Needing no further encouragement, Nan pulled Leisa’s shirt and bra off and laid her back on the couch. They made love, exploring each other’s bodies as if doing this for the first time. The ache that had filled both of them exploded in seismic orgasms as their bodies found release denied for months. When they were physically spent, they lay together on the couch, their discarded clothing on the floor.
“I didn’t think you were ready for that,” Nan said, still breathing heavily, tracing her fingertips over Leisa’s ear as Leisa’s head rested on her shoulder.
“I didn’t either,” Leisa admitted, stroking a hand along Nan’s ribs. “I haven’t felt much of anything for so long…”
“How are you?” Nan asked softly, broaching this subject directly for the first time.
Leisa didn’t answer immediately. “Better. Not good… but better.” She was quiet for a while, and then said, “I’ve never felt like that before. I’ve never experienced such hopelessness, such absolute despair.” Nan held her a little more tightly. “I think I understand better what some of your clients must feel. If I felt like that for very long, I’m not sure it would be worth… I can understand how someone can get to the point of thinking they just want it to stop.”
Nan closed her eyes at this admission. “Please,” she whispered, “please don’t ever – do you need to talk to someone? Someone professionally? I could –”
“No.” Leisa lifted her head so she could look into Nan’s eyes. “No. I don’t need anyone else.” She spoke deliberately, trying to make Nan understand. “I don’t hurt as badly as I did. It is getting better. It will be better,” she added softly as she laid her head back down on Nan’s shoulder.
“Yes, you can have the time off for this,” Maddie said when Leisa explained about Todd. “I’d go if you weren’t. I don’t want her doing this by herself. But you have to talk to Mariela before you go.”
Mariela had learned so much so quickly that the decision had been made to enroll her in kindergarten for the last grading period of the year. Leisa had taken time that first morning to walk her to school, taking her into the office to introduce her to the school secretary. Mariela gave Leisa one last hug around the waist and went to meet her new classmates. She’d been thrilled to be in school at last and had instantly charmed her teacher, but recently, “she won’t go to school,” the staff had reported. At first, she’d come down with various ailments – “I have a cold” or “my tummy hurts”. The staff, not knowing what was really wrong, had let her stay at the Home where she was content to do her schoolwork, but “now, she’s not pretending to be sick. She just refuses to go,” they said.
With a pang, Leisa remembered she’d received those reports a couple of weeks ago and had planned to talk to Mariela, but it was all mixed up with everything that had been happening with Eleanor and the surgery and then Bron….
“She won’t tell anyone what’s wrong,” Maddie said in frustration now. “Maybe she’ll tell you.”
Leisa found Mariela in the classroom where she had once found her practicing her writing. She ran to give Leisa a hug.
“I told you I’d be back,” Leisa smiled. She sat down at the next desk and looked at the arithmetic Mariela was working on. “Wow, those are big numbers.”
Mariela glowed at the praise.
“I thought you liked school,” Leisa prodded.
Mariela’s face fell and she lowered her face, letting her hair swing forward. Leisa reached out to brush it back.
“What’s going on?”
Mariela only shrugged.
“Has someone been picking on you? The other kids? Don’t you like your teacher?” To each of these questions, Mariela would not respond beyond more shrugs. “Can’t you tell me why you don’t want to go?”
Mariela shook her head.
“Why not?”
“I’m afraid,” Mariela whispered.
“Oh.” Leisa rubbed Mariela’s back. “Tell you what. Miss Maddie has arranged a trip to the zoo later this week. I have to go away again for a few days, but when I get back, I want to hear all about the zoo. And then I will go with you to school.”
Mariela looked up. “You will?”
Leisa nodded. “I will. Together, we can tackle whatever it is that’s scaring you, okay?”
Mariela thought about this for a moment and then nodded.
Nan and Leisa’s connecting flight from Atlanta brought them to a warm, slightly humid evening in Savannah. They picked up their rental car and drove straight to their hotel.
“Are you sure you don’t want to go to the hospital this evening?” Leisa asked.
