Any Minute: A Novel

by Deborah Bedford

“You should do that,” Pete said. “They should pick up Kate. The family ought to be together.”

  “Pavik,” Joe blurted as if he’d figured out the Jeopardy question just before time ran out. “Her name’s Pavik. That’s it.”

  “Let me have your cell phone again,” Gail said. “I’ll just scroll down to her name.”

  Joe couldn’t stop shuddering. He could hardly make his lips move. He fished in his pocket for his phone.

  A shrill signal echoed across the river. What looked like two buoys bobbing in the waves changed into two straggling divers. One waved, his arm raised high overhead.

  The other folded his fingers against his teeth and whistled again.

  Along the shore, men jumped into action. The crackle of two-way radios seemed to meld into one seamless strand of sound. “They’ve got something,” Joe heard the officer beside him say.

  Not until Joe rose did he hear the shriek of sirens again. He realized they’d never been turned off; the wail had simply drifted above him somewhere until it had become so common that it disappeared. Nothing moved in slow-mo anymore. Divers were donning air tanks and racing into the water everywhere.

  The crane lurched forward, its pulleys swaying. An EMT notified ER they might have located a victim, they might be coming in, to be on standby. Patrol boats revved from trolling speed to full throttle. From crackling radios, snippets drifted into earshot.

  …settled on its…

  …no apparent way to…

  …dislodged at impact…

  Joe staggered toward the closest medic and gripped his arm. “They’ve found the car, haven’t they? That’s what they’ve got. The car. And she’ll be in it.”

  A vise-grip claimed his shoulder. The hand belonged to Pete. “Come on, Joe. Stick with me. Let them do their job.”

  “That’s my wife down there. You’ve got to help her.” But Joe only said it by rote. He said it because he’d been repeating those words like a broken record for three quarters of an hour.

  “We’re doing everything we can, sir.”

  Gail anchored her arm around Joe for support, and he let his friends propel him aside. These two had become his lifeline. “Thank you. I don’t know what I’d do without you being here. I wouldn’t have anyone.” And it was true. He would have been alone. His own parents would take hours to get here from Wisconsin. At least he had Harold and Jane to be with the kids.

  “You want to know one of the last things I said to her?” Joe said. “I kept complaining to her about her job. I kept finding things she was doing wrong, especially with the kids. I kept telling her and telling her. She was furious with me. She said I didn’t see how hard she was trying.”

  The question hung in the air between them. Maybe Pete took a second too long to say, “Joe. You can’t think this is your fault.”

  “If I hadn’t upset her, she might have been driving more carefully. It is my fault!”

  “No.” Pete stood his ground. “This is absolutely not your fault. When it’s all over you’ll sort it out—” Pete stopped abruptly. He’d been about to say “together. You’ll sort it out together.”

  The crane began its task. The gigantic hook ranged out over the water. It reflected in the river, two steel Js, one upside down and one right side up, as Joe’s throat tightened with dread. “They’re just raising the car. Why are they doing that? Why aren’t they bringing her up first?”

  The man with the Patterson badge, the one introduced as chaplain, started toward Joe. Another officer fell in beside him, their steps synchronized, their movements choreographed with purpose.

  Run, Joe told himself. If you aren’t here for them to tell you, then it can’t be real.

  But his feet stayed glued to the spot. “You know what’s going to happen, don’t you?” He gripped Pete’s shirtfront. “I’ve lost her.” I lost her a long time ago, he thought, only he wouldn’t say that.

  Something between them had always been missing; he’d tried for years to put his finger on it. Even after they dated, even after they fell in love, he realized there was always something about her that she kept aloof from him.

  But was that all it was? Really? It almost seemed she’d been looking for ways to hide her true self from him. To put up barriers between them. Walls to hide behind. She behaved as if she had a dark secret, something she didn’t want anyone to know about the real her. Even him. Especially him.

  And now there’d never be any chance to make it right. Maybe there never had been. “It’s taking too long, Pete. You know what they’ve found.”

