Things You Won't Say (33 page)

“We generally divide and conquer,” Jamie had said. “Mike reads to Emily and Sam, or he tidies up downstairs while I do the bedtime routine. I’m just trying to give him a little break now, because of . . . everything.”

Now Lou wondered if that was the only reason. It hadn’t escaped her notice that Mike had been sleeping in the basement, or that a few days earlier, when Jamie had been entering the kitchen and Mike had been exiting it, he had pulled away abruptly, as if he didn’t want to touch her even in passing.

It was obvious Mike was angry with her sister. But why? Lou wondered.

She puzzled over it for a few minutes, then gave up. She certainly was no relationship expert—just look at her history. The thought led her to wonder what Donny was doing at the moment. He and Mary Alice might be enjoying a late dinner, maybe pasta primavera or one of Donny’s other specialties. They’d probably opened a nice bottle of Chardonnay, and were talking about the upcoming wedding. She needed to send Donny an email, to see if he wanted to have coffee. She hoped Mary Alice didn’t mind if they stayed friends. Now that Lou was gone from the quiet, lovely apartment, she found herself reminiscing about all the things she’d liked most about Donny: the way he turned on classical music when he got ready in the morning and could always name the composer, the way he lined up his shoes when he came home from work, the left always touching the right, like they were a married couple settling in for the night.

She wondered again what had kept her from wanting to stay with him. He didn’t have any glaring flaws, so it had to have been her fault. She’d hit a limit with her two previous
boyfriends, as well—something that kept her from turning the corner to real commitment. She’d even seen a shrink after Jamie suggested it.

“There isn’t anything wrong in talking to someone about things that you’re struggling with,” Jamie had said. “I think it’s kind of heroic, actually. Not many people are willing to do hard work on themselves.”

“Heroic?” Lou had said. “You’re giving this the hard sell, aren’t you?”

Because Lou had returned to college to study zoology, she was eligible for cheap on-campus counseling. It wasn’t like she had any pressing social obligation tying up her Thursday nights anyway. She’d made an appointment through the student center and gone in for a session. Lou figured they’d chat for a bit and maybe she’d get some sort of prescription—she wasn’t sure for what—but it hadn’t happened that way. The shrink had merely smiled at her, taken out a new legal pad and a freshly sharpened pencil, and sat down across from Lou.

Uh-oh,
Lou had thought, feeling as if she was in for more than she’d bargained for.

“Tell me about your family when you were growing up,” the therapist had begun. She had close-cropped brown hair and slightly slanted brown eyes and perfectly manicured fingernails. She wore a chocolate brown wrap dress and matching heels, and despite her warm smile, she intimidated Lou.

“Growing up?” Lou had echoed.

“Yes,” the therapist had said.

So Lou had talked a little bit about Jamie and how they’d shared a room. She’d mentioned how she’d walked to school and had swum the backstroke for the neighborhood pool’s swim team for a few years.

“Were you close to your parents?” the shrink had asked.

“Sure,” Lou had said.

“What sorts of things did you do together?”

“Oh, you know,” Lou had said. “The usual.”

The therapist had set her pencil down on her pad, folded her hands, and waited. That was the thing about shrinks, Lou thought. They got paid by the hour, so they were perfectly comfortable with long silences. Silences didn’t bother Lou, either, but paying money for nothing did, so she tried to come up with something.

“Cereal,” Lou had finally said. “Jamie and I each got to pick a new box of cereal every week. Whatever we wanted—Lucky Charms, Cocoa Puffs. That was breakfast every day.”

“Mmm,” the therapist had murmured, and Lou had hidden a laugh, wondering if they learned how to make that noise in shrink school or from watching television.

“When something upset you in school, did you talk to your mom or your dad about it?” the therapist had asked after a long pause.

“Um,” Lou had said. “Well, I guess I mostly talked to Jamie. But I don’t get upset all that easily.”

The therapist had scribbled something on the pad. “Was your mother a stay-at-home mom?”

This Lou knew the answer to: “Yes.”

“Do you think she enjoyed doing it?”

Lou had frowned. “It’s hard to say.” She’d realized she was squirming and she tried to be still. The therapist was waiting for her to elaborate, so she might as well.

“I actually don’t have a lot of memories of my mother,” she’d said. “She died when I was twelve, so . . .”

