“We’re here to see Julie Ackerman,” Officer Caldwell said brusquely. “Which of these places is hers?”
“We own them in common,” he corrected her, his expression kind. “Our sister stays in a cabin by the creek. She may be in the kitchen right now, however. Can you tell me what this is about? She’s a gentle woman. I don’t want to see her in trouble.”
“Your ‘sister’ didn’t bother to say her goodbyes before she joined you.” Caldwell stared him down. “Sometimes you can’t walk away without ghosts following you.”
After a moment, he nodded. “Come with me.”
He led the way up the rough plank steps onto the wide covered porch, then into the lodge. Inside was what appeared to be a large common room used for dining, with benches and long tables to accommodate as many as forty or fifty people. The room was empty, but voices came from an open doorway.
“Please, wait here,” their guide said. “I’ll bring Sister Ackerman.”
Craig and Ann Caldwell glanced at each other. Finally Craig nodded. They were taking a chance that Julie would flee out a back door, but he disliked the idea of confronting her in front of a bunch of other women.
The graying man disappeared. When he came back a minute later, Craig tensed.
Behind him was a woman in a broomstick skirt and T-shirt, her long blond hair in matted dreadlocks. Her face was bare of makeup, her feet shod in battered work boots. He knew her, and yet he didn’t.
He made a strangled sound.
Sister Ackerman looked at him with a peaceful, mild smile, and said, “Hello, Craig.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“DADDY!” ABBY FLEW into Craig’s arms when she came in the door after school.
Outside, he heard the bus lumbering away.
“Cool! You’re back.” Brett swung his book bag off his shoulder. “I have stuff for you to sign. We’re going on a field trip next week.”
“I’m glad to be home.” Craig planted a smacking kiss on his daughter’s cheek, swung her in a circle and set her down. “I want to talk to you two.”
“Where’s Grandad?” Abby asked.
“He went home already. He said something about a hot date.”
Brett made a face. “Yuck. He told us about her. She’s into genealogy. Like, all she does is search the Internet for long lost ancestors. What do you suppose they talk about? How her great-great-great-uncle died?”
Craig laughed. Damn, it felt good. “I’m betting they find something more contemporary than that. She also teaches yoga classes to senior citizens, you know. I imagine she has many facets.”
He had to explain “facets” to Abby, who listened seriously.
“Grandad has lots of facets, too,” she informed him. “He taught me to play poker. He always wins, but he’s teaching me to bluff. I just look like this—” she demonstrated a stone face “—even when my cards are bad.”
“Bluffing, huh? Well, you’re definitely getting the hang of it.” Craig ruffled her hair.
Brett had been watching. “What kind of talk are we going to have? Is this like a new rules talk, or…” Seeing his father’s expression, he stopped. “Or…” His voice cracked.
Craig put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s about your mom.”
His son flinched. Abby stared up with widening eyes.
“About Mommy?”
“Let’s sit down.”
He settled them on the couch in the family room and sat on the coffee table facing them, his knees bumping theirs. Abby inched over so she was just touching her brother, who didn’t object for once.
“The police have found your mother. She’s fine. That’s where I went yesterday—to see her.”
They both stared. Neither said anything for far too long. Then, in a small voice, Abby asked, “Is Mommy coming home?”
Craig shook his head. “I’m sorry, sweetie. I wish I could tell you that she is, or at least that you’d get to see her sometimes, but…” He took a deep breath. “She’s changed.”
Abby burrowed against Brett, who put his arm around her.
His chin high, he said, “She changed before she went. Didn’t she?”
Craig nodded. “She didn’t mean to cause the trouble she did. She didn’t know my flight had been canceled. It never occurred to her that the police would think she might be dead, or that they’d be suspicious of me. If it hadn’t been for the fog at SeaTac…”
“You wouldn’t have come home.” Brett sounded…older. Too old. “Then nobody would have been here. We’d have been really scared.”
