Where I Lost Her (21 page)

“Y
ou should sit down,” he says, and I feel my legs folding beneath me, cool wet grass on my skin.

At first I don't recognize him. I struggle as the black sea parts, to make out who he is. Why he seems both so familiar and so strange all at once. Without his uniform on, he could be anyone.

And then it comes to me.
Strickland
.

“What are you doing here?” he asks again. He hovers over me, arms crossed.

“I . . .” I stutter.

“You know that's trespassing?” he says, motioning with his chin toward Lisa's house. “It's posted.”

For the first time, I notice that there are
NO TRESPASSING
signs posted at the trees on either side of the driveway. Also, a
BEWARE OF DOG
sign.

“She wasn't home,” I say, and feel the sour taste of bile at the back of my throat. The burn. “I just wanted to talk to her.”

He cocks his head, waiting for me to continue. And strangely, that dubious sneer I am accustomed to is absent.

“I was looking . . .” I start, but then the image of what I saw, or at least
think
I saw, the darkly stained floor, comes in a vivid flash. The blood. It all comes rushing back to me, and bile rises from the back of my throat and floods my mouth.

I swallow hard to push it back down, and tears sting my eyes.

“Looking for what?” he says. But it is not an admonishment. He is, surprisingly, not scolding me.

I struggle to sit up, pushing myself up with my hands, and I feel a shooting pain that extends from the cut in my hand up my arm. “Shit,” I say, wincing.

He extends his hand to me, and I grab it with my good hand so he can pull me up.

“Listen,” I say, brushing the wet grass and leaves off my shorts. “I know you have the information about Alfieri and Sharp. But she has something to do with this too. You have to trust me. I saw Alfieri's dog here. They all know each other.”

He pushes his shoulders back and cracks his neck. I wait for him to deny everything. To chastise me.

I study his face, which looks more boyish than it did before. The absent uniform has stripped away that smug assuredness. Removed an entire decade from his face.

“I know Lieutenant Andrews wants this to all go away. Wants
me
to go away,” I start. I remember what Ryan told me about evidence coming from a civilian, that even if it's acquired illegally, it's still admissible. “But I know what I saw that night. And if I were you, I'd get a warrant to search that barn
and
Sharp's property.”

His eyes widen.

“You have to tell me what you found,” he says.

I hesitate. I've been burned before. I think about Andrews threatening me with charges for making a false report. I don't want to give him anything that can further implicate me. That could get me in more trouble.

“Why should I trust you?” I say.

He takes a deep breath, shakes his head. He peers out at the lake, which is glimmering through the trees now. It is going to be a beautiful day.

“She's his girlfriend,” he says, turning back toward me.

I am completely confused. I have no idea what he's talking about.

“Vince Alfieri. Lisa Connelly and he are a couple.”

“Okay,” I nod. That makes sense. But I don't know what any of this has to do with my trusting him. Why his sharing this information should make me feel safe.

“And Sharp?” he says. “He came up here when he got out of prison because his sister lives here.”

“
So?
” I say.

“Lisa is Sharp's sister,” he says.

I think about the way she responded when I told her that there was a registered sex offender living near her. The odd way she reacted. It makes sense now. And then I think about that curly-headed baby on her hip.

“How could she let him near here?” I ask, feeling sick again. Unless there's something darker, more terrible going on. “And what does Alfieri have to do with anything?”

I rub my temples. “So, the three of them know each other. Lisa probably met Alfieri through Sharp. Sharp and he were both in Massachusetts, right?”

He nods. “Yes,” he says. “And we're beginning to think they might be in business together.”

“Business?” I say.

He nods and runs his hand across his head, scratching. “I'm sorry. That's all I can say.”

“Wait, why aren't you in uniform?” I ask. “What are
you
doing here? Where's your cruiser?”

He looks at me, and takes a deep breath. “Let's just say you're not the only one conducting an . . . independent . . . investigation.”

“What?” And then it dawns on me. “Andrews doesn't know you're here?”

He shakes his head once to confirm.

“Now, please. Just tell me what you saw.”

