by Nicole Baart
“Bye, Auntie Mer!” Gabe called. As Jess followed Meredith through the living room, she could see that Gabe’s face was smeared with chocolate, his mouth ringed in frosting and a little brown dab on the tip of his nose. She felt sure that Meredith was clocking even that and made a point to head straight to the sink, where she started rinsing a washcloth to clean him up.
They said stiff good-byes over the heads of the boys while Meredith slipped on her coat and grabbed her purse. Then she was gone, the door shut just a tad harder than necessary, but excusable since the wind was howling outside. It had come from nowhere, this sudden, frigid gale that lashed the trees and made the house groan. It was exactly the sort of night that Evan had loved, and if he were with them, Jess knew that he would have set a log in the fireplace and hauled out the fat fleece blanket that they kept in a cedar chest beneath the bay window.
But he wasn’t here. And he wasn’t ever coming back. And Jess didn’t know how to start a fire or conjure the same kind of magic that her husband could pull from thin air. Apparently she didn’t even know how to take care of her own kids.
“You okay, Mom?” Max asked, putting the uneaten sandwiches in the refrigerator. She hadn’t told him to do it, but that small victory was eclipsed by the fury that was blossoming in her chest.
“Fine,” she said unconvincingly. “Everything is going to be just fine.”
* * *
River Han
New Message Request from Evan Chamberlain
August 7, 2018
Dear Ms. Han,
My name is Evan Chamberlain and I’m a family practitioner in Auburn, Iowa. I saw your comment on the Eagle Ridge Women’s Prison Facebook page and decided to reach out. It seems you have been recently released from Eagle Ridge, and I was wondering if you had some information on a former inmate there. Her name was LaShonna Tate. She was a friend of mine, and her suicide was a terrible blow. Because I am not family (and do not know her mother), I’m unable to learn anything about her death and the events that preceded it. Specifically, what happened to her child? LaShonna was due at the beginning of July, and the last time we spoke she shared that she wanted to parent. Now she’s gone and I don’t know what happened to the child. I know this is an enormous ask from a total stranger, but if you knew LaShonna, and if you know what happened to her baby, I would be so grateful for any information you have to offer.
Gratefully,
Evan
* * *
Evan Chamberlain
New Message from River Han
August 7, 2018
I knew LaShonna. We weren’t close or anything, but I knew who she was. Her suicide was hard on everyone.
I can tell you that LaShonna had her baby near the end of June. I don’t remember when exactly, but it was a girl. She came back the next day and wouldn’t talk to anyone. For what it’s worth, I heard that she gave the baby up for adoption.
Having a baby in prison is a special kind of hell. My boy was born two years, one month, and seventeen days ago, and I still think about him every day.
River H.
22, Asian, 2 years of college
Strikingly beautiful. Long hair, brown eyes, petite.
Disowned.
ABD, 68m, 2yr 1m pp
CHAPTER 17
RAIN LASHED AGAINST the windows for hours that night, but sometime near two o’clock the wind stopped so abruptly the sudden silence woke Jess. She crept from her bed and pulled back the curtain to survey the street from her second-story window. The scene was still, but shivering with droplets that hung suspended from every branch and eave and dead blade of grass. It would have been lovely except for the sky—it was as black and ominous as the sable pools of water that had collected on her driveway and sidewalk. Even the streetlamps were no match for the darkness; they flickered and gleamed dully, the borders of their lukewarm cast indistinct and feeble.
As Jessica watched, the rain turned to sleet. It fell like tiny shards of glass and filled the air with the sound of distant applause, a thousand hands clapping for what would surely be a winter wonderland. A world of ice and indefinable beauty. It didn’t seem beautiful to Jess. It seemed deadly.
Jess had been dreaming. No, not a dream, a nightmare, and she remembered it in ribbons that seemed to float just outside her vision. When she thought she caught a glimpse, it was gone. But the feeling remained, the sense that something, someone, was just behind her, reaching.
“Mom?”
