Object of Desire (42 page)

Her eyes remained fastened to mine.

“So many dreams. So many dreams for Becky—and for you, Danny! A mother has
plans
for her children. She expects to see them through the rituals. School and graduation and weddings and babies. It's not right when that doesn't happen! It's not natural! A mother has such dreams!”

“I know,” I said.

“I expected that you would get married someday, too. Don't you understand what I'm grieving, Danny? You were supposed to be my fine, upstanding son, a son who would make me proud. But now everything, everything I dreamed about…” She began to cry again, turning her face away from me.

“Mom, you can't control everything. You can't always make it be just what you want it to be. I'm not a kid anymore that you can protect from the poison ivy, or make drink extra glasses of milk to make sure everything turns out fine. Life is more complicated than that.”

She looked at me with eyes like a little girl's. It was as if all this was my responsibility to explain to her.

“I'm a simple woman, Danny,” she said, brushing aside any attempt to understand. “Brought up to believe that if you play by the rules, go to church, teach your children right from wrong, that you'll be rewarded, that it will all work out. Maybe it's all a crock. But I can't be any other way. I can't change, Danny, and I'm sorry for that.”

“Mom,” I said, my own tears falling. “We can still find a way….”

“You're right about that, Danny,” she said. “You'll be sixteen in a few months, and you'll get your driver's license. You can make it all up to me!”

I took a breath.

“You can take me where I need to go.” Her face was no more than a couple inches away from mine. It was almost like the game she used to play with us, when she'd tell us to “see the owl.”

“Yes, indeed!” Mom was saying. “We can continue to look for Becky, you and I. You can make it all up to me, Danny! All of it! I'll forgive everything if you help me find Becky!”

I sat back down on the couch, my emotions shutting down, hardening once more.

“We still have time,” Mom was muttering, more to herself than to me. “We can still find her. We can still get back to the way things were. All of us. We can all go back and do it right. We can still make our dreams come true.”

I said nothing.

And through my silence, I entered into a pact with her. A pact I knew I was not yet strong enough to break. But I would be, one day.

That night, in my bed, I thought about Chipper, about the look in his eyes when he found Troy and me. I tried to remember how I'd felt about him just twenty-four hours earlier, but I couldn't. I had loved him, I knew that much, but I could no longer recall how it had felt to love him. Part of me wanted finally to reveal that I'd seen Chipper with Becky on the day she disappeared. But even that felt pointless. I simply didn't care anymore. All I cared about was the little boy, the little son, I'd someday have. Joey, I would name him. And I would love and protect Joey with all my heart for as long as I lived.

Twenty-Five Years Later

C
ould it have been that my memory was wrong? That this wasn't the block where I had lived for the first fifteen years of my life? But, of course, it was. That was Flo Armstrong's house down the hill to my left. And across the street was the house that had been Chipper's. Even though the place had been extensively remodeled, I recognized it. For fifteen years, I'd looked out my bedroom window at that house.

But where, then, was my own?

I stood on a vast empty lot. A half acre of grass, covered with yellow leaves blown from the trees next door. Out behind me there should have been a cornfield, but instead, there was a new subdivision of houses.

“Hello,” came a voice.

I turned. A young woman stood on the sidewalk out front, dressed in a green plaid pantsuit. She waved.

“Are you interested in the property?” she asked.

“I…I used to live here.”

She approached me. “I'm Kathy Singer.” She handed me a card. “Century 21 Real Estate. The lot is for sale, if you're interested.”

“I used to live here,” I said again.

She flashed me a wide, insincere smile. “Really? When was that?”

My eyes were still flickering around the yard. “Another lifetime.”

I'm not sure what had brought me here. This hadn't been part of the plan. But as the plane had circled over Bradley Airport and I'd looked down on the long blue snake of the Connecticut River and the rolling yellow hills of the surrounding countryside, I'd known I'd had to come. After checking in at my hotel, I'd driven around the town. So many new buildings, so much steel where there used to be green. I'd driven here to my old neighborhood without even thinking about it, almost as if from habit.

I looked at the woman in front of me. “What happened to the house?”

She smiled sympathetically, more sincere this time. “Oh, it burned down about six years ago. The property was in escrow for a while, with the various heirs of Mrs. Hernandez trying to decide what to do with it.”

Hernandez. I tried to remember if that was the name of the family who had bought the house from us. I didn't think so.

“How did it burn down?”

“It was an old house. Bad electrical wiring. It hadn't been updated in over thirty years.” She sighed. “Fortunately, no one was living there at the time. Mrs. Hernandez was in a convalescent home. But she'd left many appliances plugged in.” The real estate agent made a face, lifting perfectly shaped brows over her pale blue eyes. “Let that be a lesson. Always unplug major appliances when you're not using them.”