Nan shook her head. “I’d rather rest this evening, and go tomorrow.”
Leisa knew that Nan wouldn’t get much rest, but let it drop. Nan did call the Taylors’ house and leave a message that she was in town, and would be at the hospital the next morning by ten.
Nan was quiet all through dinner. Leisa didn’t push for conversation. She let Nan have the remote when they got back to the hotel. Nan flipped absent-mindedly through channels until Leisa was regretting her decision.
“I won’t know what to say to him,” Nan said so softly that Leisa needed a few seconds to register that she had spoken. She reached over for Nan’s hand.
“He probably feels the same way. I didn’t know what I would say,” Leisa told her. “You could let him guide the conversation. He may have lots of questions. Maybe he just wants to get to know you a bit. Relax and see where it goes.”
But Nan looked anything but relaxed as they entered the hospital the next morning. Todd was on the oncology ward on the fifth floor. As they neared his room, Nan reached for Leisa’s hand and leaned against the wall. She looked like she might pass out.
“I don’t think I can do this.”
Leisa squeezed her hand reassuringly. “Yes, you can. I’ll wait out here.”
“No, you won’t,” Nan insisted as she took a deep breath and knocked softly on the door.
Mr. and Mrs. Taylor were there, sitting in chairs on either side of Todd’s bed. They both stood as Nan and Leisa entered. Mrs. Taylor was small-boned and very pretty, in contrast to Mr. Taylor who was a large, burly man who looked like he had been a football player in earlier days. Todd was lying in bed, bald and very thin with dark circles around his eyes, made even more prominent by the oxygen mask covering the lower half of his face.
“Hello, Todd,” Nan said nervously as she entered. “I’m Nan Mathison.”
She shook hands with Mr. and Mrs. Taylor, and introduced Leisa.
Todd pulled his oxygen mask off. Even with the changes his illness had wrought, his resemblance to Nan was unmistakable. Leisa saw Mrs. Taylor’s hand fly, trembling, to her mouth. Todd raised the head of his bed so he could sit up straighter. He stared at Nan as if he were seeing a vision.
“I’ve wanted to meet you for so long,” he said, his eyes hungrily searching her face.
Nan gave a wan smile. “Mr. Chisholm is very persistent.” She moved a little closer to the bed. “How are you doing?”
Mr. Taylor answered for him, saying, “He’s doing fine. Gonna be up and around in no time, aren’t you, boy?”
Leisa looked at him pityingly as he tried so valiantly to deny what was right in front of him.
“Yeah, Dad,” Todd said, giving the required response as he smiled at his father. But he turned immediately back to Nan who pulled a chair up closer to the bed. “So,” he said shyly, “what do you do?”
“I’m a psychologist,” Nan responded.
“How… how old are you?” Todd asked uncertainly. “If you don’t mind me asking,” he added apologetically.
Nan smiled. “I was in college when you were born.”
Todd nodded. “What about my –” he glanced quickly at his father, and faltered. “I mean, what about the guy who got you pregnant?”
Nan looked down at her hands, frowning. “He was someone I knew in college, but… he didn’t even know about you.” She looked back up at him.
“I really can’t tell you anything about him.”
Todd nodded, thinking. His mouth opened and closed a few times as he vacillated about what to ask next.
“You can ask me anything,” Nan prompted gently.
“Why did you give me up?” he blurted.
Nan looked into those eyes so like her own. “I was supposed to start grad school in a few months; I wasn’t married or attached to anyone. It just seemed crazy to think about keeping a baby.” She paused. “The truth is,” she admitted after a moment, “all these years, I’ve thought of you as a mistake, as something that never should have happened, but,” she glanced at his parents, Mr. Taylor’s arm wrapped protectively around his wife, “now, I think everything happens for a reason. I wasn’t ready to raise you, but I can see that you have been a gift to your parents. So, my mistake turned into something good, after all. I think the hardest part for anyone who gives up a baby is wondering if they made the right decision. Now, I know I did.”
