Authors: Rebecca Drake
“I wanna go home,” the child dared to say again, but in a teary whisper this time.
“This is your home,” Bea said matter-of-factly, carrying her back inside the house and almost tripping over Cosmo. Somehow the dog had gotten back in the house and was scratching at the door out to the garage, trying to get to them. The child must have put him back in the house. Bea put the child down, staring at her with narrowed eyes. “I think we’re going to keep you inside from now on,” she said, squatting to take off Avery’s coat and hat. She took the child’s hand and led her toward the bedroom.
“No!” Avery dug her heels in the floor. “No! I don’t wanna go!”
“Too bad.” Bea huffed as she lifted the child under her armpits to drag her the rest of the way. She pushed her through the door into the room. “Bad girls have to do a time-out in their room.” She slammed the door and drew the bolt across it. The child’s smothered cries could be heard through the door; small fists hammered against it.
Cosmo bared his teeth at Bea, growling. She clapped her hands at him and he cowered, retreating, tail between his legs, into a dark corner of the basement. “Good, you can take a time-out, too.” She climbed back up the stairs and closed the basement door to drown out the child’s cries. Her hands shook a little as she pulled the cork from the bottle of wine on the kitchen counter. The real-estate agent’s visit had unsettled her. She poured a glass of cabernet and took a healthy swig.
“Isn’t it a little early to be drinking?” Frank sat at the kitchen table, looking disapproving.
“Oh mind your own business,” she muttered. They would have to leave here much sooner than she’d anticipated. She didn’t know how they’d travel with the child; it would be too risky. “I guess your plan isn’t going to work after all.” Frank’s voice was heavy with sarcasm.
“You’re wrong.” Bea carried her glass to the kitchen door and locked it. “You’ve always underestimated me.” She took another swallow, savoring the sharp yet warm liquid before letting it slide down her throat. Bea stared blankly out the window in the top of the door without seeing the sunshine dappling the carpet of leaves outside. This was just like chess, which her daughter had learned at school and tried to teach her. Frank hadn’t been interested, dismissing it as a game for nerds, but Bea had listened to the instructions if only for the sheer pleasure of hanging out with her teenage daughter. She could still see those slim fingers moving the carved pieces around the board, carefully explaining what each piece could and couldn’t do. Bea drained her glass, trying to dull the ache that always came when thinking about her daughter. Focus on the plan. The plan was like chess. She just had to consider the cause and effect of each possible move.
“Well then, how are you going to make it work?” Frank demanded, sounding slightly slurred, which was funny since Bea was the one drinking.
“Never you mind,” she said. “There’s always a contingency.”
DAY TWENTY-TWO
Jill had broken her arm when she was young and the pain of having it set had been a high-pitched, blinding white pain, like the shrieking of a teakettle. It felt like that again as she listened to her husband recount the details of his relationship with another woman.
“It’s been over for a long time,” David said to Ottilo. “It has nothing to do with Sophia.”
“How did you and Ms. Monroe meet?”
“I don’t know—a company retreat, I think.” David glanced at Jill, but she wouldn’t look at him. She thought of those twice-a-year weekends, of David leaving on Fridays with an overnight bag and a quick kiss and arriving home exhausted but cheerful on Sundays. He used to complain about the retreats, say that he didn’t understand why a law firm actually thought that putting a group of lawyers together in an enclosed space for an entire weekend was a good idea. They’d laughed about it. She wanted to vomit.
Andrew cleared his throat loudly. “Again, I object to this line of questioning. I fail to see how this has anything to do with Sophia’s disappearance.”
Ottilo ignored him. “Isn’t it true that you told Leslie Monroe that you wanted out of your marriage?”
Andrew said, “Don’t answer that.”
“No. I want to.” David leaned forward in his chair, wiping a hand over his face as if it would wash away the stress. “I might have said that, but that was years ago. We—Jill and I—were going through a bad patch in our marriage.”
A bad patch. Was that like a bad batch? Jill thought of how easily David tossed things out when he cooked, how often he began again.
“It didn’t turn out; I’m starting fresh.”
