One More Day (18 page)

What had Carrie done during two years' worth of nap times in her house? She cleaned, she baked, she looked at home decorating websites. She cooked dinners and froze them in containers so John would have something to eat after he put Ben to bed on those evenings when she had book club, a tennis match, a charity event at church. She binge-watched TV, read a book, planted peonies. Nap time in her house represented the domestic life she thought she'd always wanted, but now, without a husband or a child, she felt as empty as she'd felt at college without Ethan.
What is my agenda without their agenda?

As she sat in her pajamas with her lukewarm coffee, contemplating another empty day, she understood better the words John had spat at her. She didn't recognize herself anymore either. After the grieving, after the knowing, after the defending, what is left?
Less, far less than you envision. The weight lifts off, and you miss the pressure of it, sitting on your chest.
The same way she'd felt after she got her scholarship.

Dr. Kenney had said she would know when it was time to move on—to look for a job, to have another baby. That she would feel a seismic shift. Was that what she felt when she'd been with Ethan on Thursday? A sign that it was over, that her old life was cleaved in half, with Ethan on the other side?

She woke up, and her first thought was,
Only one other living person knows
. She had thought telling John part of the story would make it less lonely on her side, but she'd been wrong. So maybe moving on meant moving past John. She had to face that possibility. Mentally, he was already there, wasn't he? He proved that by walking away last night. Proved that he could leave her, start over, if he had to. And all those times, following her, looking through her things, worried there was someone else—maybe he wanted there to be someone else.

She took off her pajamas and pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and an old green V-neck sweater. She went into the spare room, opened the closet. She slid the ceiling board away from the crawl space entry and pulled the large cloth box down. The lid was askew, and she knew she hadn't left it that way. Only a man would leave it that way—a policeman, not John. She lifted the crooked lid. The photo boards, with flannel baby fabric, moon- and star-shaped pins holding the photos chronologically.

There they all were in the hospital. There were Ben's tiny fists, his little feet, his first steps. She had taken care to include photos of everyone in their families, knowing they'd want their memories documented too. She'd searched
funeral photo boards
on Pinterest and copied ideas. She believed choosing the fabric and making all the boards would take up some of the empty days. But it had been too easy; it had taken only two days, maybe two and a half. Ben's life hadn't been long enough to fill more time.

She fingered the lists of songs she'd written out first by hand, jotting them down as she thought of them before she'd sat down at the computer and downloaded everything, created a playlist. The menu from the caterer, with all the dishes she wanted circled and the price they'd quoted, their business card stapled on the front. A DVD of a video she'd created on her MacBook, a montage of photos and videos. She pulled everything out, propped the boards up in the bedroom.
Let John think I did them last night
, she thought.
That I did it to keep myself busy while he was gone.
The church was already locked in; she and John had made that phone call together. She called the caterer and ordered the foods she'd circled. She went to the florist's website and ordered the bouquets she'd already chosen. She did what needed to be done, without apology. Just as she'd done the legwork, the research, a long time before.

As she finished, she heard something metallic downstairs.
John's keys on the countertop. Home to apologize?
She walked downstairs, but the kitchen and living room were empty. She looked out the divided window of the front door, expecting another news van. Nothing. Not a car, not a truck, not even a bicycle. She imagined the vans were parked outside the suspect's house now. Had they charged him? Had he confessed? Over the months, he'd grown blurry in her mind, this person other people who seemed to remember him more clearly talked about. A guy at the Y with a white iPhone, hanging around. Couldn't picture his face, just his long, swinging hair. Everyone had an idea of what he looked like except her. Still, whoever he was, he belonged to someone. Someone who did or didn't believe in him. Who worried about him. John had wanted to celebrate this man's terrible news. She felt a momentary sense of empathy for his family. Not him, but them. The innocents around him.

She went into the kitchen and starting cleaning up John's mess from the night before.

The brass knocker on her door rapped lightly, as if the wind had picked up and caught it. Or as if someone didn't really want to be there. She walked toward the door.

Detective Nolan stared at her through the mullions of the window. His weathered face cut into four planes—four ways of looking at her and doubting her. No Forrester with him. No lawyer with her.

“What do you want, Detective?” she called through the door.

“I want to talk,” he said evenly.

“My lawyer wouldn't think that was a very good idea.”

“Well, your lawyer's not here, Mrs. Morgan, is she? But you can bet if you call her, she'll bill you two hours for that three-minute call. You think she's on your side? The only side she's on is money's. That's what being a lawyer means.”

“I don't have anything to say to you, Detective.”

“Oh, I think you do.”

His bristly head, his shoulders beneath his coat, rougher and larger than other people's, a mastiff of a man. She was aware of the sound traveling, the thinness of glass, the modest protection of a hollow wooden door. She felt the nap of her pajamas brush against her vulnerable skin, scratching a little.

