Chapter Twenty-Two
It’s Phoebe who next brings up Tom. That evening, after dinner, she sits on the window bench on their second-floor landing, waiting for Duncan to come out of the shower.
Diana is around the corner in her bedroom, changing the linens on her bed.
Her mother, with her strict rules for hosting, stripped the bed that morning, but wasn’t able to remake it before she left for her Garden Club meeting.
Vivian was more put out by her inability to fully complete that task than she was by Diana’s delayed arrival home from Vermont.
“You appear to be behind in your laundry, Diana, so I washed all of your sheets,” Vivian explained before she departed. “I took care of the towels your father and I used as well. You’ll find everything in the dryer. Please be sure to put everything in the linen closet so I can find it next time.”
Diana, grateful for her parents’ help, responded to her mother’s comment with a heartfelt hug and let the criticism wash over her, understanding The General’s need for control is her way of managing life’s uncertainties.
As Diana tucks the crisp sheet around her bed, the bathroom door opens. “You were in there a long time,” Phoebe says to Duncan.
“Timing me?”
“I was waiting for you,” Phoebe says. “I wanted to show you this.”
Duncan’s footsteps thump across the wooden floor. “What’s that?”
“Daddy’s photo album from when he was a kid. I asked Mama if she’d brought me back a present from Vermont. She gave me this.”
“Move over.”
Diana picks up a pillow and its case from her bed and creeps across her room to stand behind her partially open door. She spies Duncan’s leg through the gap between the door and its frame.
“Is that Dad?” he asks.
“And Chris,” Phoebe answers. “They’re my age in this photo, don’t you think?”
“Maybe.”
“It would be better to look at this with Daddy. He could tell us who these people are and what was happening when the photo was taken. I wish he was here.”
Diana crushes the pillow against her belly and leans against her bedroom wall. Tom should be sitting with Duncan and Phoebe, telling them about his childhood. He should have shown his children this book years ago. He shouldn’t have hidden who he was from the three of them.
Especially not from me.
Duncan and Phoebe are silent for several minutes, as they turn the album’s pages, the plastic covering crinkling with each movement.
“Who’s that?” Phoebe asks.
“Our grandparents, I think.” Duncan disappears from Diana’s sight line, and his footsteps start back up again as he moves across the landing to the wall of photos. “See here? In this old wedding photo? These were Dad’s parents.”
“Did you meet them when you were little? When I was a baby?”
“No,” Duncan says, returning to the window seat. “They died a long time ago. Mom didn’t even meet them.”
Sadness washes over Diana. She misses Tom’s parents, Gary and Martha. What a strange kind of loss it is to mourn these people she never had the opportunity to know.
“Look, Duncan, here’s Daddy playing basketball.” Phoebe leans over to her brother, and Diana can make out the corner of the photo album, the top of Phoebe’s head, her daughter’s graceful hand pointing at the page. “He looks like you!”
“Or maybe I look like him,” he says.
“I wish I remembered him more.”
“Me too,” Duncan says, wrapping his arm around his sister.
Diana resists joining her children on the window bench. Moments where her children connect like this are becoming less and less frequent as Duncan approaches his teenage years. If talking about Tom is the way they strengthen their bond, she has to let that conversation happen, even if it hurts.
A few hours later, Diana sits at Lakshmi’s kitchen table, fussing with the fruit bowl.
She piles the oranges and mangoes into a lopsided pyramid.
One of the oranges bounces to the floor, forcing her onto her hands and knees to rescue it before it rolls under Lakshmi’s china cabinet.
All the while, she talks, updating Lakshmi about everything that’s happened.
The more Diana tries to remember that photo the intruder stole, the fuzzier the image becomes.
Hoping she saved a snap of it on her phone, after lunch with Duncan, she scrolled through her photo app, going all the way back to the last months of Tom’s life.
She’d never looked that far back before, and she wasn’t surprised to find very few photos from that time.
The ones she scrolled by—Mira and Phoebe on the jungle gym across the street, a bowl of cucumbers from her mother’s garden, a pie her sister baked—gave no indication Tom was dying at the time they were taken.
The last photo of her husband was from their final Cape Cod vacation.
He stood at the stove of their rental house, showing Duncan how to cook scrambled eggs, their boy at his side, both of them turned away from the camera.
Diana did find a picture from about six months ago with the missing photo in the background.
