With one deep breath, or at least the deepest she could manage, Veronica wailed out to her mother as Barb rushed out the door, once again taking her daughter away.
“You bitch!” she cried, a sob cutting off half of her scream. She scrambled to her knees and then stumbled to her feet, tripping over herself. The pinks and yellows of the room twisted into a pastel swirl as she rushed for the door, but before she could reach it, Mark had a tight grip around her waist. He dragged her back into the room, her feet unable to get any traction on the loose shag of the nursery carpet. It felt like all the good in the world was being swept away when Sophie left in her mother’s arms. The injured animal inside her riled up again like its wounds had been stabbed, and she lashed out, pulling at Mark’s arm, a fierce wail rising in her throat.
“Veronica, shhhh, Veronica. I’m so sorry, but you have to let her go. They’re going to call the police if you don’t.”
She used her nails this time, digging into the flesh and hair of his forearm, wishing it were high enough that she could bite him and get free. She’d been so close to having her baby back, her life back, and now it was gone—again.
“Don’t you touch me. You’re with them. You’re a liar. Get off me.” She wrestled against his arms, but the more she fought, the tighter they clamped down like a Chinese finger trap.
“Listen to me; I’m on your side. I’m on your side, Veronica.” He whispered in her ear, his breath moist against her face. He spun her around like a ballerina and held her in front of him, leaning down so his face was in front of hers. “Your mom wants what is best for you. She told me everything. You’ll see; it is going to be okay.”
She was going to vomit. His words didn’t compute, and the sympathetic look on his face confused her rather than calmed her. She shook her head, lost in panic and horror and wishing she could contact Gillian. She was still safe, or at least Veronica hoped she was. Every time she turned around, someone else betrayed her. And now Sophie was gone.
“Whatever that woman told you to make you help her, it’s a lie.” Spit built up at the corners of Veronica’s mouth. Her hair stuck to the tears spreading across her cheeks, and a strand stuck to her bottom lip. Mark had been reasoned with before. Maybe she could get through to him again. She grabbed on to the front of his shirt and pulled him in till she could see the stubble on his chin. Each phrase was interrupted with a gasping breath like she couldn’t get enough air. “I’m sure she told you I was sick and I wasn’t a good mom to Sophie, but I’m better now. You saw me—I took care of her. She was completely safe with me. I’m a good mom, Mark. I swear I am. I swear I am.”
She stood there with his hands on her shoulders, exposed, vulnerable, her eyes meeting with his in open desperation. His looked back, his gaze soft and concerned. It was working. She was getting through to him.
“I believe you,” he said convincingly, and then slid his arms around Veronica and pulled her into an embrace. She wanted to wrench back and run after her mother, but if this was what he needed to decide for himself that she was sane enough to be helped, then she would surrender to his embrace. There was something in his voice and touch that let her know that he wanted to help her even if he was doing it in all the wrong ways. She placed her cheek against his chest and flattened her hands against his sides. His body was different from Nick’s, longer, leaner, and his arms were strong like they could fight off any obstacle standing in their way. And he was on her side.
“Then let’s go stop her.” She slid her flat hands around his firm waist till they met and her body was leaning against his. “Together.”
“I wish I could.” Mark rested his cheek on the top of Veronica’s head and took a deep breath, his arms tightening around her in a whole different way than before. He rocked his head back and forth on top of hers. “But your mother is right. You can’t keep her.”
A harsh gust of betrayal blew away any of the warm, comforting feelings his arms and words had provided. She didn’t feel safe now. Now, she was trapped.
“Let me go,” she said coolly, and went stiff, releasing her embrace.
He wasn’t going to help her. Her mother had said some magic words that had burrowed into his brain like a parasite, and now he wasn’t going to help her. He couldn’t be involved directly or else he wouldn’t have sent her to get Sophie the first time, but how did he turn on her so quickly?
