Michael would sure as hell be a good dad. But I didn’t want to present him with a “maybe.” He was an only child, a planner. I knew he’d been thinking about what his parents getting older would mean for us, weighing the pros and cons of moving (a bigger paycheck, a clean slate for me) against the distance it put between us and them.
And it was a Saturday. He wasn’t the kind of guy who slept in, but it was still super early. If I was careful, if I didn’t wake him, I could duck out, get a test, and be back before he woke up.
* * *
Later Michael meticulously dissected one of the tiny cameras we’d found the day before, while Brady came back and swept the house with an RF detector. I followed him through every room, watching him run it along the edge of the ceiling and sweep every inch of the wall. The thing beeped and vibrated but didn’t find any other cameras.
“Does that mean there aren’t any?” I felt like my body was humming with its secret, even though I hadn’t taken the test yet. The directions said to do it first thing in the morning, and this was a test I didn’t want to fail. Even though I was saving it for Sunday morning, the world around me was opening, blossoming like a flower. These cameras were relics of the past. I should be afraid, I was sure I should be, but I wasn’t. They were like Aimee, like the thousand prying eyes of strangers on the internet. They couldn’t touch me.
“None that are transmitting.” Brady lowered the device and met my eyes. “Seriously, the batteries in those things were dead, and little guys like that don’t transmit far anyway. My money’s on the old guy.”
“Lena said he was a pervert?” I was playing the part of a normal person, asking for reassurance, and Brady seemed just as eager to give it as Lena had been yesterday.
“Could be. Or maybe he was just paranoid. Put these in to monitor his own house. I’ve seen stranger things. You wouldn’t believe what kind of electronics and lights and stuff people want rigged up in their homes.” He winked.
That would explain why we hadn’t found any cameras in the master bedroom. Instead of imagining the former owner of our house helplessly bleeding out on the bedroom floor, now I pictured him sitting there hunched over a monitor, watching every room in his own house from a central command station.
In the afternoon, I called our home security service, and over the phone they walked me through testing the system. When I armed it to “away” and waved my hand through the invisible beam against the back wall, the alarm sounded, a comforting wail.
So that red light on the wall wasn’t an eye to spy on us but a watchdog to keep us safe.
Sunday morning I woke up early again from a dream about a paper baby, all sharp folds and creases, made from fliers from the museum where I had worked but so delicate I couldn’t pick her up without crushing her.
Slipping from the bed, I tiptoed into the bathroom. With trembling hands, I opened the box and followed the directions, counting out the minutes second by second, until the symbol bloomed in the wand’s plastic window. Pregnant.
“Michael?” My voice wavered. I was on the edge of the precipice, the last moment before, when everything else would be after. And Elizabeth was still on my mind, her fear the proof that even a yes could become a no, that I might be on the brink of nine months of maybe. Maybe baby. Keeping this secret, holding it in, might be a way of protecting Michael from the uncertainty.
But I always told him everything.
“Michael?” Louder now, and I leaned out of the bathroom so I could see the bundle of covers under which he huddled. And suddenly I couldn’t wait, I wanted this bright future, and I ran to the bed to wake him with kisses.
* * *
That afternoon, instead of going to Sandy’s memorial service, Michael and I went over to Lena and Brady’s. I’d donated for a floral arrangement, but now death seemed far away, overcome by the joy of impending new life. This time we brought the food, a bag of tacos from our new favorite place. My nausea had risen in the morning, but unlike every other stomach upset I’d ever had, it subsided when I thought of food. Before Lena even brought out the margaritas, I’d already eaten two tacos, and I held up a hand. “Not for me, thanks. Just started a new medication.”
“Plain water, then, or fizzy?” Her tone was light, like this was no big deal, but her gaze had sharpened. Despite how laid-back Lena seemed, not much got past her.
And even to my eyes, Michael was vibrating with excitement. He and Brady had taken down enough slats from our fence to fit the tiered garden and had jerry-rigged sprinklers from each yard to cover it. Brady said something, and Michael laughed, shaking his head.
