Scared To Death (Live to Tell #2)(19)
“Where?” Brett is asking. “Where is it?”
“I think it just fell out of the car.” She looks in at Renny. Beside her booster seat, the tote bag is open. Several Barbies and outfits are strewn across the backseat.
Could Spider-Man have been in the bag, too?
“Hang on, Brett.” She leans into the car, showing Renny the toy in her hand. “Honey, was this in with the Barbies?”
Renny glances up and frowns. “That’s for boys.”
“No, I know, but…I’m just wondering if it was in your tote bag.”
“Why?”
“I think it was. Was it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you see it when you took out your dolls?”
“I didn’t take them out. The bag tipped over. They fell out. I told you I don’t want to play with them.”
“No, I know, I just—”
“Elsa,” Brett says on the phone, “you need to talk to me. I still don’t know what’s going on. You found Spider-Man, and what?”
She turns back to the gas pump, cradling the phone between her ear and shoulder. In a whisper, she tells Brett what she found beneath Renny’s bedroom window.
The broken branch…the footprint…and now Spider-Man?
She half expects him to say she must have been imagining things, but he doesn’t.
“Stay where you are. Just pull over and don’t move. Lock the doors, stay in the car. I’m on my way.”
“What are we going to do?”
There’s a pause.
Then Brett, who hours earlier promised Elsa that everything was fine, says in a tone laced with uncertainty, “I have no idea.”
Stepping into the storage unit in the basement of her building, Marin flips on the overhead light and sucks in a lungful of musty air.
This is not going to be fun.
But then, what is anymore?
Maybe she should save the task for another day, when she’s feeling more…
What, more ready to deal with the past?
And that will be when?
The truth is, she’s never going to feel ready, but it makes sense to tackle this today. There’s certainly nowhere to hide upstairs in the apartment. One cleaning lady is in Marin’s bedroom, the other in the den, and Annie is in the kitchen engaging in her new favorite hobby: baking.
Marin doesn’t have the heart to point out that her younger daughter really should lay off the sweets, having transformed from lithe to chubby amid the upheaval of the past year. It seems cruel to take away something she enjoys so much, especially when she’s been deprived of so many other things.
Then again, it’s probably even crueler to subject her to the teasing and scrutiny that accompanies being an overweight adolescent—particularly from her older sister.
At least Caroline went out somewhere for the time being. She’s probably off brooding in the park, or window-shopping on Madison.
Marin had considered forcing herself to do the same, figuring she can’t stay in seclusion forever, especially now that summer is here and the kids are home.
But if she went out, she’d have to make herself presentable, because you don’t walk around the Upper East Side in this state: worn jeans and sneakers, makeup-free, hair pulled back in a coated rubber band. Unless, of course, you’re a preschooler. Or a supermodel.
She doesn’t have the energy to get all fixed up, and she’s certainly not in the mood for prying gazes from those who might recognize her.
Might as well stay here and get this over with. Clutching a box of garbage bags, she surveys the room. Closest to the door are the boxes she hauled down here yesterday, filled with framed photos and the contents of Garvey’s office.
Beyond are stacks and stacks of plastic tubs, accumulated over the lifetime of the Quinn marriage. The contents of each are neatly identified with a strip of masking tape and a Sharpie-scrawled label: “Letters and Cards,” “Photos,” “Press Clippings”…
Tangible mementos of a bygone era. These days, so many of those relics are stored only in cyberspace. All it would take is the click of a delete button, and whoosh! It would be as if they never existed at all.
Too bad you can’t do that with this stuff.
Or with Garvey.
She can’t help but smirk at the thought of deleting Garvey from her life with the press of a button. There’s something to be said for black humor.
Okay, so, where to begin?
Opening the lid of the nearest container, Marin finds it filled with DVDs. Ah, store-bought and impersonal: a good place to start. This should be painless.
She glances over the titles: The Sixth Sense, Saving Private Ryan, The Big Lebowski…
When the girls were little, she and Garvey would put them to bed early on Saturday nights and curl up on the couch to watch movies together.
So much for impersonal.
She has to wipe her eyes on her sleeve a few times as she starts sorting through the DVDs. The goal is to create a pile of keepers and throw away the rest. But after a few minutes, the garbage bag remains empty; she can’t find anything she’s willing to part with. Maybe the memories here are just too fresh. She dumps the entire tear-splotched pile back into the tub and replaces the lid.
For a moment, she just stands there with her eyes closed, longing to go back upstairs and crawl into her bed—and the orange prescription bottle in her nightstand.