One More Day (7 page)

Carrie usually listened to her gut. She'd feel a kind of electric tingle she knew to pay attention to. When her father had come back to visit her mother that one time, she'd known it was the last. When her dog had been killed by a car, she'd known from the look on the motorist's face. And when she'd met John, she had known. Oh, how she had known. One buzzing brush of his hand against hers. And that was why she'd been so furious when Ben had been taken the first time: How had her radar failed her?

She'd met John at a fund-raiser at State. Her roommate, Chelsea, had pointed out the primary advantage of helping out the athletic association:
proximity to hot athletes
. But Carrie wondered, after dating a self-professed nerd like Ethan, if an athlete would be the right choice.

Carrie and Chelsea were given aprons and put in charge of grilling free hot dogs. They knew they'd be surrounded by boys. On some level, she knew before she even met John that she would. That he would be there.

And there he was, standing in line with a friend. Brushing his long bangs out of his eyes with a flick of his head that she found irresistible. A navy-blue lacrosse T-shirt stretched across his chest. Big hands, holding the white paper plate like it was nothing.

She feigned giving him a veggie dog, and he recoiled, and she laughed.

“I'm a carnivore,” he said with a shrug.

“Maybe I'm a vegan,” she said.

“Better not breathe too deeply,” he said and smiled.

Then he asked, a little sheepishly, if he could have two hot dogs. His voice, burred and a little scratchy, different. So different from the practiced, mannerly, preppy voice she was expecting.

“You can have one now,” she said, smiling, putting it on his outstretched plate. “And come back after practice for another.”

“But what if you're not here? Or what if you run out? Maybe you better give me two now.” The idiosyncratic way he spoke made certain words—like
two
—almost disappear. It made you pay closer attention, Carrie thought, made you listen harder.

“But if I give you two now, you won't come back.”

“I will come back for thirds,” he said, and when she nestled the second hot dog next to the first, she brushed his hand. It wasn't dry, no tinder of calluses striking hers. It was warm, soft, alive. His eyes were a color between green and brown she'd never seen before. And then they appeared in Ben. A miracle, twice.

They got to know each other quickly. In one night, she found out his voice had been damaged by a tackle that bruised his throat when he was thirteen. It went hoarse and never came back fully, and his teammates had started calling him Frog.

Carrie was more of an enigma to John—pretty but mysterious, downplaying her family and friends, not wanting him to know that she'd lived in a town his family considered the other side of the tracks. The only thing apparent, baldly apparent, was her unique combination of kindness and wit. Usually girls who loved words and irony and nuance were mean. Not Carrie. He was drawn to her empathy, her giving nature, her habits of going to church every Sunday and on long hikes every Friday afternoon. Other girls spent Fridays day drinking, putting on makeup, or choosing clothes for the parties ahead. Carrie always ended her week with a walk in the hills that ringed the campus. That was part of the allure to John—this separateness, this need to be alone. But it also scared him. She was vulnerable, too trusting, not careful enough.

They became a couple instantly. They graduated, found jobs, settled into cities near each other. He worked at his father's insurance company; she worked in public relations. They commuted, saving, figuring it out, before they bought an affordable new house near Carrie's old hometown, a few towns away from John's family. It wasn't like they'd met and eloped and had an instant baby. But to Carrie, it had felt that immediate. She saw him in line and saw their future unspool in front of her. The difference between him and her other boyfriends, like Ethan, was immediately apparent. John was a man, and he would be a husband and a father. Not a frightened little high school boy who hid in his books and acted brave but wasn't. John was actually brave, brave to a fault. And loyal to a fault. He was different from other guys, and that was why he didn't trust them, why he occasionally followed Carrie—to make sure nothing happened to her.

And then she caught him. One night, walking back from a concert she'd gone to with Chelsea and Justin. There had been a rustling in the bushes, the dark green edges of the path oscillating more than a kicked-up night breeze could hope to move them. She stopped, took a step toward the movement. She heard his breathing, the ragged quality that presaged his raspy voice. The way she knew he was there, thinking of something to say.

“John,” she said.

He took one step to the right, revealing himself, a half slice of his features. Everything she wanted to say, meant to say—the words bobbed in her mouth, drowning. She couldn't speak. The sight of his dark hair and eyes in the deep cobalt night. Even his tanned skin and his navy shirt looked of the woods, of the path; he was someone who belonged there, waiting only for her.

She had reached for him—for that was what he was waiting for, after all, evidence of her and her love. The smell of him, the dark wild taste of something that had turned, made her weak in the knees.

“I'll meet you later,” she'd called out to her friends, as simply as if she'd seen another path, a better one, and taken it.

Remembering that now, she leaned into John's strong frame as they looked out the living room window, listening to Nolan berating his beat officer on their front walk, his hands slicing into the air for emphasis.
You had one job, one job, and failed! You don't go out for coffee, you don't leave for a sandwich, you don't fiddle on your fucking phone, you watch! When you're on twenty-four-hour watch, you watch, goddamn it!
The man's face, young, with a night's worth of blond beard appearing, was turning ever redder with shame and regret as he murmured something about how he didn't think he'd fallen asleep, but he supposed he might have checked his text messages. Would he lose his job?