I glanced around the yard. “But what happened to all the trees? We had lots of trees here. There were maples and a big oak and at least two elms….” My voice caught in my throat. “My sister and I built a fort in a tree that used to stand over there.” My eyes scanned the grass. There wasn't even a stump.

“Well,” said the realtor, “at first the Hernandez family was going to rebuild. So everything was razed. The house was going to be magnificent, much larger than the old one. But then the city wouldn't approve the plans, so everything was off, and they decided to sell.”

“The house burned down…,” I said, almost in awe.

“I'm sorry,” the woman said, and although she probably meant it, I had the distinct sense that she was done with me, that she thought it was time for me to leave, that, no matter my history with the place, I was still trespassing.

But I wasn't ready to leave. “I slept right
here,
” I told her, moving a few feet to my left. “Right here was my room.”

She just continued smiling.

“My sister used to paint that house up there, on the hill. You see? She'd stand right over there at her easel, and she'd paint those houses up on the hill.”

Kathy Singer extended her hand. “Well, you have my card. Perhaps you'd like to own the old family homestead again.”

I shook her hand. “Oh, no. I'd never want to own this again.”

She gave me one last small smile and headed back to her car.

After she was gone, I walked around the property some more. Down the hill, little children jumped in piles of leaves in Flo Armstrong's backyard. Except it wasn't Flo's backyard anymore. I was sure Flo was dead, like nearly everyone else from here. The smell of autumn was in the air: apples and burning leaves, a smell I'd forgotten, having lived so long among the sagebrush and date palms of California. Walking across the grass, I breathed in the crisp air, stumbling upon a concrete slab. A relic from the foundation of our house.

I headed back to my rental car. I supposed it was only right that the house should be gone. All that was left of that time were fragments as fleeting and as fragile as the yellow leaves tumbling across the lawn. I started the ignition, trying to feel something. But there was nothing. Just a powerful, overarching self-awareness, which I didn't like. Not at all.

I looked at the address on the printout in my folder. The street I was looking for hadn't existed when I'd lived here as a kid. MapQuest placed it smack in the middle of what I remembered as a tobacco field, where Dad's father had worked when he first came over from Italy. I think Nana had worked there, too, not in the field, but in the office. I think that was where she met her future husband, my grandfather. So I was heading to a place that if not for what it once was, I would never have been.

The field had been subdivided into quarter-acre lots, each with well-manicured lawns and carefully tended trees. The houses were all of the same design, either colonials with one-car garages or ranches with no garage at all. It wasn't an upscale neighborhood, but neither was it working class; the cars in the driveways were Toyotas and Hondas and the occasional VW Bug. Leaves had been raked into careful piles along the street, awaiting pickup by the city. The bare trees looked no more than five or six years old. All of the streets were named after flowers: Poinsettia Place, Azalea Avenue, Rose of Sharon Road. I was looking for 64 Carnation Court.

It turned out to be a colonial, with a redbrick front facade and cranberry-colored aluminum siding. A motorcycle rested on its kickstand in the driveway, a fact I found vaguely ironic. Inside the open garage, I spied a green SUV of some kind. On the lawn, an overturned tricycle rested among the blades of grass. At the start of the walkway, one of those little ceramic men holding a lantern waited to greet visitors. On the metal mailbox near the street, elaborate calligraphy spelled out the name Paguni.

According to the online records, Chipper worked for a contracting company, building shopping malls and office complexes. Maybe he'd even helped build the housing development he now lived in. I remembered hearing that, after high school, he had gone on to Central Connecticut State College, though whether he'd graduated I was never sure. After the incident in the men's room, I had no further contact with Chipper. Mom was always pissed that the brothers had consented to give Chipper his diploma. She didn't consider the fact that he was barred from graduating with his class as sufficient punishment, even though I knew that, for Chipper, it must have been one final humiliation heaped on a year filled with so many of them. I doubted if Chipper ever fully recovered from it all. Oh, from the looks of it, he had found a decent job and a decent house; he had a wife and a family, too, and even a motorcycle, which he probably drove on weekends very fast, breaking the speed limit, up Interstate 91 or east on I-84, the wind in his face. But I doubted he ever really got over what had happened.

I pulled up in front of the house and parked the car. I contemplated whether I should just go up and ring the doorbell. I supposed I could take out my cell phone and call him, and explain that I'd come all this way to see him, and ask him to please come out and speak to me for ten minutes. But I didn't want to ask Chipper to do me any favors. I just wanted to see him, ask him what I'd come for, and then leave.

A woman, dark and plump and about my age, eventually came out of the door and, never glancing my way, walked around the front of the house and entered the garage. In a few moments, the green SUV was backing down the driveway. I wondered why she hadn't entered the garage from inside the house. In my mind's eye, I saw construction in the family room, barring the way to the garage. Chipper was putting down a new floor or paneling the walls. He might even be building an addition onto the back.

