Lauren glanced at Jeff. “What are you saying?”
“Nothing, really. It’s kind of crazy, that’s all. You being the last one to see that kid, Bo, then a couple of days later there’s this mix-up with your car.”
“The two things aren’t related.” Lauren heard how she sounded, indignant, offended. Was it how an innocent person would sound? Or a guilty one? She put her face in her hands.
“No, but I didn’t think you’d want to draw more attention from law enforcement, right? If you’d still been gone this morning, I’d have had to contact them. I’m just glad it didn’t come to that.” Jeff’s voice was so quiet, it was almost surreal.
Lauren was confused by it. “Why aren’t you yelling at me? I would be if I were you.”
“What good would it do?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“I must have dozed off, waiting for you, and when I woke up around two this morning and you still weren’t home, I went outside and found you passed out in the yard. The sprinklers had kicked on. That’s why you’re muddy.”
“Where did I say I’d been?”
“Houston, some bar near White Oak Bayou. You said some guys there hooked you up.”
Lauren closed her eyes again, feeling sick. She knew the location. It was a dive, a dank hole in a graffiti-scratched brick wall. She’d been there a few times after Bettinger cut off her legal drug supply. One of the nurse’s aides at rehab had told her about it when she showed up for a session, looking as rough as she felt. He’d taken pity on her and scribbled out an address that even she knew was located in one of the worst neighborhoods in Houston. Every time she went there, she took her life in her hands. Every time she swallowed the Oxy, she knew she could die.
She nearly had died once from an overdose. She would have if Kenzie hadn’t come home from school and found her. In the front yard, facedown, barely breathing. Lauren knew from Jeff’s account that Kenzie had been terrified. Still, she’d had the presence of mind to work through the steps, at first trying to rouse Lauren, and when that hadn’t worked, she’d gone into the house and dialed 911. The operator there had called for an ambulance, then instructed Kenzie on what to do until help arrived.
“Roll your mom on her side,” the operator said. “Tilt back her head and lift her chin to keep her airway clear.”
It was unbearable to imagine a child, her own daughter, being put through such an ordeal. What kid gets coached, schooled in what to do if they find their mother passed out and drugged to the gills? Remembering now, Lauren bent over her knees, almost choking on the evil tar of self-loathing that rose into her throat. She would never outlive the guilt; she didn’t deserve to, and here she was, at it again. Swiftly, she went to the toilet, dropped the tablets—plastic and all—into the bowl, and flushed them away.
When she came back, Jeff slid his hands under her elbows and drew her into his embrace.
“I—I sort of remember going there, but I don’t remember taking anything,” she said. “A—a glass of wine—I drank a glass of wine, or maybe two.”
“You had a bit more than that, I think,” Jeff said.
Lauren stepped out of his embrace. Finding a tissue, she blew her nose. She seldom drank anymore. Since the accident, alcohol affected her differently, and its impact on her was only intensified if she was taking Oxy. In fact, she had been warned not to drink at all when she was on it.
“I’m surprised you didn’t call Gloria,” Jeff said.
“I thought about it.” Lauren shrugged. It had seemed pointless. Gloria would have insisted on meeting; she would have given Lauren the speech about waiting through the next minute, and the next, and the next, until the whole abomination of her terrible, gut-ripping desire to lose herself passed. Yesterday, standing in the street, holding her mother’s scarf, the evidence of her deluded behavior in her hands, Lauren hadn’t believed that sobriety was anything she could want, much less sustain. She didn’t know if she believed in it now. After almost a year attending 12-step meetings, she still didn’t know where to find that conviction, the way out of her bouts with despair. “It was selfish,” she said. “Selfish of me to put you and the children through that. I’m so sorry.” Her voice was rough with her unfallen tears, but she had no right to let them go, no right to a release of any kind.
“You shouldn’t have been driving,” Jeff said.
