by Amy Gentry
“Why do you say that?”
“She’ll want to start working on her memoirs.”
Tom laughs, still a little uneasy, as we get into the SUV. We make our way to I-10, the churning of the air conditioner at full blast filling the silence. It’s a little past six, and the rush from downtown has mostly cleared, but when we hit Loop 610, the backup begins. The lowering sun, undaunted by our visors, beats down through the windshield, and the tinting in the back windows only seems to trap the heat. As we slow almost to a standstill somewhere around the Voss exit, the air conditioner, losing velocity from the incoming wind, thumps down a notch in intensity and gives a faint rattle. I wonder if this is going to be the summer the A/C gives out on us. This is the stretch of road where that type of thing always happens.
Suddenly, I say, “Pull the car over.”
“We’re getting off at the next exit.”
“Pull over now!”
He puts on his blinker. Traffic is sluggish, but he cuts across three lanes, nosing over and waving his hand like a flag in front of the rearview mirror. As soon as the tires thunk onto the shoulder, I open the door and Tom slams on the brakes as I stumble out. My stomach heaves up into my mouth and out onto the pavement.
There’s not a lot in there, I’ve barely been eating, but I heave and heave. My vision goes red in the heat, and then black, and then Tom is there, on his knees behind me, with his big arms around me, supporting me. Waves of heat that reek of gasoline and vomit are coming up off the pavement, each one bringing a fresh wave of spasms with it, but his hands on me are warmer still. After a moment, I sink back into him like an armchair, and he settles down under my weight, and we sit together on the gravel at the side of the freeway.
“She left us, Tom,” I say, but my voice disappears in the roadside symphony of honking horns and Doppler effects. He continues to smooth my hair back over my sweating temple, but now, despite the heat, I am shivering, cold and hot at the same time. I pull away from him, turn toward his face. I say it louder, but he shakes his head, still not hearing. Finally, I lean toward him and force my mouth to open wide and I yell at the top of my lungs, “Julie left!”
This time he understands, but shakes his head back and forth in response. “Come on!” he shouts, and starts to make his way to standing, holding out one hand to me and gesturing toward the car with the other.
But yelling has freed something in me that was pressed into the dingy little cage of a jail cell for the past week. Julie’s deposition is still banging around inside me, and if I don’t let it out, it will punch holes in my lungs, and I’ll drown. “Tom!” I yell. “She left!”
“I know!” he shouts back.
“How can you be so calm?” I demand.
“Come on, Anna, get in the car!”
But it’s easier to scream out here, and this is something I want to scream. “What kind of mother am I, Tom? I didn’t know her at all!”
“What do you want me to do about it?” he yells back. “I didn’t either!”
“But I’m the mother!”
“Yes, you’re the mother!” he yells. “You’re the mother, and she needs you right now. So let’s get in the car, for God’s sake, and go home and yell it at her!”
The adrenaline drains out of me, and I follow him to the Range Rover and get in, feeling the car shudder as the traffic going past starts to pick up. The quiet when we shut the doors feels profound.
“You read the deposition?” I say in a voice that is only slightly hoarse.
“I didn’t need to read it. I was there to hear most of it.”
“How could I have been so blind? How could I have missed all that? It’s like I didn’t know her at all.” I can’t let the tears prickle up one more time today, so I press them down. “I know I’ve been broken since it happened. I know I’ve been awful with Jane. But I thought—before that, I mean—I thought everything was good. I thought I was a good mother.”
There’s a long silence. Then he says, “I think it would have been good enough, Anna. But we’ll never know now. None of us know who we would have been. He took that away from us.”
Tom starts the engine, puts on his blinker, and forces the car out into the Houston traffic. He’s a wonderfully aggressive driver.
When we’re moving again, he says, “Can I confess something?” I wait. “I wish it had been me who shot Maxwell.”
I picture Tom the night Julie had her miscarriage, standing with the gun in his hand as I punched my fist through the bathroom door to get to my daughter. Then I lean over and take his hand.
