He leaned in to kiss her, which she accepted.
“Take me home?” she asked.
He touched her glass. “Mind if I finish this before we go?”
Tia smiled, ready to accept David as her due. She waved her arm, as though bestowing her favors on him. “Be my guest.”
He drained her glass and then ran his hand down her back. “Exactly what I have planned.”
In her numbed state, Tia could barely feel his hand, and at the moment, she found that level of sensitivity pretty near perfect.
CHAPTER 17
Tia
“Tia, we have a situation.”
Not today, please. How she hated the mornings when Richard popped his head in to complain about something or other before she’d even taken off her jacket. She hadn’t even drunk her coffee yet. Her head pounded from drinking with David last night.
“Are you listening?” Richard asked.
“I heard you. I heard you. We have a situation.” Did he think they worked at NASA? She pulled the lid off her coffee and took a desperate, hot gulp.
“We have a real problem.”
“Okay.” She shrugged an arm out of her jacket. “Got it. We have a real problem.”
“Leave your coat on. We have to go.”
“Go? Go where?” Tia tried to put the cover back on her coffee as she followed Richard out the door to the small hallway and then down the stairs.
“To your client’s house.”
Coffee splashed on her shirt. She tried to wipe it away while holding her cup and at the same time raised her right shoulder to keep her bag from slipping down.
“Who?” she asked Richard’s back. Dog hair covered his tweed sports coat.
“A Mrs. Graham.”
A gust of warm wind hit them when Richard opened the door to the parking lot. Tia stopped. “We’re going to Mrs. Graham’s house?”
“Let’s go, let’s go. The police are waiting.”
“The police are waiting?”
Richard turned to face her, his impatient expression emphasized by the deep red he turned whenever he became anxious or angry. “Could you please stop repeating everything I say and get in the damned car?”
• • •
Mrs. Graham tugged her sweater closer. Tia wanted to touch her, give her comfort, but two police officers stood by sternly.
She’d never seen Mrs. Graham without lipstick or when she wasn’t wearing clothes that were pressed and perfect. The pilled brown cardigan enveloping her looked as though she’d taken it from Sam’s side of the dresser.
“Oh, Mrs. G, are you all right?” Tia asked. “Do you need anything?”
Mrs. Graham looked up with an angry frown. She pressed her lips together and shook her head. The boulder in Tia’s chest became heavier. Debris covered the rug: baskets of laundry, newspapers, cloths with stains of indeterminate origin, unopened mail, and in the midst of it all, an ironing board with an iron set up like a soldier at the ready.
“A glass of water?” Tia needed to offer something.
“That’s not possible, ma’am.” The young policewoman’s words were without inflection. “Evidence isn’t finished in there.”
Stacks of dirty plates teetered on the coffee table. Smears of what looked to be spinach—creamed spinach, perhaps—covered the top one.
Mrs. Graham had been accused of attempted murder. That’s what Richard told Tia on the ride over. She supposedly fed her husband food laced with pills, and then panicked and called 911.
Tia fumbled at the catch on her bag and rummaged until she found a roll of Life Savers. “Want one?” she asked in Mrs. G’s direction, not sure whether to include the policewoman in the offer.
“Why didn’t you answer when I called?” Mrs. G’s face crumpled with despair.
“I . . . ” Tia’s voice faded. Oh, Jesus, she must have called after Tia left. Would things have been okay if she’d stayed till five? If she’d returned the call, could she have prevented Mrs. Graham from crushing those pills?
“There was no one else, Tia.” Mrs. G held out her hands, palms up, imploring Tia to help. “I needed you.”
“Mrs. G, I’m—” Tia stopped when Richard dug his fingers into her shoulder. She slipped the candy back in her handbag.
“Legal issues here,” he muttered into her ear.
“Why are we here if I can’t speak?” Tia asked.
“She asked for you. Said she had no other living relative. The police called. I thought we better check it out.”
“I’m not her relative.”
“She probably meant no other connection. I’ll explain to them.”