I
can't ride the bike into town; my legs are shaking, my whole body quaking. And so I ride back to camp, quietly put the bike in the shed. I am not ready to talk to Effie about this, and thankfully, it looks like she and Plum have taken a walk or something, and so I quickly get in my car and take off.

At the Shop 'n Save, I loosen a cart from the tangled mess in the entrance and walk, dazed, through the electronic doors. It's cold in here, freezing cold. I shiver in my thin cotton T-shirt and shorts. Goose bumps pimple my legs. I have to keep reciting the list like a mantra: French bread, flowers, gumdrops. I see Effie texted me earlier asking if I could pick up some eggs too, and I'm glad I have the car; they would never have survived the bike ride home.

I am still trying to process what I saw in the barn and everything that Strickland told me, to read between the lines to figure out what exactly he was still keeping to himself. From the little bit I could gather from Strickland, Andrews didn't want to hear anything more about Alfieri, had no interest in Sharp. After publicly denouncing me, shaming me, and denying the girl, he couldn't exactly turn around and reinstate the search. It would have made him seem wishy-washy, not exactly a trait that people want from someone hoping to make chief someday. So when Ryan's friend at the PD started digging stuff up on Sharp and Alfieri, he knew enough to go to Strickland first. And Strickland, who had initiated the search, wasting the taxpayers' money on helicopters and scuba divers, had probably also been scolded. I am beginning to wonder if Ryan is right, that maybe Strickland only hopes to use all of this to save face, to salvage his
own
reputation.

I go to the floral section and pick out a bunch of flowers from one of the buckets: daisies and snapdragons. Hot-pink carnations. It is an explosion of color. I impulsively put my face into the bouquet and inhale. But grocery store flowers never smell the way they look. The scent is artificial. Chemically enhanced. The water from the bucket drips down my arm, making me even colder.

In the candy aisle I grab a bag of gumdrops, think about how I can get out to the swimming hole and leave them at the fairy house for Plum. I look down at my hand, the gauze filthy again, with a little bit of blood seeping through. I go to the pharmacy aisle next and buy more gauze, more tape. I'll be lucky if this cut ever heals.

As I am making my way to the dairy aisle for Effie's eggs, I see Ruth, Mrs. Lund's friend from the search.

“Oh, hello,” she says. “Tess Mahoney, right?”

“Waters,” I correct her, a knee jerking reflexively. But
Waters,
the name I took all those years ago, belongs to Jake. What will happen to it if I leave him? Will I lose it? Be forced to give it back? And who will I be then? “Sorry. It's Tess Waters now. Hi.”

“I didn't expect you'd still be in town,” she says, clucking her tongue.

I shrug.

“I mean now that they're saying there wasn't a little girl and all,” she persists. Her face, which had seemed kind and grandmotherly before, appears angry now. Bitter. Her lipsticked mouth is pinched. “You got a lot of people worked up over this, you know. This is a small community. Like family.”

“I know that,” I say. “Remember, I grew up here.”

She shakes her head. “Then, of course, you understand.”

I feel like telling her everything. Telling her that there is a registered sex offender living right where I found the girl. I want to tell her what I saw in that barn. I want to stand up and tell this whole goddamned town that the only reason why the investigation has been ditched is because of that asshole lieutenant's pride.

Instead, I push my cart past her, saying “Excuse me” as the edge of the cart catches on her purse.

I am seething as I push the cart through the dairy aisle to get the eggs. When my phone dings, I am tempted to hurl it into the freezer with the frozen pizzas and leave it there.

A text message.

Jake.

Christ. I try to think about what it could be. Maybe the publishers pulled their offers while they waited for Charlie to decide. Maybe they all realized what an asshat he is and opted out. Maybe it has something to do with her,
Jess
. I don't want to deal with any of this. None of it matters. All of it is so inconsequential. So trivial and inane.

I cradle the cell phone between my shoulder and my ear as I grab a carton of eggs from the cooler. Out of habit, I flip the cardboard lid to check for any broken ones. They are all intact.

“Hey,” I say when Jake answers.

He sounds so far away. I put the eggs in the cart and use my hand to hold the phone properly.