  Not until the officers approached, not until they began to speak and shake their heads in somber confusion, did Joe realize he’d been mistaken. There was the chaplain, of course, and the badge said the other man’s name was Hamm. Together, each of them starting where the other left off, they went to great lengths to describe the position of the vehicle. Located forty-three feet below the surface. Front end demolished from colliding with the water. Vehicle resting on its right side. Nothing unusual there.

  Patterson crossed himself.

  Hamm probed the crevice between his gums and one of his tricuspids with a frayed toothpick. “I’m afraid they found a car but not a body.”

  All Joe would remember later was the round slowness of the guy’s mouth as he pocketed the worn toothpick and tried to explain.

  But there wasn’t any explanation for it. Although the front end had been mangled, none of the windows had been broken out. They’d found the driver’s seat belt fastened.

  But the SUV had come up empty.

  Sarah Harper wasn’t there.

  Chapter Seventeen

  We’re no longer visiting the past,” Wingtip warned them as they entered the tiny apartment. “This time, we are visiting the present.”

  Sarah recognized the place the moment she, Annie, and Wing-tip entered. When she and Joe had first gone to inspect this place, they’d found it adequate, although not much larger than a sardine can. “Do you think she has room to turn around in here?” Joe had whispered.

  “She’s slender,” Sarah had quipped. “Let’s make sure she doesn’t gain weight. Otherwise there won’t be room for the baby.”

  The visit had been a planned inspection arranged by the nanny service at Sarah’s request. And although the two-room box appeared undersized, they’d been impressed by the condition of the quarters. The linoleum floor was so clean you could almost skate on it. Although the faucet and the tub looked to be more than fifty years old, the pink tile, the grout, and the chrome looked brand-new. It must have taken hours to clean with a toothbrush.

  Sarah remembered Joe shrugging. “Never mind the size of the place. I’m impressed.”

  “I don’t know,” Sarah had said. “If she wants to do this as a profession, her surroundings ought to be more important to her. She ought to spend enough to have some sort of play yard.” Even though Kate couldn’t roll over in her crib yet.

  “But isn’t she spending most of her time with Kate at our house? And this is right by the park. Plenty of good places here for strollering.”

  “I want this woman to be willing to bring Kate back and forth. You know I have plenty of days when I bring work home. I can’t have a nanny and a baby distracting me.”

  “Maybe this is all she can afford.”

  “I doubt it. She’s single and hardworking. If you ask me, I think she’s a miser.”

  “Oh?” Joe’s eyebrows rose.

  “And these surroundings are important because Kate will be spending a lot of time here.” Not until Sarah read her ominous prediction reflected in her husband’s disapproving eyes did she realize the significance of what she’d said.

  If anything appeared out of keeping in this minuscule set of rooms today, it was Annie standing smack-dab in the middle of them wearing her polka-dotted dress and platform peep-toe pumps, with her hair pinned forward in I Love Lucy style. Annie’s shoes resembled those in the fall display of cute new styles Sarah had noticed the last time she’d dar
ted past Macy’s windows.

  When Annie poked her head into the bathroom, she gasped in awe. “Oh, I just love this pink! I’ve always thought pink tile would be the perfect thing for a bathroom counter and a dressing table. I would have installed it in the house right after Jane moved away, but Gordy and I never had money to remodel.”

  “Grandmother!” Sarah said in great earnestness. “That pink tile is so bad that it never came back. No one has tried to resurrect that stuff since the 1950s.”

  The only things out of place in the spick-and-span little kitchen were a high chair, a Tommee Tippee cup, a bowl of baby cereal, and an infant-sized spoon.

  Sarah did the same thing she did at home when she felt out of place and uneasy. She stoppered the sink, squirted soap in a pattern vaguely resembling a scribble, and began to rinse off the mess.

  “You can’t do that.” Wingtip lifted his chin, and their glances caught. “She’s here.”

  “Mrs. Pavik’s here?” Sarah set the cereal bowl upside down in the dish drainer. One glistening bubble slid down its side and popped. “But she shouldn’t be. It’s the middle of the day, and she—”

  “Not any day,” he reminded her. “It’s the middle of today.”

