My Lovely Wife(51)

Millicent raised her eyebrows, said nothing.

“If I lie and tell them their grandparents were wonderful, they’ll hate me if they find out the truth, right?”

“Probably.”

“But they might hate me anyway.”

“For a while,” she said. “I think all kids go through a stage where everything will be our fault.”

“How long does it last?”

She shrugs. “Twenty years?”

“I hope things are pretty quiet during that time.”

I smiled. She smiled.

I could tell them my parents abused me. Mentally. Physically. Even sexually. I could say they beat me, tied me up, burned me with cigarette butts, and made me walk to school and back uphill both ways. They did not. I grew up in a nice home in a nice area, and no one touched me the wrong way. My parents were refined, polite people, who could recite manners in their sleep.

They were also horrible, cold people, who should not have become parents. They should have been smart enough to know a baby couldn’t fix anything.

The final straw came when I went overseas. When I told them I wanted to take a break from college and travel, they gave me some money. I bought an open-ended ticket and a large backpack, and drank a few dozen shots. Andy and two other friends decided to join me, so we made a haphazard plan and set a date. I did not tell them, or tell anyone, that I was afraid.

A few hours before the flight, I was still packing, still trying to decide which T-shirts to bring or if I needed a heavy jacket. Excited, yes. I was dying to get out of Hidden Oaks. Dying to get away from my childhood bedroom, where the walls were painted to look like I was in the sky, surrounded by stars. I was tired of dreaming about what else was out there, and wanted to see it for myself.

I also had no idea what would happen. I had already failed at tennis, then again at getting into a good college. Middle-of-the-road tennis player, middle-of-the-road grades. What would happen if I was middle-of-the-road while on the road? No idea. But it had to be better than feeling like I should never have been born.

I’d hoped I would never return and never see those sky-painted walls again.

My parents did not drive me to the airport. A cab picked me up, because I was too embarrassed to ask for a ride from my friends and their parents. It was a Wednesday morning, my flight was early, and dawn had just started to break. My mother with her coffee cup, my father already dressed—all of us stood in the foyer, on the shiny tile, surrounded by mirrors. The vase on the center table was filled with orange chrysanthemums. The rising sun hit the crystal chandelier above us, making a rainbow on the stairway.

The cab honked. My mother kissed me on the cheek. My father shook my hand.

“Dad, I want—”

“Good luck,” he said.

I could not remember what I was going to say, so I left. It was the last time I saw them.



* * *



? ? ?

In the end, I didn’t lie to the kids. I said their grandparents died in a freak car accident and had been gone for many years.

I did not tell them everything, but it was close. That was because of Millicent. Together, we decided how much to say. To make it as official as possible, we called a family meeting. Rory and Jenna were so young. Maybe it wasn’t fair, but we did it anyway.

We sat in the living room. Jenna was already in her yellow pajamas with the balloons all over them. She loved balloons, and Rory loved to pop them. Jenna’s dark hair was cut to the chin, and she had bangs straight across her forehead. Her dark eyes peeked out from under them.

Rory was wearing a blue T-shirt and sweatpants. When he’d turned seven, he had declared himself too old for pajamas. Millicent and I decided we could live with that, and she stopped buying them.

It was hard to look at their tiny, trusting faces and tell them that sometimes people are better off not having kids.

“Not everyone should be a parent,” I said. “Just like not everyone is nice.”

Jenna was the first to speak. “I already know about strangers.”

“Not everyone in your family is nice. Or was nice.”

Scrunched-up faces. Confusion.

I spoke for ten minutes. That was all it took to tell my children their grandparents were not good parents.

The irony of what I had done hit me years later, after Holly and the others. Someday, Rory and Jenna might have a talk with their kids and say the same thing about Millicent and me.





Thirty-five




I had assumed the DNA testing on the lock of Naomi’s hair would take longer than a week. Perhaps because it was always so fast on TV, I figured that their timing must be fake. That real DNA testing must take months. And apparently it does, but not for the preliminary tests. And not when the police are trying to find a woman who may still be alive.

The tests indicate there is more than a 99 percent chance the hair belongs to Naomi.

Kekona is the one who tells me all of this. Our regular tennis lesson becomes a class in forensics, because her new hobby is true-crime TV and documentaries. Missing and/or dead women are common on these shows.

“Always young, beautiful, and basically innocent,” she says, ticking off the qualities one by one. She has a cup of coffee with her, and I do not think it is her first. “Although occasionally they have a case about a prostitute, as a cautionary tale.”