Leaving Annalise (Katie & Annalise Book 2)

by Pamela Fagan Hutchins

  On the way to the dining room, I stopped in the doorway to Julie’s conservatory. It probably would have been a parlor in another home, but here she taught her students and displayed her instruments, from the piccolo to the trombone. Biographies of famous musicians and stacks of sheet music were scattered about. I wondered if anyone would miss me if I hid behind her timpani.

  I turned into the navy and red dining room and squeezed the tray of eggs into a small open space between a plate of cold cuts and a plastic grocery-store tray of wilted broccoli. On the other side of the table were an ice bucket, liters of soft drinks and fruit juices, and an array of liquor bottles. The organist from the church was perusing the selection. She straightened her pillbox hat and looked around. No one but me. She grabbed a plastic cup and the ice tongs and fished for cubes. Her hands were shaking.

  Mine started to shake, too. I could help her. “I think I’ll have one of whatever you’re having, ma’am,” I would say, just to make her feel better. And then I would take only one tiny no-thank-you sip and pour the rest down the sink.

  I turned away and closed my eyes. “No, Katie. No.”

  I started counting, my lips moving as I went through the numbers. One, two, three, four. I kept counting. I became aware of classical music playing over a sound system, a dour classical piece I didn’t recognize. Slowly, the feverish yearning seeped out of my body. I counted higher. When I opened my eyes at fifty-seven, I was facing the china cabinet and its display of gold-rimmed plates with anchors in the centers. I had set my phone down on that cabinet earlier, and I reached around an enormous spray of lilies someone had brought from the funeral to grab it. Behind the lilies was a bouquet of roses in the darkest red I had ever seen. The name in block capitals on the card knocked the wind out of me: BART.

  I yanked the card from its holder and ripped it into pieces. Why couldn’t he just leave me alone? My phone was sitting on the sheet music for “That’s All I Ask of You” from Phantom of the Opera. I picked it up and read my one message.

  Ava: “Finish up your business and be back in time for Jump Up. Big things happening.” Ava was referring to the monthly street festival, although I had no idea what she meant. I thumbed through the Phantom music while I tried to think of how to answer her. I decided it could wait and returned to the kitchen.

  Nick was blocking the doorway. He was holding on to Taylor with one hand as he leaned in, deep in conversation with a gray-haired man a head shorter than him. He’d introduced him to me earlier as his junior high football coach. I touched him on the shoulder and he moved aside so I could get through.

  I caught Taylor by the other hand and said, “I’ll take him.”

  Nick smiled at me, a smile I didn’t recognize and couldn’t read. It made me feel sad. “Thanks.”

  I mustered a smile back, then swung Taylor in the air and caught a whiff. “Someone needs a new diaper.”

  I went back to Nick’s old room to change Taylor on the bed. He looked up at Nick’s old surfboard hanging on the ceiling as I pulled his elastic-waist pants off and tickled his belly. He laughed, so I did it again.

  “Gonnagetcherbellybutton,” I said.

  Suddenly, I heard loud voices from the front of the house. I strained to listen and worked faster. Off with the old diaper. Wet wipes. Lots of them. My eyes watered as I bagged the mess and put on the new diaper. Taylor wriggled and chattered the entire time.

  “Shhh, Taylor, let Katie hear.”

  Running footsteps approached and Julie burst in, her face pale. She whispered, “Katie, bring him into my bathroom and shut the door. Keep him quiet. Come on now—follow me quickly.”

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  She put her finger over her lips.

  I grabbed Taylor and hurried down the hall behind her. I moved him farther down my body so my shoulder muffled his giggles. We slipped into the master bathroom and Julie closed the door behind us.

  “Derek is here. He’s demanding we give him the baby. Nick said he wasn’t here, so we have to keep him quiet.”

  Fear wrapped icy fingers around my throat. “I’ve got it.”

  I remembered Derek’s face, his scary voice and his knife, and I thought, Please, God, don’t let him hurt Nick.