Jess turned from the window, surprised at both the noise and Gabe’s presence in her room. He had started out in his own bed that night, and when she had finally flicked off her lamp only a couple of hours before, both he and Max had been sleeping peacefully in their own rooms. When had he snuck into her bed?
“Mom, what are you doing?” Gabe called again, his voice muffled from sleep and the blankets that he had pulled up over half his face.
“Hey, buddy,” Jess said, dropping the curtain and tiptoeing over to where he lay cocooned in her sheets. She straightened the tangle of fabric around him and kissed the top of his head. “Go back to sleep. Mommy was just looking outside.”
“Is it snowing?” he asked, yawning.
Jess could hear the note of hope in his question, even though Gabe was barely awake. “No,” she said, smoothing his hair. “Shhh.” She crawled back into bed and was grateful when Gabe wiggled over to her and tucked himself tight against her side. But for a heartbeat or two, Jess held herself perfectly still, uncertain if Meredith would consider her six-year-old son too old to share a bed with his mommy. Jess hadn’t been given a handbook, a list of dos and don’ts when it came to parenting a child from a trauma-based background.
It was so hard for Jessica to admit that her son carried that label. In fact, for years she had refused to admit that the boy she had raised from infancy could be anything but wholly attached. Entirely hers. Jess didn’t want to believe that there had been some primal wound, an injury inflicted when the bond between Gabe and his biological mother had been severed. But as Gabriel grew, Evan had begun to revisit the books they had read during their home study. He started talking about how a sense of loss had etched itself deep in their boy’s soul. Gabe’s anxiety, emotional insecurities, and behavioral problems weren’t an indicator of ADHD or Asperger’s. They were the result of loss. Their Gabe, who had only known love from the day he was born, still bore an intrinsic wound. A separation that would forever change him.
There was no cure. No magic fix. But there was an ever-growing list of books Jess should read and seminars she should attend. New philosophies emerging about the stress-shaped brain and the connected child and parenting theory. Reactive attachment disorder. Forget consequences—love and logic was the way to go. And if Jess wanted to really work to repair the deep hurt Gabe would obviously spend the rest of his life enduring, she would invest in a full neurological workup at one of the few clinics in the country that worked with adoptive families, and then undergo the subsequent neuropsychological and behavioral therapy. The Chamberlains needed family counseling; Gabe an attachment specialist. Also weighted blankets, a dye- and sugar-free diet, and some framed photos of his birth family in places of honor throughout the house.
It was all so overwhelming.
And devastating. Jess felt like such a failure. Shame was a brick on her chest, a weight that was slowly but surely crushing her. But none of this was about her. It was about Gabe. What he needed. Her son was a child who had to live with the consequences of other people’s choices. A little boy whose nighttime anxieties had only increased with the loss of his father. Jess loved him so much it ached.
Deciding she didn’t care one bit about whether or not it was developmentally appropriate, Jess curled her arm around her son and pulled him close. She tried to sleep.
A muffled shout yanked Jess awake only hours later. Gabe was spread-eagled across Evan’s side of the bed, still sleeping, and Jess sat straight up, trying to get her bearings. Her heart was pounding in her throat, her m
outh sticky and tasting impossibly like lead. Blood, she realized as her tongue began to throb. She touched her cheek with trembling fingers and realized she had bitten her tongue. In her dream or because of a scream in her house, Jess didn’t know.
A scream. Jess threw her feet over the side of the bed and raced toward her room door. The house was eerily calm, the hallway milky with gray light from the high windows at the peak of the domed wall. The sky looked strange, flat and close somehow.
“Max?” Jess said quietly, hurrying toward his room.
His door burst open. “No school!” he whooped, thrusting his phone at her.
“What?” Max’s grin didn’t make sense, his bed head and the sparkle in his eyes. Hadn’t he just been screaming?
“It’s canceled,” he said, and Jess couldn’t tell if he was ignoring her distress or oblivious to it.
School. Belatedly, Jess felt the pieces click into place. “A snow day?” she asked, squinting at the screen Max held before her. She would have chastised him for having his phone in the bedroom, but she was distracted by the automated text message from the Auburn School District: Due to blizzard conditions, there will be no school at any of the Auburn campuses today.
