Hadley had done a good job as first responder. By the time Russ turned his truck onto the county road, the fire and rescue guys were already in place with cones and blinkers, ready to reroute any morning traffic that might come through. The scene—an isolated stretch of road with pastures running away on either side—was ringed round with yellow tape fluttering from flex poles. Hadley’s unit blocked the road on the Cossayuharie side, its lights looking almost dim in the brilliant August sunshine.
It had been a beautiful day back in 1972, hadn’t it?
He heard the whoop-whoop-whoop of a siren as he climbed out of his truck. He waited while the squad car crested the rise, slowed, and pulled in behind his pickup. Lyle MacAuley, his deputy chief, flipped off the light bar and got out, stretching and snapping his back. “Heard we have a traffic fatality.”
God, maybe that was it. Russ had been so overwhelmed by the news, he hadn’t thought to ask Harlene to patch him through to Hadley for the details. “I hope so,” he said.
Lyle’s bushy gray eyebrows shot up.
“Not that way.” Russ headed for the yellow tape. Lyle fell in beside him. “Just … I hope it’s not a homicide.”
“Person dead in the road? Vehicular manslaughter and fleeing the scene. Probably some damn fool jogger not watching where she was going meeting up with another damn fool texting and driving. What have you got here, Knox?” Lyle held the tape up so Russ could duck through.
Hadley Knox, three years at the department, was their junior-most officer, and the only woman sworn as a peacekeeper. Despite taking the job as a last resort—she had two kids and an infirm granddad to support—Russ thought she had the potential to be an excellent cop. If he could keep her on the force. If he could make sure there would be a force for her to work at.
“White female, looks to be in her early twenties. No ID I could see in the first pass.” She stood next to a blue Tyvek tarp spread over the body. Whoever it was beneath there, she was so slight she barely lifted the plastic shroud.
“This where you found her?” Lyle looked around at the verge of the road as if expecting to see signs of the body being dragged. A scattering of gravel marked the line between asphalt and the field beyond. No blood. No crushed grass or broken wildflowers.
“Right here in the middle of the lane, Dep. I wouldn’t move her.” Hadley sounded defensive.
“We know that, Knox.” Russ pulled his purple silicone gloves from his pocket and tugged them on. Lyle did the same. “Let’s take a look.” He peeled the tarp away from the body.
Young. Pretty. Dressed up like one of the girls he saw outside St. Alban’s a week ago, guests at a wedding. He glanced at her feet. No shoes.
“Anything that might be hers along the side of the road? Purse, backpack?” Please say yes. A flip-flop. A water bottle. Anything.
“I didn’t find anything in my first sweep, Chief. Maybe the crime scene techs will get better results.”
No. They won’t.
“If she was a hit-and-run, where’s the injury?” MacAuley got down on one knee. “No scrapes. No torn clothing.” He stretched himself flat on the roadway next to the body. “Doesn’t look like there’s any blood underneath her.”
“Dr. Scheeler’s on the way,” Hadley said. The Washington County ME. “And the state crime scene lab.”
“Good job,” Russ said automatically.
MacAuley got back up onto one knee. “Damndest thing I’ve ever seen.” He glanced up at Russ. “You think she was shot at real close range with something small caliber? We might not see that with all her hair.”
“I thought maybe she was a medical,” Hadley said. “Her heart or a fatal allergy attack.”
“Hell of a place to drop dead, in the middle of McEachron Hill Road in a prom dress.” Lyle braced his knee and stood. “No witnesses, I suppose.”
Hadley shook her head. “No one else reported seeing a body. I haven’t been able to canvass the neighborhood yet.” She looked around at the pastures rolling away from the highway, their only inhabitants grazing cows and buzzing insects.
“Who called it in?” Saying anything felt like pounding through concrete. Russ tightened his fist and took a deep breath. In. Out. Control yourself, control the situation.
Hadley flipped open her notebook. “Mrs. Laura Cunningham of 23 McEachron Hill Road. She was on her way to an eight o’clock vet appointment with her dog. She thinks it was about seven forty when she saw the body.”
“Did she see anything else? Another vehicle in either direction?”
Hadley shook her head. “No. She was pretty shook up, but she insisted her car’d been the only one on the road.”
“ATV,” Lyle said.
That word sliced through the web Russ’s memories were winding around his brain. An all-terrain vehicle. Of course.
“Chief?” Hadley was looking at him strangely.
