My Last Innocent Year(66)

“Yes. They’re there.” He rested his head in his hands, as if it had become too heavy for his neck, and for a brief moment, I felt sorry for him. But then I remembered Igraine and the smell of her hair and the sound of her cries at the party when Roxanne pulled her away from her mother, and I didn’t feel sorry for him anymore.

“What happened?”

Connelly was rocking his head back and forth. The gesture sickened me. “What happened?” I said again.

“Tom called me.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. Two weeks ago?”

“Two weeks?”

He looked at me. “Isabel, please.” He took a breath. “He needed money. Joanna was acting crazy. He said she was going to sue him for full custody. She was going to say he abused the little girl.”

“Did he?” I asked, but I didn’t want to know. Connelly didn’t answer. “What did you do?”

“I told him he could go to my cabin for a few days, until he figured things out. And that’s where he is. As far as I know.”

“We have to tell Joanna.”

“No.” He grabbed me by the wrists. “Isabel, no. They’re fine. The girl is fine.”

“Igraine. Her name is Igraine.”

“Igraine is fine,” he whispered.

“But Joanna needs to know where she is! She’s her mother.”

“Goddamnit, Isabel! We can’t tell Joanna!” His eyes were crazed. He smelled like sweat and something I didn’t recognize. “Tom knows he messed up. He just needs a little more time and he will bring her home. I promise.” He was still holding my wrists. I looked down at the fingers that had probed every part of me. I’d seen every inch of this man, and yet I didn’t know him at all.

“Isabel, please. Promise you won’t say anything.” He put his hands on my face, pressed his knuckles against my cheekbones. He knew my architecture, my soft spots. He knew the places I would buckle.

“Can he just let Joanna know where he is?” I said as he reached a hand under my shirt. “Can you ask him to do that?”

“Yes,” he said. He grazed my nipple with his hand, kissed me along the hairline. “I will. It will be all right. I promise.”

What was a promise anyway? Just a string of words. I knew as well as anyone they didn’t always mean something.

I watched the shadows move across the ceiling as he came inside me, crying out the way he couldn’t when we were in his office. I realized I hadn’t asked him about Elizabeth, but it didn’t matter anymore. I understood well enough what had happened, understood too why he had asked me, back at the beginning of things, to be clear about what I wanted, to articulate my desires. So there are no misunderstandings, he’d said. Because the stakes are too high. He had seen the end embedded in the beginning in a way I hadn’t. It was how adults behaved, I knew now, and I would never again not see the world in the same way.

After he fell asleep, I went into the bathroom and fished the amber earring out of the soap dish. I imagined it looked nice on Roxanne, golden honey against her pale skin. Over the years, I’d come to recognize what people would miss and what they wouldn’t. This earring felt like exactly the sort of thing she would, its abandoned twin forever reminding her of what she had lost. I squeezed it tight in my still-tender palm, then tucked it in the pocket of my shorts. Before I left, I placed the photograph facedown on the sink. The road home felt longer in the dark.





20





SUNDAY. I spent the whole day in bed, waking only when Kelsey and Debra came in. “Rough night?” Debra asked. Kelsey placed a cool hand on my forehead. My head hurt, my hands stung, and my knees ached, but there wasn’t anything wrong with me. Not anything they could fix.

The midday sun leaked through the blinds, painting stripes across the wall. The phone rang: Debra’s mother, Jason checking in, then two hang-ups, which I imagined were Andy wanting to know if I’d spoken to Connelly.

Before he fell asleep, Connelly had made me swear, again and again, that I wouldn’t tell anyone what I knew about Tom and the cabin.

“So you’re saying we should do nothing?” I said.

“We aren’t doing nothing. We’re giving Tom a chance to do the right thing. And he will, believe me.”

After wrestling with my pillow all afternoon, I dragged myself to the bathroom. The clock on the bell tower rang five times as I peeled back the Band-Aids on my knees; bruises were starting to form, like continents under the skin. The phone rang again, and I thought about picking up and telling Andy everything. Or maybe I would call Joanna, call the police. Or maybe I would do nothing. I closed my eyes and let the feel of nothing sink in. It felt good. Nothing felt good.

A memory came to me then, clear as a mountain lake. It always happened this way; just when I thought I’d run through every memory I had of my mother, a new one would rise to the surface like sea-foam.

“That’s the great thing about knitting,” she said. She had her hair in a loose knot at the nape of her neck. “You can always start over.”

The great thing? I’d thought. I’d been working on the sweater for weeks, a complicated cable pattern, increases, decreases, yarn overs. Somewhere along the way, something had gone wrong and I couldn’t find my way out.