There’s a car parked outside our house, and when we walk in the door, Julie is sitting at the kitchen table with an African American man in a T-shirt and jeans. As soon as we walk in the door, he stands up.
“Mom, Dad, this is Cal,” Julie says.
“Mr. Whitaker.” Cal extends a hand to Tom, who takes it, though he looks a bit bewildered. Cal is almost a head shorter than Tom, but he doesn’t seem as if he’s craning his neck up to meet Tom’s gaze. “Glad to meet you,” says Tom, and I can see Cal scoping me out from the corner of his eye before turning to me.
“Dr. Davalos,” he says. Julie must have schooled him in how to address me.
“I understand you helped Julie out of a tough situation,” I say to Cal.
“You did too,” he says, simply and warmly.
I wonder, Is this the rest of my life? Are all of Julie’s men going to have to live up to me? And do any of them know she was poised with her gun, ready to kill? Do they know what I really saved her from?
People have a lack of imagination about women like Julie and what they’re capable of. I was guilty of it myself once. I know better now, of course. But I would never disabuse the men in her life, the Toms and Cals, of the notion that Julie needs protecting. Fostering that illusion is part of how she’s survived this long. To take away that coping mechanism before it has outlived its usefulness would be cruel.
Cal looks to be older than her, though it’s hard to tell how much since his skin is unwrinkled everywhere but around his eyes when he smiles. I wonder if he will be with her on the day she outgrows the useful illusion of her frailty and how he will react if he’s still around. It might be a long time before that happens, a lifetime, even. I may not live to see it myself.
Meanwhile, it’ll be our secret.
“It’s very nice to meet you, Cal. Now, would you and Tom mind if I talked to Julie for a few minutes?” I ask. “Alone.”
Tom says, “I was just going to run up to the grocery store and get some stuff for dinner. Why don’t you come along, Cal. We can get to know each other.”
“Sure,” Cal says after a backward glance at Julie, who nods. The two men walk out of the kitchen.
When they have been gone for a full thirty seconds, I look at my daughter. I don’t know what I’m expecting. A revelation? To find out what color her eyes are, once and for all? I see the same woman I’ve been looking at for the past month, as much of a mystery to me as ever.
“Why didn’t you come back?” I ask. “After you escaped from Maxwell. Why didn’t you come home?”
There’s a long pause. “I wanted to. I was going to. But it seemed like once he—did that to me, nothing went the way it was supposed to. Things kept happening.”
I know some of the things she is talking about, and I don’t want her to have to repeat them. At the same time, I don’t want to shut her down, ever again. So I wait patiently, and after a moment, she goes on, giving me a strange look that I can’t really interpret. “Besides, I didn’t know whether you’d want me back.”
I choke on my next words. “How can you say that?”
“I thought you’d be mad,” she says with a weird smile. “I hated Julie. She was stupid and gullible. And she left you.”
“You were only a child. He took you.”
“He took me,” she agrees. “But to me, it felt like I was leaving on my own.”
“That’s what he wanted you to think.”
“And there was Charlotte. She was dead, and I was scared it was my fault.”
“He wanted you to think that too.”
“Well, he was good at it. Or I was good at believing it.” She shrugs, giving up. “Anyway, I’m not sure it makes me feel any better if I didn’t have a choice. If that’s true, if I was just a random victim, then my life was ruined for no reason at all.”
That, of course, is what I have always believed. I don’t say it, but she can see me thinking it.
“You’ve never believed in God. I don’t think Jane does either. Maybe Dad doesn’t care either way. But it was different for me; I wanted to find something out there. I still do, I just don’t know the word for it.”
“Transcendence?” I say. “There’s no such thing.”
“But maybe there is,” she says. “I don’t know. Think of all those people at the Gate.”
“I’d rather not.”
“But you have to,” she says. “You have to. What are they looking for? Why are they so happy there? Where else could they find that kind of happiness?”
