At that moment, Tricia burst through the chapel’s aged oak doors, letting in a frigid gust. I turned around. She was a haggard, wraithlike woman with sunken cheeks and glazed eyes wearing a sable coat, veiled black pillbox hat, and a tasteful black mourning dress. Seeing me, she rushed down the aisle. A man rose up from a nearby pew to assist her, but Tricia shoved him aside. Despite her expensive clothes, she looked like someone you might meet in a halfway house. Or, if she was younger, someone messed up enough to be your cellmate in a juvenile detention facility—which is to say she looked like the woman I might’ve remained had Jimmy never entered my life.
Tricia wrapped her arms around me. I feared she was going to wrestle me to the ground and smash my face into the stone floor, but she convulsed in tears on my shoulder. Her hands were freezing cold. She must have stood outside the chapel for a half hour, debating whether to come in. She was a little girl crying maniacally. I ran my hand though her hair, trying to console her. Her hair was greasy, and my hand got caught in its tangles. The minister, cane in hand, hobbled down from the pulpit and put his hand on Tricia’s shoulder, trying to calm her. I worried Tricia would shove him aside, just as she did to that other man. Others gathered around us, trying to tell Tricia that everything was going to be all right.
“It’s not going to be all right,” Tricia said. Her voice had a dreamlike, medicated quality. She leaned into me, whispering into my ear. I struggled to hear what she said. She seemed thinner than I remembered, bordering on malnourished. She was nothing more than a snowflake at risk of being blown away in a stiff breeze. She whispered again in my ear. “I should’ve bought him a Tesla. I should’ve consented to surrogacy.”
The commotion around us made me uneasy. Tricia was near delirious. I wrapped my arms around her, persuading her to sit beside me. After some minutes, others returned to their pews. The man who tried to assist Tricia when she burst into the chapel assisted the minister back to the pulpit. He was the same man, I realized with a start, who had come into my hospital room and told me about Jack Riggs’s death. Walking back to his seat, he tried to catch our attention, but we both looked away from him.
For Tricia’s benefit, the minister repeated what he said about Jimmy’s abundant optimism. Tricia trembled beside me. I couldn’t tell if the minister’s kind words assuaged Tricia’s grief, but hearing it a second time filled me with the same optimism that imbued Jimmy’s life. I felt at that moment I could do anything. I even had the strength to sit beside the woman I most detested and pretend we were best friends. I hated her for having left that message on my phone implying it was him who stole my baby. If I hadn’t heard that message, I never would have told Tully to go after Jimmy. But I can never admit this to her—or anyone else. It’s the secret I’ll have to keep with me for the rest of my life, and I suppose she has her secrets too.
I squeezed Tricia’s hand.
Tricia started crying again. I reached into my purse and produced a Kleenex. She took it from my hand and dabbed her eyes with it, seemingly at peace. Although I hadn’t noticed it before, a gossamer-thin black veil was pinned up to the edge of her pillbox hat. With great deliberation, she unpinned the veil, lowering it over her face and becoming the very vision of a proper wife in mourning. She lowered her eyes, gave my hand a last squeeze, and then got up from the pew and walked out of the chapel. I haven’t seen her since.
Chapter Forty
LAUREL
Another Month Later
I’m a helicopter parent, a one-woman safety patrol scooching after Anne Elise as she crawls on the narrow kitchen’s linoleum floor in Belinda’s trailer park home. A week ago, Anne Elise was immobile. Now, on her belly, pulling herself along, she wriggles and slithers, zipping back and forth over the length of the trailer, giggling, sticking her hands into the nooks and crannies along the baseboards, under the refrigerator and stove. Someday soon, she’ll look at me and say “mama,” but it breaks my heart that she’ll never have the opportunity to say “dada.” There are no guarantees in life. No amount of optimism, no amount of ac-cent-tchu-ating the positive can raise the dead, guarantee happiness, or prevent us from becoming poor and destitute, but I’ll always have my Anne Elise. She’s my daughter, and when I look at her, I recognize myself in the curve of her cheekbones. She’s a kinder, better version of me, the warrior princess I always wanted to be.
Money’s tight. I work evenings at the same grocery store where Belinda works six afternoons a week. I signed up for a few courses I need to get under my belt in order to get an internship with the county’s Child Services division. Classes start on Monday. Already I’m nervous. Not of the coursework but of the time I’ll be away from Anne Elise. But I couldn’t afford not to go back to school—as soon as I start attending classes again, I can defer payments on my Ethan Allen College student loans.
Anne Elise still doesn’t sleep through the night. Like clockwork, she awakens tonight at three a.m., just when I return home from my grocery store shift. I take her outside and walk down the trailer park’s crushed-oystershell driveway, the white shells shining luminescent under the moonlight’s glow. We sit on a weathered beachside bench. The cool night air soothes us both. While she nurses, I throw my head back and gaze at the starlit sky. Even at night, gulls squawk. The noise from the surf can be so loud, and it’s easy to imagine myself clinging to nothing but driftwood and being torn asunder by the waves.
“Don’t you ever trust anyone but yourself,” I say, patting Anne Elise’s back.
Anne Elise turns her head to me, and it’s as if a fleeting moment of comprehension comes over her. She squiggles her eyebrows, nods. She can’t possibly know the meaning of what I say, but hopefully, she’ll learn the message by watching my actions as she grows up.
Washing the dishes the next morning before Belinda goes to work, I hear an unfamiliar car rumble up the trailer park’s oystershell driveway. I must be seeing things. It’s a midnight-blue Volvo station wagon with DC plates. Jimmy’s old car. It drives past the single-wides at the entrance and continues toward us. My heart starts beating faster. I know it can’t be him, but there’s no doubt it’s the same car.
My mother, sensing something catch my attention, comes up behind me and asks, “What is it?”
“Wait inside,” I say, dropping the dish towel I’d been using onto the counter. “And keep Anne Elise inside too.”
The car halts right outside the trailer. Tinted windows make it impossible to identify the driver. I’m at the trailer’s screen door, the hairs at the back of my neck standing at attention. The car’s front door swings open, and suddenly I know I’m not going to like what’s about to happen. Tricia steps out of the car. Though it’s summer, she’s wrapped in her elegant sable coat. She’s skinnier than I remember, dressed in tight designer jeans, a pink camisole, and a lustrous pearl necklace that gleams on her tanned skin. Upon seeing me, she brings her hands together, looking contrite. Despite her attire, the vibe she gives off is needy. If not desperate.
“What are you doing here?” I shout at her from inside the screen door.
“I was in the neighborhood.”
I cross my arms. If my mother wasn’t locked in her bedroom guarding Anne Elise, I’d tell her to call 911.
“Okay. Fine. So I drove out special to be here. I wanted to see, uh, Zerena. Can I see her? Just for a minute?”
Though I know it won’t do much good should she try to break in, I set the latch lock on the screen door and go outside. Only a madwoman would drive a hundred miles on the off chance some near stranger might let her hold her baby.
“Please let me hold Zerena.”
“No. And her name’s not Zerena. It’s Anne Elise.”
The sun, already scorching at nine o’clock, must get to her, for she takes off her sable coat and folds it over her arm. Without the coat, she looks thinner and weaker. Just like animals puff out their fur to look fiercer and scare off rivals and predators, she must have worn that coat to make herself look bigger, wealthier, more physically intimidating. “I thought you were going to change it to Zerena. As soon as I heard James was dead, that’s what I thought: you were going to rush out and change the name of his baby.”