But she trailed off, and Melinda’s eyes immediately dropped to Maddie’s belly, but the dirty T-shirt was too big to see any shape on the tiny woman. It dawned on Melinda that the T-shirt looked like a man’s T-shirt. It probably belonged to Michael.
Maddie seemed to mull over what Karen had said for quite some time. Then she pushed open the door a little wider and backed up. “You can come in,” she said, although not warmly.
They filed in after her, stepping into a dank and dark house that smelled stale and slightly meaty. Papers, mail, were scattered across the dusty tables. A stained blanket that was draped over the couch grazed the floor. Drinking glasses in various states of emptiness lined an end table.
Maddie picked up the blanket and tossed it into a heap on the floor next to the table, then sat on the edge of the sofa. Joanna followed her lead, sitting next to her. Karen moved a stack of papers off an easy chair and slid into it. Melinda stood in the doorway, unsure what to do with herself.
“Sorry, I haven’t cleaned much lately,” Maddie said. She balled up the hem of her T-shirt, kneading the fabric in her fist.
“That’s fine,” Karen said. “We aren’t here to check up on your housekeeping skills.”
“Why are you here?” Maddie said quickly. “I don’t really remember that day, so if you’re looking for information or something, I probably can’t help you.”
“That’s very normal,” Melinda said, hating how she sounded so clinical. Not at all what they’d come here for.
“We’re not looking for anything,” Karen said. “We just wanted to check in on you. See how you were doing.”
“It was a terrible accident,” Joanna added.
Maddie turned on her, her eyes suddenly ablaze. “Yes, I remember that much,” she snapped.
Joanna looked stricken. “I didn’t mean . . . ,” she stammered.
“I know exactly what you meant,” Maddie said. “It didn’t knock my brains out, as much as it tried.” She reached up and touched a spot on the side of her head, and for the first time Melinda noticed a small shaved spot there, stubbles of hair growing back, where there had undoubtedly been stitches.
There was a beat of uncomfortable silence, which Melinda interrupted. “I think she just meant that because you were in such a terrible accident, we wanted to check on you.”
“To see how you were getting through everything,” Karen added.
Maddie let out a low, sardonic chuckle, watching her own hands as they twisted her T-shirt into angry wrinkles. “How I’m getting through everything,” she muttered.
Melinda and Joanna exchanged glances, and Melinda wondered if Joanna was thinking what she was thinking—that this was a mistake. That it was worse than not being remembered. They were not wanted. Maddie Routh seemed to be angry that they were even there. Melinda tried to convey with her eyes that maybe they should leave, but Joanna didn’t seem to catch the subtle message.
“I’m not,” Maddie said suddenly, dropping her hands to either side of her on the couch. “I’m not getting through anything. Look around you. The house is falling apart. I’m falling apart. Everything is falling apart and I don’t even care.” She leveled her eyes at Melinda. “Michael was my life. And now he’s gone and I watched him die, and I don’t care what happens with the rest of my life now. Except I’m forced to.” Her hands clawed their way back to her midsection, only now instead of twisting her T-shirt into knots she ground two fists into her belly. “I’m not making it through, but I’m forced to come out the other end.”
“The baby,” Karen said softly.
“Yeah. The baby,” Maddie repeated. “The baby is the whole reason we were waiting at that stoplight that day. The baby is the reason neither of us saw that school bus coming. The baby is alive, but its father is dead. What kind of sense does that make?”
“I’m so sorry,” Joanna said, and Melinda could see that Joanna had tears in her eyes.
“Me, too,” Maddie said. “Because without Michael, I don’t even know if I want it anymore.” She closed her eyes and dipped her head forward. “The bundle of joy,” she whispered, and gave another of those chuckles, a tear slipping out from under one of her eyelids.
Joanna reached over and tried patting Maddie’s shoulder, but Maddie shrugged her off, and Joanna jerked back. “Sorry,” she repeated. “I was just . . .”