“Poetry,” I say. “Music. Art.”
“That’s not enough for everyone. It wasn’t enough for me.”
Her face looks sad and eager at the same time, and I suddenly recognize a glimmer of an expression I remember from her childhood. I never knew what it was before. It reminds me of something.
“‘Not in entire forgetfulness, / And not in utter nakedness, / But trailing clouds of glory do we come.’” I almost stop there, but for Julie’s sake, I finish: “‘From God, who is our home.’ Wordsworth.”
“Why do you have to put quotation marks around it to understand it?”
“All I have is other people’s words, Julie.”
They are, at present, failing me. After another long moment of silence, it occurs to me to that I have nothing to lose by just asking. “You came back for Maxwell, because you saw that magazine profile, okay. But you didn’t have to come back as Julie. If you were worried about being blamed for what happened with Charlotte, why didn’t you just leave an anonymous tip for the police and let them take care of it? Why did you come back to us after so long when you knew you would have to lie?” I take a deep breath. “Was it the money? It’s okay if it was.”
She looks up, startled, with china-blue eyes. “I missed you,” she says.
The worst doesn’t unhappen, but just like that, I am home.
Acknowledgments
The love and support of friends and family made this book possible. I’d like to extend special thanks to the members of my extraordinarily talented and committed writing group, Alissa Zachary, Linden Kueck, Victoria Rossi, Dan Solomon, and Paul Stinson; to Martin Kohout and his late wife, Heather Kohout, for the time I spent working on this novel at Madroño Ranch in Medina, Texas; to my agent, Sharon Pelletier at Dystel & Goderich Literary Management, for her infectious enthusiasm for this project; to Lauren Abramo at DGLM for tirelessly representing me overseas; and to Tim Mudie, my editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, for guiding me patiently and insightfully through the exciting process of turning my words into a book. We did it! Biggest and best thanks are reserved for my husband, Curtis Luciani, for encouraging me to write a novel in the first place, believing in me when I didn’t think I could do it, and always making sure I had coffee in the morning and a room of my own.
Chapter One
Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.
I’m not a morning person. Understatement.
My hand couldn’t seem to muster the energy to turn off the alarm. It picked at the covers. The blanket felt wrong. Scratchy. Thin.
This isn’t my bed.
The realization made me uneasy. I must have crashed somewhere else. I hoped I’d remembered to call my mom. I felt a ripple of worry. If not, I was going to be in deep shit for not coming home. She was already mad about . . .
My brain was blank. I couldn’t remember why she was ticked at me. I remembered fighting about it. I’d slammed my door, and Mom threatened if I did that again, she’d take it off the hinges, but the reason why we’d argued was gone.
It felt like the reason was right on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t pin it down. Every time I tried to concentrate, it slipped away.
Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.
Most annoying alarm ever. It sounded only half awake, a slow, quiet beeping, just loud enough to make it impossible to ignore. All I wanted was to go back to sleep.
I was exhausted. Even my skin was tired, like I was stretched too thin.
I swallowed and winced at how dry my throat was. I don’t remember partying last night. What the hell did I drink? My stomach did a barrel roll. I made myself concentrate on not throwing up. Simone must have talked me into doing shots. She was the captain of bad decisions. I told myself I wasn’t scared, but it was weird that I couldn’t remember. What if someone had slipped me something? My mom had sent me an article on roofies, and I’d rolled my eyes, thinking she worried about stuff that was never going to happen, but now it didn’t seem so stupid.
Don’t freak out. You’re fine. Just figure out where you are.
I forced my eyes open. They felt gritty, like I’d rolled them in sand before popping them into my skull. It was too bright in the room. It was hard to make anything out clearly. There was a window with the blinds up and bright sunshine blasting in. Like it was afternoon instead of early morning.
Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.
I turned my head to see the alarm, but as soon as I moved, there was a shot of pain, sharp, like a dental drill, driving into my brain. I moaned and my vision blurred.
