Good as Gone (29 page)

Finally, the front-desk matron emerges with a plastic bag holding my clothes and purse. I poke through the bag and sign the papers. Then I take everything into a visitors’ restroom, change back into my street clothes, fold the blue prison scrubs neatly in a pile. I reemerge looking something like myself again.

Tom smiles.

As I set the stack of prison pajamas on the front desk, I wonder if this is it for Tom and me. If he can smile this easily at the sight of me looking like I did before, before all this happened, if he can so quickly forget the image of me as a prisoner, then he is always going to misunderstand who I am and what I am.

We exit into the bright sunlight. The sun is beating down on the Commerce Street port, and the air is scalding hot.

“Do you think Janie will come home?” I ask, thinking of her first date with the guy on the kickball team. I haven’t heard how it went. I resisted telling her to meet at a public place, to let a friend know where they were going.

Tom looks uncomfortable. “She’s staying up there for a while longer, Anna. She really wants to get back on track, finish all those incompletes and show her professors she can tough it out.” He sighs. “I’m sorry. You know Janie.”

I do know Janie. The incompletes were nothing more than a cry for attention, but she has terrible timing. Jane functions well under duress, gravitates toward drama, and can be generous as long as no one expects her to be. Then, when the waters still and her dramatics would be entertaining, she’s back to her own world. I think of all the journals. “Wait for it. She’ll switch her major to creative writing before the year is out.”

“Why do you say that?”

“She’ll want to start working on her memoirs.”

Tom laughs, still a little uneasy, as we get into the SUV. We make our way to I-10, the churning of the air conditioner at full blast filling the silence. It’s a little past six, and the rush from downtown has mostly cleared, but when we hit Loop 610, the backup begins. The lowering sun, undaunted by our visors, beats down through the windshield, and the tinting in the back windows only seems to trap the heat. As we slow almost to a standstill somewhere around the Voss exit, the air conditioner, losing velocity from the incoming wind, thumps down a notch in intensity and gives a faint rattle. I wonder if this is going to be the summer the A/C gives out on us. This is the stretch of road where that type of thing always happens.

Suddenly, I say, “Pull the car over.”

“We’re getting off at the next exit.”

“Pull over now!”

He puts on his blinker. Traffic is sluggish, but he cuts across three lanes, nosing over and waving his hand like a flag in front of the rearview mirror. As soon as the tires thunk onto the shoulder, I open the door and Tom slams on the brakes as I stumble out. My stomach heaves up into my mouth and out onto the pavement.

There’s not a lot in there, I’ve barely been eating, but I heave and heave. My vision goes red in the heat, and then black, and then Tom is there, on his knees behind me, with his big arms around me, supporting me. Waves of heat that reek of gasoline and vomit are coming up off the pavement, each one bringing a fresh wave of spasms with it, but his hands on me are warmer still. After a moment, I sink back into him like an armchair, and he settles down under my weight, and we sit together on the gravel at the side of the freeway.

“She left us, Tom,” I say, but my voice disappears in the roadside symphony of honking horns and Doppler effects. He continues to smooth my hair back over my sweating temple, but now, despite the heat, I am shivering, cold and hot at the same time. I pull away from him, turn toward his face. I say it louder, but he shakes his head, still not hearing. Finally, I lean toward him and force my mouth to open wide and I yell at the top of my lungs,
“Julie left!”

This time he understands, but shakes his head back and forth in response. “Come on!” he shouts, and starts to make his way to standing, holding out one hand to me and gesturing toward the car with the other.

But yelling has freed something in me that was pressed into the dingy little cage of a jail cell for the past week. Julie’s deposition is still banging around inside me, and if I don’t let it out, it will punch holes in my lungs, and I’ll drown.
“Tom!”
I yell. “She
left!
”

“I know!” he shouts back.

“How can you be so calm?” I demand.

“Come on, Anna, get in the car!”

But it’s easier to scream out here, and this is something I want to scream. “What kind of mother am I, Tom? I didn’t know her at all!”

“What do you want me to do about it?” he yells back. “I didn’t either!”

“But I’m the
mother!
”

“Yes, you’re the mother!” he yells. “You’re the mother, and she needs you right now. So let’s get in the car, for God’s sake, and go home and yell it at
her!
”

The adrenaline drains out of me, and I follow him to the Range Rover and get in, feeling the car shudder as the traffic going past starts to pick up. The quiet when we shut the doors feels profound.

“You read the deposition?” I say in a voice that is only slightly hoarse.

“I didn’t need to read it. I was there to hear most of it.”

“How could I have been so blind? How could I have missed all that? It’s like I didn’t know her at all.” I can’t let the tears prickle up one more time today, so I press them down. “I know I’ve been broken since it happened. I know I’ve been awful with Jane. But I thought—before that, I mean—I thought everything was good. I thought I was a good mother.”

There’s a long silence. Then he says, “I think it would have been good enough, Anna. But we’ll never know now. None of us know who we would have been. He took that away from us.”

Tom starts the engine, puts on his blinker, and forces the car out into the Houston traffic. He’s a wonderfully aggressive driver.

When we’re moving again, he says, “Can I confess something?” I wait. “I wish it had been me who shot Maxwell.”

I picture Tom the night Julie had her miscarriage, standing with the gun in his hand as I punched my fist through the bathroom door to get to my daughter. Then I lean over and take his hand.

There’s a car parked outside our house, and when we walk in the door, Julie is sitting at the kitchen table with an African American man in a T-shirt and jeans. As soon as we walk in the door, he stands up.

“Mom, Dad, this is Cal,” Julie says.