“She didn’t think of that, either.” There was one hell of a lot Julie hadn’t considered, in her desperate rush to escape a life she hadn’t been able to bear. “You’d have called Grandad, or one of your friends’ mothers.”
Brett sat silent, his expression hard. He knew the truth: their mother had abandoned them without a second thought, without caring how frightened they would have been when they got home to an empty house and her purse and car keys lying on the kitchen counter.
“Doesn’t she…” Abby swallowed. “Doesn’t she want to see us?”
With one hand, Craig cradled his daughter’s face, his heart aching at the sight of her distress. “Your mom has problems, sweetheart. She knew she couldn’t be the mother you need. That’s why she left. She thought we’d be better off without her.”
His pretty, vibrant daughter seemed to shrink. She nodded as if she understood, but he knew she didn’t. She couldn’t. Mothers didn’t do this. They sacrificed to give their children what they needed. They didn’t abdicate.
He talked until he was hoarse, mixing truth and white lies. Abby, he thought, bought into some of the lies, perhaps because she needed to. Brett, stiff and pale, didn’t.
“I hope the day comes when she realizes you’d have loved her even if she couldn’t be a perfect mother. But, selfishly, I’m glad she didn’t want to take you to Oregon, where she’s living, which would mean I could have you here only during vacations.” Once he’d seen where she was taking them, he’d have found a way to get them back anyway, but he didn’t say that. “I love you guys, and I like us being a family together.”
Abby flung herself forward onto his lap. She sobbed silently, her shoulders shaking, tears wetting his shirtfront. Craig laid his cheek against her head, squeezed his eyes shut and felt his own tears leaking out.
When her weeping slowed, he opened his eyes to see Brett watching them both with that stony look.
“I hate her.”
“She’s the one suffering a terrible loss,” Craig said. “I think she knows that.”
He’d come home less bitter, because he had seen her serene facade crack when they sat at one of the long tables facing each other, the two police officers waiting a distance away. At one point Julie had said, in a broken voice, “I just couldn’t do it anymore. I tried. I did try.” Head bent, she asked, “Do you have any pictures?”
From his wallet he took their latest school pictures and handed them to her. He saw a fine tremor in her hand as she took them. She looked at the pictures for a long time. A breath shuddered through her, then she thrust them back at him, crying, “I wish you hadn’t come!”
“Why? So you wouldn’t have to think about them?” he had asked. “They think about you every day. Abby has quit asking where Mommy is, but she hasn’t quit wondering.”
“I’m not her mommy. That person I was, it was a lie.”
Anger he had buried deep clawed free. “Which one was a lie? The potter? The career woman? Mommy? Or were all of them lies?”
“I didn’t know they were! But then…then I’d see that I was pretending. Here, I can be myself.”
Until she saw one day that this Julie, too, was an illusion. He wouldn’t want to be her, reaching inside and finding nothing, constantly donning new costumes to disguise the emptiness. For the first time, he felt pity along with the anger and bitterness.
Brett, too young and wounded to see anything but his own loss, said with shatteri
ng intensity, “I still hate her.”
Abby, limp and exhausted, lay against Craig. With his free arm, Craig reached out and drew his son into a bear hug.
“I know,” he murmured, when he felt the first sob rip the boy. “I know.”
WHEN THE KIDS, seeming drained, asked to watch TV, Craig took the opportunity to call his father. After telling him about their reactions, he asked if his father could come over.
“You don’t have to tell me that Brett’s a responsible kid. They’d be okay for an hour or two on their own. But…”
“Not now,” his dad concluded.
“If you’re busy, this can wait.”
“You’ve waited long enough, son. Robin will be good for all of you.”
“I’ve never even taken her on a date. You’re taking a big leap there, Dad.”
“You spent a weekend together, didn’t you?” he scoffed. “Who needs a date?”
Craig had intended to wait until after dinner, but the minute Hank Lofgren arrived, he said, “I can feed them. Go on. Get out of here.”
