Almost Missed You

by Jessica Strawser

  Caitlin shook her head. “Me and George.”

  It was all Violet could do not to shake Caitlin by the shoulders. “Where are they?”

  “The cabin,” Caitlin said, and Violet drew back. All along, she’d been picturing Bear being dragged along on the run, spending the night in seedy hotel rooms, even sleeping in his car seat as Finn drove and drove him farther and farther from her. But relaxing at George’s family’s vacation home, in the place where Violet and Bear and Finn themselves had vacationed the summer before? With what, with Caitlin there too? Grilling dinner, laughing around the campfire?

  “How long have they been there?” she asked.

  “A couple days,” Caitlin admitted.

  “Days?” The relief she felt that her little boy was safe and accounted for was displaced by a blind rage. Her eyes burned.

  Caitlin started to cry. “Vi—”

  “I’m calling Agent Martin right now.”

  “I swear to God, I don’t know where they were before that! I was just as shocked as you when they showed up.” Caitlin’s words came rapidly, desperately, almost incoherently through her sobs. “It’s not like Finn called me, or knocked on my door. He broke into my house while I was at work. I came home and found him there—but then he blackmailed me. And I’ve been trying to figure a way out of it, trying to figure a way to get Bear back to you, trying to figure a way no one gets hurt, but everyone got hurt. Even poor Leo—”

  “And you left them there and drove down here?” Violet felt her own panic rising. “What makes you sure they’ll be there when we get back?”

  “George is keeping watch. There’s an alarm. And Finn is … he’s asleep.”

  “Asleep?”

  “I slipped some Ambien into his drink.”

  Violet stared.

  “Leo didn’t exactly just get into the pills. I was careless—” She was heaving such gasping breaths that Violet worried she was about to hyperventilate.

  “Calm down, Cait,” she heard herself say.

  “All I did was make everything worse! It’s so scary having the FBI involved, and George still doesn’t really even know what the hell is going on, but of course he’s furious, and I know I’m in trouble, and I just want to do the right thing. I need to do the right thing before I pay the consequences, okay? So after we get there, you can call the cops, the FBI, whoever, but please, come with me first. Some part of me still thinks that if you and Finn just talk…”

  Violet’s mouth opened, but she was unable to summon any words. Caitlin turned to look over her shoulder, into the darkness of the backyard, then back at Violet. “Are they watching right now?” she asked, as Violet started to grasp the weight of everything she’d been saying. Finn had dragged Caitlin into this. Caitlin, who maybe could have helped avoid this whole thing if she’d just told Violet about Finn’s past from the start—but who had children of her own. Children who called Violet Auntie Vi, and whom Bear loved like brothers. “I wanted to tell you when I called from the hospital, but I was sure your line was bugged. I was going to bring Bear to you, but then Leo got sick and George had to come and we all went back and Finn was still out of it and George thought it would be better this way, for me to bring you there, so maybe we could all sort it out together—” She cut herself off abruptly. “Are they watching you right this minute?” she asked again.

  It seemed a maddeningly audacious question, but Violet was too shocked to do anything but answer. “I don’t think so,” she said.

  “Good,” Caitlin said. “It only took me three hours to get here. Three hours more, and you will be back with Bear.” Her eyes filled with tears again. “I know you hate me for this,” Caitlin said. “You have a right to. Just please, get dressed, get whatever you need, and get in the car. I’ll explain the rest on the way.”

  32

  AUGUST 2016

  Caitlin had once had the misfortune of breaking up with a college boyfriend on the hind leg of a road trip. Better to know now, she’d told herself, that we don’t make good travel companions. What’s life if not one big journey? They’d driven the route back to campus in near silence, until they’d been caught in an intense rainstorm, and the rubber of the windshield wipers on his rusty old Volvo kept detaching from the metal as they scraped across the flooded glass in nerve-shattering, useless swipes. They had to keep pulling over to reattach them, getting more and more soaked each time, and eventually ended up waiting out the storm on the side of the road, screaming at each other all over again, which was almost better than the silence.

