Chapter Sixteen
Sixteen
Collette, smart girl that she is, can sense that something has changed in the air. She doesn’t comment on the fact that Waylen and I pick her up together, in his car. She doesn’t even comment that we’re late, because I made Waylen stash away the Honda in a parking lot until it can be returned.
I’m the first one to speak when I glance at her in the mirror and ask where she got the glittery purple lip gloss she’s wearing.
“Finnegan,” she says matter-of-factly. “We wanted to do makeovers at lunch, but her ColourPop palette got taken by the cafeteria monitor. It was so dumb. But she had lip gloss in her other purse.”
Of course Elodie Blevins’s kid would take two purses to school.
“Be careful, kiddo,” Waylen says from behind the wheel. “You shouldn’t be sharing that stuff. Germs.”
She only nods.
“I’m glad that you’re making friends with her,” I say. “I know it hasn’t been easy.”
“She’s okay, I guess,” Collette says. “Actually, she’s kind of nice when she’s not with her other friends.”
I could say the same thing about Elodie, come to think of it.
I think again of her odd offer of friendship.
I’ve seen other groups of friends and wondered how they started—if they met in college, or at a bar, or if they made small talk while standing in line at a store somewhere.
It never occurred to me that it would be as simple as just asking, “Would you like to be my friend?”
By the time we get to the house, I’ve gotten a text from the mechanic that they’ve received my towed car and they’ll give me a call tomorrow morning.
“What did they say it was?” Waylen asks.
“They’ll look at it and get back to me.”
He smiles, as cheerful as the sun that’s starting to peek through as the rain clouds disperse.
“Since you don’t have your car, we should take a family trip.
” He turns to look at Collette, who is shouldering her backpack and about to step out into the driveway.
“What do you say, ’Lette? We could go to the grocery store and get the stuff to make one of those famous TikTok recipes you’ve been talking about. ”
“I have math homework,” she says, clearly confused by the break in our routine. Waylen isn’t exactly known for his spontaneity.
“We’ll get to it!” Waylen assures her. “Mom and I will help—not that you need us anymore.” He turns to me. “She’s smarter than either of us, isn’t she?”
“Yes,” I say, cautiously guarding my responses. What is this? What game are we playing?
I decide to let him take the lead. He drives us to the grocery store that we dubbed the “ritzy market” because it only sells select brands, all of which are organic. Collette acclimates to the change in routine and asks us if she can add some LaCroix to the cart.
When we get home, the kitchen is soon filled with the aroma of simmering broth for our homemade spicy pho, to be accompanied by strawberry cheesecake muffins that have to go back into the oven three times because the center doesn’t pass the toothpick test.
We watch When Harry Met Sally on Collette’s iPad as we eat dinner at the kitchen table.
Through the bay window, warm kitchen light spills out into the autumn darkness, where the rain has given way to light flurries.
Like something Norman Rockwell would paint.
And after, as promised, Waylen and I help Collette with her homework.
Waylen catches two small misspellings in her book report.
I struggle my way through sixth-grade geometry.
But I begin to feel that I’m in a geometry puzzle of my own, driving a car that isn’t mine through the strict confines of a grid drawn by my husband. None of the lines leads to Bertram, or my brother, or the past I’ve been running from. It all just leads back to this.
At eight o’clock, Waylen goes to his office to catch up on a deadline he says he can’t put off any longer. At ten o’clock, I check on Collette, whose bedroom is softly lit by the spinning rainbow of stars cast by her night-light. She’s in bed, breathing softly, her back turned to me.
“Mom?” she whispers as I’m starting to close her door.
“Yes, darling?”
She sits up. In the dim light, her eyes are two black pools. Her face looks too old and too serious for her age. “Do you have any family you don’t talk about?”
My heart simultaneously aches and beats faster. “Grandma and Grandpa died when I was a little girl. You know that.”
Collette nods. “But didn’t you have any other family? A brother or sister? Cousins? Aunts and uncles?”
My family sat in the courtroom, listening to the list of charges being read aloud.
I tried to make eye contact with them—someone, anyone—but they all turned away, except for two.
They still haven’t forgiven me. They still say it was all my fault.
Not that I’ve contacted them recently to see if they’ve changed their minds.
