Don't Look for Me(46)

Staying close to the building but out of the lights, she listened until she saw them move from the side of the building into the parking lot. She let them get ahead, then followed them, weaving through the rows of cars so she was out of sight. The laughter stopped. She heard the click of a car unlocking, then she saw headlights. Then a door opening, closing. She hurried now to see the row where the lights were coming from. She walked there slowly, quietly. The lights went off. The car was not leaving.

She got to the row and began to move along the back of each car, looking inside, listening for sound.

She walked until she heard them. The unmistakable sound of a man moaning. It was soft, coming through a small crack in the window. She slid to the far side of the adjacent car and looked through the windows. It was too dark to see, until a car rolled past on the other side, briefly shining a light through the windshields of each car in her row. It was quick, but unmistakable—Chief Watkins sitting in the driver’s seat. Eyes closed. Face contorted with anticipation, the melding together of pleasure and frustration as the woman leaned over him from the passenger side, her head moving up and down. The light was gone, but not the sound.

Nic walked around the car that was shielding her view. She could see that Watkins’s car was gray, but it was not until she had a clear view that she saw the make. A charcoal-gray pickup truck. Chief Watkins. The woman.

She squatted down behind the truck, heart pounding now.

Think.

The glass was intact on both taillights, but she couldn’t tell if the bulbs were out. She would have to wait until he turned the ignition.

Another laugh. The smell of a cigarette from the window. Something about fifty bucks and that’s pretty steep and then, you should have asked before, asshole.

A door opening, closing. The woman stumbling away.

Then Watkins in a cruel, mocking voice. Cheap whore.

And then the ignition. The lights. Both of them working. Still, it had been two weeks.

She hurried back to the other side of the adjacent car, and managed to snap a photo with her phone as Chief Watkins drove away.





19


Day fourteen





Mick does not come home. This is the first time he has not been home all day and now, apparently, all evening.

He must be comfortable with me, with the way I am with Alice. And, of course, he is always watching.

But then I think that he does not want to be here. That he is still hunting for whatever he lost when the woman who lived here before me died.

“I’m hungry,” Alice says. She reaches her arm through the bars and I take her hand and press it to my lips.

“I know, sweetheart. Do you want to tell me what there is in the kitchen and I can teach you how to make something?”

She hangs her head, chin to chest, but then raises her narrowed eyes so I can still see them. Her lips disappear under her teeth and her nose scrunches. I call this expression of hers Angry Face. I don’t say this out loud, but I make a note of it, and also what makes it come, and what makes it leave.

“I don’t have any better ideas, but if you do I will try to help you with them,” I say.

Now she crosses her arms and huffs. I try not to laugh, but it is amusing. I haven’t been amused for a very long time. Maybe even for years. There is a new power stirring inside me that has given this impulse of being amused some latitude. Some room to breathe.

“Did he tell you what to do in case of an emergency?” I ask now. “For example, if you got sick, or if there was a fire? Is there a way to reach him? I can help you study and play with you from inside my room, but that’s about it,” I say.

She uncrosses her arms. Angry Face softens, becomes whimsical, mischievous. She tilts her head and pushes one shoulder, always the right one, a little ahead of her chest. This is Coy Face. She knows a secret and she wants me to get it out of her.

Nicole had this face by the time she was four. Annie didn’t have it until she was six or seven, and even then it was more playful than precocious. Evan never had it. My only boy, but I could read him like a book.

I have had time to think these past fourteen days, and not just about the man and Alice and my plan. I think about why I am here, and that perhaps I have finally been sentenced for my crime. I am finally being punished. This has done something to me, shifted my insides.

With this shift has come a reversal of how I had come to see my own daughters. Annie the good girl. Nicole the bad girl. We are not supposed to do that. Parents. Good parents. But I have stopped pretending that I am one. I hate the person Nicole has become these past few years. If I met her on the street, I would thank God she was not my child. I would judge her parents with contempt. Who would allow such behavior? Who would permit their grown child to behave this way?

But now I can see that it was Annie who was also precocious, strong-willed. She could be defiant to her sister when I left her in charge. And she resented her brother. She resented them both, how they pulled her, kicking and screaming, from her pedestal as the baby, wanting her to grow up and be less of a bother. She had managed to become our sole focus. Our squeaky wheel. Babies always need more attention.

The memories keep crossing the line, and the pain they carry lessens each time. Even now, as I speak to Alice about helping her cook, I see Nicole standing on a stool, staring into a bowl of flour and sugar, mixing them together with a big wooden spoon that can barely fit in her hand.