by Nicole Baart
Evan stepped out of Meredith’s car empty-handed. But before he cut himself off from her and James completely, he leaned in and said, “We’ll work this out, okay?”
She didn’t respond, so Evan eased the door shut. It sealed with a muted thud and he was left standing in the cold.
Evan looked at the sky, searching for the moon and some indication of which direction he was facing. But clouds had blown in heavy and low, bursting with moisture that laced the air with the scent of coming rain. He would have to just start walking, hope he hit a road or a farmhouse eventually.
It was a lonely feeling, setting off in the dark. But all at once Evan remembered that he wasn’t entirely alone. Tucked in his pocket was a scrap of paper. A number that identified the coordinates home.
Max had scribbled the phone number on a piece of paper for Gabe one weekend when the boys were staying at his town house. Evan’s bachelor pad was bare bones, not exactly the kind of place where you could easily find a notepad. It wasn’t Max’s fault that he grabbed the only thing he could find. But when Evan had realized what it was—what Max had used—he lost it.
“Do you have any idea what this is?” He waved the paper in front of Max’s nose. It bore the page number and a portion of the title, a procession of digits in Max’s messy hand. It was just a fragment of the story that Evan hoped to someday share with his youngest son.
“A corner of a page,” Max scoffed. “So what? Gabe is supposed to have his phone number memorized by Monday, so I wrote it down for him. What’s the big deal?”
Evan didn’t mean to explain, but suddenly it was tumbling out. Not all of it, just the bits about LaShonna. About who she was and why she mattered. And the thing was, Max understood. He got it. It meant something to him, too.
“Write the number down on a different piece of paper,” Evan told Max. “Look in the recycle bin.” He intended to tape it back into the book, to mend what had been broken. But instead, he ended up tucking the book in Gabe’s backpack for later and keeping the torn piece. He carried it around, a talisman of sorts. A reminder of where he was from and the assurance that his family was just a phone call away. He didn’t even remember when he started using the numbers as his own personal code. A promise that things would be the way they once had been. Better.
Touching the scrap of paper in his pocket, Evan imagined finding his way back to his motel room. Calling Jess. What would he say? He wasn’t sure. But he suddenly longed to hear the sound of her voice, even if all she said to him was: “Hello.”
When Meredith turned her headlights on, Evan was bathed in a sudden spotlight. He raised his hand to shield his eyes from the unexpected glare. Maybe she had an attack of conscience. A change of heart.
But he never had the chance to turn around.
“Real courage is when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”
—Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird
CHAPTER 27
WHEN JESS WOKE, her throat was dry and scratchy, aching. Something was in her mouth, her nose. She tried to open her eyes, but they felt glued shut. Raising her hand took every ounce of her concentration, and as she did so, something began to beep. It sounded angry, insistent.
And then there was a voice. “She’s awake!”
The sound of feet pounding the floor, a shuffle, an alarm that rang long and was silenced.
“Jessica,” someone said. “Jessica, can you hear me?”
She could feel someone leaning over her, the presence of a body close enough to touch. But Jess was swimming away again, adrift on a current that was warm and hypnotic. Comforting. Someone was calling her name. They were too far away, so distant from where she was floating. Jess gave herself over to the pull of gravity, but for just an instant a barb of worry lodged itself in her chest. There was something she had to do—she just couldn’t remember what it was. Someone needed her? It didn’t matter. Jess wiggled herself free of the small, sharp hook and let herself go. She slept.
* * *
Evan was there.
And Jessica was twenty-one years old again, slim and lovely and fit from long runs and deep sleep and the gorgeous flush of youth. It was the night she first laid eyes on Evan; Jess knew it because she could feel the promise of him shimmering beneath her skin.
Her senior year of college she took a job as a waitress at the country club, and on weekends she wore a short black skirt and a white blouse and carried trays of hors d’oeuvres between men in perfectly tailored suits and women in dresses she could only dream of wearing. The women ignored her. The men smiled, taking a caviar and crème fraîche tartlet with a wink. But not Evan.
He was out of place in a sea of black, tall and unkempt with a mop of hair in desperate need of a trim. He needed a shave, too, but none of that occurred to Jess. It was impossible not to love him just a bit because he seemed so wholly unconcerned with the desperate posturing happening all around him.
Jess balanced her tray and wandered toward the entrance where a banner had been hung announcing that the event was a fund-raiser for the children’s hospital. She had worked everything from PTA meetings to wine-and-canvas nights for stay-at-home moms, and the truth was they all felt the same. But in a room filled with social climbers, Evan stood out. Jess watched him as she wove between clusters of beautiful people, fascinated by his casual disdain. By his chinos and polo shirt, his shoes that were scuffed, the laces frayed at the ends.
There was a gentleman in a motorized wheelchair and an expensive suit, and Evan spent the entire evening at his side, cultivating a friendship that would later sustain him through the rest of med school and his residency until his best friend would pass away at the painfully unfair age of twenty-eight.