“Yeah, you were just,” Maddie said. She looked around the room at each of them. “You were all just.” She stood. “Everyone is just, and nobody is actually helping.” She closed her eyes, took a breath, opened them again, visibly steadying herself. “Look, I appreciate you all stopping by. But I’m not the best company right now. There’s really nothing more you can do for me.” She stood, walked briskly to the front door, and opened it.
It took a second or two for the rest of them to catch on, but after a couple of awkward glances, they got up and followed her, spilling out onto the porch.
Karen was last out the door. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” she said softly, touching Maddie Routh on the elbow on her way past. “If you need anything, you can find me at the Tea Rose Diner most mornings.”
“Just pretend I died,” Maddie responded. “I do it all the time. I wish I had.”
“The offer stands,” Karen responded. “Come on,” she said to Melinda and Joanna as she walked past, the wood of her pumps clacking on the sidewalk with purpose.
• • •
“I never expected all that,” Joanna said when they got into the car. “I mean, I think I expected her to be confused about why we were there, but I didn’t expect all of that.”
“She’s very angry,” Karen added. “It’s normal. We came at the wrong time.”
“To put it mildly,” Joanna said. “I’m a little worried about that baby.”
“Me, too,” Karen said. “I could see her being nervous about raising a child alone, or sad about the baby not ever knowing its father, but I didn’t think she’d be so . . . against having it at all.”
“Right?” Joanna said.
“I actually think I get it,” Melinda said. And she did. A part of her really understood where Maddie Routh was coming from.
“But it’s not the baby’s fault that its father is dead,” Joanna said. “It’s nobody’s fault, really.”
“That’s exactly the point,” Melinda said. “How do you bring a baby into a world where people end up dead and it’s nobody’s fault?” She pulled into the diner parking lot and shifted the car into park. She didn’t realize until she felt Karen’s hand on top of her own that she was trembling.
“You okay?” Karen asked.
Melinda thought about that morning. Paul had been chattering away, so hopeful after their second meeting at the fertility clinic. He’d been like a kid waiting for Christmas. The guilt had eaten her up, so much so that she almost tossed her pill into the toilet, flushed it away.
Yet, in the end, she didn’t. She’d stood in the shower and sobbed as she chewed.
“I don’t know,” she told Karen, sitting in her car in the Tea Rose parking lot. “I thought I was, but now I’m not sure that I am.”
And for the first time, she told someone. The marathon lovemaking. The guilt-inducing doctor visits. The pills in the bottom of her tampon box.
She told Karen and Joanna everything.
NINE
Joanna couldn’t remember ever being this nervous. Not for any audition, not for any rehearsal, not for any opening night performance.
She stood in her kitchen, her knees shaking as she went over the checklist again. Dinner: saucy white chicken enchiladas, check. Movie: The Fabulous Baker Boys, double check. Confidence: not a check, not even close.
Joanna bent to the narrow cabinet that sat between the stove and the wall. Her mother had proclaimed it a perfect place to store cookie sheets, but Stephen had always called it her Fun Time Cabinet, bec
ause all Joanna kept in there was booze. She fumbled around inside until she found a dusty bottle of whiskey. It had been left in her apartment at the end of one particularly rowdy LaEats staff party. She didn’t like whiskey. Didn’t like how boneless it made her feel. Pliable. Careless. But she needed a little bonelessness right now, a little pliability. What she wouldn’t give to be without a care for just a few minutes.
She poured a hefty dollop into a juice glass and shot it, swallowing over and over afterward to keep her gag reflex from sending it right back up her esophagus. It burned, made her eyes water, but it also felt good the way it hit so hard. She poured, and shot, another.
Her mind tried to drift to Sutton, time and again. Sutton in her Adelaide costume, the dusk highlighting the smoothness of her skin underneath all the stage makeup. Sutton laughing, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear while she popped a green grape into her mouth. Sutton asking if she, Joanna, was okay, real worry behind her words. Joanna’s gut thumped with every image, and with the whiskey rolling around in her belly, it was instantly harder to push those thoughts—which seemed to come more frequently after she’d called Stephen and set up this night—away.
