Seven Minutes to Noon (35 page)

Austin moved out of the shadow. He looked thinner. His face, neck and arms were mottled tan and red with sunburn. Hovering at his father’s side, his eyes — a duller green now, Alice thought, and bruised with fatigue — sought Alice. Claimed her.

Ignoring Tim, she dropped to her knees and opened her arms; Austin fled quickly to her. She wrapped up his small body with her protection and love, holding tight.

“I can’t believe it,” Alice whispered into Austin’s neck. She breathed in his cinnamon smell; breathed in Lauren. “I can’t believe it’s true.”

“But it’s what you always thought.” Tim crossed his legs and leaned toward the right, making sure the gun remained completely hidden from his son.

“I never really believed it, Tim.” She raised her eyes to his. Green. Damp. He had better not cry; she wouldn’t tolerate that.

“But you thought it.”

“I thought it against my will.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Your instinct was mostly right.”

“Mostly?”

He shook his head and glanced at the floor.

“Where is the baby, Tim? Where is she?”

His gaze fixed on her now, hardening with whatever determination had brought him here.

“At the funeral,” he said, “I wanted to ask you something, but I didn’t know how.”

“I don’t like this,” Austin whispered in Alice’s ear.

“Let Austin go upstairs, Tim,” Alice demanded. She hated him.
She
would tell him what to do. If not for the gun, she would have taken the phone out of her pocket and called the police.

Tim nodded to Austin, who raced from Alice’s arms and out of the living room. His footsteps thudded fast up the stairs.

“Why are you doing this, Tim?”

He shifted in the chair and reached beside him, his hand reappearing with the gun. Lauren had seen it. Pam had seen it. And now Alice.

Her phone. If she could just get her hand into her pocket before he shot her. Open up a line to someone who could serve as witness to her death. Not Mike; she couldn’t do that to him. Frannie. Even Maggie. Someone.

“I don’t want to do this.” His face twisted into an ugly knot and he began, actually, to cry.

Alice’s fear transformed to anger. What right did Tim Barnet have to
cry
?

She thrust her hand into her pocket and pulled out the phone, flipped it open and speed-dialed Maggie.

He stood up, hand gripping the gun. A click. Not loud. The trigger cocking. He raised the gun with a stiff, shaking arm and pointed it directly at Alice’s heart.

“I just want to know
why.”
Her voice cracked. But she was ready to jump into the wave of her ending; she was
not
afraid of this man.

He raised the gun higher and then turned it, suddenly, on himself.

“No!” Alice said.

She didn’t care about Tim anymore. But Austin. He was upstairs. This would destroy him.

“Why?”
Alice demanded.

Hand trembling, Tim pressed the gun into his temple. His finger began to depress the trigger.

But then... he stopped. Coward.
Do it,
her mind urged.
Do it, you bastard.

Crumpling to the floor, he wept, pulling his hand away from the gun as if it were diseased and he couldn’t bear to touch it.

Alice moved quickly to kick the gun away from him. It slid across the floor to the far corner of the living room, stopping next to a forgotten Power Ranger contorted into an impossible fighting pose.

She walked over to Tim and stood over him, feeling no sympathy whatsoever.

“Why, Tim? Why did you kill Lauren?”

“I didn’t,” he cried.

She felt like kicking him for that lie; even if he wasn’t at the crime scene, he had still killed her. Alice controlled her anger, just as Lizzie had promised she could. To her surprise and almost pleasure, she felt capable of this moment.

“Why?”

He gathered himself off the floor and stood up, wiping his eyes on the back of his bare arm, slicking his skin with tears.

“Please, take Austin,” Tim begged.
“Please.”

“What did you do with the baby?” Alice kept her voice cool, belying the heat that coursed through her body.

“Will you take him, Alice?”

“Yes. Now tell me.”

He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a folded, rumpled envelope. “This letter gives you legal custody.”

She didn’t know whether to hit him or laugh. Always the lawyer. Thinking of everything.

“My daughter is somewhere out there, somewhere in this world.” Tim put the jackknifed envelope next to him on the floor. “We’ve been everywhere, looking for her.”

Somewhere far away, Alice thought, somewhere hot. The sunburns.