Of course, Jess couldn’t know any of those things when she offered Evan and Raymond a thin slice of baguette spread with pink pepper goat cheese. Raymond accepted, Evan declined. But Raymond looked at Jess knowingly, at the way her gaze lingered on Evan just a heartbeat too long, and grinned.
On their first date, Evan saw a woman slip on the ice in a parking lot they were driving past. He turned the car around and found her on her knees, blood spilling down her temples and onto the frozen ground where it coagulated almost immediately. They waited with her—Jess holding her hand and Evan pressing a dusty car blanket against the back of her head—until the ambulance came.
There was the neighbor boy who lived next door to their first apartment. Evan fed him prepackaged fruit cups and cheese sticks and chocolate milk in individual-sized serving boxes that didn’t need to be refrigerated—all foods that he and Jessica never ate, but that he started to keep in their pantry when he realized that Alonso was always, always hungry.
Cody De Jager was skin and bones and brown fingernails, and he broke Evan’s heart in two. Jess had resisted their unlikely friendship, but Evan saw something in that broken boy that no one else could see. “He’s a lost cause,” Jess argued. “He needs another chance,” Evan insisted. In the end, they were both right. Cody was a little boy trapped in a man’s body, a wounded soul who simply couldn’t get past the hurt of a childhood that loomed tragic and large as a mountain. But Evan had taken him by the hand anyway, had made him believe, if only for a while, that he was worth the fight.
Evan looked at them all and saw things that no one else could see.
“You never saw me,” Jess whispered. She didn’t know she was crying until a tear slipped right off her chin.
“Oh, Jess.”
Evan’s hands were warm when they cupped her face, and Jess wondered at how she could feel him. He was gone—she knew that. Evan Chamberlain had died, and maybe she had too? Somehow it didn’t matter, because she was here and she could feel him and it was enough. Their life together was a breath of wind, a hint on her skin, and Jess found that she could remember everything. Everything. First kiss. Wedding day. Max’s birth. Evan had laughed and cried and dropped the video camera on the floor and shattered it. There wa
s no footage of those first minutes when Max lay wailing on Jess’s bare chest. But it didn’t matter. She knew it all by heart.
And here he was.
Evan ran his thumb over her lips. He said, “I always saw you.”
“No you didn’t.”
“You just didn’t need me the way that they did.”
She closed her eyes. “You’re wrong.”
“No. You’re the strong one, Jessica Chamberlain. You always have been.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re the strongest person I’ve ever known.”
* * *
She was there.
Jessica couldn’t see her face, and every time she reached out to catch the edge of her coat, the woman was gone again. Folded into the shadows of this place where Jess found herself sifting memories like sand. But Jess knew who she was.
LaShonna Tate. Gabriel’s birth mom.
If her name had been a wound, it was healing now. A scar that would always remind Jessica of what she had been given—and what Gabe had lost. Because even before Evan died, Gabe’s life had been marked by deep loss. Jessica knew that now. She could still feel the moment Max’s warm, writhing body had been placed on her chest. The curl of his fist like a chrysalis about to unfold, the pink flush of his translucent skin. He was a part of her, fresh from her own body, a fragment of her soul that fell to earth and was now blinking, unseeing, at the familiar sound of her voice. It was supernatural, miraculous somehow. But LaShonna’s arms had been the first to cradle Gabe. Her voice. The scent of her warm skin against his. She was a part of him.
It was something that Gabe couldn’t understand right now, but Jess saw it engraved in the palms of her sweet son’s hands. He was two people, caught between what might have been and what would be. And Jess hadn’t given him space to live in that reality. To hold in tension the truth that he had two mothers, and they both were worthy of his love.
“I’m sorry,” Jess called around the corner, running now. Stumbling. “I didn’t know.”
No answer.
“I was selfish,” she cried.
LaShonna was silent.
“It can’t be undone,” Jess whispered. “But I love him.”
I know.
“He needs me.”
And if it was a dream or a hallucination or something entirely mystical, Jess believed she heard someone say: Go.
* * *
Three days.
Jessica lingered in a coma for three days, though Henry and Anna told Gabriel that Mommy was very tired and needed a good, long rest. When he visited, he crawled into the hospital bed with her and traced the line of the IV as it snaked up her arm. Gabe kissed her cheek when no one was looking.
“Wake up,” he whispered.
And one day, Jess did.
Afterward, when she was sitting up in bed, propped on pillows and surrounded by balloons and bouquets of flowers and stacks of books and magazines and cutouts of newspaper articles that mentioned her by name, Henry told her everything. He explained in fits and starts between Jessica’s sudden, frequent naps that she had lost three full days of her life. And while she was sleeping, the world had changed.
“It’s good to see you awake,” Deputy Mullen said when he came to visit her. He refused to sit in the chair that turned into a bed, and leaned instead against the wall with his hands dug deep in his pockets. Jess didn’t know him well, but she knew this was his stance, as much a part of him as the slightly bulbous nose on his face. It was comforting somehow, to have him nearby doing exactly what he was supposed to do.
“It’s good to be awake.” Jess tried out a smile, the muscles in her face still tingling from a cocktail of medications and disuse. It worked. Mullen smiled back.