“What’s going on?” Gabe came out of her bedroom rubbing his eyes and trailing a ratty blanket. He still slept with his baby blanket, and because Max had only recently given up his, he didn’t tease his little brother about it.
“No school!” Max said, scooping Gabe up roughly and spinning him around. “It’s been canceled because of a blizzard.”
“A blizzard?” Gabe wriggled out of his brother’s arms and pounded down the steps. Max followed eagerly, the years melting off him at the prospect of a perfectly unplanned day. Even Jess couldn’t stop herself from smiling as she trailed behind them both. She watched as the boys flung open the curtains in front of the big bay window and revealed a scene that took her breath away. Sometime in the early morning hours it had indeed begun to snow, and the world was a swirling storm of white. The flakes fell so thick and heavy it was hard to see past the end of the Chamberlains’ driveway, and because the world was so monochromatic, it was impossible to tell just how deep the snow was. Very deep, Jess suspected, because the front steps of their house were little more than a giant, slanting drift.
“It’s snowing!” the boys shouted, jumping up and down. No matter that they had both seen the text message. This was undeniable proof only inches away from their noses.
“And there’s ice beneath that,” Jess said, remembering the rain, the sleet. It was a snowstorm of epic proportions, the kind of blizzard that would not be easily overcome. She didn’t say it to Max and Gabe, but she doubted that there would be school tomorrow, either. It would take some time to dig out from under this avalanche. And it was still coming down.
“I didn’t know there was snow in the forecast,” Jess said absently as she wandered toward the kitchen. Hot chocolate was in order. And cinnamon rolls, if she had yeast. She’d have to proof it first, of course. She couldn’t remember the last time she had baked bread—or anything, for that matter.
Gabe had been praying for a snow day since school started at the end of August. She didn’t blame him. Jess could clearly remember the magic of an unexpected snow day, and it was reflected in the hoots that were still coming from the living room. There was something special about the earth swathed in white, fresh and new and gleaming like a gift on Christmas morning.
When she was a child, Jess’s mother had made cinnamon rolls from scratch on snow days and let Jess stay in her pajamas all day long. They played Scrabble and 7-Up 7-Down, a game that was usually reserved for the adults in her life. Jess felt a pang of loneliness and wished for a moment that she could remember the scent of her mother’s skin. Betsy had worn drugstore perfume and lotion scented like raspberries and cream, but she had always carried an undertone of something warm and baking. Jess couldn’t recall it and it made her heavy with loss.
“Let’s do a puzzle!” Gabe said, running into the kitchen and throwing himself at Jessica. He nearly bowled her over with his enthusiasm.
“Watch a movie,” Max said, following just a few steps behind.
“Both.” Jess smiled. “We can do both. But first: breakfast. Cinnamon rolls?”
Her suggestion was met with enthusiasm, but when the little foil packet of yeast refused to bubble, Jess had to come up with a plan B. They settled on pumpkin-spice pancakes and hot chocolate with a dollop of whipped cream and a few stale rainbow sprinkles on top. It felt ridiculously decadent to Jessica, like something out of a storybook instead of her real, painfully messy life. It was crazy how a blizzard could turn back the clock—they laughed and joked as easily as they had in the months and years before Evan left. If it felt like something was missing, they pretended otherwise. Even Max was like the boy Jess remembered. Funny, bright, and sarcastic, but not in a hurtful way.
It was close to noon when Jess realized she was still wearing her pajamas and crawled out from underneath the pile of blankets on the couch to go find something to wear.
“No!” Gabe shrieked, launching himself at her.
Jess grinned, evading his grasp so that he flopped back down on the pillows. “I’m going to brush my teeth, not run off to join the circus.”
Gabe giggled, but Max wasn’t as amused. Their morning had been an absolutely unexpected delight, but the snow showed no signs of abating and already the house was starting to feel small.
“Nobody can get out,” Max said, leaning over the back of the couch. His eyes were trained on his telephone. “All the roads are still closed.”
