by David Bell
“Okay,” Angela said, “you were talking to Erica after the divorce. Did you know about the baby? Felicity? Because she must have had her back then, right?”
“I didn’t know about Felicity back then,” she said. “I didn’t. I never saw Erica. We never met in person then, right after the divorce, so I didn’t know what her circumstances were. But if I’d known about a child, I certainly would have done something about it.”
Jake Little made a low laughing noise. “And you would have wanted them to stay together? For the sake of the child?”
“Of course not,” Gail said. “I’m not that old-fashioned. But it would have been soon enough for me to provide financial help, to see that the child had everything it needed. I would have wanted Erica to know she wasn’t alone, that someone heard her and understood her and could help her.”
“Wait,” Angela said. “When did you learn about Felicity? Tonight? Or sooner?”
“I know the answer to this one,” Jake said.
Gail gave him a withering look, as if he were a servant who had spoken out of turn. Jake acted like he hadn’t noticed, like the look had been intended for someone else.
“I heard from Erica again about a year ago,” Gail said, ignoring him. “She called me out of the blue. When I heard her voice, I have to be honest, I almost fell on the floor. I just . . . hadn’t thought about her much. I didn’t know where she was or what she was doing. I just thought she was one of those people who disappeared from my life, kind of like your best friend from kindergarten or someone you knew in college but never kept up with. People just go away sometimes. They fade out of our lives.”
“What did she want?” Angela asked.
“At first, just to catch up. And she offered her condolences about James. I guess she saw an obituary in the paper or online. It was a little odd, yes, but when James died, I heard from so many people I’d forgotten about. People were very kind to me. During that first conversation, I could tell there was something more going on, something else she wanted to say. To be honest, I thought she might be trying to have me put her in touch with Michael.” Gail shook her head. “I wasn’t going to do that.” She looked at Angela, her eyes boring in on her daughter-in-law. “I wasn’t. That’s too complicated.”
Jake Little leaned forward. “Tell her what Erica really wanted. Tell her why she called. That’s the question she asked you.”
Gail tried the withering look again but didn’t seem able to summon quite the same force. She looked like she knew she had to answer the question. Finally.
“Something was wrong with Felicity. She needed some medical treatments for a stomach ailment.”
“Pediatric pancreatitis,” Jake said. “She’d had one bout, and then it came back. It was chronic, and even though Erica had a good job and health insurance, it was getting pricey to treat. The deductibles. She needed help.”
“Why didn’t she go to you?” Angela asked Jake.
“We’d split up again,” Jake said, resigned. “We’d broken up the first time a number of years before that. I’d moved away and come back, and we got involved again, but it didn’t work. And I didn’t get to see Felicity as much after the second split. Only from time to time when Erica needed my help. But she didn’t ask me for money. If she’d called me, I would have helped, even though I don’t have a lot. I work in accounting at Hoffman Recycling, but I’d share whatever I could for that girl. I would.”
“He’s right,” Gail said. “That’s what it was, that ailment. She needed a little financial help, and her own mother had recently passed away. The family didn’t have much to begin with. So she turned to me.”
“And she told you that Felicity was your granddaughter?” Angela asked.
Gail nodded. “Eventually, she did. That’s why I gave her some money for Felicity.”
“And you believed her?” Angela asked. “Just like that.”
“Think about the situation I was in, Angela. My husband had just died. I didn’t have any other grandchildren. I knew the struggles you and Michael were having with having a baby. No one knows if Lynn can have a baby after the cancer. And even if she could, I’m not sure she’ll ever marry or settle down that way. Erica told me that child was my granddaughter. So I wondered. It is possible. I wanted to help. Erica did say a few times that she might have to leave town with the child, pick up and move for a different job to help afford things. Maybe she took advantage of my vulnerable state, but I didn’t mind. And I didn’t want her to leave without my knowing the truth about Felicity. I was helping a child. There are worse things to do.”
“And that was the end of it?” Angela asked. “You gave her some money for medical bills, and that was it?”
“Not exactly.” She sniffled. “I told Erica that I couldn’t go on doing any of it, the money, any of it, unless I knew for sure if Felicity was my grandchild. And there was only one way to know for sure.”
“A paternity test,” Jake said.
“Right.”
“And what did you find out?” Angela asked, dreading the answer but needing to ask. “When she had the test?”
Gail shook her head. “She never agreed to one. That’s when I stopped hearing from Erica.”
chapter
forty-nine
2:40 A.M.
Michael wasn’t sure what to expect in a young girl’s bedroom. He tried to remember what his sisters’ rooms looked like when they were growing up. Lynn never quite seemed like the typical kid. She had expressed an interest in music and dance as long as Michael was aware of anything, and the only things he clearly remembered from her room were the guitars and music equipment, a pair of ballet slippers, and, at some point, posters of Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, and Kurt Cobain, her musical idols, staring down on her as she slept.