“Sorry. Sorry, Knox. This is just…” He stopped himself. He had told Harlene he had wanted the others to go in without assumptions, but he was pulling theories out of thin air. They hadn’t done a large-scale area search for evidence yet. They knew nothing about the cause of death. They had no identity on the victim, no points of contact, no possible motives. He was having a hard enough time focusing on other scenarios that might explain this girl’s death. He didn’t need the rest of his team sucked into his blind spot. “Nothing,” he said. “I’m a little sleep deprived. Let’s get—” The sound of an approaching vehicle cut Russ off.
Hadley headed toward the sound, ready to turn around whoever had gotten past the fire and rescue guys. She stopped as the medical examiner’s car came into view.
Daniel Scheeler’s day job was pathologist at the Glens Falls hospital. When the previous ME had retired, Scheeler took the very part-time position. At every call, he complained about getting dragged away from his life to some godforsaken spot at some inconvenient hour. Russ used to apologize until he realized Scheeler loved working crime scenes as much or more than any of the cops there.
Scheeler ducked under the tape, his bag beneath his arm. “Lovely day, gentlemen, Officer Knox.” He was wearing an expensive, rumpled suit and bright blue shirt, neither of which looked as if it had been fresh that morning. As he bent over and slipped paper booties over his highly shined dress shoes, Russ caught a whiff of a very feminine perfume. “What have you got for me this fine morning?”
Lyle hummed a bar of “Bow Chicka Wow Wow.”
“You tell us.” Russ gestured toward the body.
Scheeler set his bag down and gently unfolded the tarp. “When do you expect the photographer? I’m not going to get much until I can move the body.”
Russ looked to Hadley. “Harlene confirmed the staties the same time she told me she’d reached the doctor,” she said.
That could mean anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour, depending on where the CS unit had been and what they were doing. “Just your preliminary impressions, please.” Russ nodded toward his officers. “Knox, I want you to start searching the shoulder and the verge of the road over here. Lyle, you take the other side.” The deputy chief grunted in agreement. In larger shops, an officer of his rank wouldn’t be caught dead doing shoe-leather investigative work. But in the MKPD, down to six men and one woman since their youngest had been hired away by Syracuse a half year ago, everybody pitched in. Including the chief. “I’ll start looking for tracks in the field.”
“That’s a lot of space to cover thoroughly,” Lyle said. “You wanna call in everybody who’s not on patrol?”
“Not until we have a better idea of what we’re dealing with. You and Knox said it yourselves; she could be a medical.”
The sound of Lyle’s doubtful “Hmm” followed him as he crossed to the far side of the road. Russ pulled out his phone and snapped a few pictures of the edge of the highway, the field, and the horizon so he could remember where he had started. He picked a spot at a right angle from where Scheeler was kneeling next to the dead girl, and struck out from there.
They had been two weeks without rain this August, and the ground beneath his boots was unyielding. The bad news was there wouldn’t be any convenient muddy ruts leading him to a suspect’s garage. The good news was the field hadn’t been used for grazing this season—no fence running alongside the highway—so any vehicle would have left clear marks through the high, thick grass. Russ walked slowly, looking ahead and to each side for anywhere the hip-high seed heads might be broken or bent. Bindweed and running myrtle caught around his ankles while thistle and dock scratched his pant legs.
The sun was well and truly up now, beating down with the unrelenting force of late summer in Upstate New York. Russ could feel the sweat begin to trickle down his back as he waded through the field, crossing and recrossing his own path in a self-imposed grid. He flushed a few red-winged blackbirds, sent grasshoppers and field mice rustling out of his path, but he couldn’t find any trace of another person, let alone an ATV.
The rumble and growl of a heavy vehicle approaching made Russ turn toward the road. The NYSP mobile crime lab rolled into view. Only—he glanced at his watch—fifty minutes after Hadley had called it in. He’d have to mention that at the next stop on his local law enforcement goodwill tour.
He took a few more pictures with his phone so later searchers could map out past where he had already been. Then he retraced his path back to the highway.
The NYSP photographer had just finished with the body and was now headed up the road to confer with Knox. Scheeler stood to one side as the other two technicians carefully transferred the body into a transport bag. Russ could see a slice of the girl before they zipped her up; she had on the kind of makeup women used for a big night out. Over her death-pale face, it looked obscene.
“She hasn’t been here long enough for hypostasis to set in,” Scheeler said. The postmortem bruises where blood had settled in the body. “At least not where I can see any.”
