7. Chapter 7
Isla
Iam in a car doing ninety on the BQE toward Queens because Matt — Beckett asked me to come with him and then immediately looked like he regretted asking, and I said yes before he could take it back.
I am driving. He did not argue about this in the office and he is not arguing about it now, which I am choosing to read as trust rather than distraction, though I suspect it is both.
The BQE is nearly empty at this hour, the city doing its mid-morning thing of moving fast in all directions at once.
Beckett hasn’t said anything since we got in the car and I haven’t made him.
His jaw is set and his eyes are on the road but he is not looking at the road — he is somewhere else entirely, running something, and I leave him to it.
I think about the text message. Move the boy if you want. I already know where your mother lives.
I think about the way he read it and set the phone face-down on the desk — not a reaction, just a pause, the kind a person makes when they are making sure the thing they are feeling does not come out in a way they will have to manage later.
I have been making that pause my entire life. I recognized it immediately.
"Tell me about your mother," I say.
He glances at me. "Why?"
"Because I'm about to meet her and I'd like to know more than her address."
A beat. Then: "Ruth. Sixty-three. Retired school administrator. She lives in the house I grew up in. She has opinions about my job, my hours, and the fact that I don't eat enough vegetables, and she is correct about all three." He pauses. "She's going to ask you questions."
"I answer questions for a living."
"Not her kind."
I look at him. "What kind does she ask?"
He doesn't answer. I take this as a warning.
We go through the tunnel and come out into Queens and I watch the neighborhoods change out the window and think about what it means that he asked me to come.
He didn’t have to. Drake was already on his way, the secondary car was arranged, Ruth's house isn’t a location that requires Isla Wrenwood's presence.
He asked anyway, and then looked immediately like he wanted to retract it, and I got in the car before he could decide whether to.
I am not going to examine why I did that. I am going to watch the road and think about the case, which is what a sensible person would do.
I think about the case for approximately forty-five seconds before I think about something else entirely.
Ruth Beckett opens the door of a tidy brick rowhouse on a tree-lined street in Flushing before we have reached the top step, which means she has been watching from the window, which means she was already worried.
She is shorter than I expected — five-three, maybe, with gray-streaked hair cut close and the kind of eyes that take a very complete reading of a situation in under two seconds and don't bother hiding that they've done it.
She looks at her son first. Whatever she finds there makes something in her expression tighten and then deliberately release.
Then she looks at me.
"Isla Wrenwood," she says. Not a greeting. An assessment.
"Mrs. Beckett." I offer my hand. "I'm sorry for the circumstances."
She shakes it with a grip that is considerably firmer than I expected, holds it for a half-second longer than a handshake requires, and then steps back to let us in.
The house is exactly what it should be — lived-in and clean, photographs on the walls, a runner on the hallway floor that has been there long enough to show the path people take between the kitchen and the front door.
There is a child's drawing pinned to the refrigerator that I can see from the entryway, crayon and construction paper, and next to it a school photograph of Elias that is recent enough that he still has the haircut I saw him in twenty minutes ago.
"Elias is in the kitchen," Ruth says. "He's been asking about you. "
"About me?"
"He saw something on the news." She glances at her son with an expression I cannot fully read. "He has thoughts."
Elias Beckett is at the kitchen table with a worksheet in front of him and a pencil behind his ear and his father's exact hazel eyes, and he looks up when I walk in with the unhurried assessment of a seven-year-old who has already decided he is going to have opinions about this and is simply waiting for the data to arrive.
"Are you the lady from grandma’s magazine?" he asks.
"Quite possibly," I say. "Are you the one with the iguana facts?"
He straightens slightly. "Yes, but I don't have an iguana. Marco has an iguana."
"I know. I heard about the shampoo."
This lands well. He pulls out the chair across from him with the gravity of someone extending a formal invitation and I sit down.
"Are your shoes uncomfortable?" he asks.
"Extremely, but after a while, my toes go numb, and then it's not so bad."
"Why do you wear them?"
"They make me feel taller than I am. And some people find them intimidating. Both are good features."
He thinks about this with the seriousness it apparently deserves. "Have you ever been to the moon?"
"No. I know someone who applied to be an astronaut and didn't get in, though."
His eyes go wide. "Who?"
"Oh, I pinky promised not to tell. He's very embarrassed about it."
This lands as intended. He processes it, files it, moves on. "What's it like being engaged to my dad?"
I look at him. "Different than I expected," I say, which is true in more ways than he needs to know.
