“I’m thinking a month, six weeks would be enough time,” I said, taking a bite of cake and letting my mouth be happy.
“What if it takes longer for you to move?”
“What if it does?” I was already calculating the number of cakes Dad and I could consume in that period of time. I should’ve paid less attention to the cake and more to her face or I wouldn’t have been as shocked by what she said next.
“Your living with us makes it seem as if we’re condoning your pregnancy. And I’ve been clear about where I stand on that.”
An army of ants crawled up my backbone. For a moment, I was incoherent while my brain processed this latest offensive comment. “As if you’re what? I’m not believing this. What you’re telling me is you’re more concerned about what your church friends are going to say about you at Women’s Fellowship?”
“Don’t turn this around. You’re the one who sinned,” she said, the accusation in her voice unmistakable.
On the verge of a total meltdown, I pointed at my father. “And where are you on all of this? Is she doing the fighting for you?”
“Your mother needs to—”
“Shut up. That’s what my mother needs to do.” I stared at my father, but my mother’s audible gasp drew our attention.
Impassive no more, my mother sat on the edge of the chair, her coffee cup pushed to the side. “Olivia, that was disrespectful. And I deserve an apology.”
“What you deserve is to listen to me. Not just hear me. Listen. What century are you living in? Wyatt and I were getting married. You call yourself a Christian, yet you’re denying me and your grandchild a few weeks in your home?”
“Let’s take this down a notch. Calm down.” My father turned to my mother. “Scarlett, let’s not act rashly. We don’t have to make a decision tonight. You can think about this.”
“‘Think about this’? She shouldn’t have to think about this. She’s my mother.” And I needed her now more than I wanted to admit. How could she not know that?
“We can barely spend an hour together without butting heads over something. What do you think would happen after a month or longer? As for what century I’m living in, the last I checked, the Bible isn’t undergoing revisionist history.” She slid her chair back and stood facing my dad. “This isn’t going to work.”
“Where am I supposed to go in three weeks? I can’t believe you’re doing this,” I said and stared at her, the mother whose love shielded me after Wyatt died. Her face was familiar, but her heart was unrecognizable. I remembered when I was a child and wandered away from my parents when we were Christmas shopping. I spotted a woman wearing black pants, worked my way through swarms of shoppers until I reached her. But when I tugged, instead of my mother’s face, a stranger’s looked down at me. That same panic, disbelief, and confusion exploded in me now.
“You’ll find your way,” she said with the warmth of a rock.
Now it was my turn to stand and stare. “I was never enough, was I? You wanted more children, but I was it. And as much as you tried, I couldn’t or wouldn’t be you. I can’t do anything right in your eyes or God’s.”
I didn’t wait to see my parents leave. I walked out of the kitchen before they did, made my way to my bedroom and closed the door.
When I stopped the ugly hiccupping and the heaving crying, I did the only thing I knew to do next.
I called Mia.
CHAPTER 17
I stretched out on my unmade bed, turned on my side, and faced the space occupied by my memories of Wyatt.
I told her everything.
I started with the call from Babycakes, then the offer, then my parents. Their lack of an offer.
“I have a plan. You can move here with us. And don’t tell me no before you’ve heard me out. We’re still frantically looking for a nanny. You could help us with Lily. Really. And you wouldn’t be in our way. There’s an apartment over the garage. It’s even detached from the house. You’d have your privacy, and we would, too.”
“Mia, I know you want to help, and I love you for that. But I can’t take advantage of you and Bryce.”
“Are you kidding me? I need you. Don’t make me fly over there and drag you to Houston myself. You’re our friend. You’re having a baby, and you need help. This isn’t forever. You and that kid aren’t going to grow old in my garage apartment. You’ll have the money from the sale of the house, and we can look for a place for you to live in Houston. And you can talk to Cara and ask if you can work from here.”
“Is Bryce okay with this?”
“Would I be talking to you about moving here if he wouldn’t be?”
I loved the way Mia framed that answer. Because “wouldn’t be” meant she hadn’t discussed this with Bryce first. But, as in most things Mia, she’d overcome any objections he might have, and Bryce would end up wondering why she had asked for his approval in the first place.
“Give me some time to think about all of this,” I said, looking around my house and imagining the exhaustion of packing boxes, moving the furniture, the clothes, the artwork . . . I hadn’t even started and I was already tired. “Cara didn’t expect me to stay away from the office months at a time, so I’m not sure what she’ll say about my working long-distance. Plus, Wyatt is buried here, which is dumb to even say because he’s not going to miss me. But I’m still no closer to finding out where he was going when he died, and I don’t know how I’ll do that hundreds of miles away . . .” I was rambling.
“I didn’t expect to pick you up at the airport tomorrow. Though it would make my life less complicated. See how unselfish I can be?” I heard the smile in her voice. “I hate to say this, but—”
“Mia, anytime you start a sentence with those six words, what you really mean is ‘You’re going to hate to hear this.’”
“I know you want to solve this mystery with Wyatt, but you can’t do it alone. You may not be able to do it at all. There aren’t any bread crumbs left for you to follow on the road from there to Oakville.”
