by Andrew Hart
“It doesn’t matter,” said Josh, feeling another spike of anger. “Call me. Anytime. I have to know what’s going on with Vron. OK?”
“OK.” She hesitated, then added, “You didn’t call from the airport.”
“What?”
“Usually you call from the airport after you’ve gone through security and you’re waiting at the gate. You usually check in. Today, you didn’t.”
“And?”
He thought he heard her sigh, though it might have just been the line.
“Nothing,” she said. “I’ll phone when I know what’s going on.”
“OK,” he said. “And this other stuff about Oaklynn . . .”
“I know,” she said. “Bye.”
The line went dead. Josh hung up but didn’t pocket the phone right away. For a moment, he stood where he was, gazing back to the hotel restaurant he had left when his cell had rung, where Mary Beth Wilson was sitting, toying with her salad. He frowned, thinking back to the moment he had been pulling out of the driveway only to meet Oaklynn coming in the opposite direction. He had been taken aback, having not even noticed Anna’s car was gone. Oaklynn had waved and, as he was about to drive away, had wound done her window and said, “Have a great trip. Say hi to everyone for me.”
He had nodded and smiled as she shut the window and pulled past, so that he had been on the road to the airport before he had processed the oddity of what she had said. Say hi to whom for her? As far as she knew, he was going to a meeting in New York with a bunch of financial managers she had never laid eyes on.
Unless . . .
Unless she had other ideas about what he was doing, though how she could have gotten them, he couldn’t say.
The possibility had bothered him, so much so that he had considered calling the house to ask her what she had meant. Fortunately, he had come to his senses, realizing that any such conversation would have been a stupid overreaction that might raise any number of awkward questions. He had resolved to stay on Oaklynn’s good side, to bring her a little memento of the Big Apple: show her she was like family to him. Just in case. He needed her to think of him as a friend, not just the husband of her employer.
Now, standing in the hotel lobby with his cell phone in his hand, he wondered dully if his determination to be nice to Oaklynn had influenced the way he had reacted to Anna’s off-the-wall suspicions.
“Everything all right?” said Mary Beth, considering him shrewdly as he approached.
Josh blinked, unsure, then nodded.
“Not sure,” he said.
Chapter Thirty-Two
ANNA
I hung up the phone and sat quite still for a moment. I had driven through the neighborhood to where I had pulled over to make the call in front of yet another partially constructed house as soon as I saw I was getting a usable signal. Now I drove back to the house, steeled myself as if I were about to step onto a stage, and got out.
At the back door, I had to steady my hand to make the keys work.
“Only me,” I called as soon as I had the back door open.
Oaklynn appeared at the foot of the stairs with unusual speed, as if she had already seen the car.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“I’m going to take Gracie with me,” I said. “She’s spooked by all this stuff with Veronica, so . . .”
Oaklynn’s smile had a fixed, catlike quality.
“So . . . ?” she pressed.
It was unlike her.
“I just want to keep her with me,” I said, feeling the blood rush to my face.
“She’s practically asleep. Seems a shame to get her up now.”
“Even so,” I said, holding her eyes and smiling with an effort. For a moment that went on just a fraction of a second too long, she just looked back at me, and I was afraid she was going to say, “Even so . . . what?”
Then she shrugged and turned half away, saying, with none of her usual sweetness, “You’re the boss.”
Yes, I thought. I am, holding on to that simple truth as Oaklynn trudged pointedly through the laborious steps of getting Grace ready. I didn’t need a reason to take my daughter with me.
“Why don’t I come with?” Oaklynn suggested.
“No,” I said, trying to make it sound like that would be too much to ask. “You stay home and have a break.”
“I don’t need a break,” she said, the smile back now but taut and fragile as spun sugar.
“Sure you do,” I said. “Everyone does. Put your feet up.”
“I can drive, or hold Gracie while you go see Vronny . . .”
“It’s fine, really,” I said.
