“I asked her about it, and she said, ‘They weren’t that good. I’d rather have new stuff.’ ‘Have’ she said, as if the things she’d broken had no more connection to her than store-bought dishes.”
Robin listened, taking an occasional sip of her latte, her eyes wide, those lines crinkling her forehead as they always did when she concentrated.
“Julie got ambitious. Pretty soon she supervised other reps, was in charge of a multistate territory. In those days I flew for a regional carrier, but she urged me to apply to the big airlines. Reminding me how much more money I’d make, what cool places I’d see.
“After a couple of years, I suggested we start a family. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said. That would mean taking time off. What about her career? She didn’t like kids anyway.”
Her expression had been disdainful; she’d glanced around the living room of their lake-view condo, decorated in cream and taupe and glass, and said, “Kids are messy, loud and hell on a woman’s figure.” She’d smiled seductively at him and twined her arms around his neck. “I know you like my figure.”
“She insisted she’d never wanted children. Talked as if we’d discussed it before we got married and I’d known.”
Of Julie’s incarnations, that was the one he’d liked least. She had been witty, elegant, passionate in bed, but more interested in shopping and entertaining and rising the next step at work than she was in having fun or talking about anything that mattered. She had become…hard.
Craig fell silent while a pair of joggers passed, a man and a woman who might be in their fifties, their strides synchronized as if they always ran together.
“Six months later,” he continued, “I came home from a flight to Paris. She flung herself into my arms and screamed, ‘I’m pregnant!’”
“She was upset.”
“Hell, no. She was thrilled. Dancing around the living room.” He shook his head, still confused. He remembered standing there with his mouth hanging open watching this bright, cheerful woman celebrating the start of a family.
“Enter the Julie I knew.” Hands wrapped around her cup, Robin looked out at the river and the trees along the bank.
“Julie Number Three. It was the strangest damn thing. The airline wanted to move me out to Seattle, and she’d thrown a fit when I mentioned the possibility. Now she could hardly wait to go. Our yuppie condo was no place to raise children. We needed to buy a house in a small town.”
With a yard, she’d said dreamily, and a patio in back. Oh, and the schools would have to be good.
“‘Children?’ I said in a daze. ‘Plural?’ Well, of course we’d have to have more than one, Julie scolded me. No child should grow up an only.”
“So you moved.”
“We moved. Got rid of most of our furniture rather than bring it. She didn’t like it anymore.” Hell, he’d never liked it. “As she went into maternity clothes, the expensive suits disappeared. Maybe she shredded them. I don’t know. All of a sudden, she was Suburban Mom. Pretty but natural. That’s when we sold her sports car and bought a station wagon. ‘They have side air bags,’ she told me. ‘I want the very safest car we can have. For their sake.’” He shook his head. “Brett hadn’t even been born. Abby not imagined. It was…”
“Weird,” Robin concluded. “I can see that it would be.”
“When I told you that our moving from Chicago meant we’d left friends behind…” He hesitated. “She’d already ditched her friends. They were career women. She wasn’t. She did the same when she married me. Her artist friends didn’t interest her anymore. They didn’t fit.”
“That does happen to all of us as our lives change…”
“But slowly. We don’t wake up one morning and say, ‘I’m going to cut off everyone I’ve ever known.’ Some friends change with us, or stay close even if our lives diverge.”
Robin nodded, her ponytail bouncing. Craig noticed the way she held her arms close to her body and wrapped both hands around the coffee cup.
“Are you cold?” he asked.
“What? Oh. No.” She frowned. “Not…cold cold. Chilled, maybe. I think you’ve given me the creeps.”
He set down his own coffee on the picnic table beside him and braced his elbows on his knees. “Yeah, this Julie gave me the creeps, too. She was a nice woman, if over the top. Whatever she did, she had to be the best at. Motherhood was a competition, too. She had to be Mother of the Year.”
