Besides, she doesn’t feel like resting, no matter what Lou and the doctor say. After all, she slept ten hours last night, waking only to scurry to the bathroom every hour or so, and, for a change, falling immediately back into a deep sleep whenever she climbed back into bed. When she got up this morning, she was surprised to feel more energetic than she had in days.
In fact, she actually wouldn’t mind getting outside with Ozzie for some fresh air this morning. It would do them both some good. She hates to plunk him in front of the television for hours on end. She’ll be doing enough of that when the baby comes, especially if she has to have a C-section.
The baby’s breech position and the prospect of facing major surgery are thoughts she doesn’t particularly want to entertain right now. Nor does she want to brood about the state of her marriage. Things seemed better this morning, after she and Lou had both gotten a good night’s sleep, but their relationship is far from rosy. Either the stress is getting to them both, or he really is having an affair.
Or, she amends, maybe keeping some equally devastating secret that’s putting distance between them. She remembers what he said about the financial pressure and how he’s being forced to work such long hours. She actually finds herself wondering if it’s possible that Lou has some secret vice that’s been eating away at their money—maybe a drug problem, or maybe he’s a compulsive gambler like his stepfather Murray was.
Right. That’s totally realistic. He’s shooting up or flying to Atlantic City when I’m not looking.
She shakes her head, deciding she has way too much time to sit around and think crazy thoughts. Besides, if she hadn’t long ago left all their finances up to him, she would know exactly what’s going on.
But no, she was always content to let him balance the checkbook and pay the bills and make investments. She never bothered herself with details like that, not having the slightest interest in anything remotely mathematical. Even in school, she’d always gotten As in art and music and English, and Ds in math and science, figuring she’d never need to know that stuff anyway, since she was going to be a famous artist.
And now look at me.
No wonder Lou’s been impatient.
“Come on, Ozzie. Let’s go outside and dig,” she says abruptly, reaching for the remote control and clicking the television off.
“Yay!” Ozzie claps his hands together and races out of the room.
She hoists herself out of the chair, jams her swollen feet into a pair of sandals—open-toed shoes are the only ones that fit—and shuffles to the kitchen. She finds Ozzie waiting impatiently by the back door, holding his little orange shovel.
“Know what?” she asks him, seized by a sudden impulse. “Those berries must be perfect by now. I’m going to pick a huge batch of them and make a raspberry pie. That’ll be a nice surprise for Daddy when he comes home tonight.”
“Pie,” Ozzie echoes agreeably.
Lou had always loved her mother’s raspberry pie, invariably served warm, with vanilla Häagen-Dazs. He had loved the way Joy Panati pampered him while they were living with her, taking care of him in a way his own mother never had. Michelle remembers how she had promised herself back then, sitting at her mother’s kitchen table watching Lou heap praise on Joy’s cooking, that she would always remember to do nice little things for her husband, to compensate for his rough childhood and Iris’s lack of maternal nurturing.
When’s the last time you did anything for him? she asks herself guiltily, as she rummages through the cupboard for a bowl big enough to hold a few quarts of raspberries. You never cook dinner anymore. He eats takeout, if he gets to eat at all.
Her defenses kick in.
It’s summertime. It’s hot out. I’m huge and pregnant. And anyway, he’s never home for dinner.
Still, you should at least try. Try and pamper him a little. Maybe he really misses that. Maybe he needs it. Maybe it’ll get things back to normal between the two of you.
She finds a big stainless-steel bowl in the cupboard and tucks it under her arm, saying to Ozzie, who’s doing an impatient jitterbug by the back door, “Okay, okay, sweetie, Mommy’s ready now. Let’s go.”
They step out into the glorious morning and Michelle feels better instantly. The sky is the purest of blues, with a few fluffy clouds sailing high. The sun is dazzling, warm on her bare arms, but not uncomfortably hot as it was a few days ago. The air is almost crisp by comparison to the humidity that vanished with Saturday evening’s storm.
Ozzie races toward the dirt pile at the back of the yard, and Michelle follows as fast as she can, realizing she’s moving more quickly than she has in weeks. Is it the lack of humidity, or is she simply energized by the thought of making a pie for Lou, making things right between them?
Her son settles himself in the dirt, plopping right down with a toddler’s lack of concern for the little white denim shorts she thoughtlessly threw on him this morning.
“So I’ll use Shout on them,” she says aloud to herself, not willing to let anything stress her in the least.
Michelle goes past him to the tangle of berry shrubs climbing along the back of the property, separating their yard from the woods. She holds her bowl in one hand and lifts the nearest vine, careful not to let the thorns pinch her fingers as she inspects it for ripened berries. Remembering the abundant pale-pink buds she had noticed the other day, she knows that by now most of them will be a lush, deep red color, so ripe they’ll easily slip into her hands as she picks them.
What’s going on?
Michelle stares at the clumps of stark yellowish nubs that had only days before been dotted with raspberries. She moves on to another branch, and then another. All that’s left are the bare stems, and a few hard greenish-pink berries that have yet to ripen.
Must be birds, she tells herself. Or deer. Or bugs.