“It’s no trouble.”
“I want to do this by myself,” I blurted. Immediately, there was a wariness in Oaklynn’s eyes, a watchfulness. “I don’t mean that you aren’t welcome, or wouldn’t be another time, but . . . Well, I just feel . . . you know, like I’ve been doing my own thing a lot lately. I need to feel, you know, more like Mommy again. You understand, right?”
“You want me to stay home,” she said, her face blank, unreadable but quite unlike her usual self. I took an involuntary half step back.
“Just this once,” I said.
Her eyes were fixed on mine, her fists clenched. I felt a powerful and irrational urge to run, to take my baby daughter and sprint for the car, but her gaze held me like a bug in amber. And then, without warning, the fixed, blank stare, the tension in her face and body that made her look poised to explode, all drained away, and she was her old charmingly innocent and sweet self again.
“I could cook,” she suggested brightly.
“What?”
“While you are gone. I could make dinner. That would help, yeah? Golly, I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before!”
She grinned wide as ever, and I took a steadying breath, suddenly wondering if I was being paranoid and that all my vague doubts were just the projections of my own guilt, as Josh had implied. Either way, I wanted to be gone.
“That would be great!” I said, seizing on the notion as I would on anything that would end the conversation and get me and my daughter out of the house. “Perfect.”
“Alrighty then,” said Oaklynn, all smiles. “Let’s see what I can rustle up.”
I drove back to the hospital in a daze, parking and rushing through to the ER in a harried state of distraction that drew the eyes of nurses and patients alike, as if I might have been a strangely well-dressed but clearly delusional homeless person or an opioid addict looking for a score. The only difference was that I had an infant asleep in my arms, though maybe that wasn’t so unusual for homeless people and addicts either.
“Anna Klein,” I said when the perky receptionist asked for my name. “My daughter Veronica got cut this morning . . .”
“Yes, I remember,” she said, giving me a plaintive smile that didn’t help quell my anxiety. Why did she remember me? Did she know something about Veronica’s injury? Or had the staff been discussing me? My negligence?
“Have a seat, and we’ll call you back as soon as we’re ready,” she concluded.
I dithered for a moment, then scanned the institutional chairs and chose one at least two seats away from the nearest person, avoiding the watchful gaze of a grandmotherly black woman in a thick coat and heavy winter boots and a stick-thin white woman who kept rubbing her hands together in a worryingly obsessive way. Her fingers looked almost raw. I fumbled with the rolling bag for something to do, wishing it wasn’t a bright, cheery pink.
“You got a plane to catch, honey?” asked the grandmother lazily.
“What?” I said, starting in my seat as if poked.
“The bag,” she said. “You got a plane to catch?”
For a second, her face was blank. Then the corner of her mouth twitched to show she was joking.
“Oh,” I said. “It’s my daughter’s. She’s . . . she likes it.”
“Uh-huh,” said the woman noncommittally. “They sure take their time around here.
I been here forty-eight minutes now. You believe that? Forty-eight minutes. I don’t even want to know what it will cost.”
I nodded vaguely, not wanting to talk, but she didn’t take the hint.
“How old is your daughter?” she asked, considering Grace, unsmiling.
“A year,” I said.
“What’s wrong with her?”
“Nothing. We’re here to pick up her sister.”
The woman nodded.
“She’s cute,” said the woman, finally breaking down and beaming.
“Thanks,” I said, suddenly more grateful than made any sense, looking away quickly so the woman wouldn’t see the tears in my eyes.
“You OK, hon?” she asked.
I nodded quickly, but the tears rolled down my face.
“Hey, there,” she said, suddenly concerned, leaning over and taking my hand in hers. It was brown and gnarled with age, the skin fine and soft as paper. “Your little girl, the sick one, tell me about her.”
“She cut herself on a slide,” I said. “In the park. Her hand got cut.”
“Uh-huh. But I mean, tell me about her. What’s her name?”