Carrie disentangled herself from John, ran to the door, flung it open.

“Stop it!”

The men turned to her in unison. Nolan's face, twisted with annoyance at this crazy woman interrupting him, and maybe, just maybe, pissed off because he was caught doing in public what usually happened in private: behaving cruelly toward another cop. Something he didn't want his wife or his children or anyone but another cop to know about him. And the uniformed cop, guilty and grateful at the same time, his chin quivering with the mixture.

“Stop?” Nolan repeated, as if dumbfounded that she'd said it and also, good Lord, that he'd obeyed. A woman trying to tell him how to do his job?

“Is this where the expression ‘beat cop' came from? Because you beat up other cops?”

“Carrie!” John cried.

“Leave him alone, okay? It's not his fault,” she said.

“Ma'am,” the officer said quietly, “I'm afraid it might be my—”

“You don't have to apologize to me. To us. Or to him. You did the best you could. You're…human. You're human, for God's sake.”

Nolan's eyes looked over her head, seeking John's, finding them, and then a slight raise of his brow.

“Please get a hold of your wife and go back inside, Mr. Morgan,” Nolan said with a long exhale.

Carrie turned around. John's face was lined with concern. It was like seeing him older, projected into the future.

“Carrie, honey, you've got to let them work! They have their own ways of doing things, of getting results. They're the experts.”

She shook her head, went into the kitchen. John paced in the living room behind her. She poured a glass of water, drank it.

“Their techniques are ridiculous. They're…pointless.”

“What do you mean?”

“I knew he wouldn't say,” she said quietly.

Her husband's footsteps, the rhythm of his worry, stopped. “I'm sorry. What the hell did you just say?”

“I said I knew. Knew that he would come and be gone again. That Ben would leave.”

“Carrie, seriously, how could you possibly—”

He stopped, looked at her like she was another species entirely. The tiny hairs on her neck came alive, danced.

“You don't trust me?” she asked, eyes flashing.

“That's not what I'm saying.”

“Isn't it?”

Wasn't that why he had done all the things he'd done over the years—not trusting, always trying to solve the mystery of Carrie?

“I don't understand,” he said. “I mean, I've always been confused by everything that's happened, but now, now you say you
knew
?”

She started to tell him, tried to describe it, knew she had to: that Ben wasn't alive, returned by the kidnapper. That he was dead, returned by…God? The universe? The forces that governed them all? She struggled to explain the unexplainable. But how to outline the existence of something in between to a man who sold life insurance, who measured the distance between living and dying, brokered it, knew its dimensions by heart?

“See, this is why I wanted to stretch things out, to not rush things. Because I knew it wouldn't last. I knew because it's what I asked for,” she cried. “What I prayed for.”

“What?”

“One more day,” she sobbed. “I just wanted him back for one more day. To hold him one more time, feed him one more time, bathe him. And that was all I got. I knew it, John,” she cried. “I knew it.”

She buried her head in her hands, but not before she saw his shoulders soften, his mouth loosen. He pulled her into his arms, forgiving her, erasing whatever terrible thoughts were there. They both felt his shame melting away with her tears.

“Honey, how about if I go call Dr. Kenney?” he whispered in her hair. The word
go
was swallowed by the crack in his voice. What was that like, to lose every fourth or fifth word, to not be understood? Was that all that was going on, that she didn't understand him, in addition to him not understanding her? “To help you,” he added, as if reading her mind.

“Not now,” she said. “Not today. Haven't I been through enough?”

He put her at arm's length and looked at her. Her dark blue eyes, when filled with tears, looked even darker, more unusual. Her hair, tumbling in shiny waves, still so beautiful even when it was mussed. Of course she had been through enough. Of course she was exhausted by it all. What was more exhausting than a roomful of questions and no answers? He folded her back into his arms. Her secrets would keep. Wasn't that what Dr. Kenney always said after John called and asked how it was going? It would take time, not to worry. Carrie's secrets, Carrie's problems, would keep until she was ready to tell them.

There's no right and wrong way to follow someone. Police do it all the time, but so do lovers. People form caravans, protecting one another. It's not always the bad thing people think it is.

I saw the way other people looked at that boy. They were jealous. You didn't have to be able to see the aura of green over their heads; you could see it in their narrow eyes and straightened lips. Jealous of his skin, smooth and golden, like buttery dough. His eyelashes so long you could see them a block away. And what is more beautiful than a tiny bottom slipping out of a slick red swimsuit? He was innocent, oblivious to it all, but the bigger problem was so was she.

She didn't hold him tight enough. She let him run, let him talk to strangers. She didn't stifle him, and he probably needed that. To be warned, to be put on alert. He was too innocent for his own good, and she let him be innocent, didn't try to toughen him up.