  Julie squeezed my hand and left. I wanted to be out there with my husband. WWMD, WWMD, WWMD. I looked around for a quiet way to entertain the boy. I found a stack of magazines and fanned them out in front of him. He grabbed a worn copy of Plane and Pilot circa 2004 and used his whole hand to flip and mangle the pages. It would hold him for about two minutes, if I was lucky.

  The bathroom door burst open and I jumped to my feet. It was Nick, looking like he was one small ignition source short of a big explosion. His pupils were dilated and his irises dark brown. His olive skin leaned toward the green end of the scale. The scent of his anger nearly overwhelmed me, like sweat but sharper, like a cornered alley cat. But he was my alley cat. I dove at him, and he wrapped his arms around me.

  His voice was strained. “He’s threatening to take Taylor. I want to kill him. I’ve never, ever hated anyone like I hate that son of a bitch.” He spat out the last word forcefully and his whole body convulsed against me. He stepped back and handed me a card. “His so-called attorney.”

  “What did you say to him?” Taylor escaped the bathroom and ran back down the hall toward the sounds of people. I started to go after him until I heard Julie talking in her high-pitched grandma voice. He would be fine with her.

  “I told him Teresa had appointed me as Taylor’s guardian and godfather, and that I wouldn’t hand Taylor over to him, now or ever. I don’t get it, though. He doesn’t even want a kid.”

  But I remembered the man I’d met outside Annalise, the one who was concerned about his son sleeping in a girly bed. “We have to get you a lawyer,” I said. “I can help.”

  So for the next hour, I made calls. Teresa’s burial in D.C. wasn’t for three more days, so we scheduled an appointment for the next morning with an attorney in Corpus Christi. Game on, for better or worse.

  The offices of Attorney Mary Posey were nice, but not as plush as those of my old Dallas firm, Hailey & Hart. That meant we wouldn’t be paying for her image by the hour, which I appreciated. Her assistant, a squarish woman of indeterminate age, ushered us in with coffees, an air of competence, and a coloring book and crayons for Taylor.

  Mary Posey said, “Derek’s attorney, Albert Garcia, already called and said Derek wants the boy. But what I think he really wants is the money.”

  “What money?” Nick asked. “Teresa didn’t have any.”

  “Teresa died while on active duty overseas for the Marines, so Taylor has a nice sum of money coming to him. At least the hundred thousand dollar death payment that Albert told me about. And there may be more.”

  “Oh my gosh,” Julie whispered. Her hands gripped the purse on her knees.

  Kurt pulled his lower lip.

  “Let’s make a few calls and see,” Mary suggested.

  Ten minutes later, Mary hung up the phone. “Taylor is the beneficiary of her SGLI policy. That’s a Servicemembers Group Life Insurance policy, and he gets another four hundred thousand under that. That raises the stakes a bit.”

  Kurt spoke for the first time. “Derek’s family has money, but they cut him off a few years ago.”

  Julie nodded. “Teresa said that was why he started selling drugs.”

  Nick snorted through his nose. “I think he could have found a few other ways to get by.”

  This was horrible. “His attorney could take his case on some kind of contingency fee basis,” I said. “They both would have plenty of financial incentive to fight.”

  “While we pay by the hour until we run out of money,” Nick said.

  “Well, yes,” Mary agreed. She ticked points off on her fingers. “When we talked on the phone yesterday, you said Derek’s name was not on the birth certificate. He never filed for any type of parental rights, so Teresa never gave him any. He had no r
elationship with Taylor. He did time for a drug-related offense.”

  Nick growled, “He doesn’t deserve to be a father.”

  Mary put both hands up and said, “I hear you, but he has points in his favor, too. We have to assume Derek truly is the father. The court will probably let him have visitation. I think they’ll give him time to show he can be a good father and develop a relationship with Taylor.”

  Nick jumped up. “Visitation? That’s bullshit.”

  “Maybe. But even if that’s the direction the court goes, the good news is that you don’t need to hand Taylor over to Derek unless and until a court orders you to do so.”

  My mind spun like the end of a spool of film.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  And all that explains why one short week later, I was back on St. Marcos, alone again in Annalise. Or it mostly explains it. But the rest of it was a natural result of all that happened before.

