CHAPTER EIGHT
Three days have passed.
Three days in which Anne Marie has gone through the motions of living while thinking every waking moment of dying. Of what it must be like.
Death, decay, extinction.
The stench of it seems to permeate her every breath; the repulsive reality of it seeps into her sleep, transforming dreams into bloodcurdling nightmares. She’s consumed by visions of rotting flesh buried in rain-dampened earth, haunted by clinical terms like
dental records
and
DNA
.
“Mommy, can I have more milk, please?” Caleb asks, and she pours rich, creamy milk into a glass, seeing only crimson blood flowing from gaping wounds.
“Mommy, tickle me, please,” Avery begs and she wriggles her fingers in his squirming midsection, imagining knives splitting flesh, wounds so deep they leave slashes in bone.
It didn’t have to be this way.
You did it yourself. You have nobody else to blame.
Yes. She can blame fate, blame the perceived immortality of reckless youth. Blame the dearly departed, or blame the devil that saw fit to punish, to extinguish life.
Or, Anne Marie can try to forget, try to move on.
Try . . .
And fail, time and time again.
You opened the door in the first place,
she reminds herself as she washes supper dishes heedless of the dishwasher, needing hot water running over her hands in a futile effort to cleanse them, to cleanse her soul.
You opened the door.
It’s become a warped refrain, one she can’t escape. Yes, she opened the door. And now it’s too late to close it, too late to shut out the demons.
She turns off the water, dries her hands, dries the tears rolling down her cheeks. She remembers to be glad Jarrett is late coming home from the office again, too far away to ask questions that might mean something for once.
The irony, she thinks as she mindlessly bends to pick up a stray sock, a small car, a crust of bread, is that ten years ago, nobody would have known her if they found her.
Now, thanks to the miracle of science, anything is possible. These days, remains of one who lived centuries ago can be identified by a single strand of hair. A human who would otherwise have gone on in infinite anonymity can be given a name, a face, grieving loved ones who crave answers.
It just takes time, and patience, but the answers will come to misguided souls who seek them.
“Mommy, I’m tired,” Justin says, tugging the hem of the shirt she hasn’t changed in three days.
“I’m tired, too,” Anne Marie says wearily, bending to gather him into her arms.
Goddamned miracles.
In the three days that have passed since Allison’s disappearance, Peyton has thought of little else—other than work, of course, when she’s there.
Alain hasn’t even left for Paris yet, but already, Tara is piling on the assignments, to the point where Peyton was too bogged down yesterday to even attend the annual Kaplan and Kline spring outing. Not that she minded. She was hardly in the mood to socialize.
But her boss didn’t know that. And it seems as though Tara secretly gloats every time she allocates a new task to Peyton.
Or maybe that’s just my paranoid imagination,
Peyton reminds herself as she wearily covers the last block heading home Wednesday night.
Half the time she’s able to convince herself that Tara doesn’t suspect that she’s pregnant. After all, Peyton’s made an effort to conceal her bulge beneath looser-fitting suits these last few days.
Then again, Tara did make that catty comment when she found Peyton carrying a bag of microwaved popcorn out of the kitchenette late this afternoon.
“Eating again?” was what she said, or something along those lines. Almost as if she expected Peyton to defend herself with an explanation.
Well, let her think I’m just getting fat,
Peyton thinks, digging into her pocketbook for her keys as she mounts the steps of her brownstone building
. Fat can’t get you fired.
Neither can pregnant, officially. But it can keep a woman from getting promoted, no matter what anybody claims. It isn’t fair, but it’s true.
Damn that Tara, anyway.
Peyton has repeatedly told herself that she can take whatever her boss wants to dish out. She wants this promotion. Or maybe she doesn’t
want
it as much as know that she
deserves
it.
In the end, she’s too preoccupied to truly
want
anything these days, other than Allison back where she belongs.
After descending the steps to her apartment, Peyton locks the door, checks it twice, then goes straight to her blinking answering machine.
Please let it be Allison,
she prays as she presses the button and listens to the tape rewind.
Or news about Allison. Good news.
It isn’t. But it’s the next best thing, and she finds herself smiling faintly despite her anxious state.
“Hey, Peyton, it’s Tom. I just got back from D.C. . . .”
D. C.?
Oh, that’s right. That last-minute business trip he mentioned on Saturday. She forgot all about it in the drama since.
No wonder he hasn’t called her these last few days . . . not that she really even acknowledged that fact until now.
“Listen,” Tom’s recorded voice goes on, “I’ve got two tickets to see the Yankees annihilate the Red Sox next Saturday afternoon. Are you game? Pun intended, ha, ha. Call me when you get home.”
Well, she’s home, but she can’t call him. Maybe later. Or tomorrow. Or whenever something as inane as a baseball game seems to matter again.
She busies herself filling a cup with tap water and setting it in the microwave. A nice hot cup of tea is what she needs right now.
Herbal tea.
That should steady her frayed nerves.
Herbal tea, and—
She reaches for the phone again.
She can’t help it. Baseball aside, she suddenly, desperately, needs to hear Tom’s familiar voice.
Her own breaks unexpectedly at the sound of it when he answers on the first ring.