He was still holding her close, despite her demand. “There’s a hospital your mom found for you. She didn’t get to tell you about it, but it sounds nice.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. You all are taking crazy pills.” She wriggled against his now-suffocating encirclement. “I’m better now. I’m better.”
He held her tighter till her arms were pinned against her sides. “I can’t let you go until you promise you won’t run away. Promise me you’ll listen.”
“I’m not listening to a word you say.” She dropped her voice an octave and stood completely still. “You are just a creepy stranger I never should’ve talked to.”
All the warmth went out of his half hug, half prison, and he put his hands back on her upper arms and stood up so their bodies were no longer touching.
“So that’s a no?” he asked. When she found the courage to glare up into his face, she saw hurt there, and a tiny pang of regret nagged at her consciousness.
“That’s a hell no and a get your hands off me this second,” she growled, unable to stop herself despite hating what her voice sounded like when it played in her own ears.
“They thought you’d listen to me better, but they were wrong.” Mark shook his head and then looked up at a spot over her shoulder before speaking. “It’s not working. You do your own dirty work.” With that, he released her, and she almost collapsed standing on her own. There was a charge to the air that was unfamiliar to Veronica. She’d walked into a trap set by her mother and whomever Mark was talking to. Was it an earpiece? A mic in the room? But Mark was staring in a very specific direction. Veronica’s fists clenched at her side, and she tried to follow his eye line.
“What the hell? Who are you talking to?” she asked, and glanced around the room.
Then she saw it, and everything came together—the camera. Someone was watching through the camera. Her knees went weak. Someone really had been stalking her. Someone had entered the safety of her home to spy on her. Someone had brainwashed her mother and taken her baby, and now they were doing it again. She wasn’t delusional or paranoid—it was real.
Mark folded his arms and leaned back against the covered window. As soon as he disengaged, Veronica dived across the room and reached the door in two giant leaps, not even checking to see if Mark was following her. The stairs were to her right, but this time she wasn’t trying to leave the house. This time she was certain that whoever was behind all this insanity was here under her own roof and sitting in the one place where there was a direct feed from the camera in Sophie’s room to a screen.
The room was, not surprisingly, shut up tight, but a closed door wasn’t going to stop her. Getting Sophie back wasn’t good enough if she couldn’t keep her safe. Veronica had to find out who was relentlessly trying to screw up her life.
Whoever the intruder was probably didn’t know that there was a key to this door hidden on the frame surrounding it. She’d had to put it there when her mom moved in and Veronica would fall asleep at her worktable. Her mom was always worried that she’d been lost in her grief and had hurt herself on purpose. Once she pried off the doorknob and forced her way inside, only to find Veronica sound asleep on top of a pile of charcoal drawings. After that, they came up with a new plan to save her mother’s sanity and save money on broken doorknobs.
Today, with a quick pop of the lock, the door to the studio flew open easily, forcing a gush of wind through the room, sending all the papers rustling and curling toward the ceiling, making the walls look alive. The room was dark except for the one screen glowing on her work desk, where she’d work and watch Sophie. Sitting there,
behind the table where she’d been creating since her mom dragged it in off the Canns’ driveway on garbage day twenty years earlier, was the one person she never would’ve expected.
He stood slowly behind the desk and gave her a stiff, forced smile. He was taller than she’d remembered and thinner, but his voice sounded the same as when he’d said I do or I love you or Good night, beautiful.
Today her husband said simply, “Hello, Veronica.”
CHAPTER 26
She’d calculated it at one point. Since meeting Nick at NYU in her freshman dorm, she’d spent 546 weeks sleeping by his side, 3,822 days hearing his voice, 11,466 meals eating across from him, 53,789 miles traveling with him, and, the most devastating statistic, 345,600 minutes without his hand in hers, the last time she counted.