Robin actually did shiver. “Everyone thought of her that way.” She pushed out her lip in a meditative way. “What was her childhood like?”
“You know, I don’t really know.” Craig sighed. “It…took on different interpretations. Supposedly, her parents had been killed in a car accident. When I first knew her, her eyes would get misty as she talked about her mom sitting on the floor with her doing art projects. During Julie’s career phase, she didn’t want to be like her mother who was just a housewife. By the time we moved out here, her mother had gone back to being a model parent. The thing was, she didn’t actually talk about them much. Especially her father. Even when I first knew Julie, I wondered if she’d really had a father at home. Mentions of him were always an afterthought. An ‘Oops, I should put him in the picture.’”
“And she had no friends from her childhood, or college, or…?”
“Zilch.”
There had been times after Brett was born that Craig had looked at the woman in bed beside him and thought of the Stepford Wives. Could somebody really be possessed? Could it happen a couple of times? Who was the real Julie?
Come out, please.
“That’s the story.” Craig gave a smile that probably looked ghastly. “Pretty bizarre, isn’t it?”
Robin was thinking again, not listening to his summation. “She was trying to change again, wasn’t she? Is that what you’re suggesting?”
Hearing it put that way, he felt a chill walk over his skin like unseen fingers.
“Yes,” he said slowly. “But this time…she was stuck. Other times, nothing was stopping her. I was the only accessory that had to fit into each new scheme. But the kids, they weren’t adaptable. What was she going to do with them? And this is a small town. What if she suddenly abandoned the Mother of the Year thing, maybe went into business, became an absentee mother? In the past, when she’d shed her old friends and acquaintances, she hadn’t had to keep seeing them.” Somehow, he’d never defined it for himself this clearly. But now he understood her struggles, her cries that she was smothering. “First she felt uncomfortable.” He was quiet for a moment. “Then trapped.”
“So you think she just…left one day.”
He shook his head, still baffled. “I’d have sworn, despite everything, that she loved the kids. The look on her face sometimes…” Craig grimaced. “But, yeah. I can imagine her shedding this life, too. Most women wouldn’t leave their purse, but in her case…”
“It was Suburban Mom. And she wasn’t anymore.”
“Something like that.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “But I have trouble believing she’d never contact us again. So I’ve wondered if something didn’t go wrong. If she hadn’t found someone she was leaving with…”
“And he murdered her.”
“Yeah. I guess that seems the likeliest scenario to me.”
Now was when she should say politely, Well, that’s interesting. I’ll have to think about it. Because, God help him, the whole story sounded ridiculous. Far out. Like science fiction.
Robin knew Julie as warm and motherly. How could he expect her to buy his tale of multiple women in the same body?
In the beginning, he’d tried to explain her bizarre changes to the cops without sounding crazy himself. No, Officer, I didn’t kill my wife. She became someone else and left.
Uh-huh. Sure.
Sergeant Caldwell and his sidekick had just looked at him with contempt and he knew what was going through their heads: Does he think we’re stupid? Eventually, he’d given up.
Beside him,
Robin was quiet for a long time. Craig struggled not to fidget while he waited.
“Do you have any idea who she wanted to be next?”
The question was the last thing he’d expected her to say. It skipped right over the “Gee, that’s a really weird story but I can buy it” bit.
“Who?” he echoed.
“Yes. Who.” Robin pursed her lips at him as if he were being exceptionally dense. “Maybe the other times she was able to change almost overnight, because nothing was stopping her. But this time she had to keep on with one role while she was aching to assume another. She must have showed flickers of who she was becoming. So, who was she trying to be?”
He still gaped. “You don’t think my whole story is the equivalent of ‘this little alien was in my closet last night, see, and he ate my homework’?”
She shook her head. “No. I liked Julie, but… Hmm.” Her face was almost comical as she struggled for words. “You’ve put things that I noticed about her in context. Things that always bothered me a little, I guess.”