She paused, but I didn’t fill the empty space with words.
“Thing is, Livvy, maybe it’s time to stop trying to figure it out. Just let it be. Maybe you’re not meant to know. Or, when the time is right, you’ll find out the truth.”
“I’m not giving up. Not yet. I know there’s an answer; maybe I’m not asking the right questions.”
The frustration kept me awake at night. Some piece of this puzzle was hiding in plain sight, like my car keys. I’d zip through the house, a cartoon character on fast-forward, lifting clothes and magazines, checking pockets, looking under beds and the sofa, checking every flat surface in the house.
I stopped asking Wyatt for help when, every time I couldn’t find something, his response was to ask me where I had it last. I’d slap my arms against the sides of my body and screech, “If I could answer that, they wouldn’t be lost, would they?” If Wyatt could have tied a string around me and pulled it, I would have been a human top spinning until exhaustion.
It was only when I surrendered in defeat that my head or the veil over my eyes would clear. I’d remember that I’d forgotten client files and left them on my desk, or they’d be hanging out with the coffee mugs when I stopped for a refill on the way out.
And every part of me thought the answer to the Wyatt mystery was waiting to be found. I just wasn’t sure yet what I was looking for.
That night, propping myself up against the headboard, MacBook on my lap, my intention to review a client’s site was waylaid by my searching for hospital birth announcements in Oakville’s Daily News. Another dead end. The hospital there stopped providing the information to newspapers because of an increased risk for infant abductions and the exposure of the hospital to potential lawsuits.
You still haven’t opened that baby gift. Maybe that’s the answer. Maybe you’ll find the truth there.
But what if I hate the truth? What if the truth destroys me?
A text from Amanda woke me up the next morning. Sh
e’d sent me the date, time, and place of the act of sale. Three weeks. In twenty-one days my life would change again. I felt like someone who’d studied French for years waiting for that luxurious trip to Paris. Then I step off the plane, and everyone’s speaking Greek. I asked for Paris. For a wedding, and a life with Wyatt, and painting the nursery blue, then pink, then blue again.
Instead, I’m sitting in the Athens airport, tossing my Paris guidebooks into the trash. Wondering if I should spend time learning the new language, or would I expend all that energy only to find myself in another place?
Regardless of where I was headed, I had to leave this place. The home I thought would be my beginning would belong to some other family and their new beginning.
I made a list of moving companies, then started my phone calls to gather quotes. My grandmother beeped in at least six times. When I didn’t answer, she left a voicemail. When she didn’t get a response to the call or the voicemail, she left a text: I called, and I left a voicemail. Did you get those? Call me!
I suspected she would volunteer to be the intermediary between my parents and me. She wouldn’t be offering me a place to stay because she lived in a one-bedroom apartment in a retirement center that transitioned to assisted living as needed.
After so many attempts to contact me, she dispensed with nice-nice when she answered my call.
“It’s about time,” she growled. “What if I’d fallen down the stairs and cracked my head open? Or had a heart attack? Or was in an ambulance on my way to the hospital?”
“I don’t know, Ruthie. I would’ve apologized profusely and hoped to get to the hospital before they pulled the plug.” I waited for her laugh, but nothing.
“You know, I’m an old woman. One of those things could really happen. You wouldn’t want to live the rest of your life feeling guilty about ignoring my calls, now would you?”
I sighed. It seemed the only trip destined for me was a guilt trip. And the cost of those was always more than the price I was willing to pay. “Of course not. I have too many other items on my Things to Feel Guilty About list. So, what is it you needed to talk about?”
“Your mother called me. Told me you sold your house, and she said you couldn’t live with them. Said she had her reasons. What happened?”
“I guess she’s more concerned about her church thinking she’s opened a halfway house for unwed mothers than she is her own daughter,” I said as I walked around the house collecting tchotchkes and putting them on the kitchen table. A ceramic frog dish, paperweights that weren’t doing their job, a mug shaped like a football helmet . . .
“Glory be. I birthed her, but sometimes I don’t understand what Bible she’s operating from.” She followed with her little hums of disapproval. “Look, give her some time. She’ll come around. I’ll talk to her. Maybe redefine what it means to call yourself a Christian and hope she doesn’t kick me out on my keister. Too bad she’s too old to put in time-out.”
“I don’t have time to give her time. I called Mia, and she’s offered her garage apartment in Houston. I’m driving there after I sign the papers.”
“Your mother didn’t tell me about this,” she said, her voice rising. “When are you coming home?”
“She didn’t tell you about Houston because I spoke to Mia after she and Dad left, and I haven’t told them yet.” I found an empty box, marked it Donations and started loading it with some items that might be someone else’s treasures. “As for home . . . in three weeks, my home can be anywhere I want it to be.”
“But your family’s here.”
“No. My family . . . all I have of Wyatt, will be going with me.”
CHAPTER 18
Moving was the binge-and-purge syndrome of consumerism for houses.
In the guest bedroom closet, I discovered another box of tchotchkes from my former apartment meant to litter the furniture and shelves with dustables. Collections of angels and owls hunkered down with ceramic pigs. Clearly things not necessary for living a full life.