But there he was in front of her, a whole man, with arms that used to hold her and fingers that used to dry her tears. He didn’t run to her and pull her into his chest and say, “I’ve missed you. How did I ever live without you?” Instead, he stood there, hands in his pockets, his hair lighter than she remembered, buzzed on the sides and longer on the top, his shirt one of those button-up athletic-fit ones she used to buy for him when he started his CrossFit phase.
“Nick!” She stumbled forward, slipping on a few loose papers on the floor but willing to go through anything, conquer anything, to touch him again. It was possible he wasn’t real. She had to touch him to know. “Nick!”
She flew across the room, expecting him to crawl over the table to scoop her up and tell her everything was going to be okay now that he was home, but he just stood there as she collided with him, her arms going around him, pinning his arms to his sides, her face buried in his chest. He smelled the same, like soap and deodorant and skin, and she wanted to be closer to him, somehow closer. She wanted to melt into him, blend together, go back in time to before he went away.
“Oh, sweetheart.” She put her hands on his face, one on each side, and relished the stubble scratching against her palm and the smoothness of his cheekbones. He stood eerily still. “You’re alive.” She went onto her tiptoes and placed a light kiss on his parted mouth. “I love you. Oh my God, I love you,” she whispered against his mouth and then leaned in, pressing her lips fully against his, trying to get closer in any way possible. Nick flinched back like she’d bit his lip and held his chin up like she smelled bad.
“Stop, Veronica.” He wriggled his way out of her embrace, backward, bumping into the rolling chair and sending it shooting out behind him and into the back wall. “Stop!” His voice echoed through the room, and he held his hands up like she was holding him hostage.
All her confusion started to swirl together in a blur of whites and reds and blacks, like the papers in the room were twisting around her in a giant cyclone. Why was Nick here? How was he alive? Where had he been all these months? Why was he watching through the camera? Why was he trying to take their baby?
The internal chaos of whys all gathered into a pinpoint of clarity: This was messed up. Completely and totally messed up. Nick wasn’t dead. Her life for the past seven months had been a lie, a lie that led to paralyzing sorrow and devastating grief. He’d stolen seven months from her as a real, loving, dedicated mother, and now he was trying to take her child away for good.
“What the hell is going on here, Nick? I thought you were dead, and now here you are, fit as a fiddle. How did you pull this off, huh? Just couldn’t take the responsibility of a wife and a kid anymore, could you? So you ran away.” She charged forward and slammed into him with both hands, shoving him backward, empowered by a red rage that sucked all the light and sound out of the room.
“You know that’s not true,” he responded, hands still up, deflecting her next blow with his forearm. With a slight stumble, he took another step back.
She came at him again, this time keeping her hands to herself but stepping as far into Nick’s personal space as she could without touching him. “If it’s not true, why don’t you explain it?”
He looked into her eyes, searching with his far-too-familiar blue gaze. She loved those eyes. They were Sophie’s eyes, and they looked at her now like she was a stranger he was trying to figure out rather than his wife of eleven years. She used to say that she’d know he didn’t love her anymore without him saying a word, because she could see his love in the way he looked at her. But that loving look, the softening of the corners of his eyes, the way each glance lingered on the lines of her face and the curve of her lips, it was gone. This new look was diagnostic at best, hypercritical at worst.
“Veronica, you are not well,” he said with very little feeling. “We are going to take you to Green Oaks. They are waiting and ready for you. I can call the police and have them come help, but I didn’t want to involve them unless absolutely necessary.”
Veronica ignored the words that only half made sense and kept waiting for that spark to happen when they were together, the playful smile, the knowing laugh. “Why did you leave me, Nicky? I’ve missed you so, so much. Why . . . why did you leave?”
The details of how and where and what in the world had gotten into him could wait till later, but right now all she wanted to know was what she had done to deserve such cruelty.
“Oh, Ronnie, I can’t go through all this again. You know why I left. Come on, you always knew why I left.”
“Because of the baby,” Veronica answered, trying to replay that night in her mind. She’d been sleeping. She’d been exhausted and mentally worn-out; the baby had been crying. Nick had gone to get gas drops and wipes. He’d taken the baby. He’d never come home.