Craig went. He sure wasn’t hungry.
He hoped Malcolm would be doing homework in his bedroom and he and Robin could talk privately. Maybe he should have waited until tomorrow. Phoned her. But he wanted to see her, not listen once again for nuances that might be imagined.
Her car was in the driveway, and she came to the door as soon as he rang the bell. Just the sight of her stole his breath. He couldn’t imagine why, married or not, he hadn’t fallen in love with her the first time he saw her. How had he ever thought her too skinny, nothing to look at compared to Julie? In plush brown corduroy pants and a sweater striped in rust and orange and deep green, her hair swinging loose, she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Inside and out.
“I hope you don’t mind my coming unannounced….”
Her soft brown eyes searched his face. “Did you find her?”
“Yes. It was her, Robin.”
“Oh, Craig,” she breathed. “I’m sorry, and glad, and…”
“Yeah. Me, too.” He reached out and squeezed her arms, wanting to kiss her and see what happened, but aware they were standing on the doorstep, visible to the world. And Malcolm might walk into the living room. Letting her go, he asked, “Can I come in?”
She bobbed her head and backed away. “Of course you can! Oh, gosh. I worried all last night when I didn’t hear from you. Did you just get home today? Surely you’ve told Brett and Abby? I want to hear the whole story in order. I can’t help babbling. You found Julie.” She sounded amazed. “After all this time!”
Following her into her house, Craig said, “She was married once before. Did I tell you that? If I’d known, we’d have found her sooner. All she’d done was go back to her maiden name.”
Robin led the way into the living room. “You did tell me. That’s so odd. What if she’d had other children?”
“The thought has occurred to me. She might still have more.” He remembered the longing and torment in her eyes when she looked at Abby’s and Brett’s school pictures. “But somehow I doubt if she does.”
“Do you want coffee, or…?”
“No. Thanks. Nothing for me.” Just you. “Where’s Malcolm?”
“He’s at a classmate’s working on a school project. I have to pick him up later.” Robin sat at one end of the couch and patted the cushion beside her. “Sit,” she ordered. “Talk.”
So he did, telling her about the entire bizarre journey, flying to Bend, Oregon, with the police officer who admitted she’d taken over the case to finish what her father had started.
“We didn’t talk much on the way down. More on the way home.” He looked down at his hands. “She loosened up a little. Maybe I did, too. She says I symbolized the kind of man her father resented. She thinks he genuinely believed I’d killed Julie, but in a roundabout way she also admitted that his investigation wasn’t as thorough as it should have been because he took a dislike to me. He thought I was smug, laughing at him behind his back.” Craig shook his head. “Laughing! I was in shock. Stunned that Julie would have left without even scribbling a note of explanation. When I finally understood that the police thought I’d murdered her and gotten rid of her body, I was…” He made a sound. “I probably don’t have to tell you what I felt. It was like wandering into another dimension. ‘This can’t be happening,’ I kept telling myself. ‘She’ll call tomorrow. The cops will discover she bought a bus ticket.’ Something.”
Robin’s hand crept out and took his. He turned his hand in hers and squeezed, probably too hard, but she didn’t protest. He needed to hold on to her.
Somehow he found he was talking, describing the commune on the banks of an offshoot of the Deschutes River. The red dirt that rose in tiny puffs under each step, the lodge and cabins and view of volcanic Mt. Bachelor, the woods that felt sparse compared to western Washington’s deep green forest.
He told her about Julie’s calm greeting and his crazy notion that she wasn’t the same woman at all, that she was an imposter who had been told about him.
Fingers laced with Robin’s, he said, “She acted as though I was someone she’d known a long time ago. A casual friend from college, maybe, not seen in twenty years. But she didn’t try to deny that she was my wife, and she actually seemed surprised that there had been any fuss because of her departure.”
“It didn’t occur to her that there would be doubt about what had happened to her?” Robin asked with open incredulity.
