Lies You Wanted to Hear (22 page)

The Indolents started playing “Crazy Little Thing Called Love.”

“I’ll go tell the boys,” Gwen said.

“Thanks,” Martinez said. “I want you folks to have a good time. Fact is, my son Preston’s here at the party. I was in the station when the call came in and figured I’d take it myself.” The light bulb went on in my head. Preston was the goalie on the soccer team and a good friend of Ajit’s. The resemblance between father and son was striking.

We watched Gwen walk toward the backyard in her white cutoffs, her legs taut and tan from running. Elliot came around the side of the house with his oboe, and Gwen said something to him and gave him a hug. He looked our way, and Martinez waved him over.

“Congratulations, young man,” Martinez said. “That’s a terrific sound you got going.”

“Thank you.” Elliot shook the detective’s hand but kept his gaze on the ground.

“Who wrote that piece you were playing? Sounded like something by Wayne Shorter.”

Elliot looked up for a second, then dropped his eyes again. I couldn’t tell if he was pleased or offended by the question. I had never heard of Shorter.

“It’s one of his own,” I said proudly.

Martinez did a double take and looked at Elliot. “You’re kidding me. You wrote that yourself?”

Elliot shrugged.

“He’s written dozens of songs,” I said proudly.

“That’s fantastic. You keep it up. I got a nephew went to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Great school. He’s a percussionist, studio musician in New York now. Plays with some of the best jazz artists in the world.”

Elliot gazed at his oboe as if he were hoping it might speak for him. I wished I could give my son the confidence to smile and look the detective in the eye, but he muttered his thanks and turned and went into the house.

The detective said to me, “He get his talent from you?”

“I wish. It’s a complete mystery. One of those lucky miracles, I guess. I’ve got a tin ear. His mother did too.” I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had such a strong feeling of Lucy’s presence, as if the police in their routine mission had brought her along for the ride. “She died a long time ago.”

I felt a twinge of guilt and let it go.

***

Over the next few years, Elliot continued to be a slacker in school. None of the needling from me or his teachers did any good. He did enough to get by, unconcerned about his grades. He had his heart set on going to Berklee. I guess it was Detective Martinez who had put the idea in his head. When it came time to fill out applications, I told him I didn’t want to pay a small fortune for him to go to a trade school three thousand miles from home.

“What do you mean, Dad? Berklee is the
best
. You won’t believe how many great musicians have gone there.” He rattled off a bunch of names. The only one I recognized was Quincy Jones.

“Yeah, I know. I’ve read their literature. But most students who go there don’t even bother to get a degree. They spend all their time playing music and graduate with what they call a
professional
diploma
.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll get a degree.”

“Why not go to a liberal arts college with a good music department?”

“And do what? Minor in astrophysics?” He rarely got sarcastic like that. “I’m a musician, Dad. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to be since I was in the fourth grade.”

“You know Berklee’s cutthroat, right? They’ve got kids coming in from all over the world. Every one of them scratching and clawing, trying to grab that little brass ring.”

“And you don’t think I can compete?”

“No, I just think you’re—”

“Lazy and irresponsible.”

“I never said that.”

“Whatever.”

“I love your music, El. I know how much it means to you. I just want you to consider other options.”

“Don’t worry. I’m going to apply to other colleges. I probably won’t even get into Berklee anyway. But I want to
try
. Isn’t that what you want me to do, aim for the top?”

I liked his spunk, but I kept coming up with reasons and incentives to steer him elsewhere. My arguments were legitimate. He’d get a much broader education at a liberal arts college. But it wasn’t just the narrow focus at Berklee that concerned me. I didn’t want Elliot to go back to Boston. I couldn’t shake the feeling that if Lucy saw him, even if it was just a casual glance on the street, she’d recognize him in an instant.

Lucy

Boston—November 1999

On the Sunday after Thanksgiving, Zoe and Eric Underwood invited Jill and Terry and my beau William and me to their house for leftovers. The gathering had become a tradition for the six of us over the past few years, and Zoe could make leftovers seem like a gourmet meal.

As we sat around the dinner table talking, Jill said, “Is that a new necklace, Luce?”

“Mmm-hmm.” I touched the string of carnelian stones. “A present from William.” I leaned into him, and he squeezed my thigh under the table.

“It’s lovely,” Jill said.

“You need to stop that, my friend,” Terry said. “It makes the rest of us guys look bad.”

“Understood,” William said. “That’s the last thing she ever gets from me.”

“Let me ask you, William,” Terry said, changing the subject. “What do you think about this whole Y2K business? Is it just a bunch of scare tactics, or is the whole world going to come crashing down around our heads?”

William was the CEO of a high-tech firm that made widgets for the government, the kind of stuff he wasn’t supposed to discuss even if the bad guys spirited him off to some Third World dungeon and pulled out all his fingernails.

Before William could answer, Eric said, “It’s going to be a nightmare, mark my words. Computers crashing all over the globe, power grids shutting down. People won’t be able to get cash out of the ATMs. Missile systems hiccupping all over the globe.” Eric taught marketing at Harvard Business School and often acted like he knew everything about everything.