  Sarah froze. The day I’m gone.

  Wingtip made a wide berth around her as if he thought she might slosh suds on him in retaliation. “Guess it wouldn’t do her much good to walk in here and think there’s an angel doing her dishes.”

  “Truth is, Sarah, she’s so upset right now, she’d think she’d done them herself. She wouldn’t even remember.”

  “She’s upset?” Sarah asked. “She’s upset?” Her arms had gone stiff in the sink. This was different from visiting her past and reliving her mother’s blame laid at her feet. It was different from seeing Annie skinning apples over her curvaceous stove or remembering how impossible it had been, trying to tug open that old car door when she was in first grade.

  Hadn’t she been a great sport up until now with all this traveling? Wingtip couldn’t expect so much from her! This journey started out differently because today was… well, it was today. This was the morning she untangled herself from the blankets with Kate whimpering in the other room like an abandoned kitten and an empty, lonesome cavern on the other side of the bed where her husband should have been. This was the morning she finally understood that the man who had once loved her wanted more from her than she could ever give.

  The thought flashed hot through her before it sprang beyond her grasp, that flicker of astonishment you get when you touch the truth: life will go on just like this; everybody will do everything just the same way; nothing will stop; everyone else will be too busy to remember this day for very long. The world will belong to everyone else, you realize, and you won’t exist there anymore.

  “You can’t expect me to do this,” she argued, feeling like she was trying to outrun some old, nagging fear. “I can’t go around looking at my life now that I’m no longer in it.”

  “You can’t afford not to, Sarah.”

  Sarah hadn’t known Wingtip all that long. Still, she had never heard him speak with such gravity. Misgiving beat inside her chest like a moth captured under glass. “Wingtip, why are you doing this, really? I’ve read the story before. Is this like you’re the angel of my past and present? I suppose you’re going to make me look at my future too.” Sarah knew this much: looking at the past and the future could never be as bad as looking at her life the moment she stepped out of it.

  “There are plenty of things I could show you, Sarah. I could show you the schnauzer still waiting for you to come home.”

  And she pictured the dog, waiting where he wasn’t supposed to be, curled up for a nap in a nest of her lingerie.

  “I could show you the times Joe’s called your house just to hear the answering machine, to listen to your voice again.”

  And she pictured that too as her stomach clenched with sorrow, seeing how grief dulled his eyes like rain dulled the fog-bound sky.

  “But I happen to think what I’m going to show you here today is far more important.”

  “What? What could be more important than how much everybody misses me?”

  “I want you to figure it out.” He stepped aside. “All your life, you’ve wanted to be happy. Maybe this is the day you will finally learn how.”

  Behind him postcards plastered the refrigerator almost to the floor. Had the pictures been there when she and Joe inspected Mrs. Pavik’s little home? For if they had, how could Sarah have missed them? How could she have combed over the premises in search of incriminating stains or insects or mold or mouse droppings and never noticed this display?

  The pictures must have all been of the same eastern European village; it had to be somewhere in Poland. Some showed a street zigzagging up a hill, its cobbles bleached white by the sun, a domed cathedral, a house with a thatched roof, a close-up of a goat drinking Coca-Cola from a sea-green bottle. There were market scenes and an aerial shot of a lake and a beautiful picture of a girl with ribbons braided through her hair. But the cards that caught Sarah’s attention were the ones that hung the other way around, the ones with messages showing.

  Sarah couldn’t translate any of them from Polish, but she could tell they’d been written in a child’s painstaking hand. Each had been signed with the same name. Elena.

  Sarah scrolled down with her finger. “The same person wrote all of these. Every single one.” By the time she reached the bottom of the fridge, several notes proudly included some cryptic, primitive English.

  HI MOMI, ELENA.

  I LOVE YOU, ELENA.

  WILL YOU COME GET MI? ELENA.