I blinked and realized it wasn’t a clock. It was some kind of machine. Plastic tubing connected it to me, pooling over the rail of the bed, leading to a needle that was stuck to the back of my hand with clear medical tape that made my skin look wrinkled and old.
I was in a hospital.
My heart skipped a few beats. Something bad had happened. Hospital bad.
“Are you going to stay with us this time?”
I turned very slowly, trying to avoid a repeat of the pain in my head. A woman leaned over. She was wearing bright yellow scrubs. A stethoscope draped around her neck. It looked almost like a . . . The word skipped out of my head. Gone. I tried to focus, it was like a . . . serpent. That wasn’t the right word, but I couldn’t think of it. Thinking about it was making my headache worse. I opened my mouth to ask her what the right word was, but nothing came out. My heart raced and I clenched my hands into fists over and over.
“Just relax,” she said. She pressed the back of her cool hand to my forehead. “You’re okay.”
I could tell that nothing about this situation was okay, but I didn’t want to be difficult. She seemed really nice. You could tell by her eyes. That’s one of my abilities. To judge someone’s character by their eyes. The window to the soul, as Big Bill Shakespeare would say. I wrote an essay on that quote last year and won a writing contest from the school district. It had only a fifty-buck award, along with a certificate “suitable for framing.” I acted like it was no big deal, but I was actually really proud.
“ . . . you are?”
I blinked. I’d missed what she said. She was going to think I was rude. She stared at me, waiting for an answer. I swallowed again. I would have sold my soul for one of those cold, sweaty bottles of Dasani from the vending machine by the gym.
“Okay, let’s try something else. Do you know your name?” she asked.
Was she kidding? Did I know my name. Didn’t she know who she was talking to? National Merit Scholar. Perfect score in Ms. Harmer’s chemistry class, first time in school history. State debate champion and an almost certain shoo-in for our class valedictorian, as long as Eugene Choo didn’t pull ahead. Not that I’m rooting for the guy to fail, but if he got an occasional 89 instead of 100 on a paper, I wouldn’t weep a thousand tears.
Know my own name? This one I got.
“Jill,” I croaked. My voice sounded like I smoked
a few packs a day and gargled with gravel.
She smiled widely and I felt the absurd rush of pride I always experienced when I got a question right. I really had to work on my need to be such a pleaser. You’d think I wouldn’t always demand validation. Simone’s always on me for that.
Simone was going to freak when she heard I was in the hospital. She’d bring me new PJs from Pink so I wouldn’t have to wear this disgusting hospital gown that probably was last worn by some incontinent old man. Or someone who died in it.
Gross.
Simone would also bring a stack of her favorite trashy magazines. She’d make me move over so she could sit on the edge of the bed, and we’d take a photo she could put online. Things would be better when she got here. Simone had that effect on people. She’d make this an adventure. My throat seized, and I was suddenly sure I was about to start crying. I wanted her there so badly my chest ached.
“I’m going to get the doctor,” the nurse said. “A lot of people are going to be glad to see you back with us.”
I started to nod, but the pain came again when I moved my head, so I stopped. I closed my eyes when she left the room. It was good to be back.
I just wished I knew where I’d been.
“Knock-knock.”
There was a sharp prick of pain in my foot. My eyes snapped open. A guy in a white lab coat stood at the end of my bed. Before I could say anything, he jabbed the arch of my foot with a large pin.
WTF?
“Do you feel that?” He reached for my foot, and I pulled it away. Back off, Dr. Mengele.
He smiled and laughed. He was a happy sadist. “Looks like you felt it. Do you remember meeting me?” He moved closer so he was standing at the side of the bed. His hair was curly and stuck up like dandelion fluff. He looked a bit like a clown, or somebody’s goofy uncle Dwight, who could be counted on to make lame jokes and wear one of those holiday sweaters with a reindeer on the front to Christmas dinner in a nonironic kind of way.