Through the pulled-back edge of a drawn living room curtain, Nancy watched until the taillights of the rental truck disappeared around the corner.
“She really shouldn’t be alone,” she said. “I should have stopped her.”
The smell of garlic and tomatoes escaped the kitchen as Mike lifted the lid from the pot and gave it a quick stir. She’d had no idea her son knew how to cook so confidently. “Melissa’s tough as nails, Mom. She finally admitted she’s been having nightmares about what happened to us as kids. She remembers more than she ever let on. And now Riley. It’s a lot to handle. Give her some room.”
“What do you mean, nightmares? When I noticed how tired she’s been, she said she was having insomnia. I assumed it was pressure from all her work, plus moving Charlie and Riley into the apartment.”
He shook his head. “It’s more than that. Remember when she was out on the beach early Friday morning, supposedly saying goodbye to the view? She wandered out there in her sleep. Riley told me she was calling out for her mommy, saying she didn’t want to get in the bathtub. She’s been reliving everything we went through in her dreams.”
Nancy knew from the police interviews after the children were rescued that Carl had abused them in the bathtub among other locations. In the early years of their marriage, Carl used to insist on bathing Nancy in the tub. The way he had touched and examined her. She was too young and inexperienced to realize it wasn’t normal. It was one of the many ways he had exercised power over her.
It pained her to know that her beautiful, brilliant daughter had been suffering, pulled into that horrific trauma from the past during her sleep. Nancy herself had been plagued for years by nightmares. How many nights had she jolted upright in bed, picturing Peter and Lisa the way they had been found, with the wet seaweed and bits of plastic on their faces and in their hair? Their bodies swollen in death. The nightmares always began the same way: she was in a police station being questioned and then she was taken down a long corridor to the mortuary and made to identify her children.
And when she would wake up, as she had so many nights, she would slip out of bed and go in to see Missy and Michael and cover them. Only then could she crawl back into bed, trying to be soft and quiet so as not to wake Ray and alert him to the darkness that she could never escape. But even in sleep, he would always sense her worried next to him, reaching out and pulling her close into his arms. Against the warm scent of him, she’d be calmed and find sleep again.
Nancy did not realize how connected a married couple could be until she wed Ray. Carl had been so cold. As eager as he had been to marry her quickly at such a young age, he stopped touching her after the children were born, trying instead to “treat” her so-called illnesses with medicine. Only after Dr. Miles questioned her under the influence of sodium amytal was she finally able to let herself remember her worst fears about Carl. She realized that Carl was the one making her so tired and complacent with those drugs… and the reasons why. Keeping Nancy drugged, in a weak, childlike state, had been one of the many ways Carl had isolated her while leaving him free to spend time alone with Peter and Lisa.
By recovering her repressed memories, she was also able to remember that Carl had staged the fatal car accident that killed her mother. She was still a teenager, but had no friends after Carl swooped into her life. He wanted her all to himself, which was why he found a way to take her mother from her.
“Did Charlie know about the nightmares?” she asked. “What has he been doing to help her through this? Did she talk to Katie about it? She should not have had to carry the weight of such a thing on her own.”
“Knowing Melissa, she thought she could make it go away all by herself. And I think it’s pretty obvious right now that Charlie doesn’t do much of anything to help anyone but himself. It’s like he took over Melissa’s life the minute he met her. She dated Patrick for years, and then suddenly marries this guy in a matter of months? Sorry, but I can’t shake the suspicion that Riley going missing has something to do with her father. He could owe a loan shark a million dollars for all we know about him.”
While Mike cooked, Nancy went to her bedroom and tried to occupy her thoughts by rearranging the clothing that the kids had brought down in the moving truck. Nancy had been so certain the first time she walked through this house that she would spend the next phase of her life here. But now danger had found her family again, before she had even arrived. She was half tempted to begin packing everything up again. Instead, she sank into the pillow top of her new bed, realizing how tired she was. She tried allowing herself a brief rest to close her eyes, but could not put aside Mike’s observations about Charlie and his influence on Melissa’s life during the last year.
After Patrick had abruptly broken off their relationship, Melissa closed herself off, focusing only on her work and a few trusted friendships. Nancy had worried endlessly that her daughter might never be willing to trust her heart to another person. But then she met Charlie. They both needed someone to lean on, and he had that sweet little girl in need of a mother. Nancy had been so happy about Melissa’s willingness to love again that she had not noticed the ways that her daughter’s new relationship had monopolized her priorities.
Nancy had never heard her daughter sound so desperate as when she was begging Charlie to simply speak to her. If Ray had distanced himself from her that way for even a glimpse of a moment when Mike and Melissa had been kidnapped, she never would have survived. That wasn’t speculation. She was certain of it.
Mike called out that dinner was ready. She was about to go downstairs when a ping sounded quietly from her purse. She slipped the smartphone that the kids had bought her last Christmas from the outside pocket of her bag. There was a new text message. It took her a moment to register the name. Dear Nancy, I am so sorry to contact you during such awful circumstances. I need to talk to Melissa, but she seems determined not to hear from me. At the risk of putting you in an awkward position, can you please let me know where I can find her? It’s urgent.
Her accomplished, confident, caring daughter had been reduced today to questioning her own sanity, wondering if she might have hurt a little girl she loved as her own heart. She needed support now—support she wasn’t getting from her own husband.
Before she could rethink her decision, she dialed Patrick’s number.