One More Day (26 page)

At the funeral, the lady got light-headed and had to sit down. Mr. Forrester thought I said too much. That's my mother's problem too, my father says. That if she said a little less, people would come back and pay her a little more.

But there was so much I hadn't told her yet. Like that I know why dead people come back. It's because they miss having bodies. They want to be touched. They would give anything for one more hug.

And that I knew what she wished for in the back of her mind as she lay alone in her bedroom when she was young. Another soul to keep her company. Another being just like herself. And that she felt all the more guilty because of it, because she believed she had wished that first baby into being.

And maybe she had that power. Maybe she had others. Time would tell.

Like maybe when I get older, I'll be able to look forward, not just back. Because people can change, you know?

You can leave a baby and find one. You can grow up a Boy Scout and end up a murderer.

Things happen.

It felt good to get out of her house, away from the Main Line, even if it was just a twenty-minute drive to the airport. Carrie rolled down the windows and tried to pretend she was someone else, a person with no past, no ghosts trailing her, her whole bright future ahead. She wondered if she'd always have to pretend or if she'd actually feel that way someday—that there was more to see through her windshield than in her rearview mirror.

John had a sales meeting scheduled in Philadelphia and was going to cancel everything for another week to be with her, to help her rest, but she had told him no. He'd already taken off Wednesday and Thursday, and they'd had dinner with his parents and her mother. Afterward, they'd looked at vacation sites online, trying to plan something fun for Carrie and John, a gift from his family. Everyone had a different idea of where they should go and what they should do. Carrie just let them talk.
Let them decide for me
, she thought.
I'll just close my eyes and pick something on a map.
What did it matter where she went? There would be children everywhere. Babies, toddlers, boys. She didn't need to find a new setting; she needed to grow a new skin.

Her mother offered to stay longer, through the weekend, and she'd told her absolutely not. They'd already booked three appointments with Dr. Kenney for the following week, and Carrie was tired of everyone's fawning concern. She'd blamed the fainting spell on the heat of the day and the smell of the food, the crush of the crowd. But she hadn't told anyone that her head started to swim again every time she picked up a paper or listened to the news. First, she learned that the baby they'd found was a pawn in a custody battle, abandoned to punish its mother. The mother finally reported it, and Safe Cradle returned the child. It should have made her feel better, but it didn't. It didn't because she'd been
wrong
.

Then her mother showed her an update in the morning paper—that an arrest was imminent in Ben's case, that the suspect was cooperating. The memory of Nolan appearing at her door again, asking questions, always one more thing, trying to trip her up, made her feel sick all over again.

She and her mother dropped John at the train station and continued onto the highway, heading for the airport and the US Airways drop-off—always a drop-off, because her mother wouldn't let Carrie walk her inside.

When they curved around the long approach to the departure gates, the road was clogged with unloading cars, a bus, skycaps. Carrie put on her blinkers in the middle of the lane, but a cop whistled at her and told her to keep driving.

“I'll just park in short term and walk you over, Mom.”

“Oh, you can let me off at another gate.”

“Don't be ridiculous. I'll park and help you with your bag.”

“It's not that heavy.”

Carrie sighed. “You know,” she said, pulling up to the short-term gate arm and plucking a ticket, “the next time Dr. Kenney asks why I'm such a loner, I'm going to say it's hereditary.”

“Well, that's true enough, I suppose. Your father was that way too.”

“Was he?”

“Yes,” she said. “He was always going off to be alone. That's why it was so hard for me to realize when he started going off to drink and then to be with someone else. I never suspected. He'd been that way since the war.”

Carrie nodded. “I think the same thing about John and his sales meetings. How would I know?”

“John loves you, sweetheart,” she said. “It's plain as day. And John doesn't have a secret war past.”

“Everyone has secrets, Mom.”

“Such as?”

“Well, if I knew them”—Carrie smiled—“they wouldn't be secrets.”

The night before, John had been so thankful for Danielle's help. Carrie had felt guilty over those years when she'd been so ashamed of her mother and, with no father around, of having no money. She remembered the meanest girl in high school, Lauren Stein, watching her swing and miss during softball practice. Lauren batting her eyelashes and saying sweetly, “Why don't you ask your dad to help you bat? Oh, right, your dad's gone.” The laughter of the other girls who didn't know how to do anything but play along.