She started to pour herself a third shot but was interrupted by a knock at the door. She quickly screwed the cap onto the whiskey bottle and shoved it back into the Fun Time Cabinet, then rinsed out her glass, and her mouth, with water.
“Sangria,” Stephen said, holding up an enormous jug of red wine, as soon as Joanna opened the door. “Well, it will be if you have Sprite to mix it with,” he added. “We are going to class this wine up.”
Joanna felt herself smile, and she was filled with a warmth that she was certain wasn’t all from the whiskey. It came from deep inside her. “I’ve missed you so much,” she said. She hadn’t realized how true that was until she’d seen him again.
“I thought you were dead,” he said, scooting through the door. “I watched the news every night to see if they said anything about your secret life as a hooker and how that led to your great demise in a seedy motel in Northeast.”
Joanna laughed out loud. “My shame is out,” she said. “And you have a very active imagination.”
He stopped next to her, looking deep into her eyes. Her heart thumped into hyperspeed, and all images of Sutton were wiped out of her mind entirely. “I’m exceedingly glad you’re not stuffed into a barrel right now,” he said.
He bent to kiss her cheek, but Joanna surprised herself and turned her mouth to his. The kiss landed, soft and quick. Stephen jerked back.
“Wow,” he said. “You should go missing more often if this is the result. And this is terrible timing, but I’ve got to put this down. My forefinger has gone numb.” He held up the jug, and then went into the kitchen with it.
“About that, the missing thing,” Joanna said, shutting the door.
“I’ll forgive you someday,” he called. “The good news is I got rich off of double tips while you were gone, so now I can afford to take you on a roaring tour of the city via the fabulous metro bus.” He poked his head around the corner. “You want yours over ice? Since we’re going classy.”
“Yeah,” she said. She leaned back against the door. This. This felt good. Having Stephen back felt so good. She’d missed him. Maybe that was all she’d needed—a break, to figure things out. She’d gotten confused, but the answer had been in front of her all the time. She wasn’t gay. She was just curious. But in the end, her love belonged here. With a man. With this man.
“It smells great in here,” he said, coming back into the living room, holding two glasses. Joanna took one and clinked it against his. “Pizza pockets have come a long way, from the smell of things.”
“That’s because I actually cooked for you,” Joanna said. She took a swallow of her wine, which went down smooth and easy and joined the whiskey to fill her with warmth and happiness. “And we have Michelle Pfeiffer in the house,” she added, setting her glass down on the coffee table and picking up the DVD case. She waved it in front of him.
“Feelings is not parsley!” Stephen cried. One of their shared favorite quotes from the movie.
“It’s less than parsley,” Joanna countered, as she always did, the Susie Diamond to his Frank Baker. They had a history, Stephen and Joanna. Relationships depended on history. How could she have not seen that before?
He put the case back down on the coffee table and picked up his glass again. “I say we eat, drink, and be fabulous,” he said, lifting his glass and then taking a sip.
“In a second,” Joanna said. She pulled the glass out of his hand and set it on the table. “I really want to apologize.”
“It’s nothing,” Stephen said. “I’m sorry Leese didn’t keep your job open for you.”
“Not just that,” Joanna said, and she found her eyes suddenly filling with tears. She wished briefly that she hadn’t drunk the whiskey. She wasn’t sloppy, but she was afraid she would never be able to convey all the things she was thinking and feeling. “I mean, I am sorry to leave you in the lurch like that, yes. But I’m also sorry about disappearing on you. And about the night with the wine.”
His head rolled back. “Oh, God, don’t bring that up. I was such an asshole.”
She grabbed his wrists, pulled. “No. No, you weren’t. You were being honest, and I . . . I was confused, is all. But I’m not anymore.”
He stopped pulling away. “What do you mean?”
