He treats her to a good-natured grin. “Hi. What are you guys doing?”
“Going to the library,” Rebecca informs him, looking up from her book.
“Yeah? That’s cool.”
Yeah, right. Molly wants to smack Rebecca for speaking up. She had planned to tell Ryan they were going to walk down to the lake, and then Ryan would tell her that was some coincidence because he and Andy were on their way to the lake, too, to go fishing, and she would look stunned, and then he would say, “Why don’t you come along?”
And then Andy and Rebecca would vanish conveniently the way things seem to happen in fantasies, and Molly would be alone with Ryan, and he would kiss her passionately and ask her to marry him.
Or something like that.
“So what’s been going on with you this past week?” she asks lamely, praying that the traffic will keep whizzing by, tons of traffic, and Andy will be stuck across the street for at least another hour.
“You mean since school got out? Nothing,” Ryan says. “This town is beat.”
At least he didn’t mention dating Jessica.
“Yeah,” Molly agrees. “This town is beat.”
“You guys going to that party out at the Curl?”
“Party?” Molly echoes. “When?”
“Friday night.”
“At the Curl?” she echoes, just to make sure.
Ryan nods and says, “Where else?”
The Curl, Molly knows, is the crescent-shaped stretch of beach that dips out into Lake Charlotte. During the day, it’s filled with people—mostly little kids splashing in the almost landlocked shallow water between there and the shore. But at night, all the cool kids hang out on the stretch of beach, drinking beer around bonfires and doing who knows what else.
Molly was at the Curl a week ago, with Ozzie and his mother, but she has never been out there after dark.
“Yeah, we’ll be there,” she tells Ryan, who nods, then rides off with a wave as Andy catches up with him.
“Molly! We can’t go to a party at the Curl,” Rebecca says.
“Why not?”
“My parents won’t let me, for one thing.”
“So sleep over at my house. Kevin’s gone, and my mother probably won’t even ask where we’re going.” This is the first time, Molly realizes, that it’ll come in handy to have a mother who’s always so out of it.
Most of the time, it’s just embarrassing, especially with Rebecca, whose mother is, like, a total Martha Stewart, always baking cookies and doing crafts and gardening, making the Wasners’ house as homey as the Connollys’ is neglected.
“What about your sister?” Rebecca asks pointedly.
And for a moment, Molly thinks she’s talking about Carleen. She thinks Rebecca means, Won’t your mother be worried about you after what happened to your sister, even if it was ten years ago?
But then she realizes that Rebecca isn’t talking about Carleen at all. That the shadow of what happened to her oldest sister doesn’t necessarily loom over everyone else in town the way it’s hung over Molly’s family these past ten years.
No, Rebecca’s talking about her other sister. About Rory.
“Oh, please,” Molly says, curling her mouth in disdain. “She has no say in what I do.”
“I thought she was here to take care of you.”
“Take care of me? Her? No way. She has no right to tell me anything. She’s never even been around. I don’t have to listen to anything she says.”
Rebecca watches her, but says nothing.
Molly squirms under her friend’s knowing gaze. “Come on,” she says, rising abruptly. “Let’s go to the library.”
Rory steers Kevin’s car, which he’s loaned her for the summer, out of the Home Depot parking lot onto High Ridge Road, then slams on her brakes, realizing she was just about to go through a red light.
That light was never here.
Hell, the vast shopping center was never here. It used to be just acres and acres of fields, dotted with an occasional tree or one of those high tension towers, the kind everyone is saying causes cancer.
Now there’s a Home Depot and a Wal-Mart—where she’d had at least a dozen different coffeemakers to choose from—and a huge grocery superstore, the kind that sells everything. Everything. Rory found herself buying imported coffee and fresh bagels and firm pink lox and even one of those exotic horned melons. As she glances over her shoulder at the bags of groceries on the seat behind her, she wonders who’s going to eat all this stuff when the house is so empty these days.
Me, she thinks resolutely. I’ll eat it. And so will Mom. And Molly.
She had gone into the store because of Molly in the first place, to buy more Cap’n Crunch. With crunchberries. She’d also bought brownies and some of those cookies with the M&Ms from the store’s bakery department, thinking Molly would probably like that kind of stuff.
Thinking she could win her sister’s stony heart with baked goods.
You’re a fool, Rory tells herself. Molly’s going to see right through you.
Oh, well. Rory likes brownies and cookies, herself. She’ll eat them.
Right after she paints the entire first floor of the house.
I guess I got a little carried away, she tells herself ruefully, thinking of the cans and cans of white paint she just bought at Home Depot. All she could think was that she had to do something to make the house less run-down, less gloomy.
White paint will make it sparkle, she thinks as she heads back toward town. Besides, painting will keep me busy.
And if she’s busy, she won’t be able to brood. About Molly. About Carleen. About Daddy. And about Mom.
Mom, who, when Rory had gone up to tell her she was going shopping, had been in the middle of an animated conversation.
With Daddy.
“No, Patrick, you’re wrong about that,” Rory had heard her say in the split second before she knocked on the master bedroom door. “It wasn’t on the dresser; it was under the bed. See? I told you I dropped it last night.”