“Mr. Whitaker.” Cal extends a hand to Tom, who takes it, though he looks a bit bewildered. Cal is almost a head shorter than Tom, but he doesn’t seem as if he’s craning his neck up to meet Tom’s gaze. “Glad to meet you,” says Tom, and I can see Cal scoping me out from the corner of his eye before turning to me.

“Dr. Davalos,” he says. Julie must have schooled him in how to address me.

“I understand you helped Julie out of a tough situation,” I say to Cal.

“You did too,” he says, simply and warmly.

I wonder,
Is this the rest of my life? Are all of Julie’s men going to have to live up to me? And do any of them know she was poised with her gun, ready to kill? Do they know what I really saved her from?

People have a lack of imagination about women like Julie and what they’re capable of. I was guilty of it myself once. I know better now, of course. But I would never disabuse the men in her life, the Toms and Cals, of the notion that Julie needs protecting. Fostering that illusion is part of how she’s survived this long. To take away that coping mechanism before it has outlived its usefulness would be cruel.

Cal looks to be older than her, though it’s hard to tell how much since his skin is unwrinkled everywhere but around his eyes when he smiles. I wonder if he will be with her on the day she outgrows the useful illusion of her frailty and how he will react if he’s still around. It might be a long time before that happens, a lifetime, even. I may not live to see it myself.

Meanwhile, it’ll be our secret.

“It’s very nice to meet you, Cal. Now, would you and Tom mind if I talked to Julie for a few minutes?” I ask. “Alone.”

Tom says, “I was just going to run up to the grocery store and get some stuff for dinner. Why don’t you come along, Cal. We can get to know each other.”

“Sure,” Cal says after a backward glance at Julie, who nods. The two men walk out of the kitchen.

When they have been gone for a full thirty seconds, I look at my daughter. I don’t know what I’m expecting. A revelation? To find out what color her eyes are, once and for all? I see the same woman I’ve been looking at for the past month, as much of a mystery to me as ever.

“Why didn’t you come back?” I ask. “After you escaped from Maxwell. Why didn’t you come home?”

There’s a long pause. “I wanted to. I was going to. But it seemed like once he—did that to me, nothing went the way it was supposed to. Things kept happening.”

I know some of the things she is talking about, and I don’t want her to have to repeat them. At the same time, I don’t want to shut her down, ever again. So I wait patiently, and after a moment, she goes on, giving me a strange look that I can’t really interpret. “Besides, I didn’t know whether you’d want me back.”

I choke on my next words. “How can you say that?”

“I thought you’d be mad,” she says with a weird smile. “I hated Julie. She was stupid and gullible. And she left you.”

“You were only a child. He took you.”

“He took me,” she agrees. “But to me, it felt like I was leaving on my own.”

“That’s what he wanted you to think.”

“And there was Charlotte. She was dead, and I was scared it was my fault.”

“He wanted you to think that too.”

“Well, he was good at it. Or I was good at believing it.” She shrugs, giving up. “Anyway, I’m not sure it makes me feel any better if I didn’t have a choice. If that’s true, if I was just a random victim, then my life was ruined for no reason at all.”

That, of course, is what I have always believed. I don’t say it, but she can see me thinking it.

“You’ve never believed in God. I don’t think Jane does either. Maybe Dad doesn’t care either way. But it was different for me; I wanted to find something out there. I still do, I just don’t know the word for it.”

“Transcendence?” I say. “There’s no such thing.”

“But maybe there is,” she says. “I don’t know. Think of all those people at the Gate.”

“I’d rather not.”

“But you have to,” she says. “You have to. What are they looking for? Why are they so happy there? Where else could they find that kind of happiness?”

“Poetry,” I say. “Music. Art.”

“That’s not enough for everyone. It wasn’t enough for me.”

Her face looks sad and eager at the same time, and I suddenly recognize a glimmer of an expression I remember from her childhood. I never knew what it was before. It reminds me of something.

“‘Not in entire forgetfulness, / And not in utter nakedness, / But trailing clouds of glory do we come.’” I almost stop there, but for Julie’s sake, I finish: “‘From God, who is our home.’ Wordsworth.”

“Why do you have to put quotation marks around it to understand it?”

“All I have is other people’s words, Julie.”

They are, at present, failing me. After another long moment of silence, it occurs to me to that I have nothing to lose by just asking. “You came back for Maxwell, because you saw that magazine profile, okay. But you didn’t have to come back as Julie. If you were worried about being blamed for what happened with Charlotte, why didn’t you just leave an anonymous tip for the police and let them take care of it? Why did you come back to us after so long when you knew you would have to lie?” I take a deep breath. “Was it the money? It’s okay if it was.”

She looks up, startled, with china-blue eyes. “I missed you,” she says.

The worst doesn’t unhappen, but just like that, I am home.

The love and support of friends and family made this book possible. I’d like to extend special thanks to the members of my extraordinarily talented and committed writing group, Alissa Zachary, Linden Kueck, Victoria Rossi, Dan Solomon, and Paul Stinson; to Martin Kohout and his late wife, Heather Kohout, for the time I spent working on this novel at Madroño Ranch in Medina, Texas; to my agent, Sharon Pelletier at Dystel & Goderich Literary Management, for her infectious enthusiasm for this project; to Lauren Abramo at DGLM for tirelessly representing me overseas; and to Tim Mudie, my editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, for guiding me patiently and insightfully through the exciting process of turning my words into a book. We did it! Biggest and best thanks are reserved for my husband, Curtis Luciani, for encouraging me to write a novel in the first place, believing in me when I didn’t think I could do it, and always making sure I had coffee in the morning and a room of my own.

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.

I’m not a morning person. Understatement.

My hand couldn’t seem to muster the energy to turn off the alarm. It picked at the covers. The blanket felt wrong. Scratchy. Thin.