“My grandparents died before you were born, honey. They were very old. But I know they would have loved to meet you.”
“Maybe we can visit their graves,” Collette says. “What if no one ever visits them? What if no one mows the lawn or takes care of it?”
“Their graves are very far away, Collette.” I don’t mean to snap at her, but I see her wince. It’s so rare for me to lose patience that she’s forgotten I even can.
I close her door and sit on the edge of her bed. She crawls up beside me.
“What is this about?” I ask her. “We’ve already had this conversation.”
“Not really,” she says. “You only told me that everyone is dead. But—Dad’s side has Grandma, Grandpa, Aunt Linda and Ellen, and all the cousins. I just thought there might be someone you aren’t telling me about.”
There are a lot of things I’m not telling you about, my love.
I study her. Where is this coming from? I know it wasn’t Waylen—he readily accepted my story about being adrift with no family to tether me elsewhere in the world.
It’s even why he loved me so much and so fast when we first met.
He had never been someone’s whole world before, and that was what he wanted. It still is.
My brother said it was for the best that it stays between us.
He’s got his hands into too many messes.
The cases he’s helped me work were all researched on his hard drives, following coordinates he sent and using vehicles he procured.
He’s so careful, but if there’s ever a lapse and he’s caught, he doesn’t want any of it traced back to me.
“No,” I lie, and of all the lies I’ve told, this is simultaneously the easiest and the most painful. “There’s no one else.”
She seems disappointed. “Could we road-trip to Oregon sometime? Where you grew up?” she asks. “Could you show me?”
“It wasn’t in a big city like Portland, or anything you’d see on TV,” I assure her. “It was basically just wilderness.”
“Camping trip,” she says. “We could go, just us.”
I stand, pulling her blankets up. “Come on,” I say, mustering my best cheerful tone. “That’s a conversation for another time. Get some sleep.”
She climbs under the covers and asks for her iPad, insisting she just found a new meditation app that helps her fall asleep.
I concede, just this once, and leave her with the sounds of a Tibetan singing bowl and babbling brook, while a soothing voice murmurs affirmations about how strong she is.
When I get into bed, I’m just about to check my voicemail when Waylen enters the room. He sighs tiredly and starts to undress.
I watch him, considering the man I married.
He is like a tall building with infinite windows, and when I peek through, I can’t be sure what it is I’ll find playing out inside him.
Most days, he’s sensitive and kind, the long-suffering girl dad and attentive husband.
Evidenced by the now faded unicorn sticker on the glove box of his otherwise pristine car from when Collette was little and used to pretend to drive while he washed the car in the driveway.
When it’s my night to host the book club, he brings trays of wine and veggie spreads into the living room, making polite small talk before jogging back upstairs to work.
The ladies swoon and tell me how lucky I am, before regaling me with some story about how their own husbands are useless when they host parties.
But there are windows I haven’t peered into, or won’t.
I assess the situation I’m in now: no vehicle, no privacy to check in with Bertram, or my brother, because the engine mysteriously died.
Bertram thinks that Annie has been stalking him since they broke off their engagement in the summer, and found him again—at least that’s his claim—but it was Waylen.
But I could see the panic in Bertram’s eyes, in the driver’s eyes, as we raced around that parking lot. Does that mean Bertram was telling the truth, and he really did think someone was out to get him? But who? If he did kill Annie, he would have known it wasn’t her. Could there be someone else?
I pull up my messages with Elodie so that I can ask her to pick me up tomorrow morning. I’ll say I had car trouble and that it will be fun for our girls to carpool together. But when I open up our conversation, I see a message that was sent hours earlier: Call me, ASAP. Big development.
I glance at Waylen through the doorway of our bathroom, brushing his teeth now. If I get out of bed now to call Elodie, what will happen? Will he try to stop me, or say nothing but then find a way to listen in?
Whatever it is can wait until morning. I have no way to leave anyway.
When he comes to bed, he leans in to kiss me, and we make love quietly, our jagged breathing doing the talking for both of us.
After, he goes to the kitchen and brings up two glasses of wine and turns on the TV.
We snuggle up in bed to an old black-and-white film on TCM.
Something about a beautiful young woman who meets a reporter who offers her a deal if she’ll let him write a story about her life.