Even after Rory’s knock, Mom had continued talking to her dead husband. Arguing with him, actually.
And for just a split second, hearing her mother’s voice, Rory had somehow managed to forget that her father has been dead for almost ten years. And when reality rushed back, she found herself remembering suddenly how, in the dark months after Daddy’s death, she had occasionally convinced herself that he wasn’t dead after all—that it was all merely a horrible nightmare.
Amazing how easy it was for her to cling to that childish denial at times when grief would have otherwise overwhelmed her.
Then again, she hadn’t gone to his wake or funeral; actually, none of them had. Mom was unable to get out of bed, sedated by her doctor. And there was no extended family to come to the rescue. No aunts and uncles—Rory’s father had been an only child, and her mother’s one brother had been killed in Vietnam.
Rory had never known her paternal grandparents; both had died before she was born. Her mother’s father had also died young, and though Grandmother Mary had still been alive at that point, she was senile, living in an Albany nursing home.
So Mom’s friend Sister Theodosia had been summoned to Lake Charlotte to take care of Rory and Kevin and Molly, just as she had when Carleen disappeared. Of course, that summer, she was around all the time anyway. She had just returned from Mexico that spring, where she’d done some kind of missionary work, and was temporarily assigned to a church in nearby Saratoga Springs. She was always showing up in the Connolly house that summer, spending her days off with Mom, and generally making Rory and Carleen’s lives miserable with her dour presence. It wasn’t long afterward—in fact, it was that September, a month after Carleen vanished—that the nun was transferred to the Buffalo area. And after that, they seldom saw her.
&n
bsp; Still, when Daddy died, Sister Theodosia was the first person Mom called. She was the one who had made the funeral arrangements for Patrick at Holy Father, and she was the one who had forbidden the children to attend, saying it would be too traumatic.
Rory has never forgiven the nun for that.
I should have been there. I never got to say good-bye to him.
And she had never even glimpsed her beloved father’s lifeless body, which would undoubtedly have made his death real to her and banished fantasies that he was still alive.
As it happened, for all she knew it was just an elaborate prank Daddy was playing on all of them. He hadn’t really died; no, he had simply gotten fed up with all of them and gone off to see the world the way he’d always wanted to do. And someday he would come back.
Yeah. Sure.
Denial.
And Mom’s still doing it.
Chills had run down Rory’s spine as she stood outside the master-bedroom door listening to that one-sided conversation, and she had walked away without telling Mom she was going out.
It had sounded so real. It sounded like the way Mom used to talk to Daddy, back when he was here and she wasn’t so . . .
Crazy.
Mom’s crazy, Rory tells herself again now, as she has ever since she left the house in a hurry, as if she could somehow flee the startling knowledge.
Mom’s bonkers. She’s totally gone off the deep end.
And what’s Rory supposed to do about it? Does Kevin realize how nutty their mother has become? Does anyone?
Rory thinks of Sister Theodosia, her mother’s one friend in the entire world. Last she knew, the Catholic nun was still up in Buffalo, living at the rectory of some church there. Maybe Molly will know how to get in touch with her.
Much as Rory dreads the thought of contacting Sister Theodosia, she realizes she has to do it. If anyone knows Mom, it’s the woman who has been her closest friend since childhood, when they grew up next door to each other in an Albany suburb.
Rory has never liked the stern-faced nun, and not just because she forbade her to attend her father’s funeral. Sister Theodosia has a way of making you feel as though you’ve done something wrong, even when you haven’t.
“Sister Teddy,” Carleen used to call her. Behind her back, of course. And behind Mom’s. Mom doesn’t believe in saying anything negative about a religious person.
But Carleen did. In the months before she vanished, when the nun was spending so much time in Lake Charlotte, Carleen would perfectly mimic Sister Teddy’s deep, monotone voice and her flinty stare. She used to say that Sister Teddy looked as if she had a giant cross stuck up her behind.
“I really miss you, Carleen,” Rory says aloud softly, with a chuckle.
Then her smile fades as she finds herself wondering if she’ll ever know what happened to her sister—and if she’ll ever stop caring.
Tonight, when he walks slowly past 52 Hayes Street, he sees that there’s someone standing on the driveway.
A twenty-something redhead, clad in cut-off shorts and a black tank top. She’s winding the garden hose around the reel attached to the house, and the lawn looks freshly watered.
Hmm.
He tries not to turn his head as he passes, resisting the urge to stare at her. Not just because he’s curious, but because the shorts and shirt are somewhat skimpy and she’s barefoot and tanned and toned, and her hair is a glorious tumble of curls.
Rory Connolly.
Carleen’s younger sister.
She’s come back to stay for the summer while her brother, Kevin, goes off to Europe.
He knows this because Betty Shilling, the old lady who runs the bed and breakfast where he’s staying, told him. She’s lived on this block almost her whole life and she knows everyone and everything that’s going on.
She comes in handy, Betty Shilling, with her neighborhood gossip.
He reaches the end of the street and thinks about turning and walking back instead of going around the block as he had planned. But he decides he shouldn’t. Not with Rory Connolly out there on the driveway. She might notice him, and then what?