  It was Finn whom she’d cried to after she got home. “On the bright side,” he’d said, “at least you’ve gotten that out of the way.”

  “What?” she’d asked miserably, reaching out to accept the beer he offered.

  “The most awkward silence you’ll ever share trapped in a car with another human being.”

  She shuddered now to think of the laugh they’d shared. Finn had been wrong about so many things.

  She knew Violet had questions. But her friend seemed determined not to ask them—or not to have to ask them. Rightly so, perhaps. But Caitlin wasn’t sure where to start. So she just drove, every few minutes stealing a glance at Violet, who remained staring out the passenger window, lips pursed, eyes glassed over with lack of sleep and the threat of tears.

  Quit being stupid, she told herself. Just be honest. She cleared her throat.

  “I guess I have a lot of explaining to do,” she ventured.

  A muscle twitched in Violet’s neck, but she didn’t move.

  “You have to believe that the second Finn showed up, I was going to call you. I was so relieved to see that Bear was okay, and so glad for you, and then—”

  “And then what?”

  “He threatened me. Finn threatened me.”

  “You’re scared of Finn?”

  “No. Yes. He knows about something I did—something I’m not proud of. He threatened to tell George if I didn’t hand over the keys to the cabin, give him a place to take Bear and get his head on straight. I tried to call his bluff, but he upped the ante, calling out something else that could ruin George’s father, and George too, and—” She faltered. It all sounded so unimportant when she said it out loud. So unworthy of what she’d sat by and let Finn put Violet through. She tried again. “These secrets, they’re bad, Vi. They would wreck my family.”

  “So you just let him blackmail you and wreck my family instead.”

  “No!” Caitlin fought to keep her eyes on the road. Up here in the mountains, even the interstates were steep and winding, and had to be navigated carefully. Especially in the middle of the night. “I didn’t. I followed him down there. I thought if I could convince him to do the right thing, I could avoid the whole mess for George and me and get Bear back where he belongs—with you. It’s just … Finn didn’t come around.”

  “And now?”

  “I couldn’t wait him out any longer. I had to do the right thing, even if it means that he’ll follow through on his threats. I probably deserve it anyway.”

  A beat of silence filled the car. “But you said George is there now. With Finn.”

  “Yeah.” Caitlin took a deep, shaky breath. A sharp curve was just ahead, and she tightened her grip on the wheel. “I guess if Finn hasn’t already told him, I’m probably going to end up having to do it myself. I dodged his questions earlier to run out and get you, but he’s none too pleased about being pulled into this mess.”

  For a moment, Violet didn’t answer. Then she tilted her chin in Caitlin’s direction, though she still wouldn’t look at her. Caitlin’s face burned with shame. They were climbing now, and the fog was thickening—she could scarcely see any farther than her headlights. She scanned the highway’s perimeter for deer, which too often managed to jump over the high concrete walls and into traffic. Why they’d go to so much effort to get to a place they clearly weren’t meant to be was anyone’s guess.

  “You going to tell me what it was? Or is? That he has on you
?”

  Caitlin knew that without a real explanation, there was no chance of salvaging her relationship with Violet. Besides, there was no point in not telling her. She’d likely find out soon enough.

  “Do you remember that party you and Finn threw, not long after you started dating? The cookout at the old house next to ours, before you had moved in there?”

  Violet nodded. “We wanted all our friends to meet.” She paused, as if reconsidering the memory. “I wanted all our friends to meet,” she said more softly, and the pain in her voice made Caitlin’s heart ache.

  “Well, by that point, George and I had been trying to conceive for a long time.”

  “You never told me that.”

  “I never told anyone. Until the day I broke down and told Finn.”

  Even then, Finn had heard only part of the story. Now, Caitlin told it all to Violet. It was her first time saying any of it aloud, and she carefully recited the details she’d been trying so hard to forget.