  Derek’s attorney filed for an emergency hearing while we were in D.C. The most honorable Judge Sylvia Nichols had no sympathy for our newlywed status. As she ruled that Taylor had to reside in Texas, the screen of my iPhone filled with Rashidi’s picture. I hit Decline and heard the judge order Taylor to stay within a hundred miles of Corpus Christi until the attorneys had duked it all out. God, I hated lawyers.

  “If you need to return to ‘the islands’ for your ‘honeymoon’ you could simply agree to hand Taylor over now and get on the next plane out,” Judge Nichols said in a take-no-crap voice.

  Ouch. I sat up straighter on the bench and tried not to look like a woman who was sad about canceling her trip to St. John. A series of texts from Rashidi hit my phone like torpedoes blowing holes below my waterline.

  When I finally got to Rashidi’s texts, I found that he’d stopped by Annalise and discovered fire damage and a broken window in the music room, apparently from an electrical short caused when a hole was drilled in the exterior wall. The shutters were in ashes.

  His last message said, “Crazy can’t help, I leaving. Sorry!” He’d be in San Juan for a month teaching in the master’s botany program at the University of Puerto Rico. I was running out of options.

  On the way out of the courtroom, Nick held my hand so tightly I imagined I could hear my bones cracking. I didn’t pull away. I could be strong.

  “Give us a minute,” he said to his parents, and pulled me aside.

  “We have to stay here, Katie, you know that, right?” He stroked my hand with his thumb.

  “I do.” I took a deep breath. “And it’s only going to be for a few months. We lived apart for two months before.”

  Nick look confused. “What do you mean, live apart?”

  I told him about Rashidi’s news. “I have to get back and get repairs made. I can’t leave her unsecured.”

  “I?”

  “We, Nick, we. It’s too risky. I need to be there.”

  His eyes darkened.

  I tried again. “When the custody proceedings are over, you and Taylor can come back.”

  He pulled his hand away. “You can hire a house-sitter, Katie. They can oversee repairs.” He ran his hand roughly through his hair, front to back.

  “But it’s not that easy. I poured every cent I had in Annalise, I gave up a successful career, and I invested myself in her as well. So, if I let Annalise go to hell, and oh yeah by the way meanwhile have no income, and you’re hardly working while we rack up enormous legal bills . . . well, that’s crazy.”

  “We just got married. We promised to be together. And we’re supposed to be on our honeymoon,” Nick countered.

  “Yes, we’re supposed to be on our honeymoon. But instead, we’re packed in a tiny house with your parents, fighting a drug dealer for custody of your sister’s kid. I fully support you, but I have obligations of my own. We can see each other every few weeks. Grown-ups do it all the time.”

  Nick turned up the heat but lowered his voice. “You know what, Katie? I think you’re absolutely right. I’ll stay here and fight for Taylor, and you go back and plant some flowers in the beds by the gate and sing karaoke with Ava.”

  My voice was loud and so shrill it hurt my own ears. “That’s not what this is about! And if that’s what you think of me, well then—” I sputtered out on that thought and launched recklessly into the next. “Real nice, Nick. I guess you are who I thought you were before. Cold. Heartless. Hurtful.”

  Nick’s words came out in cracks like gunshots. “You’re making a scene, in public, with my parents standing twenty feet away from us. Tamp down that Irish temper and quit making a fool of yourself and me.”

  And he walked away from me without another word. I was boiling, but there was nothing I could do but burn like an empty pot on a stove.

  We spent a tense evening in the Kovacs’ small house. Nick’s parents’ bedroom was on one side of us, and Taylor was in Teresa’s on the other. He wouldn’t talk to me and we went to bed angry. I lay awake all night, thinking that at some point he would put his arms around me and we would make it better. With every sleeping breath he drew measured against every moment I lay awake, I grew more upset. By morning I was fried. Nick woke up stiff and uncommunicative, and he didn’t come around. I became aware that a dark place in me thought Taylor could stay with his parents and Nick could come back to St. Marcos with me.

  I called for a taxi on the day I left. Nick walked me to the door.

  “I need you, too, you know.”

  “You can handle Taylor with your parents’ help.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” he said.

