“I’m so sorry, baby,” she said. “Mommy’s so sorry.”
“You’re—” Leo was sobbing so hard he could barely get the words out. “Scaring—” Another sob. “Meeeee…”
“Mommy’s so sorry,” she said again and again, rocking him back and forth on the tile. Poison Control. Should she call Poison Control? They’d want to know, of course, how many pills he’d had. Could she safely tell them half the amount she’d given Finn? It seemed possible that the powder might have hovered near the bottom of the thermos. So maybe Leo hadn’t gotten much. Then again, maybe he’d gotten more than his share.
Even if she ventured a guess, invented a story as to how he’d gotten into the pills, even if Poison Control said he would probably be fine—even if they brushed it off as a common accident, even if this sort of thing happened to other parents all the time, even if they asked her to just monitor him for any concerning symptoms—could she ever take that chance, not knowing how much of the drug he’d actually ingested? She knew the answer already. Besides, she couldn’t stay here now that she’d managed to knock Finn out, and she couldn’t observe Leo properly on the road to Asheville. There was no way around getting him to the emergency room.
She had to get them all out of here without waking Finn. If he woke up, this would all be for nothing. She would have put Leo in harm’s way for nothing.
If the hospital said Leo was okay—and if by some miracle they didn’t arrest her for child endangerment—she could take Bear straight to Violet as planned. If not …
She couldn’t think about that. She wouldn’t.
Leo was sniffling quietly in her arms now, heaving the occasional shaking sigh like she herself did after a good cry. She tilted his face up to hers. It was hard to tell after he’d been crying, but did his eyes look glassy? Groggy? His lead lolled against her chest and he looked at her lethargically.
She had to grab the other kids and go. They had to go now.
25
AUGUST 2016
The morning following her call with Mrs. Branson, Violet didn’t leave the house. She didn’t want to see anyone, if she could help it. Lying rumpled in Bear’s bed, cell phone in her sweaty hand, she made up excuses to evade Gram, then preempted Agent Martin’s daily visit with a phone call to check in.
“We have a lead on a car Finn may have bought, from a mobile home park in walking distance of an Amtrak station in Tennessee,” he told her.
Her heart stilled. “When was it sold?”
“Four, five days ago.” He sounded preoccupied with the information, which she took to be a good sign. “Hard to say whether the guy just wants the reward, but we’re sending someone to look into it.”
Violet had almost forgotten about the reward Gram had offered for vital information. The chances of the missing persons report drawing interest had seemed so bleak.
“Thank you,” she told him, sincerely, willing her brain to wrap itself around this new, small hope. A car would mean a license plate, and that might mean they could issue an AMBER Alert after all. It might mean there was a trail to follow. Her eyes watered with gratitude. “I won’t keep you, then.”
“As always, let us know if you think of anything else,” he said, clearing his throat. “In light of new information.” He was referring to the bombshell about Maribel, of course. Would he think it strange if he knew that she’d phoned Mrs. Branson? She hated this new lingering sensation of always feeling as if she might be doing something wrong. But perhaps it wasn’t entirely new after all. Perhaps it didn’t feel as unfamiliar as it should have.
He said he’d come by the next morning, unless there was something to report in the meantime, and she hung up feeling oddly off the hook. She reverted to not bothering to shower. She stayed in her pajamas. She didn’t eat breakfast, even though her stomach was roiling with a hangover from the night before. She left Bear’s bed only to down some ibuprofen and—though the morning sun streamed through his blinds, and her own room across the hall was invitingly dark—she nestled back in among his stuffed animals, as much because she missed Bear as because she couldn’t stand the thought of being in the place where she’d spent so many nights lying next to the stranger who was Finn. She tried to picture Bear now. An Amtrak station. A train, then. A walk to a mobile home park. An unfamiliar car. Tennessee. It wasn’t much, but it was something. She closed her eyes against the daylight, but she did not sleep.
Nor had she really slept the night before. Because even surrounded by so many sweet, soft reminders of Bear, even having downed enough vodka to make the room tilt until she had no choice but to close her eyes, unconsciousness had evaded her. She’d been unable to stop thinking back, memory by painful memory, on all that had transpired with Finn, from day one through the nightmare of today.
No, she wasn’t thinking of it—she was rethinking it.
She was trying to rewrite the story of her life. The story of their lives together. She was trying to discover what an objective passenger might have written in that captain’s log—or, perhaps more to the point, what Finn would have written there. The problem was, she wasn’t sure. Everything was a big question mark now.
Just days ago, she would have welcomed any distraction that would keep her from obsessing about Bear every second of every day and night. Now, in the revelation about Maribel, she had one—but it was a distraction that only made her feel even more helpless, more clueless, than she could have imagined possible.
That confusion, though, was juxtaposed with an odd sense of clarity that overtook specific memories—particularly the recent ones.
Violet had never been able to figure out, for instance, why Finn had insisted on flying rather than driving on their vacation. It would have been so much simpler to choose a beach in the Carolinas that wouldn’t have taken more than a day’s drive. It would have been so much easier to transport their ridiculous amount of little kid gear that way—the car seat, the stroller, the portable booster for mealtimes, the overflowing diaper bag she still kept on hand in case of accidents. It would have been so much cheaper to bring their own beach chairs, and umbrellas, and sand toys, rather than buying it all when they arrived, only to have to throw it out at the end of the week. Violet had argued all of these points, but their fights never got very far—whichever one of them was less determined or less upset, and it was always one of them, would soon cave rather than draw out the agony.