Together Alone (42 page)

“Don’t punish yourself, Em,” Brian moaned, putting his face close to hers.

“I have to hear.”

“I can tell you later.”

But she clung to him, even as she wiped her eyes and told Kay, “Julia’s at Janice Stolski’s. Will you pick her up?”

“Don’t worry about Julia now,” Brian protested. “She can stay late.”

But there was another inkling of comfort in the relationships and responsibilities that gave meaning to her life. “I want to see her. And Jill. Doug can pick her up in Boston before he drives out.” Her eyes asked the added favor of Kay.

“Done,” Kay said. “I’ll call him. Where do I find his number?”

Emily told her. “And Celeste. Tell her what’s happened.”

“I will.” Kay hugged her around Brian’s arms for a final minute. “Do what you have to. We’ll be waiting.”

Emily had been in Myra’s house countless times over the years, but it had never been as difficult as it was now. Her imagination was running circles around itself, defying her attempts to stop it by flashing visions of mayhem in each room they passed through.

Myra. Myra and Frank. And Daniel.

Emily felt sick. She willed herself not to vomit. She wanted to hear,
needed
to hear.

Absurdly, once they were settled in the living room—Brian and Emily, with two patrolmen in the background—Myra offered them tea. They refused.

Quietly, Brian began. “What happened, Myra?”

“What happened, when?” she asked.

“The day Daniel Arkin disappeared.”

She frowned. “Well, we were here and the police came, and we said we hadn’t seen him. There was a question, because Frank was in town at the same time as Emily, but he left without seeing a thing.” She nodded. “We told the police that.”

“Yes. That’s what the file says. But we know now that’s not the truth.”

“Who said? I certainly didn’t.”

“No. But we found evidence outside which suggests that your husband, and possibly you, too, were involved in Daniel’s death.”

“I
never
said that. Frank would be furious if he thought I did.” She dared a look over her shoulder toward the rest of the house, and whispered, “Please. He has a temper.”

“Is that what happened that day?” Brian asked. “Did he lose it?”

Emily remembered the yelling she had often heard and wondered how much of it had had to do, over the years, with Daniel. “This is important, Myra,” she cried when Myra didn’t answer Brian, and though Myra looked startled by her tone, she didn’t soften it. She felt betrayed. Daniel had been murdered by people she trusted. She had no sympathy for Myra. “Frank was hard on you, but he’s
dead
.” Like Daniel. Oh God. “He can’t hurt you now. You have to tell us what happened.”

Myra told the floor, “They think it’s only the mothers who have trouble when their children grow up and move out, but it isn’t. Sometimes men have the problem. Sometimes they have it worse.”

“Did Frank?” Brian asked.

“Some men are angry when their children leave,” Myra advised, as though telling a story about someone other than Frank. “They feel like the children are deserting them. They feel like the children aren’t grateful at all for the things they did.”

“Men like that,” Brian prodded, “what do they do?”

“Oh, they get cranky. They get mad at their wives for little things that aren’t bad at all. They yell. They even hit, sometimes. Now, Frank never hits me. He never raises a hand. But men like that do. They see people who still have their children at home, and they get mad.”

“Mad?”

“They don’t understand why others still have their children, if they don’t. So they kick things, and they curse. Sometimes they see children left alone in cars, and that makes them
really
mad, so they borrow those children. Just for a little while. Just to have a child around again. Can you
imagine?
My Frank would
never
do that. He’s a decent, law-abiding man.”

Borrow them?
Borrow
them? Emily was appalled.

“
Borrow?
” Brian asked.

“Just for a little while.”

“But
why?
” Emily cried. “Frank
hated
children.”

“
My
Frank?” Myra shook her head. “Not my Frank.”

“I heard yelling all the time!”

“Well, when children misbehave, a parent yells, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t love them. My Frank loves his sons. He is a wonderful father.”

“He was strict, and demanding, and abusive!”

“He counted on them to do chores. He was upset when they left home. To this day, he wants them here with him.”