The scorching beach materialized in her mind but she banished the image. She needed to stay present.

“How do you know she’s out there, Tim?”

He shook his head mournfully. “I have to find her now.” He got up and walked past Alice to the foot of the stairs. “Austin!”

There was no answer, though Alice suspected Austin had heard his father.

“I’m leaving now!”

Plain silence from Austin, resonating with banishment. Only five years old and he knew. He knew.

“I love you!” Tim called up the stairs.

He turned back to Alice, then shifted his eyes to the front door and seemed to will himself forward.

She walked over to the corner of the living room where she had kicked the gun. Holding the wall for balance, she lowered herself down. Flicked aside the Power Ranger. Picked up the gun. Turned to Tim.

“No,” she told him. “You’re not leaving yet.”

“Alice—”

“Tell me why. Then you can go.”

A hard, harsh sun poured through the window at the top of the front door, blanching Tim’s eyes of color.

“I made a terrible mistake.” His gaze fled to the door again, refusing Alice.

“You slept with her?”

He didn’t answer.

She raised the gun on him and asked again. “Did you sleep with Sylvie? Is that what started all this?”

“Yes,” he whispered. “I was never unfaithful to Lauren before. Sylvie wasn’t supposed to fall in love with me.”

Love.
Alice wanted to scream,
That is not love.

“Why didn’t you just leave, Tim? Why did you have to kill her?” Tears engorged her but she stopped them from flowing out. She could hold them back until later. She had to do this now.

He shook his head. Bleached. Vacant. His forehead pleated with anguish.

“I told Sylvie I would never leave my wife. I would never leave my children.” Finally, he looked at Alice. “I loved Lauren.”

“Past tense,” Alice said. “You said
loved.”

“I didn’t know until after it was over.” His jaw tightened, he swallowed hard. Forced himself to say one more thing. “Sylvie did it herself, so she could have me and I could have my children.”

Alice’s hand began to sweat around the gun, the muscles of her inner palm were cramping, but she managed to keep it steadily aimed at him.

“Where is the baby?”

“Somewhere out there.” His head tilted to the door. “I’ve been searching for her everywhere.”

“But Sylvie stayed so long after... after she killed Lauren.” The statement flew out of Alice and hovered between them. There it was, the simple fact. “Why didn’t you just ask her?”

“She wouldn’t tell me.” His smile was a bitter contortion. “Unless I took her with me. She was waiting.”

“She’s gone.”

“I know. I came back to bring Austin. He can’t live this way.” A tremor of shame passed over Tim’s gaunt face.

“I should kill you.”

“Let me find my daughter and then this will all be over. I promise you. Please, Alice, let me go so I can find her.”

There was a sound on the stairs. Austin had come halfway down and was watching them.

Alice lowered the gun to her side, slipped it into her pocket.

“Her name is Ivy,” she told Tim, just before he left.

Two years later

The minivan bumped and careened along Mexico’s Pacific coast, heading south from Puerto Vallarta to Cruz de Loreto. The road had spiraled out of the town, with its tiered seaside villas, nearly two hours ago. Alice was beginning to worry. Lizzie hadn’t mentioned the roughness of the terrain when she had given Alice, Mike and the kids their Christmas surprise. She had gone to the Hotelito with her new husband, George, on their honeymoon last spring and in her enthusiasm had booked the family vacation then; the success of her latest movie had afforded her such extravagances. It was supposed to be a luxury hotel with no electricity, fabulous food and candlelight every evening — a beautiful thought. And indeed, on the Web site, the
palafitas
with their thatched roofs looked heavenly. But the deeper into rural Mexico they got, the less comfortable Alice felt. The land was blanched dry from the heat. The houses, clustered together, were hovels at best. The occasional roadside restaurants were mostly rusted tin cans of buildings advertising beer and buzzing with flies.

Mike was sitting up front with their driver, Miguel, and so she couldn’t read his reaction to the obvious isolation of this place. Years ago, when it was just them, the adventure would have thrilled her. But now she was
a mother with five children. What if one of them got sick? Lizzie had said the Hotelito had access to medical care, but Alice saw nothing that indicated these tracts of sparsely populated, arid land were anything but forgotten third-world villages.

