I save my call to her for last.
“Hi, Daddy,” she answers after the second ring, sounding tired.
“I didn’t wake you from a nap or something, did I?”
“No… just been studying a lot. Was up really late last night. Any news on Claudia?”
She always asks, and that makes me smile, just a little. “No, nothing new. How about you and Carlos? You talk to him lately?”
Last time we spoke, she said they were going to try working on their issues—Carlos had never really gotten over her having their marriage annulled.
With a heavy sigh, she says, “I don’t think it’s going to work out. I love him, but…”
After several moments of silence, I finish for her. “You aren’t ready.” It’s what I sometimes thought Claudia felt, that what she told the detective was really true, that she’d woken up and realized she was nineteen, now twenty, and didn’t want to be tied down to me.
“No… I’m not,” she confirms. “Last summer was great, but it was kind of stifling. I want to date other boys and go on trips with other girls—I’m only going to be this age once in my life, and I don’t want to have regrets.”
“Maybe you’ll find one another again in a few years,” I tell her, clearly understanding her desire for independence and knowing this is what her heart must be telling her.
“Maybe,” she says with a yawn. “Daddy, I should go, but let me know if you hear anything from Claudia, okay? She still hasn’t contacted me or any of our friends after all this time… and that’s weird. I’m still worried.”
“I will. And I love you.”
“Love you too.”
I take another few minutes just to stand in the cold in an attempt to center myself. And I’m just about to head back up to the office when my phone rings again. It’s a number I don’t recognize, but I quickly pick up, as I always do.
“Luke Prescott,” I say, hearing some shuffling on the other line. “Hello?” I ask.
“Yeah, this is Luke right?” It’s a male voice, on the younger side and slightly familiar.
“Yes, is this Cory… or Kyle?”
“It’s Cory,” the boy says, his voice tight, nervous.
“Hey, it’s great to hear from you.” My heart starts to gallop. “Have you heard from Claudia? Is there anything you can tell me?”
There is a beeping sound in the background, then voices. “I shouldn’t. I know I’m not supposed to, but she’s in the hospital. And it isn’t right. She isn’t supposed to have the baby yet. I know that much.”
The baby. There’s still a baby. Knowing this brings relief, anticipation and unease all at once.
“Okay.” I calm myself down, knowing that even if I can somehow track where this call is coming from, it’s going to be a hell of a lot easier to get Cory to offer me more. “Can you tell me what hospital she’s at?”
“Uh… I think it’s just called Vancouver General Hospital… in Canada, you know?”
“This is great, Cory. Can you tell me her condition?” I’m already storming back inside and through the long hallways of Steven’s office building, making my way out front and to my truck. “Is she okay?”
“I think so… I think she went into labor a couple of days ago. I don’t think my parents wanted to bring us here, but they were worried too…”
“Worried?” My heart sinks. Worried about what?
“She was scared,” Cory says quietly. “She wanted us here with her. She’s really tired, but she was glad to see us. It’s too early, right? She’s not supposed to have it yet.”
I’m already gunning it toward the freeway, having put my phone on the passenger seat on speaker. “That’s right, Cory. Hey, I’m on my way up there. Can you let me know if anything at all changes?”
“Yeah, but it might not be a good idea. My parents don’t want you here.”
“But does Claudia?” I ask, holding my breath for the answer I want to hear.
“She keeps asking me about you,” Cory says. “It’s why I got your number from Kyle and called you. I won’t tell my parents, but I don’t know if you’ll be able to get in.”
“You did great, Cory,” I tell him. “And if you talk to Claudia again, tell her I’m on my way, okay? Tell her I love her. Can you do that?”
More rustling. “I will. I better go. My Mom just got off the elevator.”
“Okay, thank you.”
He doesn’t say anything else, and the phone clicks off.