“I knew she was unhappy—she said so. As if from that I should have assumed that she’d disappear one day.” He let out a ragged breath. “She did take a thousand dollars, she was sorry and hoped I didn’t mind. She believed I was in the air on the way to Paris, so there really was reason for her to be surprised that the police would ever have suspected me of having anything to do with her disappearance.”
Robin’s expression wasn’t forgiving. “She could have left a note.”
He grimaced. “She says she tried a couple of times to write one, but she didn’t know how to describe what she felt, and saying goodbye was hard. So she just didn’t.”
“Oh, Craig,” Robin murmured.
“She signed the divorce papers and relinquished custody of the kids. That was the one time when I could see that she remembered, really remembered, who she’d been, and that it hurt. I offered to have Abby and Brett write to her in the future, send school pictures once a year, but she asked me not to.”
“What did you tell the kids?”
The warmth of her hand in his, her palm meeting his, felt like a lifeline. As if she was recharging him with her strength and compassion.
That, too, he described: the mix of truth and lies he had offered the children in an attempt to soften the reality of their mother’s desertion without giving them false hope that they would ever see her again.
“Abby is crushed but grieving, in a way that seems healthy to me. Brett says he hates his mother. The sad thing is, I believe him.”
Robin took her hand back. She nodded, worried lines furrowing her forehead. “Hurt and anger make a volatile brew. That’s what we’ve been seeing all along in him.”
“He’s been doing so much better.”
“The counseling…”
“I don’t think that has much to do with it. I think you and Malcolm have made the difference. But this has to have hit him hard. Is he going to regress?” Craig asked.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “He was really quiet today in school. Just…withdrawn. I wondered if he’d guessed where you’d gone and was worrying. It seems like resolution has to be a good thing, even if it’s not the one he wanted. Anyway, once word gets out, the attitude of the other kids will change, which may help.”
“Will it?” Craig made a sound in his throat. “Belated sympathy and regret aren’t going to be very meaningful. I sure don’t give a damn either way, and I won’t blame him if he doesn’t.”
Robin straightened and squared her shoulde
rs. She looked into his eyes and said, “When do you intend to move?”
“Soon. I’ll put in a request to the airline immediately and get the house up for sale. With luck, we do it over Christmas, when the kids’ll be out of school anyway.”
She was quiet for a moment. “Oh. That is soon. Are you sure a move right away is the best thing for them?”
Watching her, he said, “Can you honestly tell me you think it isn’t?”
Emotions he couldn’t read skittered across her face. Finally she shook her head. “You know I can’t. Maybe a fresh start is what they need. Brett especially. Leaving her friend Summer is going to be hard for Abby.”
“I know it is, but she’s always had a gift for making friends. And maybe I’m wrong—” he had a flash of incredible weariness “—but she doesn’t seem as traumatized. She’s lost some confidence that the world is always predictable and joyful and safe. But she’s never felt the anger Brett does, and that worries me more.”
Robin bit her lip and nodded. Her eyes were bright; too bright. But she smiled as if she wasn’t about to cry. “At least your dad won’t be able to complain that he’s not ready to put his house up for sale.”
Craig gave a rough laugh. “True.”
She scooted forward to stand. “You know, I think I’ll grab a soda. Can’t I get you something?”
“Robin.” He wrapped a hand around her arm and stopped her. Thank God her son wasn’t in his bedroom down the hall.
She went very still, seated on the edge of the couch cushion, not looking at him.
“I’m hoping like hell I’m not way off base here.” Damn, this was hard. His heart was slamming in his chest and he was scared like he couldn’t ever remember being in his life. He let go of her arm. “I’ve never even taken you out to dinner. Never kissed you good night.”
A tremor ran through her.
“You said once that if I asked for almost anything, you’d give it.”
She gave a thin laugh. “I think I begged you to forget I’d ever said that. If you’re trying to explain why our friendship can’t be more, please don’t, Craig.”
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