“They gave me the full rundown. Xanax, whiskey, carbon monoxide poisoning . . . What were you trying to do? Kill yourself?”
Jess felt her smile fade.
“Sorry, too soon.” Mullen heaved a sigh and pulled a stool from the corner of the hospital room, rolling it close to the bed. He perched on the padded seat and reached for Jess’s hand where it lay on top of the starched, white sheet. “I’m sorry I let this happen.”
“It’s not your fault,” Jess protested, but he shushed her with a quick shake of his head.
“I should have listened to you. We should have pushed harder. Seized Evan’s computer, gone through his town house, anything. Everything.”
“You were following protocol. I didn’t even know what he was up to.” Jess wiggled her fingers a little inside of the warm paw of his hand, but Mullen held on tighter.
“We should have looked into the Minnesota connection more. Eagle Ridge was less than sixty miles from Elmwood Park. When we discovered Evan’s file with all those convictions, we should have pressed it more.”
“You told me you looked into Eagle Ridge,” Jess said.
“We did. But there were so many inconsistencies. We didn’t dig hard enough.” Mullen passed a hand over his jaw and sighed. “I failed you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“That’s where he was, you know. Eagle Ridge, I mean. That night, before he died.”
Jess both wanted to know and didn’t. She wasn’t sure how much she could take. In the end she asked, “What do you mean?”
“He was interviewing an inmate. Trying to figure out the truth behind Initium Novum.”
Jess’s head ached. It felt too heavy for her neck, but she didn’t want to lie back against the pillow and stop Mullen from talking. It happened all the time these days. She drifted off midconversation and woke up in an empty room. “I’m not sure I understand,” she said, forcing herself to focus.
“Communication between Meredith and the inmates she was working with was done primarily through word of mouth. A not-so-sophisticated whisper network.” Mullen’s eyes narrowed as Jess blinked along, but he kept talking. “When Evan made plans to visit Eagle Ridge, they leaked. That’s how Meredith knew he was going there.”
“It doesn’t seem real,” Jess said.
“We’re still conducting interviews and will be for a long time. No one wants to talk about it.” Deputy Mullen squeezed her hand one last time and let go. “He’s really a hero, you know. Without him, I’m not sure we would have ever realized what was happening.”
Jess knew, but she was still trying to get her head around exactly what that meant. She knew the facts. At least some of them—the ones she could remember and piece together from her conversations with her father and now Deputy Mullen. Jess had been scratching at the surface, uncovering the truth one tenacious scrape at a time. But the whole picture was still a little blurry.
Meredith quit Promise Adoption because she couldn’t stomach watching another birth mother change her mind at the last minute and decide to parent her baby. It had happened one too many times amid circumstances that Meredith knew would be devastating for the child—and she had spent the early part of her social work career intervening in situations that had gone horribly wrong. She had witnessed altogether too many hurt kids. Too many dead kids. When one of the potential birth moms that Meredith was working with was sent to prison, she realized that she might be able to do something about an epidemic of child neglect, abuse, and endangerment.
Her relationship with James Rosenburg was entirely an accident. He was presenting a clear-cut child abuse case in a hearing, and Meredith was called in as an expert witness. The case was dismissed after a long day of testimony, and they both watched as a little girl was released into the custody of a father they knew would someday kill her. They ended up in a nearby bar, drinking at first to numb the shock and then because they were so damn angry. Maybe the things they admitted wouldn’t have been confessed in the light of day or without the aid of alcohol. But the perfect combination of vodka and fury revealed commonalities they couldn’t have predicted, and they realized that maybe there was something they could do.
Five thousand dollars rolled nicely into adoption agency fees, and offering a gift to
birth mothers who followed through with the adoption didn’t seem like a bribe at all. It seemed just and fair, a small token of appreciation for making a choice that was best for all involved. Never mind that it was coercion. That it was its own form of human trafficking. Meredith had done everything in her power to ensure that the women who were given this choice really had no choice at all. And the adoptive families had absolutely no idea what was going on.
They weren’t the only ones in the dark. Meredith didn’t know that James was padding the books, charging the families more than he let on and pocketing the money himself. For Meredith, it was all about principles. For James, money played a starring role—at least, after he realized he could play the part of Robin Hood and benefit from it too. It was what caused him to step out of the back of Meredith’s car and lift his shotgun to his shoulder. She knew that he had the gun on the floor by his feet, but she swore that it was for intimidation purposes only. To make Evan believe that they were serious.
It chilled Jessica to the bone. What they had done was more than just manipulative. It was calculating. Cold. Meredith’s cunning in pressuring women at their weakest, most vulnerable moments was horrifying. And when Jess was alone, at night in the hospital when her kids were asleep at Grandpa and Anna’s house and the nurses had left her to rest, she couldn’t sleep. The trajectory of Meredith’s life, the path that her decisions had set her on, had flung her so far out into space it was hard to reconcile the woman Jessica knew with the person who had crushed up a spoonful of Xanax and stirred it into a shot of whiskey for Jess to drink, and then put her best friend in a car to make it look like suicide.