Back then, she'd blamed her mother for her father leaving, for having to work, for not being around to do the things other mothers did: bake cupcakes, drive them to museums on school trips. But glancing over at her mother, it was easier to remember how tired Danielle had been, how accommodating—buying Jinx to keep Carrie company when she was alone, even though they could hardly afford the vet bills.

When Ben went missing, her mother had flown up from Florida and spent three weeks with them. She was, Carrie realized, always happy to help, but Carrie hadn't always been happy to let her. Being around a mother reminded her that she wasn't one anymore.

The first short-term lot appeared to be full, and the tiered design of it was in the shape of an
H
, making it hard to see what spaces were open. Carrie thought she finally found one, only to see that a motorcycle had slipped into the slot.

“Damn it,” Carrie muttered.

“We have plenty of time,” her mother said. “Just go back out, loop around, and drop me off at another gate.”

“No,” Carrie said. “There's more parking at the adjacent gate.” She had to exit and enter again, but the walk would not be that much longer. This lot was only one level, open to the air, and wasn't much farther to the US Airways entrance. Carrie found a space between a van and a Vespa, and they headed inside.

Carrie led her mother to a self-check-in kiosk.

“I already have my boarding pass,” Danielle said.

“Of course you do.”

“And I'm not checking my bag.”

“Of course you're not.”

They went up the escalator together in single file, on the right. As they approached the security line, Danielle suddenly dropped the handle of her rolling suitcase and reached for her daughter's hand.

“Are you sure you don't need me to stay?”

“Yes, why?”

“Because, well, you're dragging out our time together. Circling the lot, stopping at the baggage desk.”

“That's coincidence.”

“Is it? Or don't you want to say good-bye to your mother?”

Tears fell onto Carrie's cheekbones so suddenly that they seemed to have leaped out of her eyes like small fish. Danielle folded her into a deep hug as travelers streamed around them, rolling their bags to one side or the other to avoid the elbow edges of their awkward embrace.

“What if,” Carrie whispered into her mother's shoulder, “the next time I see you, I don't know? What if I can't tell if you're really here or if something happened? What if, you know, you were in an accident and then suddenly—”

“What's more alive and real than a mother, Carrie? Can you think of one thing more real than that?”

“No.” She sniffed.

“Here's how you'll know,” Danielle said and smiled. She licked her thumb and wiped at Carrie's mascara beneath her eye.

“Ew,” Carrie said.

Danielle laughed. “If I do that, I'm alive, all right? I promise. Now, I'll be back in a month, okay?”

“Okay,” Carrie replied with a small smile.

As Danielle turned to leave, Carrie grabbed her hand. “You feel good, right? I mean, you're not sick or anything?”

“Why, do I smell funny?”

Carrie smiled and let her mother's hand go. She watched her turn and join the other travelers in the long, snaking line, then headed back down one of the wide corridors that laced the parking garages to the gates. She didn't see that Danielle turned too and watched her daughter walking farther and farther away down the concourse, until she was as small as a child.

As Carrie went back to her car in the far lot, the blue sky clotted with gray. The parking spaces on either side of hers were empty, and she had the vague thought that her car looked lonely as she walked toward it.

Behind her, bus doors and tailgates opened and closed, hissed and squeaked. What gave her pause was not those sounds but something smaller and yet larger—the clearing of a throat.

She turned. He looked vaguely familiar, with his aviator sunglasses and shaggy hair, lighter at the tips than the roots. She didn't see the airplane arcing over her head, gaining altitude, but she smelled something foul in the air, like jet fuel or garbage, half sweet, half sharp, as his steps grew longer, faster. Too fast.

She lunged for her car door, fingers scrabbling for the indent of the handle—but his hand was suddenly there, larger, long fingered, snapping it shut. His entire handprint, the deep grooves and whorls of his skin, sank into the light layer of road dust. A chill moved deep into her spine. All those fingerprints on her car they couldn't lift.
And here was one. Clean.

His hands moved onto her wrists, squeezing, twisting, so different from the way her mother had just touched her. John had always thought the man at the Y might have been after her, not Ben. Was he right?

“Why did you lie?” he growled.

