Hush Hush (13 page)

Joey down for his afternoon nap, Felicia risked a bath, the monitor perched near the tub. Her tub was a beautiful thing, a freestanding soaking tub that Felicia had selected, Stephen grousing about the cost every step of the way. But a good tub was more important to Felicia than a good bed. She considered it vital to her well-being to steep herself in warm, vibrating water on a regular basis. Yet this was her first bath in weeks. Joey had a genius for sensing Felicia’s rare moments of relaxation. If she even started filling the tub for herself, he cut his naps short. But even Joey was cooperating with date night.

Date night! Felicia was so wiggly with excitement that she barely needed the jets to move the water around. She had arranged for Alanna to babysit—a nice deal for someone who was grounded, making fifteen dollars an hour when she couldn’t go out anyway—and gotten reservations at Pazo, an old favorite from their courtship days. She had tried to persuade Stephen to book a car so both of
them could drink, but he had said pointedly that she was still breast-feeding, so how much did she plan to drink, anyway? Only maybe—maybe Stephen wanted to make sure she was wide-eyed when they returned, so she could devote her full attention to him? Okay, fine, she would limit herself to a glass of wine or two, be the designated driver. Ruby had a sleepover, so they didn’t need to worry about picking her up.

Felicia heard her cell, ringing in the dressing room, but couldn’t imagine what might be urgent enough to lure her from this tub. As long as she could hear Joey’s snuffly breaths on the monitor, nothing could be wrong. Felicia had been one of those parents who stood by the crib in the early months, checking that her son’s chest was rising and falling, that he was alive. She still did it sometimes. Being a mother was like being trapped in the first fifteen minutes of a horror film. Everything was fine, lovely. But there was this persistent sense of dread. Joey wasn’t even a year old, and already there had been a series of averted crises. His first crib had been recalled, and it turned out the little seat he used was considered dangerous, too.

Then there was the house itself, a never-ending source of potential dangers. You would think a man who had had two daughters—
three
, her mind amended—might remember what children got into. Oh, and don’t even talk to her about lithium batteries. Joey wasn’t even crawling yet, but Felicia had identified all the devices in the house with such batteries and hidden them. Stephen grumbled that getting the remote for the AppleTV device was akin to signing out documents in a government agency. Felicia didn’t care.

Joey slept on, considerate for once. She had time to do all the things she never had time to do anymore—shave her legs, wash and dry her hair, slather herself with lotion. Felicia’s looks had never depended on makeup, but she needed a little help these days, especially with her sleep so disrupted. She studied her face in the mirror,
wondering how Melisandre Dawes had aged, then wondering why Melisandre still used the surname Dawes after all these years.

Her phone again. The cell. Stephen. She almost didn’t take it. The quiet was delicious. She was as close to being alone as she ever was these days.

“Listen,” he said. “About tonight.”

No
, she thought.
No, no, no
. “Yes?”

“Something has come up.”

“At work? On a Friday?”

“Melisandre wants to meet with me. She says it’s for the documentary. And you know what? I might as well get it out of the way. Tell her face-to-face that I won’t do it and the girls have changed their minds. That the girls aren’t going to see her at all, with or without a camera. Then she’ll be out of our lives forever.”

“But tonight is date night.”

“What? Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot. Well, we can still go out. I’ll just be home a little later. I mean, maybe not some big fancy meal, but we can have some time to ourselves.”

“We’ll see,” she said with a tight-lipped fury that didn’t seem to register with him at all.

“I’ll be home by nine, I’m sure. See you then, okay?”

No
, she decided, after hanging up the phone,
it’s not okay. I’ll treat myself to a night out. Alanna’s already agreed to babysit. I’m going to go out on my own, see a movie, stop somewhere for a drink. Let Stephen arrive home and wonder where I am. That would show him
.

She went to her closet, selected a knit halter dress. Although it left her shoulders bare, it would be warm enough paired with a jacket. Felicia’s shoulders had always been among her best features. She might not be in peak condition, but she still looked pretty good. Lots of men would look at her tonight, offer to buy her drinks, maybe even flirt with her. Nothing wrong with flirting, especially if one’s husband was going to spend date night with his ex-wife.

