“Come in.”
She stood a beat or two, nursing a feeling of all her tension and panic running down through her gut and out through her feet. Well, maybe not all of it. She still had to speak to him. But enough to pass for all of it, strictly at the level of her feelings.
She opened the door.
He sat behind the desk, looking out the window, one huge, beefy hand running back and forth over his freshly shaved scalp. It took him a second or two to look at her.
“Ah,” he said when he did. “Our very own prodigal daughter. I thought it might be you.”
His face looked as though he was trying to frown at her, but without much success. He liked her, and she knew it. Maybe in spite of all he knew about her at this point, but he still did. That was one small point in her favor. It was the only point she had now.
“I came to talk to you about the money.”
“Good. I was hoping so.”
“It’s in progress.”
“Meaning?”
“I’m working on getting it back here.”
“Since you came on your own to tell me this, I’m going to assume it’s true.”
Which affirmed why she had come on her own.
She stood in front of his desk. She did not sit. She felt that sitting would make her feel small. She already felt too small. She did not say more voluntarily.
“You broke our hearts with what you did,” he said. His voice sounded even. As though he could strip all the judgment out of a statement like that.
“I’m not sure what you expected of me,” she said, trying for the same tone. “I told you I don’t belong here.”
“Everybody says they don’t belong here,” Boris said. Without hesitation. “The point is that your children thought differently and the judge agreed with them. And to answer your question, Mrs. Clements, what I expected of you was not to slip away with all the money the residents raised at the Christmas choir performance and the auction. That money was for charity. But of course you know that.”
It was the most harshly he had ever spoken to her, and she braced against her own emotional reaction. She assumed it would be shame. To her surprise, it was a flame-like burst of anger. It felt welcome, and clean.
She stopped bracing.
“You gave me no choice!” she shouted. She surprised herself by slapping her palm down on his desk, hard enough to make him jump. “You took all my money. You take my Social Security checks. I had a home. I loved my home. I had enough money to get by and live happily in my own home. That’s a kind of power, to have what you need to get by. It means you can make your own decisions. Shape your own life. And you took that away from me. You made me helpless. You took all my power. What was I supposed to do? I took it back. I have a right to live my own life.”
A silence fell. Her words seemed to bounce around the office like an echo. But not a real, audible one. Just the impact of them seemed to come back around again and again.
“I think you know,” he said, “that a judge and your children made that decision. We just offer the care.”
“Right,” she said, her voice still hard. “You don’t arrest and convict me. You’re just the jailer.”
She thought she saw him wince slightly. She felt bad then. She felt she had been too hard on him. Gone too far.
“Look. Mrs. Clements. In my business we’re not without empathy, and we know this can be a difficult adjustment. For some of our residents more than others, of course. Some people have a terrible time losing their independence. It’s something they can never really accept. Others of our residents appreciate the care we have to offer.”
“I’m not like them.”
“So I’ve noticed. Well. Thank you for coming in. I’m sure you’ll keep us posted about the repayment. And I’m sure that once we have it, we can settle this whole unpleasant matter amicably. Reasonably so, anyway.”
She heard a tight reserve in his voice that he had never used with her before. She had offended him, or wounded him emotionally, or both. She just stood a moment, wondering if there was any way out of this uncomfortable new situation.
Then she remembered that she probably could not get the money to repay what she had stolen. That, of course, sealed the deal. And not in her favor.
“Anything else?” Boris asked.
“No, I suppose not.”
She walked out of his office, nursing that knot of regret in her lower belly.
She turned right and walked toward her room. And nearly ran smack into Betty, her daughter.
They sat on a bench, outdoors, overlooking the little artificial pond. There were a few ducks that had just begun to fly back for the summer, hunkered over their own webbed feet as if napping. There was a fountain shooting up from its center, tumbling this way and that. It made a fair amount of noise with its tumbling and splashing.
Meanwhile Betty was staring at her. Marilyn could see it in her peripheral vision, and it was making her uneasy.
They hadn’t spoken for quite some time.
Marilyn felt that anything she said would invite a wrath she would prefer to avoid, or even delay. For an awkward and truly admirable length of time—at least, in her mind—she had kept her mouth shut. But the staring had become too much.
It just burst out of her.
“Oh, will you stop looking at me that way!”
It opened the exact can of worms she had expected.
“How am I supposed to look at you, Mom? What would be exactly the right way to look at you after five months of being worried sick about you? Five months without so much as a phone call or a postcard to let us know you were okay. Gerry and I figured there was just as good a chance you were dead as alive. How do you suppose that made us feel?”
“Relieved?” Marilyn asked.
She kept her eyes on the ducks as she spoke.
“See?” Betty said. “I can’t deal with you when you’re like this.”
“You can’t deal with me ever. No matter what’s going on. That’s why I thought you’d be relieved.”
Another strangely protracted silence fell. This time Marilyn knew better than to break it.
“Well, you were wrong,” Betty said after a time.
“I need six thousand dollars.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“That’s all you have to say?”
“It’s not like it’s the first time it’s ever come up. Gerry and I have been dealing with calls from the Eastbridge people for months. They even had one of their attorneys call a couple of times. I told them the same thing I’m telling you now. I have three teenagers. People with three teenagers don’t have six thousand dollars lying around. Anything extra we get our hands on goes straight into their college fund. In less than three years we’ll need tuition for all three of them. Imagine how that makes me feel.”
“Maybe Gerald can help.”
She heard her daughter let out an odd sound that she took, at first, to be a sneeze. A moment later she realized it had been meant as a sarcastic bark of a laugh.
“That’s a good one,” Betty said. “Gerry’s going through a nasty divorce. You know how he is. He won’t stand up for himself. Greta got a pit bull attorney and she’s bleeding him dry.”
“And why didn’t I know about this?”
Even as the words flowed out of her mouth, Marilyn realized her mistake. It was too late, though. She could only wince and blink against the wrath she knew her words would incite.
“Oh, let’s see, Mom. Maybe he didn’t tell you, because . . . we didn’t know where the hell you were!”
“Right,” Marilyn said. “My mistake. Sorry.”
“Why did you do it?”
“You know damn well why. I loved that house. I lived forty years with your father in that house. We raised two children there. I wanted to live out my life in that house. I wanted to go straight from that house when the time came, in a body bag, right out to a mortuary van parked under that nice oak tree out front.”
“You almost burned that house to the ground,” Betty said, her voice cool and even.