“Yeah.” Nick nodded, looking relieved he didn’t have to say it out loud. “The baby.”
Veronica sniffled loudly and ran her arm across her nose and used her fingertips to clear her cheeks of the angry tears that had flooded everywhere. Her mind seemed to be clicking pieces into place; she swore she could hear it, the click, every time another important piece of information came together, still hodgepodged and confusing but clearing up minute by minute, like when the eye doctor clicked different prescriptions into place. The baby.
“You went to the store . . . for the baby,” she added, hoping that adding some detail would pull her story together in some way that made sense. Movement behind Veronica made her check over her shoulder. Mark was standing inside the threshold, looking both like a guard and her guardian. She wasn’t sure which he was just yet. Surely she’d find out soon enough. “I got your text that night. You said you were sorry. I thought you died.”
She looked back at Nick, hoping he could clarify, but he shook his head.
“No, no, Ronnie. No.” He rubbed his face and scratched at his light beard and then slashed at the air. “That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“Then I have no idea what you mean.” She slapped her leg and whimpered. “I don’t know what you’ve been told about me, but I’m better now, damn it. I mean, how the hell can you give a shit now when you’ve been in hiding or whatever for all this time? I just want Sophie back, okay?”
Nick’s features softened, his eyebrows tipped in and his forehead smoothed, and his mouth worked hard to hold in what sounded like a sob. Tears gathered on his bottom lids, and one fell down his cheek and got lost in his beard.
“I want her back too, Ronnie. I want her back too.” He covered his mouth again, this time making a noise that sounded like choking. Nick didn’t cry. Ever. And the shock that went through Veronica at his tears glued her feet to the ground and made her more scared than she’d been all day.
“So . . . you’re just going to take her away from me? We could have her together. We could be a family. You aren’t making any sense.” She looked to Mark as some bastion of sanity in this ever-spiraling “funhouse,” but he was staring at his feet, shaking his head like he wished he’d never gotten up this morning.
Nick made a sudden movement, pushing past Veronica and stopping at her workstation. He shuffled through a pile of papers there, some of them bi
lls, some sketches, one or two dried watercolors that she wanted to add some details to. He picked one up and then went to the wall, filtering through the overlapping pages that hung from pins, lining the walls like three-dimensional wallpaper. All his searching made the papers move in unpredictable ways, as though the room were alive, a bird fluffing its feathers.
“What are you doing? That’s my work.”
She touched his arm, but he ignored her and kept searching, pulling down selected pages one at a time, stopping at her portfolios where her full-color mock-ups were for Mia’s Travels. He rummaged through the stiff pages, filled with brilliant watercolors. Without a word, he yanked out three pages, full spread, final draft, and ready to send to her publisher.
“Hey, stop it! I need those.” Veronica reached for the pages, but Nick held them high enough that only her fingertips brushed at them.
“Sit down, Veronica,” he ordered and rolled the desk chair toward her and pointed at it with great flourish. “Sit.”
And for some reason, even with all the bewilderment and betrayal, she responded to his voice. She still wanted him to love her, and some part of her addled brain thought there must be an explanation. Her darling Nick, her college sweetheart, her best friend, the father of her child. He wasn’t the kind of person to do any of this. So she sat.
“You still haven’t answered any of my questions, Nick,” she said, sitting in the chair. Her bare feet dragged on the floor as he pushed her to the cluttered desktop. He used his empty hand to clear a spot until only wood showed. “Where is Sophie?”
Nick placed a four-by-six piece of cardstock in front of her, a simple pencil drawing of a little girl picking a flower.
“What is this?” he asked her.
“I don’t know, a little girl. I was working on ideas for a friend for Mia, and this was an attempt. I used to pick flowers in my backyard on Main. I guess that’s where the idea came from,” she explained and shrugged. “What does this have to do with anything?”
The Waiting Room Page 21