The therapist had looked up suddenly. “What do you remember?” she’d asked.

“Almost nothing,” Lou had said. The therapist had waited. “Nothing, really.”

The therapist had just nodded and written something else in her pad.

“Is that strange?” Lou had asked. That was the thing about therapy; it made you curious about yourself. Which led to
more sessions and more money for the therapists. Sneaky, that therapy.

“I wouldn’t say strange,” the shrink had said. “Sometimes we block out memories that can cause us pain. It’s the mind’s way of protecting ourselves.”

“Like selective amnesia?” Lou had asked.

“In a way,” the therapist had said. She seemed to have a Ph.D. in vague answers.

“Anyway, most of my memories are of Jamie,” Lou had said. “I have lots of them.”

“Your sister sounds special to you,” the therapist had said.

“Yeah,” Lou had said. “She is.”

They’d talked awhile longer, and the therapist had suggested Lou come back next week, and Lou had nodded politely and canceled the appointment the following day. And that was that for her flirtation with therapy.

Tabby climbed out of the pool and came over to stand near Lou, her muscular trunk stretching through the fence. Lou reached out and stroked it. An elephant’s trunk was magical—strong enough to uproot a small tree, and dexterous enough to pluck a single blade of grass. Lou thought Tabby might resume pacing, but instead, she stayed by Lou.

Lou looked into the beautiful creature’s eyes, which seemed endlessly wise, and she kept a hand on Tabby’s soft, rough trunk.

“Everything is going to be okay,” Lou promised, hoping with her whole heart it would be true.

Chapter Sixteen

CHRISTIE WONDERED IF A
tiny piece of her had loved Mike all along. Years ago, she’d been having dinner with a friend who was divorced, and her friend had confessed she hated seeing parts of her ex in their children—she cringed when they talked about going to his alma mater for college, and she let her son grow his hair long, because her ex had always worn his in a military cut. But Christie had never minded seeing Mike’s expressions cross Henry’s face or watching his hair darken until it perfectly matched his father’s. Had that been a clue her feelings for Mike had always been murkier than she’d believed? Sure, they’d had their share of arguments through the years, but those differences had tapered away until they’d stopped altogether a couple of years ago. Christie couldn’t even remember the last time she’d had a disagreement with Mike.

Early on, of course, there had been many. Immediately after Henry was born, when Christie was still aching and dazed, Mike had infuriated her by asking if she’d breast-feed (his timing so exquisitely bad). When she’d said no, he’d tucked a pro-breast-feeding pamphlet into Henry’s diaper bag with a Post-it that said, “Read me, please.” Christie had torn the
pamphlet in two and returned it to the diaper bag, and it had eventually disappeared. But Christie had conceded to some of Mike’s wishes. She’d let Mike have Henry baptized, and she’d gone to the ceremony, even though she typically never set foot in churches except for weddings, and even then she sometimes skipped the ceremony and headed straight to the reception. The service was the first time she’d met Mike’s parents and siblings, and she’d breathed a sigh of relief that she wouldn’t have to sit around with them at holiday meals—his mother was a ninny, the brothers talked over one another in a nonstop game of one-upmanship, and the whole group seemed loud and larger than life, except for the father, who kept sneaking out to his car to turn on the radio and listen to, inexplicably, weather updates.

Christie glanced at the kitchen clock. She’d texted Mike that morning to let him know Henry had gotten safely off to sleepaway camp and to confirm the meeting with Elroy. Mike had responded immediately, saying he’d be at the spot of the shooting at the appointed time.

Now only an hour remained until she’d see him again. She felt a tingle in her lower belly and she went to get dressed in the outfit she’d chosen after some deliberation—her most flattering jeans and a simple pink cotton top. She didn’t go overboard with her makeup, either. She wanted to connect with Mike honestly. If he was having serious issues with Jamie, as she suspected, she’d be a friend for him. And, someday, maybe more. She wondered how Mike felt about her now. Maybe that was why Jamie had been so awful to her; maybe she felt threatened. Christie felt the ire rise inside her as she thought again about how Jamie had degraded her.

From now on, she was going to interact with Mike directly. That’s how it should have been all along. How had Jamie managed to worm her way between them, with her tight-lipped, superior smiles?

