“You think you still have it? The tissue?”
“Downstairs.” Abby led the way back to the kitchen. “I emptied the wastebaskets from up here into a bag, but I didn’t take it out yet.”
The scrap wasn’t much, and it was weeks old, but Dennis said it was fine. He said, “We have dental records, too.” He repacked his case and they walked to the front door and out onto the porch. Abby thought of telling him about the phone call. She thought of saying that she believed it came from her daughter, but he would only think of her what everyone else did, that she was losing it, and maybe they were right. Maybe she was.
He paused at the foot of the front steps. “You have a real pretty place here,” he said, “a nice home.”
Abby nodded, and in his quiet presence, she felt somehow comforted. It was almost as if he held her within an embrace.
* * *
After Dennis Henderson left, Abby went upstairs and made herself go through Nick’s closet and his dresser drawers. She wasn’t certain what she was looking for. A confession of lies? A map to his destination with his reason for going there clearly stated? A diary exposing his thoughts? Given his penchant for privacy, she had little hope of finding anything, and she didn’t. Not on his closet shelves, nor tucked into the pockets of his suit coats or slacks. There was nothing in his bureau drawers but the socks and underwear she herself had washed and folded dozens of times.
Back downstairs, she opened the coat closet in the front hall, and her knees weakened slightly at the smell of stale sunshine and wind; the too-familiar scent of her family seemed pressed into the very fibers of their assorted coats and jackets. There were gloves and scarves pushed into cubbyholes—Jake and Nick’s ball caps, an old fishing hat. There were the knitted caps Lindsey favored, a riot of color. Her letter jacket. Abby ran her fingertips down the wool sleeve, swallowing the ache of her tears. She touched the cuff of Nick’s leather bomber jacket, the one she had bought him for Christmas last year, and before she could stop herself, she pulled it off the hanger and slipped into it, shivering slightly at the sensation of the silk lining against her bare arms.
Closing her eyes, she gathered fistfuls of the leather in her hands and brought them to her face, and breathing in, she could smell him, feel him there with her, just waiting for her to open her eyes. He would be there; he would materialize. She leaned against the wall, willing it to be so, willing her mind to let her believe, struggling not to cry when it didn’t happen. It was when she took off the jacket that she felt something in the inside pocket, and her heart stalled, but it was only his checkbook. Nick wouldn’t have missed it; they seldom used checks anymore.
Returning it to the pocket, she rehung the jacket and went back upstairs and into Nick’s study, where she sat behind his desk feeling sick at heart and weird. He wouldn’t like her going through his things. Once, a few months after they married, she had been gathering clothes from their bedroom to do a load of wash, and when Nick had found her emptying the pockets of his jeans, he’d been upset. It had startled her to have him pull the pants out of her grasp, to have him say he would wash his own damn jeans and stomp out of the room. Within a minute or two, he’d come back.
His mother had done it to him, he’d said. She’d been furious when Nick’s father, Philip, had disappeared, and she had taken out her anger on Nick. He was no more trustworthy than his father or any other man, and as long as he lived in her house, she’d felt she had a right to search his belongings and pry into his personal business whenever she felt like it. If Nick had objected, she’d cut off his privileges, made his life hell. Abby had already known by the time Nick shared this with her that Louise was a strong-willed, difficult woman with impossible expectations. She had known Nick’s relationship with his mother was complicated, and that he was conflicted about it. She’d sensed it was a source of pain, even resentment. That day she’d gone to sit beside him on the edge of their bed. He’d taken her hand, and it had been as if he was grateful she was there. Abby remembered telling him she couldn’t imagine the kind of pressure he was raised under. He hadn’t answered, and she hadn’t pressed him about it. It just wasn’t in her nature to pry.
Now Abby pulled open the top middle drawer of Nick’s desk and passed a shaky hand over the contents. Even with so much at stake, she felt somehow disloyal.
“Mom?”
Her glance bounced as if on a string, finally settling on Jake in the doorway.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I didn’t know you were coming home.”
