Kiss Her Goodbye (17 page)

“Robby? Are you okay?”

“I'm fine.”

But he isn't. His voice is laced with tension and an odd undercurrent of something else. Anger, maybe? But that doesn't make sense. Why would he be angry with her?

Jen sinks lower in her seat, her fingers reaching toward her left hip to make sure her seat belt is fastened.

She closes her eyes. Her mother's face flits into her mind's eye, and then her father's. Erin's, too.

Yes, and if she does that, she'll lose him. That's for sure.

How much does she care?

He's all you have. He's the only one who cares about you.

All right, she admits in a moment of clarity, Curran and Riley care, too. Her brothers have been watching her with worried expressions these last few weeks, trying unsuccessfully to lure her from her self-imposed exile.

Truth be told, Mom and Dad probably care, too. Despite their lies, despite their hypocrisy, despite the fact that she doesn't even have Dad's blood flowing through her veins, he must care about her. Mom, too. She hasn't missed the anguish in their faces or the hurt in their voices whenever she turns a cold shoulder on their attempts to win her back.

If they knew where she was now, they'd be upset. Upset, and furious.

Until this moment, she wouldn't have cared. Now, for whatever reason, all at once, she does.

This is wrong. All of it. Not just cutting class, but Robby, and—

A blast of sound shatters Jen's thoughts.

A siren.

Robby curses, jerking his gaze to the rearview mirror as Jen turns her head to see a police car emerging from a shrub-sheltered speed trap.

In moments, it's bearing down on them, red light spinning.

For a fleeting second, Jen wonders whether Robby is going to try to outrun the cops.

Then, abruptly, he brakes and pulls to the side of the road.

“You're going to get a ticket,” Jen tells him, her heart pounding. “And we're going to get into trouble for being out of school.”

“Yeah.” He shoots a glance in her direction. “I know that.”

Gone is the devil-may-care swagger. To her surprise, he looks almost . . . relieved?

Relieved to be nailed by the cops?

It doesn't make sense.

Jen frowns, realizing that she doesn't know him nearly as well as she thought.

She only knows that when the stern-faced uniformed police officer appears at the driver's-side window, she, too, is relieved. Their adventure is over.

At least, for the time being.

Kathleen sits bolt upright in bed.

The baby is crying.

Heavy eyelids fluttering closed again, Kathleen automatically swings her legs out from beneath the warm covers, over the edge of the mattress into the inky darkness.

The moment her feet hit the chilly bedroom floor, she's jarred into consciousness.

But. . .

She listens.

The night is still.

Beside her in the bed, Matt is snoring softly, his breathing deep and even. The only other sound she can hear is a water faucet dripping somewhere down the hall, and a faint breeze stirring the leaves outside their bedroom window.

She must have been dreaming again. Dreaming of the long ago nights when the boys and Jen were infants, waking her to nurse at all hours. Funny how the routine comes right back; how maternal instinct is so innate that you will rise to start the familiar sleep walk to the cradle, even when the cradle has been empty for years.

Kathleen settles her exhausted body back beneath the warm blankets.

Just as she is drifting into slumber, another faint cry pierces the night.

Her blood runs cold as she listens to the unmistakable wail of an infant. For a moment, she's paralyzed by fright. Then she clutches the arm of her sleeping husband and whispers frantically, “Matt! Wake up!”

His even breathing disrupted, he is jarred to alertness with a sputtering snore. “What? What is it?”

“Shhh! Listen!”

Silence.

“What?” he asks again.

“I heard something.”

“Probably the wind,” he mutters, rolling over again.

“No!” Kathleen pulls at his T-shirt. “Matt, I'm scared. Please.”

“What did you think you heard?”

“I didn't think I heard it, I know I heard it. It was a baby.”

“You were probably dreaming, Kath. Go back to sleep.”

“I wasn't—”

She breaks off at the sound of another distant cry. The sound is muffled, but it's there.

Matt sits up, his body poised as he listens.

“You heard it, didn't you.” Kathleen clings to his arm.

“I heard it. It's probably one of the neighbors' kids.”

“The windows are closed, Matt. It's November.”

“Kathleen, do you remember how loudly Curran used to scream? Somebody could have been a mile away and—”

“There it is again! Matt!”

“Okay, okay.” He rubs his eyes, swings his legs over the side of the mattress.

“Where are you going?”

“To check on the kids. Maybe one of them is watching TV downstairs or something.”