“What's up?”

There is nothing but silence, and I pull the phone away from my ear and study the screen to make sure we're still connected.

“Jake?”

“It's my mom,” he says, and he sounds strange. Like a boy.

“Your
mom?
”

There is nothing on the other end of the line. And then I can hear a stifled sob. “I'm at home,” he says.

“At the house?”

“In South Hadley,” he says. His parents' house in western Mass.

“Jake?”

“She had an aneurysm,” he says. “She was doing the dishes. And she just fell over. Dad found her.”

“Is she . . . okay?” I ask, feeling hot despite the cold freezer aisle.

“She's in the ICU,” he says. “It doesn't look good, Tessie. I really need you to come down here.”

“W
hen are you coming back?” Plum asks, standing at the open window of the driver's side of the car.

“I'm not sure, honey,” I say, and reach out to touch her hair. It's in two braids today, ending with two small puffs. “I promise I'll be back as soon as I can.”

“Pinkie swear,” she challenges, pushing her tiny little pinkie finger toward me. We hook them, and then she backs away from the car, starts cartwheeling across the lawn. Without Devin here to mow it, and with the major rain we got last week, it is overgrown already. A thick, plush carpet of bluegrass and clover.

Effie comes out of the camp holding a small, insulated lunch box; the screen door slams behind her.

“I made you a turkey sandwich. There's iced tea in there and a couple of brownies too. Zu-Zu's famous triple-chocolate fudge. Do you need anything else?”

I take the bag from her and shake my head. “You didn't need to do this. I could have just swung by Hudson's and grabbed something on my way.”

She bends down and leans into the window.

“Do you know how to get there from here?” she asks.

I nod. Jake and I have visited his folks on our way home from Vermont many times. It's on the way. Just three hours, a straight shot down I-91.

“Do you think she's going to be okay?” Effie asks.

“I don't know. Jake didn't have a lot of information. I think it happened last night. He drove up from New York and just got there this morning.”

“Call me when you get there?” she says.

I nod.

“What are you going to do about . . .” she starts, and then sighs. “This?”

I shake my head. I haven't told her about what I saw in that barn, or that I saw Strickland out of uniform. I promised him I wouldn't say a word. We have an agreement now. Strickland, suddenly my secret ally.

“Ryan and the police have my phone number. I'm hoping this stuff with Shirley isn't as bad as it seems, and I can come back up here in a day or two.”

A day or two. It's already been a week. I can't let myself think about how futile this is all beginning to seem. How the chances of it ending well seem to be growing smaller and smaller. The possibilities of what has happened to her growing fewer and fewer.

“I love you,” she says. “Give Jake a hug from me.” I can see that it pains her to say this, to offer this affection. Effie is fiercely loyal. I know there's a small part of her that thinks I shouldn't go down there at all. That what he's done (what he's
doing
) is unforgivable. But she also knows how much I love Shirley.

Leaving here always hurts. I have to remind myself as I round the lake that I am coming back. But still, as I drive by the spot (restored now to its pristine, unadulterated state), I can't help but feel like I am betraying her. Leaving her behind. I also wonder, as the dirt road crushes under my tires and the wind blows through my open window, if Jake would do the same for me. Would he drop everything? Would he forget everything he was doing to go to me if I needed him?

As I drive, my mind drifts, and I realize I am going 80, 85, 90 miles per hour. It's easy on these desolate roads to forget. For your foot to grow heavy as your mind wanders.

Jake said that she's at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield. I've never been there. And it seems crazy to me, as I pass the exit for Holyoke, the city, not the college, that before this week I'd never given Holyoke, Massachusetts, a single thought. And now, here I was. This is where Sharp was living before he came to Gormlaith. And Alfieri was from Springfield, where I am headed. I try to focus on the reason for this trip. To forget about what I am leaving behind.

 

I text Jake as soon as I park at the hospital, and he gives me directions to the ICU.

I stop by the gift shop and pick up a bouquet of flowers, noting how much more expensive they are than the bunch I picked up for Effie just this morning. This morning feels so long ago, and now Gormlaith feels distant as well.

