How could any father want to forget?
Finn packed his bags as silently as he could so as not to disturb the nap. From his wallet he removed the sealed envelope containing the letter he’d written, the one that asked her to raise Bear alone and not tell him what a coward his father was. He stood there holding it for a long minute, eying the kitchen counter where the letter should go, and then looking back at his blissfully oblivious son, the only good thing he had to show for his life, his only proof that something good could still, somehow, come from a string of mistakes. And then damn it if he didn’t pocket the envelope, pack up the boy’s clothes and toys too, and carry Bear’s sleeping form out to the backseat of their rental car in the dim hotel garage. Car seat laws seemed like more of a suggestion down here in this land of frozen cocktails with breakfast and smoke shops “for tobacco use only” and no-shirt-no-shoes-no-problem and pirate flags and barely-there bikinis and anything goes. So he didn’t think much of hitting the road with his sleeping son not exactly strapped in, any more than he thought about what would happen after he woke up.
28
AUGUST 2016
As Caitlin stared at the courtesy phone receiver in her hand, she couldn’t escape the sting of Violet’s words. Call your husband, Cait. At least you know how to reach yours.
Worse, though, was the sting that she had failed to convince Violet to come.
Damn it all to hell.
She turned back to the boys, who had grown restless with the crayons and resumed their game of superheroes, climbing up and down the slick vinyl chairs. It was only a matter of time before one of them got hurt again. Or complained of being hungry. Or needed a nap. It really wasn’t feasible for Caitlin to be here alone with two barely three-year-olds when another was lying in a bed somewhere down one of these hallways and needing her desperately.
Where was that nurse? What was taking so long?
She glanced at the clock. They had already been here for ninety minutes. She had no idea how long she could count on Finn sleeping off the Ambien. If he woke to find them gone … What were the charges for hiding a kidnapper and then basically just setting him free? Would anyone even believe her that she’d gone to extremes to escape with Bear, that she’d meant to give Finn and Violet a last-ditch chance to work this out before their lives were irreparably ruined in federal court? Would anyone believe that her intentions had been good?
She’d feared that she could lose her family as she knew it if Finn made good on his threats. But now she feared that they all could lose everything. Once it was discovered that she had done this, all of it, George would be ruined, whether Finn opened his mouth or not. He could never run for office. His father’s legacy would be stained. All because of her, the ordinary girl from the suburbs whom George had exercised poor enough judgment to marry. And the boys—they might have to grow up with their mother behind bars. What kind of shameful life was that? How could that reality ever in a million years become hers?
“You made bad choices, Mommy,” Gus had chastised her one day after he was less than enthusiastic about the lunch she’d served. Caitlin had laughed, caught off guard by his grave tone. She guessed he had picked up the phrase at day care. It was a very politically correct way of handling things when a child needed to be disciplined—break it all down to choices. Out of context, though, the “bad choices” line could actually be quite astute.
Now she really had made bad choices. Important ones. She couldn’t unmake them—she could only try to stop herself from making more. So she braced herself to do the thing that she knew she had no choice at this point but to do, no matter the consequences for her life, her marriage. With a shaky hand, she picked up the phone again. She had to call George.
“Mrs. Bryce-Daniels?”
The receiver clattered back onto the hook
She hadn’t heard the doctor come up behind her. His voice sounded young, vibrant, but as she turned, she came face-to-face with a man old enough to be her father. He had on a white lab coat, and his hands were clasped behind his back. “I’m Dr. Avery. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Leo,” she breathed, her throat clenching. “Is he … how is he?”
“All of his lab work came back within normal limits, and his vital signs have remained steady.” He dropped his hands, and she saw that one of them was holding a clipboard. Leo’s chart. “We’ll monitor him until he’s awake, but it’s likely he’ll be fine once he sleeps it off.”
“Oh, thank God,” she said, blinking back tears of relief. Over the doctor’s shoulder, she could see the boys watching her curiously. She couldn’t let emotion get the better of her now. “Can I see him?” It was all she wanted. To wrap her arms around him and feel him breathing, to press her ear to his chest and hear his heart beating.
“In a few minutes,” the doctor said. “He won’t know whether or not you’re there, anyway—not for a few hours at least, I’d guess. He’s out pretty good.”
Caitlin’s eyes widened in alarm. “Just heavy sleep,” the doctor assured her. “It was sleep medication, after all.”
“Right,” Caitlin said, flush with humiliation. But as ashamed as she was to be in this position, nothing could override her gratitude. “Thank you for taking care of him, Doctor. I can’t tell you how truly grateful I am.” Her voice broke as the tears threatened to spill over again.
Dr. Avery looked away and cleared his throat. “Yes. Well, we do need to ask you a few more questions—you know, about how this happened. To go over it again.” He seemed uncomfortable, as if he’d drawn the short straw in coming out here to deliver the news. Maybe this kind of thing didn’t happen that often after all.