Is that how he thought of their marriage? Of her? This one didn’t work, so I’ll just find someone new?
“Wasn’t the only thing holding you in your marriage your daughter?”
“No!”
“You didn’t tell Leslie Monroe that Sophia was the only thing holding you back?”
“What? No! I never said that.”
Ottilo consulted his notes. “Did you meet Leslie Monroe on September nineteenth?”
“She called me—”
“Yes or no, Mr. Lassiter?”
“Yes, but it wasn’t—”
“Leslie Monroe says that at that meeting you told her that you couldn’t leave because of Sophia.”
David pressed his hands against his temples. “I told her that things were different now—Sophia was just one of those differences—”
“Mr. Lassiter, Sophia was the only thing standing between you and a new life. If it wasn’t for Sophia you’d be free to be with Ms. Monroe—”
“I don’t want to be with Leslie!”
“If you could just get rid of Sophia—”
“No! I didn’t hurt her!”
Andrew said, “This is outrageous speculation!”
They were all yelling, three male voices raised in accusation and justification. Only Jill and Detective Finley were silent. Jill could feel the other woman staring at her, but she wouldn’t meet her gaze. Her skin felt hot, tight. When this happened to men it was called being cuckolded. Was there a similar word for women? She couldn’t take anymore. She stood up, headed to the door. David called after her, “Jill, wait!”
She kept walking, out the door and down the hall, but stopped in the front lobby when she saw a crowd of reporters still clustered outside the station. The desk sergeant stared at her. “Can I help you?”
“Is there a back exit?”
He pointed down another hall, which led to stairs and an exit onto a parking lot. She stalked out into the cold, wanting to get away from the building, away from everything, and then she remembered that they’d come in Andrew’s car and she had no way of getting home. She stopped walking and David was on her, trying to wrap her in his arms.
“Please, let me explain!”
“Get off me!” She fought him, knocking his hands away until he dropped them to his sides.
“It meant nothing to me, you have to believe me. She meant nothing!”
“Get away from me.” Jill backed away, arms clutching her stomach. She turned and walked in the opposite direction, heading toward what she hoped was a way out around the other side of the building. She felt as if she were being torn apart, piece by piece. Soon there would be nothing left of her. But David wouldn’t stop; he ran after her, walking backward in front of her, trying to see her face. She looked away from him, staring down at the pavement, studying the cracks in the asphalt and wondering what it would be like to disappear into them.
“It was nothing,” David said. “I swear, it was just sex.”
“What does that mean? What is
just
sex?” How could something that intimate be “just” anything? She was aghast at him and at her own naïveté. She wondered how many times he’d lied to her. How many times had he really slept with this woman? Where had he met up with her? A terrible thought crossed her mind. “Did you bring her to our house?”
“What? No, never, I wouldn’t do that.”
“Oh, so there are some lines you won’t cross?”
Andrew had come out of the building and was standing a discreet distance away. Jill felt a moment’s shame at seeing him standing there, witnessing this, but anger at David overcame any sense of discretion.
“Jill, please! I only met her a few times. We were going through a hard period, remember?”
She laughed bitterly. “How could I forget? We’d just buried our son, David. You were fucking her when our son was barely in the ground!”
“It was a terrible time—I was vulnerable, we were vulnerable.”
“I didn’t cheat on you!” She pushed past him and strode over to Andrew. “Can you please take me home now.”
“Of course. Let’s go.”
David trailed them to the car, where Jill took the front seat rather than risk David trying to climb into the back with her. David took the seat behind her and she felt his breath on her neck. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered, but then Andrew got in the driver’s side and David sat back. They rode in silence broken only by Andrew as they approached the cul-de-sac.
“This news is going to be leaked, I don’t see any way to avoid it, but you need to keep a united front, weather the storm.”
“I agree,” David said. “I think I should go to the office. It looks bad if I don’t—”
Jill got out of the car while he was still talking, pushing through the crowd of reporters and past the open-mouthed patrolman. She saw another patrolman sitting on the sofa munching on a fast-food burger, the grease-stained wrapper splayed on the coffee table. “Eat that in the kitchen or get out of my house!”
