by Lisa Tucker
“I don’t have a choice. I have to go to this dinner. It will probably determine my future in the program.”
“And of course your future is more important than me,” she said—and hung up.
He hoped that was the last of it. He was nervous enough about this meeting without adding unnecessary stress. But when she called again, at 6:52, he’d just arrived at the restaurant. He was outside, rubbing his hands together because he’d forgotten his gloves, planning how to defend the latest version of his paper and make the case that he had the ability and commitment to cut it in the profession. He was so tense that he answered the phone without thinking.
“You have to come home,” she said. No hello, no I hope you’re all right, no I understand how important this is.
“I told you, I can’t.”
“But I really need your help.”
“I’ll leave as early as I can. That’s all I can promise.”
“I’m not doing very well, David. I’m serious.”
“Well neither am I.” He exhaled. “I wish you could see that this is our future, too. I have to support our family.”
“No you don’t. My father would be happy to—”
“Not this again. I’ve told you, I refuse to sponge off your father.”
He saw Professor Vinton opening the glass door of the pizza parlor. He recognized the prof’s trademark Cossack hat, which he wore from October to April, even if it wasn’t particularly cold. “Got to keep the brain warm,” Vinton would say, and chuckle like he hadn’t said it a hundred times.
“We can talk about this later,” he said quickly. “I have to go.”
“Please, David, I’m so tired. I didn’t want to tell you before, but I haven’t been able to get another—”
Vinton was standing at the hostess desk. Waiting. David could not be late. He repeated that he would be home as soon as he could and said good-bye.
They were just sitting down when the phone rang again, but this time, David hit the ringer mute button. Vinton took off his hat and gently set it on the placemat in front of the empty chair next to him. He moved his menu over, too, without looking at it. “Shall we follow tradition?”
David nodded. He’d learned last year that most of the history faculty always ordered the same pizza. It wasn’t a joke, though the newbies always assumed it had to be.
When Professor Vinton told the waitress, “Spinach and olive pizza and a pitcher of beer,” she shot David a smile. She was pretty, but it didn’t matter. Despite everything that had gone wrong in his marriage, he had no interest in other women.
After she left, the professor said he had some news. Did he say good news? “I was going to tell you this yesterday after class, but when you had to leave, I decided it would be better this way. I got a call from Bloomington. Your paper has been accepted.”
David was so taken aback that he could only mumble, “Really?”
“They remarked on the strength of the last passage,” said the professor, which was a nod to the work David had done in revisions.
David started gushing his appreciation for all Vinton’s help, but the professor waved him away. “Everyone in the department knows you’re serious. I told them when you applied that you’re a star in the making.” He grinned. “And you know I always like to be right.”
The pizza arrived and David ate two slices, all he could manage given that he couldn’t feel his stomach. His legs were gone, too. It was as if the rewiring of his brain to accept this had taken all the blood from his body. He did drink, because Professor Vinton encouraged him to. They finished the first pitcher, and David briefly wondered if he should get going, but then the professor ordered another one. When the room started to look fuzzy, less familiar, David switched to water. Vinton had walked to the pizza parlor, but he had to drive home.
They stayed until 10:47: almost four hours of talking history with the historian he admired most. It would have been heaven even if Professor Vinton hadn’t kept emphasizing how well David was doing. How he belonged there. How Vinton was looking forward to working with him, and eventually, supervising his dissertation.
David found it simply incredible that this brilliant professor respected him. I’ll respect you when you act like a man, his father had said, when David cried. I’ll respect you when you’ve worked for a living—when David was eleven and brought home another perfect report card. I’ll respect you when you have kids and you show me what a better father you’ll be—if David dared to complain about his father calling him a sissy, a girl, a mama’s boy, a weakling, or a crybaby.
And Professor Vinton wasn’t just an intellectual heavyweight. He’d been a boxer in college, and he owned three motorcycles. He could probably beat up Ray without breaking a sweat. Yes, David knew this was a dumb thing to be thinking, but he didn’t care. Sitting at this table, he felt more accepted as a man than he ever had in his life.
When they stood up to leave, David was in an expansive and wildly optimistic mood. He didn’t feel the cold as he walked to his car. The streets around the university looked cleaner and brighter and bursting with possibility. As he drove by stately houses, he imagined them filled with people who were looking forward to the future as much as he was—now that he knew he was a star in the making. Somehow he’d have to live up to it, but for now, it was just so incredibly, impossibly cool.
He was out on the highway, almost back to the apartment complex, when he remembered his phone was off. He thought about turning it on, but he didn’t see the point of listening to all Courtney’s messages telling him to come home when he was going there anyway.
Later, he would force himself to listen to those messages over and over, though the pain was unbearable. It was the least he could do, now that it was too late to do anything.
I took a cab to a doctor weeks ago, but he wouldn’t give me any pills. I never sleep anymore. I lie there and listen to you but I never drift off, no matter how hard I try. Do you have any idea what that’s like?
I don’t want to be like this, David. Please help me. I don’t know what to do.
