by Fran Louise
I exhaled involuntarily.
“That good, huh?” Her eyes were warm on me, if hesitant.
“How was your meeting?”
She shrugged. “Good.” The sunlight glanced off her tilted nose. “Do you want to grab a late lunch somewhere? She’ll probably sleep for a couple of hours; we could go to the park after all, get some fresh air.”
The suggestion, I could see, was meant to be delivered casually, as if she didn’t care what my response was. I nodded in the same spirit; lunch in the park with my family sounded pretty good after the scene this morning.
We grabbed sandwiches from a local deli and ate them in companionable silence, Nina asleep in her pram. As the silence stretched I wondered, stifling a smile as I watched her stern profile, if Stella was simply trying to comply with her hastily drawn rules yesterday. I was glad for the brief cessation of drama, but at the same time, it didn’t bode well for the future if silence was the only alternative to sex or arguing. Did we have anything else in our portfolio?
The yearning to make something else was a sharp needle in my chest.
After about ten minutes of watching the joggers and dog-walkers and nannies with prams striding past, Stella turned to me. “You never told me about your father,” she said.
Her tone had the quiet force of bottled up emotion. Ah, so this was what she wanted to talked about. My returning look had all the wariness of someone waiting for a cork to pop.
“I wish you had,” she said. She looked centre again, frowning. “If I’d known that that was why you left us in D.C., I wouldn’t have acted like that when you got back.”
I breathed in the warm air, and then exhaled. Ambivalence swirled. “It doesn’t matter.”
“I checked my phone,” she added. “There were no calls.” Another pause. “I think you’ve still got my old number.”
“I should have checked, before I left. Don’t worry about it, Stella. We were both stressed out. I just want to forget about it.”
There was another silence.
“You can’t keep things like that from me, if we’re going to raise Nina together,” she said now.
My brows lifted. “Well, you haven’t exactly shared a lot about your family with me, either. I know your mother’s name; you never talk about your dad.”
Stella’s shifting on the seat disturbed the air. My head turned towards her of its own volition. She looked pensive as she contemplated the park around us. Anticipation tightened my chest.
“He’s an alcoholic,” she said.
It was a heavy admission, uttered far too casually, and unexpectedly. I couldn’t metre a response at first. The silence, mingled with regret, settled on me like a film of grease. It had been gauche to push her.
After a moment, I placed an arm over the back of the bench, not quite touching her. I’d known there was something amiss about her relationship with her father, given how circumspect she was about it every time I’d broached the subject. I was curious to see inside this crack in her facade.
“Do you still see him?” I asked.
A darkness passed across her face, like a cloud covering the sun. “No. Not for a few years now.” I thought I saw the sliver of pain vibrate across her skin. “I love him, but—we don’t see each other.”
“Why not?”
A smile stretched her tight mouth incongruously. “I can’t have a relationship with him.” The thickness in her voice caught somewhere in my chest. When she looked at me, her gaze seemed liquid. It fell away again.
The silence stretched. I let it.
She picked up the thread of the conversation as though no time had passed at all. “He’s tried to stop a couple times, but he likes drinking; he told me that. He’s holding a tiger by the tail, but for the most part he thinks he’s got it under control.” There was a long sigh. Her expression cracked with dark humour, forcing her to stop and regain control. “Obviously, though, it’s completely ruined his life. It ruined his family, anyway.”
Disquiet churned low in my stomach at the tension in her expression. “Do you have any contact with him?” I asked.
There was no hesitation; she shook her head. “No, there’s no point. There’s too much water under the bridge now. Everybody keeps saying that I’ll regret it if I don’t give him another chance, but…” She glanced at me with a rueful smile. “What they don’t know is that he doesn’t really want one.”
Nina’s pram entered my vision. If I failed her, would I want another chance? Yes, undoubtedly.
