The Pieces We Keep (27 page)

T
he drive home from the gallery had worn Audra’s strength to the nub. If not for tunes on the radio, silence in the car would have swelled like helium, the pressure growing until something burst.

Behind the wheel, Sean had trained his eyes on the pavement. Audra had hoped there was another cause for his glacial mood, but his two-word answers suggested nothing else. With Jack in the backseat, she had no opportunity to voice how and why she’d approached Luanne. When they rolled up to the apartment, Audra thought to invite Sean in; they could speak in private once Jack went to bed. But she simply said good night, figuring it was better to let everything settle.

Two days and three voice mails later, however, he hadn’t responded. Though his reaction seemed excessive, she at least wanted to explain. She considered calling the house instead of his cell, but she refused to bother Luanne. Plus, by now he and his great-aunt had probably conferred over the police visit and custody case, further justifying his avoidance.

On the other hand, maybe he had just been busy.

The swirling thoughts were making Audra neurotic. At some point, couldn’t sleep deprivation literally make a person insane?

She readjusted her bed pillow and rolled onto her other side. She wished her brain had an off switch. Tess and Grace had come by to steal Jack for an afternoon outing, first to a bookstore, then to ice cream, allowing her a much-needed nap. But now here she was, on a quiet Saturday, and her body wide awake.

Finally she gave up.

Needing an activity, she went to the kitchen for a snack. She had just reached the fridge when the phone started to ring. The cordless was missing from the charger.

“Fabulous.”

The ring trilled again and she froze, listening to trace its location. It was in ... Jack’s room. She jetted in there, and on the fourth ring she found the phone on his dresser—right where she had left it. She was definitely losing her mind.

“Hello,” she answered, and was relieved the person hadn’t hung up.

“Hi, Audra, it’s Russ. Did I catch you at a bad time?”

Her relief ended there.

“No, not at all.”

“Great. Because I have good news for you.”

For a blissful instant Audra imagined that the case had been dropped, that the other attorney had convinced Robert and Meredith to withdraw the petition. But then Russ announced, “Our court date has been set.”

Audra’s silence must have communicated her failure to view the development as “good,” since Russ went on to elaborate. “The ‘housekeeping’ hearing will be in Just two months. Depending on how it goes, there’s still a chance you could keep your plans in Boston.”

All things considered, that chance wasn’t a strong one, but she aimed for optimism. “You’re right. It’s possible.”

“Would you like to hear the details? Or I can e-mail them over.”

“Um, now is fine. Let me write them down.” She went to Jack’s desk and snagged a pen from the plastic cup that held markers and kid scissors.

“Are you ready?” Russ asked.

“Almost. Just need some paper.”

“No problem. Take your time.”

She opened the top drawer of the desk to discover a chaotic mound of old homework. The first two sheets were writing assignments with
Super Job
stickers at the top. She opted for a half sheet of pink paper—just a library notice from the school. She flipped to the blank side and said, “All right. Go ahead.”

Russ rattled off dates and times and locations. When she had finished transcribing, she read them back for confirmation.

“I’ll be in touch with more soon,” he said, and she thanked him before they hung up.

A court date.

A judge.

This was actually happening.

She sat on the foot of Jack’s bed, letting the handset tumble free. The page, though, remained in her hand. She gazed at the note unseeing.

After a while she folded the paper half, putting the thought away, and a printed word leapt out at her:
OVERDUE.

It was an overdue notice for a book, checked out by Jack in March. According to the warning, if it wasn’t returned by the third week of June, he would owe the school a replacement fee. The final due date was this coming Thursday, the last day of the school year.

What book would he have kept for three months?

She unfolded the note to read the title:
Incredible Moments of World War II.

Any book about war would be intended for older students—unless it contained only snapshots of the glorified aspects: Rosie the Riveters, victory parades, and patriotic banners.

Then she remembered. She had seen a book in Jack’s closet. Last weekend, while scrounging for his helmet, she’d spotted an oversized paperback among his things. It was just before she’d stepped on the shreds of paper....

As the elements collected in her mind, an indescribable dread seeped through her. The world went portentously still, an eerie calm that precedes disaster.

Audra flung open the closet. She tore through the piles of clothes and toys. Beneath the tattered box of Monopoly was the book she recalled, edges worn and corners curled. A scrap of paper dangled from the inside pages.

She flipped to that section, where various photographs had been cut out. He had never done such a thing before, destroying a book like that. What use would he have for the pictures? As a second grader, he’d have no school projects involving world war. Even if he did, the principal would have mentioned it during their last—

Suddenly it came to her.

The journal.

She hurried to kneel by his bed and pulled out the book.
PIECES OF ME.
The title accurately described a life once whole, now shattered into jagged parts.

She leafed through the collages she had already seen, the comic strips and candy wrappers, the magazine ads featuring families. This time she noted that the cruise ship was bound for Europe, and recognized the symbolism of the Eiffel Tower as the heart of the continent. She had gained a new perspective on these images, but they still fit the equation, just in a different way.

Now to reveal the pictures beyond them.

