Chapter Thirteen
The plan to go to Hamilton, Vermont, four hours north of Alcott, comes together in short order.
Chris, Uncle Brian, and Aunt Teresa are free the following weekend, and Diana’s parents offer to watch Duncan and Phoebe.
“I’m glad you’re taking time for yourself,” Vivian says when she picks up the kids’ overnight bags.
“But why not a spa? Someplace where you can really unwind?”
“I told Chris I’d visit,” Diana says, choosing her words with care.
Andrea calls later, in between patients. “I have to work Saturday or else I’d come with you.”
“It’s only a few days,” Diana says, grateful for her sister’s busy schedule. “You won’t even realize I’m gone.”
Diana makes the trip on a Friday, taking a day off from work.
She gives Duncan a kiss before he leaves that morning, sticking twenty dollars in his pocket for emergencies.
She waves goodbye as Phoebe walks across the street to school with Mira, the morning bell ringing throughout their neighborhood, the pom-poms on the girls’ winter hats bouncing with each step.
They’ll be safe at her parents’, she assures herself, repeating the sentence three times in the hope that the words are true.
As Diana throws a suitcase in her trunk, Lakshmi meets her in the driveway, holding a travel mug filled with coffee and a lunch sack.
“You didn’t eat this morning, did you? Or pack food for the ride?”
Diana grins. “Of course I didn’t. Thanks for always feeding me, Lax.”
“Drive safely and text me with an update. I hope you find what you need.”
The drive is easy: highways through Massachusetts and New Hampshire and into Vermont, back roads from Route 89 into Hamilton. But the farther she drives from home, the more Diana worries about what she’ll discover.
Over the years, Tom kept his connection to Hamilton through his extended family. While Uncle Brian and Aunt Teresa came to Alcott a handful of times, Chris visited every winter. Every winter, except the ones since Tom died, Diana thinks.
Both only children, Tom and Chris grew up as the best of friends, cousins so close they thought of themselves as brothers.
When they were boys, they spent countless hours playing ball and riding bicycles on the dirt roads weaving around their town.
As adults, during Chris’s trips to Alcott, he and Tom caught a Celtics or Bruins game, and afterward sat at the kitchen table late into the night, drinking and talking.
Diana would pass Chris in the early morning, asleep on the sofa, still in his clothes from the night before. He always came alone.
Chris was briefly married to his college girlfriend, Becca. She left him years ago, moving to Los Angeles to try her hand at acting. He heard from her only once after she departed Vermont, Tom told Diana, when she filed for divorce.
Diana asked why Chris hadn’t remarried or found someone else to love. He was a catch, she said. Tall and lanky, with black hair and kind hazel eyes, he had a good job running his own carpentry business. Tom dismissed Diana’s question with a wave of his hand.
“Why not?” Diana persisted. “Isn’t he lonely?”
“Lonely? I’d guess he doesn’t allow himself to think much about that. Becca’s leaving broke him. I’m not sure he’d ever risk himself like that again,” Tom explained. “Don’t try to be a matchmaker here, Diana. It won’t go anywhere.”
As the buildings of Hamilton take shape, a new list starts up: What I Might Learn Today.
Nothing. I’ll find out nothing, and this trip will have been a waste.
Diana blinks and the list is gone, popping like a bubble.
That doesn’t usually happen, but it’s appropriate, isn’t it?
This is her deepest fear, more than learning the awful thing Tom did.
She is terrified she’ll be left in this uncertain wasteland of enough information to make herself sick with worry and not enough to let go.
She’s worried about Duncan, too—both finding out answers for him and sharing what she learns.
He’s still a kid; she has to be mindful about what she reveals.
She told Chris she’d meet him for dinner, so her early arrival affords her time for research.
She drives to the west side of town, past the high school, the lone supermarket, and a metal-clad diner in the shape of a railroad car.
The streets here are lined with oak trees, the bare branches arching over the cars as if they’re trying to reach one another, an embrace years in the making.
