CHAPTER TEN

JENN

April 2 11½ Months before Drowning

I cleaned up the mess left over from story time—scissors, paste, and paper scraps left over from the craft—then collapsed in my chair at the admin station. Stacie had taken the day off to care for a son who got his wisdom teeth out, so I filled in for her. Pregnancy kept me constantly exhausted. I picked up my phone and texted Becca.

Someone gave the story time toddlers coffee this morning, I’m sure of it.

Becca texted back, along with a hilarious GIF of a woman with burned hair sticking up in all directions. I thought you loved kids. . .

I laughed and replied. Turns out that when you’re exhausted and not sleeping anyway, little kids sense you’re vulnerable. Like a lion smelling a wounded gazelle.

I didn’t elaborate on why I wasn’t sleeping well. Either I lay awake, or I slept fitfully and woke from nightmares. When the reason you can’t sleep is that you’re afraid your husband’s lying to you, and you’re exhausted from a pregnancy he doesn’t want, even a pretty great job can be miserable.

Hang in there! Becca wrote. I’ll bring you a treat tonight. You’ve earned it.

You’re the best. I’ll go back to appreciating my awesome job now.

Most days, I thought that being a librarian was the best job in the world. It didn’t have long, stressful hours or tense meetings. No project managers breathing down my neck. Always something new to do. One of the bigger stresses, if you could call it that, was getting behind on cataloging new shipments of much-anticipated books. Readers got impatient to get their hands on new releases.

Even with toddlers that seemed jacked up on caffeine, I loved my job. I was surrounded by books all day. I got to recommend titles to people, and sometimes those authors became new favorites. I helped people with research, watching them find nuggets of information they were searching for. I helped patrons register to vote, find literacy classes, write resumes, and more.

After the story-time crowd left, the library grew strangely quiet. The place usually had a bit of a buzz from soft noises: whispers, footsteps on carpet, page turns, clicking keyboards. Occasional louder sounds punctuated the quiet: a book dropping to the floor, a kid trying to show a parent something, followed by the parent shushing said child, an older gentleman with hearing loss asking the same question four times of the ever-patient Kathy.

At that moment, the library felt downright tomb-like, empty yet filled with something intangible. Throughout the morning, my attention left the rows of books and compulsively returned, again and again, to the two rows of computers on one side of the central desk.

I had to do some research, and not the kind I found on any of our shelves. I needed to go online. Not from home. I couldn’t risk leaving a digital footprint or Rick would fly off the handle. Having my journal on my laptop was enough to freak me out, even though it had a fingerprint reader and I changed the password regularly. I’d started keeping my laptop under a floor mat in my car so he wouldn’t come across it. Glance in the car window, and you couldn’t even tell it was there. If we ever went somewhere together, it was in his Lexus. He’d never step foot into my oh-so-practical Prius.

The library’s public computers were safe for my purposes; any digital trace couldn’t be linked to me directly. I eyed that bank of computers for hours, debating whether to use one, if I could discreetly do my digging on one of the main library computers in the public area instead of at an admin one at the central desk where we did most of our work. Kathy and Tim, who worked the same shift I did that day, would notice if I suddenly started Googling stuff on the public computers. They’d also notice if I wasn’t doing actual work in the admin area, and I couldn’t risk having any connection between myself and my searches.

I wanted to tell Becca, but I couldn’t get myself to until I knew more. And hopefully, I could get myself to eat crow sooner than later, admitting to her that she’d been right about Rick and our super-fast courtship. I was loath to admit that; she might pity me, see me differently, when she knew the truth.

I opted to use my lunch hour to slip over to the public computers. Kathy and Tim thought I was going out to eat, and I didn’t correct the assumption. I sat at the station farthest from the central desk, and I put on the black cardigan I had in my bag. I tended to get cold from the air conditioning, so I often brought layers with me, but I hadn’t put the sweater on yet today. I waited until I was at the computer station in the hopes that if Kathy or Tim glanced my way, the black sweater would keep their eyes moving past me and they wouldn’t realize it was me, not seeing my pale-blue top.

The first thing I did was a search for Wagner High in Del Marita, California, a tiny suburb of L.A. where Rick said he grew up. I’d never heard of it, but California was huge, with hundreds of tiny neighborhoods, each with a Spanish-sounding name, so my not recognizing it didn’t mean much. As I pressed enter, I wondered if the high school or the town even existed. Turned out, both did. I let out a sigh of relief, but my hands were trembling after that one search, and I had a long way to go.

I searched for Wagner High School alumni and got several hits—Facebook reunion groups, several individuals’ business profiles, bios on various websites. Nothing that stood out at first glance, but I combed through dozens of hits, hoping to find something about Rick.

