Even though her car was there, the house felt empty, the doorbell echoing. As I bent to lean the envelope against the wall, I glanced in the side-panel window and nearly jumped out of my skin to see her standing in the darkened foyer. I held up the envelope, smiling out of reflex, but she turned on her heel and disappeared into the kitchen. My face felt as if it were on fire.
I’d just stepped off the porch into a drizzle so fine it was more like mist, when I heard the door open behind me. “Oh my God, thank you,” I said as I spun around. “I know I’m the last—”
“What are you doing here?” She pushed open the storm door and glanced at the envelope propped against the wall. “Whatever this is, I don’t want it.” She nudged it with her toe.
“Please, Annabelle. Just glance at it. You don’t have to talk to me. I’m not—I waited to come here until the kids were at school. I’m not trying to upset you.”
She shook her head in disbelief. “You really are something, you know that? Showing up here, peering in my windows, smiling like…what? You thought I’d be glad to see you?”
“No. That’s not…” I swallowed. “I thought these articles—” I nodded toward the envelope. “I hoped they might help explain. I made a mess of things yesterday.”
“Yesterday?” She fake-laughed. “You think I’m upset about yesterday? Yesterday is the only day you’ve been honest since you ingratiated yourself into our lives.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Please. You are not going to talk to me about fair, are you? After keeping from me the information you did? And not just for a year, but six? It’s unforgivable.”
I stared at her incredulously. My hair was damp from the rain, and I could feel a film of it on my skin and beaded on my lashes, and it made her seem blurry and indistinct, but not so much that I couldn’t feel the fury radiating from her in waves. She also looked pale, though, and tired—she was wearing baggy sweats and a faded flannel shirt of Scott’s over her T-shirt—and I imagined it had been a rough night with Spencer. “I wanted to tell you about Lucy, but we both know that if I had before you got to know me, we never would have become friends.”
“Correct.”
“Then what would you have had me do?”
She held up a hand. “Not my problem, Claire.”
“I love those children, Annabelle.”
“No! You used those children!”
“Used? How? My God, Annabelle! Have you really never made a mistake, never once done anything you wish you could undo?” Tears spilled down my face, though I doubt she could tell. I was soaking from the drizzle, which was still so faint it looked like glitter, the air filled with millions of silver specks.
“Oh, here we go,” she sneered, a hairpin turn in her voice. “I wondered how long before you’d try to blackmail me.”
“Blackmail?” I felt like I was staring into one of those fun house mirrors, everything stretched into something else, distorted and wrong, and all I wanted was to step away and let the world contract back into what it was before. “I know you’re furious, but this is me. I would never use that against you. I’m just saying people mess up, horribly sometimes, and—”
“Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare try to imply there’s any similarity between what you did and—” She flicked her eyes at me dismissively, her jaw hard.
“I wasn’t suggesting—”
“Bullshit. That’s exactly what you were doing. Do you even know what the truth looks like, Claire?”
I glanced down, a terrible neediness welling up in me. “So the last six years count for nothing?”
“Oh please. Just go away.” She bent down, picked up the envelope, and flung it at me. “Take your crappy papers or whatever they are and get off my property. I don’t want you anywhere near me or my kids.” She stepped back, the storm door banging, though she stood there, staring at me from the other side of the glass.
I picked up the rain-soaked envelope without looking at her and walked to my car, humiliation burning in my throat. I was cold and soaked and I had trouble getting the key into the ignition, my legs shaking so uncontrollably, it took effort to steady my foot on the gas pedal.
I’d left the house without my cell, and now all I could think about was getting home and phoning Erik before she did. I needed to explain to him why I’d come here. I needed him to know how desperate I was to make this right. Although this pained me too. How could he not know this already?
There were two messages on the answering machine: Eva checking in, and Erik. The meeting with the lawyer had gone well. My taking care of the kids for the last six years pretty much nullified Annabelle’s sudden claim that I was a danger to them. Erik sounded relieved, but the message only made me feel worse. How could I keep getting everything so wrong? I shoved the manila envelope into our trash and dumped coffee grounds on top.
And then I sat on a stool, took a deep breath, and called him. His phone went straight to voicemail, which meant he was talking to someone else. “Call me,” I said, and then sat, shivering in my damp clothes, not knowing what to do.
I tried Erik’s phone again after I changed, got the voicemail again, then called Ten Chimneys. An intern answered and told me Erik was in a meeting.
I couldn’t settle. In the kitchen, I noticed the grime around the handles of the cabinets we used most and scrubbed those, and the inside of the microwave needed cleaning, and the top of the refrigerator. Something about the stillness of the air and the silvery light and waiting for whatever was going to happen next reminded me of preparing for one of the nor’easters that slammed up the coast every autumn in Rehoboth. My dad marking X’s across the windows with duct tape, making sure the flashlights had new batteries. Everything eerily quiet until it was shattered by the wail of the firehouse siren that sounded for miles.
I ended up in Spencer’s room, straightening the mess from the night before, righting his globe, arranging his books back on the shelf. His weather calendar was torn, and the glass covering the photo of him and Annabelle was splintered across one corner. I stared at that picture for a long moment, her huge smile, face pressed up to his. She was my best friend. I loved her. She’d taught me to be a mother, allowed me to be one. Guilt and grief slammed over me. Yes, I should have told her about Lucy, but how, how, could she throw away our entire friendship?
When the phone finally rang, it was our landline, and I hurried to our room to grab it.
“Do you want me to lose my children?” Erik’s voice was so filled with rage that I thought he’d meant to call Annabelle and had mistakenly phoned me instead.
“Erik?”
“What are you doing, Claire? She got an emergency PFA against you.”
“What?” I was still holding Spencer’s calendar. “What do you mean she got a PFA?”
“A protection from abuse order. You went to her house this morning? You were peering in her fucking windows? What is wrong with you?”
“I went there to give her those articles! I was leaving them on the porch. I wasn’t—God, Erik.” I sat gingerly on the edge of the bed and stared numbly at Spencer’s calendar. On this day in 1970, a lightning bolt in St. Petersburg, Florida, struck a high school football team, knocking all thirty-eight players and four coaches off their feet. “She actually said I was peering in her windows? Does that even sound like me?” I closed my eyes. “Why are you—”
“No.” His voice was steel. “Why are you? Stay out of this, Claire. I don’t know how else to say it. They’re not your kids, and all you’re doing is making this worse.”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t hang up or move or maybe even breathe. They’re not your kids. There was so much silence on the line I thought Erik had hung up. But then, “I’ll talk to you when I get home,” he said, and I heard the click of the receiver. Still I sat there, holding the phone to my ear until our bedroom filled with the echo of the dial tone.