Ben suggests we meet in the food court at Arundel Mills, a cavernous mall south of Baltimore. At just before four on a school day, the place is a madhouse, packed with after-school shoppers, harried moms and their screaming kids, and a slew of somewhat sketchier types thanks to the casino next door. By some miracle, I find us a table at the edge of the dining area, sit down and wait.
He shows up ten minutes later, and other than a fresh T-shirt, he hasn’t changed much since the last time I saw him. His hair still hangs dirty and long over his eyes, his clothes still dwarf his childlike limbs, his face is still arranged in that carefully disinterested expression. But his eyes find mine from beneath the chunks of his bangs, and I catch their light. He’s eager to hear what I have to say.
He slides his backpack off his shoulder, drops it on the floor and sinks onto the chair across from me, pulling the buds from his ears. “Hey.”
“Hi, Ben. I didn’t know what you wanted,” I say, gesturing to the mini-mountain of Chick-fil-A bags and cups on the table between us, “so I just got one of everything.”
His gaze dips to the mounds of food, then back to me. “The cows will be thrilled.”
Okay, so maybe I went a bit overboard, as I tend to do, but this offering is fueled by more than just guilt. It’s also fueled by worry for the skin-and-bones kid who showed up at my doorstep all those weeks ago, and the fact that he travels all over Baltimore and the District unsupervised. Where is his father? I rip open a bag of sandwiches and hand one to Ben.
“Maria Duncan’s real name is Maria Elizabeth Daniels. She wasn’t from Detroit, but from Toledo, sixty miles south. She never went to college, never got a degree in business accounting, never worked for any one of those places on her résumé.”
Ben drops his sandwich back onto the table uneaten. “So, she lied?”
His prepubescent voice cracks on the last word, and I wonder if it’s hormones or emotion that send it into a tailspin. Either way, I soften everything about mine when I answer.
“She lied.”
“About everything?”
I nod. “Pretty much.”
“But that’s…that’s insane. The press dug up everything on my mom. Everything. Even shit that shouldn’t have mattered, like bounced checks and speeding tickets. How could they have missed such humongous things about Maria?”
“Same way I did. Because we were so focused on exposing your mother that we didn’t take a closer look at the victim.”
“But if Maria’s a liar, then she’s also not the victim. My mom was.”
By making that connection, Ben is grasping a little at straws, and understandably so. No one wants to believe their mother is capable of cheating on their father, of the dishonesty and pretense and hypocrisy of publicly condemning the very thing she is trying to suppress in herself. But Maria’s lies don’t erase Chelsea’s guilt, and Maria was a victim long before Chelsea came along, just not in the way Ben thinks.
“When Maria was eight, she was abducted from her bedroom in the middle of the night. Her captor broke a window, plucked her out of her bed and stole her from her own house. Her parents were fairly prominent, and they were in the middle of a very loud, very public divorce. But because one of Maria’s first-grade teachers had reported bruises on Maria’s skin a few years prior, the police went after her parents. Her father, specifically. They questioned him for days, while meanwhile across town, a janitor from her school had Maria locked in his basement. Think about the worst thing he could have wanted her for, and that was his reason.”
Across from me, Ben swallows, but he doesn’t speak.
“The police found her three days later, naked and filthy and abused in every possible way, thanks to a tip from a neighbor. He saw her through a basement window. This was 1996, the year Amber Hagerman’s murder prompted the Amber Alert system, but too late to help Maria. But that neighbor recognized Maria that day because of the media, and the way they plastered her face on every newspaper and television set across America.”
Ben is silent for a long moment, and then he looks away. I give him plenty of time, watching his gaze roll over an elderly couple in matching green tracksuits sharing a plate of fries, three toddlers wrestling in the aisle, the throngs of people and shopping bags and messy tables piled with fast-food wrappers. He takes several deep breaths, as if collecting himself or his thoughts, deciding what to say, and with each one, his expression smooths out to carefully blank. It’s a practiced move, and I’m starting to think the kid’s way tougher than I’ve given him credit for.
Finally, his gaze hitches back to mine. “So, okay…if her parents were prominent, they must have had some money.”
“They went bankrupt around the time of the divorce. There were whispers that maybe it was the reason for the divorce. Either way, Maria needs the money. As far as I can tell, she’s not working, and she’s got a handicapped brother to support.” He shrugs, the gesture a silent so what, and I plant both palms on the table and lean in. “Look, I’m not in any way excusing her behavior. I’m only trying to explain why I think there’s more to her story than we originally thought.”
Ben falls silent. Still. I don’t want him to get his hopes up for news I can’t give him. This time around, I’m not making any assumptions, not until I know all—and by all, I mean every single goddamn one—of the facts.
“Look, Ben. I have someone looking into Maria’s finances, but I just want you to be prepared for the possibility I might find nothing.”
“You won’t.”
“I might. If Maria’s smart, which she clearly is, she’s got the money well hidden and will keep it black, which means we won’t be able to trace it.”
“Do you think my mom was paying her, too?”
I start to remind him his mother was far from wealthy, but his voice sounds so hopeful, so desperate to believe Maria took his mother for a ride, that I quickly stem my answer.