“If you’d called, everything would have been okay.” Mrs. Graham fussed at a hole in her sweater.
Tia remained mute, grateful that Richard had forbidden her to talk, choking on waves of Mrs. Graham’s grief and blame.
“Can I wash my hands?” Mrs. Graham asked the policewoman on her right.
“Sorry, ma’am, no.”
“But they’re dirty, so dirty,” Mrs. Graham told the officer on her left.
“It won’t be long,” he said.
“Tia, don’t you have a wet nap or something you can give me?”
Tia opened her bag again, frantic for some way to offer comfort.
The policewoman held up a broad hand. “Ma’am, please don’t.”
“Why are we here, Richard?” Tia whispered.
“They need information,” he said.
“Sam, he had an accident. I needed to clean him. Please,” Mrs. Graham said, “please, let me clean my hands.” Soft sobs replaced her pleas.
Tia dug her fingers into her forearms. “I need to use the bathroom.” She stood, waiting to be stopped.
“You’ll have to go down the street. There’s a coffee shop.” The policewoman pointed as though the living room wall were invisible.
Tia ran out before Richard could stop her, before Mrs. Graham could speak again, but her words followed Tia down the hall.
“It wasn’t my fault, right?” Mrs. Graham’s thin voice pierced Tia. “What could I do? Let a stranger clean him? Sam wouldn’t like that. Sam is proud, just about the proudest man in America.”
Tia squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, then turned and walked back, stopping at the doorway so she could bear witness as Mrs. Graham spoke.
Seeing Tia return, Mrs. Graham sat straighter. Her watery blue eyes locked on Tia’s. “He managed fifty people at John Hancock. Fifty. Everyone looked up to Sam. I don’t care what any of you say. He always knew what was happening; he knew it was me feeding him, cleaning him.”
“You did a good job,” Tia said.
Richard glared at her.
“He knew when people came into the house,” Mrs. Graham said. “I couldn’t shame him, letting people see him like that.”
“You showed him love every day. He knew that.” Tears ran down Tia’s face. “I’m sorry I didn’t call.”
Tia walked away. She stopped at the kitchen entrance, seeing where Sam had lain before they took him out. An empty bottle of pills was next to the half-eaten bowl of applesauce into which Mrs. Graham had supposedly crushed tablet after tablet of Ativan tranquilizers.
The medication Tia had persuaded Mrs. G to request from her doctor.
• • •
Richard exploded the moment he slammed the car door shut. “What the hell, Tia? When was the last time you made a home visit?”
“Maybe he’ll live,” Tia said. “How much could she have gotten him to swallow?”
“Live, die, either way we’re fucked. When did you last go into that home?”
“Home visits weren’t mandated in her case.” Tia threw her head against the headrest and then immediately changed her position. Everything smelled like Richard’s dog. “She liked coming to the office. It got her out of the house. She’d come when Sam napped.”
“Yeah, I can imagine how she got him to take those naps.”
“She loved him.”
“She t
ried to kill him.”
“She did it for him.”
“She did it on our watch.” Richard started the engine. “Your watch.”
“She didn’t want me to come to the house.”
“Wasn’t that a fucking clue?” He pounded the dashboard. “Do you know how this will read in the Globe?”
“There was absolutely no hint of abuse in the home. None,” Tia insisted.
“Really?” He pulled out into traffic. “Did you see that house? How could you let her live like that?”
• • •
“It’s not your fault.” Bobby slid closer to Tia on the stone wall lining Day Boulevard. The ocean appeared calm under the inky night sky. He put an arm around her shoulders and hugged her close.
“Of course it’s my fault.” Tia reached for Bobby’s hand. “I should have seen it.”
“You said it yourself, she always looked perfect. And home visits weren’t mandated.”
“Mandated and the right thing aren’t the same.”
Tia wished she had one of the six-packs they used to bring here when they were kids. She’d asked Bobby to bring her here because she couldn’t face the crowd at Fianna’s. She couldn’t take any jokes tonight. He’d taken her to eat in a faceless diner in Dorchester, and then they’d driven here.
