“I always thought gray hair would make you look older.”
It was good that Joe spoke first, because Faye was caught too unawares to know what to say, her jumbled thoughts uploading question after question, all a variation of “What the hell are you doing at our son’s house?” But Joe might misconstrue that into thinking he had the upper hand, so instead Faye simply said, “My hairdresser says it isn’t gray but silver.”
Joe reassessed her head as if he’d last seen her yesterday and not four years ago, when they’d faced each other in the courtroom and the judge had granted the divorce. Faye knew that once the shock had passed, she’d be angry that he was acting so nonplussed.
“I have not, however, traveled across the country to talk about my hair.” She wondered if his blasé reaction was merely a defense tactic to cover up his shock. She could not remember if that was something Joe would do. Over time she had worked hard to erase all sentiment of her husband from her mind.
He blinked. “How are you, Faye?” he asked with the kind of interest that seemed genuine.
“I’ll be better when I’m out of the heat,” she replied. “And when I’ve seen our son.”
“Yes,” he said, “of course.” He stepped aside and Faye walked past him. He smelled of sandalwood, a scent that she’d once bought him. She wondered if he’d worn it when he’d been with Rita Blair.
“I’m sure you know I’m surprised to see you here,” she said.
“And you,” he said.
She walked to the wall of windows and stared out at the rusty canyon, wishing she were somewhere else, anywhere but there.
“He’s not here right now,” Joe added. “Greg.”
She nodded, because what did she expect? It was the way life went for Faye: never easy, never smooth.
“He went to town, but he’ll be back soon. You can wait here if you’d like.”
She did not know if she could do that, if she could stand in the same space as her former husband and not kick and scream and claw at his face because he’d never told her that he knew where Greg was—unless … Had he known all along?
Chances were Riley was safe. She’d not been bound and gagged and raped and had her throat slit until she’d bled to death. She’d not been a victim of any of the other million scenarios Hannah could have conjured up if she’d not known all along that Riley had run away—that Riley was simply making a statement to her mother that she hated her.
Hate, Hannah could deal with.
Rape or murder, she could not.
But if Riley had overheard Hannah’s confession, could that have made her angry enough to run away … to San Antonio?
Don’t be ridiculous, Hannah scolded herself. Riley could not have gone to Texas. She did not know Betty Barnes’ name. She did not know where the woman was locked up.
Besides, Evan had said, She has no money. Yet Hugh said she paid cash for her ferry ticket.
She had no money.
Unless …
There was one possibility.
Which was why, after the sheriff left again, Hannah climbed into the attic, to Mother Jackson’s trunk.
The beaded purse was gone.
The Silver Certificates, gone.
Certainly the cash was enough to afford passage to the Cape, and for a time thereafter, until … until what? How far ahead was a fourteen-year-old capable of thinking and of planning? Did she expect she could find work without a permit or did she think the cash would last forever?
Hannah noticed that Scout’s overalls from To Kill a Mockingbird were rumpled in disarray, not the way Hannah would have left them when she was there … when? Just the other day …
Oh, God, she thought.
Oh.
No.
And all Hannah could remember was when she’d gone up to the attic and she’d read the old news clipping and how she’d thought she’d heard a bat.
Oh.
God.
Wishing she did not have to do what she had to do, Hannah slowly began to remove the trunk’s contents and set them carefully on the wide floorboards around her.
Please, please, she whispered into the air as she took out one playbill after another, one folded poster, one covered, leather box.
At last she reached the false bottom. She stopped; she said one last prayer. Then Hannah lifted the lid of the compartment.
She groped around the small space. Nothing; nothing was there. Not her yearbook or her birth certificate. Not the old biology book. Not the news clippings from the trial. Everything was gone. Riley knew it all.
Did God have some sort of checklist that He used for everyone, a certain preset number of problems that each person must endure?