“You sounded pretty freaked the other day when you called about the DNA.”
“Dennis just left.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, honey. You didn’t have to come home. I don’t want you worrying about me.”
“I’m not. I’ve got a chemistry final tomorrow; I came here to study. It’s too loud in the dorm.” He sat in one of the wing chairs. “What are you looking for anyway?”
Abby ducked her chin. She thought of saying it was none of his business.
“Mom?”
“Just there might be something, you know? To say where they were going exactly.”
Jake dropped his keys onto a small table between the chairs.
Neither of them spoke. Morning sunshine from the window behind Abby heated her shoulders. On an ordinary morning in May in her old life, she would have been out in the vegetable garden, maybe with Lindsey, maybe weeding around the tomato plants she’d set out. How long ago was that? March? There wouldn’t be much of anything left of them now.
Jake propped his ankle on his knee, picked at his sock. “I doubt Dad would leave evidence where you could find it.”
“Evidence?” She looked sharply at him. “What do you mean?”
“Nothing, except if somebody’s up to something and they don’t want you finding out, they aren’t going to leave stuff lying around so you can.”
“What could he have been up to?”
Jake stood up, flinging his hands. “How do I know? It’s not like he ever discussed anything with me.”
Abby leaned back and crossed her arms. “I’ll be glad when you and Dad iron out your differences.”
“There’s not much chance of that now, is there?” Jake said.
Abby swiveled the chair around and stared out the window. “I guess you can give up if you want to. I can’t stop you.”
“Mom, Sheriff Henderson didn’t take DNA samples so he could match them to somebody alive.”
“I know that, Jake.”
“Do you? Because it sure doesn’t seem like it to me.”
* * *
Abby began losing time. She would waken on the sofa assuming it was morning only to discover it was three o’clock in the afternoon, or she would find herself in the barn with no memory of having gone there. Every day she would try to follow a routine, but then she would come to and find herself balled up in a corner of Lindsey’s room or standing outside the door of Nick’s study, and her face would be wet with tears and she would not know how long she had been there.
One morning in the first week of June, two months after the flood, she was huddled on the kitchen floor by the stove clutching a wooden spoon when her mother appeared. Abby squinted at her. “Mama? You didn’t drive on the freeway, did you?”
“Never mind that, sweet.” Abby’s mother pushed lank strands of hair from Abby’s eyes. “What are you doing?”
“Making oatmeal, the long-cooking kind. It’s what I should have fixed for them before they left. It’s healthier than French toast.” Tears flooded Abby’s eyes as if more of her tears could make a difference. As if anything she’d done or left undone could have prevented her car from rocketing off the road in wet slick darkness with Nick and Lindsey inside it. As if cooked-from-scratch oatmeal made from steel-cut oats packed with nat
ural goodness and touched with honey would bring them back.
Abby’s mother pulled her up from the floor by her elbow—Abby was always mildly surprised at her mother’s wiry strength—and led her upstairs and into the bathroom she and Nick had shared. While Abby undressed, her mother drew water in the oversize tub and tested it with the inside of her wrist. “Jake called me,” she said, adding bath beads to the water, stirring them with her hand. “He says he can’t come here anymore.”
She turned away, and Abby slipped off her robe and stepped into the tub. She drew up her knees.
Her mother opened a cabinet, running her eye over the assortment of linen stacked inside. “It’s hurting him to see you this way, honey. He’s found a job near campus; he says he’s staying there with friends this summer.”
“I don’t blame him,” Abby whispered. “I can hardly stand to look at him either.”
Her mother found a washcloth and handed it to Abby, and while she busied herself at the vanity, Abby soaped the cloth and moved it over her breasts and down her torso. She lifted each foot, soaped her calves and in between her toes, and as she worked, the tight icy core of despair in her belly thawed a bit, and the sense of her desolation shallowed in the warmth and dampness of the steamy lavender-scented air. She let out the water, turned on the shower and washed her hair, and when she was finished her mother handed her a towel.
