One More Day (6 page)

Outside, a pair of bees dive-bombed her as she stepped off the front stoop, and she waved them away with one hand.

She opened the rear car door, then hesitated. When was the last time she'd opened that door? How long had it been? She stood frozen, the stale air from the car, wet leaves, oil. It suddenly smelled different from the front seat.

She looked back at John, who was battling the same bees, bobbing and weaving with his head and arm.

“There must be a hive somewhere. Happened yesterday too.”

She nodded. It was late for bees, but it had been so warm, so lush. Only recently had the sun finally been muted and the clouds filled with gray, moving closer to Carrie's true mood. The metallic tang in the air was an anodyne for her loneliness; today had been the first day in a long time she felt aligned with the universe. Not sunny. Not rainy. Just the dark, endless in-between.

“John, will you…put him in the car seat?”

“Um, okay,” he said.

Even after the detailing incident, she'd kept Ben's seat in her car, insisted. Fought John so bitterly over it that spit came flying out of her mouth. He'd said it was downright ghoulish—like keeping a sarcophagus in the backseat. And she'd been furious at his use of that word—when had he ever used it before?
He wasn't killed in his car seat!
she'd screamed.
He loved his car seat!
But winning that battle and having the seat—that didn't mean she could touch it. That didn't mean she trusted herself with this task.

John clipped in his son. Ben smiled at him, as if thanking him. He wasn't a boy of many words, but he had a million different smiles. Raising a child was like communicating with someone who spoke another language. It was all gestures, nuance, vibe. Almost like understanding a woman, John sometimes thought. He ruffled his son's hair, smiled back at him broadly, then got in the front seat.

It wasn't until they were at the bottom of their street, turning left onto Sugarland Road, that he realized, maybe, why Carrie had asked him to do it. Did she recognize that he was better at it? That she was simply too lackadaisical, too trusting? You would think that a latchkey kid would know the value of safety! But no, Carrie's childhood had made her tough, invincible. There was a shell to Carrie that other women didn't have, and she had relied on it too much. She had believed nothing would happen, and then it had. But this, oh, this signaled a change, he thought. That perhaps she had finally put him in charge of safety.

“You didn't have to adjust the straps,” she whispered.

“What?”

“On the car seat. He's not taller,” she said.

John swallowed, said nothing.

At the second intersection, idling at the long stoplight, a man approached the line of cars, selling flowers. John tapped the lock on their doors, and Carrie jumped.

“Better safe than sorry,” he said. “That's why—”

She sighed. “John, I know how you feel about locking the doors. But…lightning doesn't strike twice.”

“You know that reasoning doesn't wash with me, Carrie. I know too many guys who've broken both legs on the lacrosse field.”

Carrie looked out the window. She was tired of arguing about this. It was the same way she had felt when her mother left her to go work, always saying the same words:
Lock up lock up lock up
. But locking up hadn't kept her father from leaving. Locking up hadn't kept their money safe from his gambling debts. Locking up hadn't kept out anything that had hurt her mother.

“But, John,” she said softly but firmly, “you also have to know, to realize…if I had locked the house, Ben might not have been brought back.”

John bit the inside of his lip. So she hadn't locked the door when she went to church, despite all his warnings. She hadn't forgotten
at all
, which meant she'd lied to the detectives! Was this the first time she'd done that? Or merely the most recent? He continued driving and didn't look over at Carrie, even though he felt her eyes on him, begging for him to engage. But he couldn't. He just couldn't. Especially with Ben in the backseat.

In front of him, the sky was gray and white, not a trace of blue. It had been like this for days, threatening rain, warning them that autumn was on its way.

It took every ounce of willpower John possessed not to say the words bursting through his pores:
If you had locked your car while you fed that goddamned meter, Ben never would have been taken in the first fucking place.

