Live to Tell (Live to Tell #1)(4)
She kept the dog walkers, too.
Nick hired the lawn service last March, just in time for the spring thaw, as he put it—ironic, because it was also just in time for the killing frost that ended their marriage.
Yes, she had seen it coming. For a few months before it happened, anyway. That didn’t make it any easier for her to bear.
And the kids—Lauren hates Nick for their pain; hates herself, perhaps, even more. She was the one who’d gone to great lengths to maintain the happy family myth, such great lengths that the separation blindsided all three of them.
Nick had wanted to tell Ryan and Lucy last fall that they were seeing a marriage counselor. But Lauren was afraid they’d start piecing things together, suspecting the affair. Or that they’d ask pointed questions that would demand the ugly truth or whitewashed lies.
Nick was probably right—though she wouldn’t admit that to him. They should have given the kids a heads-up when things first started to unravel.
He was right, too, that sending Ryan and Lucy away to camp for eight weeks was the healthiest thing for everyone.
When he suggested it back around Easter, Lauren—who for years had frowned upon parents who shipped their kids hundreds of miles to spend summers in the woods among strangers—had taken a good, hard look at what their own household had become. She was forced to recognize that her older children would be better off elsewhere while she picked up the pieces.
Still, she didn’t give in to Nick about camp without a fight. God forbid she make anything easy on him in the blur of angry, bitter days after he left. She wanted only to make him suffer.
In the end, though, Ryan and Lucy went to camp.
They were homesick at first—so homesick Lauren was tempted, whenever she opened the mailbox to another woe-is-me letter, to drive up there and bring them both home. Now that it’s almost August, though, it’s clear from their letters that Ryan and Lucy are having a blast in the Adirondacks.
Lauren has only Sadie to worry about for the time being, while she figures out how to move on after two decades of marriage.
She has yet to come up with a long-term plan. It’s hard enough to keep her voice from breaking as she reads bedtime stories in an empty house, to fix edible meals for two—and to keep tabs on Sadie’s toys.
Find Fred.
She walks down the back porch steps, past fat bumblebees lazing in the flowers, and crosses over to the Volvo parked on the driveway.
Please let Fred be in the backseat…
Please let Fred be in the backseat…
Fred is not in the backseat.
A lot of other crap is: crumpled straw wrappers, a dog-eared coloring book and two melted crayons, a nearly empty tube of Coppertone KIDS, a couple of fossilized Happy Meal fries, and one of Sadie’s long-missing mittens whose partner Lauren finally threw away in May.
Lauren carries it all back into the house and dumps it into the kitchen garbage before returning, empty-handed, to the living room.
Sadie, tearstained and sucking her thumb, looks up expectantly.
“Sweetie, you must have dropped him, somewhere in the city. I couldn’t find—”
Cut off by a deafening wail, Lauren helplessly sinks onto the couch. “Oh, Sadie, come here.” She gathers her daughter into her arms, stroking her downy hair—not as blond this summer as it has been in years past.
Is it because she’s growing up?
Or because she’s been stuck hibernating with a shell-shocked mother who’s barely been able to drag herself out of bed and face the light of day…
Riddled with guilt, Lauren says, “I’m sorry, baby.” About so much more than the lost toy.
“I want Fred! I love him! Please,” Sadie begs. “I need him back.”
I know how you feel.
In silence, Lauren swallows the ache in her own throat and fishes a crumpled tissue from the back pocket of khaki shorts that last August felt a size too small. Now they’re a few sizes too big, cinched at the waist with her fourteen-year-old’s belt.
The Devastation Diet. Maybe she should write a book.
Lauren wipes her daughter’s tears, then, surreptitiously, her own. “Come on, calm down. It’s going to be okay.”
“I want Fred!”
Lauren sighs. “So do I.”
I want a lot of other things, too.
Looks like we’re both going to have to suck it up, baby girl.
“Please, Mommy, please…where is he? Where? Where?”
“Shh, let me think.”
Mentally retracing their steps, Lauren is sure the stuffed animal was with them in the cab from her sister Alyssa’s apartment to Grand Central, because it almost fell out of Sadie’s bag when they climbed out on Lexington. She remembers carrying both Sadie and the bag across the crowded sidewalk, through the wooden doors, along the Graybar passageway. She set Sadie down and gave the bag back to her when they stopped to buy a New York Post and some gum at Hudson News.
“You must have dropped Fred at the station or on the train. Next time we go to the city we can check lost and found,” Lauren promises.
That’s not going to cut it: Sadie opens her mouth and wails.
Now what?
Lauren closes her eyes and lifts her face toward the ceiling.
Where the hell is Fred?
Never mind that, where the hell is Nick?
Why does he get to start a new life and leave Lauren here alone to handle the fallout from the old? Lost toys, lost souls…none of it seems to be his problem anymore. No, he’s moved on to a two-bedroom condo down in White Plains—furnished with “really cool stuff,” according to Lucy. Complete with a “gi-mongous, kick-butt flat-screen,” according to Ryan. On a high floor, “close to God and the moon,” according to Sadie.