“Did he think
my son
could do those chores? He was only
two
. What in the
world
was Frank
thinking?
What
possessed
him to take my child?”

“Who? Frank? Frank never took anyone’s child.”

Emily let out a shuddering breath.

Brian took her hand. “These men who borrow children,” he said to Myra, “what do they do with them?”

“Oh, they drive them home, and carry them in the house, and their wives are
furious
. Their wives tell them that they can’t just wander off with other people’s children. They argue until they’re blue in the face, but all it does is get everyone upset.” Her eyes met her fingers, which were snaking around each other. “They don’t mean to make things worse. They’re trying to fix things, only they can’t.”

“Where are they?” Emily asked in a high voice.

Myra seemed detached. “In the kitchen.”

“And the boy?” Brian asked. “Where was he?”

“With them.” She grew silent.

Emily saw Daniel there, saw him frightened by Frank’s booming voice, rushing to the door, pressing his face to the screen, crying for her. She saw his cheeks growing red with his screams, saw the streaming tears, heard the hiccuping howls, coming harder and louder.

Her heart broke. She flew to her feet, unable to sit still.

Shrilly, Myra wailed, “He wouldn’t be quiet! I tried to get him to be quiet! He was making things worse! But he wouldn’t stop crying because he was scared, and the more he cried the madder Frank got—”

She stopped abruptly. Her eyes flew from Brian to Emily to the floor, but if there was upset in them, Emily was beyond caring. Brian reached for her, only it wasn’t his arms she felt, but smaller ones that had clung to her in the wake of a scraped knee, a measles shot, a Halloween mask. She
felt
those smaller arms clawing at the Balchs’ back door, groping frantically for a knob, for Emily, for air, for help. Caught up in the terror, she gasped aloud, then said, “I’m okay, I’m okay,” when Brian tried to take her from the room. She held up a hand to reinforce her words.

For another minute, his eyes expressed concern. Then he ran his hands up and down her arms, sat her on the sofa again, and, after a last look to make sure she was all right, turned to Myra again. “What happened then?”

She seemed confused. “When?”

He paused, rephrased the question. “What happens, in situations like that, when the child is crying and making the man madder and madder?”

“Why,” she began as though it were obvious, “he keeps telling the child to be still, but the child is so frightened that he doesn’t hear, so the man slaps him to get his attention.”

Emily made a sound. Again she held up her hand to assure Brian that she was all right. The hand curled into a fist and settled against her mouth. She didn’t want to cry out, didn’t want to interrupt. She had to hear the story, had to know, finally.

Myra turned to her. “The wife tries to get him to stop hitting, but he throws her off to the side with one more big sweep of his hand, and by the time she has herself back on her feet the child is quiet.”

Emily began a convulsive rocking. “Dead? Dead then?”

“Well, yes, most likely, because his head has hit the table, and he isn’t moving. The wife tries to wake him up, but he isn’t breathing.”

Emily bolted up and staggered toward the door. One of the patrolmen caught her, then Brian.

“If that was the end,” she whispered, “if he didn’t know anything after that, I don’t need to either, it isn’t important.” She thought of her baby’s terror, cut with a knife-sharp pain into nothingness. Only that wasn’t the end. There were years of agony that had followed, a marriage destroyed, the subconscious searching of faces for a familiar one that might have been misplaced, the guilt, the anger, the energy spent in trying to find answers that were under her nose all the time, and she whirled on Myra, hating the woman, crying, “Why didn’t you
tell
me? All those years, you
knew
, and I was going through
hell
. You saw me all the time, you saw my husband all the time, you saw my
daughter
all the time. You let that—that
barbarian
near her. How
could
you? How could you
not tell me
what he’d done?”

But she knew—maybe not the details of the threats, but she could guess them.
I’ll kill you
, he might have said, or,
I’ll kill your sons,
or,
Say one word, and I’ll get you in hell, you old bat
—and, whatever, Myra had been so terrified that not even Frank’s death had freed her. So she had carried the secret with her, haunted by it, obsessed with it, trying in her pathetically evasive way to get anyone and everyone to sit with her under the willow, as though whoever sat there would know, and she would be relieved of telling them, and thus safe from Frank.

