“Uh, yeah. I live just down on Park and Fourth. Close. You okay?”
“Yeah. I’m...yeah.”
“Hey, I was thinking, we should talk more about making our own writing group...but like without any psychos like Jonathan or hotshot writers ruining it with loud readings in the background. Just cool people, maybe some booze involved.” She laughs. “You in?”
“Yeah, maybe. I’ll think on it.”
“I’ll text you,” she says, before she pulls her rubber hood tighter with two drawstrings and jogs off down Main. What exactly does she have against Jonathan, and was the hotshot writer comment a dig at Luke? There were a few other authors who gave readings at the bookstore over the summer. I’m sure it was a general statement, and I’m sure that she is really just jogging. I didn’t know she ran races, but how well do I know her? She didn’t look dressed for training, but I guess a runner would throw a rain parka on over running clothes in this weather. There are perfectly reasonable explanations for why Mia was running from Luke Ellison’s property.
I remember the story she wrote in for the writing group. She seemed a little too comfortable describing murder and slow revenge in great detail. I feel my stomach turn when I think about the possibility that she was sleeping with him too. If it was easy to have a fling with Lacy, why not her? A single guy stuck in this small town. I take a deep breath and blow it out through my mouth, hard. No. I can’t let myself get paranoid.
17
WHEN I GET HOME, Ben is playing a video game—some car racing thing—Rachel is on her laptop with headphones attached, settled into the recliner in the living room, and Collin is napping on the couch between them. Not a bad way to spend a rainy day. I see Collin has made some cinnamon rolls from a tube, the cardboard curl and tub of sugary icing discarded in the sink. I pour a cup of coffee and instinctively check on Claire the way I usually do when I come in. I grab the last cinnamon roll and put it on a small plate to take to her.
“Hey, bub, get your swim stuff together,” I say to Ben as I make my way down the hall. I see Claire’s door cracked open. That’s odd; she always keeps it closed. She prefers her privacy, and she sleeps most of the time. Although I know she doesn’t have the capacity to do so, sometimes I think she wants it that way to protect the kids from seeing her waste away, but that’s not really possible, I know. I don’t think too much of it until I open the door, peering in, and don’t see her in her usual spot, propped up in her bed with the TV and fan on. She wanders to the bathroom on her own sometimes. I put the plate down, and I check the bathroom. Then I check all the other rooms in the back of the house, telling myself she’s just wandered off down the hall somewhere, before shouting to Collin and running to the living room, looking again inside each door on my way.
“Collin!”
I see him sit up quickly, pretending he wasn’t asleep.
“Mel, what’s wrong?”
“Where’s your mom?”
“What do you mean?” He hasn’t registered my panic yet.
“She’s not in her room, or any of the back rooms. Kids, go check the rest of the house, look in your rooms.”
Ben starts to cry. He cannot handle shouting or any kind of stress or emergency without shutting down. I should have been more careful.
“Mom?” Collin starts calling around the house. I comfort Ben.
“Honey, it’s okay. Nobody is upset, it’s just not like your grandma to go anywhere on her own.” I make my voice overly light. “It’s fine, baby.”
He calms a little.
“Do you wanna help?”
He nods and goes to check his room. We clear all the rooms, and Rachel even checks behind every shower curtain and behind open doors like it’s a deranged game of hide-and-seek. Collin runs down to look in the basement, and I carefully open the sliding glass door as a clap of thunder sounds and the gathering storm inches closer. I’m afraid to look in the backyard. I shudder thinking about Claire wandering off because of our negligence, that I might find her bloated body floating in the backyard pool. The blood around Luke’s head flashes in my memory as I walk across the pool deck and peer in. I exhale when I see she’s not there.
I meet a panicked Collin back in the living room. He grabs an umbrella from the front closet and starts to put his shoes on.
“When’s the last time you saw her?” I ask.
“I don’t know. Last night. She was asleep, I thought she was still asleep, right?”
“She was when I checked on her this morning.”
“What time?” he demands.