He coughed, bent over, clutched at his side as if coughing hurt. Not so tough, was he? He looked paler, grayer than the last time she'd seen him—probably because he'd been working the case. He was rumpled because he'd put in too many hours, but he still counted on his size, and the person he used to be, to intimidate. He came because he thought she was weaker than he was.
But where was his car? Where was his partner?

“I'm calling your precinct,” she said, “and telling your boss you're harassing me.”

He cleared his throat. “You do that. And then remind him that I'm here to ask you what he asked me—why the hell you planned Ben's funeral early. And also to explain why a handsome young man we interviewed has photos of you on his phone. Did you two lovers think up some kind of adoption scheme together, huh? A twisted way to get rid of your own kid?”

“What?” she asked, then regretted it. Didn't want to let him have an inch—not an increment of surprise, disgust, anything. A man like him could take the purest sentence, the most innocent response or tidbit, and ruin it.

“You heard me. Dozens of them, taken at all times of day. Some of them with you looking right into the camera. How is that possible, do you suppose? Oh, I know. You were sleeping with him. Your husband's worried about the guy who owns the dog now?” He clicked his teeth. “Way to throw him off the trail. Well played, Mrs. Morgan. Well played.”

“You need to go,” she said. She could walk away, but he could move to another window. He could circle the house. He could get to her one way or another.

“Is that what women like you do? Cheat on anyone who loves you or cares about you? Is that why your high school boyfriend killed himself? Is that why all the girls on your cheerleading squad called you—and I quote—a
stone-cold bitch
?”

“Get out of here!”

“Is this why you went all the way out to Peterson Nature Preserve? To talk to a tree like a crazy person, sob about your disgusting life, then vomit over all the terrible things you've done?”

“I wasn't talking to a—” She stopped. She remembered the dark car on the highway. Perhaps it had been parked in the lot too, behind the wide tree sheltering Ethan.

“So you're—you're following me?”

“Is that why you keep a list of everywhere you've ever volunteered your whole life, to trick yourself into believing you're a good person when you're actually a monster who would kill her own child?”

“Stop it! Stop it!”

“What, are you going to call 911? Explain that the police are already here but you want the whole squad over here, maybe? Mrs. Morgan, this looks bad. Real bad. I mean, we can explain away you nearly killing the Orkin man for doing his job, but y'know, this—this is different. And the only one who can make it better is you.” He coughed again, and when he stopped, his voice was broken, weaker. “So yeah, I'm here for a reason. Just like you're home, right now, alone, for a reason.”

A prick of heat at the base of her spine. His face was almost gray. His right hand clutched his side oddly. The coughing bent him in two. Two partners always. One backing the other up. But what had happened today? Was today the day when one of them couldn't protect the other one anymore? Friday. It was Friday.

Her nose was so close to the thin glass she was almost on the other side. The air smelled vaguely of smoke, of earth.
Tobacco, maybe? No—gunpowder
, she thought suddenly.

“Have you been shot?”

He blinked at her, and the sharp, smoky scent barreled into her nostrils.

“Oh my God,” she whispered. “You're—you're dead too.”

The weight of her words pulled her down, and she disappeared from the frame of the glass. She lay on the floor and felt her eyes flutter before they closed, as if in slow motion, as if wishing she could just take a minute to sort things out, to think, to finally, finally, at last, get some rest.

When her eyes opened again, everything was white around the edges. Under other circumstances, she might have thought she'd died too and landed in a gauzy version of heaven, but when she squinted and recognized Dr. Kenney standing over her, she knew exactly where she was and precisely how he came to be there. Regret flooded her brain. She blinked a few times, as if she could brush her memory clean, start over.

“Carrie,” Dr. Kenney said and smiled. “Thank goodness. Are you feeling better now?”

“Yes,” she said, forcing a small smile. But she did not feel better. She felt worse; she'd made a stupid, completely avoidable mistake, and it was going to cost her. She hated this combination of wisdom and naïveté. What was she supposed to do with what she knew, what she sensed? Something had to be wrong with Nolan—she felt it in her bones, her muscle and tissue. She just didn't know what.

She tried to sit up, prop herself with one arm, but a firm hand behind her guided her back down.

“Don't sit up too soon,” the other man said. She tried to twist her neck to see him, but his hands guided her away from that motion too. He fluttered a light above her eyes, checking her pupils, and she saw him upside down, but even upside down, she could tell: he was young and in uniform.

“Just take it easy,” he said. “Deep breaths.”

In the corner, near the table in the foyer, a stretcher was propped up against the wall. Of course. A paramedic. The wood frame of the door splintered and jagged where someone had kicked it in.

“Where is…” She hesitated, reluctant to limit her question. She wasn't sure if she wanted to know where her husband was. But she needed to know where Nolan was and why Forrester hadn't come with him. Was it possible Forrester was with John? Could her husband be that disloyal?