“I should have gone to her house,” she said.
“You couldn’t know. She worked hard to hide it.”
She leaned against him. “I should have seen through her denial.” His shoulder felt durable enough to be unbreakable. She slid her hand into his. She needed a friend.
• • •
Tia walked to work every day following the incident at Mrs. Graham’s house. No more Doyle’s. No more drinking. No more sleeping with David. She’d ended that with a sober face-to-face.
Tia had seen Bobby three times that week, each encounter chaste and pure. Twice they went out for dinner, once they went to the movies, and each time Bobby reassured her. Nothing was grey in Bobby’s world. You were right or wrong. Memories of awful choices didn’t complicate his moral compass.
She longed to walk around with that sort of righteousness. Sam would live, but confusion as to whether that was good or bad complicated Tia’s reaction. Certainly, for her, for the agency, it was good. Somehow, the newspapers hadn’t written about the tragedy that almost occurred.
Who was she kidding? The tragedy had damn well happened, and she hadn’t helped. What would happen to Mrs. G now? To Sam?
Bobby kept telling her to go easy on herself. She’d been Mrs. G’s friend, right? Hadn’t Tia been the one Mrs. G asked for? How could Tia save people when the entire system was so awful? He kept reminding her that Mrs. G had declined her help. Tia couldn’t do it alone, right?
His talk soothed her, but she knew better. She’d messed up. Maybe she’d obeyed the letter of the law, but she’d been lax in not probing deeper with her client.
Tia pulled out her iPod and tried to follow Bobby’s advice by walking faster and faster. Fresh air! Exercise! Endorphins! Don’t blame yourself!
She sped up again, walking so quickly that she reached the coffee shop by work in half her usual time. The line at Fazenda Cafe didn’t seem as daunting as usual. Without headaches and hangovers, things almost flowed.
Now if she could only find a way to find Bobby as exciting as she did comforting. She wanted the grain of his skin, the tone of his voice, and the texture of his hair between her fingers to electrify her like Nathan’s had.
She pushed away her obsessive Nathan thoughts, using a visualization technique Bobby had shared, though he hadn’t known she’d use it for this purpose. Nathan became a massive rock that she pushed off a cliff.
Adios, Nathan.
“Two blueberry scones,” Tia said to the kid behind the counter when her turn came. “And a corn muffin.” Richard liked muffins; she and Katie were scone addicts. Tia would bring treats for all of them.
Act positive, you’ll be positive.
And she’d find a way to visit Mrs. Graham at Suffolk County Jail. Richard kept saying no—he wanted to consult with their agency counsel first, but everything moved so slowly, she feared both Grahams would be dead before she could visit.
• • •
Richard and Katie were waiting for her when she walked into the office. Too bad. She’d wanted to surprise them by leaving the pastries on their desks.
She wasn’t even late. Why where they posed like that? They looked like cops, standing in front of her desk with their arms crossed.
“What’s up?” Tia held her purse tight to her chest. “Did Sam die?”
Shamefully, she prayed the old man would live, so she could escape with her hands a little cleaner, when in truth, death was his better option.
“Good morning.” Richard gave Tia a look that felt like a slap. “Question: anything slip your mind lately?”
Katie looked at her like she had mud smeared on her face. Had they found out about some reports she hadn’t filed?
“What are you talking about?” She inched toward her desk. Katie blocked her. Richard held a file folder.
“What’s going on?” Tia asked.
“We found out.” Katie jutted out her chin. “There’s no more hiding it.”
“Found out what?”
“Do you realize what this will cost us?” Richard smacked his folder against her desk.
Her desk looked wrong. Everything on top was messed up differently than it usually was. Odd piles lined up across the edge.
“How could you?” Katie shook her head, as though mourning Tia. “Our clients, they’re the ones who’ll suffer, you know.”
“I haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about.”
If only that were true. The anxiety that Tia had been pushing away for weeks bloomed full in her belly. Pop. In an instant, she had a stomach full of acid.