She started to scream, but his hand covered her mouth. He wasn't that tall, wasn't that wide, but he was strong and quick, and she hoped—she prayed—that he had been quick with Ben too. He had killed her son, yes, but let it have been quick. Before Ben knew what was about to happen.

“Did you do it to save your own skin?” he asked through gritted teeth. “Or just so no one would know what a terrible mother you are?”

Carrie closed her eyes and felt her body start to go limp. The scenes of that day played out across her eyelids, like the hazy moments just before she fell asleep.

The smell of chlorine in the car, the wet beach towel rolled in the passenger seat.

“Look, Ben,” she'd cried when she'd found the parking spot next to Starbucks. “Aren't we lucky?”

Ben had tried to say “lucky” back to her, but it came out all consonants, all hard edges.

As she'd closed her door and walked around to the parking meter, she'd carried that lilt, that spinning luck, whistling until she'd opened her purse and found nothing but a penny at the bottom.

Was that the moment it all turned?

She'd looked down the street and had seen the parking attendant coming toward her. She glanced into Starbucks, noted the long line—imagined the people telling one another “but it moves fast, really”—and then her eyes kept going, looking farther up the block, until she saw the bank on the other corner. And so she walked. Not whistling anymore, not sauntering. She half walked, half ran, as well as she could run in a tight maxi skirt and sandals, toward the teller who would give her change for a dollar, who would give her quarters for the meter so she could have a cup of coffee.

But she never made it all the way there. Something made her turn back just as she reached the revolving door, the bright, squeaking floors inside, the uniformed guard, the basket from which she would grab a lollipop to take back to Ben.

It was guilt; it was knowledge. Or it was the smallest sound only a man makes, of clearing his throat.

The man at the Y. Who knew she hadn't locked her car. Who knew she hadn't just been fumbling in her purse. Who knew she hadn't stayed with her son.

And she hadn't said good-bye.

His breath on her face felt stale and dusty, like he'd eaten hot sand. With her free hand, she rooted around in her brown shoulder bag, scrabbling to find something sharp, stinging, fiery.

He leaned in closer.

“I hate bad parents who don't even know how beautiful their little boys are. My mother was like that too. Never knew the value of what she had. You always let him run around, talk to strangers. And then you leave him alone in an unlocked car?” He laughed so hard it came out like a honk. “That was the last straw. People like you don't deserve to have children.”

Tears stung her eyes.

“Oh, you cry for him now? Now you cherish him? Too late. You threw away one child, but I forgave you for that. I gave you the benefit of the doubt. But I was wrong to do that. You disappointed me. So I took him away, and I strangled him before you hurt him even worse. Just like I strangled the others. With the laces from that itty-bitty sneaker.”

She yanked a pencil from her purse and raked it through the air, aiming for his neck. He bobbed away but stumbled with the effort, sprawling, and Carrie didn't hesitate. She didn't look, and she didn't think, and she didn't see anything but her feet on the ground. This time, she ran.

She sprinted toward the terminal, the busy lane of buses and cars. Behind her, he screamed.

“Don't you know you can't hurt me? Nothing you do can hurt me!”

Carrie kept running, past her mother's gate, past the next one, searching the crowd for a police officer, a police car. Where were all the uniforms when she needed one? Up ahead, a Hertz bus idled. She banged on the door, surprising the driver, who opened it with equal parts concern and annoyance.

“You all right?” she asked.

Carrie ran up the steps, gasping for breath. “Please,” she croaked. “Please don't let anyone else on. Please drive. Someone's after me. I need to—”

The woman blinked at Carrie, taking in her messy hair, a scratch across her cheek. She swung the lever, shutting the door. “Okay,” she said. “I'll drive you around a little till you calm down. But I can't leave the terminal, you understand?”

“Yes,” Carrie said, trying to catch her breath. “Just…don't let anyone on.”

As the bus pulled away, Carrie looked out the window in every direction, looking for the man. He could be hidden, in a car, on his way. She kept her eyes open for police as the driver continued on their route. Shouldn't they have an office somewhere on-site? Should she call 911 and give them a description?

The driver turned on the radio, and after a few seconds of weather, a news report blared throughout the bus:
Suburban Philadelphia police are under increased scrutiny today as a murder suspect in custody hangs himself in the interrogation room…