“No,” she said, and she turned from him to lean on the sink’s edge while the awful question of what she might have done coiled in her brain like a snake, tongue darting, ready to strike her down with any number of sordid revelations.
“The kids need to get up. They’ll be late for school. Do you want me to take care of them?”
“No, I’ll do it as soon as I take a shower. There’s time.” Lauren lifted her glance to the mirror and, wincing at her image, looked quickly away. “I’ll make waffles. They’ll be thrilled.” BTA Lauren had made waffles. Maybe if she copied her, if she faked those motherly, nurturing things she had done often enough, the knack of being her would come back.
She looked again in the mirror and found Jeff’s gaze there. He looked so worried, so undone. Turning to him, Lauren cupped his cheek. “Just let me get a shower. Then I’ll make breakfast, okay? I just need to be with you and the kids.”
He wasn’t convinced.
“Look, you can hide the car keys at night if you want. I’ll go to more meetings. I won’t drink again, ever, because maybe that’s all this is, a bad reaction to the wine.” Even she knew better.
“Maybe you should talk to Dr. Bettinger.”
“Yes.” She brightened, feeling eager. “It’s almost time for my checkup anyway.”
Jeff said, “Okay then. If you’re sure you don’t need me, I have a couple of calls to make. We’re starting preliminary work on the Waller-Land building.”
“Today? Oh, of course, today. What am I saying?” Her smile felt foolish, wrong. “Go,” she urged, brightly.
He held her gaze a moment and then left, and she leaned, stiff-armed, on the vanity. What if she’d had a wreck last night and killed someone? What if she’d gone home with one of the men she vaguely remembered drinking with? What if a neighbor or the children had seen her passed out on the lawn?
After her shower, she woke them, first, Kenzie, who was easily roused, and then Drew, who was not. Back in the kitchen, she started breakfast, layering bacon into a frying pan, turning on a low fire underneath it. But then, getting out her cell phone, she called Tara, needing her sister, the sound of her voice, her reassurance. “Can you have lunch later?” Lauren asked when Tara answered. “I’ll meet you at that tearoom near your office. What’s the name of it?”
“I can’t.” Tara declined so quickly that Lauren was taken aback.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, but then, remembering Greg, she thought she knew, and she waited to hear that Tara had found out he was gone or back on heroin or both.
Instead, Tara said she wasn’t at the office but home in bed, still not feeling good. “It’s some nasty intestinal bug.”
She was lying, Lauren thought. It was Greg that ailed her. Tara just didn’t want to admit it, that she’d lost another man, another relationship.
“I could bring you some 7UP.” Lauren named the soft drink their mother had given them to settle their stomachs when they were kids.
“That’s sweet of you, but I don’t want you catching this.”
“Okay,” Lauren said, “but you can talk to me, you know.”
There was a beat of silence, and Lauren got the sense that Tara was fighting not to cry. “I’m okay,” she said, but her voice was strained. “I will be, I guess.”
“Has he called?”
“Who?”
“Greg,” Lauren said. “Have you talked to him?”
“Have you?”
“Not lately.” Lauren paused. “There’ll be o
ther guys, you know.”
“Oh, Lauren, if only that could fix it.” Her voice hitched.
Lauren felt her own tears rise. “It’ll be okay, TeeRee—”
“Has he been at meetings? Greg, I mean?”
Lauren said she hadn’t gone to any meetings this week, and she was explaining about Bo, that she was helping in the search for him when Tara broke in.
“I can’t talk about this now.”
“About what?”
“Greg. I don’t want to talk about Greg.”
Lauren was nonplussed. “Okay,” she said.
“Why did you want to have lunch, anyway? What’s wrong?”
Lauren thought about saying it was nothing; she thought about saying the everything that it was. But suddenly, she had as little desire to talk about last night as Tara did to talk about Greg. Her antics, her backsliding were only symptoms of the real trouble anyway. “I don’t trust, TeeRee. I have no faith in people. You, Jeff. I’m going to drive everyone who loves me away if I don’t stop feeling like this, doubting everyone, being suspicious of them.”
