The Homewreckers(73)

“About your mom?”

“Yeah. He knew all about that lady finding Mom’s wallet in the house out on Tybee. And he said some cop had been leaving messages. He was really pissed about that.”

“Why should he be pissed at you?” Mak asked.

“He doesn’t need a reason. He just is. He wanted to know if I’d talked to you. Of course, I lied and told him I hadn’t.”

“Why lie to him?”

“Habit. I’ve been lying to my dad for so long, I guess it’s just reflex. Me and him have been lying to each other, probably since the night Mom went away.”

Makarowicz reached over and helped himself to a handful of popcorn from the bag sitting between them. “Maybe it’s time for an honest discussion about that night?”

“Now you sound like my shrink,” she said.

“Cops sort of are like shrinks. Sometimes,” Mak said.

Emma was watching the pigeons. There were eight or nine of them, nervously pecking at the asphalt walkway where the dregs of the popcorn had been. She flung a handful of popcorn at them, and they excitedly swarmed in on it.

“I asked my dad what happened. The night she left. Of course, he played dumb and told me he didn’t know. That it was some big mystery.” She waved her hands in a circle. “Woo-woo. Nobody knows anything. But I called him out. Finally. I fucking called his ass out.”

She dusted her hands on the dress, leaving a greasy streak of butter on the fabric. She crossed her legs, and he noticed a tattoo on the inside of her calf that he hadn’t noticed on their last interview. A large, jagged lightning bolt. Probably a Harry Potter thing, he thought.

Emma followed his eyes and pointed to the tattoo. “You like it?”

“Truthfully, I’m not much of a tattoo aficionado. But yeah.”

She traced the ink with a fingertip. “You know, it was storming bad that night. Real bad. Lightning and thunder.”

“The night she left? You can remember that?”

“Hell yeah, I remember. He didn’t think I could,” she said, her voice dripping with scorn. “But I did. About a year ago.”

“Go on.”

“All my life, I’ve been scared of lightning. Like, pee-the-bed terrified. This one time, when I was about ten, there was one of those bad summer storms. Lightning striking all around. I got hysterical. Hid in the bathtub, shaking and crying. Rhonda finally gave me one of her pills, to get me to shut up and calm down. That was the first time I had a Xanax.”

Emma’s eyes got a faraway look. “It was pretty magical. Like I was just floating in that bathtub, and nothing could touch me. Or hurt me.” She looked up at Makarowicz, her blue eyes narrowed. “Pretty fucked up, huh? Your dad’s girlfriend gives you a Xanax at ten?”

“Not exactly model parenting behavior,” Mak allowed.

“My whole life, I never knew why I was afraid of lightning. Why it messed me up so bad.”

She was watching the pigeons again. The largest of the flock, one with a paler coloration, aggressively pecked the smaller birds until they skittered away, or flew off.

Emma picked up a pebble and flung it at the bird. “Cut it out. Stop picking on them.” The pigeon edged away but didn’t leave. She picked up another pebble and threw it closer and the bird flew off.

“You were telling me why lightning scared you so much,” Mak prompted.

“Yeah. I never knew why. Then, my first time in rehab, there was a bad storm, and I kinda went nuts. The counselor who lived in my pod—that’s what they called our dorms—after I finally calmed down, she suggested I talk to my therapist about it. Why not, right? It gets boring talking about why you want to do drugs and why you want to harm yourself and why you hate your family all the time.”

“And what did your therapist say?”

Emma rubbed the lightning bolt on her calf. “She asked me to talk about the first time I could remember being afraid. I told her about the bathtub thing, and she said, well, that’s not the first time you freaked out, right?”

“Is that when you remembered that it was storming the night your mom went away? But you were only three years old at the time, right?”

“I was four, but no.”

Makarowicz stared at her. “Back up. You weren’t three when your mom disappeared?”

“I was definitely four,” Emma said.

“All the old newspaper accounts I read gave your age as three,” Mak said slowly. “Come to think of it, the initial police reports said the same thing.”

“That’s probably what my dad told them. Jesus! What kind of father doesn’t even know how old his only kid is?”

“Maybe the kind who doesn’t want the cops to question that kid,” Mak said. “Who wants people to believe the kid is too young to remember or understand what happened the night her mother disappeared.”

Emma crossed and recrossed her legs again. “For a long time, I didn’t remember. My therapist says it’s called infantile amnesia. Because little kids’ brains aren’t physically developed enough to retain memories.”

“That sounds about right,” Mak said. “Emma, what do you remember about the night your mom went away?”

Her fingertips strayed to her right calf, picking at the scabbed-over tattoo. “There was a bad storm. The lightning woke me up. Usually, when that happened, my mom would come into my room and lay down on the bed with me. She’d hold me and sort of sing, and then I’d fall back asleep. But that night, she didn’t come. So I went into their room. But nobody was there.”