“So you can’t tell if she was killed here, or elsewhere and then moved?”
“When I can get her clothes off back at the lab, I might see something.” He waved toward where the two techs were inching over the patch of asphalt where her body had lain, searching for any tiny bits of physical evidence that might help tell them all what had happened. “As you can see, there’s nothing biological here to indicate her death. No blood, no feces, no vomit, nothing.”
“Any thoughts as to cause of death?” Russ asked.
Scheeler shook his head. “Nothing readily apparent. No visible signs of strangulation, no bullet or knife wounds, no visible signs of blunt force trauma—”
“But you might find something in the lab, right?”
Scheeler looked at Russ. “Of course I’ll find something in the lab. Death doesn’t just happen without leaving evidence of its passage. Not in a healthy young adult.”
Russ hesitated. “What if I told you I had seen a case like this, a long time ago? And that no one had found a cause for the woman’s death?”
Scheeler looked skeptical. “If it was a long time ago, I would say the technology must not have existed to properly diagnose cause of death. That’s not the case today. We have MRIs and CTs and nuclear microscopes. We can decode the human genome, for God’s sake.” He stripped off his jacket, releasing another delicate tendril of ladies’ perfume. “Trust me, I’ll have a cause of death for that girl. Two weeks tops.”
“Good,” Russ said, but what he meant was Please.
Margy Van Alstyne was loading her gardening tools into her Camry when her son pulled into her dooryard. Her first thought was Two minutes too late—she had just heaved a forty-pound bag of mulch in the trunk and was feeling it in every muscle. Her second thought was What’s wrong? Russell wasn’t one to stop by in the middle of his shift. She set the pruning hook and secateurs on the backseat and walked down the dusty drive to meet him.
Russell unfolded from his police cruiser like a Macy’s balloon, going up and up and up. Fifty-three years on it still shocked her, at times, that she had made this tall, broad-shouldered man out of her own small body. He enveloped her in a hug. “Hi, Mom.”
Her arms went around to the middle of his back. “Hello yourself, sweetie. What’re you doing here? I don’t have the baby today.”
“I know.” He straightened. “Where are you off to?”
She gestured to her ratty old denim shirt and baseball hat. “Garden club. We’re working on native plant restoration at the old Haudenosaunee estate.”
“Native plants. That’s nice.” He looked toward her side yard, where a fence overgrown with flowering shrubs separated her property from a sharp downward slide into the shallow, rocky Hudson River. “I should tear out that old fence and rebuild it. It’s got to be pretty punky by now.”
“Just don’t disturb my weed. I keep it planted underneath the spirea.”
“No, I wouldn’t—” His eyes sharpened and his attention snapped back to her. “What?”
“How ’bout you tell me what you came for?”
He frowned. “You don’t really have any pot plants on the premises, do you?”
“Be pretty foolish of me, with my son the chief of police, now, wouldn’t it?”
“Mom…”
She relented. “No, I’m not growing any marijuana. No promises if the state makes it legal, though. Tell me why you’re here.”
His face settled into uneasy lines. “We’ve had a suspicious death this morning. We’re investigating.”
She raised her eyebrows. Why on earth he was sharing one of his cases with her she couldn’t imagine. Well, yes, she could. But it wasn’t for any nice reason. “Yes?”
He shifted his feet. “The body was found on McEachron Hill Road. It’s a young woman. In a party dress.”
Margy felt her mouth go dry. “It surely can’t be…” She lost her thread for a moment. “The same. It can’t be the same.”
“I know. I can’t see how. But it looks the same. I’ve got three officers canvassing the area, talking to everyone in the hopes of turning up some sort of witness. So far, nothing.”
“Do you know who she is?”
“Not yet.” He anticipated her next question. “No obvious cause of death. The medical examiner promises a preliminary report within twenty-four hours.”
She pressed her fingers to her lips in thought. “You know, some of the folks up in Cossayuharie are bound to remember what happened back then.”
“Oh, yeah. I’m sure there are plenty of geezers left in Millers Kill who still have opinions about it, too.”
She shot him a look. “Watch it, junior. You’re practically a geezer yourself these days.”
He laughed a little.
“I hate to be political—”
“Don’t lie, Mom. You love to be political.”
“Okay, yes. But if you can’t get this case solved quickly, and it starts to bring up all the old stories and gossip, it’s not going to do the ‘No’ campaign any favors.” She brushed an invisible piece of dust off his uniform shirt.