“We’re selling passes to the bunker in our basement,” Zoe said. “Five hundred dollars a night per person. Bring your own booze and cyanide capsules.”

We all laughed, no one harder than Eric. Zoe was always the quietest person at the table, but she had a knack for zinging her husband on his more outrageous statements.

William said, “This Y2K stuff is much ado about nothing. Our biggest problem is what to
call
the new decade. Here it is, less than a month away, and nobody can agree on a name.”

Everyone had an idea—the
aughts
, the
zeros
, the
O-ties
—which led to some very good puns.

On the way home William said, “Well, Eric succeeded in making an ass of himself again.”

“I know. He can be insufferable. But do you see how he looks at Zoe with that boyish devotion and laughs when she cuts him off at the knees? It helps me forgive his pomposity.”

“Is that what you want from me? Boyish
devotion
?”

“At the very least. Diamonds would also be appreciated.”

William and I had been going out for three years. The two of us were more like pals than lovers. We met through an adult literacy program we were associated with—I gave my time and William gave his money. There weren’t any fireworks, good or bad, between us, just a solid, comfortable connection. We had both been married twice and didn’t want to make another mistake. I didn’t like to think of us as cynics, more as realists who had lived and learned.

I’d met my second husband, Drew Lofton, in 1991. In the eight years since the children had been kidnapped I’d gone back to graduate school for a degree in library science and taken a job in a small private day school, leaving my summers free for travel. Drew and I met in the Château de Chenonceau in the Loire Valley, then found ourselves at the same restaurant that evening. He was traveling with his two daughters, who were in their early twenties. My instincts told me to decline Drew’s offer when he asked me to join them at their table—I could see those girls had no interest in sharing their father’s attention—but I have never been good at following my instincts, at least not the cautionary ones.

Drew’s wife had died the previous winter, and he and his daughters had come to France to spread her ashes in a place she loved. I didn’t give him my address or phone number that evening at dinner, but he remembered my name and looked me up when he got home. A professor of comparative literature at Boston College, Drew was the most well-read person I had ever met, someone who could snatch a quote from Molière or Goethe out of the air as easily as a nursery rhyme, but he was a wounded man. His wife had spent the last few years of her life spiraling into madness before committing suicide. Drew needed to talk, and his openness pulled me in. We dated for a year, and he asked me to marry him. I accepted without hesitation, but we were at odds over where to live. He didn’t want to leave his lovely old house in Manchester-by-the-Sea; I was adamant about staying in Jamaica Plain.

My house, I tried to explain to Drew, was both a prison and a sanctuary. I believed that as long as I lived there, my children might come home and find me, never mind that they wouldn’t have remembered the address or a single thing about it. I didn’t maintain it as a shrine. I had redecorated their rooms and, except for a few treasured items, had given away most of their clothes and furniture, the trampoline and swing set. But the house still held the sounds of their laughter, the rhythm of Sarah’s quick footsteps on the stairs, the soughing of Nathan’s breath in the night. I kept their pictures on the mantel in my bedroom, though I purged them from the rest of the house. I didn’t want any questions from people who didn’t know what had happened to me, no reminders of so much sadness for those who did.

Do
you
have
children?
In some ways that everyday question was the most difficult for me. Saying yes inevitably led to more questions—
How
many? How old? Where are they now?
—ones which I couldn’t answer without telling my story or telling a lie. My story had no moral, no end, only sorrow and pain for me. If I answered by saying I didn’t have kids, it felt like I was denying their existence, admitting they were gone forever. I had never found a strategy to cut off that question before it was asked. I knew that people were simply making conversation, but it could seem like an unwittingly cruel reminder of what I was missing. Each time the question required me to do a quick mental calculation: Who was this person? A passing acquaintance? A new colleague at work? How would my truthful answer change the way that person saw me? How would I undo the lie if I chose to tell one?

In the first year or two after the kidnapping, when I’d be at work at Garbo’s or walk into a room full of people, I’d notice some woman—it was almost always a woman—give me a furtive glance and whisper to the person beside her. I couldn’t hear the words, but I knew what she was saying:
That’s her, the woman whose husband kidnapped their children.
I didn’t know if she was saying it in pity or blame, but at least there was some comfort in knowing that she and the person she was whispering to were already aware of my story. Sooner or later, when I had to tell a new friend or lover about the kidnapping, it was easier for me to make it brief and direct, sticking to the facts and trying to describe the whole thing as if it had happened to someone else. The reaction was invariably a mix of outrage and sympathy and curiosity. But I had learned over time that my sorrow and loss, even my anger at Matt, wasn’t something anyone else could share. They were mine to endure
alone
, and they touched me most deeply when they came unbidden—when I was brushing my teeth or sitting at a traffic light or trying to pick out a ripe avocado in the supermarket.

Drew knew about sorrow and loss as well as I did. The more we talked and fell in love, the more we believed we could pull each other through. He agreed to come live with me in JP, and we were married in a small ceremony in the fall of 1992.