Without thinking, Joanna did what she knew was the right thing to do. The only thing to be done. The only way out of this confusion and this hiding. She leaned into him and pressed her lips on his.
At first he was unmoving, stiff, and Joanna was bowled over by a sinking feeling that she’d made another mistake. That he didn’t want her anymore and that she’d just made a fool of herself again. It had been over a month—what if he had a girlfriend now?
But when their lips parted, Stephen tipped his chin down and gazed at her warily. “Are you sure?” he whispered.
She nodded. “This is the way it’s supposed to be,” she said.
It seemed like it was only moments before they were in her bedroom. So fast Joanna wasn’t sure she could entirely recall how they’d gotten there. There had been such urgency—such tugging and pulling and breathing words into each other’s mouths. It had been gymnastic and feverish, and Joanna was as caught up in it as she’d ever been. She wanted this. She wanted him.
They fumbled their way to her bed, attached as if their lips fused together while their hands removed clothing and explored.
And then, just as they reached her bed, Stephen got still. He put his hands on each side of her head and stared into her face as if he were trying to memorize it. She could feel him breaching the distance between them, pressing into her thigh.
“I’ve wanted this for so long,” he whispered.
Joanna tipped her head up, parted her lips, and closed her eyes.
And as she fell backward beneath him, the images she’d been keeping at bay ever since calling him flooded her. Sutton, blushing in her Adelaide costume. Sutton, giggling as Joanna tucked a piece of hair behind her ear, feeding her a grape with her own mouth. Sutton’s lips pressed against her. Sutton in her arms, skin creamy and warm as milk.
As Stephen shuddered and cried out against her, Joanna’s eyes flew open. She gulped and gulped, flooded with guilt and shame and disappointment.
TEN
Karen stood in the lobby by a row of spill-proofed couches for a solid ten minutes before she could gather enough courage to approach the information desk. She figured the elderly lady sitting there would never give her the information she needed, and even though she’d promised herself she’d come up with a plan by the time she got to the hospital, she still hadn’t.
But she didn’t intend to spend her entire Saturday standing in a forever-flowing river of hospital bustle. The weather had finally cooled a
bit. She could smell the coming winter in the air. Neighbors were putting decorative hay bales and cornstalks in their yards, and soon the kids would be donning costumes for trick-or-treating. She wondered briefly if Kendall would bother to dress up Marcus—if she’d bring him to Karen’s house, disguised as Batman or a pirate—or if she’d be too into herself to worry about something as boring as Halloween. Karen needed to pull some weeds, to mow her lawn, to prune the smoke tree before it dropped leaves into her gutters. She probably needed to clean her gutters, too. She’d been lucky the cold weather had held off as long as it had.
So why she was standing in the hospital, unmoving, when she had so much to do was beyond her. She knew only that when it came to “had to do’s,” this errand was at the top of the list.
Quietly, she ducked into the hospital chapel, a bare, cream-colored box that seemed afraid to commit to any actual representation of a god. BYOF, Karen thought. Bring Your Own Faith.
There was a stand of candles in red cups next to the front door, along with a metal locked box. Karen rooted through her purse, tucked a dollar through the slot on the top of the box, and grabbed a match.
“Curt MacDonald, I don’t know you, but I’m praying for you,” she said as she lit the match and touched it to a candlewick. “I’m praying like crazy.”
She had learned the name of her son’s victim only the night before. Kendall had somehow ferreted it out of someone—Karen honestly didn’t want to know whom or how—and had even managed to discover in which hospital Mr. MacDonald was recovering. It should have frightened her, the reach of Kendall’s manipulative prowess, but at the moment she could only muster gratitude over finally knowing something.
Having his name somehow made the whole thing more personal to Karen. She’d called Antoinette in tears, and Antoinette had been the one to talk her into visiting him today.
“Oh, sure, just show up at the hospital. Hi, Mr. MacDonald, my son’s the one who almost beat you to death. I thought you’d like to have a face to go with the shittiest mother who ever lived. Can I get you some ice chips?”
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