“The detective?” Dr. Kenney asked, as if she'd forgotten her own husband's name.

“Yes.”

“He stayed here till I arrived, but then he had a call from his partner.”

Carrie tried to swallow, and it hurt, like something was caught. “Did it seem urgent?”

“Somewhat, yes.”

“And John?”

“He's on his way, with the others.”

“Others?” Her voice filled with panic and possibility, all contained in one short word.

Dr. Kenney glanced at the paramedic, who waved his penlight over Carrie's eyes again.

“Your family,” he said, overpronouncing every syllable.

“My family?” The word sounded foreign coming out of her mouth. How long had it been since she'd said or thought that? It was always simply her mother. Even when Ben was alive and she'd created her own family, she'd never grown accustomed to the idea, to the word.

“He's at the airport picking them up.”

She blinked. Surely Dr. Kenney meant John's family, not her mother, but no one was due in for at least three days. But she didn't want to say anything; she couldn't blurt things out anymore. She really, really had to be more careful.

“Who called you?”

“John called me.”

“No, I know that. I mean the paramedic.”

“Detective called 911,” the paramedic answered.

“So…you kicked the door in?”

“Nope. Already like that.”

Carrie frowned, trying to imagine Nolan being able to accomplish that feat in his condition. Wondering if he even cared where the door fell, if it hit her or not.

“Don't worry about all this now, Carrie,” Dr. Kenney said. “You need rest. I know you've been under a great deal of strain.”

She wanted to ask him what he knew. What had John told him, exactly? And if John had told Nolan about the guy with the dog, what other secrets had he shared? And who—who on earth had called John?

“Dr. Kenney, can you call the precinct and find out if the detectives on Ben's case are—”

“Carrie, as I said, you need to rest.”

“No, I need to know if those detectives are—”

“Are what?”

“If they're both…okay. Hurt or anything.”

Dr. Kenney's eyes were kind, so kind. It was as if they radiated a different energy than other people's; they almost warmed the whole room. Was that how all his patients felt? Did he know he had that quality, that it would make people trust him automatically?

“Have you been…sensing things again, Carrie? Or seeing confusing images?”

“No,” she said, but her lip quaked, and she had to bite it to stop it.

“We've always been honest with each other, Carrie.”

“He was here, all right? Detective Nolan was here.”

Dr. Kenney glanced toward the paramedic, then back at her.

“Yes, he was outside and witnessed you fainting—”

“Oh, you know that then.”

“Of course we do, Carrie. That's why we're here.”

“Oh, so he's okay.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean he seemed unwell. Injured.”

“Is that why you asked him if he was dead?”

All the sound went out of the room. The metronome of the heart monitor. The buzz of the clock in the kitchen. All of it swallowed by an oceanic fuzz, like being inside a shell.

“He looked like death warmed over,” she said quietly.

“Are you saying he misunderstood you?”

“Yes,” she said. “That's what I'm saying. Of course, maybe he was twisting my words. Since he's always had it in for me.”

She swallowed hard and nodded for emphasis, and Dr. Kenney did a slow rocking nod in return. He always did that when he was processing something, when he was halfway toward believing. She wrapped her hands up inside her sweater sleeves. She didn't feel guilty—sometimes you had to lie to save yourself. She'd learned that lesson the hard way—like when she told her mother she stayed in bed all day because she had cramps and not because she was bleeding postpartum.

There needed to be another term besides
white lies
for lies that weren't innocent but weren't dark as much as they were self-preserving. Gray lies. Sometimes you needed to tell a gray lie.

Dr. Kenney stayed another hour or more, stayed as the paramedic packed up, discussing their need for more appointments if Carrie didn't feel up to talking. Always that word:
talk, talk, talk
. She liked to talk, always had; that was why she'd been drawn to Ethan. He was the kind of boy you could nudge awake with a question, the kind of person who would sit around a campfire until it dwindled to embers, discussing an idea. But that was a different kind of talking. Dr. Kenney wanted more: he wanted answers.

Finally, after Carrie's vitals returned to normal and she declined the offer to go to the hospital, Dr. Kenney left shortly after the paramedic did. He called John to verify that he was on his way back from the airport, then fingered the ragged edge of the door frame as if reluctant to leave.

Carrie poured herself a cup of tea. She needed to pull herself together if she had to deal with John's parents. The hotel was out of the question. John would install his parents to babysit her until her own mother arrived. Then what would they do—watch her in shifts?

She went upstairs and put the photo boards and caterer's notes and playlists in the master bedroom. She made up the guest bed, put fresh towels and new soaps in the bathroom. She brought up two bottles of water and an extra box of tissues. She was losing her mind, perhaps, but not her manners. She'd be ready for company soon. But first, there was someone she had to see.