  After the first year of trying to get pregnant, Caitlin had made an appointment with her ob-gyn. They ran some tests and could find no obvious cause for infertility. The doctor told Caitlin that meant one of three things. One: They were overlooking something that only deeper evaluations would turn up. Two: The problem was with George, which they would need to rule out before ordering any more involved testing on Caitlin. Three: There was no problem and they just needed to keep trying.

  But George was not interested in getting his sperm count tested. In fact, he was adamantly opposed, and when Caitlin asked why, he gave no reason, only clammed up and changed the subject. She would let it go, then wait a month and try again. As the months piled on top of one another and the ovulation kits became a daily ritual and half the time he was overseas on her fertile days anyway and still her period kept coming, she tried everything to cajole him—it was noninvasive, a simple test, so why not just take it so they could pursue the real root of the problem?—but he refused to go.

  Having children was not something that Caitlin could take or leave. Not only did she continue to want what she’d always wanted, and what George had always known she wanted—a family—but she wanted it more than ever. She was tired of being alone so much while George was off working. She wanted a purpose to the days that dragged on while he was away. And if that involved George jerking off in a cup so the doctors could find out what it would take to get her pregnant, Caitlin really didn’t think that was too much to ask. She didn’t ask much of George at all, in fact. He had given her so much just by choosing her as his wife that she’d been hesitant to ask for anything. That he would deny her this one request ate away at Caitlin. That she could not persuade him made her think of him as selfish, and thinking that of her otherwise generous husband made her like herself less, which only made her resent him even more.

  Finally, with no other options that she could see, she went to Finn and begged him to try to talk some sense into George.

  Finn frowned when she explained what was going on. “Weird. Those tests are no big deal.”

  “I know. I don’t get it.”

  “I mean, they’re really no big deal. There’s this guy I used to work with, Kevin—he teaches in the graphic design program at UC and would hook our firm up with co-ops when we needed them. Anyway, one day a bunch of us go out for beers and he starts telling us that he volunteered for this study the med students were doing on campus. He gave samples, like, once a week for an entire summer, and it had to have been easy, because it’s not like this guy really needed the extra cash.”

  “He just happened to mention this?”

  Finn laughed. “He was bragging. He found out he has an abnormally high sperm count. I guess sometimes that can actually be a bad thing, because they don’t have enough room to swim, but he had a high volume of fluid too, and … anyway, I guess he was the shining star of the study. Super Sperm, we were calling him. Seemed appropriate, because the guy will sleep with anything that walks.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Appropriate, or dangerous?”

  “Exactly. Dangerous, probably. But I always did wonder if there was some kind of correlation there. Would you say George’s sex drive seems a little low?”

  “Absolutely not.” She punched him in the arm. “And also, none of your damn business.”

  So the next time George invited Finn to go golfing, Finn accepted. He promised Caitlin he’d broach the subject, let George know that it was no big deal, that it was a small thing to do that would mean something big to Cait. When they returned home that afternoon, she came out to the driveway to greet them, calling out cheerfully that she’d made a fresh pitcher of Tom Collinses and put up the patio umbrella.

  Finn was unloading their golf bags from the trunk of George’s SUV, one slung over each shoulder. As he reached to close the heavy rear door, his eyes met Caitlin’s and he shook his head almost imperceptibly.

  “I don’t know why,” he told her later. “Are you sure George wants kids?”

  “Of course I’m sure. Why? Did he act like he didn’t?”

  Finn raised his hands, palms up. “I honestly didn’t get that vibe. But he was pretty opposed to the test, and I couldn’t figure out why. He seems to think it’s unnatural or something, that it will happen on its own if it’s meant to be. And maybe it will, Cait. How long have you guys been trying?”

  “Since our honeymoon,” she said quietly. “Years.”

  Finn put his hand on her arm. “I’m sorry.”

  And then, a few weeks later, Violet and Finn threw their party.

  George was out of town on business, as usual. She’d let him go without argument, without reminding him that the trip fell across the fertile days in her cycle, that they’d be skipping yet another whole month of trying. She was tired of arguing.