I waited a few more moments. It was a Saturday. Clearly, there were children in the house; the tricycle told me that, and occasionally, I could hear hoots and laughter from upstairs. It was a warm day; the windows were open. How many children did Chipper have? Besides Kelly, that was.

I was just about to get out of the car and walk up to the door, scolding myself for behaving like a stalker, when Chipper sauntered out through the garage, wearing faded jeans and a gray hoodie sweatshirt. He bent down to inspect a tire on the motorcycle. I quickly got out of my car.

“That your bike?” I asked.

He stood up, looking my way. The late afternoon sun must have obscured my face, or perhaps he just didn't recognize me, because he replied cheerfully, “Sure is.”

I walked toward him. “How are you, Chipper?”

“Chipper?” He laughed. I remembered that laugh. It was the same laugh I'd heard so many nights, when we'd sit in his room, our feet touching, my heart racing. “Nobody's called me Chipper in years,” he said. “Who are—”

Then either the light shifted or my face registered for him. He fell silent.

“I just need to ask you one thing, Chipper,” I said calmly. “Then I'll be off.”

He stared at me. I could see him clearly now. He had gotten heavy—not fat, but big around the waist, with a belly and a wide, flat butt. His hair was still thick and dark, and it looked as if he had never changed his hairstyle. It was still parted on the side, with bangs feathered back. Not so different from the hair of those pretty boys I'd pasted in my scrapbook, none of whom could match, in my teenage opinion, Chipper Paguni.

“What do you want?” Chipper stood in his driveway, his back suddenly stiff, his feet planted firmly apart on the pavement. It looked as if he was protecting his house, his entire life, from me.

I kept my voice level. “Just the answer to one question. When Becky disappeared, is it possible that she may have been pregnant?”

He didn't reply.

“Might that be why she ran away?” I asked.

“Listen.” He was angry. “All that was a long time ago. I told the police and your mother everything that I knew.”

“I'm not accusing you of anything, Chipper. I just want to know if it was possible Becky was pregnant.”

He made a face. “I don't have to talk to you.”

“No, you don't, but I think you should. You owe it to me, Chipper.”

“Daddy!” a little girl's voice called from the front door. “Are you making us SpaghettiOs?”

I couldn't see her face. It was getting too dark. But I could see her pudgy little hand on the door handle.

“No, Jamie Lynn,” Chipper called over to her. “Mommy will be back in a little while. She'll make supper.”

I heard the front door click shut.

Chipper took a step closer to me. I saw his eyes, those black holes that seemed to bore deep down into his brain. “How dare you come here,” he seethed in a whisper, “and say I owe you
anything
after what happened?”

“Well, what
did
exactly happen, Chipper? Isn't it just possible that my sister came to you the day she disappeared and told you that she was pregnant?”

“No,” he said. “I didn't see her on the day she disappeared.”

“Yes, you did.” My voice was calm. “Because I saw the two of you at the pond that day. I never told anyone what I saw, because I didn't want you to be accused of anything. But maybe I
should
have told. Maybe I should have told what I had seen.”

“You don't know what you're talking about.”

“Tell me the truth, Chipper!” I was aware that I had raised my voice. In that quiet little subdivision, voices floated quickly over the manicured lawns. “I saw you and Becky that day at the pond!”

“Okay! So what! We had a swim, and that was it!”

“No, it wasn't. I'll tell you what I think happened. I think Becky took off because she was pregnant and you wouldn't support her. You were a big football star. Or you
wanted
to be, anyway. It would have ruined all your big dreams if it came out that you'd made your girlfriend pregnant. Isn't that right, Chipper?”

“No!” His black eyes blazed. “That's not what happened! I don't know where Becky went! I don't know what happened to her! Why won't you fucking believe me?”

“Daddy!” The little girl was at the front door again. “We want our SpaghettiOs now!”

“Just a
minute,
Jamie Lynn!”

“Just tell me, Chipper. Is it possible that Becky was pregnant that day?”

“I don't know if she was!”

I narrowed my eyes at him, angry that I wasn't getting the confession I'd expected. “She didn't come to you that day at the pond and tell you she was pregnant?”

“No! She did not!”

“But is it possible?
Might
she have been pregnant, and by you?”

Chipper moved in very close to me. Once, such close proximity would have thrilled me. But Chipper was no longer the young football player, with the strong, taut muscles. Instead, he was over-weight and had bad breath. Beer and Doritos. “Look,” he said forcefully. “I have a family. I have
three daughters
inside that house.”

“All right.” My voice was barely a whisper. “Just tell me if it's possible that Becky may have been pregnant, by
you,
on the day she disappeared. Tell me if that's possible, and then I'll go away.”