“Peyton?”
“Yes,” is all she can manage.
“Are you okay? What’s wrong?”
“It’s my friend. Allison. She’s missing and she’s . . . pregnant.”
There’s so much more she wants to tell him, things she couldn’t say even if words were flowing easily past the anguish welled up in her throat.
“Allison. I think you mentioned her,” he says, although Peyton is certain that she hasn’t.
She was careful not to, knowing that there was an off chance he might ask too many questions.
Like how she met Allison.
She tearfully spills the details, careful to stick with only the most cursory of them.
Eventually, she’ll tell him more. But if he finds out that Peyton is pregnant now, he might very well walk away. And she isn’t ready to handle that. Not yet. Not tonight.
“Do you want me to come over?” Tom is asking.
“No. I’ll be okay. I just . . . I got your message and I thought I should call you back tonight. You know. To tell you what’s going on.”
“I don’t think you should be alone, Peyton. Especially after that break-in you had. It’s been hard enough for you to deal with that.”
The break-in. This is the first time she’s arrived home since it happened and entirely forgotten to search the closets and under the bed.
She begins to do so now, carrying the phone and turning on lights as she goes.
“Let me come over,” Tom says again. “I can be there in two minutes.”
There’s a certain comfort in knowing that. Knowing that if the phone rings in the middle of the night with bad news, she doesn’t have to be alone.
“You don’t have to come over, Tom. I know you just got back from your trip, and—”
“But I—”
“Look, I promise I’ll call you if I need you, okay?”
He hesitates. Then says, reluctantly, “Okay. I’ll be here. And I can be there, too. Two minutes. Remember?”
“I remember.” She smiles, but only briefly.
A sudden twitch in her stomach has caught her off guard.
She goes still, wondering if it could possibly be—
A startled gasp escapes her as she feels another sharp twitch, down and to the left of her navel.
This time, there’s no mistaking it.
The child within her has just kicked for the very first time.
“Are you all right?” Tom is asking. “What happened?”
“Nothing. I—I stubbed my toe.”
“Are you okay?”
She says nothing, standing motionless, hoping to feel the miraculous stirring of life once again.
“Peyton?”
“Hang on a second,” she says abruptly, and sets the phone down.
She wraps her arms around her abdomen, pressing gently in the spot where the baby’s tiny limb was moving.
Where are you, little one? What are you doing in there?
No response.
For a long time, she waits.
Are you sleeping now, baby?
she asks silently, feeling less alone, less
lonely,
than she did just minutes ago.
Then the sound of Tom calling her name emerges from the receiver.
She reaches for it slowly, realizing that she can’t go on fooling him, or herself. She can’t sustain this relationship—if it can even be labeled a relationship. They’ve seen each other only a handful of times.
Yes, there’s an undeniable connection. An attraction. Yes, this could go somewhere, if she let it.
But she won’t. She has to tell him she can’t see him again. Now.
Or at least, tell him that she’s pregnant—and let him be the one who curtails the relationship because of it.
Why prolong the inevitable? That isn’t fair, and it isn’t healthy.
Steeling herself for the turmoil to come, she lifts the receiver to her ear. “I’m here. Sorry.”
“I think I should come over. I’m really worried about you.”
“No, you shouldn’t come over.”
“But—”
“Tom, just wait. Just . . . stop. I need to talk to you.”
A beat of silence. Then he asks quietly, “What’s going on? Is there more? More than just your friend?”
She’s poised to tell him about the baby.
Just say it. You have to.
She does. And she will.
But not tonight.
Because before she can utter another word, her confession is curtailed by the urgent beep of call-waiting.
Lowering the receiver to check the ID window, she recognizes Wanda’s number.
“I’ve got to get that, Tom,” she says hurriedly. “It could be something about Allison.”
“Want me to hang on?”
“No, hang up. I’ll call you if I need you.”
But I won’t,
she tells herself firmly, ending the call with a trembling finger.
No matter what happens, I won’t let myself need you.
“Here.” Derry walks across the living room, lit only by the flickering blue light of the television. “You forgot this.”
She’s tempted to fling the alarm clock at Linden, newly settled on the couch with his blanket and pillow.
If I do that, he might haul me into jail for spousal battery,
she thinks wryly, though the premise isn’t entirely without validity.
“Yeah, I’ll take it since you don’t need it anyway.
Ever
.” He sits up, snatches the clock from her outstretched hand, and plugs it in.
Yet another nasty crack about her unemployment.
The fight that erupted earlier in the bedroom didn’t even revolve around her idle lifestyle, nor around the prosthetic that strains the bodice of her lone summer nightgown.
No, this time, they were at each other’s throats over Linden’s failure to say good night. It started out as yet another a minor tiff in a week filled with them, but quickly escalated.
All because he just plopped himself down in bed beside her with a grunt, and ignored her when she said good night. He pretended he was asleep, which irked her because she’s not gullible enough to believe that a person can possibly be that deep in slumber two seconds after hitting the pillow.
Linden claimed that it’s possible for him, because he works so hard, of course. What he didn’t say—at least, not aloud—is that he wouldn’t have to work that hard if she would get a job.