Other surprises included finding the steak knives I’d searched for after Wyatt and I moved in together (which meant I now owned eleven more knives than I needed), a pair of boots I’d ordered shoved into a box of Christmas ornaments, and a plastic bag full of paper clips.
Buried under the boots, I found a high school yearbook. Wyatt’s high school yearbook. I sat cross-legged on the floor in the closet staring at the pebbled cover, holding it as if it would break. I flipped through the glossy pages, black-and-white images of students at lunch, at football games and dances. All the seniors were pictured in their caps and gowns. When I saw Wyatt, the front of his cap mashing his bangs so that they almost covered his eyebrows, I outlined his picture with my fingertip as if he could somehow sense that I was there. Colin’s picture was there, too, his cap as crooked as his smile.
A few pages later, I spotted a picture of Wyatt on a page featuring a collage of prom pictures. Maybe I had seen it when he first showed me his yearbook the night we strolled down memory lane to visit ourselves in the past. But this color photograph didn’t look familiar. Wyatt wore a tuxedo. The girl’s chestnut hair was gathered at the nape of her neck, the ringlets falling between her shoulder blades. They were dancing, her hands clasped around his neck, his hands framed her waist, both of them oblivious to the camera lens. The girl’s smile reflected his, their eyes caressing each other.
I shuddered. I felt like an intruder staring at the picture of this intimate moment between them. I wouldn’t have been surprised if one of them reached beyond the page to slam the door of the space and time between us.
Who was this girl? Without a caption, I had no way to identify her. And, as obsessed with getting to the truth as I was, it didn’t encompass searching through almost a thousand students to find a match. She might not even have attended that school.
Could there have been an intimacy between them beyond these pages? Could they have met again years later? Could she be Jacob’s mother?
I knew only one person who might be able to answer at least one of those questions.
Colin.
I was separating my clothes into stacks of What Were You Thinking? and Possible Post-Baby and I’ll Eat Four Lettuce Leaves a Day Until I Can Wear That Again when Colin returned my call.
He asked what I was doing, and when I told him, he laughed. “Let me guess, the What Were You Thinking pile is winning. My girlfriend’s been on an organizing binge, and last weekend she emptied her entire closet on the bedroom floor. I couldn’t walk in the room without wading through puddles of clothes. She had a mountain of outfits she said she must have purchased because she felt sorry for the salesperson.”
“Does she hire out?” I was only partly joking.
“Even if she did, she wouldn’t have time. She’s helping me with catering. But I’m sure you didn’t call me to talk about clothes. Bryce told me you may be settling in Houston for a while. Did you need some help moving?”
I thanked him for offering, then went on to tell him the reason I called. I described the picture and asked Colin if he had any idea who Wyatt’s date was that night. “A part of me feels foolish asking you to remember something from so long ago. But the part of me that wants answers isn’t ready to give up.”
“I understand,” he said softly. “Her name was Chelsea Sullivan. She didn’t go to our school. She went to St. Mary’s Academy. Wyatt and Chelsea didn’t see each other after graduation. If you’re thinking she’s the person Wyatt was going to see, it’s not possible.”
“I’m learning things I thought impossible do happen. How can you be so sure?”
“Because two years after graduation, Chelsea walked into her house, and one of the three men who’d broken in shot and killed her,” he said.
“Oh, dear God.” I lowered myself to the floor and leaned against the wall between the hills of clothes. I remembered her smile in that picture when she and Wyatt were dancing and didn’t want to imagine what it must feel like as a parent to lose a chil
d. “That’s so awful.”
“Yes, it was devastating. They were eventually arrested and convicted. I think that brought her parents some peace.” He paused. “But even though they know that, they still don’t know why it happened. Maybe that’s a question you, or any of us who knew Wyatt, may never find the answer to.”
What people didn’t understand was that I went to sleep with never and woke up with it every morning.
I left early for my meeting with Cara to discuss my working from Houston and for an appointment with one of my clients who owned an emergency-care clinic.
Whatever doubts I had about my shift to Reputation Manager dissolved when I started checking my clients’ social media and reviews on sites like Yelp. After five minutes cruising through Dr. Wayne Yellowstone’s clinic, I called not only to schedule a time to meet him, but to ask him to suspend his posting to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other sites.
If he exchanged his white lab coat that may have, at one time, actually buttoned across his expansive stomach, for a red velvety suit and sat in a sleigh led by Rudolph, Dr. Yellowstone could convince anyone he was the real-deal Santa. When he smiled, his eyes almost disappeared into the crinkles that formed at their edge, and his silvery mustache offset his white teeth.
I dispensed with my title and explained I wanted to review his social media guidelines and offer a few suggestions for posts and reviews.
He drummed his stout fingers on his desk pad and looked at me from under his eyebrows as if I’d informed him I was there to perform a lobotomy. On him.
“Olivia . . . Is it okay if I call you Olivia?”
I nodded.
He continued. “We opened this clinic six months ago; of course, you probably already know that. What I know about all that social stuff could fit on a prescription pad, and I’d still have room to doodle. I’m too busy seeing patients to learn, so my granddaughter handles all that for me.”
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