The corners of my own mouth curled up, and the glass of sparkling water Lena handed me caught the light as the bubbles rose.
Lena sank into the chair next to me and clinked her glass against mine. “Here’s to us.”
“And the boys.” My eyes were still on Michael, bending to tamp down the earth around a plant on the top tier. There was something so competent yet tender about him.
“Sure.” Lena raised her glass in their direction, and Brady looked up and waved back. “Here’s to the guys.”
Then she cut her eyes at me. “But we run this world. Here’s to them and cheers to us. All of us.”
She knew.
* * *
Pregnancy anchored me in my body, making everything beyond its borders—the past, the thoughts of others, my future plans—hazy and unimportant. In my second trimester, I felt powerful, supercharged with energy.
Lena and I continued our daily walks, and I made an effort to check in with Elizabeth. As zen as I felt with the new hormones surging through me, I could still see the fear beneath Elizabeth’s stretched-thin calm. I called and messaged her on the slightest pretext—about the Bluebonnet fund raiser, about a story I’d seen on the news, even for directions to a store she’d mentioned. Lena might have said, “Your GPS not working?” But Elizabeth always responded warmly, and usually followed up, and soon I didn’t even think before reaching out.
The evening of the Bluebonnet fund raiser for childhood literacy went off without a hitch with a predictable but fun “favorite literary character” theme. Michael had deferred to me on our costume, so I was dressed all in purple with a name tag that said Crayon, and he wore a pale-blue pajama top with the name tag Harold. Princesses, Austen characters, Sherlock detectives, and animals ranging from bears to mice to dragons laughed and danced around us, and I felt so buoyant that I didn’t miss the champagne.
That morning Michael and I had found out we were having a girl, news I wanted to tell Elizabeth in person.
I scanned the crowd until I saw her standing by a table of silent-auction items, her blond hair shining against the dark-brown dress she wore. Slipping between the revelers, I came up and grabbed her hand. “A girl,” I whispered. “It’s a girl.”
She hugged me, so quickly the embrace was over before I realized it had happened. Then she bit her lip, glanced around as if confirming that no one was listening to us, and whispered back, “We’re having a boy.”
I squealed, and she shushed me, but her eyes were sparkling. “We’re not telling people. Not yet.”
“Let me throw your shower,” I offered.
“I don’t know.” She shook her head, reaching up to straighten her name tag, which read Toad. Somewhere, Wyatt must be in a green shirt, styling as Frog. “It seems like tempting fate, celebrating too much, too early.”
“You don’t have to have it tomorrow. You’ve got five more months.”
“Have yours with me,” she blurted out, and then her hand flew to her mouth. “I’m sorry. That was stupid. You want your own shower. You deserve your own. I just thought if there were two of us … but that was selfish.”
I wasn’t even listening to her apology. “Yes.”
“What?” She looked at me, her eyes wide.
“Yes, let’s have a joint shower. I mean, can we? We can’t throw our own.”
She waved her hand, as if that detail didn’t matt
er at all. “Really? You won’t feel cheated?”
“I’ll feel lucky.” And as the party swirled around us, I could almost forget that this life hadn’t been my original plan. Things were better, sweeter, than I had expected.
And this time, I hugged her.
CHAPTER
12
ELIZABETH WAS RIGHT to wave away my question of who would host our shower. Turned out that was another benefit of belonging to the Bluebonnets. Inés and Rachael took the lead, although to their credit, they tried to recruit Lena too. I was entering my third trimester, just a few weeks behind Elizabeth, on the day of the shower.
To Lena’s disgust, there was a decorate-the-onesie station, a guess-the-baby-food-flavor game, and a poster of celebrity baby pictures for people to identify. Lena busied herself rearranging the plates of tea sandwiches and bouquets of cake pops and refreshing the rainbow sherbet punch.
