Chapter Twenty
TWENTY
Late in the evening, I am sitting in bed listening to an audiobook, because reading still gives me a headache, when I hear the front door open.
Suddenly, the quiet house is filled with domestic noise.
Kugel starts barking, Miguel calls out to me, and I can hear Rachel fuss over the dog.
Those sounds of a family home calm me better than any medication ever could.
I go to the landing and catch Rachel in a hug just as she bounds up the stairs. I hug her with desperate intensity as if she might vanish if I don’t hold her tight enough.
“Welcome home, baby!”
“Careful, I’m stinky,” she says.
I pull back to examine her, taking in every detail.
She looks more like me as she gets older except that she’s a few inches taller and has Miguel’s nose.
Her dark hair is streaked with gold from the sun, and she’s tan and scruffy looking—as she should be after spending ten days in the outdoors.
She practically glows with happiness. The sight of her fills me with relief.
She’s here, she’s safe, and she’s untouched by whatever darkness has been circling me the past few days.
“Mom, it was amazing.” She immediately launches into a retelling of the trip, words tumbling out in excited bursts.
“So Aida’s aunt lives in Burlington, and she picked us up at the airport, and we spent one night there, and oh my God, Burlington is so cool, and then the next morning she drove us and all our gear to Brandon Gap… ”
I pull her into my bedroom by her hand, and we sit on the edge of my bed, where I let her talk nonstop for about twenty minutes.
Miguel comes in and folds laundry, listening and watching.
Even Kugel joins us, curling up at Rachel’s feet.
For a moment, all seems right with the world.
I’ve missed this so much I feel like I might cry, the pressure building between my eyes as I struggle to focus only on now, trying to push away the swirling questions that have plagued me.
“You sure you want to turn around and go away in a couple of days?” I say once she has stopped for breath, attempting to mask the desperation in my voice with humor. “You can stay in Bethesda for the summer, get a job at Ledo’s.”
Rachel rolls her eyes. “Funny. I already have a job, remember?”
I nod. I know this. She’s going to be a junior counselor at a tennis camp she’s attended since she was little. “I can match their salary,” I say, hoping it comes off as a joke, but I can feel tears welling in my eyes.
Rachel makes a face, her eyebrows drawing together in concern. “Okay, that’s just weird. Are you all right, Mom?”
Miguel clears his throat. “See any bears in Vermont?”
“Oh, so many bears. Let me show you. Let me get my phone.”
As soon as she rushes out of the room, Miguel walks in front of me, his eyes boring into me. “What was that all about?”
“What? I was joking.”
“Only it wasn’t funny. And it looked like you were about to cry.”
“I guess I like having her home. That’s not so weird, is it?
” I drop my legs over the edge of the bed and let my bare feet land on Kugel’s back.
The handout from the hospital says that big emotional swings can be one of the effects of a concussion, and that’s what this feels like.
Like I’m strapped to some giant pendulum, swinging from despair to nostalgia and back again.
“No. But we don’t want to upset her. We agreed on that.” He stretches out the word agreed for emphasis.
Just then my phone rings and I grab it, grateful for the interruption. It’s Kenya. Finally.
“Hey, sorry I didn’t get back to you earlier. I was at mah-jongg. What’s going on? How can I help?” Though her voice is casual, it sounds forced to me.
“I had a weird conversation with that Holly Stone woman this afternoon. We bumped into each other at Wagshal’s.” I can feel Miguel’s eyes on me, and I turn my body slightly, my back stiffening under his scrutiny.
“What happened?” Kenya’s voice goes up a notch. “I thought Miguel returned her bracelet.”
“Yes, he did. But she claimed that she contacted us several times about the bracelet. I only got the one email. Did you get any messages from her? Maybe a DM on Facebook?” A pause follows, and I close my eyes tight as I wait for her answer.
It feels like forever until she speaks again, although I know it’s only a few seconds.
“Oh, right. I did see that she had contacted us through Facebook.”
“I don’t remember seeing any DMs.” I squeeze the phone harder.
This doesn’t make any sense. If anything, Kenya overcommunicates.
I’ve known this woman for fifteen years, worked with her on the yard sale for eleven, and she’s never met a Google Doc, Excel spreadsheet, or SignUpGenius that she hasn’t blasted my way.
During the run-up to the yard sale, it’s not unusual for me to wake to five separate emails from Kenya, a few texts, and a voicemail about trivial matters.
No way she wouldn’t have told me about getting multiple messages regarding a stolen bracelet.
“This is my fault,” Kenya says. “I saw them and put reaching out to her on my list of things to get to, but it slipped my mind.”
“So you did see her messages.” I press harder, hungry for the truth.
“Yes, there were a couple of them, if I recall. I was going to circle back, but then—” Kenya lets out a hearty laugh. “You know how life is. Noah graduating and everything. Parents of seniors should never do the Eastbrook yard sale, am I right? What were we thinking?”
“I guess that clears it up,” I say, unconvinced.
“Yeah, sorry you got sucked into all this. I just dropped the ball.”
I get off the phone to see a frowning Miguel. His face has hardened into a look of distaste.
“Why were you talking to Holly Stone?” he asks, measuring each word carefully.
“What?” I ask, momentarily confused. Then I realize he was listening to my conversation with Kenya.
“Oh. I bumped into her outside Wagshal’s.
Don’t make it sound weird.” A defensive edge has crept into my voice.
“She told me that she reached out to us several times about the bracelet, but no one ever responded. Don’t you think that’s odd that Kenya never told me?
” I search his face for a flicker of agreement but there is none.
“Maybe she never got the emails. Maybe they went to spam or junk.”
“She admitted she got them, on Facebook.”
“Admitted?” Miguel knits his eyebrows together. The skepticism in his voice rankles. “Caren, why does this whole bracelet thing matter so much? It’s over.”
“I don’t know, I feel like it’s connected to what happened to me on Saturday night.”
He nods, as if considering this. “True, they both happened to you this weekend, but it doesn’t mean there’s some deeper connection. You’re becoming a little fixated on the bracelet.”
“I’m not fixated.” I sound defensive even to myself.
“Well, what did Kenya say?”
I shrug. “That she saw the messages but forgot about them. She said she dropped the ball.”
Just then Rachel comes bounding in with her phone in one hand and one of the Berger Cookies I bought today in the other. “Sorry, I am starving. Hey, do you guys want to see photos?”
“Sure,” I say, patting the bed next to me.
As I look over my daughter’s shoulder, trying to focus on images of the lush Green Mountains that flicker across her small screen, it hits me—I don’t believe Kenya. That woman has never dropped a ball in her life.
But why would she lie? What is she hiding?
Noah.
The answer comes to me without having to search.
She’s protecting Noah. It’s the only thing I can think of that would make her act so irrationally.
Make any of us parents do so. It’s what we have in common in Eastbrook—we might be different religions, races, ethnicities.
We might have grown up in the mountains, on farms, or in cities.
But we all agree on one thing—we’d do anything to help our children, to protect them.
I squeeze Rachel’s shoulder hard. When Yumi told me that she thought that she’d seen Rachel with Van, skulking around the backyard, my first thought was How can I protect her from her own mistakes?
I would do a lot. I would certainly tell a little white lie to Kenya.
But that only raises another question—what is Kenya protecting Noah from? What exactly has he done?