“Veronica,” I said, not sure why I was doing this.
“I thought it would be one of those Asian names,” she said matter-of-factly. “Veronica. That’s a nice, regular name. And what does she like to do?”
I blinked, swallowing down my indignation, then forced myself to tell her about the Leapfrog game pad that she liked to play because of the animal noises and the alphabet keys.
“She sounds smart,” said the woman, whose name I still did not know. I nodded, then, like a child myself, and forgiving her previous insensitivity, I showed her Lamby and the other things I had brought from home. I knew the woman didn’t really care and was just trying to get me to focus on a positive version of my daughter so that I wouldn’t fixate on her injuries. She nodded and asked questions, her hand still clamped to mine, and I answered and nodded and finally smiled, though my cheeks were still wet with tears. They had been tears of anxiety and stress and fear—maybe some anger, too—but now they were mostly gratitude, and by the time I was called back to see Veronica, I turned to the woman I did not know and hugged her.
She nodded, consulted her watch, and, her face stiffening again, observed, “Fifty-four minutes. What do you think about that?”
It was a rhetorical question, and she followed it by shaking her head, then nodding toward the open door where the nurse was hovering, waiting for me.
“How is she?” I asked before I even reached her.
“The doctor will be by in a moment to talk to you . . .”
“But how is she? How is her hand?”
The nurse hesitated a moment, took in my bleary, red-rimmed eyes, and lowered her voice as she led me back toward a simple room surrounded by a plastic curtain such as might fit an overgrown shower stall.
“The doctor will explain everything, but she’s going to be fine.”
So saying, she parted the curtain, and there was Veronica, pale but sitting up in bed, her hand raised to shoulder height and dressed with a bandage from palm to elbow. Her eyes brightened as she saw me, and then I was wrapping her in my arms and squeezing her to my heart.
Chapter Thirty-Three
“She’s really OK?” said Josh into his phone. “Oh, thank God.”
“The doc wants to check on her in a couple of weeks,” said Anna, “sooner if she develops any stiffness or pain in her fingers, but he sees no reason she should. She has full mobility of the hand,” she added, clearly quoting. “I have new dressings to apply, but he said it was a very clean cut. They used those dissolving sutures so we don’t have to come back to have stitches removed. I have an appointment in his office in two weeks.”
“Thank God,” Josh said again. There didn’t seem to be anything else to say. He heard Anna’s exhalation of relief. “Where are you now?”
“Still at the hospital. About to head home.”
“And Oaklynn?”
“She’s back at the house.”
“With Grace?”
“No, I have Grace with me.”
Josh frowned.
“Anna?”
“It’s OK,” she said, her usual self now. “I know I freaked, but it’s fine.”
“Really? Because if you can’t trust Oaklynn around the kids, we need to talk seriously about sending her back to Utah . . .”
That was, he was aware, slightly underhanded. Anna’s former nutso idea had faded, but in voicing the real possibility of sending Oaklynn back, he knew she would panic and run in the opposite direction. It was a low strategy, but he used it, anyway, because her freak-out had infected him, distracted him from the things he desperately needed to be focused on. He was, albeit subtly and only for a moment, punishing her.
“No,” she said, quick, certain, and a little scared. “I was being crazy before. I see that. Oaklynn loves the girls. She wouldn’t do anything to hurt them. I was just . . . I don’t know.”
“You were worried and stressed.”
“And wanted someone to blame,” said Anna.
He heard the self-condemnation in her voice and relented.
“Someone was to blame,” he consoled. “It was a perfectly understandable response.”
Well, mostly.
“How are things there?” Anna asked.
“Oh, you know,” he said breezily. “Fine.”
Again, mostly. Or rather, he qualified in his head. Partly.
“You have plans for the rest of the day?” he added, covering.
“Oaklynn was talking about going to BJ’s.”
“So I will come home to find you making a fort out of a hundred cans of beets.”
“I hear they go well with Tuscan chicken,” she said.