  So Caitlin went alone to Finn and Violet’s party. Actually, thinking back now, she knew Violet was right to have corrected herself earlier—it was Violet who’d been so enthusiastic about the idea of the party, and Finn who had grudgingly gone along with it. Secretly, Caitlin had worried that he felt awkward about friends who’d known Maribel coming to a party to meet his new girlfriend. His social pool had diminished, anyway, after the tragedy—Caitlin never knew how much of that was his own doing, him keeping everyone at arm’s length, and how much of it was them avoiding Finn because of what he’d inadvertently done. In any case, Finn invited hardly anyone to the barbecue in his own backyard. There was Caitlin, of course, and the wedding photographer he worked for, and a handful of former coworkers, but no one, Caitlin noticed, whom he’d ever been particularly close to.

  Violet, however, seemed to have invited everyone she knew. She often joked that practically all her friends had gotten married in the past couple of years, and Caitlin could see now that not only was Violet not exaggerating, but that the group of them had moved on to phase two—never had she seen so many pregnant women in one place. Caitlin got drunk out of belly envy. And in that drunkenness, she grew from being confused and hurt by George’s behavior to being angry, really angry, with George—George who was so far away right now, with a baby or a stupidly easy sperm count test the farthest possible things from his mind, when they wouldn’t stop weighing on Caitlin’s own. It all suddenly seemed impossibly unfair. And when Finn introduced her to Kevin, the assistant professor at the university, a lightbulb of recognition went off in her brain. Super Sperm. And that lightbulb turned flirtatious. It was almost too easy. He will sleep with anything that walks, Finn had said.

  In the kitchen as the guests started to leave, Finn pulled her aside. “Do not do this, Cait,” he said quietly. “Go home.”

  And Caitlin did go home—with Kevin trailing behind her through the grass to her back door, Finn watching them out the window with his forehead creased in ugly frown lines.

  The funny thing was that not once did Caitlin think of sleeping with Kevin as true infidelity, as an act of intimacy beyond her marital bed. She simply thought of him as a means to an end. If George’
s sperm would not do the job, eventually the two of them might need to seek a sperm donor anyway—which is what Super Sperm was. In fact, if he’d participated in that study for three whole months, and if his sperm really was so legendarily “super,” wasn’t there a decent chance that if she ended up at a sperm bank, the DNA would be his anyway?

  It was never all that hard to rationalize your way through doing something wrong when it was a way to get what you wanted.

  She didn’t stop to think about the ramifications of getting pregnant with someone else’s child. She didn’t think about the baby who would not be George’s and how she would live with that secret—if she could keep it a secret—for the rest of her life. She thought only about how she wanted to be a mother and didn’t want to miss her chance just because George had too much macho pride to get a routine test done.

  It was indeed fortunate that she had not, for once, whined to George that he was going out of town during her fertile days, had not begged to tag along and been denied. Because he believed that she got pregnant the next week, when he got back. His count was off by only a few days, not enough that he ever questioned the timing of her first ultrasound at six weeks to confirm the pregnancy. And when she saw not one but two tiny heartbeats blinking on the monitor, she couldn’t resist, just for a split second, a flash of satisfaction that Super Sperm had lived up to his name.

  As far as she knew, Finn had never told Violet what had happened. And she presumed, thank God, that he’d never told Kevin about the result of their little indiscretion either. If he had, Kevin must not have cared, because he’d never shown up at her door.

  And Caitlin and Finn had never discussed it. Not until the day he stood in her kitchen, his kidnapped son playing in the twins’ room upstairs, and demanded she give him the keys to the cabin with the words she could hardly believe she was hearing.

  “If you don’t, I’m going to tell George.”

  Caitlin confessed it all to Violet, point by point. The cabin was still a couple hours away, and nothing could be worse than that accusatory silence between them, so Caitlin spared no detail. By the time she got to the part where she’d returned from the heartbreaking days at Violet’s, had the power outage disrupt her first day back at work, and gotten home to find Finn and Bear in her house, her eyes were filled with guilty tears. But there was nothing she could do but hope that something in her friend still had the compassion to understand.