Caitlin felt thrown off balance by the intense roiling of emotions—such dread on the heels of such relief. “Of course,” she said, willing herself to ignore the sound of the blood coursing through her ears, the dots beginning to creep into her peripheral vision.
The doctor looked over at the kids. “Is there someone to watch over them?” he asked. “Do you want me to designate a nurse?” Caitlin felt dizzy. His words came to her through a tunnel.
“I was actually just about to call my husband,” she stammered, gesturing toward the phone behind her. “George. I—” She needed a better explanation. “I tried to reach him earlier but I couldn’t get through.”
“Why don’t you go ahead and place the call,” Dr. Avery said. She watched then as he hesitated, doing a double take at the top sheet on the clipboard. “Your husband is George Bryce-Daniels? From Ohio?”
“Yes,” she managed to answer. Cold water. She needed a drink of cold water.
“Oh my word,” the doctor said, clucking his tongue. “I didn’t realize! Of course. I used to play golf with his father, at the lake club. He owns that cabin down here, you know…”
Something like a glimmer of hope was presenting itself to Caitlin. She had to sit up and take notice. She couldn’t succumb to the light-headedness or the encroaching panic. “Yes,” she said, smiling as demurely as she could. Sometimes it paid to be the wife of a senator’s son. Please God, she thought, let it be one of those times.
“The cabin is actually where this happened, where we are staying,” she explained. “It was my mother-in-law’s Ambien. I thought it was out of reach—he’s never climbed on the counter before—”
She didn’t fight the tears this time when they started to come. Better for him to see them.
“Oh, her insomnia,” he said, nodding. “Augustus used to talk about that.” His tone softened, and he placed a gentle hand on her forearm. Caitlin felt almost guilty. She didn’t deserve his sympathy, she really didn’t. But Leo and Gus needed her. And at this moment, so did Bear. And Violet.
“Why don’t you call George,” he said, handing her a tissue from the end table at his side. “Then we’ll talk. Never fear—this is all routine. Nothing to worry about.”
Caitlin nodded, dabbing at the tears with the rough fabric. “When do you think Leo can come home?” she asked.
“George will be asking, I’m sure,” she added for good measure.
“Provided that he remains stable, that depends on when he can be roused. Could be later today. Could be tomorrow morning.”
Caitlin nodded, not trusting her voice to speak again.
Maybe the powder had settled at the bottom of the thermos after all. If Leo hadn’t had enough to cause any alarm, there was a chance Finn had had more than enough. Which simultaneously renewed her hope that he wasn’t likely to wake anytime soon and her fear that she might have slipped him too much. She couldn’t think about the latter. The important thing was she might not be out of time to try to fix this unfixable mess.
“I’ll give you privacy to make the call,” he said. “I know these times are not easy. Being a parent never is.”
And then Caitlin was left alone with the receiver, and only one thing left to do. She would call George, and he would come. And if she managed to walk out of this hospital untouched today—and if Leo managed to walk out unharmed—she would have gotten better than she deserved. And she would pay it forward by doing what she should have done all along, no matter the consequences.
29
AUGUST 2016
It wasn’t that Violet was ungrateful for Gram’s support. It was just that she desperately wanted her to leave before she witnessed any more of her unraveling.
Gram was there, dropping off yet another casserole from the ladies at her living center, when Caitlin’s call came in. Gram had let herself in, dragged Violet out of Bear’s bed, announced that she looked like “death warmed over,” ordered her to stop torturing herself, and informed her that what she needed was a meal to settle her stomach and clear her head. It was lunchtime, after all. Standing disheveled in the center of Bear’s room, Violet told her what Agent Martin had said about the possible lead on a car, and Gram clapped her hands so enthusiastically, yelling out, “Now we’re cooking!” that Violet couldn’t help but follow her to the kitchen. Violet was scooping coffee grounds into the filter, Gram squinting at the dial to preheat the oven, when the phone rang.
Violet took the call in her bedroom, and when she returned a few moments later, she was determined not to tell Gram what had happened. But Gram saw through her, like she always did, and before Violet knew it she was repeating the conversation practically word-for-word.
An odd thing had happened these past few days. Gram had gone from encouraging Violet to open her eyes and stop telling herself the stories that she wanted to believe about her life, to trying to convince her that things weren’t as bad as she made them out to be.
When Violet admitted that she’d basically hung up on Caitlin, leaving her to wait alone in the emergency room, Gram’s eyes filled with tears. “I know you’ve just had shock after shock,” Gram told her. “But that doesn’t mean you have to do a complete about-face on everyone in your life. It might seem easy to blame Caitlin, but try to put yourself in her shoes, how caught in the middle she must have felt.”
Violet’s hands were still shaking from the sickening combination of high emotion and low blood sugar, and she steadied them on the counter while she waited for the coffee to brew.”But—”
“I’m not saying she was right not to tell you the things that she didn’t tell you, but that doesn’t change the fact that for years, she’s been your closest friend. And I’m not sure this is a time when you should be pushing people away. If Caitlin needs you—”
“You know what? Spare me the lecture,” Violet snapped. “Maybe I should have gone. But aren’t I allowed to be a little selfish right now? Can’t I stay in self-preservation mode if that’s what it takes to get through the day without Bear, without even knowing where Bear is, or if he’s okay?”