Fear expanded, encompassing her like a fog, as she turned to the next page. Thankfully, she discovered only more of the same. The London Tower, the Colosseum, remnants of the Berlin Wall. For several more pages the theme continued.

And then it all changed.

V
ivian startled from her semi-conscious haze. A rapping on wood. Her bedroom door. She was about to plead for Luanne to answer but recalled her roommate’s absence, out for a late appointment at the beauty salon.

“Miss James?” The voice of the landlady.

“One moment.” Vivian maneuvered herself upright on her bed, noting her nightstand clock. Nearly six. After work she had dozed off while resting her head, which continued to throb from three weeks of harbored worries-over not only the FBI’s case but also her maddening indiscretion. With such compromised morals, she had needed no other reason to decline joining the WAAC.

Her one saving grace was the military assignment that had kept Gene out of town, hopping between bases. The separation should have enabled her to unsnarl her mesh of feelings. But how could she even begin without an update on Isaak’s case?

“Miss James.”

“Yes, I’m coming!” Vivian called out, rising to her feet.

“A gentleman is on the phone for you.”

Vivian halted.

Agent Gerard. The call she had been expecting all week.

In an instant, the haze dissipated. She scrambled into the hall, bid her thanks, and flew down the stairs. The man had repeatedly affirmed that the Hemel family had been moved to a safe, undisclosed location before all eight spies were apprehended. But there were no developments regarding Isaak. Only that visitors were prohibited until legal formalities were complete. Growing antsy, Vivian had recently left numerous messages at the New York Field Office, where a slew of meetings, according to the receptionist, had occupied the agent’s schedule.

At the entry table, praying for good news, Vivian snatched up the handset. “Hello? This is Vivian. Hello?”

“Hi ya, twinkle toes.”

Her chest constricted, stealing her breath. Her lungs refused to function.

“Sweetheart? You there?”

“Gene.” She hefted a smile into her tone. “You surprised me.”

“I know. Didn’t think I’d have a chance to ring you till this weekend. They got me running so ragged here. But turns out, I had time to spare and the phone was free. So, how have you been? You get my last letter?”

“Letter? Oh, yes. A couple of days ago.” She couldn’t bring herself to read more than half of it. She didn’t deserve his kind and doting words. “I’m sorry I haven’t written back. It’s been terribly busy around here too.”

“Sure thing. Not to worry. I just wanted to-” He stopped.

“Vivi, hold on.” He spoke off the phone, muffled, and returned with a groan. “Sorry about that. Looks like they need the line already.”

“It’s okay. I understand.”

“Ah, doll. It’s swell to hear your voice anyhow. I hate that I can’t be there for the holiday.”

Vivian had nearly forgotten. Tomorrow was the Fourth of July. With gunpowder needed for the war, she doubted it would feel much like a celebration.

“At any rate,” he said, “should be just two more weeks. After that, how about I treat my girl to a fancy night on the town? Even kick our heels up if you want. What do you say?”

She swallowed down the shame, the turmoil, rising in her throat. “Marvelous.”

“It’s a date, then. I’ll call again when I can.”

“Good.”

“Oh, and Vivi?”

“Yes?”

His voice dropped to a hush. “I love you.”

It was the first time he had verbalized the phrase. Her chest tightened even more. The reverent words formed a vice inside her, each crank the result of another deception.

That’s when she realized: With the saboteurs in custody, she could at last tell Gene the truth. How much he could bear to hear she didn’t know. Considering what Luanne had said about his former steady’s betrayal, the odds of his forgiveness were slim, the chances of hurting him guaranteed.

“Vivian?” He sounded tentative, fretting over her silence.

The confession gathered on her tongue. Like a cluster of pepper, it stung her senses and begged for release. Yet she couldn’t. Not over the cold, impersonal wires of a telephone. No matter how daunting it was, she owed him the admission in person.

“Me too,” she heard herself say, and detected his easement in a small breath.

Soon the line went dead, but the handset stayed in her grasp. A pair of female tenants entered the house and tossed out greetings in passing. They carried bags and hatboxes from an array of department stores. Sunshine had brightened their noses with rosy hues of summer.

Envy for such normalcy swept over Vivian. Good or bad, she needed to know where matters stood. Anything was better than this state of uncertainty.

On the phone, she summoned the operator and requested the FBI. The receptionist, even at this hour, cited a meeting for Agent Gerard.

“Would you care to leave another message, Miss James?” Vivian refrained from her standard agreement. “That won’t be necessary,” she decided.

After all, there was no need to leave a message when she could confront the man in person.

H
is eyes stared back from the grainy pixels of a black-and-white photograph. At the top of the page, halfway into Jack’s journal, was a Nazi commander in uniform. A flag bearing a swastika hung in the backdrop. None of this, in particular, was the cause of Audra’s angst. It was the caption beneath the picture.

Not Himmel. Not Hemel.

Himmler.

The entire collage represented World War Two. Prominently displayed was another disturbing image: a bomber plane diving toward the ocean with smoke pluming from its tail.