John didn't forget things like locking doors. Just as he would never forget a million other details, like the day Ben was kidnapped. A woman he didn't know had called him on Carrie's phone and told him there had been an incident outside the Starbucks in Ardmore, and his wife needed him right away.

He'd been exiting a men's room in a sports bar along City Line Avenue, about to join a group of clients and another salesperson for lunch. He'd answered right away when he'd seen it was Carrie calling, but the call itself gave him serious pause.

“I'm sorry,” he said, holding one hand over his ear to drown out the din of the ESPN announcer coupled with music, as if competing for attention. “Who are you exactly?”

“I'm a passerby,” she said.

“Passerby?”

“Yes.”

He frowned. It sounded like a hoax. Like something his mother would fall for on Facebook, although she wasn't asking for money or his credit card number. She was asking for him.

“Did you say ‘accident' or ‘incident'?”

“I don't know, but you need to—”

“Can I speak to my wife, please?”

“She's with the police now.”

“The police?”

“You really need to get here,” she said. “She's really upset, and—”

He cut her off by saying okay and ended the call. He left without truly explaining—because who could explain what had just happened, a random call from a stranger—and got into his car, thinking there must be a car accident and an injury. A reason Carrie couldn't call herself. He pictured a stretcher, a spent air bag, flashing lights.

When he arrived not even a half hour later, there was a circle of crime tape around his wife's car, three police cars blocking the intersection, and a crowd of at least twenty people gathered down the block, listening to a woman holding a sheaf of paper in her hands.

He put on his flashers and stepped outside. A uniformed police officer approached him, his hand raised.

“You can't park here,” he said.

From behind him, a young man in a suit approached, tapped him on the shoulder.

“Excuse me. Are you Mr. Morgan? I'm Detective Forrester.”

“Yes. Where's my wife?” John said, his voice rising, his neck craning. He searched the crowd for a flash of Carrie's shiny hair.

“She's in the squad car. I'll take you to her.”

“Squad car? God, what's happened?”

“We're trying to sort that out.”

“I mean…generally.”

“Generally?”

“Has there been a car accident?”

Detective Forrester blinked, swallowed. He had been on the force for just a few years, had never handled anything but insurance fraud, a house fire, a stabbing between neighbors near the city. And here was the husband, a young guy who looked like they could have gone to school together, played soccer, who depended on him to make things right. And his boss, Nolan, standing like a wall behind him, just waiting to say it:
Find out where the hell the father was, to make sure his alibi was air-fucking-tight, and that these two's marriage was A-fucking-OK
. Because that was the way things went with these kinds of cases.

“John!” Carrie cried, emerging from the back of the squad car. “They've taken him! He's gone!”

And the looks the three men silently passed around spoke volumes.
Who's taken him? Gone where?
And
Whoa, wait a minute. She said “they.”

Later that night, after John had gathered all of Ben's photos for posters and called their families and helped search the woods below the Y and along the train tracks, as they had struggled to fall asleep despite being exhausted, John had asked Carrie what she'd meant when she'd said “they.” Had she seen a group of people nearby? A gang of teenagers maybe?

“Maybe. I don't remember.”

“Otherwise, why did you say that, Carrie?”

“I don't know. I don't remember what I was thinking, but I didn't see anybody. I guess I just…assumed. I mean, how could one person do that so quickly? It doesn't…make sense.”

He had waited a long time before he'd nodded, agreed. There was something that clearly did not add up.

At the hospital, the female nurse who dealt with trauma victims wore bright, printed teddy bear scrubs. She picked up a large sterilized kit from the table and smiled at Ben. An acrylic, pastel plaid curtain trembled on a metal rod, separating them from someone on the other side. Carrie didn't want to see through the opening, but she could. She did. A girl. Sixteen or seventeen, alone, red-eyed, biting her nails, feet in stirrups. Carrie looked away, didn't want to think about sex and teenagers.
That girl should be doing her homework
, she thought. Should have a test to worry about, some innocent concern, not this.