Before the breast cancer, Hannah might have felt she’d been through enough, that no benevolent God would make her go through any more pain for one lifetime. She remembered walking home one night after a play. She was holding Riley’s right hand and Evan was holding Riley’s left, and she felt filled with so much gratitude and love that she figured her quota of hard times must finally have been met. She thought God must be pleased; her suffering was done.
She might have even felt that way until her diagnosis, despite losing Mother Jackson, despite her growing difficulties with Riley. Those were ordinary, everyday problems. They did not compare to Hannah’s early life that she’d hidden in the trunk.
She thought of that now, as she went out to the greenhouse where there was a telephone, an extension Evan had put in to take his calls for work. He was not working now.
On her way downstairs from the attic, Hannah had seen Evan sitting in the living room, staring at the television though the set was not turned on. Riley’s disappearance had made her husband motionless.
Hannah had stopped in the kitchen and taken her pocketbook from the broom closet. She’d opened up her wallet, and removed the torn section of yellowed paper with a number written on it. Even in the darkness of the obscure corner of her wallet, even though the ink had faded over time and the creases of the paper had nearly broken through, Hannah could still make out the phone number that had been written so long ago.
She’d hoped she’d never have to call it.
At Evan’s small desk in the greenhouse, she shoved aside a stack of order forms that needed tending to. Then she picked up the receiver and drew in a long breath.
Oh, God.
Oh, God.
Was that the smell of pot?
For a moment, Hannah did not breathe. And then, in that moment, she decided some things no longer mattered. Not what the neighbors thought or didn’t think, not breast cancer, not whether or not her husband was smoking pot. The only thing that mattered was finding Riley.
Hannah picked up the receiver and firmly dialed the numbers.
Texas Department of Women’s Corrections.
On one hand, it had been so long since Hannah had heard a Texas accent that she nearly did not understand the operator’s drawn-out words. On the other hand, or with some other, innate sense, Hannah sadly knew exactly what the woman said.
“I’m calling about one of your prisoners.” She closed her eyes so this wouldn’t seem so real.
“Call her lawyer,” the Texan drawled. “This isn’t a hotel.”
“Wait!” Hannah cried, afraid the woman would hang up. “I don’t want to talk to her. I only want to know if she’s still there. If she’s been released.”
“I can’t give you that information.”
“Who can?”
“Like I said. Call her lawyer.”
“I don’t know who he is.” She might have recognized the name if she could check the news clippings, but Riley had those now.
The woman sighed. “I’m sorry, lady. I can’t help you.”
“Please,” Hannah implored, “the inmate is my mother. My fourteen-year-old daughter has run away, and I’m afraid she’s going there. Please. I live in Massachusetts and I can’t come down there. I have breast cancer. Please.”
During the pause that followed, Hannah feared she’d been disconnected. Then the woman asked, “What stage?”
“Excuse me?”
“Breast cancer. What stage?”
She felt her body sigh. “Three,” she said. “I’m almost finished with my chemo, then it’s surgery.”
“My sister had Stage Three eighteen years ago. She’s doing great.”
Hannah did not know what to say. She should have felt reassurance. Instead, she wanted only to cry.
“You do everything they tell you, honey, and you’ll be fine.”
Hannah nodded as if they were in the same room now, sisters in awareness.
“Now,” the woman added, “what was the inmate’s name?”
Hannah blinked. A tear leaked from the outside corner of each eye. “Barnes,” she said, wiping the tears. “Betty—Elizabeth—Barnes.”
“Hang on. This might take a few seconds.”
So Hannah hung on, her thoughts drifting to the Texas heat and a nameless, faceless woman whose sister had Stage Three breast cancer and who was doing great, but might not be so great if she had a fourteen-year-old daughter who’d run two thousand miles away.
She sucked in another breath and quickly wished she hadn’t. That was pot, all right. No mistaking it.
“Sorry,” the woman’s voice said when she came back on the line, “but Elizabeth Barnes was released last month on good behavior.”