The joke pleased him, made him feel more like she really was herself again, and he felt bad for making that crack about sending Oaklynn back to Utah. That would never happen, he thought, his heart sinking. She would be in the house forever, or as long as Anna wanted to keep her. Whatever Oaklynn knew or thought she knew would be in her eyes every time she looked at him.
Have a great trip, she had said. Say hi to everyone for me.
“Let us know when you’re getting in, and we’ll make sure we have something nice on the table,” said Anna.
“Great,” he replied, refocusing. “I’ll look forward to it. But I do have to go now. Meeting.”
“Yes,” she said. “Go do your thing.”
He listened for a trace of irony, bitterness, or uncertainty, but hearing none felt like he had dodged a bullet. It was a miserable thought.
“Will do,” he said, squeezing his eyes shut. “And thanks for calling. I’m so glad that everything is OK.”
It wasn’t, of course. Not for him. But Anna couldn’t know that. Not yet. He just had to make sure she didn’t find out from someone else first.
Chapter Thirty-Four
ANNA
I was feeing fine—good even—as I led Veronica back through the hospital, holding her unbandaged hand and cradling Grace in the sling around my neck as we came back through the reception area. That was when I saw Oaklynn. She was surrounded by staff—at least two nurses and a receptionist—and she looked like she had been crying. One of the nurses—the blonde one whose name I couldn’t remember—had laced an arm around her shoulders consolingly. When she saw me, the nurse’s face hardened, and she stood up.
“Hi,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” said Oaklynn, “I couldn’t stay away. I felt so terrible . . .”
“She is such a treasure,” said Nurse Alysha to me smilingly.
I nodded in agreement but knew I still looked confused.
“How did you get here?” I asked.
“I took a cab,” she replied, to a chorus of sympathetic Awws. The blonde nurse squeezed her arm, as if to express how hard it must have been for her.
“I thought you were making dinner,” I said.
It was a ter
rible thing to say, which I realized as soon as the words were out of my mouth, but I had only meant to ask why she had come, though I suppose she had already answered that.
She couldn’t stay away.
In any case, the blonde nurse gave me a frosty stare and said, “She was worried about your daughter. She’s obviously very close to the child. She’s not just an employee.”
I felt my head jerk back a fraction as if she had slapped me, and for a moment, I just gaped.
“I didn’t mean . . . I know that . . . ,” I faltered.
“I know,” said Oaklynn hurriedly, giving me a teary smile to dull the edge of the daggers the nurses were looking at me.
“I shouldn’t have asked you to stay home,” I added, catching something of her overwrought emotional wobbliness. I suddenly felt very tired. “I was just feeling . . .”
“It’s fine,” said Oaklynn. “I totally get it. Really. Now, where’s my brave girl?”
She dropped to her knees, and Veronica launched herself into Oaklynn’s outstretched arms. Oaklynn’s face shone with tears of happiness and relief. When it was done, Oaklynn squatted down on the floor with her hands on my daughter’s shoulders, gazing at her till she giggled. As they hugged, the nurses eyed me coolly over her hunched shoulders.
See? they seemed to say. Fancy excluding Oaklynn. The child loves her. But then, who wouldn’t? She’s such a treasure . . .
I nodded and smiled and tried to look like I was part of the domestic tableau, and then I announced that we should go, and the nurses hugged Oaklynn again and said they hoped she felt better and how nice it had been to chat with her. I felt a prickle of anxiety at this. What had they been talking about? About the circumstances of the accident? About me?
As we drove home, I watched her out of the corner of my eye as I told her all the doctor had said—she would, after all, have to help change the dressing—and Oaklynn nodded, never taking her beaming eyes off Victoria’s face all the way home.
“Dinner is almost ready,” she said as we walked in the door.
“Oh,” I said. “I assumed you hadn’t had time.”
“Did most of the work before I came back to the hospital,” Oaklynn remarked.