn’t dragged her up the rocks, Laura would still be making plans to go off to college. She’d still be thinking about decorating her dorm room. She’d still be making plans for her future instead of this.”
Ice coursed through Hilary’s veins. Across the way, she saw Pam raise her head. Of course, Hilary knew people were out there saying things like that. But here they were in a church, seeking grace. Here they were remembering Laura, trying to heal.
“Let me tell you, you couldn’t punish that kid enough for what he did.”
Hilary’s hand spun the rag inside the glass. The only thing she could do was stare at her fist twisting inside the goblet. Across the room, Hilary knew Pam had heard what the woman said because Pam started scouring plates so hard that lettuce fluttered in every direction. Beans flew into the trash can. Pam dashed the dishes into the sink, making a horrible racket. When she aimed the heavy commercial sprayer at the plates and let the water surge, Hilary wasn’t sure what she expected from Eric’s other wife. Pam was hanging on to that sprayer like she was about to turn it on somebody. Hilary was just waiting for Pam to aim the water across the room at the volunteer and shout, Don’t you know that’s his mother over there? You can’t blame Seth for this because she could have stopped him! You have to blame her. If Hilary knew anything about Pam at all, it was that she didn’t do well controlling her emotions.
His Other Wife Page 21