“I guess between six and seven. I left a breakfast tray. I thought she was sleeping late too. Like she usually does.” This morning I tiptoed around the kitchen because I was up earlier than everyone. I made up a plate of eggs and toast. She usually wakes up to eat and then naps most of the morning, but she was still out, so I just left it.
I remember this and run back to her room. The food was eaten. Just the crusts left on her bedside tray. The window isn’t ajar. I didn’t imagine that, distracted as I am. Where could she possibly be?
When I get back to the living room, the kids are slipping rain boots on. Collin is being gentle with the way he handles himself so Ben will want to help and not revert into meltdown mode.
Should we call the cops? I mouth to Collin over Ben, who is sitting on the floor pulling on a sock. He answers out loud because his reply won’t scare the kids the way my question would.
“Let’s drive around and look for her first. If she slipped out the door, she couldn’t have gotten far.”
I nod in agreement and we all pile in and drive the tree-lined streets as the sky opens up and the rain falls in torrents, thundering on the metal roof of the car. It’s half past noon. I try to think about the window of time she’s been gone. She’s been unaccounted for for at least five hours. The sliding door was unlocked when I went out to look for her, but it usually is during the day.
Suddenly, I can’t help but wonder if that simple sentence on a disposable cell phone, I know what you did, Melanie Hale, was a threat.
What if someone has taken Claire? It doesn’t make sense. They have dirt on me. If they want something in return for keeping quiet, why haven’t they asked? I’ve been going up to the bathroom and checking the phone for a message as often as I safely can. There’s been nothing. I feel the bile rise in my stomach as we drive and I think of her scared, hurt...because of me.
After twenty minutes or so, there is a lull in the downpour and we open the car windows.
Ben calls out with hands cupped around his mouth, “Grandmaaaa!”
We’ve woven through all the streets in a reasonable distance from our house. We stop and ask a few of the neighbors we see sitting out on covered porches. No one has seen her.
“Where is she, Mom? Is she mad at us?” Ben asks, pausing from his steady bellowing of her name.
“No, honey, she just gets mixed up sometimes. You know that. It’ll be okay.”
I notice that Rachel is quiet. She looks worried, but there’s something else too. After about an hour, Collin looks over at me, defeated. I give a nod, and he seems to understand that it means we should go back to the house and call the police.
When we get back, I tell Rachel to occupy Ben with a video game or something so we can talk to the police and he won’t get freaked out. She obeys without protest, and they go into his room, where I hear her asking him about his Lego ship and successfully distracting him. Before Collin punches in the numbers to call, I motion for him to wait, and I point out the back sliding door with wide, confused eyes. He puts the phone down and comes over to see what I’m pointing at. It’s Claire.
She’s sitting on a wrought iron bench in the garden area. She’s wearing a white nightgown and her wig is sliding down the side of her head. She’s drenched and her hands are covered with mud up the elbow. Her feet are covered too. She s
tares at the house with a very unsettling look. It makes me shudder. Collin and I stand at the open glass door and stare back a moment. It feels as though she’s looking right through us and it’s chilling. Then she spits on the ground.
He shakes off the shock of how strange it all is and rushes over to her. I go and grab towels and her robe and hand them to him when he gets her inside.
“Mom, where were you?” he asks, shaken, but he knows that no answer will come. She’s looking away, at nothing, her mouth slightly open.
“I’ll get her into a bath,” I say, knowing that Collin is eternally grateful that he does not have to see his mother naked, and he knows that she would want it that way too, so I always offer when it comes to things like diapers and bathing. He smiles, gratefully.
“Okay. I’ll put some tea on.”
“Thanks. Ben missed his swimming thing, so that might take some strategic deflection once he realizes it,” I say as I help Claire up the stairs to the bathroom.
“I’m on it.” He gives a weak smile and I’m glad we’re such a good team with things like this. As I take Claire past Ben’s room, Rachel is standing in the doorway, watching us.
“He’s playing Mario Kart.”