“Maybe…” I lift both palms from the table and point them to the sky. Even if I do find evidence of blackmail, it won’t release his mother from wrongdoing. Chelsea was still a hypocrite and an adulterer, just perhaps a deceived one. “Like I said, I’ve got somebody looking into it.”
“So, basically, you brought me all the way down here to tell me you’re still working on it.”
“No, I brought you all the way down here to tell you I’m not making the same mistake this time. Maria Duncan-slash-Daniels will not get past me again. I don’t have all the facts on her yet, but I will.”
“And when you do?”
This time I can give him the answer I know he wants to hear. “You’ll be the first to know.”
* * *
Gabe calls at exactly ten-thirty, as he’s been doing for the past four nights, only this time, he doesn’t start the conversation by asking about Graciela.
“Hey,” he says, then nothing more.
Weird how you can cram so much into one syllable, how you can fill up three little consonants and vowels until they’re boiling over in emotion. In that one tiny word, I hear despair and frustration and misery and desperation and loneliness and sorrow. Above all, I hear sorrow.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Everything.” He sounds tired, and his words are slow and slushy around the edges, as if maybe he’s been drinking. He sucks in a long breath that catches on the end. “It’s Zach’s birthday.”
I freeze in the middle of my living room, my heart pinching in sympathy. “Oh, Gabe…”
“We went to Nick’s. Mom insisted, even though he told us not to come.” I hear him take another deep breath, this time through his nostrils. “It wasn’t pleasant for any of us, and not just because we were missing Zach. Nick is…not well.” There’s another long pause, another hitching breath. “Watching Zach die has broken him in a way I don’t know how to fix.”
Gabe sounds so sad and confused and lost, and my heart heaves for him, just rises up in my chest and rolls over. I want to reach through the phone and wrap myself around him in a tight hug, hold on until this awful day has passed and it’s tomorrow. From everything I’ve learned about Nick, Gabe didn’t just lose one brother that day on the battlefield; he lost them both.
I tell him the only thing I can think of: “I’m so, so sorry.”
“Yeah,” he whispers. “Me, too.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“You can talk to me. I don’t care about what. Anything. Just…talk.”
So that’s exactly what I do. I sink onto my couch and steer the conversation far, far away from war and death and dying. I point it instead to a long, drawn-out tale of the summer Mandy and I spent waiting tables in Tahoe, drinking and partying and kissing far too many boys and maybe once a girl, and how our little adventure solidified Mandy’s position as not just my best friend, but my sister. I tell him about Rose, how I had no idea my heart could hold so much love for one little person until she came along, and how flattered I was she wants me, and only me, to take her trick-or-treating this Halloween. I tell him about the book I’m reading and the cooking lessons I’m giving my mother for Christmas and the race my rowing team won last month. I talk about everything and nothing.
After forever, my words trail off, and the waiting stillness on the other end of the line makes me think Gabe must have fallen asleep.
And then his deep and rumbly voice comes down the line. “So. To recap, you kissed a girl?”
“I just talked for forty-five minutes straight, and that’s the part you picked up on?”
“Uh, yeah. Was it Mandy?”
I can still hear the heaviness pushing at the edges of his tone, but something lighter has blown in, something that makes him sound much more like Gabe again, the one I met those first two times at the hardware store. It pushes a smile into my answer.
“No, it wasn’t Mandy. I don’t even remember her name. She was just some girl I met at a bar.”
“Was she hot?”
“Yes. She was hot, I was drunk, we were both in college. It was an experimental summer for me.”
“I’ll say. Was there tongue? Any skin-on-skin action?”
I can’t stop the giggle that sneaks up my throat. “Gabe. Can we please move on?”
“One more question.” He pauses, and his voice drops an entire octave. “What are you wearing?”
My giggle turns into a full-blown laugh, and Gabe joins me. I know he’s only joking. I know his questions and his flirting are little more than a distraction tactic—albeit a fairly effective one—to lighten up the weight of the day, but I can’t help the way his interest makes my skin tingle. The way Gabe makes my skin tingle.
“Are you going to be okay?” I ask.
“I think so. Thanks for talking me off the ledge.”
“Anytime.” I check my watch, see it’s closing in on midnight. Gabe and I have been on the phone for well over an hour. “Only twenty more minutes and we’ll have talked into tomorrow.”
My unspoken offer hangs in the air for only a second or two before Gabe snaps it up. “You forgot to tell me how the bathroom is coming along.”
I flick off the table lamp behind my head, pull an afghan over my body and fill him in on the bathroom, as well as my ideas for the powder room down the hall. Twenty minutes stretch into twenty more, and those twenty into another hour. We talk about TV shows and restaurants, about vacations and books and movies. It’s the kind of conversation that says nothing except neither of us wants to get off the phone. Finally, at some time past one, our words fade into whispers and then into silence.
“Abigail?” he says, his voice just another shadow in the room. It pulls me back right as I was drifting off.
“Yes?” I whisper, but I’m already smiling.
He’s quiet for a moment, then, “Talk to you tomorrow.”
“Talk to you tomorrow.”
We hang up, and I fall asleep right there on the couch, my phone clutched close to my heart.