He isn’t ready to approach her.
Not yet.
But soon.
Nodding to himself, he continues walking.
Lou is snoring.
Lou snores every night. Lou has snored nightly ever since he broke his nose playing football as a child; he has snored nightly despite the operation two years ago to correct the deviated septum that was supposedly causing him to snore.
Michelle has never had a problem sleeping through the racket until now. Now, at 3:33 on a steamy June night, with her belly swollen with an almost-term baby and her chest and throat burning with indigestion and her bladder needing to be emptied yet again, Michelle is restless. She lies on her side with two pillows beneath her head, another propped against the small of her back, and a fourth tucked between her knees, listening to Lou snore and feeling the baby pitch and roll inside her. A tiny foot must be jabbing into her ribs, and there’s a triangular bump protruding to the left of her navel that has to be an elbow.
She sighs heavily as the digital clock on the nightstand flicks to 3:34, and over the baby monitor plugged in beside the clock, she thinks she hears Ozzie stirring in his crib.
She swings her legs over the edge of the mattress and hoists herself to a standing position, waiting a moment until the light-headed feeling subsides.
Then she makes her way down the hallway, which is lit only by a night-light plugged in near the baseboard at the top of the front stairs, the only working outlet in the hall.
In Ozzie’s room, she finds him sound asleep, his mouth slightly open and both arms thrown up over his head, in the exact position he was in the last time she checked, less than forty-five minutes ago.
He hasn’t moved.
But she thought she heard something—a rustling whisper of a sound—and she thought it had come over the baby monitor.
Absently rubbing her belly, she stares down at her sleeping child uneasily, not certain what’s bothering her but knowing that something isn’t right.
It’s the pregnancy, she tells herself finally, tiptoeing out of Ozzie’s room. God knows none of my senses are working properly these days.
For one thing, her ability to smell seems to be in overdrive. She can pick up the aroma of frying meat wafting from a block away, and it’s always enough to send her gagging and lurching for the toilet.
And nothing tastes right anymore, either. She used to love chocolate; now she can’t stomach it. And she’s never liked lemons, but lately all she craves is lemonade.
So now my ears are out of whack. Now I’m hearing things. Great. Pretty soon, I’ll be seeing things, too.
She huffs a little as she trudges to the bathroom, wiping a trickle of sweat from her hairline. The night is hot and still, and she can smell honeysuckle blossoms from the hedge next door drifting through the open bathroom window.
After washing her hands and splashing cool water on her face, she realizes that she’s feeling queasy again. The nausea comes and goes at all hours of the day with this pregnancy. Not like with Ozzie. When she was expecting Ozzie, she felt great.
The ultrasound in the second trimester indicated that she’s most likely carrying another boy, but Michelle isn’t convinced. Maybe this baby will be a girl, she thinks idly, walking back out into the hallway. Didn’t she read something someplace about female hormones causing increased morning sickness in pregnant women?
Wearily, she heads downstairs to find something to settle her stomach before she goes back to bed. Just a handful of cereal or a couple of saltines; suddenly, she’s feeling sleepy again.
She turns on lights as she moves through the quiet house, though there’s enough moonlight filtering in the windows to see her way to the k
itchen. There’s something spooky about the darkened rooms, and it isn’t so hard to believe that there are ghosts lurking in the shadows.
In the kitchen, Michelle crosses to the cupboard and takes out the box of saltines from this morning. It feels lighter than it should.
Frowning, she opens the flaps and looks inside to see that there are only two saltines left in the bottom of the waxed paper bag, along with some small broken pieces and crumbs.
There were more than this earlier today—weren’t there?
At least a dozen crackers, maybe more. She remembers how she ate only one from the handful she took out and put the rest back into the bag.
Where did they go?
Lou didn’t eat them. He worked late tonight, and came straight to bed when he got home.
And Molly didn’t baby-sit today. There’s been no one in the house but Michelle and Ozzie.
Could Ozzie have . . . ?
No, she thinks, shaking her head firmly. Ozzie can’t reach this cupboard. Even if she had taken her eyes off him long enough for him to sneak alone into the kitchen.
But she hadn’t. He was under her constant supervision after the toilet brush incident this morning.
Okay. If Lou hadn’t eaten the crackers and Ozzie hadn’t eaten the crackers . . .
I must have done it, Michelle tells herself dubiously. I must have done it, and forgotten all about it.
She’s momentarily shaken by the thought that she could actually have done something and not remember.
Am I losing my mind? she wonders.
No. Of course not.
After all, isn’t forgetfulness a symptom of pregnancy? Just last week, she’d spent a good hour searching the house for her library books before she’d given up and gone in to say she’d lost them. The librarian had given her an odd look and told her that she’d dropped them off the day before, and she’d instantly remembered that yes, of course she had. She’d somehow forgotten.
And she still hasn’t managed to call her cousin John, the architect, even though Lou reminds her constantly to take care of it. It keeps slipping her mind, the way everything else seems to lately.
Mulling that over, she methodically chews and swallows the last two crackers and tosses the empty box into the trash.
All the Way Home Page 5