  I knew it wasn’t, but by then it didn’t matter. Cinderella rode away from her prince in a pumpkin, alone.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  The morning after I got back to Annalise, I planted new bougainvillea by the gate under a brilliant pinkish-red sunrise unlike anything I had ever seen before. I stood back to see how the flowers looked. Wrong, I decided. They just looked wrong, nothing like what Nick and I had imagined.

  I looked across the road at the deserted shantytown. Wrong there, too. Ever since I first saw Annalise, the shantytown had been home to multiple generations of a gentle Rastafarian family. They were gone now, and all that was left behind was a housedress flapping in the wind on a clothesline and the blackened carcass of a yellow school bus.

  I headed back to the house. I was expecting the glass worker to arrive any minute to install the new window, then I wanted to drop in on Crazy on the way to pick up Ava. She was dragging me to Jump Up that night. I wasn’t up for the crowds and street vendors, mocko jumbie dancers on stilts, or rum-fueled open houses at all the shops, but Ava had stressed the life or death nature of my presence, although she refused to tell me why.

  I got to Crazy’s just before the supper hour. The scrappy old man ignored my inquiries into his health, asking instead, “Where the boy and the mister?” through the left side of his mouth. He sounded stronger.

  “Texas.”

  “So why you here, then?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  He chuptzed and said, “Red skies at morning,” then shooed me with his left hand. “Lotta, I ready for my nap,” he called.

  As Lotta walked past me to put a pillow behind her husband’s head, I whispered, “What did he mean about the red skies?”

  She sniffed. “Red skies at morning, sailors take warning.”

  “Which means what?”

  “He saying bad t’ings coming.”

  The things one doesn’t learn growing up landlocked. I got back in my truck and put my face in my hands. I didn’t want to see myself through Crazy’s eyes. I didn’t want to think about my mother giving up law school to raise my brother and me and telling everyone she met for the rest of her life she was the luckiest woman in the world. I wanted to think about the nights she cried because my father didn’t come home from work. The times I heard her asking him why his job was more important than her. I didn’t want to be my mother. I wanted to be the most important thing.

&n
bsp; I pointed my truck toward Ava’s. With each turn of the wheels, going with her seemed like a worse idea. We weren’t even going to be performing. I pulled into her long driveway and rolled up to her house. I didn’t even have time to put the truck in park before she had bounded out her door and across the grass.

  She jumped in and said, “We late.”

  “Hello, Ava.”

  “We meeting Trevor at the Boardwalk before Jump Up. He said he have an offer for us.”

  I tried to care, I really did, but I couldn’t. Nick had called us karaoke singers, and it still stung. Ava continued to tell me about Trevor and all he could do for us, but I tuned her out and concentrated on not thinking about Nick, which only made me think about him more. I wondered what he was doing, and if he was thinking about me, too. The next day was Derek’s first visit with Taylor, and Nick had to be eaten up with worry. I was so lost in my reverie that I managed to make it all the way from Ava’s through the excited throngs congregating in Town to the Boardwalk Bar without consciously interacting with her or taking any notice of the world outside my head.

  Ava searched the bar for Trevor, who wasn’t there. Surprise, surprise. I hadn’t seen the man arrive anywhere yet when he said he would. I wasn’t thirsty, but I armed myself with a sparkling water with cranberry and a lime. As soon as I turned away from the bar to rejoin Ava, Bart lurched into me. He grabbed my free arm as we collided. I held my bright drink high away from my blue linen shift. At least I wasn’t wearing white.

  “Katie, I was just coming to talk to you.” He snuck under my raised arm and pulled my body to his in a tight hug, trapping my other arm against my side. I craned my head back to avoid his face and mouth and levered my elbow out with a sharp thrust to break his grip, then ducked out of his hold.

  This wasn’t the Bart I used to know. His eyes were bloodshot and he had lost a ton of weight. He had a seedy Don Johnson stubble going on, à la Miami Vice, and stringy hair. The only time I’d seen him like this while we were dating was when he was nursing the third day of a wicked hangover. It wasn’t a healthy look then, and it sure wasn’t now.