He smiled down at her. “Can I bring you in as a consultant if necessary?”
She smacked his arm lightly. “If you’ll listen to me, yes.” She sobered. “That poor girl. Somewhere, someone is missing her. Solve your case for that person, if you can, son.”
Russell kissed her on the cheek. “I’ll do my best, Mom.”
She stood in the dooryard and watched him drive away. She stood for a long time, waiting for the August heat to chase away the chill of the ice water cooling in the back of her brain. Trouble coming to town. Trouble. She shook her head to get the foolishness out of it. She was being an old lady. The last time she’d been thinking that way was early April, when her newest grandchild had been born. Of course, there were reasons she’d been worried back then. First there was the kerfuffle over her son and his bride tying the knot while already three months pregnant—not an issue for most of the world these days, but Margy’s daughter-in-law was an Episcopal priest, so that particular bit of timing had been … inconvenient. Then it fell out Clare had been drinking during those first months. Not that Margy blamed her, not at all. Clare wasn’t the first soldier whose head had gotten screwed up in Iraq, and she wouldn’t be the last. But Margy had spent way too many years dealing with alcoholics not to know about the dangers to mother and child, and she worried, for the baby and for Clare, who seemed to find it way too easy to stop drinking while pregnant. In Margy’s experience, easy sobriety was not lasting sobriety.
So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when the child decided to make its appearance two weeks early, catching them all off guard. Maybe she should have tweaked to it when she called Clare Tuesday morning to ask her where to drop off the leftovers from the previous day’s baby shower. “Bring them by the church,” Clare said. “I’ve got so much heartburn, I don’t even want to think about eating. Might as well set it out for the rest of the staff and the vestry to enjoy.”
“Oh, the heartburn can be awful. When I was expecting Russell, I went through a box of Alka-Seltzer a day by the end. How are you elsewise?”
“I’ve been having Braxton-Hicks contractions all morning.” Clare laughed. “My office is littered with scraps of paper with time and duration jotted on them.”
“Maybe you ought to go home and put your feet up, sweetie.”
“I’d love to, but Holy Week starts on Monday and the diocesan retreat is this Friday. I’m just too busy.”
“Hmm. What does Russell say?”
Clare laughed again. “About what you’d expect. Look, I’m telling everybody, and you can hold me to it, that as soon as I’ve taken the last service on Easter Sunday, I’m out of here.” Someone said something away from the phone. Clare laughed. “Lois doesn’t believe me. She’s threatening to lock the doors.”
“You listen to your secretary. She’s a smart woman. Try to have a sit-down until I get there. Don’t make me call Russell.”
When Margy walked into the offices of St. Alban’s an hour later, toting half a sheet cake and a bag of Tupperware containers full of hors d’oeuvres, someone was already trying to call Russell.
“I understand,” the church secretary was saying, her normally smooth voice fraying around the edges. “But you need to listen to me. His wife is in labor. You’ve got to get a message to him. That’s all. Just take him a god—” She bit herself off. “No. No. I’ll call back in five minutes to see.” She hung up the phone. “Oh, Mrs. Van Alstyne. Thank God. Can you drive Clare to the hospital?”
Margy dumped the containers on Lois’s desk. “I was just talking to her on the phone! What on earth happened?”
“Her water broke. She’s in her office with Deacon de Groot. She says she’ll have hours yet, so there’s no rush to get to the hospital, for heaven’s sake.” Margy could hear her daughter-in-law’s Southern cadences in Lois’s recounting. “Maybe you can talk some sense into her.”
“How often are her pains coming?”
“Every four minutes.”
“What!”
“I know, I know! I’m trying to reach Russ, but he’s testifying in court today, and I’m having a hard time persuading this idiot deputy to interrupt while they’re in session.”
“You keep trying. I’ll take care of her.” Braxton-Hicks, my aunt Fanny.
In her office, Clare was leaning over her cluttered desk, braced on her hands, panting. The Reverend Elizabeth de Groot, her deacon, was pushing against the small of Clare’s back with one hand and holding a watch with the other. “Hello, Mrs. Van Alstyne,” she said, no differently than if Margy had arrived for Bible study. Clare let out a moan. “Keep doing your breathing, Clare.”
Finally Margy’s daughter-in-law let out a long exhale and straightened up. “Forty seconds,” Elizabeth announced.
“Oh, Margy.” Clare was hot-cheeked. Her enormous black blouse, complete with white clerical collar, was creased and damp around the edges.