Robyn’s room . . . never changed. They lived in the house for three years after she died, and her parents refused to touch or change a thing to do with their deceased daughter. Michael remembered that the room was painted yellow, with matching bedclothes, but the door remained closed after her death. Michael and Lynn talked about going in there from time to time, but neither one of them ever summoned the courage. To do so would have felt like a violation, like sneaking into a church or a museum when it was closed. He and Lynn kept their thoughts and curiosity to themselves.
But Michael saw his mother emerge from the room on a weekday afternoon about a year after Robyn died. He’d stayed home from school with a stomach bug and was supposed to be sleeping. But he felt better and wanted to sneak downstairs to watch TV in the basement. He stepped out of his room at the same time his mother emerged from Robyn’s, her hand held to her face. He knew she’d been crying. She walked down the hall in the opposite direction of Michael and never saw him, but Michael stepped back into his room, feeling once again the full weight of his sister’s death. He knew then that his parents would never get over the loss of their child, that they’d carry it with them from place to place like a family heirloom, something that simply could not be disposed of. He couldn’t remember what happened to the things in Robyn’s room when they moved to their new house—the house his parents still lived in—three years later. Someone packed the things and sent them away or stored them. And the new house, of course, had rooms for him and Lynn but not Robyn.
When he entered Felicity’s room, Erica had already flipped the overhead light on and was sitting on the edge of the twin bed, her hands limp at her sides. She seemed to be staring at the floor. At nothing. Soon enough, Trixie reappeared, sniffing the floor and the desk as though she had lost something as well. Erica didn’t move her head or track the dog at all. Her posture was slack, drained of energy.
One wall was painted lavender, with a bedspread and curtains to match. A neat row of books lined the top of a small desk, and in the corner near the closet, two pairs of shoes and a pair of orange flip-flops sat bunched together. In another corner sat a ukule
le, evidence of Felicity’s interest in music. Everything in the room clutched at Michael’s heart. By all rights, Felicity should be sleeping in that bed at that very moment. And he should be home with his family, miles and miles away.
“She keeps it clean,” he said.
“I make her. I try to, anyway.” Her voice sounded hollow.
“Are you okay?” Michael asked. “It’s been a long day.”
“I’m tired. But I’m hanging in. I want another cigarette, but I’m going to hold off. Plus, I’m too tired to walk outside and light up.”
“What did the police do in here?” he asked.
“They went through the drawers, the closet.” She lifted her hand off the mattress an inch or so, a feeble effort at pointing. “They were neat about it. They went through all the drawers and closets and everything in the house. They said they might have to come back at some point. I don’t think they found anything relevant.”
The dog continued to nose around. She came up to Michael and sniffed his shoes again.
“Do you think we ought to do something else?” he asked. He still held the bag of peas and lifted it to his face, gingerly placing it against the skin. It felt good, if only because the night was so hot. “Time is passing quickly.”
For a moment, Erica continued to stare straight ahead, almost as if she didn’t hear. Michael was about to repeat himself when she spoke. Her voice still sounded hollow, even fainter.
“Can I ask you something? Do you think if you’d known about Felicity back then, if you’d known I was pregnant or that I’d had her, would we be together now?”
“Erica, I don’t think—”
“Answer the question. Would we be together? Would we be living in a house somewhere with Felicity? And maybe another kid?”
“Is this productive?”
“Just answer. It’s okay.”
“If I had already met Angela, then no,” Michael said. “If I hadn’t . . . then I guess I don’t know. I don’t know what power a child would have to keep a marriage together.”
“Okay. That was honest.”
“Erica, I don’t know why we’d want to reopen something from the past like this.”
“Maybe it’s not in the past for me,” she said. “I see . . . saw Felicity every day.”
“You didn’t tell me about her,” he said. “You didn’t have to raise her without my help. You cheated me out of that time with her.”
She still looked at the floor, her eyes not directed at Michael as she spoke. “I wanted to punish you by not telling. But I also wanted to prove something. To you, I guess, even though you didn’t know. To everyone really.”
“Prove what?” he asked.
“That I could do it. See, there was always this thing with us. There was always the notion that you were the grown-up, you were the reliable one. You came from money and you had a career waiting for you out in the real world and nothing ever bothered you. And I was emotional and difficult and flighty. I couldn’t pay my tuition bill on time or find my car keys or even remember to fill up with gas before a road trip. That was the dynamic between us, wasn’t it? Always?”
Michael knew their friends saw them that way. Opposites on the surface. Michael the grounded one, Erica something of a child. He frequently grew frustrated with those qualities of hers when they were together. He lost his patience, insisted she try harder to keep her life in order. As Michael looked back on it—on his whole life really—he’d done only two truly impulsive and crazy things in his life. The first was marrying Erica. The second was getting into the car with her earlier that night. Leaving Erica and divorcing her made complete sense. Their time together as husband and wife brought all the problems into sharper relief, and Michael came to understand he wasn’t that guy, the kind who just up and married his college girlfriend because they’d been together awhile and because he thought it would make his life more interesting. If Erica didn’t want to be defined by who she was in college, then Michael didn’t want to be defined by that one rash decision. He stepped away from it when he could.