While spring is beginning in Alcott, here it’s still winter, an overcast day that leaves Hamilton in gloomy darkness. And the snow: At home, it’s gone; in Hamilton, piles hug the road, stubborn, mud-covered mounds of what had been bright white and new.
The Star is housed in a three-story building off Main Street.
Painted cream with mullioned windows and tall columns in front, the building resembles a wedding cake.
Diana parks in front and steps slowly up the ice-covered stairs to the front door.
A large wooden desk sits inside, with the empty office in the rear.
Diana expected more activity; she thought the Star would be like the newsrooms she’s seen in the movies: a bustling space filled with reporters, arguing with editors waving red pens.
“Can I help you?” A woman emerges from behind a six-paneled door, wiping her hands on a paper towel. She is round, with gray hair cropped short. Eyeglasses hang on a beaded string around her neck.
“I’d like to take a look at your archives. Is there a fee to view them?”
“Only if you want to make copies, dear,” the woman says, throwing the paper towel in a trash can next to the desk. “Follow me, and I’ll set you up.” She walks Diana into a small conference room. “What are you looking for?”
“Your issues from June to December 1982, please.”
The heater under the window barely throws off any warmth.
Even in her winter gear, Diana feels the chill.
She zips her coat to her chin and follows the woman across the room.
Open shelving covers two walls, and each shelf is filled with boxes labeled with dates.
The woman climbs a rolling ladder and begins handing items to Diana.
When the last box has been stacked on the table, the woman steps off the ladder and brushes dust from her hands. “If you need more help, just give a shout. My name is Kara. Kara Marquis.”
Kara’s welcoming nature unnerves Diana. She expected this request to be more complicated, that she’d be interrogated and asked why she wants access to the back issues of the Star. “I’m Diana Morgan. Thanks for your help.”
“Morgan?” Kara squints at Diana. “Any relation to Teresa Morgan?”
Diana should have realized Hamilton is like Alcott: Everyone knows everyone, everyone knows everyone else’s business.
Instead of answering, she seizes onto an unexpected idea: She could pretend.
She could lie to this stranger; she could imagine a different Diana Morgan, a version that has not been shattered by loss.
Every ounce of her body covets this other life where her husband is alive, where her family is whole, where there aren’t people breaking into her house.
What would this other Diana have done today instead of looking through old newspapers?
Would she and Tom have made love when they woke, their bodies sticky with sweat, pressed together under the striped sheets he hated?
Would they have cooked the kids blueberry pancakes for breakfast, laughing as Duncan read the comics and Phoebe told corny jokes, maple syrup smeared down the front of her pajamas?
Diana’s desire for what she had before Tom’s death flares within her, a seductive pain she finds herself craving.
But pretending won’t bring him back.
Tom is gone.
Diana shakes off the last tendrils of that brutal fantasy and forces out a response. “Teresa is my husband’s aunt.”
“Husband’s aunt?” When Kara realizes who Diana is, her eyes soften.
“You must be Tom’s wife then? I’m sorry for your loss.
” She bustles over to the table and picks up a box labeled May–June 1982.
She hands it to Diana. “You’ll want this box to see his high school graduation.
My niece graduated the same year as Tom.
The Star did a nice summary of the ceremony, as it does for every senior class.
” As Kara leaves the room, she points to her desk.
“I’m available if you need anything else, and the publisher should be in later if you have questions for her. ”
Once Kara leaves, Diana shifts the box containing Tom’s graduation to the far end of the table. “First things first,” she murmurs. Tom turned eighteen on June 30, after graduation, so that story will have to wait.
The first box she opens holds the July and August 1982 newspapers. It hits her then that she’s looking for evidence to prove her husband committed a crime.
She knew this, of course, but the truth of it makes her nauseated, and she begins to shake.
Needing to calm herself, Diana remembers how each session of that support group she hated began with a meditation.
It was the only part of those meetings she liked.
She sits on one of the conference room’s hard wooden chairs, rests her hands in her lap, and inhales.
She closes her eyes and lets out a slow exhale.
She repeats this breathing four more times, and her agitation slowly ebbs.