Mother May I(101)

Even as I said the words, I knew. I knew I was a liar.





27




Bree only talked about it once.

Not Trey. Marshall and Bree talked about Trey all the time, keeping his memory alive for his children, same way they both told Betsy stories for Cara.

And they talked about Coral, and Lexie, and Kelly Wilkerson, though the more honest of these conversations never happened when the children were around. Bree said to him, over and over, how much she wished she’d obeyed Coral one more time; Coral had told her to call Kelly. Bree believed she should have called Kelly right after her own envelope came. Coral had not explicitly told Bree that she was also sending Kelly a letter, but Bree felt she should have guessed that. And she’d known, they both had, how unstable and angry Kelly was.

Kelly’s envelope had arrived the day after Bree’s. When she saw the pictures, read the letter, she waited until her husband came home for lunch, and then she shot him five times. She put the gun inside a pillow to muffle the shots. While he bled out, she coolly showered, changed, made up her pretty face, and then reloaded.

Marshall believed that Kelly had not meant to survive long after Trey. She’d dressed herself beautifully, the way some suicides did, then looked up Trey on the Internet and driven straight to Atlanta to lie in wait for him in the parking garage outside his job.

In the spring, when she got melancholy, Bree would say, “If only I’d reached out to her. Coral said I should. Coral told me, when you get your letter . . .” A thousand times she fell silent, and then she’d sigh and tell him, “Trey should have apologized to her.” He wouldn’t know if she meant Kelly or Lexie or both. He thought that Kelly and Lexie sometimes became the same person in her head.

So it wasn’t like she stuffed it down. She talked about all that shit: Robert’s kidnapping, Spence’s death, Coral, everything. She’d discussed it endlessly with both Marshall and her therapist. She still did.

But the lamb thing. That? She only said it once.

It was St. Alban’s winter break, right at the end of February. In Georgia it already felt like spring. Bree hated it when the air turned warm each year. Hated the transition that reminded her the anniversary was coming. Every year it felt as if spring came a little earlier, making the warm march to the anniversary stretch out even longer. That was probably true, Marshall thought. The world cooking to death.

The third year she asked Marshall to take the week off, and he had agreed. The weather change shifted the moods of both Bree’s girls as well. They were weepier, more temperamental. They missed their dad more. They had a week off called “winter break,” for all the high was getting close to eighty. He decided that they all needed to opt out of the endless spring.

In Bonaire it felt like summer. Peyton was calmer and A-C was kinder, watching palm trees sway in the breezy brightness. All four of the kids loved the big iguanas who lived by the villa’s private pool. One was out basking near the deep end that afternoon, sunning himself fearlessly as the girls floated nearby, his weird, floppy toes splayed and his chin up.

The girls were tired from scuba, all three drifting on bright floats. Purple, yellow, blue. Trey had been an avid diver. He’d always meant for his kids to learn. Bree was making good on that. Of all of them, Marshall probably loved scuba most, even though with four ladies and five heavy dive bags, he got stuck with most of the gear rinsing.

It was nice to have the option to take up such an expensive sport. To be able to say, Fuck it, the weather changed and we feel sad—let’s go to the Caribbean. Bree had said yes immediately. No thinking. Just, Yes, let’s do that. As if it were a reasonable plan to on the spur of the moment buy seven business-class tickets, rent a five-bedroom villa, pay for diving lessons and equipment.

Marshall had wondered if in another decade or so he wouldn’t blink at an unplanned, unsaved-for vacation.

It was a good problem to have. He was getting used to it. He didn’t really need to work, actually, but God, he loved his job. With Bree he had real backup. She and Cara were thick as thieves. She looked at his girl and she saw Betsy, same as him. There was no reason not to do the thing he loved. So detectives earned a little less money than lead investigators at tier-one law firms. Really not an issue these days.

The girls chatted lazily on their floats. Peyton in the middle, buffering. Two divas under one roof was a lot of divas, and the more Cara came into her mother’s sly and sparkling beauty, the more she held her own with A-C.

He was glad the diving tired them out. The cast list for Chicago, Junior, the high school’s spring show, had landed while they were at the airport. Cara had been cast as Roxie Hart, the part A-C had gone after, while A-C was Velma Kelly, the part Cara wanted most. The girls were juniors, and they’d won the lead roles over quite a few disgruntled seniors. They ought well be damn happy. And they were happy. Mostly. Just there was a lot of side-eye happening on this trip.

That was the downside, he thought. To the money. What they needed, they already had, pretty much on tap. Most of what they wanted, they got. They thought the world was like that. Shocking how fast Cara had come to think the world was like that. He and Bree were working on it.

He sat beside his wife, both of them dangling their feet in the bright blue water. They were holding hands, on and off, but they kept having to let go to stop Robbie from drowning himself. The little rat kept lunging off the pool steps. Whoever was closer would leap down and drag him back. He trusted his water wings too much. He trusted the whole damn world too much.