Vancouver is a good two and a half hour drive from Seattle, maybe longer depending on the time it takes to get over the border, but I’m determined to do it in less while trying not to get pulled over for speeding. I’m just passing Bellingham when my phone rings.
“This is Luke,” I answer through the Bluetooth.
“Luke!” The voice is frantic and so very familiar.
Isabelle.
“What’s wrong?” I ask her, though I already know by the tone of her voice she’s in crisis mode. She couldn’t have picked a worse time.
“Gabe is gone, and it’s been two days, and I keep trying to call him, but he won’t answer!” she shrieks through the phone.
“Take a few deep breaths,” I instruct her, knowing even as I’m saying it that it likely won’t do any good.
“Don’t tell me to calm down, Luke! I can’t until I hear from him.” She’s frantic. “He was gone when I got back, and I’ve been trying to hold it together, but I just can’t!”
I sigh, hoping I can at least talk her away from the ledge she’s obviously found herself on. “Where were you when he left? You aren’t one to really leave the house, Izzy.”
“Seeing that girl,” she says without taking a breath. “They made me do it! Said they’d give me money, and Gabe told me to go. I wanted him to come with me, but he said he was having another artistic epiphany and he couldn’t—”
“What girl did you go and see?” I ask, but I think I already know.
“That girl… the one you got pregnant. They told me what to say, and I did. They had her in some hospital like the ones you always put me in. I thought it was a trick at first to get me there, but—”
“You saw Claudia? Were you with her parents?”
What the hell is going on?
“Her parents? Yes, I guess so. They offered me a thousand dollars to go with them, to tell her things about you. Maybe they were lies, but Gabe told me to go, and now he’s gone!”
What she’s telling me sounds almost delusional, and yet I know it’s real. It’s bad enough what Claudia’s parents have done to their own daughter but to involve my fragile ex-wife is a new low, even for them.
“I need you to calm down,” I tell her, trying to make better sense of this new information. “I can’t go to you right now, so you need to be strong. You need to have faith that Gabe will come back like he always does.”
“I told you not to tell me to calm down!” she snaps back, a new degree of hysteria in her voice. “I’ve been trying to do that for the last two days after that man brought me back here and Gabe was gone. Luke, I’ll hurt myself… I really will—”
“You are not going to hurt yourself, Isabelle! Remember everything you’ve learned during your hospital stays? You need to dig deep now. You need to self soothe. You need—”
“Fuck you, Luke! I’m going to do it. I’ll finally kill myself, and then Gabe will be sorry. He’s—”
“Don’t say that, Isabelle! You need to hold on.”
“Then you better get your ass over here,” she snarls before hanging up on me.
“Fuck!” I slam my hand on the wheel and call her back.
“Are you coming?” she asks, picking up right away, her voice calmer but just as insistent.
There’s an exit coming up, and if I turn around now, I might be able to get to her in three hours, three hours that could save her life. But it would take me hours further from Claudia who might need me now more than ever. This could be my one and only chance to be there for her, to
potentially be there for our child.
“I’m coming,” I tell Isabelle with resignation.
“I knew you would,” she says with a smug satisfaction.
She hangs up, and it feels like the world drops out from under me.
Chapter Forty-Six
CLAUDIA
Luke should be here. I wish he was here, holding my hand and telling me it’s going to be okay.
“We’re not going to be able to stop these contractions any longer,” the doctor, a white-haired woman with heavy glasses and pink lipstick, says while a nurse hooks me up to a bunch of monitors. “I’m afraid the baby’s going to come out whether we’re ready for it or not. It’s just a matter of time.”
“I don’t understand why she’s gone into labor this early,” Mom says somewhat frantically. She actually looks worried about me for the first time in months.
The doctor frowns, takes my wrist and holds it up. “Could be a lot of reasons, but I might have a better idea if I understood why the hell she’s got bruising on her wrists and ankles. We know she didn’t get them here at the hospital, so anyone care to explain?”