Audra rolled off of her knees to sit on Jack’s bedroom floor. She needed a solid foundation before turning the page. A snippet of an article appeared on white paper, like the various Web pages he had printed during computer class. Except this one was educational in a much darker way. It featured the account of Nazi spies who were caught on the East Coast and sentenced to the electric chair.

Audra had barely digested this when she plodded onward and found a Rose Festival calendar.
Upcoming Events on Memorial Day.
Included in the listing were small head shots of the soldiers being honored—including PFC Sean Malloy.

The journal slipped from her hands as she tried to make sense of it. Jack had checked the book out in March, months before the night terrors began.

From a place deep in her memory came the scene of a movie. The title eluded her, but she could see the actor’s face. It was Kevin Spacey, playing a character who was pretending to be someone he wasn’t. In an office at the police station, he recounted his life to an investigating detective. But the story he told wasn’t real. He had made it all up by combining photos and fliers and names that surrounded him. And the detective had swallowed it whole. Why? Because he was so hungry for resolution he would have believed anything.

Audra glanced around her. She saw the model planes suspended from the ceiling. She saw Captain America, the hero on the poster, his face on Jack’s backpack. She saw the toy plane on his nightstand, its paint rubbed thin from ... deception? Confusion? Desperation?

As the old saying went, the simplest answer was typically the right one.

Perhaps Jack, in his seclusion, had invented a fantasy world aided by his collage. And those images, embodying the darkness of wartime, had gained a realism that now consumed his days and nights.

She had questioned him on every element; always he’d replied with a shrug or
I don’t know.
After all, if he’d admitted the source of his knowledge—of the people or words or pictures—it would have meant confessing to a journal crafted from a vandalized book. More than that, his imaginary realm would be over.

Which it was, from this minute on.

Audra marched to the kitchen, grabbed a trash bag, and returned to do what she should have long ago. She blamed herself more than Jack for creating this disaster, for seeing things that weren’t actually there.

In his drawings, the people falling from the plane were her and Jack. Nobody else. The photo from the library book, of the bomber in a fatal dive, must have left him terrified to fly. It was no different from a child watching Jaws and becoming fearful of the ocean.

Sure, while half asleep he’d responded to being called Jakob. Swap out a few letters and the name would be Jack. As for the inscription, a few German words from a TV program would have sounded close enough to convince a poor combat vet that the puzzle of his own past could be solved.

In other words, there was never some spiritual message in need of decoding, no unsettled soul seeking a reunion. But Audra had bought into everything—perhaps unconsciously craving her own fantasy world—and dragged others down with her.

Enraged at herself, she stood on a chair and yanked down Jack’s model planes. She shoved them into the trash bag and added the poster from the wall. Next she grabbed his backpack, emptied its contents on the bed, and threw the casing away. She would replace them all with better ones. Harmless and normal, they would feature robots and athletes and dinosaurs. Things that didn’t drive her and Jack to the brink of insanity or deplete their family savings. They wouldn’t draw policemen to the front door or pry open an elderly woman’s tomb of memories.

Most important, they wouldn’t jeopardize Audra’s right to keep her son.

Her hands trembled as she pitched the toy plane into the trash. She scoured his desk for anything more and found the submarine from Dr. Shaw.

No surprise that the hypnosis had failed. If the man were astute enough, he would have known why. Jack needed someone who recognized what this was from the beginning.

That someone should have been her.

It wasn’t too late. She would start over and do it right. Together they would clear out mistakes of the past. To that end, she picked up the journal, its pages splayed in her hands. She would take Jack to the store and let him pick out a new one, any design of his choice. A journal that couldn’t be used as evidence of what a gullible mother she had been.

“What are you doing?”

Audra swung toward the doorway. Jack stood there in front of Tess and Grace. He scanned the room in a panic, over the bare wall and ceiling, and halted at the open journal in her hand. The look he gave was of sheer betrayal.

In defense, she reminded herself what had driven her here. This wasn’t all of her doing. “I found the library book you destroyed, the pages all cut up. Jack, why would you do that?”

He stared at her, not answering.

“Jack? Tell me why.”

Still he was silent.

“Please, say something,” she demanded. Frustration returned and her eyes pricked with tears. “Don’t you realize what you’ve done to us?”

“Audra,” Tess broke in. “I think that’s enough.”

Jack curled his fingers, his chin crinkling, fighting back his own tears. The sight was a stab to Audra’s heart. She was trying to protect him, and all she was doing was making things worse.

“Baby ... I didn’t mean that.” She moved toward him, but he vehemently shook his head. He pushed past Tess and ran toward the front door. Audra instinctively went to follow, but Tess touched her arm.

“You stay, I’ll go.”

It was either a kind gesture from an experienced mother or a message that Audra had done enough damage. Whichever the case—perhaps it was both—Audra managed to nod. When Tess hurried off, Grace followed.

Alone, Audra surveyed the room. In the aftermath of an explosion that she had largely created, she couldn’t deny that if it were up to her, if she were the judge at this very moment, there wasn’t a chance she would rule in her own favor.