Nell, Peter and Austin, in the van’s third row, seemed to love the bumpy ride. But the toddlers, in the second row with Alice, were looking a little green. Henry was fast asleep in his car seat, but Oscar was getting agitated; he needed a diaper change.

Alice hated to distract Miguel — she had noticed that every car and truck they passed had a cracked windshield, as did this van — but they were going to have to pull over. She leaned forward so he could hear her above the loud rumble of tires on the rocky dirt road.

“Excuse me,” she said, knowing Miguel spoke fairly good English — he worked at the Hotelito and had welcomed them graciously at the airport. “We have a dirty diaper situation back here. Any chance we could pull over?”

Miguel twisted around, saw Oscar’s pout and swerved to an abrupt stop in front of a broken-down shack with a hand-painted sign,
CAFÉ.
Miguel hopped out of the front passenger’s seat and slid open the van’s side door. The three older children immediately scrambled out. Mike stayed in the van with sleeping Henry, while Alice unlatched Oscar and grabbed the diaper bag.

Once outside the air-conditioned van, Alice was hit by the richly sweet country air. The humidity here was different than at home, where it settled into your lungs and made you suffocate. Here, it was heavily warm with light breezes that grazed your skin, circulating around you. All of a sudden, in this forgotten place, Alice felt elated to be so far from home.

Miguel had taken the big kids into the café and bought them orange sodas in glass bottles. They stood ten feet from a trio of Mexican children, the opposing sets eyeing each other until finally a boy reached into his torn red
shorts and brought out a stack of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. The gesture instantly broke the distance between them as the two groups nearly fell on each other.

“You see?” Miguel said, smiling. “Anywhere you go, kids find their way together.”

“They should work at the UN.” Mike had stepped out of the van and was standing near sleeping Henry.

Alice set Oscar down on his feet and he clung to her legs. Henry was the explorer of the two; Oscar mostly stayed close. There was a patch of grass at the side of the café that looked like as good a place as any to unfold the changing mat. Oscar laid himself down and lifted his legs; he wanted that diaper
off.
Alice changed him quickly, smiling and tickling his soft tummy. She swatted a fly from his face, set him on his feet and packed up.

Just then she heard the sound of a motor in the distance, getting louder, nearing the café. Behind the rickety building, she now saw, was a narrow dirt road that wound through a field and disappeared behind a hill. The motor puttered closer and Alice saw that it was a European car, white and dented. It was an old Saab, not the rough-riding vehicle she would have thought would best suit these roads.

Alice turned around to watch Oscar toddle in the children’s direction. She caught Miguel’s eye. He had noticed her looking at the incongruous car and with a self-forgiving smile said, “Gringos, like you.”

Alice laughed. Yes, gringos like them. She turned back to watch as the car veered toward the café and pulled to a stop. Looking bored in the passenger’s seat was a very tan woman with short black hair. She looked a little familiar, Alice thought — and then saw the man who had just stepped out from behind the wheel.

He was slight and lemony blond, his hair longish, curling behind his ears. Green, green eyes. A crackling tan. His attention snagged on the scene of the other gringo family.

The woman yawned, unlatched her door and came out of the car. She was wearing a black bikini top and long white flowing skirt that sat low on her hips. She had a ruby stud in her belly button. A tattoo bracelet encircled her ankle.

Behind her, asleep in the back of the car, was a little girl about two years old. Her head was turned away and Alice couldn’t see her face — how she wanted to see that face! — but her brown hair was done up in two messy pigtails and the red birthmark on the back of her neck was as good as a face and a name. It was exactly Lauren’s birthmark, in miniature. The maternal family birthmark common to every female in the family for three — now four — generations.

Mike stepped forward. So he had seen it too, all of it. Tim, Analise, Ivy. Standing right there in front of them, comfortable as locals in their sweaty, tanned skin.

Off to the side, Austin watched. He was seven now, lanky and confident. He dropped his soda bottle and took several steps forward across the dry, dusty ground.

Analise turned sharply to Tim, who directed her with a nod back into the car. Tim then walked quickly forward, kicking up dust with his woven straw sandals. His toenails were dirty. He stood in front of Austin, stared at him, then snatched his hand and tried to tug him toward the car.