Ruin Falls (3 page)

“Mommy?”

“Yes, sweetie?” Liz stroked Ally’s feathery hair out of her eyes. Her daughter’s scalp was sweaty.

“Sometimes I worry about Reid.”

“About Reid?” Liz glanced across the seat. Reid’s head lolled back,
his sleeping face so open and revealed that it seemed her son could hide nothing. Not the objects he took, nor the source of his sadness about the end of life. “Why are you worried about Reid, sweetie?”

Ally took in a rippling breath. “I don’t know.”

It was clear she knew something, though.

Paul made an impatient gesture, swiping his brow with the back of one hand. “Hey. I’m dying out here. I forgot what this felt like.”

Liz nodded quickly, holding up one finger. The car was heating up; they couldn’t stay long. She looked down at Ally.

“Maybe he’ll get into trouble. Like with that man in the—the place where you buy food that’s bad for you. Or for some other reason.”

Liz felt a flick of relief that she couldn’t identify. “Oh, sweetie. I don’t think you have to worry about that. Really. I think Reid will be fine.”

Paul opened the door on the other side of the car. He woke Reid, trundling the boy forward, while Liz got out the cooler. They could eat dinner in their room. Liz half carried, half marched Ally across the parking lot. The doors to the hotel slid open, air-conditioning a welcome reprieve. The kids came to life, and began running laps around the lobby while Liz handled the process of checking in.

“Look, Mommy, there’s candy machines!” Ally said.

“I bet I could get something out of one of those,” Reid mused, a few feet away.

“Come on!” Liz heard Ally say behind her. “Let’s go!”

“Reid?” Paul was rearranging things on the trolley. “No taking any—”

“I was just joking, Dad.”

The two kids walked off. Liz allowed herself the indulgence of watching them for a moment, feeling the trace of a smile. Ally reached out and fingered the leaves of a potted plant, which even from here Liz could tell was fake. Her daughter looked dismayed by her finding, before hurrying to catch up with her brother.

“Sir?” A bellhop came up to Paul. “May I bring that upstairs for you?”

The woman behind the front desk slid Liz’s credit card back, along
with a little envelope with two key cards in it. “This is your room number,” the woman said, pointing to the digits on the envelope without saying them aloud. A security measure, Liz realized.

Paul turned to round up Reid and Ally, forgetting to respond to the bellhop.

“Thank you,” Liz said. “That’d be—” And then she paused.

“This way, ma’am,” the bellhop said.

Liz had the sudden, purest desire to send this man away. She didn’t want him handling their things, and she didn’t want him to see their room, let alone their children. He was a nondescript man, in the flat expanse of middle age, with eyes of neutral blue, and a thinning cap of hair. The uniform he wore was a little dingy, as if the hotel didn’t bother to replace them as often as they might. The bellhop’s only notable feature was a thread-thin mustache.

“We can take care of it,” she said. “Thank you, we’re fine.”

She glanced around for her husband, who was answering a text as he ushered the children back from the vending area. Probably one of his students. Even on vacation, Paul’s students—disciples was more like it—couldn’t leave their guru alone. Paul drew closer, sliding his phone back into its clip. He wore his connection to the rest of the world as if he were a surgeon or a cop instead of a college professor in a rural agricultural school.

Liz started to push the trolley forward. It was awkward and unwieldy, the wheels swiveling instead of straightening out.

“Ma’am?” the bellhop said. “Let me.”

Paranoid
, Liz told herself.
This day has made me crazy
.

A long drive with two children, that near miss on the highway, Reid’s episode of thievery. The heavy wet heat of a summer spent anywhere outside the Adirondacks. It was ridiculous to worry about a bellhop in a chain hotel. Liz fell into step behind the man, tugging Ally along with her, and pretending not to see the glimmer of wrapper sticking out of Reid’s back pocket. How had he done it? Neither child had any money on them. Then the elevator arrived, and the kids were excited enough by the ride that both stolen candy bars and strange-looking bellhops were forgotten.

THE COURT ORDER

A
bby Harmon sat at her kitchen table, staring down at two things. The envelope that had arrived today, hidden between the usual sliding pile of junk, like a snake in a thicket of grass. And the text message she’d just received.