Any time I found a list of alumni from the year he said he’d graduated—three years ahead of me—I searched for a Rick Banks. Thinking of a boy I’d known in foster care who went by his middle name, I checked for other variations using Rick’s middle name, Christopher. I tried every version I could think of, including Christopher Banks, R. Christopher Banks, and on and on.

Nothing.

I broadened the date range. No dice.

Maybe he didn’t graduate and wasn’t considered alumni. I searched deeper, and by some miracle, found an archive of Wagner High yearbooks going back twenty years. I looked for him in every grade of every year he would have been in high school and five years on either side.

Never found him. Not in a student picture, not in any activities or clubs, not even in the index of not-pictured students. I was quite sure that even with dated hair, braces, and acne, I’d recognize Rick. He wasn’t there.

My phone’s alarm went off, telling me that lunch hour was over. While I didn’t want to get back to work, I also didn’t know what to look for next or how to feel about what I’d learned—that my husband had lied to me about something else.

What was I going to do about it?

Did I dare confront Rick over his lies about high school? After he denied knowing anything about surfing or Just one more, I didn’t know what was safe to bring up. He was wrong about this too, whether he was intentionally lying or not. Maybe he hadn’t been a surfer at all and made up that story. Or maybe he was concocting a new lie to deny his past. In a weird way, I hoped he’d forgotten—that maybe he’d had a concussion that wiped out a few years of his memory. Something besides outright lies to explain everything.

For a brief moment, I wondered if I’d gotten the name of the high school wrong, but no. I distinctly remembered because when he first mentioned it and I found out the school was near the coast in southern California, I shuddered, wondering if it had been named after Robert Wagner, celebrity actor and possible murderer. A school near Hollywood might very well pick a celebrity as a namesake.

“How did the school get its name?” I’d asked Rick. “Tell me it’s not for the TV star.”

Rick had said nothing, just laughed, which gave me pause.

I insisted on an answer. “Are you telling me that your high school honors the guy who probably killed Natalie Wood?”

I knew her best from West Side Story and had been disturbed as a kid when I learned how she’d died mysteriously. Back then, I was morbidly fascinated and horrified by the story. Then, a few years ago, the case had been reopened after decades as a possible murder investigation. Whether a conviction could be secured so many years later without new evidence was anyone’s guess. Regardless, I’d never been able to stomach the sight of the eighties heartthrob Robert Wagner.

“Tell me the school’s Wagner was a war hero, a scientist, or, heck, a different non-homicidal star.”

Once again, Rick laughed, as if my reaction was a severe overreaction. He waved his hand as if brushing off a nonexistent fly. “The school was built before all that. I think it was named after some guy who donated the land—the farmer who owned the orange grove that used to be there.”

Sitting in the library, staring at the monitor and the spread of the Wagner High yearbook that should have contained Rick’s senior picture, I couldn’t stop thinking about that months-old conversation. As I heard Rick’s laugh in my head now, it sounded amused, with a dangerous edge to it. But maybe I was remembering it wrong and reading too much into it. Even so, the basic substance of the conversation was seared into my brain. No way did I make up the name of his high school.

“Hey,” a voice whispered over my shoulder.

I yelped—quietly in any other setting, like a foghorn in a library—and whirled around, my heart nearly jumping out of my chest. Tim looked back as if he thought I’d lost a few marbles. So help me, if one more man suggested I was losing my mind . . .

I tilted the monitor so Tim wouldn’t have a good view of it. Then I realized that might make me look guilty as if I were watching porn or something on the library computer.

“Hey,” I said back, trying to sound airy. Good thing I had to whisper; I couldn’t have used my vocal cords if I’d wanted to. In a series of quick motions, I swiveled frontward, exited the browser, and stood, slipping the chair back into place. Only then did I look up at Tim. He was a little taller than I was but slight; he probably weighed less than I did. The guy would have had a hard time killing a spider. I had no reason to be afraid of him. “What’s up?”

The questioning look left his face, and he didn’t so much as glance at the computer. “Do you know where the new James Patterson books are? I can’t find them in the back room.”

“I’m still cataloging them,” I said, glad he was after something utterly mundane. A glance at my watch made me feel guilty for having spent time past my lunch hour on the computer instead of getting the Patterson books ready to be checked out. “They’re under the desk.” I led the way to the admin area.

Generally, when cataloging new books, I kept them on a cart next to me. But Patterson titles tended to walk out of the library if they weren’t attended, so I’d slipped them under the desk for my lunch break, where they’d be less visible. They were all Tim had wanted. When we got to the desk, an eager fan awaited us, and I informed him that the books would be ready to be checked out tomorrow, but that they already had a pretty long waiting list. He informed me that he was number one on the list, then left, half happy and half disappointed.