Drew’s daughters put on their plastic smiles for the wedding, but both of them had disapproved of our romance from the start. Plain, prickly young women, they were unhappy in their jobs and neither had a man in her life—no one except their father. They felt he had gotten involved with me too quickly after their mother’s death, which, in retrospect, was probably true. Drew and I convinced ourselves that the girls’ resentment would diminish over time, but it only became more entrenched. One girl moved to France and rarely communicated, while her sister contracted a mysterious illness that left her debilitated and unable to work. Drew worried about both girls constantly. I said they were acting like spoiled brats, and he and I began to quarrel about them. Things came to a head when he got a vituperative letter from his daughter in France, a litany of perceived slights and wild accusations.

“Oh, Drew, I’m so sorry,” I said when I read the letter.

“This is how it starts.” His face twisted in anguish. “They get paranoid and lose touch with reality.” He was afraid the girl was contemplating suicide. “I should go see her.”

I looked into his sad brown eyes. It didn’t matter if his daughter was a manipulative vixen or mentally ill like her mother; either way the drama would keep escalating until she had won her father back or descended into madness.

“Yes, you should go,” I said.

I can’t honestly say if letting Drew go was an act of generosity or cowardice, good judgment or bad. The older I get, the more I realize the answer to most questions is:
All
of
the
above.

***

The second week in December, I was in the teachers’ lounge when Lewis came in. Lewis was the vice principal and our de facto computer expert.

“Lewis,” I said, “what do you make of this whole Y2K problem?” I had recently finished computerizing the checkout system in the library.

“Why, Lucy?” He smiled. “Don’t tell me you’re worried about overdue library books?”

“Just curious. There’s been so many articles about it in the newspaper lately.”

“Forget about Y2K. It’s much ado about nothing.”

“That’s exactly what another friend said. I wonder if Shakespeare anticipated this.”

“Absolutely. The man was prescient. This whole thing is a
tempest
”—he dunked a teabag in his cup—“in a teapot.”

“All’s well that ends well?”

“Exactly. Which is just
as
you
like
it
, my dear.” He had a devilish glint in his eyes, waiting for my retort.

I paused, stumped. “You win, Lewis.”

He chuckled and sat down across from me. “I saw Amy Vogel’s mother today, and she was singing your praises.”

“Amy’s a doll,” I said. She was in the third grade and one of my reading junkies, kids who read on the school bus, in the lunchroom, outside at recess. They’d finish one book and immediately start another, like a chain smoker lighting his next cigarette off the last. I wanted every child to be an avid reader, so I set up a challenge to give them some incentive. Each student started out the year as a Walker; after finishing five books and handing in a short report on each, he became a Jogger. The next level was Runner, then Sprinter, Jet Pilot, and Astronaut, with a small prize at the end of the year for every student who made it to Sprinter.

When I was studying for my master’s in library science, I pictured myself working in a university helping professors with their research and tracking down rare books, but the market was tight when I got my degree, and I took a job at an elementary school in Arlington. I spent the summer boning up on children’s and young adult literature and found I really enjoyed it. Once school began, I fed off the energy of the kids. I loved their wide-eyed enthusiasm and candid reactions to books. It was such a pleasure to read to them, to pause before some dramatic moment in a story, anticipating their gasps of horror or squeals of delight. Parents began telling me how much their children enjoyed story hour, so I set up an evening workshop to help them improve their reading skills and discover new books for their kids. The workshop was so popular I turned it into a regular course at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. I felt like I had finally found my calling.

I finished my tea and asked Lewis if he’d come by the library some afternoon to make sure I was backing up my computer system properly, just in case Y2K was real. He said he’d be glad to.

As I was straightening up the library at the end of the day, Sophie Reardon hurried in to pick out a few books. Sophie was a second-grader new to our school this fall, a delicate Asian girl with silky black hair that hung down to her waist. She was reading well above grade level and working her way through Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary. At the rate she was going, she’d be an Astronaut soon. I considered inventing a new category for readers like her. Moonbeams? Shooting Stars?

Sophie came up to the front desk with
Double
Fudge.

“Can you please find another good book for me, Ms. Thornhill?”

“Of course.” We went to the shelves. “Have you read
Harriet
the
Spy
yet?”

She shook her head.

“Oh, you’ll love that one, honey,” a woman said behind us.

We turned around. Sophie said, “Mummy!” and ran and gave her a hug.

I recognized the woman instantly. She was wearing a stylish black coat and a fur hat, wisps of gray hair framing her face. She had Sophie’s red jacket over her arm.

“Hello, Winnie,” I said.

“Hello.” She had a confused look on her face. “I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”

“Lucy.” People had only used first names at GrieveWell. “Lucy Thornhill.” I never went back to the group after the night Winnie rebuked me.

“Yes, of course,” she said, though I could tell she was faking it, trying to fix me in a time and place.

“Let me check these books out for you,” I said to Sophie.

I wasn’t surprised that Winnie didn’t remember me. When I met her, she was still in the throes of grief and rage, eviscerating strangers like me and probably her loved ones as well. Perhaps I should have pretended I’d never seen her before. What good would it do her to be reminded of our brief acquaintance all those years ago at such a painful time in both our lives?

While I checked out the books, Winnie helped her daughter into her coat. Sophie pulled a white wool cap from her sleeve and put it on her head.