Gram dropped it then, but she didn’t leave. Instead, in true Gram form, she served up the casserole to Violet, had only a few bites for herself, and then set about baking a cheesecake neither of them had any desire to eat.
Violet perched at the kitchen table, nursing her hangover and watching. Even in her exhaustion, she couldn’t seem to quiet her mind, couldn’t shut off the dizzying strobe light shining in flashes over her best and worst memories. She had to bite her tongue not to talk at Gram, rehashing everything all over again.
Violet had never been one to overanalyze, and she’d once seen her more even-keeled approach as an asset. She’d tried not to dwell on the things she and Finn might not know about each other as intimately as they should. She’d tried not to worry about worst-case scenarios with Bear the way Caitlin did with her twins. She’d never convinced herself that any of his ordinary colds were meningitis, or that if she looked away for an instant at the playground he’d fall off the slide and break a bone, or be snatched up by a sex-trafficking ring.
Now, of course, it was hard not to view what she’d once seen as levelheadedness—or a faithful trust in the natural order of the universe—as a fault.
It didn’t take much stretching of the imagination to see that a little more analysis at certain points along the way might have prevented all of this in the first place. If she’d allowed her wildest fears to have free rein, some of them might not have been too off the mark.
But now that she couldn’t stop herself from frantically turning things over in her mind, she hated the sensation that came with this obsessing. It was as if she were spinning along with her thoughts, over and over, until she felt physically sick, but she didn’t know how to hit the Off switch on the ride.
Last night’s vodka had been as close as she could come.
For too many days she’d been behaving as if Bear would walk through the door at any minute. She had tried to be responsible, a mother ready to start mothering again at the turn of the doorknob. She had forced herself through some motions and allowed herself to be forced through others. And when she was still reeling that the roof had blown off, and the floor suddenly crumbled out from under her too, the first thing she did was to calmly place a phone call to Maribel’s mother, seeking a sensible explanation where of course there was none.
After she’d hung up with Delilah last night, and sat with Gram for a few more hours, and then sat awake drinking for a few more, something in Violet had become unhinged. Something dangerous. Something she wasn’t ready to put back in its place.
Even now, she couldn’t bear to let herself place too much stock in the lead Agent Martin had mentioned. He’d cautioned her that the tipster might just be after a piece of the reward. And even if the lead panned out, they’d still be four or five days behind Finn on the trail. She didn’t think an AMBER Alert would do any good if Finn had made it to Canada.
When Gram suggested that Violet take a shower, she ignored her. When she fussed over the cheesecake, Violet wrinkled her nose. When she asked cheerfully for a hand drying the dishes, Violet poured herself another cup of coffee and returned to her station at the table. When she suggested a movie, Violet lied and said the DVD player was on the fritz. And when she asked one more time if Violet might like to call Caitlin back and make sure Leo was okay, Violet looked right past her, like an unruly child.
But when Gram mumbled reluctantly that she might as well go, Violet quickly got to her feet, returned all the right niceties, opened the door to a wall of humidity and late afternoon sunshine, and waved good-bye. Then, even before the sound of Gram’s old Buick had faded away, she went and poured herself a stiff drink.
* * *
The Internet was always changing—redesigns, relaunches, old Web sites vanished, new ones in their places—but the Missed Connections page on Craigslist looked exactly as it had years ago.
Violet appreciated that. At least something was the same.
The screen vibrated in front of her. It was finally dark enough outside that Violet’s drunken state didn’t feel out of sync with the rest of the world. “I could go down to Jack of the Wood and blend right in,” she slurred aloud to the room. Not that she was going anywhere. She just liked the idea that others out there were also drinking by now. The imagined solidarit
y.
Wherever Finn was, he probably wasn’t online. Or was he? Was he reading up on his own crime—“parental kidnapping”? Did he even know there was a name for it, or how common it was? Did he sense the weariness the federal agents would bring to the search, the look in their eyes that let Violet know how often these cases went unsolved?
Violet almost wished she had learned something that had made her stop loving Finn. She was heartbroken at what he had been through with Maribel, and disappointed that he hadn’t told her, and hurt that he’d gone along with the move to Asheville without sharing his reservations, and maddened that he’d let things go so far as to leave her without having clued her in to their problems that she didn’t even know they had. Above all, she was furious that he had taken Bear.
But in other ways, learning Finn’s secrets had actually deepened her compassion toward him and her regret that things hadn’t somehow turned out differently between them. If only he’d given her a chance.
She had no idea if she could ever trust him again, if he would even want her to—it seemed far-fetched to think of it, pathetic. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that on some level she actually did know Finn. And that of all he’d been through, the most pivotal thing was what hadn’t happened to him.
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