I stare back.
She looks as put together as I must at the moment: Her eyes are red and puffy, and her hair is knotted in a messy bun atop her head. She’s wearing navy-blue sweatpants and a gray tank top with a red stain—ketchup, maybe—dribbling over her right breast.
But there’s certain relief in her expression the moment our eyes meet.
I shift Elizabella in my arms, balancing her on my hip, and turn the dead bolt and open the door.
My ex-roommate practically falls over the threshold and into my arms.
Despite her grip on her daughter’s hand, she throws her arms around me and, sobbing, buries her head into my shoulder.
“Natasha, how did you—”
“I’m sorry for just showing up, but I didn’t know if you’d be here, and your car’s not here . . .”
“It’s in the garage.”
“And my key doesn’t work.”
Her key?
“I changed the locks.”
“I haven’t known what to do or where to go. Someone’s . . . it sounds crazy, but I think someone’s following me. I told the police, but they seem to think I know something I’m not telling them.”
We share a knowing glance.
“You too?” she asks. “What’s Micah mixed up in?”
I want to ask her what business it is of hers, but instead I usher her and her daughter into the house and engage the dead bolt behind them. “You should’ve called. I could’ve . . . We could’ve compared notes and—”
“Veronica.”
I look her square in the eyes.
“Is he dead?”
Chapter 54
“I got your card.” I pour a strong cup of mocha roast and top it off with a healthy spill of cream. Just the way Natasha likes it. It’s been a while, but being with her is comforting, in a sense, as if we’d never ripped our friendship to pieces for the sake of a man. We’d clicked right away as freshmen, and I wonder if there isn’t something magnetic in our systems, something that pulls us together.
Yet there’s a wall standing between us. Secrets.
I clear my throat. “I did call but . . .”
She takes a sip of the coffee and dabs a tissue at her eyes. “I got your message.”
“I wish you’d called back.”
“I couldn’t risk it. Maybe I’ve been paranoid, but I’m pretty sure my conversations haven’t been private lately. I let the battery on my phone die so it couldn’t be tracked.”
I have a million questions about how much she knows, but Natasha seems so sad, devastated actually, that I don’t think she’s equipped to answer at the moment, and I don’t know where to start, anyway.
While my first instinct is to be irate with her assuming nature—he’s my husband, after all, and she’s unraveling as if he’s always been hers—I’ve never seen her so vulnerable and crushed before. Even after she caught Micah and me together all those years ago, she’d stood her ground. She’d looked at me with an expression of disappointment in her eyes. Something akin to how could you? And simply, very logically and calmly, she walked out the door. I moved out shortly thereafter, and we never spoke again.
But now, she’s inhaling over tears, breath caught in her throat, and she looks as if she hasn’t slept in days.
I cough. “Your daughter. Nini, is it?”
“Mimi,” she corrects me. “Miriam. After my grandmother.”
So Christian was right. The girl in the pictures is Mimi.
“Elizabella seems to know your daughter,” I say.
“The girls met back in April.” At last, she looks at me—“After the miscarriage”—but promptly refocuses on her coffee. The very mention of miscarriage causes her to hiccup over her tears. “I’m sorry you had to go through that.”
“I don’t know how I’d be surviving with three children under the age of four at this point if I hadn’t . . .” I shut up. “Sorry. It’s a stupid rationalization. I would’ve made do.”
“But you’re right,” she says. “Sometimes even the cruelest things happen for a reason.” She catches tears on her fingertips. “I only wish I could rationalize this.”
“So you were up at the cottage on Plum Lake then in April.” I hope my bitterness doesn’t come through in translation. Or maybe it should. Not that I’m deprived due to my never having been to the lake house, but I sure as hell should’ve been welcome there if my husband was bringing his ex-girlfriends for weekend visits.
“No.” She sips her coffee. “We met here. At Goddess Island Gardens.”
Curtains part, and sun shines on dark rooms in my mind. I feel my cheeks grow hot with fury, but I bite my tongue. Natasha is confirming what I suspected. All that time spent wondering how my daughter could have foreseen the landscape of this place, puzzling over her knowledge of God Land, over her creation of the mysterious Nini. It wasn’t just that Micah told her about this place; she was here.
“But Bella knew the plane would be in the water,” I whisper.
“Pardon?” Natasha leans closer, her elbows resting on the countertop.
“My daughter . . . before Micah went missing. She said . . . she knew about this house. She drew it. And she knew there was a plane in the water, and then there was a crash . . .” I chew on my lip, trying to decipher, trying to put it all together.
Does this mean Micah knew the plane was going to crash? Is he responsible for the accident?
I open a drawer in the kitchen and pull out a stack of Bella’s drawings. I leaf through them. “She drew the crash. She explains by saying this is where the big house is”—I indicate to the left of the drawing I’m holding up, the way my daughter always does when interpreting this particular piece of artwork—“and this is the plane in the water.”
“She’s talking about the seaplane.”
There’s a faraway look in Natasha’s eyes, as she reminisces about a happy memory she shared with my husband. With my daughter.
“We took the kids by seaplane,” she continues, “to Dry Tortugas. The plane landed in the water, and Bella was amazed . . .” With a shake of her head and a shiver, she zaps out of her wonderland. “She wasn’t talking about a crash.”
“Oh.”
And Micah knew that, too. He could’ve put my mind at ease, assured me our daughter was referring to something else. Instead, he allowed me to worry about our daughter’s sanity.
The girls chatter over Bella’s crayons, a DVD playing in the background.
“So all this time, you’ve been in touch with Micah.”
She shakes her head. “It’s not what you think. You know, when Micah and I were dating, I was close with his mother. We stayed in touch.”
Jealousy burns inside me. I always assumed Mick was the reason Shell and I couldn’t be closer. Little did I know she’d already filled the daughter-in-law position with the woman her son neglected to nail down. “You and Shell stayed in touch?”
“I guess you could say we had a mutual friend, but Shell adores you, Veronica.”
I study her. I wonder how Mimi’s father, if he’s in the picture, feels about Natasha’s friendship with an ex-boyfriend’s mother. She’s wearing a thin, silver band adorned with a pear-shaped aquamarine on the fourth finger of her left hand. “Are you married?”
“No. We talked about it, but we hadn’t gotten around to it.”
I glance at the little girl whose name my daughter has been mispronouncing since they met. She’s beautiful, like her mother. Just as Elizabella has been insisting, she’s seven. Not little, at least to a three-year-old. The longer I look, I realize there are certain similarities in our girls’ appearances. Their brow lines, their smiles. Wait. “Who’s her father?”
“I was in a committed relationship—”
“With my husband?”
Her hand lands atop mine. “And we couldn’t have children. Miriam is a miracle . . . courtesy of artificial insemination. But yes,” she says. “Not the way you assume, but Micah is her father.”
I pull my hand away and try like hell to ward off tears. “So all this time . . . you’ve been in touch with my husband since college.”
“We reconnected a few years after graduation. There was a—”