Authors: Rebecca Drake
“Be careful,” he said. “That could go off.” He sounded surprisingly calm, sliding back into his usual charm even if his appearance belied his tone. Dead twigs and leaves were caught in his once beautiful coat, a pocket ripped, the high sheen wing tips coated with debris. The camera-ready hair now fell in limp strands; angry red gouges from her fingernails tore down one side of his face from eyelid to jaw. “I’m sorry I scared you, Jill. This has all been a big misunderstanding. Let’s put the gun away, and we can sit down and talk.”
“Give me your phone,” Jill demanded. As Andrew started to lower his hands, she shouted, “No! Just one hand. Slowly!”
He raised an eyebrow at her, but reached into the breast pocket of his coat and took out his phone. “I wasn’t going to hurt you, Jill. I’d never hurt you. You’ve got to believe me.” He held the phone out to her, but she shook her head.
“Place it on the ground, then kick it toward me.”
“C’mon, Jill, this isn’t the movies.” He smiled and there was something both desperate and mocking in it. “I’m not a bad guy.”
“Just do it!”
Andrew sighed, giving her wounded little-boy eyes as he slowly placed the phone on the ground and slid it across to her. It landed near her feet. Jill kept her eyes on him as she stooped to pick it up with one hand, the gun still raised in the other. Andrew’s phone always had connectivity. She dialed with her left hand, listening to a sporadic ringing, and then finally, blessedly, a voice: “911, what is your emergency?”
“There’s been a car crash, I need help—”
“Are you injured?”
“Yes. I need the police to come to—”
“What is your location, ma’am?”
“Fernwood—” The phone died. “Hello? Hello?” Jill pressed redial, but she couldn’t get reception. “Damn it all!”
Andrew’s hands lowered. “Keep them up!” Jill shouted, shoving the phone in her pocket and gripping the gun again with both hands. He smiled, taking a small step toward the door.
“They’re not coming, Jill.”
“Stand still!” The wound on her shoulder—or was it fear—had weakened her grip; the gun shook in her hands. Sweat, or was it blood, dripped into her eyes. She blinked rapidly, trying to hold the gun steady.
“You’re not going to shoot me,” Andrew said, taking another step back toward the door. “It’s not in you to shoot anyone.”
“Stop moving!”
“Mommy?” A tiny, trembling voice. Sophia stood in the doorway.
Jill’s gaze shifted from Andrew to her daughter. “Get back, Sophia!”
But her moment’s inattention allowed Andrew enough time to step to the door and catch the child. She screamed as he grabbed her, holding her high against his chest like a human shield, one hand clasping her small neck.
“Let her go!”
“Drop the gun or I’ll hurt her!”
Jill stared into her daughter’s wide, frightened eyes, watching her dangling helplessly in Andrew’s grip. She slowly lowered the gun.
“That’s it,” Andrew said, “drop it—”
The gunshot to his knee cut him off mid-sentence. He shrieked, an inhuman, high-pitched sound, releasing his grip on Sophia as he collapsed backward on the floor. Jill ran forward, holding the gun on him as she grabbed Sophia, trying to shield her from seeing the blood pouring onto the floor.
“You bitch!” Andrew pulled at Jill, trying to climb up her, and Sophia screamed, flailing at him with tiny fists.
“Let go of my mommy!”
Jill kicked him off, carrying Sophia out into the hall. She headed for the stairs, looking back as Andrew crawled into the hallway after them.
“You can’t leave me here, you stupid bitch! I’ll bleed out!”
She only moved faster, helping Sophia climb down the stairs and walk back toward the front of the house. Andrew’s cries followed them out the door.
Jill dropped the gun in one of the stone planters flanking the front walk. Up the hill the night sky was lit by fire. Flames from the wreck had caught the dry branches of nearby trees, traveling from one to the next like birthday candles being lit on a cake. She hurried down the driveway holding Sophia’s hand. Neither of them had boots on, and Sophia’s legs were so much shorter than Jill’s. After a minute, her mother hoisted her up once again in her arms, trudging down the driveway toward the road while the canopy above them burned.
“It’s going to be okay,” she told Sophia when they got to the road, but Jill was losing her grip. “Wrap your arms around me.” She felt her daughter’s small hands lock around her neck.
