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I FOUND A BENCH tucked into a small, rectangular garden on my way to the hospital’s parking garage. The cell coverage was good, and privacy wasn’t an issue.
Cissie’s phone rang fifteen times before I hung up and called the shelter directly. The woman who answered double checked, but Cissie and her car were gone.
“Yes, home...Yes, her home. Where else does she have to go?”
I clenched my fist in front of my teeth and tried to think. A conversation on the Voight’s house phone might still be picked up by Ronald’s nanny cam, and showing my face anywhere near Cissie might spark another blow-up, this time directed at me. However, my daughter did live next door, and it would be natural for her and Cissie to cross paths as a matter of course.
I reached Chelsea while she was grocery shopping and outlined the problem.
“You suspected Eric!” she railed, as it became obvious I had.
“Can we please skip past that?” I begged. “Right now you need to find a safe way to tell Cissie she can trust the guy.”
She said she would get back to me, “when the deed is done.”
I waited.
One day.
Two.
I was almost ready to send my daughter next door to borrow a cup of sugar, when she reported that Cissie had come to her.
“I was reading the paper in the backyard with a glass of iced tea, and there she was with Caroline on her hip.
“’I’m so sick of being alone I could scream,’ she said. ‘You got any more of that tea?’”
“So you told her,” I remarked, cutting Chelsea short.
“Yes.”
“How did she react?”
“She changed the subject. Turns out that neither of us know how to fry chicken.”
“In other words...?”
“She couldn’t bear to talk about Eric.”
Which made sense. Breaking free from Ronald’s grasp would take much more than another man’s outstretched hand. Confidence. Courage. A physical place to go, and the means to sustain herself and her child. Cissie had taken one brave step toward escape, and Natalie, and others like Chelsea and I, would eagerly support her again.
First Cissie had to be ready.
***
HIDDEN IN SHADOW, Eric Zumstein leaned against an oak tree at the edge of his opposite neighbor's yard. Diagonally across the street, Cissie's car was once again in the Voight's driveway, blocked in by Ronald's truck.
As twilight began to fall, lights switched on and revealed activity inside. Cheslea and Bobby side by side watching television. The neighborhood spy looking into his refrigerator. And Cissie moving about in the baby’s bedroom.
From his vantage point Eric saw her reach for something in the dresser he'd helped put in place, bend down for a new diaper from the bag he knew to be on the floor next to the changing table. He could almost hear her humming as she prepared the baby for bed, a song of his imagination but no less sweet to his ears.
When she was out of sight, he shut his eyes and lowered his head. Soon speaking on the phone would no longer suffice. Cissie knew that, too, and a part of him admired her for breaking off contact. Any choice she made invited serious consequences; he knew that, but this particular decision made his own infinitely more difficult.
He raked his hand through his hair and glanced again at the window. Half a dozen late-season moths circled in the soft light.
"Poor bastards," he whispered into the night air.
***
I’LL FIND OUT if Eric will see me when we get back from our walk,” I announced to my audience of one at breakfast Monday morning. Eager as I was to explain everything I’d learned, 7 A.M. was way too early to phone an unemployed bachelor. “In person, of course,” I reaffirmed to Fideaux and myself. What I had to say was way too sensitive for the phone, including the answer I found on the Internet to the question no one had asked.
So, naturally, Fideaux rolled in something vile during our walk. Before I allowed him back in the house, I had no choice. I leashed him to the bird-feeder post near the backdoor, changed into work clothes, and hauled dog shampoo, water buckets, and towels outside.
I was rinsing my uncooperative pet and grumbling when George Donald Elliot arrived. He wore a spotless blue, buttoned-down shirt and crisply pressed, insurance-salesman slacks.
“Hello!” I said, swiping splatter off my cheeks with my t-shirt sleeve. “Didn’t hear your car pull up.”
“Or the phone either,” George remarked. “Hope you don’t mind. I thought I might catch you at home.”
Delighted to be released, Fideaux frolicked around the yard like a deranged puppy.
“I don’t mind,” I answered, “if you don’t mind me smelling like wet dog.”
“No problem,” he assured me, but I noticed he inched the folding chair I offered slightly farther away from mine.
“How is Susan holding up?”
“She’s leaving for Los Angeles Friday to stay with a friend. I think she has a couple of job interviews lined up.” His disappointment was painful to see, and I worried that he blamed me.
I mumbled a vague apology, but he waved that away.
“We stopped being close a long time ago,” he reflected. “The truth is I never knew how to relate to a daughter, to my daughter, I should say, so I gave her things. Everything but what she wanted.”
“Have you talked to her about this?”
The way he pressed his lips together told me it hadn’t much helped.
“So you bought her the ticket,” I guessed.
“That’s what she wanted.”
“Not exactly,” I disagreed. Airfare to California was not golf clubs or a tuxedo. It was white shirts. “This time you gave her something she needs.”
George cocked his head to show me a slow smile. “You’re a piece of work, Ginger Struve Barnes. You know that?”
“So I’ve heard. Now why are you really here?”
He caressed my face with his eyes. Then he told me.
My conversation with Eric could wait another half-day.