I spent the rest of my workday in a fuzz, trying to process what I’d learned—rather, hadn’t learned—and comparing that information to what I did know about Rick.

Turns out, I didn’t know as much about him as I had believed. He had no yearbooks at home. No memorabilia from childhood. No friends from childhood or teenage years that he kept in touch with. Only friends from college onward. Not many of those, and he was rarely in contact with them.

Did I know for sure that he had no family? Or did I just swallow that information, hook, line and sinker, so happy to find a fellow orphan looking for a family that I ignored the red flags waving all around me?

After my shift ended at five, I slipped over to another public computer and did one more search; I wanted to request a copy of my husband’s birth certificate. The website asked questions that only someone close, like a spouse, was likely to know—past addresses and the like. The instructions looked pretty straightforward. I figured I’d fill out the form on my laptop later, maybe at Becca’s house. I’d for sure have the new birth certificate mailed to her house. Most days, I got home before Rick, but I wasn’t about to chance him getting to the mailbox first and finding that envelope inside.

I decided that the birth certificate was how I’d tell Becca about all of this madness. Our texting conversations this week had been light and funny, filled with silly Friends GIFs and other things. I hadn’t told her about Rick’s reaction to the tattoo or the baby. Now I was too scared not to bring up Rick’s past and the blanks I was starting to find in it.

Becca had been right all along. Despite her warnings when I rushed into marriage, she still loved me and swore she’d be in my corner no matter what. She had noticed little things here and there that bothered her, things that didn’t seem to ring true or line up. Things I didn’t want but agreed to because how could I say no to a trip to Manhattan when the one he planned with Chloe never happened?

Yes, marriage to Rick turned out to be far harder than I’d expected, and his temper, among other things, was exactly what Becca had feared.

I’d justified my silence about the topic of Rick not only because he’d get upset if I talked about us—plus, all of the advice books and Dr. Phil said the same thing—but also because complaining about my problems might hurt her: rub salt in the wounds of Becca’s own failed marriage and bitter divorce.

Oh gee, I have a husband and no financial problems. I didn’t want to be that friend.

But now . . .

Good husbands don’t lie to their wives about who they are.

While the thought of telling Becca everything was awful, the idea of going through all of this alone—especially when I didn’t have any clear idea what “all of this” was yet—was unthinkable.

An urgent need to know more came over me. Before I left the library, I pulled out my laptop and connected it to my phone’s hot spot for a secure connection. I went back to the Orange County website to request Rick’s birth certificate right away.

They had no record of his birth. As I had with the yearbooks, I tried variations of his name, expanded the search to the entire state of California. I couldn’t find anyone that matched.

Nausea twisted through my middle. I put my hand against my stomach, wondering briefly if it was morning sickness, but this was something more. It was a deep cold fear that I didn’t know my husband at all. That maybe I was about to bring a child into a very bad situation.

Oh, I was going to be sick.

So much for telling Becca when the birth certificate arrived. I packed up my laptop and headed to my car. When I had facts—indisputable facts—I’d tell her. I needed something to give me a direction, a next step, something Becca and I could do together to figure this mess out.

After getting into my car, I locked the doors, then promptly burst into tears as the meaning of what I’d not found washed over me. I felt orphaned again, alone. I didn’t even have the tiny family with Rick that I’d believed I had. I thought of the little faces of the children at story time, and my arms ached from the pain of wanting to hold a child of my own.

I pressed a palm to my belly, which was growing, but not much yet. I needed something else in my life, now. The husband I trusted had been yanked away from me.

As I drove toward home, I tried to come up with a way to fill the strange, painful void in my chest that would bridge me to the day when I had my baby to hold.

On the freeway, I passed a billboard for a new pet store. That was the answer. I could have a pet to care for. Something small to care for. No animal would satisfy my maternal yearnings—only a baby would do that—but caring for a living creature might take the edge off the pain. A living presence that relied on me, that I could love, might help me get through the rest of this pregnancy.

Rick had refused to have any kind of pet, saying he was allergic to all animal dander. Was he, though? If I brought home a little furball, would he break out into hives and go into anaphylaxis? I’d never doubted it before, but now, nothing was a given.

I got off the freeway and headed for Walmart to grab a few groceries. As I parked, I realized that the store carried other things too. I could go home with a pet fish.

Fish didn’t have dander. I could take care of one entirely by myself, and inexpensively. No shots or getting a fish fixed or trained. No daily walks needed. No time or money needed from Rick. No messes on the carpet. No reason to object.

I pushed my cart through the store, on a mission. I’d get the smallest aquarium and put it on my dresser so it wasn’t in Rick’s space. I’d clean it out more often than recommended to be absolutely sure there weren’t any smells he could complain about.

The whole thing felt like a sneaky plan, but about something so minor as to be laughable.

So why did I feel triumphant about it?