I'd seen this happen every week, sometimes twice, and something had to be done about it. But I didn't know when. And I didn't know who.

I don't know everything, but I try to. I look to the sky, I shut my eyes, and I try really, really hard to know. I wish I could know before, but it seems I'm only capable after.

On the first anniversary of Ben's kidnapping, they had held another candlelight ceremony on the grounds of the Y. The director of the Y, Elizabeth Matthews, had suggested it and said she could arrange for a poet to give a reading and perhaps a priest to say a prayer.
Everyone here wants to help
, she'd said.
Balloons aren't healthy for the environment, but we could light candles again.
Carrie had been noncommittal until she'd talked to John. Of course, John thought it was a good idea; he thought publicity and people were always a good idea. Better to be outside, spreading the word, than inside, ruminating.

The swim moms were there again, and so were Libby and Anna and a lot of other folks from the congregation who Carrie didn't know. They were friends of John's family and circled around them in a tight knot. John's parents stood next to their son proudly, as if he were getting confirmed. Their chins were always up. Carrie's mother didn't fly in; Carrie had insisted she not come, but she had sent special candleholders for the occasion, as if the idea of her daughter and son-in-law getting burned by wax would be the ultimate salt in the wound.

It was a clear night, and though Elizabeth Matthews had promised the ceremony would be brief, one of the speakers—the poet—had chosen to read a long sonnet that lost focus, meandered. Under other circumstances, beneath the yoke of someone else's grief, Carrie and John would have shared a look and a giggle over this woman and her tortured, dramatic delivery. But they kept their eyes lowered, focused on the candles. The last person to speak was a young rabbi, who offered a prayer related to the water, to swimming, and Carrie was grateful for its simple symbolism. Later she would recall its prescience and wish she could speak to the rabbi again, to see him at his temple, to know what he knew.

Afterward, after John thanked everyone for coming and then ran off toward a couple of his coworkers, whom he'd spotted in the crowd, Libby came up, put her arm around Carrie, and gripped the knob of her shoulder tightly.

“You'll find him, lovey,” she said firmly, calmly.

“Will I?”

“We could do another collection at the church. Maybe it could pay for another billboard or increase the reward.”

“Billboards.” Carrie sighed. “His face was so large on the highway the first time I saw it, I nearly crashed.”

“It
was
attention getting.”

“That's for sure. You know, we got the Amber Alert on our cell phones that first night,” she said suddenly. “Wouldn't you think they would take the parents off the list? Out of kindness?”

“When all this is over, that's the kind of thing you can fight for. The kind of thing that can be changed.”

Carrie shrugged. It was hard to imagine it ever being over. Hard to imagine anything changing.

The crowd thinned out. A gibbous moon rose over the building, above the dark tops of trees. Carrie couldn't remember what the moon had been like that first night without her son. Why couldn't she remember?

John walked back toward her, smiling, with a young woman walking briskly behind him, almost catching up to his long gait. Her hair was bobbed and spiky at the ends, and she wore large black glasses that looked almost like a prop.

“Carrie,” John said breathlessly, “this is—”

“Maya Mercer,” the woman said, extending her hand.

Carrie shifted the candle to her left hand, shook with her right.

“From
24/7
,” John added.

“The TV show?”

“The investigative program,” Maya said with a half smile. A business smile.

“Oh,” Carrie said.

“Maya's thinking about doing a story on Ben's disappearance, and she wants to interview you!”

“Me?”

“Yes.”

“Not both of us?”

“Well, you were there, Mrs. Morgan,” Maya said coolly. “Your husband wasn't.”

“How do you know that?”

“Carrie!”

“I mean, if you're just thinking about doing a story and not actually doing one, how would you know?”

“You're a witness,” Maya continued. “It's on record. Simple as that. We'd try to talk to anyone who was there—you, the detectives, other people on the street that day, at Starbucks, here at the—”

“No.”

“No?” Maya Mercer looked genuinely perplexed.

John touched Carrie's arm. “Babe,” he started to say.

“Don't ‘babe' me!” Carrie said, yanking her arm away.

“Let your wife speak for herself, John,” Maya said quietly.

Carrie's eyes met Maya's for a moment. For a second or two, they held, seeking refuge there.

“I'm sure she wants the publicity,” Maya said. “I'm sure she has absolutely nothing to hide.”

Carrie swallowed hard, lowered her eyes. She knew the detectives were in the parking lot, surveying the crowd. Looking for anything unusual, anything amiss. She knew strangling this woman would be considered slightly amiss.

“There's a difference between publicity and scrutiny,” Carrie said, gritting her teeth.

Maya blinked at this, considering. “Maybe you need a few days to think about it. Discuss it.”

“Just interview my husband. He's more photogenic.”

As Carrie walked toward her car—parked a block away, pointed west, toward home—she saw Forrester standing on the sidewalk, staring across two lanes of traffic as if he were watching a movie projected on the other side.

She blew out her candle with an irritated huff. When she swung open the car door, wax sloshed onto her hand, burning her just enough to make her cry out.