by Lisa Preston
“Denies it?” Ardy asked.
Osten nodded. “We’ve confronted Brayton about this and he just flat denies it. So, no matching statement. No confession.”
“That woman was there,” Ben said. “You’ve got to find her.”
The rest of the family echoed him.
The deputy held up a hand. “First of all, according to Greer, she wasn’t there when Brayton assaulted him. That happened after she left. Greer can corroborate an assault on her, but there’s no one to corroborate the assault on Greer.”
Caroline shook her head. “How could that woman leave him there?”
“And second of all, we found her.”
Oohs and aahs and yells again. Osten waved a hand to get them back on track. He held a finger to his lips and pulled out his recorder, giving Ben a look.
Ben stood before his family like a conductor, hands wide and they fell silent, watching.
Osten squatted in front of Greer. “Can you describe what the woman was wearing?”
“It was night,” Greer said. “It was dark.”
“Try hard.”
“A dress …” He thought some more and pointed at Emma’s shirt. “Her dress had shapes kind of like flowers, swirly shapes like that. They were red.”
Osten smiled and closed out his statement with a few official-sounding words. He pulled a notebook from his hip pocket and opened it to a page with three words. Everybody crowded around to see what was written.
Red paisley dress.
“That’s as good as it gets,” Osten told Greer. “You’re a hero. I have Brayton on domestic violence, an assault on his wife.”
Clara and Emma and Maddie mobbed Greer in hugs.
“Brayton won’t be able to have guns anymore,” Clara told them.
Osten looked away.
Doug caught the dodge and cornered him. “It’s just a law.”
Osten nodded. “Conviction will take away his gun rights. Even before, it’s likely that the judge will order him to relinquish guns upon formal charges being filed. He has a .357, and he’ll be ordered to give it up.”
Doug folded his arms and told Osten, “You know better than that.”
“What?” Clara asked.
Doug gave her a look. “It’s not that Brayton can’t have guns. It’s just that it will be illegal for him to have them. The law doesn’t change what a man will do. It was illegal for him to beat his wife, to threaten Greer.”
In the hallway, Osten told Ben, Bella, and Ardy how the gaps were filled. “It’s already been verified by Seattle PD. They’ve got a woman claiming things that are matching up. They dispatched a street officer and say she sounds a little amped up over this, too.”
“Like, now?” Ben asked. “This is happening right now?”
“Right now. They took a statement from her. They have her ripped, bloody dress with dirt stains on it.”
Ardy whistled. “You think it’s her? The wife?”
“It’s her, verified.”
There was more joshing about killing.
“Enough,” Ardy said. “Brayton. Where’s he live?”
Osten hesitated, then nodded, waving toward the east. “Way the other side of town, ten miles from here as the crow flies, at least fifteen miles to drive. That newer gated development with the cul-de-sacs that back right up to that far piece of state land.”
Ardy nodded. “Okay. What’s his car look like?”
Osten pursed his lips and nodded at Ben and Ryan. “It looks like mine. A Chevy Tahoe and a GMC Yukon look almost identical. His is black.”
Ben winced, realizing why Osten’s personal car at the house had provoked Greer into hyperventilating.
“A big dark SUV?” Maddie frowned. “You know, the night Greer was lost, I saw a vehicle like that driving by. It was before Greer came home, but not long before.”
Ryan whistled. “Wow. The fucker drove by this place. Now I really do want to kill the guy.”
“We should definitely get him,” Ben agreed. “He hurt Greer, threatened him.”
Bella shook her head. “Don’t even joke about it anymore. That’s not how we want to be measured.”
Osten too got fed up with their talk of killing and told them all to shut up about it. He left, telling Ben to calm things down.
Ben nodded but wondered how far to trust. Could a bureaucracy, a state system that meant to punish a person for transgressions like Harold Brayton’s, measure up? No, that’s all. No. But the vigilantism requisite in righting a wrong, preventing expected future damage, was a barrier beyond which almost none tread. They were Donners and they talked rough, but they didn’t harm.
Every time anyone talked about how extraordinary it was, how awful things had been for Greer, how surprising it was that Harold Brayton was a wife beater, Caroline came back to one question.
“But how could that woman leave a boy in the woods alone with a man like that?”
Emma still marveled about the bank president as the room crowded and quieted at turns. “Why would anyone do something like that? He’s come into the coffee shop, seemed like a regular guy.”
Ben shrugged. “But maybe you never really know someone.”
“You know them,” Doug said, shaking his head while Maddie nodded. “You spend enough time, you can see all sides, even when there’s a part they keep hidden most of the time.”
Ben wanted to explain it to him, and this was the most Doug had offered on the subject. “But maybe you can never see it all. There are parts you see but you never, ever see it all. Ever seen the back of the moon?”
“It sees me,” Doug said. “It’s got my back, all the time.”
CHAPTER 23
Gillian cast about and opened her palms as she paced the bedroom, seeking an analogy, some way to explain herself to her husband. “You scheme and plan for how to travel to Mars. It won’t happen in your lifetime, right? Your life’s work, what you really want, it will never happen and yet you go on. You go to the U and work for something you’ll never get. How do you do that? And why?”