Something bad is happening. I’m seeing things, baby. I know they’re not there, but I’m so scared. Even if you don’t care about me, please come home for Joshie’s sake.
I just have to sleep or I’m going to die!
He kept the messages on his cell phone until the phone service deleted them. Even years later, he had most of them memorized. For as long as he lived, he would never forget the desperation in his ex-wife’s voice.
He was still crouched on the floor in Michael’s bathroom when he heard a noise and felt something banging against his head. “David? Are you there? Can I talk to you?”
It was his mother. She was knocking on the bathroom door, which he happened to be leaning against. He was still holding Michael’s little robe, but it was damp with sweat.
She sounded a little apprehensive. He wondered if she was afraid to tell him what she’d told Kyra, and reveal the fact that she’d stayed in contact with his ex-wife all these years. But he wasn’t upset with his mother. He didn’t even care what Courtney had told Sandra about that night. What he was afraid of was more solid and intractable; it made the air feel so heavy in his lungs that when he stood up, he was dizzy from it.
He opened the door and looked into his mother’s kind, weary eyes. “You’re right,” he said softly. “She didn’t take him.”
Without his anger, he wasn’t sure how to think about Courtney, but he was sure she hadn’t done this. There was no motive, just like the detective said. Courtney didn’t blame him for that night. He remembered when the doctor said Joshua couldn’t be revived, how she’d grabbed a blade from an ER cart. I killed my baby! She’d fought hard against the police who tried to stop her. The sound of her weeping and wailing as they took her away was something David would have given anything to escape. I
want to die! I can’t go on without him!
“Aw, honey.” Sandra’s voice was so soft, he could barely hear her. “My poor, poor boy.”
She was looking at him, and then she had her arms around him. She was holding him tightly, as though he were six years old and her arms could protect him from the mean kids who teased him for being a bookish kid, from his mean father who teased him for being skinny and weak. Her cheek was against his neck. It felt softer than he remembered; the skin was looser and thinner, like the fabric of a favorite shirt worn a million times.
The next thing he knew, his wife was there. She’d come up behind him and put her arms around him, too. He could tell something had happened, some news about Michael, but they were waiting to tell him because he was obviously losing it.
For so many years, he’d been afraid that if he ever let himself cry, the pain would destroy him. Now he was crying hard, maybe as hard as Kyra had been crying when he saw her sitting in Sandra’s lap, but the two women he loved best in the world were holding him up, telling him over and over that it would be all right, as though it really could be this time.
TWENTY-SIX
It was almost ten o’clock, and Courtney was sitting at the bar of the Ocean Nights Motel, trying to ignore the lowlife seated next to her. She’d already pointed to her laptop and muttered “busy” when he asked if she wanted a drink. A few minutes later, when the bartender set a margarita down perilously close to her MacBook, she knew that the lowlife had bought her a drink anyway. “All work and no play makes Jack go out of business,” he said, chuckling before he’d finished his stupid joke. “Jack Daniels, get it?”
She didn’t bother to point out that margaritas wouldn’t help “Jack” much either, given that they weren’t made of whiskey. At least they usually weren’t. Who knew at a dump like this? The sign out front said that Ocean Nights had an on-site restaurant, upgraded rooms, air-conditioning and free Wi-Fi. The only part that turned out to be true was the free Wi-Fi, which, weirdly, was available only in the bar. The on-site restaurant was a hamburger shack across the parking lot, and the air-conditioning was “temporarily” out of commission, meaning the margarita she didn’t want was already sweating through the napkin. Worst of all was room 13, which the front desk clerk had let Courtney see, after Courtney had given her forty dollars for the privilege. It was decorated in a nauseating shade of green and so filthy it was probably a health hazard. The clerk frowned when Courtney said that if it was upgraded a little more, it might be able to cut it as a prison cell.
Courtney had been on her way back from a disappointing job fair in Newark when Hannah called. She was glad to hear from her, and glad that the girl was on the East Coast—until Hannah told her what she’d done. Then she had to pull off the interstate or risk plowing into some innocent commuter.
“You have to bring him back to his family.” She hoped she sounded firm, but she was having trouble catching her breath. “Right now!” She punched on her warning lights, knowing it wasn’t safe to be sitting on the shoulder of the road in this traffic. There were notices up and down the interstate that these “breakdown lanes” were to be used only for emergencies. She hoped the highway patrol didn’t stop to help her, or she’d end up with a ticket.
“But I’m feeling really sick,” Hannah said. “I don’t think I can drive.”
“I’m going to call David and Kyra to pick him up. I’ll call you after I talk—”
“Please don’t tell them yet. You come, okay? By yourself. You can take him back.”
“I have to call them,” she said, twisting a lock of her hair. “I have to tell them where he is and that he’s all right.”
“But they’ll have me arrested! I might have to go to jail. Courtney, I’m begging you. If you promise not to tell them, I promise I’ll wait in the motel down the street. Please. I’m not doing so great here. I really need your help.”
Courtney wondered if it was possible that David and his wife would really have their own niece arrested. It sounded unlikely, but what if it wasn’t? Oh God.