Margy gave her as much of a hug as she could. “You’re coming with me to the hospital, and you’re not going to argue about it.”
“But the first stage of labor takes eight to twelve hours! They said so in Lamaze class!”
Margy and Elizabeth exchanged glances. “Clare, sweetie.” Margy used the same tone of voice she would have talking to a not-very-bright child. “That’s the average. Some women take more time. Some women take less. It looks like you’re in the less camp.”
“A lot less,” Elizabeth said.
“But Russ isn’t here! I don’t have my bag packed. I haven’t got my music for labor!”
“Clare, if you don’t get going right now, this baby’s going to arrive in less time than it takes to play the doxology.”
“Elizabeth’s right, sweetie. Russell will meet us at the hospital. Let’s go. There’s a good girl.”
Clare had two more contractions before they got her in the car and another two by the time Margy had reached the Washington County ER. While an attendant was helping Clare into a wheelchair—over her protests that she didn’t need one—Margy called the church.
“I got ahold of him,” Lois said. “He’s on his way.”
“Thank heavens. What did he say?”
“That the first stage of labor lasts eight to twelve hours, so Clare shouldn’t be this far along yet.”
“Good grief. What do they teach them in those birthing classes nowadays?”
“Not statistical analysis, I’m guessing.”
Margy followed Clare up to Labor and Delivery. Her birthing room was in soothing shades of cream and gold, with a comfortable rocker and a bed that folded up like a piece of origami if you wanted to sit, or lean, or turn around while laboring. She helped Clare change into a johnny robe. No shaving, no enema—a lot different from Margy’s day. A lot better.
A nurse bustled in to take Clare’s vitals and to give her her first internal check. “Reverend Clare. We finally get to see you as a patient instead of as a chaplain.” She glanced at her tablet. “And I see you’ve reported contractions every four minutes, right?”
Instead of answering, Clare nodded and began to pant.
“And here’s one now. I’m just going to strap this monitor over you and get the baby’s pulse rate. Do you know what you’re expecting?”
Clare shook her head and pawed at Margy. Margy gave her hand to squeeze. Clare lost her blowing rhythm and began growling, “Ow, ow, ow, ow, shit, shit, shit!” At the end of the contraction she fell back against her pillow, scowling. “That really hurts!”
“What did they tell you in class?” Margy said.
“That there would be discomfort. And that I should visualize my birth canal as a tunnel of golden light.”
The nurse pushed away from the rolling stool where she’d been giving Clare an internal examination. “Well! You weren’t kidding about those contractions. You’re already eight centimeters dilated.”
“Visualize your birth canal as an express elevator,” Margy said.
Clare laughed, then grimaced. “Oh. Damn. Damn, damn, damn, damn.” She rode out the contraction, clutching Margy’s hand. When it was over, she said, “Where’s Russ? I want Russ.”
“He’ll be here any moment, sweetie. I promise.” She was worried he’d make a liar of her, though. Under normal circumstances, there’d be no problem, but this baby was in one all-fired hurry to come out and meet the world. Then she heard, far away and floating, the sound of a police siren. “Listen!” She wiped Clare’s face with a damp washcloth. “Can you hear the siren? That’ll be Russell.”
“Everything looks fine,” the nurse said. “I’m going to put in a call and make sure your doctor’s on the way. Grandma, you can just press this button if she needs anything.”
“I need my husband,” Clare snarled. “God! Damn!” She panted and blew her way through the remaining contraction before sagging back, damp and wilted. “I’m sorry,” she said in an entirely different tone. “I thought this was going to feel a lot more spiritual. Taking part in creation and all that. Can you fix it so I’m sitting up more?”
“You swear all you want, sweetie.” Margy pressed on the bed’s control. “We like to think we’re different and better’n the other animals, with our big brains and our religion. Giving birth takes us down a peg or two, that’s for sure.”
There was a thud of heavy footsteps from the hall. “Clare? Clare?” The door, closed by the nurse when she exited, burst open. Russ had taken the time to divest himself of his duty belt and gun, but otherwise he was still in uniform, his khakis slightly rumpled as always, his chief’s badge and thick-soled shoes polished to a high shine. Margy scooted out of his way as he crossed to Clare’s side. “Oh, darlin’.” He took her hand. “Are you all right? God, I’m sorry I took so long. I’m so sorry I wasn’t there for you.” He held out his other hand to Margy. “Mom, thank you. Thanks for staying with her.” He dropped a quick kiss on her hair.
