“It is! You want him to have a happy childhood. You want to give him a good start.”
“But I’m lying.” Jennifer risks a glance at Megan, and is almost undone by the sympathy on her face. “I’m lying to him.”
“No, no, no, it’s not lying.” Megan frowns. “It’s like what we do when we pretend there’s a Santa. It’s preserving the magic. I don’t see anything wrong with him having good memories of his father.”
Don’t talk, Jennifer. For God’s sake. Say thank you and shut your mouth. “Tommy wanted to be a good dad,” she says. “But . . .” She hesitates, thinking of Sebastian’s claims about Megan, and then says it anyway. “He drank too much. So you could never quite trust him.”
Megan waits.
“Once I woke up in the middle of the night with a bad feeling. I woke up startled—you know that feeling?”
Megan nods, watching Jennifer with a worried frown.
“Tommy wasn’t in bed but that was normal. He usually stayed up late, drinking. I got up and went to check on Milo—he was two and still in a crib—but he wasn’t there, so then I panicked. I searched the house, and he wasn’t anywhere. Then I realized I could hear him crying, but I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. It was like he was a ghost, like he was in the walls—” She stops with a shudder. “Anyway,” she says. “I went outside, and Tommy was on a blanket in the middle of the yard, passed out. And Milo—Milo had climbed through a broken window into Tommy’s storage shed. There was a stack of paving stones beneath the window Tommy never fixed, for the patio Tommy never built. Milo was in there in the dark, with the lawn mower and the rakes. He had little pieces of glass in his hands and feet.” Milo’s face, Milo’s desperate face. When she opened the door, he looked at her with terror. The trail of blood he’d left round the shed, the bloody fingerprints on his pajamas, his diaper soaking, his plump little feet, filthy and bare and stuck with glass. She’d let that happen to him. Because she couldn’t leave Tommy. Because of love.
“I’m so sorry,” Megan says. “How awful for you.” She puts a gentle hand on Jennifer’s back, keeps it there as they walk.
“Somebody at the bar told Tommy about a meteor shower, so he got Milo out of bed to show him. It was supposed to be a ‘rare and magical experience.’ He just wanted Milo to see.”
Now Megan stops walking; now she turns Jennifer toward her and embraces her. There is no choice, is there, between steeling yourself and sobbing. Jennifer steels herself. There’s no way to feel just a little bit. “You poor thing,” Megan says. “You poor, poor thing.”
She could tell the story, the whole story. Megan would understand.
Wouldn’t that be a magic trick.
We’re all a little morally ambiguous, Megan. Maybe, as it turns out, even you. We all have a little dark flame. Ah, but that doesn’t mean we understand each other. We do bad things and yet think of ourselves as good. Fundamentally good, you see, despite a slipup or two. Other people, though. When they do a bad thing, we tend to think they’re bad.
Megan pulls back to look Jennifer in the eye. “I’m glad you told me,” she says. “Because that’s a miserable thing to go through, and I can’t imagine you’re not still coping with it. I want you to know that I’m always here to listen.”
“Thank you,” Jennifer says. “I appreciate that.” She turns toward the Cross, which is looming now, enormous and white, so much bigger than she expected it to be. “Almost there,” she says, attempting a smile.
So now she’s told that story and can’t take it back. Exhibit A. Offered as defense in advance of the trial, she supposes, because surely she’d never have told it if Milo hadn’t let Carrasco slip, if her secret hadn’t been momentarily exposed. She walks fast and Megan does, too, and she hopes by the time they reach the overlook she’ll have thought of something sprightly to say, so that Megan feels like it’s okay to resume normal conversation, to break the melancholy silence of sympathy.
Here is what Margaret might now know: That Tommy died of a painkiller overdose. That Zoe went to the police. My mother killed him, Zoe said. My mother wanted him dead. She cheated on him. She lied. My father loved me too much to take his own life. My father was a wonderful man. Reasons to investigate, the police said, and the newspaper repeated, and after that how they all looked at her! Her daughter, her mother-in-law, everyone she knew, thinking murderer, murderer, murderer, even after no charges were brought, so loud they should have just chanted it. Zoe Eleanor Carrasco. Her daughter. She went to the police. She gave quotes to the newspaper. That’s how sure she was.