Andy slid her hand into her pocket. The detective’s card was still wet from the bathroom counter.
Palazzolo tried to talk to me again. She wanted me to turn on you. She gave me her card.
Gordon said, “Laura, this is deadly serious.”
She fake-laughed. “That’s an interesting choice of words.”
“Cops protect their own. Don’t you know that? They stick together no matter what. That brotherhood bullshit is not just some urban legend you hear on TV.” Gordon was so angry that his voice broke. “This whole thing will turn into a crusade just by virtue of the kid’s last name.”
Laura inhaled, then slowly shushed it out. “I just—I need a moment, Gordon. All right? I need time alone to think this through.”
“You need a criminal litigator to do the thinking for you.”
“And you need to stop telling me what to do!” She was so furious that she screeched out the words. Laura covered her eyes with her hand. “Has hectoring me ever worked? Has it?” She wasn’t looking for an answer. She turned to Gordon, roaring at him, “This is why I left you! I had to get away from you, to get you out of my life, because you have no idea who I am. You never have and you never will.”
Each word was like a slap across her father’s face.
“Jesus.” Laura grabbed the handle above the door, tried to shift her weight off her injured leg. “Will you drive the fucking car?”
Andy waited for her father to say Laura was welcome to walk home, but he didn’t. He faced forward. He pushed the gear into drive. He glanced over his shoulder before hitting the gas.
The car lurched toward the main road.
Andy didn’t know why, but she found herself turning to look out the back window.
Alabama was still standing under the portico. He tipped his hat one last time.
The look on her mother’s face—panic? Fear? Disgust?
Is something wrong, Officer?
Alabama stood rooted in place as Gordon took a left out of the hospital drive. He was still standing there, head turning to follow their progress, when they drove down the street.
Andy watched him watching the car until he was just a speck in the distance.
I’m sorry for the situation your wife and daughter are in.
How had he known that Gordon was her father?
Andy stood under the shower until the hot water ran out. Manic thoughts kept flitting around inside of her head like a swarm of mosquitos. She could not blink without remembering a stray detail from the diner, from the video, from the police interview, the car.
None of it made sense. Her mother was a fifty-five-year-old speech therapist. She played bridge, for chrissakes. She didn’t kill people and smoke cigarettes and rail against the pigs.
Andy avoided her reflection in the bathroom mirror as she dried her hair. Her skin felt like sandpaper. There were tiny shards of glass embedded in her scalp. Her chapped lips had started bleeding at the corner. Her nerves were still shaky. At least she thought it was her nerves. Maybe it was lack of sleep that was making her feel so jumpy, or the absence of adrenaline, or the desperation she felt every time she replayed the last thing that Laura had said to Andy before she went into the house—
I’m not going to change my mind. You need to leave tonight.
Andy’s heart felt so raw that a feather could’ve splayed it open.
She rummaged through the clean clothes pile and found a pair of lined running shorts and a navy-blue work shirt. She dressed quickly, walking to the window as she did up the buttons. The garage was detached from the house. The apartment was her cave. Gray walls. Gray carpet. Light-blocking shades. The ceiling sloped with the roofline, only made livable by two tiny dormers.
Andy stood at the narrow window and looked down at her mother’s house. She could not hear her parents arguing, but she knew what was happening the same way that you knew you had managed to give yourself food poisoning. She was seized by that awful, clammy feeling that something just wasn’t right.
The death penalty.
Where had her mother even learned to catch a knife like that? Laura had never been in the military. As far as Andy knew, she hadn’t taken any self-defense classes.
Almost every day of her mother’s life for the last three years had been spent either trying not to die from cancer or enduring all the horrible indignities that cancer treatment brought with it. There had not been a hell of a lot of free time to train for hand-to-hand combat. Andy was surprised her mother had been able to raise her arm so quickly. Laura struggled to lift a grocery bag, even with her good hand. The breast cancer had invaded her chest wall. The surgeon had removed part of her pectoral muscle.
Adrenaline.
Maybe that was the answer. There were all kinds of stories about mothers lifting cars off their trapped babies or performing other tremendous physical feats in order to protect their children. Sure, it wasn’t common, but it happened.
But that still didn’t explain the look on Laura’s face when she pulled the knife through. Blank. Almost workman-like. Not panicked. Not afraid. She could’ve just as easily been sitting at her desk reviewing a patient’s chart.
Andy shivered.
Thunder rumbled in the distance. The sun would not go down for another hour, but the clouds were dark and heavy with the promise of rain. Andy could hear waves throwing themselves onto the beach. Seagulls hashing out dinner plans. She looked down at her mother’s tidy bungalow. Most of the lights were on. Gordon was pacing back and forth in front of the kitchen window. Her mother was seated at the table, but all that Andy could make out was her hand, the one that wasn’t strapped to her waist, resting on a placemat. Laura’s fingers occasionally tapped, but otherwise she was still.
Andy saw Gordon throw his hands into the air. He walked toward the kitchen door.
Andy stepped back into the shadows. She heard the door slam closed. She chanced another look outside the window.
Gordon walked down the porch stairs. The motion detector flipped on the floodlights. He looked up at them, shielding his eyes with his hand. Instead of heading toward her apartment, he stopped on the bottom riser and sat down. He rested his forehead on the heels of his hands.
Her first thought was that he was crying, but then she realized that he was probably trying to regain his composure so that Andy wouldn’t be even more worried when she saw him.
She had seen Gordon cry once, and only once, before. It was at the beginning of her parents’ divorce. He hadn’t let go and sobbed or anything. What he had done was so much worse. Tears had rolled down his cheeks, one long drip after another, like condensation on the side of a glass. He’d kept sniffing, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. He had left for work one morning assuming his fourteen-year marriage was solid, then before lunchtime had been served with divorce papers.
“I don’t understand,” he had told Andy between sniffles. “I just don’t understand.”
Andy couldn’t remember the man who was her real father, and even thinking the words real father felt like a betrayal to Gordon. Sperm donor felt too overtly feminist. Not that Andy wasn’t a feminist, but she didn’t want to be the kind of feminist that men hated.
Her birth father—which sounded strange but kind of made sense because adopted kids said birth mother—was an optometrist whom Laura had met at a Sandals resort. Which was weird, because her mother hated to travel anywhere. Andy thought they’d met in the Bahamas, but she was told the story so long ago that a lot of details were lost.