“After you left me,” Joe was saying, “I couldn’t stand it any longer. I lost everything. I had to find my son.”
Faye had opted not to sit, but instead remained at the bank of windows, watching the sun do its day’s-end stretch over the canyon as it seeped through the twisting juniper trees and the rich dark pines, illuminating the red, high-desert floor.
She could have challenged Joe’s words about her leaving him. She could have reminded him that he had pushed her away with his philandering with Rita Blair and all the other women who’d come and gone before and after. She could have said that he did not “lose everything,” that she had only kept the Vineyard house and he’d taken the rest. What he’d really “lost” had been his family. As she had, too.
She could have said those things, but what would be the point? Joe would still be Joe and they still would be divorced and Greg would remain the only common thread left between their lives.
“So you found him,” she said. “And he welcomed you so quickly?”
Joe laughed. “Not so quickly. I bought a house here in Sedona. It took two years before he said ‘hello.’ ”
Faye felt a smile of some gratification pass her lips.
“Our boy has done okay,” he added.
“With a little of his daddy’s help, I suspect,” she replied, and for some reason hoped her words were not laced with sarcasm, because she’d not wanted them to be.
“No,” he said, and that surprised her. “Greg did this on his own, with his partner, Mike. Neither one had a pot to piss in, but they wanted a restaurant, so they worked their butts off. I guess he picked up a thing or two from his old man after all.”
He might have added “and from his old lady,” but as much as he’d say he wasn’t, Joe was a chauvinist at heart. It was their generation; old traditions too often died too hard.
She wanted to ask how he felt about Greg being gay. She would not have expected he’d take it so well. Perhaps “losing everything” had altered his attitude.
“And what about you?” Faye asked. “Do you live out here, too?”
“Part-time. Part-time in Boston. Semi-retired from the business. Not completely, though.”
Maybe he’d softened, but apparently he still needed to boss someone around, be a man, tough as nails.
“And you?” he asked. “How is your business?”
“Okay,” she answered. “Fine.”
“And your sister?”
“Claire is fine, too.” She wouldn’t tell him otherwise; he and Claire narrowly escaped killing each other on more than one occasion.
“And your health?” he asked.
She did not, would not pause. “Fine.”
In the distance she heard the low howl of a coyote. It was followed by another, this one closer, then another.
“Choir time,” Joe said, hoisting himself from the dust-colored sofa and walking to where Faye stood. “Every night at sunset, the coyotes sing to one another all through the canyon.”
They stood beside one another; they listened. The music was, indeed, a chorus of nature, of highs and lows and in-betweens, a melody of life. Beneath the chorus, too close to her, Faye heard Joe’s breath as well.
“He blames himself, you know,” Joe said, and he needed no other words.
“Yes,” Faye replied. How could she not know that?
And then the door behind them opened, and her son—their son—stood there.
It was one of those rare moments frozen by time and space and emotions not yet ready to be felt, a tableau of life on hold while thoughts made themselves ready to be thought, while voices waited to know what words to speak.
“Mom?” Greg said at last, and Faye felt instantly ashamed that she had not gone first.
She moved toward him.
He set two grocery bags on the Spanish tile in the foyer.
She stopped about a yard in front of him. Was he taller than before? No, he was not taller, but he was fuller, “filled out” her mother might have said, if she had known him, if she’d not died three months before Greg had been born. Died because her daughter married a rogue of an Irishman, Faye had often mused with great mother-daughter guilt.
Stepping closer, Faye lifted a hand and touched the high cheekbone of his face. She looked into his aqua eyes that were lidded with dark lashes. Her handsome son still resembled her sister, Claire.
“Greg,” she whispered, as the music of the coyotes resonated in the background. “Can you forgive me?”
He stood there for a moment, his eyes scanning her face, their color turning bright, brighter, from the pools of water rising in them.
And then he touched her shoulders and Faye began to cry, and she was overcome with weakness and the need to just be in the comfort of her only living child.