“People don’t like their love and loyalty questioned. They don’t like to be—” Tara interrupted herself. “Whatever it is you think Jeff is planning—divorcing you, taking the children—it’s just not true. It’s nuts for you to think either of us would do that.”
“You did say—”
“Yes, but that was when you were still using, and you’ve stopped now.”
“My mind isn’t the same, though. I don’t feel like me, the me I used to be. I’m scared—and lately, I feel so crazy. Crazier, I guess.”
“Have you called Bettinger?”
“I’m going to.”
“Maybe you need a shrink instead. I don’t mean that in a bad way—”
“I know. Oh, God, the bacon’s burning. I’ve got to go!” It was true. Lauren dropped her phone on the counter and shut off the gas flame under the frying pan. How did it happen? a punishing voice in her brain wanted to know. You were standing right here, it said.
It was the last of it, the last of the bacon. There wasn’t any more, and she set about salvaging the burned batch, prying the charred centers of the strips from the bottom of the pan, then carefully pressing the curled ends into the still-hot drippings to brown. Grim now, focused on simply serving her children their breakfast, she whipped up the waffle batter. It was a sudden longing for something lovely that sent her outside to collect a few roses from the heavenly scented antique shrub, Souvenir de la Malmaison, that bloomed near the back door. The thorn that pricked the tender webbing of flesh between her thumb and the base of her index finger drew blood and a renewed threat of tears that disgusted her. She had put the flowers into a small vase and set it on the kitchen island, and she was dishing up the waffles and overdone bacon, when Kenzie and Drew slid onto their stools. They exchanged a glance, one that said louder than words, What’s up with her?
Before the accident, Drew would have smarted off about the bacon; Kenzie would have turned up her pert nose and said she wasn’t having any. But these days, they never said such things. They never gave a moment’s trouble, and Lauren deplored it—how nice they were, how careful of her feelings. She’d heard Jeff admonish them: Don’t talk back to Mom. Don’t fight with each other. Don’t yell in the house, slam the door, run the stairs. Don’t, don’t, don’t. Ever since she’d come home from rehab, the family walked on eggshells.
She wanted her regular, mouthy kids back, the ones who could be brats, who could shove and sass each other, who could argue and laugh and shout uproariously. She wanted the loud clatter of their feet on the wood floors, their incessant nattering and arguing.
“I heated the syrup, so be careful,” she said.
“Where’s Dad?” Drew cut a huge bite of waffle, poking it into his mouth.
“On the phone.” Lauren brought her mug of coffee to the island and sat down across from her children.
“Mommy, are you okay?”
Lauren could have cried on seeing the gravity of her daughter’s expression. The worry etched onto her sweet brow belonged to someone older, a person with a world of trouble on her shoulders, not an eleven-year-old child. “I’m fine, honey,” she said, and it was an effort to lift her voice and the vestige of a smile above the well of sorrow that felt permanently wedged under the floor of her heart. No matter how clean and sober she got, the past was there. She’d never be able to undo it.
“You don’t look fine,” Kenzie said.
“You’ve got that mug in a death grip,” Drew pointed out.
Lauren loosened her grasp, feeling the blood flow into her cramped fingers. She settled her breath. Still, she jumped at the squeal of brakes that announced the school bus.
Kenzie scrambled off her stool, grabbing her backpack.
“Don’t forget your lunch.” Lauren retrieved a small pink nylon tote she’d packed earlier with yogurt, a banana, and Wheat Thins—Kenzie was already conscious of her weight—from the kitchen counter and handed it to her.
“You’re picking us up after school, right? Me and Amanda? We have ballet, and it’s your turn to drive.”
“I’ll be there,” Lauren promised.
“You won’t forget?”
“Three twenty, right?” Lauren smoothed Kenzie’s brow.
She nodded, but her gaze was somber and riddled with apprehension.
