by D. J. Palmer
“I can’t sit around and let you cover all of our expenses,” Mom said. “It doesn’t feel right to me, even if you can afford it.”
“But I can afford it,” Simon whined. “We’re fine. I’m making way more money than I thought renting out my house.”
How does he have money? I wondered. Simon always bragged how he could provide for us, college and all, but I never thought it was possible on what a teacher made. Then again, he did own a two-thousand-dollar costume prop. Maybe he came from a wealthy family. What did I know? I hardly knew him.
“I don’t get why you’re so against me working,” Mom said. “It’s not the fifties, Simon. You do know women work.”
Simon made a noise to convey his awareness of that fact.
“I know what year it is,” he said. “Most of my colleagues are women. My point is I think it’s going to be bad for Maggie.”
For me? I thought. Leave me out of it. Before, I was against my mom working because it would have meant more time for me at the house alone with Simon. But now that I knew he was against Mom going back to work, well, I was suddenly all for it.
“I’m her mother; I think I know what’s best for Maggie.”
“I get that you’re her mother, but it doesn’t help me that you won’t give me a voice in the house,” Simon said. “I’m always going to be an outsider.”
Damn straight, I thought.
“Some decisions need to come from me,” my mom said. “Including my decision to go back to work. I want my own money, and honestly, I think it’s good for Maggie to see me being independent, getting back on my feet. I want her to understand that no matter what life throws at you, you can always bounce back. Rather than tell her to be resilient, I can show her.”
Connor came down the hall and I put my finger to my lips so that he would stay quiet. He wasn’t a dummy. He was just as interested in eavesdropping as I was.
“That’s a fair point,” Simon said. “I’m just saying I’ve been around her a lot is all. I’ve noticed things about Maggie’s behavior, and not just today.”
Connor made a face at me that I wanted to wipe off with my fist.
“What kind of things?” Mom said. I could tell by her tone that she was worried.
“I think she’s on edge. If you get involved in a new job, it’s going to take a lot of your focus. That’s how it goes.”
“Thank you for your concern,” Mom said. “But I think I know myself well enough to know how to balance a job and my family. My social worker credentials are up to date, I’ve got my résumé put together, and I’m starting to send it out tomorrow. I’m not asking for your permission here, Simon. I’m asking for your support.”
But Simon didn’t say anything, and for the first time in ages I felt great, really fantastic. I’ve never had a boyfriend, but I’ve watched plenty of TV, read lots of juicy YA books, so I knew cracks in a relationship when I saw them.
CHAPTER 8
On Saturday morning, Nina woke with a start. It was her father’s birthday on Wednesday, but she hadn’t gotten around to sending him a card with the kids’ school pictures in it, something she did every year. It was the job search, she realized, that had distracted her, and in some ways the oversight supported Simon’s assertion that she wouldn’t be able to focus on work and the rest of her life while everything was in upheaval.
From outside, Nina heard the faint hum of a lawn mower, and wondered how late she had slept. A warm late-summer breeze pushed against the fluttering curtains, allowing in sips of light that painted the bedroom in an amber glow.
Nina stretched her arms skyward, then puttered over to the closet, where she retrieved a terry-cloth robe. It caught her off guard, still, even after all this time, to see Simon’s clothes in there, leading her to wonder when he would become her new normal instead of her new man. Cinching the robe tightly around her waist, Nina went off in search of her family, as well as some coffee, hopeful that Simon had been his usual thoughtful self and made her a cup.
She could see from down the hall that Connor’s bedroom door was closed; no surprise there. That child could sleep until noon. Maggie’s was open, meaning she was lurking about somewhere, probably parked in front of the TV, along with Daisy and a towering bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios.
The aromatic smell of coffee drew Nina downstairs as though she were a cartoon character following a scent trail. She poured coffee from the pot into her favorite mug, wondering why Daisy hadn’t come to greet her. Usually it was Nina who fed the dog in the mornings, and the dog’s hearing was especially keen on an empty stomach. The TV wasn’t on and Maggie and Daisy weren’t in the living room when Nina checked, so with mug in hand, she stepped outside and found Simon on the front lawn, standing on a ladder perched against the oak tree she loved, tying yellow ribbons around several of the limbs. These were the same ribbons her well-meaning friends had once tied around another tree in honor of her missing husband. This time they no doubt carried a different meaning.
At the edge of the property, somebody, presumably Simon, had spray-painted a jagged orange line from the curb well past the oak tree. Upon second viewing, it became apparent to Nina that some of the limbs from the neighbor’s tree had unwittingly grown across the orange boundary line.
“What is going on?” Nina asked Simon from the base of the ladder. On a nearby table, Simon had rolled out an architectural drawing of their property. Nina guessed the spray-painted orange line corresponded to the property’s defined boundary.
“Is that permanent?” she asked, pointing at the line.
Simon beamed at Nina from his perch up high before directing his gaze to where she indicated. “Oh, hey, honey, good morning. No, not to worry. It’s marking chalk, comes off easily.”
“Good. What are you doing?”
At that moment, Maggie and Daisy appeared from the back of the house.