He considers this. "He's grumpy in the mornings," he offers.
"I've noticed."
"He makes good pancakes though."
"I haven't had those yet."
Elias nods like this is something that will need to be remedied and writes something on the corner of his worksheet.
I do not look to see what it says. He asks me two more questions — whether I know any famous people, and whether the ring is real — and I answer both honestly, which seems to be the correct approach with him.
He receives information the way his father does, quietly and without a lot of visible reaction, filing it somewhere behind those hazel eyes.
I am aware, somewhere in the vicinity of my sternum, that this child is doing something to my carefully maintained equilibrium that I was not prepared for and cannot entirely account for.
Through the wall I can hear Matt and his mother, their voices low and controlled in the way of people having a conversation they have had before and not resolved.
I catch pieces — don't, and I know, and once, unmistakably, Ruth's voice saying Matthew in the tone that mothers reserve for things their children are doing that they find both understandable and wrong.
He comes back with his jaw set and does not explain.
We stay another twenty minutes. Elias shows me his iguana research binder, which is an actual binder, tabbed and color-coded, and I tell him it is the most thorough research I have seen outside of a board presentation and I mean it, and the look he gives me in response is so purely his father's that I have to look away.
Before we leave, Matt crouches to Elias's level in the kitchen doorway and they talk quietly, too low for me to hear from the hallway where I am standing with Ruth, who is handing me my coat and watching her son with an expression that is so unguarded I feel like I am seeing something I was not meant to.
She hands me my coat and does not look away from them. "He doesn't bring people here," she says, conversationally, the way people deliver important information when they have decided you are going to receive it whether you want to or not. "In six years. Not once."
I look at her. She is still watching Matt and Elias.
"He has a very tidy list of what Elias needs to know about his work," she says. "Which is: nothing. Nobody from that world comes into this one." She pauses. "Until today."
I do not know what to say to that, so I say nothing, which I am finding is often the right answer in this house.
Then Elias wraps both arms around Matt's neck without warning.
Matt goes still. Not the professional, controlled stillness — something else, something total, like every rigid thing in him has simply stopped.
It lasts four seconds. Then his arms come up and he holds his son with a completeness that I feel somewhere I am not going to name, and I look at the wallpaper and study the pattern and breathe carefully in and out.
Ruth says, quietly, beside me: "He doesn't let people see that, either."
"I know," I say, because I do. I have been watching him not let people see things for a week and a half, and this is the first crack in it, and it’s not for me — it’s for a seven-year-old with a research binder and his father's eyes — and somehow that makes it land harder, not softer.
Ruth looks at me for the first time since she handed me my coat. Whatever she finds, she keeps to herself. "Drive safe," she says, which is directed at her son, and she goes back into the kitchen, and that is the end of the conversation.
He takes the keys when we leave Ruth's without asking and I let him, and we are back on the BQE headed toward Manhattan when he says it.
No preamble. No wind-up. Just: "Elias's mother was killed in a robbery. He was one year old. I was overseas when it happened."
"Coming home to that must have been devastating," I say.
He doesn't respond to that, exactly. But something in his shoulders shifts, like a door opening a quarter inch. "He doesn't remember her," he says. "He knows about her. It's not the same thing."
"No," I say. "It isn't."
The car is quiet for a moment. The city slides past on both sides, indifferent and enormous, doing what cities do, which is continue regardless.
"He seems okay," I say. "Genuinely. Not the version kids put on for adults — actually okay." I pause. "That's not an accident."
He says nothing. I keep my eyes on the passenger window and I don't look at him, because this is a car on a highway and neither of us has to look at the other, and I understand that is not a coincidence — that he said this now, here, in the one setting where the rules of eye contact don't apply.
From the corner of my eye I see his hand tighten on his knee, just slightly, and then release.
I let him have it.
My phone buzzes in my bag. I fish it out, expecting Ivy or Cole or Celeste, and find a text from my best friend, Lina instead.
Lina: hey. don't freak out. but there's a man outside your building photographing the entrance and he's been there for at least three minutes and I'm watching him from across the street right now
I read it twice. Then I say: "Beckett."
"What?"
I turn the phone so he can see it at the next red light, and I watch his jaw set.
"Call her back," he says. "Tell her to go inside and stay there."
After a quick conversation with Lina, I look back out the window.
The city keeps moving. I think about the wallpaper in Ruth Beckett's hallway and the way Matt's posture changed for exactly four seconds, and I put that somewhere safe, somewhere I can find it later, and I focus on what's in front of us.