She helped Abby out of the tub and into her robe. “I’m taking you home, Abigail,” she said, sitting her down on the vanity stool, drying her hair, “and I won’t have an argument about it. I spoke to Charlie. He’ll look after things, the horses and so forth, for a while. You can’t go on this way. You just can’t.”
Abby didn’t argue. She packed a suitcase and went with her mother, and it grieved her that she was the source of so much consternation. She bent her forehead to the passenger window. “I think Nick was keeping something from me.”
“But you didn’t find anything, did you?”
“Jake told you. He caught me looking through Nick’s desk. I know he was upset.”
“He’s worried, honey. He wants you to be the way you were. I told him grief has its own timetable.” Abby’s mother reached out to pat Abby’s hand.
“I should be driving,” she said.
“No, this once, you can let me.”
Chapter 7
At the marina, they walk along a pier between rows of moored boats. They’re all different sizes, mostly crisp white, trimmed in red or green or blue, like rows of Spectator shoes. Nick carries the cooler with their picnic supper in one hand, the other rests lightly in the small of Abby’s back. She’s aware of sea birds wheeling overhead, the gentle slap of water against the pilings under their feet, the jostling of boats caught in their moorings. The slight shift and tilt of their masts gives the impression of impermanence. She’s anxious. What if she falls?
But Nick’s hand is there as if he intuits her unease, a solid prop beneath her elbow, as he helps her over the side of a pretty blue-and-white boat, then hands the cooler to her. Abby manages to hold herself steady, but when she goes forward, he says why doesn’t she sit in the cockpit, and she thinks, there. Now he’ll know she’s ignorant. She had no idea that a boat had a cockpit. Planes. Planes had cockpits.
She sits down, putting the cooler beside her. He frees the knot that tethers the boat to the dock, then steps around doing other things. She would like to help, but she has no idea how. The wind picks at her hair, whipping it across her cheeks and eyes, and she pulls it away, tucking strands behind her ears.
Nick finds her gaze from where he’s standing on a step above her. “You’ve never been sailing before.”
“No,” she admits, and her heart pecks at her ribs, a nervous bird. She loves the look and sound of water but from the shore. Her pale skin only burns and peels. She never tans. Nick looks as though he was born tan.
He tells her it’s okay. “When there’s a good wind like today, I can usually single-hand her with just the jib.”
She nods. Should she ask, what’s a jib? Should she worry about his use of the word usually?
“You’ll see when we get into open water.” He jumps down beside her, and within seconds, she hears motor noise. She hadn’t expected that, and she’s thankful. They clear the dock area but are still within sight of land when Nick begins unfurling a sail. “This is the jib,” he explains, “and these ropes are the halyards.” He lets the thick cords play through his hands.
She shades her eyes, watching the white canvas-sheeting rise.
“People think sailing is hard,” Nick says, “but for me it’s as easy as breathing.” He grins at her. “Stick with me, kid, you’ll make first mate in no time.”
She’s laughing when he cuts the engine, then a hard wave slaps the boat, and she grabs the railing. Nick is there instantly, sliding his hand beneath her elbow, telling her to relax, to flex her knees. “I’ve got you; I won’t let you go,” he says.
Abby loses focus. Her whole awareness is consumed by her sense of him, the feel of the calluses on his palm, the slow, confident pitch of his voice near her ear. And then it happens: she unlocks her knees as he’s instructed and all at once the boat’s rhythm takes her, and it is as if her body has become unjointed, as fluid and formless as the water that surrounds them. And she smiles, feeling thrilled. Nick gives her elbow a jubilant squeeze. He bends to tie a rope onto a metal cleat. The little boat catches the wind now and leaps ahead, slicing through the water almost as if it weren’t there, as if they were flying.
She tips her face to the sky. The blue seems without end, translucent, an inverted fragile cup, the blue of a robin’s egg. The blue of June. Endless blue with hours of daylight left in it. She thinks Nick is right, the predictions for evening thunderstorms were mistaken and she is relieved. Soon he has guided them into a secluded cove. Abby opens the cooler to find one long-stemmed pink rose, a thick lush bud with petals that are just beginning to unfurl. Lifting it out she looks up at Nick to find him smiling down on her.