“Do you think things were so intense between us back then because we were so young?” Erica asked. “Do you still feel the same intensity for things? We were so honest, so open, so . . . raw, I guess.” She stared straight ahead, as if seeing the past. “I remember when you told me about Robyn. How emotional you were, how real. How vulnerable.”
“Let’s not get into that.” He saw the images that were always there. The clear summer sky, the swing set. Robyn’s body bent and crumpled on the ground. The football resting in the grass twenty feet away . . .
“So you don’t feel things the same way?” she asked.
“Maybe not with that intensity,” he said. “But I feel things deeper now. It’s different.”
Erica let out a small quiet laugh. “You mean your marriage to Angela, right?”
“That’s one thing.”
“Well, I knew you then, and she didn’t. I’ll always have that picture of who you were in college. She won’t.”
“It’s not a contest, Erica. Time moves on.”
“Can I tell you something else?” Erica asked. She yawned, not even bothering to lift her hand to her mouth to stifle it. Or maybe she lacked the energy to.
“Sure.”
“I wouldn’t tell anybody else this because they wouldn’t understand. They’d think I’m sick in the head or a bad person for it.”
“Okay,” he said.
She didn’t speak right away. Her body listed slightly to the right, toward the mattress. Michael took a step forward, thinking she was about to collapse onto the bed, but she held herself up.
“I used to think about moving away, about finding a better job somewhere else, starting over in a new place. But I never brought myself to do it because I always wanted you to come here, to see my life. To see the house and the yard and the dog. And Felicity. To see that I’ve done it. I’ve made it work.” She slowly turned her body toward him, looking at him for the first time since they’d entered Felicity’s bedroom. Her face looked pale, drained. She looked like someone fighting through a disease. “I want Felicity back. More than anything.”
“But?”
She yawned again, and as she spoke, her body leaned back, heading for the mattress.
“But there’s the tiniest part of me that’s glad this happened so that you finally came here and saw the life I’ve made for myself. I’ve wanted that for a long time.”
She fell back against the pillow, the mattress squeaking as she did, her eyes closed, asleep.
chapter
fifty
2:45 A.M.
Griffin leaned toward Randi Friedman, listening more carefully than ever. She felt like a character in a sitcom, hearing a juicy secret in an exaggerated fashion.
Twitchell waited patiently, his face a mask of calm benevolence. He acted like he didn’t have a care in the world, even though Randi Friedman’s ex-husband was holed up in a house across town surrounded by police officers. No one knew what he had in mind, whether he intended to hurt himself or anyone else.
“What else is there to the story?” Twitchell asked.
“Todd and I never had kids, like I said. We were older when we met; we both worked. It just didn’t fit our life.” Her eyes opened wide in relief. “Can you imagine if we had had a kid? Sheesh.” She looked at Griffin as if needing her confirmation.
“Right,” Griffin said, still leaning forward.
“I knew Erica was struggling,” Randi said. “Not financially really because her job paid pretty well. It was everything else. Being a single mom and trying to take care of a house. Dealing with child-care issues and still attempting to have a little bit of a social life for herself. You can imagine how hard all of that would be.”
“Of course,” Twitchell said.
“One evening, Todd and Erica we
nt out for a drink together. They’d invited me, but I had work to do and didn’t really feel like going.” She looked at the two officers with intensity. “There was nothing going on like that between them. We were all friends. I didn’t worry about that. They were able to go out for a quick drink because Felicity had a music lesson or something. Erica just wanted some adult conversation for an hour or so. I guess Todd was the best she could do.”
“So, what did they talk about?” Twitchell asked.
“Todd told me Erica vented. About all the things I just mentioned. And she expressed her concern that she wasn’t going to be able to keep up with the demands of being a single mom, that she was going to end up failing. And failing Felicity. She wished she had someone to help her raise Felicity, that she thought it was so much better if two people were involved to some extent. But she didn’t want to get back together with Jake, her ex-boyfriend. She didn’t love him. She wanted it all, you know? Like all of us, right?”
“Did she ever say who Felicity’s father was?” Griffin asked.
“She told me a couple of times it was her ex-husband. What was his name? Michael. She said he didn’t have anything to do with her. When I suggested she go to court over it, she refused. The subject never really came up again.”
“Did she ever say she wanted to get back together with Michael?” Griffin asked.
“No, she never said that to me.”
“Did she ever suggest she wanted to harm him?”
“No,” Randi said. “Never that. She didn’t really act hung up on him.” Randi snapped her fingers in the air as though something had just occurred to her. “She did post a wedding picture of them on Facebook one day. I thought that was weird.”
“Did you ask her about it?” Griffin asked.
“I did. She said she had a moment of weakness, that she was feeling nostalgic for being young. I guess they married right out of college. That’s all she said about it.”