The worst part was when Elizabeth and I settled into chairs between the two gift tables, differentiated only by slightly more pink or blue tissue paper. As we took turns opening presents and holding up tiny outfits, oohing and aahing and thanking the gift giver who just couldn’t resist, Lena stayed on the edges of my vision.
I looked up from a bag full of board books to thank Rahmia, but I couldn’t find her friendly face in the throngs of women. At last I saw her standing by the door, talking on her cell phone, her expression uncharacteristically grim. I set the bag down by my chair and nodded to Elizabeth to open hers.
Finally the only gifts left were our matching towers of rolled diapers festooned with rattles and baby socks and bath toys, swathed in cellophane and bows. “Diaper cakes,” Elizabeth had whispered to me. “You can’t unwrap them or all the diapers will unroll and it’ll be a big mess.”
I felt like we’d been sitting for hours. As the semicircle of gathered women began to disperse, I stood, brushing the last bits of pink confetti off my lap, and scanned the room.
“Hey there, what did I miss?” someone said behind me. I turned to see Alondra. She gave me a hug as brisk as everything she did and handed me an envelope. “Gift card. Figured you didn’t know what you needed yet. Who are you looking for just now?”
“Rahmia.”
“Ah.” Alondra nodded toward the back door. “Rahmia was outside on the phone when I got here. Sounded like she might be wrapping up.”
My throat was dry and my cheeks were starting to ache from all the grateful smiling. I nodded at the punch bowl, and Alondra walked with me. I dipped up two glasses of the sticky-sweet punch and handed her one, which she sipped before wincing and setting it down unfinished.
She said, “I’ve been trying to get her to join the Bluebonnets, but she’s too busy. I’d hoped she would be one of our speakers, but she doesn’t want the attention.”
“What?” I tried to piece together friendly Rahmia, exasperated by Emir, and the shadow I’d thought I’d seen in the shopping complex with the words Alondra was saying.
Then Alondra looked past me and raised her voice. “At the very least, we could do some fund raising.”
And Rahmia herself came up beside me, smiling at Alondra. “Nag, nag, nag.”
“What is she talking about?” I asked Rahmia.
Alondra answered. “Rahmia works with the local branch of the International Women’s Resource Center. Listen, I’ve got to get some water or something. No offense, but that punch is like drinking a lollipop.”
As she left, I turned to Rahmia. “I didn’t know about this.”
Her hands fluttered as she said, “Alondra makes it too big. I just help where I can.”
“You help women, like with a women’s shelter?”
Rahmia sighed. “Let’s sit. You shouldn’t be on your feet so long.” She drew me back to the twin chairs, sitting in the one where Elizabeth had been. “So, it started because I am lucky. I wanted an arranged marriage; I didn’t have to have one. My sister and her husband met in medical school, but I was tired of waiting for my family. I knew Ali from before; we’d been in grade school together. And even when we went overseas to our different colleges, we both spent summers with family. Ali had started his PhD, and I had just finished my master’s, so the timing was perfect for our engagement.”
“I don’t understand what this has to do with your work.” My eyes felt gritty, and I reached up to rub them. The fluorescent lights and the beam of everyone’s attention during the gift opening must have made me more tired than I’d realized.
Rahmia patted my arm. “Just that I am lucky. I have a husband who loves me, and our marriage is happy. Not everyone can say that. Some women, they come here and maybe their husband locks away their passport, keeps their money. Maybe he isn’t kind. But if they don’t already speak English well, or if they have no money of their own, or once they have kids, they have no way to get help if they need it. So that is what I was doing.”
“That’s great work. You should speak at a meeting, tell people about it!”
She shook her head. “I don’t want to cause trouble for Ali or to put our family at risk. Interfering in a marriage is dangerous, but I feel strongly these women need help and the law here does not protect them. When I need a legal question answered, Alondra helps me out. Unofficially. Because sometimes the only help we can provide is unofficial help.”