Perhaps sensing where my thoughts had gone, she added, “He knows that if he wants a relationship with me, he has to be sober, and he can’t do that. He says he will, but he can’t.” She paused. “I’ve tried compromising—”
She stopped abruptly, an ebony fissure glowering in her pragmatism. The emotion in her voice was so dense that the air between us was crowded. I placed my hand on top of hers where it lay on the bench, stroking the cold fingers. She stiffened, and then relaxed.
“He’s not a bad man,” she said. “He has an addiction.” She looked away again. “But he’s the only one who can do something about that. You try to help them, but—” The words broke off. She touched a hand to the pram. “Which is hard to deal with, now that I have Nina, but I can’t expose her to that.”
My stomach clenched at that, the force of possessiveness alarming in its strength. A jogger ran past, distracting me, and she straightened momentarily. She swallowed deeply. In a split second she seemed to wrestle herself under control.
“Anyway, the details are ugly and uninteresting,” she said in a low voice. “I know it probably doesn’t seem like it, but I’ve made my peace with it in as much as I can.”
I didn’t reply; it seemed like a very dark peace to me. There was obviously still a lot of pain behind those shifting eyes.
They settled on me for a long moment. I watched as the colour changed from troubled skies to deep, dark water. “That’s the sorry state of my family, I’m afraid.”
“Is that why you find it hard to trust me?”
Her jaw flexed; it was white with tension now, her cheekbones taut under her skin. The scar took a faintly blue edge in this light. I hadn’t expected to ask the question; she obviously hadn’t expected to hear it delivered so bluntly.
“I can see you’re a good person, Jay,” she said, taking me by surprise. Her voice was thick. “I’m sorry if I’ve been—I know this has all been difficult. I do worry, sometimes, that I’ve become—too suspicious of people.”
Her eyes filled with water. Her face creased, she glanced around, self-conscious. I searched for something to say, anything to comfort her. Why was she crying? Finally I just drew her in to me. She was stiff with restrained emotion, but she turned her head into my neck.
She cried for a while. My heart beat in steady alarm, but I held her close. I saw Nina moving and pulled the pram in closer to check on her, but I was too distracted to pay much attention beyond registering that she was still asleep. Her tiny face, features so like Stella’s, was soft and perfect, and for some reason it made me think of the scar on Stella’s cheek.
Had her father given her that? I’d never pressed her—this was not the time for it, either—but I’d always suspected there was something sinister behind her unwillingness to share the story. A childhood tumble; an over-ambitious sporting exploit; there was no reason to hide something like that.
A blow, or even the drunken carelessness of a parent, was not something easily shared. It seemed especially horrific as I stared down into the innocent face of my own daughter.
Stella eased against me; I realised I was gripping her and let her ease out of my hold. She wiped her red eyes with a shaky hand. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I told you all of that.” She glanced around again, concerned in case anyone was watching. “You get used to carrying around a dirty secret. It’s a bit of shock to have it out in the open.”
“Stella, look at me.” Arm still looped around her shoulder, I touched her neck. �
�I’m glad you told me.”
She nodded with effort. She looked calmer now, her skin resuming a more even tone. “Is it obvious I’ve been crying?”
“Who cares?” I clasped her hand again, mentally daring any passers-by to stare. “You don’t get to choose your family, you know,” I said. “You shouldn’t carry that stuff around with you. It’s not healthy.”
“I know,” she said. She sounded tired now. “It’s not exactly something you bring up at the dinner table, though.”
“I’m not your dinner companion.”
She looked at me, eyes narrowing on my features. Her fingers played with mine, and she sniffed. She wiped her face, taking a deep, shuddering breath. “No, you’re not.” Her hand tightened in mine.
We sat for a while in silence again, letting the raw emotions settle, until Nina’s tiny fist waved out of the pram.
Stella gave a precarious laugh. “She’s dreaming.”
“Do you think she’ll be sitting on a bench in thirty years’ time bemoaning her family?” Though I said the words to lighten the mood, a weight dropped in my chest at the prospect.
