Here and Gone(34)

‘I’d like you to leave now,’ she said.

Patrick shot up from the couch, his mouth open, but Margaret waved at him to be quiet. ‘It’s all right, dear, she’s bound to be emotional. The first weeks are always the hardest.’

As she walked to the door to the hall, Audra said, ‘I think you should know something.’

Margaret stopped, turned to her with a raised eyebrow.

‘Last night, your son hit me.’

Margaret looked to Patrick, who looked at his feet. ‘It’s hard on the father too, but he shouldn’t have done that. Though I imagine you deserved it.’

She left the room, silence in her wake until Patrick spoke, his voice quivery and wet.

‘Don’t ever do anything like that again,’ he said.

‘Or what?’

‘What happens between us stays between us,’ he said.

‘I’m going to put Sean down for a sleep,’ Audra said. ‘I’m going to take a shower, then I’m going to pack.’

‘You have nowhere to go,’ Patrick said.

‘I have friends.’

‘What friends?’ Patrick asked. ‘When was the last time you saw any of those artsy shitbags?’

‘Don’t talk about them like that.’

Sean stirred in her arms, agitated by her rising anger.

‘Whatever, when was the last time you saw one of them?’

When Audra couldn’t think of the answer to his question, she turned and left the room, went to their bedroom, and closed the door. She swaddled Sean once more and went to the en suite bathroom. With the door open, she showered, her tears melding with the hot water, flushed away into the drain. A cold feeling in her gut as she accepted that Patrick was right: she had nowhere to go. He had never wanted to be around her friends when they were dating, and she had drifted away from them, quietly pulled from their orbits and into his.

Once she’d dried off, she wrapped her dressing gown around her and lay on the bed, watching Sean through the bars of his crib. Listened to his breathing, allowed herself to be carried away by it.

Hours later, he woke, hungry again. Audra lifted him from the crib, brought him back to the bed, where she offered him her breast once more.

He refused it, and she wept bitter tears of defeat.

Even so, she tried again through the day. And still he squirmed and fussed, his lips slipping away from her. The screeching returned, that drill bit boring into her head. The small cups of expressed milk did not satisfy him, most of it spilled and wasted. She caught glimpses of Patrick watching her from doorways, saying nothing, and she knew what he was waiting for.

At ten o’clock that night, twenty-four hours after the first and last time that Sean would ever drink from her breast, Audra went to the cupboard by the fridge and took down one of the small cartons of formula. As easy as Margaret had said. Just put it in the bottle, heat it in the microwave. Simple as that.

She sat on the couch, Sean gulping at formula, nothing but a dry hollowness inside her. Patrick came to her then, sat down beside her. He put an arm around her shoulders, kissed her hair.

‘It’s for the best,’ he said. ‘For you and for him.’

Audra had no strength left to argue.





16


DANNY LEE WATCHED the rolling news as he worked out in his living room. He raised the pair of twenty-pound dumbbells from his thighs to his shoulders and back again, keeping his breath steady, not rushing the lift or the drop, letting his biceps do the work. Ten reps in a set, thirty seconds between sets.

That image of the woman launching herself at the sheriff, over and over. Nothing new had emerged through the afternoon into the evening, yet he kept watching.

He moved on to lateral lifts, swapping to twelve-pound weights. Sweat-drenched hair fell into his eyes, and he shook it away. On the television, a detective from the Arizona Department of Public Safety, Criminal Investigations Division, talked about search parties and aerial scans. The picture changed to a police helicopter circling over a desert road, then teams of uniformed men picking through the scrub and the rocks and the cacti, two highway patrolmen hunched over a map that was spread across a cruiser’s hood.

Then a photograph of the woman, a mug shot, her face reading fear and bewilderment. The woman had a history, the anchor explained, of addiction. Booze and prescription drugs, an overdose two years ago. Destroyed her marriage. And Children’s Services had been on her back recently, trying to get the children signed over to the husband. So she had put the kids in the car and taken off. Four days later, she’d made it as far as Arizona.

But no children.

Now a photo of the kids, at least a couple of years younger than they were today. Both of them beaming amid piles of torn wrapping paper and Christmas toys. Next, the anchor addressing the camera, saying the search was on to find Sean and Louise Kinney before it was too late. But he couldn’t hide that tone in his voice, the one that said it was already too late, these children were gone as gone could be.

Danny lowered the weights to the floor, rolled his shoulders, worked the muscles with his knuckles. He closed his eyes for a moment, savored the weary tingle through his upper arms and back, the rush of oxygen as he breathed in through his nose, out through his mouth.

Mya’s face shimmered in his mind.

Five years she’d been gone. Sara six weeks before that. Mya just couldn’t take it. Danny had tried to be strong for her. He couldn’t have done any more. By the end, Mya asked him again and again if he believed her.