Paul gave a crooked grin. “Getting to Mars probably isn’t the difficulty. Rather like getting to the moon in the sixties. They figured out how they could get there, good theory, good science.”
“Getting to the moon wasn’t the problem?”
“No. The difficulty was getting back.”
Getting back. Coming out the other side. Coming home. Gillian closed her eyes. “So you won’t get back from Mars. Not in your lifetime.”
He nodded assent. “Probably not. Things happen, things change. Fresh minds, new ideas. We’ll see, won’t we? Time will tell.”
“And if time has told?” she said, her voice dull as she eyed him.
“What aren’t you telling me?” He gave one downward nod of his head, asking.
Sorrow shook her voice. “It’s not what you planned. It’s not what I planned on either,” she said in a rush. “I know people with bad parents can make bad parents and I didn’t want to do that. It’s just too much of a risk, I always thought. For me. Becky managed. That seemed like enough. But I want, I want my own …” She stopped, embarrassed at her keening.
Silent Paul. He waited for the other shoe to drop, his face serious and patient.
“I want a child.” And she wept with shame at her longing. She couldn’t see him, how he responded, because her eyes were closed.
“Oh, Gillian.”
As desire built, she’d come to feel it would break her if she didn’t heed the call. She’d thought admitting it out loud for the first time might break her as well. She repeated the four words to see if they were just as painful on the second try. “I want a child.”
The want bore so deeply, Gillian sank onto their bed and bawled. Paul cleared his throat. He pressed his face into her hair. He pressed his body against hers and stroked her back.
“It’s not what you planned on,” Gillian said, once her voice was level. “Certainly not what I … oh, I never knew I’d want one, ache for one. I k
now you don’t want one. You knew you didn’t, before we ever met. And I certainly didn’t before. I was afraid of the idea. I stayed away from it on purpose. I didn’t ever want to want one. But … I do. I want a child. I want a child.”
She had so long rejected the idea, it was gutting to transfer the forbidden into a must-have.
As forbidden as indiscretion was in Paul Cohen’s world, incomplete discussion ranked worse. He would talk it to death, but she’d already thought it through.
Now he told Gillian how she’d hurt him. “And you wouldn’t even discuss your thoughts with me, your desires.”
“You’d be in your seventies by the time a kid hit college.”
“Maybe I could get him out of high school in three years. And maybe she could skip a year of elementary school. Maybe he’d take summer school. Like I did.” Paul smiled wider with each suggestion. “Enough of those tricks and we could get him-her graduated almost before she-he is born.”
She pushed herself away from him, searching his face for understanding.
He smiled, gave a slight dip of his chin, and explained, “Well, I did it. Went to college at sixteen. My child could, too … if I had one.”
“You would consider having a child?” Gillian was openmouthed in shock.
He nodded, a twisted grin playing at the corners of his lips.
She shook her head in disbelief. “Have you ever considered it? Having one? Being a father?”
“Well, I’ve considered that I’m married to a thirty-three-year-old woman who looks as fertile as anything and is a natural mother.”
She shook her head furiously, derailed by this unexpected direction of the baby conversation, the revelations. “I am not a natural mother, except maybe a naturally bad mother. I would be terrible, you know.”
Laughter shook him.
“Please, don’t,” Gillian asked.
“Ah, well, as a selling point, you might have skipped that self-assessment, endearingly inaccurate as it is.”
“Oh, I’m an ass.”
“Gillian, my Gillian. Why didn’t you talk to me? Couldn’t you?”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t. I couldn’t ask you. I couldn’t face myself, my want. Not for the longest time. My parents …” Perhaps experiencing a lack of love as a child was an account that could never be corrected, but the loss did not have to direct the future, and it was better if it didn’t.
Paul held her as they talked now and she clung right back, listening to his heartbeat, his words. “So you kept this inside, kept this from me, from us?”
“I was dead wrong,” she admitted, seeing it all clearly now.
“Why did you finally face it? What helped you try?”
“This thing with Liz pushed me over the edge, I think.”
“This thing with Liz? Her screaming and getting so upset?”
ePaul’s face straightened to grave severity. “How much of your dread is coming from your experience with your parents?”
“Oh. Umm …” Her long, soft exhalation felt like the beginning of absolution. “All of it, I suppose.”
“You would be, you will be, an immeasurably better parent than either of them. You are not them.”
“That’s what I hope, but I’m terrified. And yet, I don’t want to miss my chance.” She was babbling now and took a deep breath to try to get clearer.
“Your chance?”
“I want a child.”
“Listen to me, Gillian, my love. We can have a child.”
She cried. It had never seemed in the realm of possibility. Not with her iron outlook, her wants that she confused with needs, her wants and needs that she ignored. And not with Paul, not ever with Paul. He was over fifty, had made his choice before they met.
Oh, Paul, how badly have I mistaken you? She felt crimson and drained. “I didn’t think it was possible for us.”
“Ah, but we’re Silly-Philly’s godparents. It’s no small thing. It’s a willingness to be parents.”