Climbing down from the ladder, Simon wiped his hands on his faded jeans after reaching the ground. He planted a gentle kiss on Nina’s forehead. “Did you get enough beauty rest?”
“Plenty,” Nina said. “What’s going on here?”
“Oh, this tree.” He patted the thick trunk lovingly. “Some of these limbs, they’re crossing into our property. Gotta come down.”
“Yeah?” Nina folded her arms across her chest. “And the neighbors think so, too?”
“It’s not their property,” Simon said. “People have to respect ownership. There are laws for that.”
Maggie, with Daisy following off-leash, came to the tree. She looked up and then over at Simon. “What’s going on?” she asked.
Nina didn’t answer her daughter, instead speaking directly to Simon.
“You can’t cut those down without asking permission,” she said sternly.
“But I have asked.”
From the table with those drawings on it, Simon produced copies of letters he had sent the neighbors. Nina had not seen the Greens since they’d brought over cookies after she and Simon moved in. The letters Simon had sent announced his intention to trim the tree to his property line on this given date unless the Greens took it upon themselves to do the job. Simon then produced a copy of the law that made it legal for him to trim branches that extended onto his property line as long as he did not destroy the tree. He even got into a bit of the history of property law, not that anyone was interested.
“I’ve got these documents with me in case the Greens raise objections. It’s clear the law is on my side.”
“I don’t care,” said Nina, taking more of a tone. “I’m not going to have the Greens over here screaming about their mutilated tree.”
“Well, what do you want me to do about it? Just leave it be? This is our property.”
Maggie tilted at the waist. Is this normal? her eyes were asking. Would Dad have freaked out about some dumb branches?
“Unless you think those branches are going to fall on somebody’s head, keep them on that tree where they belong,” Nina said sharply. “I happen to lik
e how it looks.”
Simon’s posture straightened at the rebuke. His shoulders went back as his neck seemed to lengthen. His stance grew rigid and Nina could see the muscles of his jaw tightening, while the corners of his eyes twitched several times as if dust had gotten in them. And then she saw something catch in Simon’s eyes, a spark igniting in a brief flash before it dimmed, a look she’d never seen before. Was that what Maggie had seen—a fleeting darkness that bordered on anger, or something worse? Whatever it was, Nina found it unsettling.
But what came on quickly soon was gone. Simon’s expression cleared and he returned to his normal self. A smile brightened his countenance and warmed his whole appearance.
“Of course,” he said. “We’ve got to live next door to them. And if you like the tree as is, then I like it too.”
He leaned in to again kiss Nina on the forehead, while Maggie looked on with a hopeful expression. The moment, though brief, had been illuminating for Nina on many levels. There were aspects to Simon’s personality that would only be revealed with time. This, she understood, should be expected and embraced. She did not know he had a hang-up about property lines, but it fit with his personality (fastidious, far more rigid than Glen, a lot neater, too), so it made sense to her that he’d be somewhat obsessed with rules and order.
The incident with Maggie and the television remote suddenly took on new vividness for her. It better explained why rule-following Simon had been so insistent on shutting the TV off at six, ignoring common sense, while claiming a mandate she may or may not have issued. As for Maggie, a young girl without much life experience who missed her dad tremendously, who desperately wanted to get her life back to the way it had been, it was certainly conceivable she had misinterpreted Simon’s angry expression as something more sinister. In some ways, it was a relief for Nina to see Simon’s frustration, because now she saw what her daughter had seen, and it no longer concerned her.
CHAPTER 9
Summer turned to fall as Nina began her job search in earnest. In that time, she did a dozen drafts of her résumé, with Susanna’s help. She updated her LinkedIn profile, reconnected with former colleagues and friends, all while sending inquiry after inquiry into the black hole of the internet, receiving no return responses. Somehow this was not supposed to dampen her spirits; after all, she was just beginning the process. Hadn’t she taught her children that patience was a virtue and not to expect instant gratification? But in this day and age of social media and continuous feedback, she expected a certain degree of immediacy and tried not to take radio silence as a portent of things to come.
Nina was back in Dr. Wilcox’s office, seated on the now familiar comfy chair, soothed by the sounds of the fountain and the white noise machine. How should we start today’s session? she asked herself. Should she talk about Maggie and Simon, their argument about the TV remote that was really about so much more? Or maybe she should talk about her career; share her worries and fears about being professionally put to pasture and Simon’s concerns over her resuming a demanding job?
As it turned out, Dr. Wilcox had a different topic in mind.
Glen.
She glanced up from the notes she’d jotted down. “In a previous session you said you didn’t think you’d ever date again after what Glen did to you. Can we talk about Glen now?”
A flood of memories rushed over Nina as if she were drowning in them. She remembered driving down her dirt road, dazed, seated in the back of the police car, where the prisoners usually go, on her way to the station to discuss her missing husband.
“I spent a lot of time with Detectives Wheeler and Murphy, answering their questions,” Nina told Dr. Wilcox, who studied her with a look of sympathy and concern. “I thought maybe Glen had cut himself badly with a fishing knife, fell, hit his head hard, and somehow ended up in the water. He was an excellent swimmer, so he could have made it to shore, got lost in the woods, maybe he had a concussion and was disoriented. It gave me hope.”