They were clinging to each other, staggering down the snow-covered road, when Jill finally heard the wail of approaching sirens.
OCTOBER 2014
In what had become a weekly ritual, Jill dropped David off for physical therapy before taking their daughter, as promised, to the park.
“Have a good time, you know I won’t,” David said, groaning in an exaggerated way to make Sophia giggle, before he got out of the car with his cane and limped into the building. The park was only a ten-minute drive from the medical center.
It was a hot afternoon and Jill held Sophia’s hand as they crossed the road to the playground, clutching the dog’s leash in the other. “C’mon, Mommy, c’mon!” Sophia pulled free and ran toward the slide, outwardly unscathed despite what happened in this same spot little more than a year ago.
“Children are surprisingly resilient,” the therapist said.
Cosmo pulled against the leash, straining to follow Sophia. The dog was a constant reminder of what had happened to her, to all of them. But after the police found him half-dead in the snow, Jill couldn’t deny him a home. Cosmo had saved their lives. Some mornings, Jill would find him curled up in bed next to Sophia and she’d say that he’d comforted her when she had a bad dream. The nightmares were becoming less frequent, fading away along with the memories. Given her young age, it was likely that Sophia wouldn’t remember much of what happened as she grew up, if she remembered anything at all.
Adults weren’t so lucky. What had happened had imprinted itself on Jill in ways that could never be erased. “You’ll probably always feel the pain,” the therapist had told her, “but it will hurt less over time.”
She and David still moved around each other tentatively, like guests in each other’s lives. Jill supposed it would be like that for a long time while they found their way to a new normal. So far, there had been no big discussion about the future of their marriage. At first because David had been physically unable to, and later because having all three of them back together under one roof had seemed like too big a miracle to mess with.
“Slow down!” Jill hurried after Sophia, careful to keep her in sight. The sun beat down, just like last week, and the park was crowded. A nice day so late in the fall meant everyone was out enjoying the sunshine. Sophia clambered up and around the plastic fort and slid down the slide with other children while Jill stood to one side with other parents, watching. A slightly older boy ran up the slide the wrong way, catching her eye. Something about him seemed familiar, but it wasn’t until she saw Sophia playing with him that Jill made the connection. She moved closer to get a better look. “Andy?”
The boy looked up from his play, giving Jill a jolt because Andrew Graham’s namesake looked like a miniature version of his father. Just then, a familiar voice called, “Andy, let’s go!”
Jill turned to see Paige Graham standing across the field by her SUV flanked by her two other children, the oldest in a little league uniform. Her middle son took off running toward the car and before Jill could stop her, Sophia bolted with him. “Paige!” she called, running fast across the field, her blonde hair flowing behind her like a kite.
“Sophia, come back!” Jill ran after her, Cosmo bulleting along at her side. When Paige Graham spotted them, her immediate reaction was to turn her back, opening the SUV’s rear door and ushering her kids inside.
Jill hadn’t seen her since that awful day last November when she’d confronted Paige on the soccer field. She had no desire to see her now. Paige’s husband hadn’t bled out in the empty house; the police rescued him in time. Andrew had done his best to deny his part in the whole sordid mess, but the police had plenty of evidence that corroborated Jill’s story, including Liz Galpin’s own journal entries. They were soon leaked to a tabloid. Senator Graham hired a top civil defense team, but even he couldn’t stop the stream of women who came forward to detail for the media the full extent of his son’s sexual aggression.
Jill ran faster to catch Sophia, grabbing her just before she got to Paige, but it was too late to turn back, too late to pretend she hadn’t seen her.
“How are you?” Jill said as Andy climbed into the backseat to join his brothers.
Paige closed the door on them. “We’re fine,” she said, Southern charm kicking in automatically, but the smile was small and tight, her eyes cold. She looked unchanged—the same beautifully coiffed hair and perfectly applied makeup, the same attention to detail in clothing that she’d always shown.
“I got a dog,” Sophia announced, reaching for the leash that Jill held. “His name’s Cosmo.”
Paige stared down at her for a moment, face expressionless, before shifting her gaze to Jill. There had been a change—Paige was thinner, her face harder. “What do you want, Jill?” she said, her perfect exterior cracking. “Haven’t you done enough damage to my family?”