The man mumbled an apology, but Jill ran past him and up the stairs to the second floor. She went into their master bedroom and did something she’d never done before—locked the door.
Within seconds she could hear David’s footsteps pounding up the stairs and coming down the hallway. She lay on her side on the bed, her back to the door with bent legs pulled to her chest, hands over her ears. But she could still hear him, his hand on the doorknob, trying to turn it. Knocking on the door. “Jill? Jill, let me in.”
The noise seemed to echo in her ears. She remembered being at the seashore with Sophia and showing her how to hold a conch to her ear and listen to the noise of the sea. Where had he been then? Off fucking someone else?
“Don’t do this, Jill. Please.”
But she wasn’t doing anything. He’d done it. He’d brought this poison into their lives. She thought of how casually he’d lied at the restaurant. He’d lied to her repeatedly. How often had he been with that woman during that time? Had he bedded her and then come home to Jill? Had he compared them, finding fault with Jill? She tried to remember what he’d said to her at the time, but couldn’t.
“I’ve got to go to work,” David said through the door. “We can talk when I get back.” Silence. She made no move to fill it. “I’m sorry, Jill,” he said in a lower voice and she knew he was pressed right up against the door. “I know you don’t believe me, but I never meant to hurt you.”
It was strange how intense emotional pain could become physical. Jill felt as if she had the flu. She thought of all the times that she and David had made love while they were trying to conceive. The thermometers and ovulation kits and record keeping they’d mastered to keep track of something that other people managed with seeming ease. She thought of the day they’d come home to their apartment with Ethan and she’d nursed him in this same bed, while David hovered around grinning from ear to ear. She thought of the worst days of all, the days after Ethan’s death, when she’d barely left her bed, shuffling to the bathroom and back and willing herself to die.
The tears she’d held back finally spilled from her eyes in a hot wave, and there was relief in shedding them. She cried and cried, thinking of that tiny torn and stained nightgown and how the detective had referred to Sophia in the past tense. Jill had barely survived the loss of one child—how would she survive the loss of another? And how monstrously unfair that in addition to losing Sophia she had to lose the last remaining relationship she cherished, on the same day.
But hadn’t she known her marriage was in trouble back then? Hadn’t she sensed David pulling away at the time, but been too afraid to ask about it because she couldn’t handle another loss, not after Ethan? And really, if she looked back, hadn’t their marriage been under stress even before Ethan? Hadn’t they been simply hanging on, burned out by infertility treatments and demanding jobs?
The darkest months after Ethan’s death were a blur to her. Swallowed whole by grief, she was amazed she hadn’t simply died from it. How could he even think about sex during that time? The selfish bastard—she’d thought they’d been in it together, working through their grief even if individually, adopting Sophia, moving on as parents and partners.
But it was all a lie. She wondered what it had been like, his first meeting with this woman. The other woman. It was something from a made-for-TV movie, not her life. She’d heard David say something once about other lawyers at the retreats, how they viewed it as a free pass from their marriage. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Had he been testing her with that information? Judging how gullible she was, how ready she was to believe that he’d done nothing when he was away on those weekends?
Her body felt so heavy and her eyes ached from crying. She closed them and fell into a deeper sleep than she had had in days. She dreamed she was trying to find Sophia, that she was searching through room after room of a house and then suddenly she opened the last door, but instead of Sophia what she found was David in bed with a faceless woman.
It shocked her awake. Jill sat up, blinking. The sun was starting to set; streaks of orange covered the bedspread and carpet. She stumbled out of bed and into the bathroom. The face in the mirror was puffy and salt-streaked, hair a tangled mess. She washed her face, ran a brush through her hair.
She listened at the door before opening it. There was no one in the hallway and she walked slowly down the stairs. It surprised her to find David in the kitchen.
“I thought you were going in to work?”
“I did.” He’d pulled his tie loose and the sleeves of his crisp white dress shirt were rolled up. He was standing at the window, staring out at the backyard with a drink in his hand. “They asked me to leave.”