Sandy looked skeptically at the machine on his desk. He was no Luddite. The department had not relied much on computers at the time of his retirement—Google was barely used, as Sandy recalled—but he had always used databases, especially when he came back to work cold cases.

But this thing, this
tablet
. How had he allowed himself to be sold this? He didn’t even understand why it was called a tablet. The young woman had been so enthusiastic, though, and the demo at the Apple Store had been seductive. All you have to do is take it home and plug it in, she kept saying, after setting up basic programs for him—his e-mail, the text message function, an iTunes account, and his first-ever Facebook account, which was the whole point of this exercise.

Had she looked at him strangely when he expressed interest in that particular application? It was probably in his head. But she had seemed almost a little pitying when he offered the lie “I need it to keep in touch with my grandkids.” She said: “Kids don’t use it as much as older people, actually. I hope you won’t be disappointed if they’re not in touch with you as often as you hoped.”

How much would she have pitied him if she knew the real story?

Sandy opened the Facebook app. His profile had no photo attached, and he currently had zero friends. Strangely, there were already requests, but he ignored those. Facebook urged him to share his “status.” He ignored that, too. He was a faceless man, using his proper name—Roberto—trolling these strange waters. The things that people shared here! And so many had clearly ignored the privacy settings.

But that was to his advantage. It took a while, but he found what he was looking for. Some people would call what Sandy did playing hunches. Or, perhaps, making an educated guess. He had given up
on trying to explain that what he did was a kind of science, informed by a lifetime of experience. True, he hadn’t really known what Facebook was a few days ago. But once he understood, he was sure he would have better luck with it than Tess would, and here was a solid lead, justifying his confidence. He would have to do more research before he shared the information, make sure he was right. He felt a little cocky, having bested her in a milieu where she should have been able to outthink him.

Before he signed off, he did an odd thing, knowing it was odd, yet incapable of stopping. He searched for women with the name Mary Bailey. His late wife’s maiden name had been Bailey. She’d made a joke about it on their first date, but it had gone over his head. As a boy in Cuba, Sandy had never seen
It’s a Wonderful Life
. As a teenager in the United States—essentially a refugee, orphaned within months of arriving—he’d had no desire to see a film with such an incomprehensible title. Eventually, Mary had gotten him to watch it one Christmas Eve, and he had tried not to let her see how much he hated it. Really, people thought this was a warm, celebratory movie? It was the saddest thing he had ever seen. Nice guy spends his whole life never getting what he wants. Sandy had lived it. He didn’t need to see that in a movie.

And yet George Bailey, holding Zuzu aloft in his arms, ended up being one up on Sandy. They both had their Mary Baileys—lovely women, much too good for them—but Sandy’s son was not the kind of child to be held placidly. Bobby would have torn Zuzu’s petals to bits, knocked down the tree in a rage, chucked his toys at his parents’ heads.

The boy had been institutionalized since age six. The best thing about Mary’s death was that Sandy could stop pretending to care about him. Once Bobby’s problems emerged—and once his rage nearly cost Mary her life—Sandy could not regard Bobby as his son. It was more as if they were in some horrible fairy tale and had given
birth to an animal, one prone to attack and hurt those who loved him best.

So when Tess talked about how hard it was to be a mom, or how she could not imagine someone not having a relationship with her children, Sandy didn’t
share
. What could he say? She was a nice young woman, but she didn’t know from hard. One of the advantages to not being a big talker was that no one noticed when you shut down.

There were a lot of Mary Baileys on Facebook, but none was as lovely as his own, in Sandy’s opinion. He started to power down the tablet, then saw that the lady at the Apple store had added gin rummy and hearts to the games folder, probably because he had admitted he liked to play both of those on his laptop. And you could name your opponents. That was pretty nifty. He set up the gin game so his opponent was named Mary. She beat him soundly, just like the real Mary. Sandy was never sure what he thought about the afterlife, but for a half hour or so, he allowed himself to believe that his beloved wife was playing gin with him. Game after game, he took wild chances, played stupidly against the odds—and lost happily.