The Walker grant.
Richard peered at her. “Ah, you remember. The fact that you may have put us out of business finally dawns.”
How late was she? Tia had been pushing the Walker grant out of her mind for so many weeks that the deadline had become too fuzzy to recall.
“How could you, Tia?” Katie’s eyes were red and swollen. “Do you know what you’ve done to us?”
The coffee began leaking; she felt wet heat in her hand, but with Katie and Richard blocking her desk, she couldn’t put it down. With the bag threatening to fall apart in her hands, she held it out to them. “I brought us coffee. Scones. A muffin for you, Richard.”
“This isn’t the time to joke around.” He massaged his forehead with the palm of his hand. “It’s serious.”
“I just thought you’d like a muffin.” Tia’s hands shook.
“We’ll be lucky if we have desks to eat at when this is through. The Walker money is sixty percent of our budget!” Richard’s voice rose. “Sixty percent!”
Tia bit her lip against asking him when he’d last supervised anything in the agency. “I’m sure it will be okay. People are late with grants all the time, right?”
“Not two months late!” Katie said. “They called yesterday, before you got here, because they wanted to know if we were still in business. They’re reallocating our money and want to earmark it for another agency in JP.”
Daphne Morrow probably called. Daphne should have known better than to talk to someone other than Tia. Maybe Tia should call Daphne’s supervisor and spill her guts about what a pain it was to work with Daphne.
“You’re not getting it,” Richard said. “We may not be able to get those funds back.”
“The Walker Foundation is enraged.” Katie said. “You made us seem very disrespectful of them.”
“They said they repeatedly tried to get in touch. That you ignored their emails.” Richard leaned too close. “Did you think you deleted them? Don’t you know they’re still on your computer?”
They’d rummaged through her computer. Jesus. They’d been looking for a way to get rid of her. Richard c
ouldn’t do it based on Mrs. Graham, not when he’d barely supervised her since he’d hired Tia.
The coffee bag was going to break. Finally, not knowing what else to do, feeling foolish, she grabbed a newspaper from the wastepaper basket, placed it on a file cabinet by the door, and rested the bag on the improvised mat.
“Just tell me what to do. I’m sorry, okay? This was a mistake. I mixed up the dates.”
“No you didn’t,” Katie said. “I saw it written in your desk calendar. You knew.”
“You looked through my stuff?”
“I told her to,” Richard said.
“You told her to snoop around my things?”
“They aren’t your things. They belong to the agency. I asked Katie. I needed the truth,” he said.
“You could have asked me.”
“Like I said.” He waited a beat. “I wanted the truth.”
“I found it all,” Katie said. “The reports you never did. The home visits. You didn’t fill out any forms. No wonder Mrs. Graham—”
Richard put out a hand to stop Katie. “This is all in the formal letter from the board.” He took an envelope from his breast pocket and handed it to Tia. “Sorry, Tia. You gave me no choice. You’re fired.”
CHAPTER 18
Juliette
Juliette thought she couldn’t imagine a life without Nathan, but these past two weeks had given her a taste of what it would be like. She and Nathan fell asleep as far apart as two people could while sleeping in the same bed. Then in their sleep they’d become one again. She’d wake to find herself leaning against him, the two of them making a pool of warmth, his back, his rump, comforting her. She’d rise up from the depth, and they’d turn as one, and he’d curve to her, and for a moment, they danced their usual night ballet. Then she’d remember, and she’d throw off his arm and move to the outer tundra of the mattress.
He swore he hadn’t known about the child, but he knew something. What? Judging in a vacuum of silence was impossible. He wouldn’t talk; she didn’t push. She retreated into a fog of pretence, giving him time and air, grasping for ways to hold on to the brittle illusion that things wouldn’t change.
Juliette was happy to be going to work this Saturday, a day she usually hated leaving the house. She flew through her last-minute chores. Loaded the dishwasher. Sorted the teetering pile of mail on her desk. Brushed on one more coat of lip stain.
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