Nan and Leisa stayed in Savannah for three days. They visited Todd a couple of times a day at the hospital, but he tired quickly, so they kept their visits brief. He turned out to have Nan’s wicked sense of humor. When he finally figured out that they were lesbians, he said, “No wonder you thought I was a mistake!” – but he did wait until his parents weren’t around to have that conversation.
Leisa watched Nan slowly evolve from stoic resignation at having to meet him to genuinely enjoying talking to him. As she sat there watching them argue about the Ravens’ and Falcons’ chances in the upcoming football season, she couldn’t help but compare this reunion with her own with Eleanor. Todd, who’d always wondered, always felt he’d been given away, was getting to know a woman who really liked him for himself, while she, who’d been content just to know her parents had chosen her, who had never felt abandoned before, felt more abandoned after meeting her biological mother.
“What?” Nan asked one evening as they walked back to their hotel from the hospital.
“You’re different with him than I thought you’d be,” Leisa said.
Nan thought for a moment. “It’s not as bad as I expected,” she conceded. “He’s a nice kid.” She glanced over at Leisa. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?” Leisa asked.
Nan reached for her hand and held it. “Don’t keep wishing and wondering about how things might have been.”
“How do you know I am?” Leisa challenged. Nan just looked at her sideways until Leisa laughed a little. “Okay, I am.”
“I know you are. I can see it in your eyes when you look at him,” Nan said gently. “But you of all people, you who loves to think about alternate realities for every choice we make, should know that if I had decided to keep him, chances are very good that I wouldn’t have gone to grad school, wouldn’t have stayed near Maddie and would never have met you.” She brought Leisa’s hand to her lips and kissed it. “Things unfold more or less the way they’re meant to.”
She smiled as she heard Leisa mutter, “In this reality.”
Leisa watched Nan and Todd say good-bye, both pretending for Mrs. and Mr. Taylor’s sake that they would see each other again, making tentative plans to get together again later that summer, when Todd was strong enough to travel. Nan managed not to cry until they were alone in the elevator. Leisa wrapped her arms around her, oblivious to the other people who got on and off the elevator. As they exited on the ground floor, Nan wiped her eyes on her sleeve. Her cell phone beeped, indicating a text. She checked it, and started laughing and crying at the same time. She held it out so Leisa could read it.
It was from Todd. “How many kids get to have two extra moms?”
They were packed and carrying their suitcases down to the rental car when Leisa’s phone rang. She stopped in the lobby to dig it out of her pocket. “It’s Maddie.”
“Hey, when are you guys due back?”
“This evening,” Leisa said. “Our plane gets in at seven-forty. Jo and Bruce are supposed to pick us up.”
“Tell them we’ll pick you up,” Maddie said.
“Why? What’s wrong?” Leisa asked. Nan leaned near so she could hear.
“It’s Mariela. She’s missing.”
Chapter 20
“THE KIDS WENT ON their field trip to the zoo this morning,” Maddie reminded Leisa over the phone as she and Nan waited impatiently for their plane to board. “The chaperones don’t know what happened. She was with them one minute then gone the next. They put out an alert and searched the entire zoo, but there was no sign of her.”
Leisa listened to this as she paced. She pressed her other hand to her eyes, and suddenly froze. “Alarcon.”
“What?”
“I never told you,” Leisa groaned. “At the cemetery, the day we buried the ashes, I saw someone I couldn’t place at first. Then I realized it was Alarcon. I forgot all about it until now.”
“He was shadowing us?” Maddie asked incredulously.
“He must have been.”
Leisa suddenly gasped. “That’s why she’s been afraid to go to school! She must have seen him hanging around there, too. You have to let the police know he’s the one who has her,” Leisa insisted anxiously.
Nan sat helplessly beside Leisa on a tense, nearly silent flight back to Baltimore, knowing there was nothing she could do or say to comfort her or to ease the guilt she felt. It was a feeling Nan knew from personal experience.
“How is this your fault?” Maddie had asked Nan several years ago when one of her clients had committed suicide. “You can’t be responsible for this. You couldn’t have known.”
