Night Road(117)

The sight of her aunt’s face was like a tonic. Lexi felt a loosening in her chest. For the first time in hours, she smiled. She wasn’t as alone as she’d thought. “Hey, Aunt Eva,” she said, scooting forward.

“She’s here, Barbara!” Eva’s face broke into a bright smile. “Come look! This is my Lexi.”

My Lexi.

A heavyset woman with a head of steel gray curls bent at the waist and peered into the camera, smiling. “Hello, Alexa. My sister never stops talking about you.”

“Hey, Barbara,” Lexi said softly, overcome with emotion.

Barbara’s face moved out of view and Eva scooted closer to her computer. She looked different, older; her cheeks were deeply tanned and lined and her hair had gone completely white. “So, tell me everything, Lexi.”

Scot left the room and shut the door behind him.

“I met Gracie,” Lexi said. It was the first thing that came to mind.

“How is she?”

“Sad. Beautiful. Lonely.”

“Oh. That must be hard to see.”

“It’s all hard, Aunt Eva. I didn’t want to come here, because I knew it would be hard, but now I’m here and everything is a mess.”

“I suppose you’ve seen your young man?”

“Yeah.”

“And?”

Lexi shrugged. “It’s been a long time.”

“You look tired, Lexi.”

“It’s been a bad day. It’s going to be hard for me to get a job and hard to afford a place to live. Impossible, maybe.”

“You just got out, Lexi. Maybe you need to come home and get taken care of. Barb and me got a hide-a-bed just waiting for you. You could get a job down here and save up your money. Floyd at the Tilt-a-Curl says he’d be happy to hire you to answer phones and clean up. Without rent to pay, you’ll have a nice little nest egg in no time.”

Home.

Lexi had to admit, the ease of it appealed to her. She needed to be wanted somewhere. “But how can I leave Grace again? She’ll never forgive me.”

“You know how hard it can be on a kid to have a momma who isn’t ready. Take some time for yourself. Get strong and happy and then go back to your daughter. You go back when you’ve got your life together. I think that’s the responsible thing to do.”

“The responsible thing,” Lexi repeated, hating the idea, even as she recognized the truth of it. She would only confuse Grace now. How could she be a mother when her own life was in shambles? Grace deserved better; she deserved stability. Lexi knew about moms who were unreliable. It didn’t make a child feel safe.

“Alexa?”

She smiled as brightly as she could. She didn’t want to talk about this anymore. It was breaking her heart. “So, what’s up with you? Did you ever take those knitting classes?”

“Lord, yes,” Eva laughed. “Barbara and me got enough blankets to fill a motel. When you come down here…”

*

The view from the forty-second floor was dreary on this wet June day. The Space Needle hovered to her right, a black-and-white disc suspended against a dull gray sky.

Jude stood at the window, seeing her ghostly reflection in the glass. She was trying to stand still, appear calm, but it wasn’t working. She felt jittery and uncomfortable in her own skin, as if she’d drunk ten cups of coffee on an empty stomach. She chewed on her thumbnail and went back to pacing. Panic lurked just outside her field of vision; she felt it stalking her, a shadow in the corner, waiting to pounce. But she couldn’t pinpoint the source of her fear. She just knew that she was afraid, that she’d been afraid ever since she’d read that letter of Lexi’s.

“I’m proud of you, Jude,” Harriet said in that strangely even voice of hers. “It took a lot of courage to face Lexi again.”

“I didn’t face her. In fact I tried not to look at her.”

“But you did look at her, didn’t you?”

Jude nodded, gnawing on her thumbnail now, tapping her foot.

“What did you see?”

“I saw the girl who killed my daughter … and my granddaughter’s mother and my son’s first love. And … a girl I used to care about.” Jude scratched nervously at the side of her face. Her skin was crawling suddenly. “What’s wrong with me, Dr. Bloom? I feel like I’m going crazy.”

“Not crazy. I think maybe you’re ready to try a Compassionate Friends meeting. There’s one today, you know. At two.”

“That talk again?” Jude sighed and sat down, tapping her foot, fisting and unfisting her hands. “I am not going to go sit in a meeting with a bunch of other grieving parents. Should I talk about Mia? Will that bring her back?”

“In a way.”

“Spoken like a person who hasn’t lost a child. No, thanks.”

“The only way to get clos—”

“So help me, God, if you say closure, I’ll walk out. There’s no closure. That’s just a bunch of claptrap. I still can’t listen to music—any music. I still cry almost every time I shower. Sometimes I scream in the car. I talk to my daughter and she can’t hear me. None of that goes away.”

“You used to say that you felt gray.”

“I said I live in the gray. A thick ashy fog.”