Lauren reached for her, hoping to reassure her, but just then Drew called to her from outside, and she wheeled from Lauren’s grasp, bolting through the back door and running down the driveway, Lauren following in her wake.
When Kenzie reached the bus door, she paused and looked back, and Lauren smiled and waved, the way she always did. Maybe her smile felt more adamant and her wave foolishly large and of longer duration, but never mind. The important thing was that she was there for Drew and Kenzie—for all the neighborhood—to see she was a sober and responsible parent. And no matter what else happened today, she would be at the school this afternoon, front and center, first car in the line.
She was rinsing the syrup from the breakfast plates when Jeff came into the kitchen, carrying his briefcase. “There are waffles leftover,” she said. “I can heat one up for you.”
“I wish, but no time. Can I have a rain check?”
“Maybe.” She was glad for his easy manner. “I put the Waller-Land folder in your briefcase.”
“I saw it, thanks,” he said. “I damn sure don’t need an inspector on my ass today. Kaiser’s nervous enough as it is.”
“He didn’t seem nervous to me.”
“Well, I guess you haven’t seen him since we found the asbestos.”
“Asbestos?” Lauren hadn’t remembered the inspector finding asbestos in the building. She hated for Jeff to work around it.
“Yeah. I had to tell him you can’t just shovel that shit into a landfill, you know? He wasn’t too happy.”
“I thought it was marginal—” Lauren was guessing, pretending she knew. It wasn’t necessary. Jeff was on to the kids.
“You’re picking Kenzie and Amanda up for ballet, right?” He shrugged into his jacket.
“I told her I was.” Affront rode in Lauren’s voice. She couldn’t help it.
“Hey,” Jeff said, “don’t shoot the messenger. She asked me, okay? She’s worried. You know.”
Lauren looked down at the towel, fighting the thrust of her resentment. It was as if she was the child and Kenzie the mother.
“Do you want to ride with me?” Jeff asked. “I’ll wait.”
She looked at him. “I don’t need a babysitter.”
“I didn’t mean—”
She cut him off. “I’m going into town first anyway. I want to see how Annie’s doing, if she’s had any news.”
“No! Lauren, for God’s sake. You were there all day yesterday. You made yours
elf—”
Crazy. She wondered why he didn’t say it.
“That isn’t why I went off the deep end—” Lauren clamped her jaw. She didn’t want to talk about the mix-up with the car. She didn’t want to even think about it. “I’ll be at work as quickly as I can, Jeff. I promise.”
“The search effort’s being shut down.”
“But the police are still looking. Annie, other people—no one’s giving up.”
“Don’t do this, okay?” he said. “Don’t get yourself involved in this other family’s business any further.” He waited, and when she didn’t respond, he brushed by her without another word or the rote kiss.
Lauren readied herself in anticipation of hearing the door slam, but he closed it behind him so gently she heard almost nothing at all, and it seemed all the more ominous that he should be so upset with her and yet make so little noise in leaving her.
She turned to stare at it, wondering what he might do, what he could be planning.
After a moment, she pulled her cell phone from her purse, dialed Tara’s number, and walked to the window, twitching the curtain to one side, watching Jeff back his truck down the driveway while Tara’s phone rang four times, five, then six before rolling to voice mail.
Tara had probably turned off her phone and was sleeping, Lauren thought.
“If you’d like to leave a message . . .” the canned voice said.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said in response. “I’m scared,” she told the waiting silence, and she listened for a moment to the blood in her ears, the ticking of her pulse.
“Where are you?” she whispered.
18
They’d been calling veterinarians for close to a half hour on Thursday morning when Annie caught the lilt of what sounded like cautious excitement in Lauren’s voice. Their eyes connected. Lauren held up a finger even as she continued speaking. “Yes, that sounds like the woman we’re looking for,” she said, then, “Would it be possible for you to give me her name and phone number?”
Crooked Little Lies Page 21