“I don’t—”
“She’s been in a psychiatric facility,” Dad tells her. “They’d been putting her in restraints. We just found that out before we’d brought her here.”
The doctor eyes them warily. “Clear Water by chance?” Before she can get an answer, she looks at me. “How long were you there?”
“Five… six months?” I say before getting hit with another tight snap in my belly, the grimace on my face coinciding with an alert on the monitor that a nurse had just attached to me.
The doctor shakes her head, eyeing the monitor. “Let’s run a quick tox screen on her,” she tells the nurse. “I have a feeling she’s been loaded up with pharmaceuticals that might still be in her system—we don’t want to be mixing the wrong anesthesia when we get her into the operating room.”
“This wasn’t supposed to happen!” Mom is yelling, angry and shaking her head. “It was just meant to give her time to think, to change her mind. Claudia… we never meant to put your health in jeopardy.”
Dad takes my hand, sorrow and regret in his eyes. “Claudia, baby. I’m so sorry.”
“I want Luke,” I cry. “If you’re sorry, then call Luke. I need him!”
I think he nods, but then it’s like I can’t focus. The muscles in my neck give out, and I can’t hold my head up. I’m staring at the ceiling now while the monitors scream and beep and the doctor yells something at the nurse. My mom is crying, and my dad—I think it’s my dad—grips my hand a little tighter. My lashes flutter and all of the noises sound muted, muffled somehow.
“Claudia,” someone says, but I don’t know who.
And then it all goes silent and dark.
Chapter Forty-Seven
LUKE
Dani holds my hand and leans her head on my shoulder.
It’s a sunny February day, cold and crisp, a day as good as any to say goodbye.
Her cremated remains have been placed into the niche on the very top row, closest to a small garden where crocuses have begun to bloom, the final blessing given by the priest.
“I’m so sorry, Daddy,” Dani says to me after everyone else has left, after we place two final roses in the wreath that stands below the niche.
I turn to her, her eyes surely as red as mine. “She was something to you too,” I tell her. “I’m sorry for your grief as well.”
We stay there a short while longer, leaning on one another, letting out those last tears that I’m sure will come again. Grief isn’t something you can just get out and over with. It can span months, if not years. And for her, I will grieve, for all that could have been, for a life cut short because of the whims of someone else.
“We can visit again,” Dani tells me, “as often as you want.” And then she tugs at my hand, and I’m ready.
We walk past the other niches where urns reside behind marble blocks inscribed with names of men, women and children. The dates of births and deaths tell of lives that were long, spanning decades; or short, perhaps just a few brief months. But the names and dates cannot tell how the lives were lived, if they were full or empty, happy or sad. I want to believe she had enough happiness in hers to make it a life worth living.
Beyond the niches, we cross the lawns of the cemetery where people are still placed in the ground, flowers filling vases, some fresh and beautiful, others wilting in the frigid winter air. Brandon is here, a large tombstone inscribed with the words: Beloved son and brother. We’d come here earlier, bringing fresh flowers to his grave, but we pause here again. I wish more than anything that he could be alive and with us, that the cemetery wasn’t the only place I could visit him, aside from the place he has in my heart.
After several minutes, we walk on in silence, Dani’s arm slipped through mine. When we get to the open wrought iron gate, the one leading from the cemetery to the parking lot, he’s waiting for us.
My brother.
Maybe too ashamed to have attended the service, knowing he was the one that drove her to her grave. I’d felt some of that guilt at first too, when I’d told her I was coming for her but instead kept going to Vancouver, closer to Claudia. I’d called 9-1-1, given them her address, told them she was suicidal and would need to be hospitalized. Something about their arrival had spooked her, and she’d called me one last time to call me a lying bastard before hanging up.
I knew that wasn’t the real Isabelle talking, but those were the thoughts she had, intoxicated and afraid and angry in the last moments of her life.