Jake greets me in the ICU waiting room. I am overwhelmed by something when I see him, though I can't pinpoint exactly what it is. My impulse is to hug him, to hold him. Like Effie, I am inclined to suspend all grievances, to let go, this emergency somehow negating what he has done.

I once worked with a woman at Norton who was a horrid person. Everyone hated her. But when she got throat cancer, it was as though she'd received some sort of pass. Her bitchiness, her cattiness, her back-stabbing and abrasiveness were somehow forgiven. Cancer exonerated her from all her bad behavior. I felt guilty for getting irritated with her, though her worst qualities were amplified by her illness.

Still, when he moves toward me, I don't turn away. Instead, I hug him, smell the familiar scent of his shampoo. And I soften.

“Where's your dad?” I ask.

“I sent him home to sleep,” he says. “He's been up all night.”

“So what happened?” I ask, and we sit down together in the uninviting plastic chairs in the waiting area. They are linked together, immoveable.

He recites what it is that the doctors have told him. A massive cerebral aneurysm burst in her brain. It's a miracle that she survived at all. Had she been alone in the house, had Dick not come into the kitchen the moment that he did, I'd have been coming down here for a funeral.

“Can I see her?” I ask.

“I think so,” he says, and asks the nurse at the desk if we can go in.

I have loved Jake's mother since the moment I met her. His father, a professor at Amherst, has always intimidated me. But Shirley is like a warm breeze. She is all air and sunshine. I have known this woman for almost twenty years. When I met her, she was younger than I am now.

Seeing her like this makes me ache. And then everything disappears. My anger at Jake, everything that has been happening at the lake. This woman has been a mother to me when I had none. How could I have been so selfish to even consider for a moment not coming here to see her?

She is sleeping, medicated. And it strikes me that hospitals have a tendency to strip you of everything that makes you human. Hair, skin, bones; the skeletal essence is all that remains in a hospital bed. There is no room in a hospital for the dirty jokes she loves and her full-body laughter. For the curlers she sometimes wears in her red hair halfway through the day before she remembers them. The hospital is inhospitable to a wink before the shot of Irish whiskey, which she drinks from an airplane bottle she keeps stashed in her bra.

“Ma,” Jake says, reaching for her hand. And it is only paper-thin flesh, spotted with freckles, the architecture no different than any other hand. Though this is the hand that held mine when we got back from Guatemala. The hand that stroked my hair until I fell asleep. The hand that knitted the tiny blanket and sweaters and then later packed them all away in boxes stored on high shelves in our closet.

I sit down in a chair next to the bed, terrified of accidentally disrupting the equipment that surrounds her: the whirring, humming, dripping machines that are keeping that blood clot from doing any more damage than it's already done.

I reach for her hand, and am startled by how cold it is.

Jake is in the doorway; he seems to be waiting for me to tell him what to do.

“Can you get me a coffee?” I ask, and he seems grateful for a project. For a mission.

I hold on to Shirley's hand as gently as I can and am aware of the softly beating pulse just beneath her skin. I study her face, which, without her careful makeup, seems paler, older. I have never watched her sleep before. I have only seen her as she usually is, a whirling body full of life and energy. Dancing in the kitchen to the imaginary songs that played inside her head. Digging in the soil of her garden.

“Hi, Shirley,” I say, and my throat swells.

Jake had explained that the ruptured aneurysm caused a bleed in her brain, effectively causing a stroke. That one moment she was fine, washing dishes, listening to the radio, and the next moment her body conspired against her. An explosion, a detonation in her brain. It was a live grenade she didn't know was there, and it went off. She's lucky to be alive, though it's impossible to know yet the extent of the damage. If she makes it through the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, she will then be transported to Boston to see neurology specialists. Because even if there is no significant damage done to her brain already, there is still a chance, an even greater chance, of this happening again. Her body could be riddled with these horrific landmines. It is all delicate, fragile, now. Dangerous.

When Jake's dad returns to the hospital, he looks a hundred years old. I mistake him for an elderly patient as he shuffles, head down, shoulders hunched, toward us.

“Tessie,” he says. “Thank you for coming down.”