“I have to go,” Emily whispered seconds before her legs gave out. She was distantly aware of being carried, then deposited on something soft, then held, but it was a long time before she felt any warmth, and an even longer time before she slept.

• • •

The next morning Celeste was in her kitchen dropping batter by the spoonfuls onto baking sheets. She was making butter cookies for Emily. It was a small gesture, but she needed to do it. Emily had been a loyal friend, sticking with her through many an ordeal with Dawn. This latest with Carter had been the worst, but it was petty compared to Emily’s own.

Celeste had to keep reminding herself of that, lest she wallow in self-pity. Okay, so she had lost Carter. The man was less of a loss than the fantasy.

Dawn was something else. She was back at the dorm. Celeste didn’t know much more than that.

Dropping the spoons in the empty mixing bowl, she wiped her hands on her jeans and dragged open the oven door. One cookie sheet went in, then the second. She closed the door and set the timer.

“Hi.”

She whirled around.

Dawn stood just inside the kitchen door wearing a guarded look. Celeste’s heart was pounding, but only in part from being startled. She hadn’t known when Dawn would show up, hadn’t expected her this soon, didn’t know what to say or think or feel.

“I heard about Daniel Arkin,” Dawn said. “I thought I’d stop over at Emily’s.”

This isn’t Emily’s,
Celeste thought.
Why are you here?

“How is she?”

“Okay.”

Dawn nodded. She looked at the mixing bowl. “Are the cookies for her?”

They sure aren’t for you, sweetie, not after what
you
did
. “Yes, they’re for Emily. She’s been a good friend to me.”

“Does that mean she hates me, too?”

“I don’t know. You’d have to ask her.”

“Do you hate me?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“But you’re disappointed.”

“Very.”

Dawn grappled with that for a minute. “After Jill called me last night, I was thinking about what happened to Daniel and thinking that something like that could have happened to me with Carter. But how could I know he was a louse?”

“He went from mother to daughter. That should have tipped you off.”

“It didn’t tip
you
off.”

“It sure did. The minute I learned he was with you, it did. You should have vetoed his little escapade the minute he suggested it. You should have known right then he was no good. Good men don’t do things like that.”

She shrugged. “I was angry.”

“Because I had my nose done? Because I was having a good time while you were at school? Because I was happy?”

She shrugged again, looking guilty now.

“Ever hear the expression, bite your nose off to spite your face?” Celeste asked. “That’s what you did, Dawn. Boy, you may be book smart, but when it comes to common sense, you get an F.”

“I’m sorry!” Dawn cried.

“Why? Because you’re worried that I won’t let you use my car? Or that your father might cut down your allowance, or, worse,
reneg
on his promise to pay your tuition? He doesn’t have to pay it, Dawn. As you love pointing out, you are an adult.”

“I know.”

“Adults have to take responsibility for their actions.”

“I
know
.” She sank into a chair by the table and said in a quiet voice, “I was wrong. I shouldn’t have done what I did.” She raised sad eyes. “But he was unreal. Handsome. Sexy. He made me feel like I was special. It’s nice to feel that way sometimes.”

Pointedly, Celeste said, “Isn’t it.”

“I was
wrong
, Mom. Are you going to hold it against me forever?” She sounded so young that Celeste remembered the child she had once been—yes, stubborn and willful, but so full of spirit, so like Celeste once, that Celeste had been green with envy.

“Remember the awful fights we had over curfews?” she asked.

Dawn nodded.

“You thought I was trying to control you. Maybe I was. And maybe not for the best of reasons,” if jealousy had been the case. “But there were valid reasons, too. I’ve been your age. I got into more than my share of mischief, so I know what teenagers can do. Only things were different in my day, more innocent, less random. I wanted you home safe and off the streets before the roads filled with crazies. I really did worry, Dawn. Would I have done that if all I’d wanted was to get rid of you?”

“I didn’t say that was all you wanted.”