It’s nearing ten o’clock in New York City. I call Chris from a cell phone stashed in my pocket, to tell him that Willow has stolen from me, and yet his cell phone rings and rings without an answer.
I wait ten minutes and then try again, knowing that Chris is a night owl, and so he is certainly awake, certainly slaving away on some offering memorandum that he swore he’d be writing.
Or so he said.
When again there is no response, I text a message: Call me. ASAP. And proceed to wait futilely for twenty minutes or more.
And then I begin to seethe.
I search online for a phone number for the Manhattan hotel and put in a call, asking reception to transfer me to Chris Wood’s room. I whisper for Zoe’s sake, and she asks me more than once to repeat myself. There’s a pause as the woman tries to make the connection, but then she comes back on the line and says apologetically, “There’s no answer in that room, ma’am. Would you like to leave a message?”
I hang up the phone.
I consider calling again and asking to be transferred to Cassidy Knudsen’s room.
I consider a red-eye flight out to New York, a surprise appearance in the lobby of his hotel, desperate to catch him and Cassidy flitting about, laughing at some joke the rest of the world is not privy to. I see Cassidy in her hotel-issued robe, Chris in his, champagne delivered via room service, and strawberries. Yes, of course, strawberries.
The Do Not Disturb door hanger placed on the handle.
I can feel the blood creeping up my neck, making my ears ring. My pulse loud enough that Zoe, sound asleep, can certainly hear. My heartbeat is so erratic it makes me dizzy, and I drop my head again beneath my legs to catch my breath, thinking evil thoughts toward my husband and that woman, thoughts of planes bound for Denver bursting into flames and crashing to the ground.
“It’s time for Ruby’s medicine,” I hear then, the timid voice of that girl, that kleptomaniac who has stolen my father’s wedding band from me.
I want to scream, and yet, instead, with astounding control, I say, “You took my father’s wedding ring. You took the ring,” and I want to grab her by the neck and shake the living daylights out of her because she took the one thing in the world that meant the most to me.
But I remain on the edge of the bathtub, running my hand along the fleece robe, along the straight edge of the Swiss Army knife tucked safely inside, considering its many tools, or weapons if you may: a corkscrew, scissors, a gimlet, and of course, a blade.
“What?” she asks feebly, hurt, as if she’s the one who’s been laid to waste. Pillaged. Plundered. Her voice is light, barely audible, as she shakes her head desperately, frantically, and whispers, “No.”
But her eyes don’t look at mine, and she’s begun to fidget with her hands. She blinks rapidly, her fair skin turning red. Telltale signs of deceit. I rise to my feet and, as I do, she retreats backward, quickly, and out of the room, prattling in an undertone something or other about Jesus and forgiveness and mercy.
A confession.
“Where is it?” I ask, following her into the living room, my footsteps delicate but fast, a half step faster than her own, so that I quickly narrow the gap. I drift across the room in my sheepskin slippers and turn her by the arm so that she’s forced to look at me, forced to maintain eye contact as only the best perjurer can. She steps away quickly; I’ve intruded upon her space. She sets her arms behind herself so I cannot touch them again.
“Where is my father’s wedding band?” I demand this time, aware of the way the baby watches us from the floor, gnawing on a polka dot sock she’s pulled from a foot, her pale pink piggies hovering midair, completely insouciant to the tension surrounding her, filling the room, making it hard to breathe.
“I don’t have it,” Willow lies, her voice as spineless as an earthworm or a leech. “I promise, ma’am, I don’t have the ring,” she says, but her eyes remain shifty, scheming, and in place of an impressionable, naive young woman, as I had once perceived her to be, I see someone, instead, who’s wily and astute. Artful and sly.
She evades my stare, twitches uncomfortably in her own skin as if it’s suddenly the skin of a porcupine, riddled with quills.
An act.
Her words come out staccato-like, abrupt and clipped, an outpouring of denials: I didn’t do it, and I swear, her hands overgesticulating, her face turning red.
A charade.
She mocks me with her lies and her tomfoolery, with the naive eyes that are anything but naive. She knew exactly what she was doing, from that very first day I spotted her at the Fullerton Station, waiting in the rain.
Waiting for someone like me to take the bait.
“What did you do with it?” I ask frantically. “What did you do with the ring?”
“I don’t have it,” she says again, “I don’t have the ring,” shaking her head briskly from side to side, the bob of a pendulum.