His usually gruff voice, his caustic demeanor, is gone. It's as if he himself were a walking aneurysm: puffed up, dangerous, always on the verge of bursting. But now, he is deflated. Bled out.

He holds on to my hands and studies my face as though he's forgotten who I am. And for just a moment, I feel a pity so deep it nearly swallows me. But it's not pity at all. It's a sort of odd longing. Out of place. Confused.

In two years, Dick and Shirley will celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary. They met when Shirley was a student of Dick's during his first year of teaching at college. It was a forbidden love affair, kept secret until she graduated. And even then, her father apparently came after Dick with a shotgun (literally, Shirley was from the Appalachian wilds of West Virginia, where shotgun weddings got their name) when Shirley announced that she was pregnant. They lost that first child, who was born with a hole in his heart, but went on to raise three boys (Jake being the youngest). They moved around a lot when the boys were little until Dick got his tenured position at Amherst and then they settled here. Forty-eight years. A million meals, a million conversations, a million head colds and family vacations and miles spent together in the car. A million dreams fulfilled or deferred. And yet, every time they were together, Dick looked at her like she was still that nineteen-year-old coed. It embarrassed Jake how his father mooned over his mother; when they held hands or Dick nuzzled into Shirley's neck while she was trying to do something else, Jake would roll his eyes. Mortified like a twelve-year-old who has just caught his parents making out.

But it was deeper than affection, deeper than the raw energy that seemed to pulse between them. There was a tenderness between them that I have never felt with Jake. Not once. And somehow, somewhere along the line, I must have gotten the wrong idea that he would one day look at me the way his father looks at his mother. Is it possible that I was that stupid? That I believed this was some sort of genetic inheritance held in a trust to be released, disbursed at a later date?

“Dad, we're going to get some dinner. Can we bring you anything?”

Dick shakes his head and shrugs his shoulders. “I'm okay. I can get something in the cafeteria.”

“Well, call me if you change your mind,” Jake says. “We'll be back in a couple of hours. Text me if Mom wakes up.”

Dick nods and looks at us, as though he is looking for something he's lost. But it's not here. And I think maybe it never was.

 

We find a little pizza shop in a brick building near the hospital; next door is an Irish pub and grill.

“Pizza?” Jake asks.

I shake my head. “How about a drink instead? Looks like they've got burgers too.”

We go inside and take a seat at the long wooden bar. There's a Sox game on and a half dozen men in Sox caps grumbling. None of them acknowledge us.

I am grateful to be sitting side-by-side rather than across from each other. It's easier this way to avoid looking at him.

“What happened?” he asks, motioning to my hand.

“Bagel injury,” I say. “So, what did Charlie decide?”

Charlie and he are supposed to make a decision by tomorrow. Part of me wonders if Jake will be conducting business from the hospital waiting room, from the parking lot. It must have killed him to have to leave New York in the middle of the biggest deal of his career.

He shakes his head. “I don't know. I'm not really thinking about that right now,” he says, hurt. “How are things going up at the lake? Anything more with the girl?”

There is so much he doesn't know. It feels like our lives have divided; after that night, mine continued on without him. (And his without me as well.) I wonder if this is what it feels like to split up. Just the decision and then the parting. And then I think that maybe it started a long time ago. A weak seam, the fabric slowly separating until one day you notice the rip. And it's too late to repair. The damage too complete.

“The police have some leads. They're looking for the guy in the truck,” I say. “They traced his plates. He's actually from here. Springfield.”

“A tourist?” he says.

And I realize, the threads are gone. Nothing is holding this together.
Us
together.

People who've been together as long as we have usually have children. And even when their marriages fall apart, they stay. For the kids. But I wonder if that's just an excuse. Because without children, I am still struggling to find reasons not to leave. It's harder though, the reasons less compelling.

“When do you think you'll leave?” he asks, and I don't know whether he's talking about Gormlaith or something else.

I turn to him, sigh, and shrug. I shake my head, and he looks at me sadly. He knows. He understands. These nuances, these gestures are unmistakable after all this time. A language that has grown over the last two decades.