* * *
She had one more stop to make before leaving Ocean Beach: the bank. She still had nearly two thousand dollars in her account. She took the money in cash, stuffing it into her purse, and hoped that she hadn’t set off some kind of alarm in the teller’s head. She was sure she looked like the frightened, guilty woman she was.
* * *
She made it all the way to a rest stop near a town called Redding in northern California before she absolutely had to sleep. Even so, she only managed to doze for about an hour, cramped in the backseat of her car, before fear woke her up. Maybe she should have called Celia before heading to Portland, but she was afraid of what Celia might say. What if she told her not to come? Everything was going wrong for her all of a sudden, and if things went wrong with Celia, too, she couldn’t take it. She didn’t know how she’d explain showing up at her apartment out of the blue, though. Suddenly she felt like she didn’t know Celia well at all. Charlie’d said to go to her, though, and he knew her best.
* * *
She was numb from worry and the road by the time she reached Celia’s apartment the next afternoon. Celia wasn’t there, and Jade sat on the landing outside her door. She had to pee and she was starving as she went over and over in her mind what she planned to say to her. She had it worked out, a long and elaborate string of lies. But when Celia walked up the steps, her face registering surprise at seeing her there, Jade burst into tears.
And then she told Celia everything. Everything. Even the things Daddy had no idea about.
Even the things he couldn’t possibly guess.
PART THREE
40.
Riley
Once I pulled myself together after leaving the message for Suzanne, I drove the rest of the way home with a thrill of excitement running through my body. Lisa was alive! Unless she’d met with some terrible illness or accident—but how likely was that? She was only forty years old. I would find her, and nothing would stop me. I knew, though, that I’d have to be cautious. That meant not telling Danny what I knew, for starters. I’d look for Lisa in a way that put her in no danger, remembering what Tom had said: If Lisa wanted to see you, she could have found you. She had to be afraid of being found. Did she know Daddy was dead? Did she know about our mother, for that matter? Would she care if she did?
* * *
When I walked in the house, Christine grabbed my hand. “Where’ve you been?” she asked. “We hit the mother lode in the attic!” She dragged me into the dining room where she had completely covered the table with knickknacks and stacks of old books and other odds and ends I’d never seen before. I yanked my hand away from her, not at all in the mood to deal with details of the estate sale.
Jeannie walked into the room, her arms overflowing with old sewing patterns.
“Look at these!” she said. “Deb must have saved these from when we were teens just learning to sew. Check out the styles on the packages!”
I looked around my mother’s warm, cozy dining room, now turned into a junk store. I saw the gleam in Christine’s eyes and the dress patterns spilling out of Jeannie’s arms onto the floor. The two of them were now more familiar with the house of my childhood than I was, treating it like their own. I wanted them gone.
“I can’t take this anymore!” I shouted, my voice so loud even I was surprised.
Jeannie stopped walking toward the table, a few more of the patterns falling from her arms. Christine held a small ceramic horse frozen in midair.
“What are you talking about?” she asked. “What can’t you take?”
“This!” I waved my arm through the air above the table and the hundreds of items from the attic. “The mess in my house! People in my house! I really—”
“Honey”—Jeannie dropped the patterns onto one of the dining room chairs, where they spilled like a fountain onto the rug—“you just need to let Christine and me handle everything. I’ve told you. There’s absolutely nothing you have to do.”
“I need some peace and quiet,” I said, trying to lower my voice. Trying to keep myself calm. “I know you two are doing a ton of work and I appreciate it, but I need some time to myself.”
They looked at one another. “We could go get a cup of coffee and come back in an hour,” Jeannie suggested to her daughter.
“No.” I looked from one of them to the other. They wore puzzled expressions as if I were speaking a foreign language. “You don’t understand,” I said. “I need days to myself. Maybe weeks.”
“But the sale is in eight days, Riley,” Christine said, “and we’re making fabulous progress, but we have a lot more to—”
“You’ll need to move the sale,” I said.
“What do you mean, ‘move it’?” Christine said. “We can’t cart all this stuff someplace—”
“I mean, postpone it,” I said.
“Oh, no.” Christine finally caught on. “The date is already set and we’re—”
“I don’t care!” I gripped the back of one of the dining room chairs. “I hate this! I hate people in my house, taking it apart bit by bit until I don’t recognize it anymore!” My voice rose to a hysterical pitch and it felt good. “I just lost my father, and now I’m losing the house I grew up in!”
“You should have thought of that before you hired me.” Christine put her hands on her hips. “Everything was ‘rush rush rush’ and now suddenly the brakes are on?”
“Christine.” Jeannie moved to her daughter’s side, a hand on her arm as she tried to calm her down, but that did nothing to temper the anger in Christine’s eyes.
“Yes,” I said, more quietly now. “The brakes are on. I’m not ready to let go of everything. You need to wait until I am.”
Complete silence fell over the dining room. Finally, Jeannie spoke. “All right,” she said, “I’m sorry if we’ve been in your way, Riley. I wanted to make things easier for you, not harder. Let Christine and me organize this mess we made today, and then we’ll postpone the sale and we won’t come back until you’re ready. How’s that?”
“That would be excellent,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Mother!” Christine shot a look of daggers at Jeannie.
“Of course that means the house won’t go on the market until late in the season,” Jeannie said. “We can’t get the repairs and painting and everything done until after the estate sale, but maybe we can—”
“It’ll be fine,” I said calmly, heading for the living room. Suddenly, though, I turned back to face them. “Oh, but the RV park?” I said to Jeannie.
“What about it?” she asked.
“You can put that on the market right away.”