He had been hoping to spend the afternoon at the gym, or at the very least to be able to make it to Trey’s house.
“The storm of a century,” Jess said, trying to make a joke. But it sounded threatening, not funny.
Upstairs, Jess grabbed her phone off the nightstand and checked for messages. Nothing from Meredith (she couldn’t decide if she was hoping for an apology or if she was still too upset to accept it), but her father had texted and called.
No voice mail, but his messages became increasingly urgent as the morning went on.
What a storm!
Electricity is out in part of town. Do you have power?
Everyone okay?
I’m coming over.
Jess quickly called her father. “Hey,” she said when he picked up. Henry wasn’t one for small talk, so she didn’t bother. “I didn’t realize the power was out.”
“It’s only a couple of blocks. A transformer blew,” he said. “Anna and I are fine; how about you?”
“It’s warm and well lit here.”
“Good. Stay put. I’m going to try and dig out later.”
“Don’t bother, Dad.” Jess pulled open her curtains and draped them behind the decorative hooks beside the window. Snow was piling up on the window ledge, blocking the feeble light of the furious day. “It’s still going strong. The plows haven’t even attempted a pass of our street.”
“I don’t think they’re out at all yet.”
“Then what makes you think you’ll be able to dig out?” Jess laughed a little. “Stay put. Seriously. We’re fine.”
“Do you know how to build a fire?”
“If I need to, I’ll google it on my phone,” Jess said. “It can’t be that hard.”
Her father wasn’t the outdoorsy type. And he wasn’t particularly hands-on, either. Henry could paint a wall or hang a picture, but he had never taught Jessica how to change the tire on her car (the Lancasters had a AAA membership for that) and she could not recall a single time in her entire childhood when they went hiking or camping. She barely knew how to roast a marshmallow much less build a fire without burning her house down.
Evan had been different. His dad was an avid camper and Evan had grown up crisscrossing the US in a hatchback Toyota Corolla with a three-man tent in the back. Just enough room for Bradford and Helen, with Evan tucked snug between them. One of Jessica’s favorit
e pictures of her husband had been snapped in an unidentified campground with three happy faces poking out of the faded red tent. Evan was ten, maybe eleven, with longish hair in a sleepy tangle and skinny arms thrown around the shoulders of his parents. As if the roles were reversed. As if he were the father and they the children. Even at that age his smile was measured, mature.
If Evan were home, he’d have a fire roaring by now.
But Jess couldn’t think about that. She told Henry, “If the electricity goes, we could always turn on the oven and open the door. It’s gas.” She could hear her father sputtering on the other end of the line. Clearly he hadn’t registered the note of sarcasm in her voice. “I’m joking,” she said quickly. “Trying to be funny.”
“I don’t find that very funny.”
They hung up shortly after Jess convinced her father to wait for the plows, and she took a few minutes to put her room in order. Bed made, yesterday’s clothes in the hamper. The manila folder from Deputy Mullen was on her nightstand and Jess flipped it open for just a minute and skimmed the notes she had written on a piece of lined paper tucked inside.
She had spent a couple of hours propped up in bed the night before trying to make sense of Evan’s strange notes. First, she researched the crimes. He had categorized everything from felony embezzlement to counterfeit trademark—Jess wasn’t even entirely sure what that meant. But as far as Jess could tell, there was no rhyme or reason to the convictions, nothing that tied them all together. The women were of varying ages and backgrounds, and they represented different races and interests.
Then there were the tenuous connections that Jessica had tried to make between the women on Evan’s Post-it Notes and her own imperfect list. One of the women had the initials DJ, and Jess had drawn a line between her and Cody De Jager with a question mark. Maybe they were related? It was an almost ludicrous stretch, but it was all she had. And another had a surname that started with an H. Worthy of another line. Of course, Anthony Bartels and James Rosenburg were tied together by the thin thread of perceivable association: one was a social worker, the other a family lawyer. There was overlap there. Perhaps they shared a case or two. Maybe they worked with one or more of these women. Jess intended to find out.