A shadow fell across us, and I looked up to see Lena, a wrapped gift in her hands.
Hastily, Rahmia rose to her feet. “But I have been talking too much. This is your party. Have fun.” With a wave, she headed across the room.
I started to stand, but Lena dropped into the empty chair. “Freaking Bluebonnet baby shower. I swear, if they’d let me throw this thing solo, we’d be having some real fun.” She passed me the box. “I didn’t want everyone gawking at this. Were you just about to die before it was all over?”
Laughing, I said, “Yeah, I hate being on display.” I loosened the tape and smoothed back the paper even as Lena started to twitch with impatience. Amused, I actually took a little longer than necessary to unwrap the package, a fancy video baby monitor.
She leaned close and pointed to the description on the box. “It’s got enough of a range that you can even hang out at the pool with me and still keep an eye on the nursery. You can make sure the baby is safe. And you can install an app on your phone so you won’t be tied down. No worries.”
“It’s great. I love it.”
Sitting back in her chair and stretching out her legs, she grinned. “Good. Because even a baby isn’t going to keep us from having fun.”
* * *
As the days passed, my body kept changing, and although I felt bigger and heavier, my confidence, the sense of being rooted in a community, stayed with me. And despite my larger size, Lena and I walked every day. She was still the friend who could make me laugh easily, who made me feel unselfconsciously free. Our walks past the mailbox and around the neighborhood were slower, but we spent just as much time together.
I never did send a revenge postcard to Aimee, not even after another one arrived from her. This time Aimee had chosen a black-and-white print of a seamstress’s dummy in front of a window overlooking Brooklyn in the thirties. In black permanent marker next to my address, she’d written, Is this what you wanted to be when you grew up? Soz ~A
Before I realized what was happening, laughter bubbled up inside me. Aimee had no idea. She didn’t know I was pregnant; she didn’t know I had friends; she didn’t know I was chasing happiness and it was right within my grasp. Lena twitched the postcard out of my fingers and flipped it over to read it. “That fucking bitch.”
“It’s okay.” The sun was warm, without the slightest edge of winter. Aimee would be wearing sweaters, or she’d be shivering in too-thin blouses.
“It’s not okay. Bad enough that this psycho loony framed you and got you fired; now she’s stalking you? Someone needs to teach this bitch a lesson.”
“It really doesn’t matter, Lena. I’m over it.”
Lena folded
the postcard and shoved it into the pocket of her jeans. “You are too damn good for this world.”
“No.” I tilted my face up and closed my eyes, letting the sunlight turn my vision gold. “I just figured out the difference between people who matter and people who don’t. Good friends are the only ones worth keeping.”
C2C TRANSCRIPT
7
Helen: So now we’ve got a baby in the mix.
Julia: I’m sorry, I need a minute to freak out. Because the baby shower? Thrown by a killer. Seriously, how creepy is that?
Helen: After the baby was born, she even babysat. They left their three-month-old infant with a couple that had killed over a dozen people, picking off the homeless, the elderly, the undocumented. There’s a huge homeless population in Houston, but there’s also a robust safety net of shelters and social workers. Even commuters pass the same faces every day. If a cluster of people went missing, someone might notice. But our killers plucked one from Harris County, one from Spring, one from Galveston, always staying below the radar.
Julia: And I know what our listeners are thinking. Maybe the authorities hadn’t noticed a serial killer was in the area, but how could their neighbors, their best friends, have no idea?
Helen: We’ve talked about this. Serial killers can be incredibly good at compartmentalizing. They can be charming; they may have spouses, friends, even kids of their own. Ann Rule wrote a book about working the phones at a help line with Ted Bundy. This couple is so good, so very approachable, that they are literally taking people off the side of the road without a fight. They just don’t look scary.
Julia: That super-nice couple that is so very helpful, those neighbors that “keep to themselves,” the guy you carpool with, the woman with the adorable dog … they’re all suspects?
You Can Never Tell Page 11