“I didn’t do anything to you—your husband did that damage all by himself.” Facing disbarment and a slew of sexual harassment lawsuits, Andrew had taken down a favorite gun from his own collection and ended his humiliation, though not his family’s.
His widow’s face turned white, then red. She glanced around, afraid that someone had overheard, before leaning closer to Jill, hands twisting the wedding ring set she still wore. “You’re no better than I am, so don’t think you are. Standing here all smug with your
bastard
.” She hissed the word, voice shaking with barely repressed rage. Jill stepped back, pulling Sophia with her, but Paige followed. “You think I didn’t know?” She gave a harsh laugh. “Of course I knew. I knew about every single whore he bedded.”
Revulsion rose in Jill. She couldn’t believe she’d ever felt inferior to this woman. “I feel sorry for you.”
Paige kept talking as if she couldn’t hear her. “None of them mattered. I had the home and the children and the money. He came home to
me
.”
Jill turned her back, pulling her daughter and the dog away. Sophia glanced back over her shoulder and then up at Jill. “Why is she mad, Mommy?”
“Life didn’t turn out the way she wanted,” Jill said, struggling to keep her voice even. She felt an odd sort of pity for Paige. Her high expectations hadn’t been met, but then when were anybody’s? Jill thought of the album that Detective Ottilo had returned, of how she’d wept over the pages of Ethan’s short life, of how many other parents she knew turning the pages of the albums that she’d made for them. She’d wept again as she wrote a letter to her son, saying good-bye before tucking it in the album’s final pages.
When Jill was younger she’d believed that if she worked hard and planned with care that life would proceed in a sensible, orderly fashion, that she’d be guaranteed the family that she’d wanted complete with a matching set of perfect photos to celebrate every milestone. Except life didn’t work that way. Life was more often about what happened outside of the frame, on the margins. But love happened in the margins, too, and in the end love was the only infinite thing.
Jill clasped Sophia’s hand in hers and started back across the field, their little dog running ahead.
Dear Ethan,
I have tormented myself with asking why you had to go. Why, when so many children are born and thrive did you have to die? Why, when other people abuse their children and take them for granted, did you, who were so longed for and so adored, have to slip away like a forgotten guest at a party?
But “why” is the wrong question. The right question, I’ve come to see, is not why you had to die, but how you ever came to be in the first place. Life is so fragile and such a great mystery. It is beautiful and terrible and more often than not both of these things at once. I don’t know why you had to go, but however brief your life it did have meaning. You were wanted and cherished and I treasured every day I had with you. I will never forget you.
Your spirit will live on in me, your dad, and most of all your sister. I see you in her every day, but she has her own life to live and I can’t tether her to yours. I have your album on a place of honor on a shelf, but please don’t judge me a bad mother if it gathers some dust. I need to let you go, just a little, so I can live. I know that we will meet again some day and when that day comes, you’ll have to forgive me if I want to spend all of eternity holding you.
Love forever,
Mommy
Thank you to Leslie Williams, whose love and devotion to her children helped inspire this book. Thank you, also, to Abby Leviss, who writes so poignantly about loss on her blog, Missing Maxie. And thank you to the Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep (NILMDTS) organization and the work of all bereavement photographers, whose generous service to grieving families also inspired this novel.
Thank you to the Fox Chapel Police Department and especially Sgt. Mike J. Stevens and Officer Richard Klein for patiently talking me through police investigative techniques and the particulars of major crimes investigation in Allegheny County. Any mistakes are entirely my own.
Thank you to Pittsburgh readers for indulging my creativity with the geography of my adopted hometown: I’ve added street names and places that don’t exist in the ’Burgh.
Thanks to my lovely and talented agent, Rachel Ekstrom, and all the wonderful people at the Irene Goodman Literary Agency (IGLA). Thank you to my two editors extraordinaire, Jaime Levine and Anne Brewer, and the incredible team at Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s Press; I’m privileged to be one of your authors.
A special thank you for the support of my writing pals, especially Nicole Peeler, Annette Dashofy, Meredith Mileti, Shelly Culbertson, Kathryn Miller Haines, Lila Shaara, Meryl Neiman, Nancy Martin, Kathleen George, and Heather Terrell who read early drafts, brainstormed plot complications, helped me navigate social media, and in general served as sounding boards for this book. You’re some of the smartest, funniest women I know.