It tasted sour, but Lucky drank it anyway. She was nervous. She kept imagining herself telling Gloria about the ticket, asking for her help. Once it was out, she wouldn’t be able to take it back. But who other than Gloria could help her with this?
“Hey, ya know what?” Gloria said a little later. “I got some pictures of John, from back then, when we were together. I know he’s not really your dad—but did you want to see them anyway?” She didn’t wait for an answer. She went inside and came out with an envelope, opened it to reveal a handful of old snapshots of Gloria and John almost thirty years before. Gloria had been surprisingly attractive, pert-faced and trim, smiling up at John like he was the best thing she had ever seen. He was looking at her the same way—but he could look at every woman like that, if he wanted to. Lucky knew that.
Gloria put down the photographs and sipped her wine. “I sure was in love with him, for a while. He used to tell me there weren’t nothing we couldn’t do together, that I was all he had.”
Lucky drained her wineglass; Gloria refilled it. “He used to say the same thing to me,” Lucky said.
“I’m sorry,” Gloria said. “It’s a shitty deal you got. I wish I could help you out more than I am.” She shook the nearly empty bottle. “Want me to go in and get us something stronger, something that’ll really take the edge off?”
“Sure, why not?”
A few moments later, she accepted whatever moonshine Gloria handed her, slugged it back, and held out her glass. “Attagirl,” Gloria said. “This will make it all better.”
Gloria’s lips and teeth were purple from the wine and her hair was even more askew than usual. She settled back in her chair and kept talking. Lucky tried to focus on her, but whatever had been in the glass was strong. Her vision blurred as Gloria spoke. “I told him he needed to take you to a police station, you know, and when he refused, I left him. That was it for us. Never saw him again—though I did sometimes wonder what had happened with all that. Hoped, for once, that he had decided to do the right thing. Figured he’d have a few days of diapers and no sleep and change his mind. Apparently not.” She kept on talking and Lucky closed her eyes. Eventually, Gloria’s words just became noise, blended with the chorus of crickets and hum of cicadas and trucks speeding past out on the road. At some point, she felt Gloria putting a blanket over her knees, and then it was silent and dark and Lucky was asleep.
September 2008
BOISE, IDAHO
“Cary! Where are you?”
Her panicked voice brought Cary downstairs, his footsteps pounding. “Are you okay?”
“Betty is gone! I let her outside a few minutes ago, in the yard. And now she’s… she’s just gone!”
The two of them spent hours walking up and down the streets of their neighborhood, calling Betty’s name. They printed signs and taped them to telephone poles. Cary had to go back to the restaurant eventually; Lucky sat at home, waiting by her phone, staring down at the papers she had procured to take Betty to Dominica with them, crying endless tears. Just like the loss of the baby, this was her fault. She had been preoccupied, too focused on the money they were moving offshore. She ignored the voice that told her she hadn’t done anything wrong, anything different from what she did every day.
“It’s like someone took her,” Lucky said to Cary when he got back. “Like someone stole her. Betty would never run away.”
“Maybe she sensed we were about to leave, and she didn’t want to go. You have to try not to worry about it, okay? You can’t fix this. We have to keep moving.”
“How can I not worry about her? She’s all I—” She had been about to say, She’s all I have. But this wasn’t true. She had Cary. They had the money. She had to start believing that the things she actually still had in her grasp mattered.
Betty didn’t come home. Days passed, and then it was time for them to leave. “What if someone finds Betty, though? Can’t we delay our departure? Just a few more days?”
“We can’t stay here,” Cary said. “We’re going to get caught. The stock market has gone even lower. How many clients called you today, asking about their money?”
“Too many,” Lucky admitted.
“Babe, it’s time. We have to get out of here. We’ve waited too long already.”
But it didn’t feel right. It felt like bad luck to leave on this note, like if they left like this, any chance they had of ever having a happy life would be lost. And she was still holding out hope. Someone would call about Betty.
“I have an idea,” Lucky said. “What if we go to Las Vegas? What could be more fun than that? And it’s safe there; we know how to go incognito.” It felt like exactly what they needed to do, all of a sudden. Like the perfect way to hit the reset button on her life, and buy a tiny bit more time. “We’ve lost so much. We need to do something special—go out in a blaze of glory. Don’t you think? Before we leave forever?”
Cary took her in his arms, looked down at her. “Will it make you happy again? Because I hate seeing you sad like this.”
“Yes, it will.”
“All right,” Cary said. “What’s one more night in America, I guess? No one will find us in Nevada.”
The next day, they got in their silver Audi, and they started to drive.
February 1982
NEW YORK CITY
Margaret Jean went back to bed the night the baby cried on the steps of St. Monica’s cathedral and the man with the shiny shoes stared into her eyes and said, “This is my child.” But she couldn’t sleep. When dawn broke, she went to the sisters and asked about her aspirancy. They told her they had indeed decided she could join their order, and she felt something unexpected: relief so deep it was almost rapturous. All at once, this was what she wanted. To redeem herself, and to redeem others.
It was weeks later when Sister Margaret Jean—as she was now known—heard there was a young woman in the parish asking about a baby left on the steps.