They weren't there long. No crying, no fuss. Ben had always been good with doctors and nurses, fine with getting his temperature taken, getting shots. He got that from John's family, Carrie supposed, the ability to be both easygoing and stoic. Carrie held his hand but turned away, didn't watch. She stared at an aqua wall, wondering how they'd chosen that particular shade. She heard the sounds of plastic packaging being opened, metal tools sliding on a tray, the snap of a rubber glove tempered by its powdery interior. But no crying from Ben, who just listened to his father telling him he was a big boy and he was doing great, buddy, way to go.

An hour later, they were back in the car, driving to Ben's favorite place for dinner, a diner that had fifty flavors of milkshakes. Carrie hadn't been there in over a year, partly because it was a place you only went with a child and partly because she hadn't allowed herself the pleasure of a milkshake, of a flavor, in a long time.

“John,” Carrie said, “should we maybe go somewhere else?”

“What? Why? He'll love it.”

“But…we went there every Thursday. They'll remember him. There will be…hoopla.”

“Hoopla?”

She swallowed. It was a strange, old-fashioned word. Her grandmother's kind of word. She had been full of words other people didn't use anymore.
Hoopla. Rapscallion. Balderdash.
At her funeral, everyone had mentioned this singular tic kindly, with love.

“They'll ask questions. It will turn into… It could be too much.”

“I guess you're right.”

Why qualify it?
she wanted to scream. Why couldn't she just be plain right, obviously right?

“They have another one out by the mall, don't they? We could go there instead.”

She nodded.
Yes. Let's go where no one knows us, where we look vaguely familiar, but no one realizes who we are until the next day.
John eased the car onto a back road that cut across the township, heading the back way to the mall, hiding, slinking, she thought. Like a criminal. Would everyone make something of that too?

When Ben was a baby, they'd always taken turns putting him to bed. It was something a man could do at the end of a mother's long day: one last bottle, a fresh person attending, still patient, willing to rock, to sing, and to shush. But the truth was Ben always wanted John to do it. From the moment he could reach out his arms, form his words, if John was home, Ben wanted him, not Carrie. Oh, he was content with her during the day. He loved his mother; Carrie knew he did. She told herself that, over and over—
he loves me, he loves me, he loves me
—singing it like a lullaby, those nights when she rocked him and his eyes kept looking over her shoulder, searching for his father.

They put Ben to bed together, neither willing to miss out. John sat on the alphabet rug next to the green chair, holding his son's hand while Carrie rocked him. Later she would wish she could have a portrait painted of that moment, that synchronicity, her husband supplicant at her feet. She'd kept one of Ben's pale pacifiers on the changing table, but he didn't need it anymore; the world had weaned him of it.

Ben's eyes fluttered closed, and Carrie smiled, thinking of his happy dreams, the day he could relive when he fell asleep. She thought of Ben eating a cheeseburger, sipping a milkshake. His fat fingers dipping a french fry in ketchup. Ben standing in the leather booth at dinner, bouncing with happiness, and then, when John said something to Carrie, his hands on either side of John's face, turning his head toward him. They'd both laughed, but then she felt a tear forming. She'd forgotten,
forgotten entirely
, that he used to do that—not only reach for John, but also take him away, own him. How was that possible, after all her cataloging, that she'd forgotten this thing he did nearly every single day?

They stood over his crib a long time that night, watching his chest rise and fall beneath his fleece pajamas. Finally, John squeezed her hand and pulled her out of the room.

“Not yet,” she said.

“Carrie,” he said. “The windows and doors are locked. A car is patrolling the street, just in case.”

She nodded; she knew. Forrester had taken every precaution. That was all it took for John to feel safe—these systems in place. She allowed John to guide her back to their room, two doors down. Ben's bedroom, guest room, master suite. In bed, he held her, knew better than to ask or to push for more, knew sex could ruin the purity of the moment, so he kept his pelvis tilted away from her. She knew he did this and appreciated it.

