Blood Red (25 page)

“D
ammit.” Rowan disconnects the call without leaving yet another message for Rick.

She probably shouldn't be surprised that he hasn't picked up his cell phone, yet somehow she expected him to.

Aware that he'll probably delete her voice mail messages without even listening, she decides to send him a one-­word text message. Maybe he won't reply, but at least he won't be able to miss it.

Coward.

It feels good typing it, and even better after she sends it zooming through cyberspace.

Her phone vibrates a moment later with an incoming text, but it isn't from him.

Not now
, her sister Noreen has written in response to the frantic
Can you talk?
text Rowan sent her a few minutes ago.

Just leaving court. Will call you in 10
, her sister adds.

Cell phone clutched in her hand, Rowan paces back across the kitchen to the open package on the counter.

It's a snow globe. That's what he sent her today.

Not the store-­bought kind like the one her kids bought her, with the built-­in music box that plays “Winter Wonderland.”

This one, which came wrapped in layers of yellowed fourteen-year-­old newspaper dated November thirtieth, is crudely homemade from a glass jar that sits upside down. A pair of tiny figurines are glued upright to the inside of the lid, submerged in water and glittery fake snow.

She immediately recognized them as Polly Pocket dolls.

Katie had a whole collection when she was little, and Rowan spent hours crawling around playing with her. Each doll was about the size of her pinky finger and came with a name and personality.

The two dolls in the snow globe are glued together in a ghoulishly sodden and stiff embrace, faces locked in a plastic kiss, surrounded by swirling snow when you shake the jar.

The female has long red hair; the male is blond.

Rowan doesn't remember the name of the red-­haired girl doll, but there were only a few boy Polly Pockets, and Katie owned this one. Rowan clearly recalls that her daughter got him for Christmas one year from Noreen and Kevin, along with a bunch of other Polly Pockets. By that time they'd been living in Mundy's Landing for a few years and neither Katie nor Noreen grasped the name's significance. But it didn't escape Rowan then and it certainly doesn't escape her now.

The doll's name is Rick.

M
ick was as pleasantly surprised not to find his mother waiting at the bus stop today as he was yesterday when he beat her to the house—­even on foot—­after dropping the gift at Brianna's house.

Mom had no idea that he hadn't taken the late bus home after practice yesterday, but he fully expected her to be there to meet him on this sunny afternoon, maybe with Doofus on a leash and definitely with a million questions.

Maybe she's already figured out that he'd lied about having to go to school early this morning to take a test. But that's the least of his worries right now. So is the fact that he seems to have misplaced his good down jacket.

He can't believe Brianna was out sick today, of all days. He kept thinking she must have shown up, because he heard her name among those on the daily list of students called down to the office between periods. But at the end of the day, there was still no sign of her.

Throughout basketball practice, he kept thinking about the gift box he'd stashed behind the bags of prunes. As soon as the coach blew the whistle, he took the world's fastest shower and then raced from the locker room to the cafeteria. The doors were locked, and the room beyond the windows was dark. He had no choice but to leave the gift there until tomorrow and hope the rest of the treasure hunt clues remain intact overnight.

The minivan is in the driveway at home, and he braces himself for the inevitable barrage as he steps into the mudroom. But instead of questions, he hears his mother let out a high-­pitched cry.

“Mom?”

“Mick! You scared me,” she calls from the kitchen. “I didn't realize it was so late already.”

By the time he's taken off his sneakers and the lightweight jacket she's sure to point out isn't nearly warm enough for this weather—­“and where is your good down coat that cost me a fortune?”—­she's disappeared. Doofus is there, sniffing his empty water bowl and food dish.

Mick hears Mom's swift footsteps retreating up the stairs, and her voice calling, “There's leftover meatloaf in the fridge. I'll be down in a few minutes.”

“What's the matter, boy? Did she forget to feed you?” Mick asks the dog, who responds with a forlorn gaze.