She shot herself with a gun that belonged to Gabe, a gun that shouldn’t have been anywhere near her. He’d gone off to Mexico, had been on the beach with some woman he barely knew when his wife was committing suicide. He’d at least had the guts to admit that much.
I’d done everything I could for her, had wanted so desperately for her to thrive and to be a mother to Dani, perhaps a grandmother to her children someday. But it wasn’t meant to be. And I’m done taking responsibility for it.
“You should go in,” I tell him, putting a hand on his shoulder, done with the anger and animosity. “You should do at least that much for her.”
He shakes his head softly, true emotion ready to crush him. “I… I can’t…”
I pull Dani closer to me. Gabe is her biological father after all, and seeing him here, when so much time has passed, must be difficult.
“You owe it to her.”
He looks from me to Dani. His face falls, and he begins to cry. “I fucked it all up… I fucked it all to hell. I always thought she’d be there when I’d come back,” he gets out through his ragged tears.
She doesn’t move to console him or to disagree with him. She’s not ready to forgive him and maybe never will be.
“Go in and tell her that.” I tilt my head back over my shoulder. “Go.” I take my hand away from him and tug Dani forward, leaving him there alone, leaving him to face up to what he’s done.
She’s holding our baby close to her when I walk into the room, talking to him like only a mother can speak to her child.
I pretty much vault myself toward her, not wanting to intrude on their bonding moment but unable to stay away.
“Luke.” She looks up at me and smiles. Her cheeks are rosy, her hair pulled back into a ponytail, her eyes bright, cheery and her skin creamy and glowing. She hadn’t looked that way when I’d first seen her in that hospital room in Vancouver, after she’d just given birth and had nearly died doing it.
“I missed you guys,” I tell her, sitting at the edge of the bed and wrapping my arm around her, looking adoringly down at her and our son.
“And we missed you too, didn’t we, Bryant?” she says, a look of love for both of us.
I’d had her moved to this hospital in Seattle to continue her recovery. She’d apparently been loaded up with so many drugs at that poor excuse for a psychiatric facility that it was a miracle our child hadn’t
been damaged, physically or mentally, that Claudia herself hadn’t died from the toxic cocktail of medicine they’d been pouring down her throat to keep her subdued.
“And how did you two do at the service?” she asks with a concerned expression as I stroke her hair with one hand and toy with Bryant’s tiny fingers with the other.
“We did okay. It was a lot for Dani, and she’s back at the hotel resting. Gabe showed up at the end—hopefully he’ll get some closure.”
“And do you have closure?” she asks with a raise of her eyebrows, her blue eyes intense… concerned.
“Absolutely. I’ll always grieve the loss. She was Danielle and Brandon’s mother. And I have to hope she’s at peace now, that she’s with Brandon.”
Claudia smiles, but it’s more than a smile. It’s everything. It’s compassion and love, trust and faith… in us and in our future. “I’ll be here, you know? You’ll always have us,” she says, looking back down to Bryant. “We’ll never leave you.”
“And for that, I’m eternally thankful.” I hold tighter to my little family, kiss Claudia with reverence, inhaling her sweet strawberry scent. I am happy. Truly, deeply, and forever.
Epilogue
CLAUDIA
Four Years Later
I’m not one to focus on the bad, but sometimes things I’d like to forget have a way of slipping in, reminders of past events I don’t ever want to be repeated. These thoughts always return me to my parents and what they’d done to me, having me followed and then locking me up in that psych hospital for months on end. They’d been sorry, but being sorry hadn’t been enough—they’d nearly killed me and Bryant.
Clear Water had apparently been a dumping ground for “hysteric” young women for years, and after my experience there, Luke had pushed his lawyer into an investigation that soon found its way into the governments of Washington State and British Columbia. Among the many transgressions uncovered at Clear Water was the revelation that my parents had two women who their clients had been in divorce proceedings with committed there. One of them had apparently hanged herself in her room, thus removing her as a problem for their client.
The Years Between Us Page 30