  Sarah thought, Mrs. Pavik has a small daughter? How old is she? She must have lived a hard life. Sarah had always thought she was an older woman. Spotty ink on the foreign stamps made the postmark dates indecipherable. Sarah thought the numbered day came first, the month second, in European style.

  Baby Kate’s belongings, the extra car seat, one of an enormous tribe of stuffed bears, the foldable stroller—the very best money could buy, everything the Harpers had stockpiled to equip their infant daughter, waited in a row by the front door, each with its “How’s my nanny doing? www.nannyrating.com” sticker affixed.

  “You remind me of the KGB with your computer,” Mrs. Pavik had huffed the last time Sarah spoke to her about the Web site.

  Someone had sent an e-mail post about how the nanny tied Kate’s shoelaces too tight. Only one problem, Sarah realized later, after she’d complained to Mrs. Pavik about it. The nanny-rating post had been submitted on an afternoon when Sarah herself had tied Kate’s sneakers at the play yard. And still, she’d felt too awkward to apologize.

  “I will let Kate climb backward up the slide. I will let Kate swim in Buckingham Fountain. Someone will send you a message about that. You want to bug my phones too?” Mrs. Pavik asked in her histrionic manner. “This is not what I have always been told about America.”

  And suddenly Sarah understood. Sarah would always remind Mrs. Pavik of the wall between herself and her young daughter, half a world away. If Mrs. Pavik ever dared let Sarah see past her melodramatic behavior, she risked revealing that she too had made a desperate, painful choice.

  Mrs. Pavik sat in the other room now, jamming the phone against her ear, her face crimson with determination. When Elena’s voice sounded, her fingers relaxed on the receiver, her eyes flooded with light.

  “Mrs. Pavik is having a hard time today,” Wingtip translated. “She’s just been called about what happened to you at the bridge. You know how sad things like this can magnify the distance that already exists between two people.”

  Somewhere across the world, Mrs. Pavik’s daughter yearned for her mother to send for her. Money had to be made for Elena to go to school and have what she needed, but most important, money had to be made for Elena’s medical expenses. Good, solid American dollars, not zlotys. Elena had been born with a heart condition that required expensive medicine and regula
r doctor visits. And what Mrs. Pavik longed to do most for her own child, she took pay to do for Kate instead. It broke her heart, but if she wanted Elena to live she had to have the money for her care.

  The Father had shown Sarah she’d never been responsible for her mother’s unhappiness, but she had always taken the blame for it. Now he was showing her that she’d been so focused on redeeming herself that she’d missed really looking at others—she’d missed a great deal about the people in her life.

  “I wanted to know if she had experience handling babies,” Sarah said. “She gave me references, other nanny positions here in Chicago. I spoke with one family in Lincoln Park. No one ever told me anything about this. Someone should have found out about it and tried to help her.”

  Annie said, “It’s more blessed to give than to receive, but very few people get around to doing it.”

  Wingtip said, “Everyone else has been busy just like you have, Sarah. No one’s ever bothered to ask Mrs. Pavik anything about her life.”

  Before today Sarah had been in Tom Roscoe’s office only when he invited her. She’d entered only when Rona glanced up from her computer screen, gestured, and said, “He’s expecting you.” To end up in Tom’s office this way, when only she and Annie and Wingtip could see him, and he couldn’t see them, made Sarah’s heart pound with fear.

  “Do we have to do this?” she whispered. “This isn’t my place.”

  “All of it is your place,” Wingtip said. “It was your life.”

  Tom sat in his office chair, swiveled away from his desk. He sat staring at the droplets rolling down the pane, at the vapor smudging the windows. No matter how hard he looked, he couldn’t see the street below. “Rona!” he said into the intercom. “Rona!” Still no answer. “Where is she? Rona? Where is everybody? All I want is the midday futures prices.”

  He rocked forward in the chair and stood. “The world still goes on. The trading floor is still open.” He stared at the pelting rain, as if it might give him some answer. He stood for a long time, peering down, his expression granite hard. “All we’ve lost is one employee, not the whole company.”