The Things We Keep(85)

I shake my head. This, I know, is not right. “I’m living at a huge place filled with people that feels like a shopping mall. Jack is there all the time. And I want to go home.”

“Home where?” the woman asks. “To the residential care facility?”

I blink.

“Home where, Anna?” she asks again.

“To my … place.” It is beyond frustrating that I can’t remember where home is. Here I am, being given the opportunity to say what I want, and I can’t f*cking remember. “Jack knows.” I jab a thumb at Jack, but I don’t look at him. The sight of him is enough to make me angry.

“Rosalind House,” he mutters. Even his mutter sounds irritated. I get the feeling he is as angry at me as I am at him.

“Rosalind House,” the woman repeats. “Is that home?”

Rosalind House. I wait for a bell to ding or something to happen in my brain to tell me that, yes, Rosalind House is home. Is that home? I wait some more. Still no ding.

“I don’t know,” I admit.

“It doesn’t matter, anyway,” Jack says. “I can’t take her back there. Not after what happened.”

The woman takes the square things off her eyes and sighs. “Have you discussed … the other thing?” she asks Jack. “Does she have any memory of it?”

“I have no idea,” Jack says. “As I told you, she hasn’t said a word since she came back to live with us.”

“And the guy, the … father … has she seen him?”

“No. Of course not.”

The woman nods and is quiet for quite some time. Her expression is still—like she’s worried or concentrating. I can’t really tell which. “Can I be frank?”

“I wish you would,” Jack says.

“I tend to share your worries about Anna’s quick regression. She’s had a trauma, so some regression is to be expected, but even to look at, she seems severely depressed. I can’t help but wonder if she’s missing her home. And, perhaps, missing this friend of hers.”

Jack makes a noise and shakes his head.

“You have her best interests in mind, I know that. What happened … all of it … must have given you quite the fright. But … if Anna were my sister … and she seemed happy there … I’d be trying to think of a scenario where I could get her there again.”

“You’re not serious? Take her back to a place where she was impregnated, then tried to kill herself?”

“She doesn’t have a lot of time left, Jack. A year, if that. If that’s where she’ll be happiest, why not?”

“Because it isn’t safe!”

The woman nods. “Obviously her safety is paramount, and you’d need to come to some sort of arrangement with the center to ensure that nothing like that would ever happen again. But, Jack, it’s obviously what she wants.”

He looks at me. “Is this what you want, Anna?”

“Yes,” I say, and this time, it’s not just something I’m going along with. “I want to go home.”





47

Eve

They say time gives perspective, and in a way it does. Christmas goes by. Clem and I spend it with Mother and Dad at their apartment. It’s different from past holidays—sadder, because of the empty space where Richard should have been—but it was surprisingly nice, all of us tucked up in one little room, eating and drinking and being together. Clem didn’t even seem to notice that she had only a few gifts. I’d been living paycheck to paycheck while working at Rosalind House, and now I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do. A lot of places were closed for the Christmas break, so I was banking on finding a job in the New Year. In the meantime, Mother and Dad wrote me a modest check for a Christmas present, which I hoped would tide me over.

Angus and I stay in touch, mostly via text message. He understands that Clem is my focus. Sometimes after she’s asleep, I lie on the couch and just talk to him on the phone. No matter what Clem is going through, I don’t think she would mind us talking. Mother and Dad are wonderful, offering to cook, clean, look after Clem. I accept all offers, with the exception of Clem. The best thing to come out of my forced sabbatical is time with her.

I withdrew her from school before Andrea could launch an investigation, and the timing allowed us to have Christmas break and then start her new school afresh in the New Year. At the news she was leaving Legs, she’d kept it together quite well. In fact, when I told her we were going to have some time at home together, just the two of us, she actually seemed happy.

“Why did Daddy have to be a bad man?” she asks on New Year’s morning, when I’m still yawning and stretching awake. Outside, fresh snow pats down for the third day in a row. We’d stayed up late to see in the New Year, watching movies and eating popcorn. Judging from the divots in my back, a few kernels still roam between the sheets.

“Sometimes I really hate him,” she says.

I think of my call to Dr. Felder. This is it, I realize. She’s having her moment. I roll to my side, then sit up. “Sometimes I hate him, too.”

“You do?”

“I do. Sometimes I want to slap his face and scream at him, and other times I want to hug him and tell him how much I miss him.”