Mick pours food and water into Doofus's bowls, then puts a plate into the microwave for himself. As it heats, he notices that the kitchen is even messier than usual. There are dishes in the sink and a cutting board covered in vegetable scraps alongside a chef's knife and unopened mail on the counter. Nothing interesting. Mostly catalogs and a stack of Christmas cards from ­people he either doesn't know or doesn't care about.

He thinks about last week, when Mom got that crazy package of burnt cookies. Caught up in Brianna drama, he never did remember to ask her again about it.

She shows up in the kitchen as he's eating his ketchup-­smothered meatloaf and browsing the ski jackets in the catalog, wondering if he should ask for a new one for Christmas in case the old one is permanently lost. He expects her to have changed into comfortable clothes, but she's still wearing a skirt, sweater, boots . . . and her wool coat?

“Are you going someplace?” he asks her.

“What? No.” She looks down and quickly strips off the coat. “I got distracted when I came in, same as always in this crazy house.”

Mick digests that. Some days are definitely hectic around here. But as far as he can tell, this isn't one of them.

“How was school?” she asks, draping the coat over a breakfast bar stool.

“Good.”

“Good.” She goes to the fridge, takes out a bottle of water, and stands silently drinking it, staring off into space.

He keeps his head bent toward the catalog but watches her, wondering if she's okay. She looks pale.

“Mom? Are you . . .”

“Hmm?” Snapping out of it, she looks at him, and he decides not to ask if she's okay. He's not so sure he wants to hear the answer. Instead, he changes his query to the first inane question that comes to mind.

“Are you . . . going to drive me to work?”

“Of course. How much homework do you have tonight?”

“Not a lot.”

“As soon as you're finished eating, go start it. Okay?”

“Okay.” He can't believe she didn't ask about the test he said he had to take this morning. Maybe Dad didn't mention it to her, and maybe she didn't notice he'd left early.

That's hard to imagine, though. When it comes to Mick and his brother and sister, Mom is so good at interrogation techniques that Dad teases her she should be a detective.

Mick finishes the meatloaf quickly, loads the plate into the dishwasher, and retrieves his backpack from the mud room. When he heads upstairs to do his homework, his mother still stands sipping water, absently looking out the window above the sink.

A half hour later, when he comes back down, she's in her study with the door closed. He knocks and then opens it a crack.

“Mom? I have to go to work.”

“Okay, I'm coming.”

He hears her say, “I have to go. I'll call you back later,” and realizes she's on the phone.

“Who was that?” he asks as she follows him to the kitchen.

“Aunt Noreen.”

“What did she want?”

“Nothing. You know, we were just . . . catching up.”

“We're not going out there for Christmas, are we?”

“No!” she says so quickly that Mick realizes she's no more eager to do that than he is. The funny thing about Mom is that she's always urging him and Katie and Braden to stay close to each other, but she barely talks to her own sister and brothers. Mick's uncles live far away and their kids are so much older that Mick's cousin Andrew is getting married next summer. Aunt Noreen is within a few hours' drive, but she and Mom are so different. Just like Mick and his siblings. Katie and Braden are pretty close to perfect, while he's . . .

Just
not
.

“Have you seen my keys?” Mom asks, rummaging around the kitchen.

“No.”

She finally finds them in the pocket of the coat she'd draped over the stool earlier, and they leave for Marrana's.

Ordinarily, Mick looks forward to working, but not tonight. He knows Brianna won't be there and that Zach will. They'd passed each other a few times in the hall at school today, and Zach barely said hi.

Terrific. He probably screwed up a friendship he'd really come to value.

“What's going on?”

Mom's voice startles him, and he looks over to see that they're stopped at a light and she's watching him.

“What do you mean?” he asks.

“Something's bothering you. I'm going to guess it's a girl,” says Mom the Psychic.

“Well, you're wrong.” The lie pops out easily, but it doesn't sound very convincing.

“What is it, then? You don't have to tell me, but I know something's bothering you and I feel like I've kind of dropped the ball on this mom thing lately.”