But she knows that’s not the case. Birds peck at the fruits, fully ripe or not, leaving some half eaten, and deer devour the whole thing, stems and all. Bugs eat only the fleshy part, and chew holes in the leaves as well.
But birds or deer or bugs wouldn’t manage to eat every single ripe berry in the entire crop and leave the ones that aren’t yet fit for human consumption.
These briars have been picked clean with methodical precision.
Somebody has obviously been back here, eating them.
So?
It could have been Lou.
But he hasn’t been home to do it, unless he came out here in the dark late Saturday night, after he got home, without her noticing, and that’s highly improbable. No, it must have been Molly and Ozzie yesterday. Lou said they were outside.
“Ozzie,” she says, turning to him, “did you and Molly pick raspberries yesterday?”
He glances up, then responds with a disinterested, “Nope.”
“Are you sure? Did Molly eat them while you were busy digging?”
“Molly digged, too. Molly found treasure, Mommy! Buried treasure. See? In here . . . Help me find it, Mommy.” He’s furiously scooping dirt from the hole.
She notices that it’s grown considerably. In fact, a huge patch of soil seems to have been freshly turned over.
“Wow, Ozzie,” she says mildly, “you and Molly really spent a lot of time digging for buried treasure yesterday, didn’t you?”
“Yup. Mommy dig, too?”
“Not right now.” She walks away from the berry bushes, sitting in her lawn chair that’s still positioned under the spreading lilac branches and holding the empty stainless-steel bowl in her lap. “I’ll just watch you, sweetie.”
So much for the berry pie for Lou.
Oh, well. She can do something else. Make him a meat loaf, or something.
But the thing is . . .
What happened to all those raspberries? Did Molly eat them when Ozzie wasn’t paying attention?
Maybe.
And if she did, so what? Michelle certainly couldn’t care less about the baby-sitter helping herself to some fruit from the yard.
Besides, it might not have been Molly. Michelle knows that their backyard is occasionally used by neighborhood kids as a cut-through to the path through the woods that leads down to Lakeshore Road. When they first moved in, Lou was always hollering at teenaged trespassers, telling Michelle, when she protested that they weren’t doing any harm, that it was just asking for trouble, letting kids cut through their yard.
“If any of them ever tripped and fell while they’re climbing over that woodpile and got hurt, Michelle, we’d be looking at a personal injury lawsuit.”
“You’re just paranoid, Lou.”
“I’m an attorney, Michelle,” he’d pointed out. “I know about these things.”
It’s been a while since Michelle has seen anyone venture across their yard to the woods. Lou must have scared them all off. But maybe some brave kids had been here recently and eaten the berries.
A perfectly logical explanation, but it doesn’t explain why food seems to keep disappearing around the house, too.
Do ghosts eat? she finds herself wondering.
And then, with a brisk shake of her head, she tells herself she really is losing it.
There’s no such thing as ghosts, and if there were, they certainly wouldn’t be required to do anything as mundanely human as eat. They’d be too busy . . . haunting. Or whatever it is ghosts do.
She glances idly over at the Wasner house next door. It’s quiet today. She saw a police car pull up out front earlier, but the place isn’t crawling with cops the way it was yesterday. She wonders whether they’ve found any clue as to what happened to Rebecca. The whole thing is so unsettling.
“No treasure, Mommy.”
“Hmm?” She looks up to see Ozzie tossing his shovel aside, apparently dejected that he hasn’t come across pirate gold the way Barney did in that video he loves so much.
“No treasure,” he repeats. “Let’s go.” He toddles off toward the house, having lost interest in the dirt, at least for the time being.
Grateful for the diversion, Michelle follows him.
Molly closes the front door behind Detective Mullen and turns abruptly to go back upstairs to her room.
“Are you okay?”
Rory is standing there.
“I’m fine.” Molly starts up the stairs, thinking, Please, can’t you just leave me alone? Why can’t everyone just leave me alone!
“Are you sure? Because I went through this. I know what it’s like, Molly.”
She pauses on the stairs, asks, “You went through what? What did you go through, Rory?”
“I was questioned by the cops after Carleen disappeared. And again after Emily did. I know what it’s like, Molly—”
“You do not.”
“Yes, I do. You sit there with some cop staring at you and asking you all kinds of nosy questions, and I know how it is—how you try to think of something—anything, any little thing—to tell him so you can feel like at least you’re doing your best to help, when you know the whole time that there’s nothing—you don’t know anything, and you can’t tell him anything meaningful; you can’t do a damn thing. You’re completely helpless. And you just want them to leave you alone.”
Yes.
That’s exactly how it is.
Molly closes her eyes, standing there, her hand on the railing.
Rory’s right. She has been there. She does know.
But she doesn’t want to give this to Rory.
Why should she let Rory know that she’s reached her, that she’s nailed it right on the head?
Rory obviously needs to feel like an understanding big sister; she needs to make up for all the hurt she caused when she left Lake Charlotte and didn’t look back, for all the pain she caused Molly just the other night when she told her that shocking, devastating secret Molly would have rather not known, should never have known.
Molly’s not going to forgive her for that. She’s not going to let her sister ease her guilty conscience. She doesn’t owe Rory that. She doesn’t owe Rory anything.