Envelope.

Text.

Two very different roads, each wending away into a thicket of its own.

If she did what the letter inside the envelope compelled her to do, Abby could envision the next several years of her life, and the prospect made her cringe. The next several years of Cody’s life, actually. How old would he be when they finally emerged? Eight? Nine? Half again as old as he was now, years lost, and that was presuming a happy ending.

If there wasn’t a happy ending, then they would lose a lot more than years.

A fan rattled on the counter, coming around again to unleash its hot breath upon her. Hot air that moved was hardly better than hot, still air. It wasn’t supposed to hit temperatures this high up here, certainly not at night. The person who had just messaged her was right—things really were getting apocalyptic. Abby blinked sweat from her eyes.

She looked down at the sheet of paper. An ounce of wood pulp. Such a light, ephemeral medium—a match would turn it to curled, gray shreds inside of a second—to be the bearer of a blow that could destroy her whole life.

And then the text on her phone. Which would bring about an end even less predictable.

“Mama?”

Abby jumped in her chair, a flimsy metal thing that rocked back under the force of her sudden movement. She’d had to look for a furnished rental since she couldn’t take any of her own things, stealing away like a captive during the brief hour Bill spent at the gym. They’d left the city when he got a job that allowed him to work from home—just one more way to keep an eye on her and Cody. And going back for her stuff was an encounter that she couldn’t risk.

Even this letter, written by a third party, was too close to her husband for comfort.

Abby steadied the chair, and brushed her hair out of her eyes. How long had it been since she’d styled it? She used to give herself a blowout every other day like clockwork, even after they moved. None of the women did that here, but Bill had insisted. Now Abby couldn’t recall the last time she’d washed it, and the strands hung lank and deflated against her sweaty face.

“Mama?” Cody said again.

“Yes, Bun?” She had no idea where the pet name had come from. She only knew that it seemed to soothe Cody, and that Bill didn’t use it. He preferred real titles to endearments.

“I had a bad dream again.”

Her little boy’s face withered, as wrinkly as an old man’s. Abby had a vision of years passing while she and Bill wrangled things out in court, Cody’s story changing in the telling as his perspective broadened with time.

She held out her arms, and he ran to her. His back was sweaty through the polyester of his pajamas. They had to make them flame-retardant, as if fire were the danger children were most likely to run into. This pair was a size 3T, bought over a year ago, then. Which Pixar movie had been available for streaming, and consequently
Cody’s favorite film of all time? Abby looked down at her silently stroking hand. Lightning McQueen. She couldn’t even remember seeing the second
Cars
movie. So many elements of your child’s life were lost. Who recalled why one particular pair of pajamas hanging on a rack at The Children’s Place had to be purchased, just
had
to be, to a tune of jumping up and down and long, drawn-out pleases? And yet those things made up a childhood. Abby shivered, right there in the stifling kitchen, and squeezed her son to her.

“You’re warm,” Cody murmured, an echo of Abby’s tone whenever he ran a fever.

Abby released him. “Feel better now? Dream all gone?” Better not to ask who—or what—had visited Cody in his sleep. They had learned not to talk about the dreams.

Cody’s damp head nodded against her.

She glanced down again. The letter with its declarative, impossible to ignore injunction. And the phone with its invisible, intangible connection to a whole other world.

Abby rose with her little boy in her arms. “I’ll tuck you back in.”

After laying him down on top of the limp, creased sheet—how she wished that sheet were crisp and cool, that Cody might need a light blanket as the night hours wore on—Abby drew the hollow door shut. Another thing she had learned: not to pull too hard on the weightless doors in this place. They splintered.

A few short weeks and a lifetime ago, she’d had rough-hewn beams and wood paneling in the house that they’d built.

Abby walked back to the kitchen, thinking about a frost-beaded glass of iced tea. There were a couple of bottles in the fridge, kept for nights such as this when she couldn’t sleep anyway and the caffeine wouldn’t be a problem. It would’ve been chilled white wine back in the days when Abby would never have dared to stay up all night. When she had plenty of wine and crystal to drink it from, but sleep was her only escape.