Hannah was still talking. She had such a sweet voice; it was hard not to want to do whatever she asked. And Courtney wasn’t actually very far from the shore town where Hannah and Michael were. She could probably be there in less than an hour. If only her heart would stop pounding; if only she could breathe slowly and make a decision. Finally, when she saw a patrol car pass by on the other side of the interstate—and realized her location might be being radioed in right now—she said okay. “Text me the name of the hotel. When I get there, we’ll figure something out.”
But when she got to Ocean Nights, Hannah wasn’t there. Courtney tried to call her repeatedly, but the calls went straight to voice mail. Luckily, Hannah had left her a note. It was lying on the bed in room 13, and tucked underneath was a picture of Michael and a gaunt-looking girl with enormous eyes, standing on the deck of a boat. In the note, Hannah explained that she’d forgotten her phone charger and her phone was dead. But she said she was feeling much better and she’d decided it was time to take the little boy home.
Courtney was immensely relieved that Hannah was doing the right thing—and that she could call Sandra now and tell her what was happening. She was dialing her cell phone before the annoyed clerk had even escorted her out of room 13. The conversation turned out to be less difficult than she expected. Somehow her former mother-in-law already knew who Hannah was, and she didn’t sound all that surprised that Hannah had taken Michael, though of course she was mystified that Courtney was the person telling her this.
“I met her on the Internet,” Courtney said. “It’s a long story.” She waited a moment. “But I had nothing to do with . . .”
“I know you didn’t,” said Sandra.
“She’s very sorry for all this. She told me she didn’t intend to scare her aunt and uncle.”
Courtney didn’t share with Sandra the other things Hannah said. The girl was very upset with Kyra for not bothering to inform Hannah or her father that Amy Callahan had died. This was why she’d decided to come to Philadelphia while her father and stepmother were in Colorado, on their annual trip to visit her stepmother’s family, and one of her stepsisters was on her honeymoon. Her plan was to confront her aunt and uncle, but in a nice way. She even bought toys for their child, so they’d let her in and listen to her. But then she saw Michael standing alone in his backyard, and he looked so much like her that she knew it was true: he really was her cousin, and the first person she’d ever seen who was related to her mother. Before she had time to think about the consequences, she’d talked him into spending the day with her.
“She didn’t mean any harm,” Courtney said. “She’s only seventeen and a little impulsive, but she’s a good person.”
“This is such a relief,” Sandra said. It was the third or fourth time she’d said this, but her voice still sounded a little tight and airless, as if her feelings hadn’t caught up with her words.
Courtney’s head throbbed as she thought about what her former mother-in-law and David and his wife had been through. She couldn’t help feeling that if she hadn’t told Hannah that her mother was dead, none of this would have happened.
“One other thing.” Courtney rubbed her left temple. “I hope the police won’t have to get involved . . . With Hannah, I mean. I think that’s a very bad idea.” She paused. “She may be afraid to drive up to the house if she sees a police car. Could you stress this to David and his wife?”
Sandra said she would. Then she said, “Thank you, Pumpkin. You have done so much for us with this phone call. David is going to be so grateful.”
Sandra always called her “pumpkin,” because she had red hair, but she smiled hearing it this time. And the part about David—it would be great if it turned out to be true. If only her ex-husband would see her as a decent person. A wrecked-up mess maybe, especially now, when she’d torn off every nai
l on her left hand on the drive to the Ocean Nights, but at heart, not that bad.
The lowlife next to her at this bar, now, he was a bad person. First, he kept bugging her while she was trying not to panic as she kept thinking about Hannah’s note; then he ordered her a drink she didn’t want; and now he was telling her how uptight she was after she’d ordered another Diet Coke.
“I can’t deal with this.” She scooted her stool as far away from him as she could go without crowding the gray-haired woman on the other side. “Please, I have to do something.”
If only she hadn’t canceled her phone Internet service when she lost her job. If only there was someplace else with Wi-Fi around, a normal place like Starbucks or McDonald’s. The Wi-Fi connection here was slow of course, but she’d finally loaded Amy/Hannah’s Facebook page. Amy’s friend list had always been hidden; Courtney had originally liked that, because it meant no one would know that she’d friended Amy. But now her wall was hidden, too. There was nothing except her name and her profile picture: a sea turtle.
“I’m not going to leave you alone until you drink that margarita,” the creep said. “A pretty gal like you deserves to have some fun.”
A pretty gal like you? The guy was older than she was, but he couldn’t be more than fifty. The last person who’d called her a “pretty gal” was her grandfather.
He was clearly drunk, and probably a regular at the fabulous Ocean Nights bar. On a normal day, when Courtney wasn’t stressed beyond belief by the fact that she might have just told Sandra something that wasn’t true, it would be bad enough. But this was no normal day. She was going to have to break into Hannah’s Facebook account. Of course she wasn’t some hacker mastermind, but she didn’t need to be. In one of her emails, Hannah had said something about her password, some hint. Unfortunately, Courtney no longer had those emails, but she might be able to remember what Hannah had said if this jerk next to her would just shut up.