“’Course I stayed with her.” She picked up her purse from the bedside table. “I’ll be in the waiting room now.”
“No,” Clare said. “Margy, please don’t leave. I want you here. Please?”
Margy glanced up at her son. “Whatever Clare wants,” he said.
“Smart boy,” Margy said. “I’ll stand on that side of her, near the machine, and you take this side.” This side was Clare’s dominant hand. Margy supposed it was a husband’s privilege to have his knuckles ground into dust during his wife’s contractions.
He looked around the room. “Do you want me to get you a chair, Mom? Some kind of stool?”
She smiled at Clare. “I don’t think this baby is going to keep me standing long enough for my feet to get tired.”
She was right. Clare labored on for less than half an hour before the doctor, who had performed another internal exam as soon as she arrived, announced it was time to push. And a good thing, too, since Clare’s obvious pain and wrenching contractions had turned Russ pale. Or maybe it was her prodigious vocabulary of obscenities, none of which she used in her day-to-day life as a priest.
“Okay, Clare,” the doctor said. “When you feel the urge, go ahead and bear down. Keep pushing for as long as you can. Dad, Grandma, you help keep her in position.”
Clare pushed with a guttural growling sound, as if a wild animal were trying to escape her body. Margy could see her stomach bunching, the powerful muscle of her uterus working to bring her child into the world. It was so amazing to see it from this angle, without the haze of drugs and pain of her own children’s birth. She glanced at her son. He was leaning over his wife, supporting her back, holding her hand with his free hand. His eyes were wide and wild, looking at Clare with such a fierce intensity Margy had to turn away again.
“I can see the head!” the doctor said. “Lots of hair. Just a few more, and your baby will be here.”
Russ pressed his lips against Clare’s sweaty temple. “You can do it, darlin’.”
Clare nodded, and pushed again, red-faced, open-mouthed, curling up over the bulk of her stomach.
“Okay, the head’s out! I want you to breathe instead of push for the next one, Clare, while I ease the shoulders out.” Clare nodded, panting. The doctor bent between Clare’s legs, then beckoned to the nurse, who grabbed a receiving blanket. “All right, Clare. This one should do it.”
Clare pushed one last time. Margy saw a long wet body slither into the doctor’s hands. “It’s a boy! And he’s a big one.” The doctor held him up, his legs kicking, his mouth working in outrage. “You want to cut the cord, Dad?”
Margy had never seen that expression on her son’s face. He nodded, never taking his eyes off the baby. “Come on over here, then. See? I’ve tied off here and here and all you have to do is snip right there.” As if the final separation from its mother was the last straw, the baby began crying angrily. “You can follow Mary over to the station while she cleans your little guy up,” the doctor told Russ. “Clare, I’m afraid you still have a little work left to do.”
Clare groaned. Margy looked at the clock. Three hours since she had arrived at St. Alban’s. She couldn’t believe it. “Ten pounds!” the nurse announced from the other side of the room. Almost the same size Russell had been at birth. “Eight on the Apgar. Here you go, Dad. You can bring him over to Mom.”
Russ turned toward them, the tightly wrapped baby cradled against his chest. He looked so utterly struck with wonder it brought tears to Margy’s eyes. She had never thought to see her son have a child of his own, but here he was, over halfway through his life, made a father.
He crossed to Clare’s side and laid the baby in her arms. “Oh, Clare.” His voice was almost broken. “We have a son.” They bent over the tiny, wrinkled face, their heads together.
“Hello, Ethan,” Clare said softly. “Hello, little boy.”
Hours later, standing outside the nursery, looking at the Perspex bassinet containing Ethan James Van Alstyne, Russell put his arm around Margy and hugged her close. “I’m glad you were there, Mom.”
“Me, too.”
“It makes me think…”
“What?”
“I wish Dad could have been here, too.”
She felt a hot sting beneath her breastbone. The night Russell had been born, his father had been at a bar getting drunk. He hadn’t seen his son until the next afternoon. She had spent a lifetime cultivating her children’s good memories and downplaying the bad, tying herself in knots to create moments with their father and shouldering the burdens on the many, many times Walter had been absent. In the end, after he’d passed, she had been oddly grateful. When trouble came to her house, she was well able to deal with it. She glanced up at her son, so grown and still so worrisome.
“Me, too, sweetie. Me, too.”