“Ah,” she said, deciding that she liked using this Paul-speak. Liked sinking to the bed and pressing into him. “You really are a kind, generous person. More than I deserve.”
“Gillian, you deserve your happiness.”
“I … love you.”
He responded immediately. “I love you.”
“I know. I never doubted that. I made the mistake of my life in not appreciating you. It was so wrong, I—” She lurched to her feet, grabbed the phone, shaking it, momentarily stuck for words with the thought.
“What?” Paul asked.
“I was so wrong.” Then she called the police and asked where the officer who had been to their house took Liz and her child.
“To a women’s shelter, ma’am,” the dispatcher said. “We do not disclose that address.”
“I’ve made a terrible mistake,” Gillian said. “Please let her know she is welcome here. We’ll come get her or she can jump in a cab and we’ll pay for it when she gets here. She’s very welcome here. Please tell her.”
She hung up after the dispatcher promised to relay the message, and she cried without tears, shaking and hiccupping as she told Paul.
“Is there anything else we can do?” he asked, pulling her close to sit on the bed.
She shook her head. “We have to wait.” Like waiting for a photo to develop, she thought.
An hour later, drowsing in Paul’s arms, she rose to her feet again. There was something she could do. She dug into her purse for the envelope with the Hellman award. She turned the check over and started to sign it payable to Liz.
“What’s her last name, Paul?”
He wasn’t there. He’d gone downstairs to open the garage door and meet the cab. She heard their low voices on the studio steps.
“There was no hurricane,” Gillian said when he finally came back.
“Her own personal kind of disaster,” Paul said.
“Yes,” Gillian agreed.
“You know that godparent thing? Liz asked. She seems to think her world is about over and she asked me if we’d take care of her kids—did you know she’s pregnant?—if something happened to her.”
“What? What did you say?”
“I …” He rubbed the back of his neck, bowing his head. “I didn’t know what to say and—”
“And?”
“And I said yes.” He gave her a helpless look.
“You said yes,” Gillian repeated, feeling her pounding head relent. He said yes to her as well, yes to the impossible.
“You know Myron and Becky are trying to have another?” Paul said. “Get you rolling and I’ll have three pregnant women in my life. What could be better?”
Gillian roared at that and wiped away the tears in the corners of her eyes.
He explained how the police in some podunk little town two hours away on the peninsula needed to re-interview Liz, but matters were settling. The Seattle police officer helped her get a restraining order that temporarily banned the abusive husband from coming to Paul and Gillian’s property.
Gillian thought about Liz using Paul’s last name, disappearing here in Seattle, ridding herself of the car, not using the credit cards or iPhone, subsisting on a bit of cash Paul provided, and finding an under-the-table job. Hiding. She nodded as he talked about being more involved in his stepsister’s life, about her needing family, and about how they had to get to the bottom of what was going on with her, see what she needed, help the lost lamb before they helped themselves forward.
She zipped up the steps to tell Liz that they cared and to give her the envelope with the check.
The baby was asleep.
“William,” Liz told Gillian. “I called him Billy. My husband called him Bit. He called me Bitsy.”
It didn’t sound nice, the way she said it.
“Do you know what I did?” Liz asked. “Do you get it?”
Gillian shook her head and extended one hand to Liz’s shoulder.
“When my husband caught me trying to leave, I ended up tra
pped on a dead-end dirt road in the forest and a boy came out of the woods and allowed me to escape.”
Gillian shook her head. “I really don’t understand that.”
Liz had tears in her eyes. “I didn’t either. But I know now I left him there. I left the boy. I left him there alone with my husband, who was in a rage. He got into such rages. I have to talk to that boy’s people. I don’t know how I’ll face them, but I have to. The policeman said that the boy is okay, but I don’t know how I …”
Gillian hugged Liz. “I’ll go with you, if you like.”
“You would do that?”
“Of course. Don’t think about it. Don’t worry. You’re home and safe and we can talk again in the morning.”
Paul surprised her at the bottom of the steps. “It stopped raining. Can we go outside and check the stars?”
“Of course.” She hadn’t gone with him to look at the sky in so long.
Paul got blankets and they spent hours in the two chaise lounges. And now as they shared the night, she also talked of her want for a child, and he floored her again with his willingness, his commitment to her.
When they were first together, they used to bundle up and he’d point out those natural satellites by the dozen, telling her names that very few people knew.
Avraham and Yakov Tulchinskaya. Garik Reiner. Igor. Stefan David. Yad Vashem was right to want the names remembered. At last sure of her future, Gillian found power, enough to return to the Istoks’ past.
She drove past the bow shop at a crawl, saw Alex in the window, and went straight to the Istok house.
“It is you I’ve come to see,” Gillian told Agnes, pounding on the front door again, shouting back to the drunken hollers of “He’s not here.” She held the Bantam Anastigmat in one hand, ready to take as long as necessary for understanding.
Agnes opened the door, wiping her mouth, then turning away.
“Please,” Gillian called, shutting the door as she followed the woman into the house. They ended up in the living room, on the couches.