She nods, shivering beneath the covers, wanting desperately to believe that the sound came from the television. The explanation makes more sense than anything else her brain can conjure.

As she hears his footsteps treading down the stairs, she wonders if it's Jen who's up in the family room. She wouldn't be surprised if her daughter were having trouble sleeping after what happened yesterday.

The vice principal reached Kathleen at home just as she walked in the door after visiting her father. Fifteen minutes later, she was sitting opposite his desk, beside her silent daughter. Jen's eyes looked swollen and red, as though she'd been crying, but by the time Kathleen arrived her face was a sullen mask.

Robby, who had been caught cutting class one too many times, had been suspended. That the vice principal let Jen off with a week's worth of detention seemed generous to Matt when Kathleen broke the news to him over the phone while he was still at work.

“Maybe she needs to be suspended,” was his grim reply. “Maybe that would snap some sense into her.”

When he arrived home, he informed Jen that she would be grounded for an additional four weeks. She would have to give up the babysitting job, and soccer, too, was out of the question now.

Jen's response was a shrug, as though she couldn't care less about soccer, or about anything.

“We're losing her, Matt,” Kathleen told her husband tearfully right before they fell asleep a few hours ago. “I don't know what to do.”

“Neither do I,” he admitted, and again brought up family therapy.

This time, Kathleen agreed to at least consider it, well aware that nothing matters now more than rescuing Jen from the frightening downward spiral.

Kathleen hears Matt's footsteps coming back up the stairs again.

In the hallway three bedroom doors creak open one by one and then close quietly again before Matt reappears beside the bed.

“The kids are all sound asleep in their rooms, and the TV is off downstairs,” he informs Kathleen as he walks to the window, lifts the shade, and looks out. “I bet it was an animal.”

“What kind of animal?” she asks incredulously, huddled beneath the comforter, unable to stop her body from trembling.

“I don't know . . . maybe a cat or something.”

A fuzzy memory flits into her mind, a memory that makes her heart ache with longing for more innocent days. She sees Jen snuggled on her lap as a little girl; Kathleen reading aloud to her from the Little House on the Prairie books she herself had loved as a child. She recalls Jen's big brown eyes growing rounder than ever at the author's vivid description of a panther crying out in the night, a blood-curdling sound that was almost human.

But this isn't the prairie. There are no panthers in suburban Buffalo. She tells Matt as much when he slips back into bed beside her.

“I know a baby's cries when I hear them,” Kathleen informs him, her voice wavering on the verge of high-pitched hysteria. “And this isn't the first time, Matt. I heard it last night, too. But I thought it was just a dream. And—”

“And what?” he asks when she falls silent, suddenly reluctant to tell him about the phone call a few weeks ago.

“Nothing.” She takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly. “Never mind.”

“Go back to sleep, Kathleen. Whatever it was, it's gone now.”

Moments later, he's snoring once again.

Kathleen lies awake, her body tense, hands clenched at her sides.

The phone call and the cry in the night were no coincidence. She's certain of it.

Yet the only explanation she can conjure is a supernatural one. Kathleen has never believed in anything like that, and it's not as though they're inhabiting some Gothic Victorian mansion. Even if she were inclined to go with an otherworldly explanation for the cries, this newly built Colonial is the last house she would ever imagine as haunted.

All night, she keeps a fearful vigil, her thoughts whirling feverishly over and over traumatic events—not just those that are recent, but the ones that torment her still, after all these years.

When at last the first gray light of dawn filters through the window, she silently bids her firstborn a happy birthday, tears trickling slowly down her cheeks.

 

 

“What are you doing still in bed?”

Stella stirs, roused out of a deep sleep by Kurt's voice somewhere overhead. Rolling over, she opens her eyes and then quickly closes them again, blinded by the glare of the overhead light.

“Can you turn that off?” she croaks, her mouth foul-tasting and so dry she can't even muster enough saliva to swallow.

She hears him cross the room to the light switch. “Okay, it's off,” he says, sounding almost curt.

Kurt sounds curt. Imagine that.

Resentment mingles with the nausea that slips in to claim her once again, making her long for the blessed reprieve of sleep that was a long time coming. She was up far into the wee hours, most of that time spent huddled in misery on the chilly bathroom tile. Every time she dared to venture away from the toilet, she found herself racing back.

But of course Kurt doesn't know any of that.

When he came home—
if
he came home at all—he spent the night on the couch. He'll blame it on her being sick, but she has her suspicions.