In it, Phoebe leans against the refrigerator, demonstrating the handstand she learned that day in gym class.
Diana zoomed in for a closer look, her fingers hovering over the screen, and spotted the missing photo in the small gap between her daughter’s upturned legs, but the image was too pixelated for her to see it clearly.
As Diana talks, Lakshmi cleans up from dinner, while Ramesh reads to Mira upstairs, his voice a hushed chant in the background.
Next door, Diana’s kids are already asleep.
She tucked them into bed before she left, kissing their cheeks and wondering what they, especially Duncan, might dream about tonight.
She worried about leaving them alone but checked all the locks before she came here and positioned herself in front of the window with a clear view of her front door.
“I’m going to Jessica’s place this Sunday.
My parents are babysitting Noah since both Evan and Andrea have weekend shifts, so they were happy to take Duncan and Phoebe, too.
I’m planning to be at Jessica’s apartment at 10:45 a.m. Grace said Jessica calls her daughter every Sunday at 11:00 a.m. I figure they must talk for, what?
Twenty minutes? Maybe thirty? At 11:30, I’ll ring her bell and hopefully get some answers.
I know it’s a long shot. With a cell phone, Jessica could call her daughter from anywhere.
But it’s the only lead I have right now.
” Diana pauses, gently holding a mango, the weight of the fruit heavy in her hands, its green skin smooth to the touch.
“Is this a good idea? Or am I crazy to show up unannounced?”
Lakshmi twists her braid around her fingers and tugs, her gaze thoughtful.
It’s her tic, Diana realizes, the subconscious quirk that shows Lakshmi is nervous or about to make a decision.
Chris has one, too: He runs his fingers through his hair, making the ends stand up.
How funny it is to discover something new about people you’ve known for a long time.
Diana grins at the observation, thankful that this bit of learning isn’t upsetting.
“Why are you smiling?” Lakshmi’s forehead wrinkles in confusion.
Diana rolls the mango between her hands. “Nothing important.” She keeps her thoughts to herself, just like how she hasn’t yet told Lakshmi about the evening she spent with Chris. That development in her already complex life isn’t ready to share, not even with her best friend.
“I’m coming with you. You have no idea what you’re walking into,” Lakshmi says. “This woman has a history of addiction. She could be unstable. You can’t predict how she’ll react to your questions. Plus, after that intruder . . . you can’t be too careful.”
Diana is ready to argue, to persuade Lakshmi she can do this on her own, when she realizes the opposite: She doesn’t want to go by herself. “Okay.”
“I thought it was going to be harder to convince you.”
“What can I say?” Diana drops the mango back in the bowl. “I’m open-minded these days.”
“Good, because I have another concern.” Lakshmi selects an orange and peels its dimpled skin. The rind falls on the table, scenting the air with citrus.
“Makes me think of summer,” Diana says, accepting a segment from Lakshmi and popping it into her mouth. The orange is tart and sweet, and she savors the taste, curious how she’ll feel about all this when summer arrives. “What’s your concern?”
“Have you considered this has been too easy?” Lakshmi shakes her head.
“That came out badly. This clearly hasn’t been easy for you, or now, for Duncan.
What I mean is everyone, except Teresa, has been willing to talk with you.
It might have taken some persuasion, but no one threw up an insurmountable roadblock, or even, as much as you can tell, lied to you. Isn’t that odd?”
Diana frowns. “This hasn’t been easy at all. It’s been the opposite: scary and disorienting. I’m really stupid not to have picked up on the fact Tom had a secret.”
“No, that’s not what I mean at all.” Lakshmi takes Diana’s hand, her fingers sticky with juice. “Wait—your rings.”
Diana extracts her necklace from under her shirt. “It was time.”
Lakshmi holds Diana’s wedding and engagement rings between her fingers. “You all right?”
“Yes, surprisingly.”
“This is a big step. I’m glad you felt ready.” Lakshmi gently lets the necklace fall back against Diana’s collarbone. “It must be strange. Like letting go of him again.”
“It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be,” Diana says, thinking again of Chris.
“That’s a good sign, Diana.” Lakshmi shifts in her seat, flicking her braid over her shoulder. “Which is why I want to make a case for caution and for being practical. It may not be straightforward with Jessica. I want you to be prepared.”
“Yeah, all good points. I’ll be prepared. Or as prepared as I can be.”
“And I’ll be there.”
“And you’ll be there.”