Caught off guard by that candid admission, he says, “What do you mean?”

“I've been so busy with . . . work. I don't think I've given you the attention you deserve.”

“Mom, I'm good. With attention, I mean. And everything else.”

“I was thinking maybe I can get you an appointment with a therapist, if you wanted someone to talk to about—­”

“No! No way. No. I don't need a therapist. I'm fine.”

The light changes and she starts driving again, looking at the road instead of him. “So your heart isn't broken?”

“No. I just . . . I had a stupid fight with a friend of mine.”

“Who?”

“You don't know him.” Another lie. She does know Zach, along with every other kid in Mundy's Landing.

“So what happened, Mick?”

“It's my fault. I did something stupid. Nothing horrible, you know, just . . . something I wouldn't have done if I'd stopped to think.”

“Tell him that.”

“I did, and I apologized but I don't think that matters.”

“It happens to the best of us. You did the right thing when you apologized. All you can do is be accountable and hope he'll forgive you. If it wasn't horrible, he probably will. And if it was . . .” She shakes her head, not finishing the sentence.

But Mick does, in his head:
. . . then you probably don't deserve to be forgiven.

“W
hat was that about?” Kevin asks when Noreen walks back into the kitchen, cell phone in hand.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? Your sister starts texting you out of the blue and you drop everything to go call her at a time like this? That's not ‘nothing.' ”

No, it's isn't
nothing
. But it's not as urgent as Noreen made it out to be when she interrupted Kevin mid-­sentence to say she had to call her sister.

“I'm sorry I bothered you while you were in court,” Rowan had said.

“It's okay.” She didn't regret the lie she'd sent her sister's way. Rowan would never know the difference, and Noreen wasn't about to admit that she and her husband had just sat down to have their first real conversation in weeks, about . . . logistics.

As it turned out, listening to her sister's concerns over a snow globe when her own world is unraveling wasn't much better than listening to her husband talk about the unraveling itself.

“She just needed to talk to me about something,” she tells him now.

He's shaking his head. “I can't believe you told her.”

“Told her what?”

“About us. We said we weren't going to tell anyone before we told the kids.”

“Believe me, I haven't told anyone.”

“You must have told your sister. Why else would she be texting you now?”

“She's my
sister
.”

He does have a point, though Noreen chooses to ignore it. She and Rowan go for weeks, sometimes months, without being in touch. “Believe it or not, she has a life that doesn't hinge on the state of our marriage,” she tells Kevin. “So do I, for that matter.”

“What's going on with her, then?”

“Why would I tell you?”

“Why wouldn't you?” he lobs back as expertly as if he were in tennis whites on the court at the club instead of sitting here on the couch in four-­hundred-­dollar midlife crisis jeans.

“My sister is none of your business anymore. If you're ending this marriage, then get used to the fact that she's my family, not yours.”

He shrugs as if it's no great loss, and goes on talking about Christmas—­or the lack thereof, really—­with the kids.

Something has shifted for Noreen, who for the past few months has been wishing he'd change his mind about leaving, for the sake of the kids, finances, convenience, appearances . . .

Until now, she could think of countless reasons to stay married. But in this moment, they're outweighed by a single compelling reason to divorce.

I loathe him.

 

From the
Mundy's Landing Tribune
Archives

Police Blotter

June 12, 1979

Senior Prank

At 7:27 a.m. yesterday, police responded to a call from Mundy's Landing High School custodian Timothy Reynolds, who reported livestock loose on the premises. Upon their arrival, officers discovered several piglets running rampage through the halls and promptly evacuated the building. Animal Control Officer Lyle Timmons was summoned to the scene and apprehended three of the animals, marked with the numbers 1, 2 and 4. As arriving students and faculty congregated outside, officers carried out a lengthy and fruitless search for the missing piglet in what was presumed to be a quartet. Upon their failure to discover the animal, they determined that the incident was part of an elaborate hoax. Three local youths were being questioned pending charges of criminal mischief in the fourth degree in connection with the incident.