Don't Look for Me(50)

But wait—Nic pictured that morning with Edith Moore and Reyes. In her car, looking across the road to where she said she saw her mother. Rain coming down in sheets. That’s how she’d described it. Maybe she’d seen the color of the purse, but the letters? Could she really have seen the letters from that far away, through the rain, at night? And yet she knew about them.

She knew, or someone had told her—someone else who knew about her mother’s purse.

And what did that have to do with Abel Hill Lane?

Her father said they’d stopped searching when they reached that fence.

Maybe she should just get a drink. Maybe get a few. Calm her nerves. Settle her mind.

But she couldn’t stop.

She typed in Hastings and then history.

And then she started to read.





21


Day fourteen





There is antifreeze in the cupboard. But this is not all that I assess in the kitchen with Alice. Alice and her Happy Face.

I assess many, many things. Thoughts and emotions, but mostly instincts which, as before in the woods, require the closest scrutiny.

Alice has unlocked the grate. She has set me free and it is a gift I cannot squander.

I could run for the front door, to my tools in the woods. But it’s dark and cold and I don’t know where Mick is. He could be outside in his truck, watching the camera feeds. He could be five minutes away. Ten minutes away. Days of work would be undone.

I could take this child hostage. Put a knife to her neck right in front of the camera. It is not beneath me. It is not out of my capabilities, and I don’t allow myself to think about the implications. It’s nothing personal, Alice.

There are other things, worse things. But nothing gets me the time I need to get through that fence.

I go back to what I have found here—to the antifreeze in the cupboard. I know about this from my other life when I was a science teacher. When I was a good mother. When John and I were still in love. Before we had a child that died. A child I killed.

Before life started to close its hands around my throat.

We finish eating and I clean the dishes and put a kettle of water on the stove.

“We should go to bed,” Alice says.

“Yes,” I agree. “You go ahead. I am going to make a cup of tea to bring with me.”

Alice leaves and I take a teacup from a cupboard. I bring the cup to the cupboard under the sink and pour in the antifreeze. Dolly cannot see the sink.

We go to our bedrooms. She gets ready for bed. I get ready for bed. I change in the bathroom with the door open. I take my time, though I fear it is futile.

Alice comes now to lock the grate. I don’t resist. But then she changes her mind.

“Can I sleep with you tonight?” she asks.

Of course you can, sweetheart.

We close the grate but do not lock it. The key remains in the hole.

“What about your tea?” she asks. Nothing gets past her.

Alice snuggles up beside me.

“I would rather sleep now,” I whisper.

The heat from her body, her breath, her heart beating—none of it bothers me tonight. None of it pulls from my gut the feeling of my lost child, my precious, precocious Annie. None of it stirs the longing, or the guilt, or the redemption that has begun to appear.

Tonight, Alice and I are one. I absorb her into me while I lay awake, making assessments. Contemplating my instincts.

The grate is still open, and with it, my options.

It is a different kind of prison now that I know Dolly is watching me. Before I knew about Dolly I felt the freedom to release my face. To have my own Angry Face or Coy Face or Sad Face. There was freedom to pound my fists into the pillows, to cry, to hold myself and rock myself to a place of calm, like a mother holding her child.

That freedom is now gone, and the open grate does nothing to mitigate this other type of insidious confinement. I have done things in the line of the camera that should be the cause of humiliation. He has seen me naked, changing into the clothes that he slides through the panel. He has seen me naked and unaware and still, this has not kept him here with us. He still longs for more. I think about my old friends and our battle to hold on to youth. But being a size four can’t make you twenty-five. Age is about maturity and knowledge and it seeps out in the way we move and carry ourselves. Here is the proof. I have skinny legs and blond hair and this man has seen all of me. Still, he longs for something more. Something he lost. And knowing this has caused me to reassess. I decide to move on and think about my instincts. Make a new plan.

Alice is also slow to drift off and she rambles now. I want to make all kinds of faces but I hold my expression steady. Pleasant. For Dolly to see.

Alice talks about her first mommy, so I chase away my thoughts to concentrate on hers. I wonder if she is beginning to feel things for me that she felt for her. It’s been too long since she’s had anyone to have these feelings for.

“She smelled good,” Alice says, pressing her nose into the nape of my neck, insinuating that I do not smell good. Maybe I do smell bad to her by comparison, but I am stuck with the cheap body wash that Mick slid through the panel.

“She used to sing to me,” Alice says now. Her voice is soft, dreamlike. I decide not to sing to her because that might upset her, although I used to sing to my babies when they still slept in my arms. I could see my voice reach deep inside them, settle their nerves. Mine was the voice they heard as I carried them inside me. It is primal, the way the body reacts to the voice of the mother.