“Okay, thanks.”
“Need help?” she asks. She doesn’t usually volunteer. There is still that same, odd look in her eyes.
“Come on,” I say, and she follows to Claire’s bathroom. She pulls herself up to sit on the counter while I get Claire into the water.
“Why do you think she walked off like that?” Rachel asks, looking at the tile floor and hooking her hair around her ear.
“Well, sweetie, she gets confused. I don’t really know. She hasn’t done it before, but maybe she opened the wrong door while everyone was off doing their own thing, and she didn’t realize.” Rachel nods, tentatively.
“What is it, honey? It’s not your fault.”
“Okay.” She twists her hair around a finger.
“I hope you don’t think it is.”
“It’s just that—it’s not the first time.”
“What?” I stop washing Claire’s back and straighten up, turning to my daughter.
“A week or two ago, I don’t remember exactly, I noticed she wasn’t in her room. I was the only one home with her, so I panicked. I looked all over and she just showed back up, just like today.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You told me to keep an eye on her and I didn’t,” she says, looking like she may cry.
“Honey, it’s not your responsibility to take care of her. That’s not fair to you. If we knew she’d ever take off like that I wouldn’t have left you alone with her. You should have called me though. One of us would have come home right away. Okay?”
“Yeah. I’m sorry. Where do you think she goes?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart, I think she just gets turned around in her mind and she doesn’t know what she’s doing sometimes.” I know that’s disturbing to her.
Claire is sitting silently, patiently, in the bathwater with her hairless scalp bobbing slightly, mouth open. She’s off somewhere very far away and I can imagine how frightening and ominous that must be for a child to see. It’s difficult for me still, and each day I handle bodily fluids and discard rancid-smelling linens. I should be used to it, but maybe one never gets accustomed to looking at vacant eyes and a body that has betrayed itself. A soul vacating its body should be reserved for death. This is cruel, a life without memory—without a past or future—she’s just existing, and I wonder if living like this is what Claire would have wanted, if she’d had a choice. Or would she have just wanted to go to sleep and not wake up again?
Rachel lowers herself down from the counter and hands me a bath towel for Claire. I hear Ben wailing down the hall. We both know he’s realized he missed his swimming lesson he was excited about.
“It’s okay, he has a sleepover pizza party thing with his baseball friends tonight. Want me to remind him so he shuts up?” she asks, half out the door, but lingering to wait for my answer.
“Thanks, honey,” I say before she disappears into the chaos in the living room. I hear her walk down the hall and call Ben a spaz. But seconds later, his crying is quieted, so I guess it worked.
After I get Claire dressed in a wool nightgown and gently prop her against a heap of pillows in her bed, I hand her a cup of peppermint tea, not too hot, and turn on a channel that plays old, syndicated sitcoms. When I close the door, I go to the kitchen to make the kids some lunch, but Collin has taken care of it. The counter is littered with open pickle jars, ketchup spills and a bag of whole wheat buns that I seal before they go stale. He hands me a turkey burger on a plate, and I smile, exhausted by the task of Claire and grateful the kids have eaten.
“Thank you. This looks great.”
“She okay?” he asks as he makes up a plate for her.
“Yeah. She’s resting. She’s fine as far as I can tell.”
“It’s so weird that she’d do that.” He’s cutting a pear into bite-size pieces. “We’ll have to figure something out to secure the back door.”
“I suppose we will. Like a child lock?” I know it’s hard for him, this role reversal with his mother. I try to take the brunt of it so he can maintain a mother-son relationship with her as much as is possible. I really can’t imagine seeing my mother like that, so it breaks my heart for him. I don’t ask why she’d be muddy up to the elbows—was she digging for something? Where could she have been?
“I guess.” He clearly doesn’t want to think about it.
I offer to take her plate back, but he says he has it and heads back to her room. Ben bounces into the kitchen holding a Buzz Lightyear sleeping bag. He tosses it next to his overnight bag sitting on a kitchen chair.
“We get to sleep on the floor!” he says excitedly.
