The Wrong Family(59)

“We all had that hope. Unfortunately, Josalyn was too sick to even seek change.”

Juno, who still had her eyes closed, frowned. She had sought change, though, hadn’t she? In the form of Illuminations for Mental Health, where she’d been assigned a counselor named Winnie Crouch.

“What was your name again?”

“My name is Juno Holland, Mrs. Russel. I met your daughter in Seattle, Washington...before she passed,” Juno lied.

“Yes?” Terry said, a little impatiently.

“I worked with her briefly at Illuminations. I’m sure you know of it?” Juno didn’t wait for Terry to respond and she didn’t need her to. “She was a very good writer. That’s how I came to know of you. She would write stories and poems about you for group session.”

Juno didn’t have the slightest clue as to whether Josalyn even knew the alphabet, or if Terry would call bullshit. She held her breath and was rewarded with Terry’s voice a moment later. “She won a short story competition once...at school...” She sounded wistful. As a therapist, Juno hated to leave that wistfulness untouched, but she wasn’t on the phone to give Terry Russel therapy.

She pushed on.

“I’m sorry to bring up such a painful subject, Mrs. Russel, but something has been nagging at me for some time. Did Josalyn ever mention anything to you about being pregnant?”

There was a long pause on the Russel end, during which time Juno acknowledged a beast of a headache groping along the back of her skull.

“Yes...” Terry said uncertainly. “But she was on drugs. She said a lot of things. She claimed to be pregnant once when she was fourteen, too. We took her to the doctor and he said her hymen was still intact...”

Juno made a slight harrumph in the back of her throat. That was a topic she didn’t care to get into today. It wouldn’t make a lick of difference to Mrs. Terry Russel, who had already decided that her dead daughter was a lying drug addict.

“She mentioned it to her counselor at the time... Winnie Crouch.” Juno imagined the name traveling across the space between them. She found the spot behind her ear and pressed her cool fingertips to it.

“No, Winnie wasn’t her counselor, I know that name. Winnie was her friend. She said so. Winnie was helping her. She distinctly said that name the second to last time I spoke to her. I said well, who names their kid Winnie anyway, and how equipped is she to help you? And then she laughed at me.”

Juno didn’t just get chills, her body started to tremble. So, Winnie had secured Josalyn’s trust enough for the girl to consider her a friend; so much so that she affirmed it to her mother. Her mouth was so dry she had to pry her tongue from her teeth before she could speak again.

“Did she tell you she was pregnant when she called that time?”

“No. I asked why she was calling us if she had this Winnie to help her. She didn’t like that at all. She said terrible things I won’t repeat and hung up on me. The next time I heard from her she was so high she couldn’t string two words together.”

“Do you remember the year she claimed to be pregnant? Not when she was fourteen, but the second time.”

“I don’t understand why you need to know this.”

Juno was losing her; she’d have to act fast.

“Because I think she really was pregnant.”

Terry Russel was breathing heavily on the other end of the line, probably deciding whether or not Juno was crazy or credible.

“April 2007,” she said finally. “She called asking for money. She was living in Oregon and said she was eight weeks pregnant and wanted to get back to Seattle.”

“And then did you ever hear from her again? Or hear about a baby being born?”

Terry was quiet, and when she spoke again, there was a different tone, one that didn’t sound quite as sure of itself.

“Yes. She called after she supposedly had it. I couldn’t hear a baby in the background, though. So I asked her where the baby was.”

“What did she say?” Juno asked, growing impatient.

“She said that Winnie had stolen him.”

Juno felt herself get hot all over. For a moment her eyes closed and her head lolled back.

I need a minute, she thought, feeling woozy. But she didn’t have one; Terry was waiting for her to say something on the other end of the line. She could see the reflection of her own face in Winnie’s framed photographs across from her. A deep groove cut down the center of her forehead. It had been there since she was twenty-five. Kregger called it her Mariana Trench. Try to come at this from Terry’s angle, she told herself.

She remembered the obituary: “Died unexpectedly.” It wasn’t a lie, just a cover-up. Terry was disappointed in the product she’d put out into the world and hardened her heart against her own flesh and blood. So did Juno really want to alert her to the possibility of a grandson? Well—yes, because if Sam was Josalyn’s, telling Terry was the right thing to do. Sam was the one Juno cared about, and Sam deserved to know his real family.

“What?” Juno said.

“She was a very disturbed young woman. She thought a lot of things,” Terry replied.

“I raised two children myself,” Juno said. “You get what you get, and you try to help them as much as you can. They take the help or they don’t.”