“I wanted to thank you for coming with me,” he says.
“It’s beautiful,” she murmurs.
“I know.” He is looking steadily at her.
Flustered, she brings the bud to her nose, breathing in its faintly heady scent. “It needs water or it will wilt.”
“I can take care of that,” he says and disappears down the stairs that lead below deck.
Abby sets down the rose, feeling ridiculously pleased, a sensation that deepens as she unpacks the small feast Nick brought for them. There is an assortment of crackers and exotic cheeses, a crusty loaf of bread, peach chutney, a small container of caviar, a bunch of red grapes so flawless they glow like polished rubies in the early evening light. There are tiny cream-filled éclairs for dessert. It occurs to her that he took the time to shop specifically for this occasion, and she is somehow touched by this. It seems so foolish and romantic, so unexpected. She hasn’t known him very long, but he seems too serious for romance, too pragmatic.
He comes from the galley bringing a small vase and a basket filled with china plates, linen napkins and crystal stemware. He sets a hurricane lamp on the adjacent bench seat, lights the candle inside it, then uncorks the wine. He watches while she takes a sip, and only after she’s pronounced it delicious does he relax. He talks about sailing, and she is happy just to listen to him. She wants to touch the corner of his mouth where he has cut himself shaving, to put her fingertip into the dimple that clefts his left cheek. At the office, the other secretaries call him a player. Her stomach waffles at the thought.
He wonders if she would like to swim.
“I didn’t bring a suit.” She fingers her linen skirt, eyes her flats. She had come with him straight from work.
He takes her hand. “You don’t swim either, do you?”
“No.” She can’t look at
him and looks instead at their enfolded arms. His is dark, olive-toned, hers as white as typing paper. As white as his teeth when he smiles at her. He slides his palm along the ridge of her jaw, cupping her neck, drawing her toward him, and his kiss is gentle, tentative at first, then it deepens and she gives herself to it, shivering in the fearsome thrust of her desire for him. His mouth moves to the hollow of her throat. She arches her back, aware that she is thrusting herself at him, and she is appalled and enchanted. But then, when thunder cracks, she jerks upright, uncertain what has happened. She wipes her mouth, looking wildly about herself.
Nick takes her by her shoulders. “Hey,” he says, and it is a moment before she sees him, before she recalls where she is. The wind picks up. Clouds muscle the sky as bunched and ominous as dark fists, and her breath draws down hard.
Nick tips her chin, forcing her gaze to his. “Don’t worry. I can beat the rain. It’ll be fine, you’ll see.”
But it isn’t fine. Within moments of packing up and stowing their dishes and leaving the little cove, the water goes from choppy to rough. The swells seem huge. Nick switches on the motor, and Abby hears it strain. She flattens her hands on either side of her, spray from the water dampening her hair and her clothes, while Nick moves nimbly, adjusting the ropes, handling the wheel. His face is intent, his expression rapt. He’s loving this, she thinks.
A sudden sharper gust of wind heels the Blue Daze over. Water swamps the deck, filling Abby’s shoes. Her throat closes. She will not scream, will not be sick and shame herself. Lights finally appear, a necklace of them lie curled in the distance. She blinks to be sure. Yes. The lights are there, on the shore, coming closer. Nick meets her glance, looking exultant.
At the pier, he hands her out of the boat, and when she slips in her wet shoes, he reaches out to steady her, pulling her against him. His gaze locks with hers. “You were afraid?”
He’s asked because she’s trembling, and at first she nods, then almost immediately, she shakes her head. Out over the water, lightning forks rake the sky. Within a few seconds, thunder growls. Nick disappears over the boat rail and returns with a lightweight blanket. Wrapping her in it, he bends, brushing his lips against her temple, and he is as surprised as she is when her eyes fill with tears.
Evidence of Life Page 7