“That’s just it,” Nan tried to explain. “It wasn’t anything he said, or threatened to do. It’s just that I ran into him downtown, coming out of a pawnshop that specializes in selling guns. I thought it was an odd place for him to be, and I meant to follow-up at our next session, but he cancelled and before I could call him to re-schedule, he had shot himself. If I had taken the time to put the pieces together, if I had made more of an effort and followed up… but I didn’t and now he’s dead.
“I can’t believe I forgot to tell Maddie about him,” Leisa kept muttering.
“The police at least know where to start looking now,” Nan tried to reassure her. “That’s more than they had before.”
It was almost eight p.m. when they landed at BWI. Maddie and Lyn were waiting for them. Lyn was driving their Explorer and Maddie was listening to someone on her cell phone as Nan and Leisa slid into the back seat. “All right,” Maddie was saying. “Let me know if you find anything.”
She turned around in her seat as she hung up. “Nothing yet.”
“But they know about Alarcon?” Leisa asked anxiously.
Maddie nodded. “They do. They don’t have a current address on him.” Seeing the look on Leisa’s face, she hastened to add, “But they’ve circulated his photo and Mariela’s to all their patrols and the local news stations. They’ll find him.”
“What are we going to do?” Leisa asked.
Maddie glanced quickly at Nan before saying emphatically, “‘We’ are not going to do anything. We’re going to let the police handle this.”
Nan reached for Leisa’s hand. “Maddie’s right. Let’s go home and wait.”
Lyn drove them to their house where she made a pot of decaf, lacing each cup liberally with a couple of shots of Kahlua. “This will help you relax and get some sleep tonight,” she said soothingly as Leisa paced anxiously.
“I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep until she’s safe,” Leisa fretted. “Why didn’t I listen more carefully to her? She had a reason for not wanting to leave St. Joseph’s. She knew he was out there. She knew how dangerous he was.”
“I’m more at fault than you are,” Maddie said miserably. “We all missed it.”
A few hours later, Nan called Maddie and Lyn in a panic. “She’s gone. I woke up, and she wasn’t here. I found a note that said she had to try and find Mariela. She said she’d call later. She’s not a
nswering her cell. Where would she even start?” Nan asked in bewilderment.
Maddie thought for a minute. “The only place I can think of is the building where Mariela and her mother were living. I’d have to look it up in her file.” She mumbled something to Lyn that Nan couldn’t make out. “We’ll be by to get you in a few minutes.”
Together, the three of them drove to St. Joseph’s. There, lying open on Leisa’s desk was Mariela’s file. Maddie quickly found the original police report and wrote the address down.
“This is crazy,” Lyn muttered a short while later as they drove into a very bad section of downtown Baltimore. “Shouldn’t we call the police?”
“Probably,” Maddie admitted, “but if Alarcon is here with Mariela, any sign of the police will make him take off.” She drove slowly, reading the street signs while Nan scanned the alleys for any signs of movement.
“Here’s Leisa’s car. This is it,” Maddie said, parking behind the Sentra in front of a run-down brick building that stood five stories high. She pulled a flashlight out of the glove compartment.
They got out of the vehicle, quietly closing the doors. “We’re a bunch of lesbians, for crying out loud. Why didn’t we at least bring baseball bats?” Lyn asked nervously.
“Because we don’t play softball?” Nan reminded her.
“Let’s look around the outside first,” Maddie suggested. “See if we see any sign of Leisa or Mariela.”
Staying close together, the three of them walked down the alley that ran along one side of the building. There were several overflowing dumpsters and the equally strong odors of rotting trash and stale urine.
“This is disgusting,” Nan whispered.
“This is what Mariela came from,” Maddie replied, also whispering.
They all jumped at a rustling in the shadows near one of the dumpsters. Maddie aimed her flashlight in the direction of the sound. A homeless man sat up, peering at them with bleary eyes as he tried to shade his eyes from the harsh beam of light. Reaching into her pocket, Maddie pulled out a couple of bills and crouched near the man, lowering her flashlight.
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