Stella’s expression was equally grave.
I laughed gently. “She won’t.” Taking in a long breath of the fresh air, I added, “Everything’s going to work out. I know it.”
She looked at me. The sudden warmth behind her eyes was so illuminating that it was like the sun emerging from behind a cloud. “You think so?”
“I know it.”
She laughed. Then, to my surprise, she kissed me.
#
I didn’t want to leave her, but I sensed that Stella needed time to lick her wounds after the emotions of the afternoon. So I sent her and Nina back to the apartment in the town car. I was grateful for the walk back through the park to my offices. I was more disturbed by the conversation with Stella than any drama with my family this morning.
Though perhaps disturbed wasn’t the word. I was elated—a little terrified, as though I was hurtling around on a fairground ride. An elusive thread of excitement that moved like a shadow at the corner of my eye but stubbornly refused to abate.
I kept seeing the slope of Stella’s profile; the impossibly straight line of collarbone; the way her fingers fluttered against mine when she wanted to hold my hand; a confusing flash of images that sent hot and cold running through me like faulty plumbing. I almost stopped functioning for a moment in the coffee shop; I reached into my inside pocket for a card and the scent of her skin and hair, still on my jacket, rushed at me. It was a good five seconds before I realised the barista was waiting for me to speak.
It didn’t remain long, this feeling; certainly not long enough to analyse. Instead it was replaced with a much more concrete sense of fear. I was picking up a coffee when I first saw the headline. It ran along the ticket tape on the large screen on the wall.
“Abel Fitzsimmons indicted in Benson scheme,” it said. “Authorities announce son, James, under investigation.”
#
It was late when I got back to the apartment, after midnight. I tested the throbbing in my skull with tense fingers. Looking around the study, for a moment I felt like I’d walked into the wrong apartment. Somehow Stella, and Nina, had made it her home overnight. They’d done the same thing in Washington, in both cases without any apparent effort. Their sheer presence was enough to infuse a house, like a strain of insistent scent. It didn’t even look the same anymore.
Both of them would be soft and blissfully asleep at the other side of the hallway. Though I still had work to do, I wanted nothing more than to shed my clothes and curl up beside Stella’s naked body. I wanted to be part of them.
I sat down with a sigh, followed by a low curse. I’d forgotten to call, of course. I picked up my phone and switched it on. There were reams of messages and missed calls, all of which I’d spent the day avoiding.
I loosened my tie and shoved it into my jacket pocket, tossing the jacket on to the sofa. My head was noisily incoherent. On autopilot, I woke up the tablet screen on my desk. I rolled up my shirt sleeves and logged on, checking emails. I tried to answer some but after a few minutes it became apparent they were all the same: worried clients; worried business partners; concerned lawyers; concerned friends. All I had were questions and no answers.
The frail, hollow figure of the man in the bed hovered somewhere around the peripheries of my memory, causing me to balk inwardly with each recollection. How could that frail man still be fucking terrorising me?
My gaze floated from the tablet screen of its own accord, staring into the blackness. The investigation wasn’t real. I’d called Fueller, who’d recommended a lawyer, who then advised me to turn myself in for questioning. The FBI had only had one question: how was my father involved in Benson’s business dealings. They wanted names, they wanted times and places; in short, they wanted everything it would take to put my father behind bars, and if I didn’t comply, then they’d ask my father for exactly the same information on me.
I lifted my elbows on to the table and rested my face in my hands for a moment, before rubbing harshly. Laughter was a silent rush of air. I wanted to hate him, but the image of the man in the bed wouldn’t let me. When he woke up—if he recovered—what would he do? Would he have an epiphany, and try to turn his life around? Or would he turn me over to save his own ass? He’d threatened to ruin me before. The only reason the FBI had any leverage on me at all was because of Abel’s mismanagement of my firm’s stock.