She had escaped for real now; she and Cody both had. Bill was a buttoned-up type who played by the rules. But rules wouldn’t keep Bill from making her life hell, and Cody’s, too. In fact, as this letter proved, they would enable him to.

Dear Ms. Harmon:

You are hereby ordered to submit to two (2) supervised visitation sessions weekly to be held at …

Abby put the letter down and twisted the cap on her iced tea, drinking deeply from the bottle. Frost-beaded glass indeed. Who was she kidding? There were sippy cups in the cabinet, some paper plates, and that was about it.

Abby felt a small poof of air upon her, even hotter than the enclosed heat of the condo. She went to turn off the fan, which was useless anyway. There was no air-conditioning in this place, even if she had been able to afford the utility bill.

She couldn’t be sure, but she didn’t think the air had come from the direction of the fan. Abby let the swallow of iced tea that had gone warm in her mouth trickle down her throat. She took a long look around the empty apartment.

In the room that was intended for living, but invited no such sort of activity, there was a pair of cheap club chairs, so small they almost fit Cody. They were upholstered in some nubbly white fabric whose nubs had long since worn off.

White. What a stupid choice in a place where people came, waited for their luck to change, and went. The cloth had grayed in spots where elbows and bottoms rubbed. The chairs’ sole claim to fame was that they rotated; Cody loved to spin in them.

It was so hot. Maybe Abby would wash her hair just for an excuse to stand beneath a cold stream of water. She didn’t like to be out of earshot of Cody, though. Not with his dreams.

Abby went to peer out into the starless night. A trident of heat lightning forked, and the window stared back at her like a lidless eye. She squinted, trying to make out something besides her own dark reflection. Then she turned around, and everything inside her folded. Abby felt her heart stop pumping, the blood cease its flow in her veins.

Bill sat in one of the club chairs in the living room.

His long body dwarfed the wheeling thing. He was a not-handsome man who spent regular time at the gym to compensate. Even through
a shirt and suit pants, muscles could be detected. Bill rose from the ridiculous chair. His thinning hair was shaved close, and his face still bore the ravages of adolescent acne. He nodded at her, all business.

“I wanted to make sure that you received the letter.”

Autonomic function had come to a halt as soon as she’d seen him. Abby couldn’t catch her breath.

Bill took two long strides; they covered the cramped room. “And that you planned to obey it.”

She felt the chill of wherever he’d come from.

“I always thought you were a team player, Abigail.”

Abby stared down at the floor. The worn, scuffed floor, grouted with dirt. She’d been demoted; Bill used to address her, only her, by her nickname.

“But if you’re not on my team any longer, you had better follow the laws of the land.” Bill paused, taking a look around, and the sparse meanness of the place she’d come to live in was mirrored in his gaze. “You’ve probably already guessed that I entered this shithole through Cody’s room.”

He walked past Abby without so much as grazing her body. Bill’s tactics had never been crude. Rather, he was like the very air around her: invisible, oppressive, impossible to escape.

After he left, Abby went back to the light, wobbly kitchen table and picked up her phone. Without a pause, she typed a curt reply in the text box.

OK. We’ll come. What next?

CHAPTER FIVE

L
iz woke the next morning under a dome of white comforter. She stretched luxuriantly, trying not to disturb the still-pristine sheets, or the duvet that lay over them light as a cloud. They must have both slept solidly, hardly tossing or moving. The promised romantic interlude hadn’t come to pass before they’d collapsed. Liz remembered stirring once in the middle of the night, and shifting to reach for her husband as she hadn’t done in more nights than she could remember. But the bed had been too delicious to do anything besides sink right back into sleep.

Next to her, Paul lay on his back, eyelids trembling as he slept on. A bad dream? It shouldn’t be possible to have nightmares in such a sumptuous bed. Liz yawned widely, managing to extricate her hand from the material draping it so that she could reach for the clock. The temperature outside the bedclothes was pleasantly cool.

Eight o’clock. Even the kids had slept in.

Liz got up, trying not to wake Paul, whose body twitched as she rose. He’d done most of the heavy lifting yesterday with the bags, although getting Reid and Ally settled after the elevator ride had been no walk in the park for Liz.