Christie looked in the mirror as she applied a clear lip
gloss. There definitely were lines around her eyes, spreading outward like cracks in a mirror, and her lips seemed a little thinner, too. Aging was like climbing aboard a train—it started gradually, the scenery outside your window changing so slowly you weren’t sure if everything else around you was shifting or if it was you that was moving, then it accelerated suddenly, catching you off guard. Maybe that was part of the reason most of the things she’d wanted a decade ago had lost their luster. Trips to Vegas and Cancún were expensive, partying even more than two nights a week left her exhausted and haggard, and living in a crummy apartment no longer seemed as if it was a stepping-stone to something better; it was pathetic. The truth was, she’d been scarred by Simon and Jim, and by the guys before them, too, like the one she’d married who’d had a dozen texts from other women on his iPhone when she scrolled through it a week after their wedding. Then there were the guys who’d had sex with her, given a satisfied grunt, rolled over, and gone to sleep without a word. Their faces blended together, all of the men who’d taken her for granted or used or mistreated her.

She applied a single squirt of Bobbi Brown’s Beach perfume to the hollow of her throat and went downstairs to wait for Elroy in the lobby. He pulled up a few minutes later in his ancient Volvo, and she got in the passenger’s side, brushing fast-food wrappers off the seat and hoping there weren’t any lingering ketchup smears before sitting down.

“Mike meeting us there?” he asked.

Christie nodded.

“I got that Mace you wanted,” Elroy said. He gestured to the glove compartment, and Christie opened it. Inside was a small canister with a nozzle. Christie took off the cap, and Elroy nearly drove off the road. “Mind not aiming that thing at me? I got you industrial strength.”

“Sorry,” Christie said, replacing the cap.

It would be intensely satisfying to wait in the darkness out
side Jim’s house, biding her time until he took out the trash. Bam! She’d squirt the entire canister into his face. She pictured him in his boxers and bare feet—they were probably stark white and hairy—writhing helplessly on the ground, tears streaming from his eyes. She’d never asked Elroy what happened to the video, but she hoped Jim’s wife had seen it, and had run far away from him.

“Got a few new cases,” Elroy said. “Up for starting again tomorrow?”

“Sure,” Christie said. She ran her fingers over the cool metal of the can. It would never be out of her reach.

Elroy cut down a side street, then took a sharp right, following a path to downtown that Christie had never before taken. “Is this a shortcut?” she asked.

Elroy nodded. “At this time of day, with traffic, it’s usually the quickest. If it wasn’t rush hour, I’d take the bridge.”

“Are you one of those people who can drive anywhere if you’ve been there once?” Christie asked, thinking of Lou.

“Guess you could say that,” Elroy said.

Christie pulled down the passenger’s-side visor to check herself in the mirror, suddenly feeling nervous about seeing Mike again, which was equal parts silly and thrilling. A picture of a woman was clipped to the visor. She had curly blond hair and a big smile.

“Who’s this?” Christie asked.

Elroy kept his eyes on the road. “My wife,” he said.

“You’re married?” Christie asked. Somehow it surprised her; would a married guy drive a car full of fast-food wrappers and dress like that?

“Ex-wife,” Elroy mumbled.

“Sorry,” Christie said. Something clicked into place; she thought she knew why Elroy had taken on this job. “Did she cheat on you?” Christie blurted.

“No.” He shook his head.

Christie frowned; she would’ve bet money that she was
right. They drove another mile, with Elroy expertly weaving in and out of traffic, then he broke the silence.

“I cheated on her,” Elroy said. He cleared his throat. “And I lost her.”

Christie sensed the pain contained in those simple words, and she reached out and touched his hand. Sweet Elroy, with his courtly manners and cowboy hat, had probably messed up the best thing that had ever happened to him.

“Anyway,” Elroy said, his voice businesslike now, “this week we’ve got a wife who found a pair of panties in her husband’s car. He tried to blame it on the parking lot attendant at his office, said he must’ve been having a little fun during his break, but she knows. He’s in a bowling league on Thursday nights, so you can catch him there.”

“Is she sure he really bowls?” Christie asked.

Elroy nodded. “She followed him once. She did as much as she could on her own before calling us. Then we’ve got a bride-to-be who’s worried about what went on at the bachelor party. The wedding’s in six days, so we need to move fast. In this case we’ll need you to try to get the story out of the groom if he doesn’t come on to you.”