“But that wasn’t the story?”
“No, it wasn’t. Because the police searched the woods, with dogs even, and there was no sign of Glen anywhere. Then they asked me all sorts of questions. Was Glen depressed? Could he have been suicidal? They even wanted to know about our marriage.”
“What did you tell them?”
Nina opened up about several issues that hadn’t seemed worth mentioning to the detectives. They were little things, really, like how Glen still resented her for moving them out of the city. Seabury was too isolated for him, and moving there had only confirmed his belief that “rural” equaled “remote.”
Nina, on the other hand, had adjusted quickly to their new town. It was safe, the kind of community she’d always wanted to live in, a place where other mothers kept an eye out for her children, where everyone had each other’s backs. Nina appreciated Glen’s willingness to move, and told him so almost daily for the first few years. It was an idyllic community in so many ways—it just wasn’t Boston, as Glen took every opportunity to remind her.
The marriage gradually became overwhelmed, thanks in part to the move north coupled with the daily grind of life. Spontaneity had yielded to schedules. Glen did what he always did: put his focus and energy into his work, moving up the career ladder, while Nina directed hers into the kids and home. As time wore on, and his work responsibilities grew, Glen showed increasingly less interest in her world—the mundane tasks of gardening, shopping, cleaning, laundry, the dog, and the kids—because he’d become too consumed with his.
The day-to-day went along smoothly enough, but Nina was also aware of a growing gulf between them as exhaustion replaced intimacy. Then again, wasn’t that most marriages? Didn’t most couples start off feeling some sort of imperative, an insatiable need for the other person, until those feelings became so familiar they went as unnoticed as breathing?
“But you never talked about divorce or separation?” Dr. Wilcox asked.
“No, no,” Nina said dismissively. “We were happy … I mean happyish, right? I mean, who doesn’t have problems? But I wasn’t going to get into all that with the police. I felt the focus needed to be on finding Glen. Nothing else mattered. So eventually, I went home because I had to break the news to the children.”
“How did they take it?”
“It was hard, of course. I know the words ‘Dad,’ ‘accident,’ ‘missing’—they all came out in the course of the conversation, but for the life of me I have no recollection of saying them. All I remember is Mag’s sweet voice cracking when she asked for her daddy. We hugged and cried together. Even Connor cried so hard he couldn’t speak.”
“How painful for all of you.”
“Oh, it was. But it was just the start.”
Nina recounted the first night after Glen had gone missing, reliving those moments in vivid detail for Dr. Wilcox’s benefit. That evening she felt like she was hosting a wake for a person who wasn’t dead. At least forty people were in the house, probably more, with cars lining the side of the road almost to the end of the street.
Several news vans had parked out front, their bright portable lights turning twilight into daylight. They had wanted a statement from Nina and the children. They wanted tears on camera, raw emotion that would make for a juicy tease to get viewers to tune in and satisfy advertisers.
Nina wasn’t going to play their game, but she did want Glen’s picture on the broadcast in case he was an amnesiac, lost and wandering. Susanna went on TV, functioning as the Garrity family spokesperson. Nina watched the News 9 broadcast live from outside her home. The picture they used for the report was of Glen smiling after a family hike to the top of Mount Monadnock. Susanna found the photo on Facebook, and everyone agreed it was the best one to use.
“Where were Maggie and Connor while all this was going on?” Dr. Wilcox asked.
“Maggie was hiding out in her room. It was too overwhelming to be downstairs. Connor wanted to go to the lake and search for his father—in fact, a whole group of us sugges
ted we do just that, but the police didn’t want us there. That part of Lake Winnipesauke by Governors Island has all sorts of terrain, and they had professionals on the scene, and we would have been in the way.
“Connor was really upset about not being able to help with the search, and I did what I could to reassure him the police would find his dad, that everything would be all right, but I could tell he didn’t believe me. Hell, I didn’t believe me either.”
“You implied things got even worse. Do you want to talk about it?”
Nina took in a breath to inflate her resolve. Some memories were harder to relive than others.
“Well, it was a chaotic night,” she said a bit apprehensively, “with people coming and going. By eleven o’clock the house had nearly emptied out. At Susanna’s urging I went upstairs to get some rest. I was probably a vodka tonic away from slurring my words.”
“Understandable,” Dr. Wilcox said.
“I had just closed my eyes when my cell phone chirped—an incoming text. It was a New Hampshire area code, six-oh-three,” Nina said, “but wasn’t a number I recognized, and it wasn’t anyone in my phone’s contacts. In fact, the text message started off by saying they were using an anonymous texting app that kept their identity a secret. Whoever it was didn’t want to be involved, but they had something to share.”
Bitterness rode up the back of Nina’s throat, the memory still so raw and cutting it was easy to conjure up her initial shock and anger.
“What was it?” Dr. Wilcox asked.
“The texter—to this day I don’t know if it was a guy or a girl—believed Glen was seeing a woman named Teresa.”