Blowing out a breath, my mind swimming in circles, I lifted the tablet and tried to focus. It was with some surprise—alarm—that I noticed Stella standing at the door. Heart in my throat, I lowered the tablet screen and returned her concerned gaze. She was in a t-shirt, her legs bare and her hair tousled.
“Is Nina with you?” she said, breathless.
I stared at her for a moment in confusion. “No,” I said finally.
“She’s not with you?”
“No,” I said, and got up.
Her lips parted. “She’s not in her cot,” she said. A pause. “I didn’t take her out.”
The first sign that all was not well wasn’t the words, exactly, but Stella’s demeanour. She was panting. I could see clearly, even from this distance, her hand shaking on the door handle. The grogginess in my mind evaporated.
“Did you take her out earlier?” I asked.
“No.” She turned back to the dark hallway. “No, no, I put her down around eight, and then I checked her at ten before I went to bed. I heard you coming in a bit later, but I fell asleep again.”
“But I just got in,” I said, approaching her, “no more than five, ten minutes ago. Stella—wait. Are you sure?” I clasped her arms, turning her to face me. Her eyes were frantic. “Are you sure you didn’t take into bed with you?”
“Of course, I’m sure!” She clasped my arms in return but still swayed. My grip hardened. “My God, Jay. What do you mean you just got in? I heard you—or someone—hours ago.” She looked around wildly. “Where is she?”
CHAPTER TEN
Stella
I could feel every process in my body working to keep me alive. The steady beat of my heart; the blood churning through my veins; the shallow rise and fall of my chest as my lungs filtered the air. I could feel every process as though it was taking every last drop of energy to function. I couldn’t move or think or speak, or I wouldn’t be able to keep even the most basic functions going. My heart would just stop.
“I’m sorry, Mrs Fitzsimmons. I need you to tell me what she’s wearing again, okay?”
I looked up. My eyes were swollen and sore and it took a while to focus on the scene. The policeman standing in front of me was holding a picture on his phone to my face.
“Was it like this?” he asked. Behind him, men in uniforms and overalls were standing around, looking at things and talking in low, grave tones.
I glanced back at the photo. I couldn’t see the baby’s head, but the chubby body was around the same size as Nin
a’s. The babygro, from a well-known clothes store, was the same as the one she’d been wearing when I’d put her down earlier. I nodded mutely.
“Exactly like this?” he said. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Fitzsimmons, but this is important. I need you to tell me.”
“It...” The word came out on a rush of air and disappeared. My body complained at the extra effort. My heart started pumping madly, my lungs palpating. “It’s exactly like that,” I said on a breath. “White, with those little—” God, what were they? “—things on the sleeves.”
“The design on the sleeves,” he asked, “like this? The lambs and the little cherries?”
I nodded. I said, “Yes,” on a burst of anguish again before he could chastise me again for silence.
Lambs and cherries … who could take an innocent child like Nina? I grabbed his hand before he could leave. “Are you trying to find her?” I asked, dizzy with desperation. “Is somebody out there now, looking for her? Are there cars?”
“We’ve got officers all up and down the block,” he said, his voice gentle but authoritative. “They’re going around all the apartments.”
“She ... she might have been gone for hours,” I said. “She could be much farther away.” I sat down again and covered my stomach with my hands, pain slicing through me. As though I were still pregnant and someone had slashed me, taken my baby from inside me, the pain couldn’t have been more vivid. “I can’t…” I said the words, unsure if I could keep functioning like this. I thought I might literally die here, on this sofa, if someone didn’t help me. “I can’t–”
“Stella, it’s okay.” The sofa depressed next to me, and warm arms slid around my waist. I turned, staring into Jay’s familiar face. The hard planes of his bone structure were so taut as to cut. “It’s okay,” he said in a low, firm voice. “They’ll find her. We just have to be patient.”
I gripped his arms, tearing my nails into them, desperate to communicate the sheer depths of my anxiety. “Did you tell them, that she might have been gone for hours?” I said. “Did you tell them?”