“Like?” He sounded hoarse, but doubted she’d notice. She was too involved in her own internal replaying of remembered scenes to guess how stunned he was.
Nobody had believed him in so long. Why her?
“I always felt like we should be better friends than we were. But she was either incapable of some kind of deeper relationship or she didn’t want it. I couldn’t decide which. Women share their histories. They talk about their mothers and their first boyfriends and dreams that didn’t come true along with comparing notes on new dishwashers and last year’s fourth-grade teacher. The dishwashers and teachers she’d talk about, but the other stuff… Julie just…evaded anything about her past. I realized one day that I knew absolutely nothing about her. Not really. So, while I liked her and we connected about our kids, that was it.”
“But she talked to you about me.”
“Oh.” Her cheeks turned a little pink. “Yes, those last few months. But…something about that bothered me, too. Isn’t that funny?” He sensed she was talking to herself now. “Then, I thought it was because nothing she said seemed to jibe with you. I mean, the you I saw at practices and games. She’d grumble about you never doing anything with the kids, and I’d look down at the field and there you were with Abby on your shoulders as you cheered Brett on. My husband—” Robin apparently thought better of what she’d nearly said, because she stopped so quickly she almost gulped. “Well, I sat there wondering if you were putting on an awfully good show, or whether she was crazy.” She made a face. “I didn’t actually mean crazy in the sense you’re talking about. Not then. I just thought…well. If she wanted to see a man neglect his kid, she should have met my ex.”
Beneath her flippancy, Craig heard pain. “Does he see Malcolm?”
“No. He did the every-other-weekend thing, more or less reliably, for the first year. Then, to prove to a woman he was seeing that he was Devoted Father—hear the capital letters?—he actually went back to court and claimed I was keeping him from seeing Malcolm as much as he wanted and that Mal should live with him. I was scared to death. What if some male-chauvinist judge thought a boy needed a father’s influence more than a mother’s?” She shuddered and hunched her shoulders. “It was the worst few months of my life. I’m sure Glenn enjoyed hurting me. When he lost, he shrugged and went on his way. He and the woman he was trying to impress parted ways. Now he calls once in a while. Mal doesn’t see him more than every few months.”
Craig’s eyes narrowed. “That’s what you were going through a year and a half ago, isn’t it? Why you let Brett drop off your radar, as I think you put it?”
Robin nodded, her eyes filled with regret. “I was so terrified, I let my world narrow to my own problems. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”
“No. You have no reason to be sorry. You’ve done a huge amount for us now. Even with the new pressure on us, Brett’s able to hold on to hope. You gave him that.”
“I don’t deserve that much credit,” she protested. “All I did was make a phone call.”
“You know better than that.” Somehow he’d set down his coffee and half turned to face her. Their knees bumped. “You—and your son—invited Brett into your home. You made him feel like any other friend.”
“But…he’s a nice boy. None of this had anything to do with him.”
“No.” His throat felt thick. “But I have everything to do with it, and you invited me into your house, too.”
“I…” Her eyes were huge pools of a thousand emotions. Her lips were soft, parted, as if…
He made a guttural sound and realized he was staring. He wanted to kiss her. God, he wanted to kiss her.
He swung back to face the river. “You’re a good woman, Robin McKinnon. Most people would say too good. Foolish. Credulous. But I…” He had to clear his throat, and even then heard the raw feel of it in every word. “I’m grateful. You treated Brett like any other kid and me like a human being.”
“Craig…” she whispered.
He couldn’t look at her. He’d do something he couldn’t take back. Something he had no right to do.
“Practice is going to be ending. We’d better get going.”
“Oh. Oh!” She jumped from the picnic table. Voice as artificially bright as the Superdome on game night, she said, “I’m so glad you were watching the time! Gracious, I try to be so careful never to be late.”
She chattered some more on the short drive back to the soccer fields, trying—he guessed—to restore some normalcy, to regain distance.