“Cool, bud.”
“We gotta wear our jerseys.”
“I see that. Is it clean?”
But he’s already in his number eight baseball jersey. Bless Mrs. Miller for taking on six special needs kids overnight.
“Yeah. Can I wear your Saints cap?”
“Sure, honey. Look in my closet,” I say, and he’s darting away before I can ask him if he packed his toothbrush. I don’t sit to eat; I stop to take bites while I tidy up the kitchen. I scrape plates into the disposal and wipe down the spills on the counter with disinfectant wipes. I don’t take for granted the beauty of this simple act—caring after my children. I promise myself not to take anything for granted anymore. I guess guilt offers perspective.
Ben comes back in, minutes later, with an overcome look, giving me a dramatic account of all the places he looked and couldn’t find the cap.
“I looked everywheeeere.” He drapes himself over the kitchen stool as though the search has drained him and he needs reinforcements. I start to tell him I’ll help him look for it, but then I stop cold.
There is no need to look for it, because we won’t find it. The doorbell saves me, and I help him on with his backpack and carry his sleeping bag and pillow down the slope of the front yard to meet Sandy Miller at her car and thank her for taking him. I tell her I’ll pick him up tomorrow before noon, and then I sit a moment after she drives away, on the front stairs, to collect my thoughts.
The cap isn’t here. The night I sat in Luke’s truck in the bookstore parking lot, I took it off. Lacy almost caught us, so I rushed out of the car. I left it behind. You’d think that investigators wouldn’t look twice at a worn-out Saints cap left in a car. Except that once Ben fell in love with it and kept wearing it to school, I wrote the word HALE in Sharpie on the inside of the rim so it wouldn’t get lost. My name is literally written somewhere in Luke’s property.
18
COLLIN WORKS FROM HIS home office on Monday, and I usually love having him home. It means a long breakfast a
fter the kids leave for school, chatting about nothing in particular over coffee and usually a walk to Edith’s Café for lunch, but today I’m fidgety and anxious and I want to be able to catch up on any developments in Luke’s case without fear of him seeing me.
I hear him in his office on a work call, talking to Richard, a notoriously high-maintenance client, so I pour a mug of coffee and drop some bread in the toaster. No elaborate breakfast today. The kids had cereal, and I can’t concentrate on much more than pouring milk or buttering toast right now. I sit in the window seat next to the dining room table with my coffee, curling my knees to my chest as I watch a fat squirrel balance on a telephone line across the street. Amy Johanson, who lives a few houses down, steps onto her front stoop to collect the morning paper. I watch her clutch her robe at the neck; she’s surprised by the chilly wind. The Rodderhams’ dog is roaming without a leash again, sniffing his way through the adjacent yards and lifting his leg to every shrub he passes. It’s a perfectly normal morning and it seems so hard to believe that Luke is gone and everything just moves ahead as if he were never here.
I think about the Saints cap. I haven’t been able to sleep since I remembered it. In Luke’s house, which is full of clothes, books, shoes, hats, furniture—a person’s whole life, tons of everyday things—why would they notice a ball cap? They don’t examine every single item in the house, of course not. They’re looking for things that stand out. Why would they even notice it? That is, if he brought it into the house.
Surely he did. He must have seen it on the passenger seat that night, brought it inside, and planned to let me know I’d left it but forgot, so it’s sitting on a hook somewhere or on a living room bookshelf, anonymous. I had been in his truck once more since the day I left it there. I’d ducked down in the passenger seat as we drove to a secluded spot near a creek. My toes on the dash, we’d bumped and bobbed through rough terrain, and I’d held on to the door, laughing, as we acted like naive teenagers that day. It shames me to think about now. I would have seen it though, in the cab of his truck, or he would have remembered to return it if it were sitting there on the seat, reminding him every day. It must be tossed somewhere in his house. I need to stay levelheaded. It will not do me any good to start unraveling over the very minute chance it could be noticed.
Such a Good Wife Page 14