“Do you remember the day we brought him home?” she asked.

“Of course,” he said, then immediately started gathering up details, in case she asked. How long it had taken the valet to bring the car while Carrie sat in the wheelchair, shivering. How he'd wished he'd brought her a sweater.

Carrie recounted how much trouble they'd had installing that first car seat. They'd both thought it would be simpler.

“Remember how I joked about how on earth you could possibly assemble our baby's tricycle on Christmas Eve if you couldn't put a car seat in a car?”

He smiled back at her. Yes, that he remembered. He also remembered how Carrie had ridden in the back because she was so disturbed by the idea of the baby facing backward, when they couldn't see him. They knew other moms who'd had mirrors installed to fix this problem and thought they were overreacting, nervous.

“I drove you two home like a chauffeur.”

“Yes.”

“And then you looked in the mirror and said, ‘John, I just realized the baby could have been riding backward and upside down for nine months in my uterus too!'”

They both laughed, remembering this. For weeks, Carrie had fretted over Ben's head bending sideways in the enormous seat.
Why don't they make smaller seats?
she would ask over and over again, until they both saw, a month later, how quickly babies grew. How soon they filled the space provided. How much they outgrew, almost immediately. The difference between two years old and three years old?
Enormous
, she thought. It had to be enormous.

They talked for a couple of hours, or Carrie did. She talked and John listened, commenting here and there. He was used to this, her need to talk. He knew her old boyfriend had loved to talk; she'd mentioned this once with a kind of light in her eyes, as if she'd loved him, and John tried to do the best he could. To talk as much as he knew how.

She had been the most talkative in college, hopped up on coffee before exams, unable to wind down, and John, who could fall asleep anywhere, anytime, struggling to stay awake to listen to her as she cuddled into his side in his narrow dorm bed. Nothing had changed.

Carrie asked him what he wanted to do tomorrow, if he was taking the day off, and what would Ben want to do, what would Ben have missed most, and when John didn't respond, she knew he'd fallen asleep. She glanced at the clock—eleven thirty. She lay on her back for a long time, eyes too wide for sleep. A faint buzzing from the wall near Ben's room, a sound she always thought was electrical, related to the heating system. She wondered if it was something else.

She slid away from John's arm, got out of bed, took her pillow. She opened the linen closet quietly, grabbed a blanket. It wouldn't be the first time she'd curled up on that alphabet rug, her head on
C
and her feet on
T
. She'd done that whenever Ben had been sick. When she worried the baby monitor wouldn't be enough. That he could choke, gasp for air, and she wouldn't hear it. If she went to him, she could drink in everything, every breath, every time he turned over. The small sound of his wet lips opening to the air, to gobble more life.

She walked toward the opening of the door. Six inches, just as before. Just as she always left it, as if she'd measured it unconsciously with the width of her own hand.

Inside, squinting in the path of the green night-light that wasn't lighting up enough. Dark shapes, getting clearer. Then nothing. A flat plane. An empty crib.

She ran to the light switch, flooding it, no dimmer.

He was not in the crib. He was not in the room.

She screamed a scream she didn't think she was capable of anymore. She believed she'd used up her lung strength, damaged her organs. And then, suddenly, they regenerated.

John's feet in the hallway, Carrie on her knees in the room, too bright, too empty.

His rush to the window, testing the lock. His instincts, not hers.

Him throwing open the window and screaming into the night, “Where are you? Why are you fucking with us? Why?”

Running downstairs, testing all the locks, his fist slamming the kitchen table, jostling the sugar and creamer, as he dialed Nolan's number again.

Carrie curled up on the rug, crying, but not blaming herself for leaving Ben's room. No. She knew it wasn't her fault, that it was all she deserved, all she would be given. Knew it all along.
She'd made the wrong deal. She'd asked for the wrong thing. She'd made another mistake.