But he couldn’t let it go at that. When he’d pulled into the still-open slot next to her car and she reached for the door handle, he said, “Robin.”
She went still, then turned very slowly, as if reluctant to face him.
He couldn’t help himself. He reached out and touched her cheek. He meant to stop at that, but the satiny texture of her skin eroded his self-control. His fingers slid to her mouth. He felt a tiny vacuum as she drew a quick breath, then the quiver of her lips before he snatched his hand back.
“Thank you,” he said, voice husky.
Her teeth closed on her lower lip. She gave him a panicky look, nodded, and fled.
HOURS LATER, he remembered her question and realized he’d never answered it.
Julie must have showed flickers of who she was becoming. So who was she trying to be?
It was a question he’d never asked himself. With quickening excitement, he saw that this answer might give him others.
He lay in bed, moonlight building a silver ladder where slivers slipped through cracks in the blinds, and let himself fully remember a woman who had become a mystery to him, even before she disappeared and left his life in chaos.
CHAPTER NINE
ROBIN HAD FORGOTTEN the upcoming state-wide teacher in-service day until Malcolm reminded her that evening. There’d be no school on Thursday—except for the teachers.
“Oh, dang,” she said, pausing with her hands in dishwater. “I know you’d be okay by yourself, but…would you rather go to a friend’s house?”
Her son put away the pan he’d just dried. “I was thinking Brett could come over.”
“Sure. Or…” Okay, was she nuts here to actually be suggesting this? “Why don’t you go to his house? I could drop you off in the morning. If his dad isn’t home, his grandfather probably will be.”
“You think we’re going to play with matches or something if somebody isn’t supervising us?”
She laughed at his indignation. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to imply that you aren’t mature, responsible and completely adult. But you are only eleven years old. And Brett has had a few problems at school. He may not be quite as mature, responsible…”
“And completely adult as I am.” Mal rolled his eyes. “Okay, okay!”
“So why don’t you check with him?”
“Can I quit drying?” he asked hopefully.
“You may.”
“Cool!” He whipped the damp
dish towel around the handle on the fridge and had the phone off the cradle before she could blink. “Is Brett there?” he was asking as he left the kitchen.
Robin sighed. Why was “May I speak to…” an impossible phrase for kids to learn? Or, better yet, “Hi, Mr. Lofgren. This is Malcolm McKinnon. May I speak to Brett?” She knew her son wasn’t alone; his friends all said the exact same thing when they called. “Is Mal there?” Occasionally, just for fun, she said, “Yes,” and let the silence dangle. She loved to hear them fumble. “Um…well, uh…like, can I talk to him?”
Mal came back a minute later. “His dad says sure. He won’t be home, but Brett says his grandad will.”
They arranged for Malcolm to take his soccer gear and for her to pick him up after practice. With a chilly rain falling, she wouldn’t have watched anyway.
When she arrived, the boys were already trailing toward the parking lot. Soaked to the skin and muddy, they squelched across the wet grass, their shoes undoubtedly caked. They laughed and yelled insults back and forth, apparently delighted with the chance to play in mud sloughs.
Brett and Malcolm were the worst, she saw with a sigh. Of course. She flipped open the trunk, a signal Mal understood. He grabbed the old comforter from atop the spare tire, slammed the trunk and spread it on the seat before gingerly climbing in.
“I wish I could hose you off,” she told him. “Did you have fun?”
“It was great.” He grinned at her, looking about two years old. “Brett played goal. We dueled.”
“Which apparently involved going face first in the mud.”
Despite the groundskeepers’ best efforts, the grass always disappeared in front of each goal. By the time the rains began in October, the bare, worn ground was ready to become a mud puddle. No, not puddle—pond.
“Yeah!” her son said enthusiastically.
“Did you have a good time at his house?”
“Yeah. Wow! He has, like, ten thousand Nintendo and computer games. His bedroom is bigger than our living room. We set up goals and played soccer with a hackey sack.”
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