It was only after she begged him over the phone that he left the office on time to meet the girls' day care bus. He fed them takeout pizza—its aroma wafting up the stairs and sending Stella running for the bathroom—then got them into bed and informed his wife that he had to head back to the bank to finish some paperwork.

Doubting his story and too sick to care, she asked him to pick up some ginger ale and saltines for her on his way back.

If he did, he never came upstairs to tell her, or to offer to bring her some.

Now, she looks up at him, wearing suit pants and a dress shirt, a tie looped through the collar. Clearly, he's headed back to work . . . and expects her to do the same.

“I can't do it, Kurt,” she informs him, her stomach roiling as she tries to sit up. “I have to stay home. You'll have to get the girls ready and drop them off.”

“I have a breakfast meeting at eight.”

Breakfast.

Food.

She tries again to swallow, but her mouth is too dry. Nausea rides up her throat and she clutches her stomach. Her bed might just as well be a storm-tossed sea. Her efforts to fight the waves of seasickness prove futile and she bolts from the bed.

This time, she doesn't make it to the bathroom.

She vomits on the bedroom carpet—ironically, in the very spot she imagined her husband making love to a phantom mistress just yesterday.

He looks down at her in disgust. “Jesus, Stella. You're worse than one of the kids. This is going to stink to high heaven. By the way, I have a banquet I have to go to on Friday night, so you'll have to get a sitter if you're still planning to chaperone that dance.”

Stella leaves the mess behind; leaves him behind. Staggering to the bathroom, she slams the door behind her.

“Bastard,” she mutters as her jellied knees give way and she sinks to the floor in front of the toilet once again.

Her body wracked with dry heaves, she wonders how on earth she wound up married to a stranger.

 

 

“Look, I already said I'm sorry,” Robby snaps into the pay phone at the 7–11 store around the corner from Orchard Arms apartments. “It isn't my fault that I got stopped by the cops for speeding. They made me go with them and they got a truant officer to take her right back to school. There was nothing I could do.”

“I paid you to do a job, and I expected it to be done.”

“I know. It will be. Just as soon as I can figure out how.”

“I'll tell you exactly how.”

As the ominous voice murmurs in his ear, Robby watches a packed yellow school bus pass the parking lot out on Cuttington Road, filled with kids on their way to Woodsbridge High. He finds himself scanning the windows for Jen's familiar blond head, even as he listens to the carefully outlined plan for her demise.

“Do you understand?”

He hesitates. “I don't know. That seems a little—”

“Are you going to do it or not? If you're not, I'll need the money you've already been paid returned to me when we meet in a half hour, and I'll find somebody else. I can't risk another screw up.”

Robby throws his head back to examine the overcast sky, contemplating the offer.

He needs the money. Needs it desperately. And yet . . .

He closes his eyes, seeing Jen's innocent face—and his father's beaming one.

His father made him promise that he'd stop dealing—that he'd stay away from drugs altogether. Robby is fairly—all right, completely—certain that the old man wouldn't prefer he convert himself into a murderer-for-hire instead.

Jen paged him last night, and again this morning. He ignored her, and finally turned his pager off. He feels guilty every time he sees her number come up, knowing she's probably worried about him.

She shouldn't be, damn it. She should be afraid of him. Is she really that clueless? That trusting? If she is, then she deserves what she gets.

Or so he tries to convince himself.

He lowers his head, his gaze falling on his new black leather boots. He paid full price for them, over four hundred bucks. He's always wanted boots like this, with thick soles and shiny silver buckles.

If he goes through with this, he can buy the other stuff he's always wanted. A stereo with kick-ass speakers, a shearling coat, hell, maybe even a computer.

Okay, but if he had a computer he could IM like all the other kids do, and burn CDs, and surf the Web for stuff. Not just porn, but other cool stuff, too.

“Are you there?” asks the voice.

“Yeah. I'm here.”

“I need to know. If you can't do this then tell me right now.”

This is it,
Robby realizes.
It's in your hands. This is where you get to decide which way your life is going to go.

He squeezes his eyes closed again and he sees his mother's face, filled with fury, with resentment, with hatred.

Sees the cop gazing down at him through the driver's side window yesterday, wearing an expression of utter disdain.

Sees the vice principal's obvious contempt, his blatant surprise that a girl like Jen would become entangled with the likes of Robby.

He's seen it, seen all of it, so many times before, on the faces of the teachers and adults and the kids who inhabit the homes of Orchard Arms. They judge him, all of them, based on where he lives, who his parents are—no, who they
aren't.