“Oh,” she says, as though she’s surprised, “is that what it was like for you, Rory? That’s too bad. It wasn’t like that for me at all. I just told the detective what I know. And that’s nothing. I know nothing. Why should I feel the least bit guilty and helpless over that?”
“You shouldn’t,” Rory says quickly. “I didn’t mean it like—”
“I’m going back to bed,” Molly says, continuing up the stairs, going into her room, slamming the door shut behind her to discourage any notion Rory might get of coming after her to pelt her with more nuggets of big sisterly understanding.
She sits on the edge of her rumpled unmade bed, trembling, struggling not to cry. God, she’s so weary of all the crying. She managed to hold her tears back the whole time the detective sat across from her at the kitchen table, scribbling notes on his pad and watching her so closely, as though he expected her to reveal some tidbit of a clue.
Now she lets out a shaky breath and glances at her desk, at the framed photograph sitting beside the stacks of books she’d cleaned out of her locker, and notebooks from the school year, and other clutter she really should put away. The rest of it. Not the photo.
Rebecca gave her the photo for Christmas. It shows the two of them, arms around each other, laughing about something. Rebecca is wearing her old Leonardo DiCaprio T-shirt leftover from her Titanic phase, and Molly is in one of Kevin’s huge flannel shirts with the sleeves rolled up, and they both look casual, and comfortable, and happy just to be together.
Rebecca’s gone.
Until now, she has managed to hold her grief at bay, but it hits her all at once and she finds herself shaking, sobbing, nauseated.
I need help with this, she thinks plaintively, the ache in her heart so intense that it scares her. I can’t handle this alone. It’s just too huge and horrible.
But there’s no one.
No one to help her.
No one to turn to.
Nothing to do but pull herself together and go on.
Downstairs, she hears the phone ring once . . . twice . . .
Rory must have answered it.
Maybe it’s Kevin, Molly thinks hopefully. Maybe he’s calling to check in on me. After all, he’s been gone a whole week already. You’d think he’d want to know how things are back home. You’d think he’d at least want to call and say hi. He promised he would.
She wonders if he’s going to end up doing what Rory did. Just turning his back on the family, on her, while he goes off to see the world. After all, he’s just about the same age Rory was when she left. It would be so easy for him to just get rid of the responsibility he’s had weighing him down for so long. She can almost understand how he might—
There are footsteps on the stairs, then a knock on Molly’s door. “It’s for you, Molly.”
Rory would have said immediately if it was Kevin.
“I don’t want to talk to anyone.” She pauses. Then, thinking of Ryan, asks Rory, “Who is it?”
“A friend of yours . . . Amanda Falk?” Rory replies in a do you know her? tone. “Should I tell her you—”
“I’ll take it,” Molly says, quickly wiping her tears and stepping out into the hall. She brushes past Rory, hurrying down to the kitchen, wondering why Amanda is suddenly calling her.
She’s Jessica’s friend, after all, and even though she was all friendly at that party the other night, Molly knows better than to think she wants to be pals. Girls like Amanda and Jessica—girls who live in Green Haven Glen and wear designer clothes and are effortlessly pretty—don’t seek out girls like Molly. No, obviously Amanda and Jessica were temporarily on the outs, and Amanda wanted to see Ryan ch
eat on Jessica with anyone, anyone at all, even a nobody like Molly Connolly.
Still, in response to Molly’s cautious “Hello?” Amanda sounds breezy and enthusiastic, asking, “What’s up, Molly? How’s everything going?”
“Okay, I guess.”
“I heard about your friend. God, are you all right?”
“I’m okay,” Molly repeats, touched that Amanda would call to check on her. “I mean, it’s so awful, but I’m hanging in there.”
“What’s going on? Do they know what happened to her?”
“No. The police came to talk to me a little while ago and—”
“They did?” She hears Amanda say to someone in the background, “You guys, the police actually questioned her!” Then, to Molly, “That’s just Dana and Lisa. They’re over here. We were all just kind of wondering what was up, you know, ’cause it’s so scary. The whole thing with Rebecca, I mean.”
“I know.”
“Listen, we were just thinking about going out on Lisa’s boat this afternoon. Are you into it?”
Molly hesitates.
“Molly, you shouldn’t just sit around and stress about Rebecca,” Amanda says. “I mean, you’ve got to go on living, you know?”
That’s pretty much what Molly just told herself up in her room. Still . . .
“I don’t know,” she says. “I’ve never gone out on a boat before.”
“Oh, it’s really fun. Lisa’s brother will take us out. Will. Do you know him?”
“No.”
“He’s in college. He and his friends go out on the water almost every afternoon, and they usually don’t mind if we tag along. It’ll be really fun. It’ll cheer you up. Maybe I’ll call Ryan and see if he wants to go, too.”
“Ryan?” Molly’s spirits lift. She hasn’t talked to him since she left his house Saturday night—not that she’s spent much time dwelling on that. Still, now that Amanda’s brought him up, she can’t help wondering why she hasn’t heard from him. He must know about Rebecca. He must know she’s Rebecca’s friend.
All the Way Home Page 21
