The rain that had begun before breakfast showed no signs of stopping as lunchtime approached. Michael and I played with blocks and trains. We read books and sorted laundry for Marlene, who tempted Michael with a cookie she’d made that morning so he would stop trying to climb into the tub washer in the mudroom. It was a relief to have some normality in our day. He didn’t even call out “Eva! Eva!” when we went into the nursery.
It hurt sometimes that he looked so much like her. Both fair and small-featured, neither of them particularly resembled Press. (Though by the time Michael was a teenager, he looked a bit more like his father.) Press had teased me that they were changeling children, that perhaps they weren’t his at all. It had been a great joke between us because we both knew that I was as faithful as a dog.
It had never occurred to me to be unfaithful. Rachel teased and flirted with other men, but I was certain she’d never cheated on Jack.
Olivia had been forced to be with a man who wasn’t her husband, and he had been forced to watch. My heart broke for them both. I still could hardly believe what I had seen. Was I going insane? Had what had happened to Eva pushed me into madness? I tried not to think about it as I played with Michael, but I couldn’t help myself. I had been a witness, and to witness something like that was akin to participating. Olivia had had to live with it every day of her life, and who knew what had happened afterward. What if it had happened more than once?
I knew who the man was. His face was on many of the paintings on our walls, and in a few photographs in the stack of leather-bound photo albums in the library. What I didn’t (couldn’t? wouldn’t?) force myself to think about was what it meant. Not then. Not yet.
At one o’clock, just after I put Michael down for his nap, Marlene let me know that Terrance was driving her into church in town, where she would dust and vacuum the sanctuary as she did every week. I wondered at her steadiness, her willingness to work in Bliss House. I knew she disdained talk of the supernatural beyond the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (never the Holy Ghost, because she wasn’t that sort of Christian). It was reassuring. She was the perfect complement to Terrance who, for all I knew, was Satan himself. (Of course I didn’t really think he was Satan. But he was so unreadable that I might have believed anything about him.)
When they were gone, with the exception of Michael, I was alone in the house. What I wanted more than anything was to sleep, but I swore to myself that I would never again sleep when I was alone with Michael.
Chapter 23
Missing
“Terrance might have come back!”
J.C., Press, and I clustered in a half-circle in the front hall, watching Terrance in the kitchen doorway. At least I was watching Terrance. J.C. and Press were watching me as though I were raving. Which, perhaps, I was. I was as irrational as any mother might be whose child has disappeared from the bed where that child had been taking his afternoon nap, and was perspiring from running up and down the hallways, tearing apart rooms. Press and I had separated to look upstairs. Marlene and Terrance had scoured the downstairs, while J.C. went outside. Though none of us really believed, I think, that he had been able to open an outer door. We’d been looking for more than half an hour, and there had been no sign of Michael.
Terrance’s face was impassive. How I hated that face. His hands, upturned at his thighs, were his only expression.
“You didn’t hear him, Terrance?” Press said. “Maybe coming down the stairs?”
“Marlene and I only just returned a few minutes before you did, Mr. Press.”
“For God’s sake, Press. He could have come back earlier and left again. I don’t think you know what kind of man he is. What he’s responsible for. What he did to your mother!” I turned to Terrance. “Tell him what you did, you bastard.”
Behind Terrance, I heard Marlene murmur “Oh, dear Lord.”
Press took my arm and all but jerked me aside, pushing his face into mine. “You will not do this, Charlotte. You don’t get to behave this way just because Michael got out of his room while you weren’t paying attention.”
“What are you saying?” No, it wasn’t that I didn’t understand what Press was saying. He was only saying what everyone else was thinking. What I was thinking.
The nursery had smelled slightly of urine from the diaper pail because Marlene didn’t empty it until the evening. How used we women become to such smells, not minding what a man would find repellent because they come from our precious children.
After not seeing Michael in the crib, I had crossed the room quietly to the trundle bed’s rumpled coverlet, expecting to find him snuggled beneath it. But the bed was empty except for the Lassie doll, which lay on the pillow where Michael’s head might have been. I fell to my knees to run my hands over the rumpled sheets as though I would conjure Michael from them, but he was gone.
Would I have to tell them where I had been? I couldn’t. No one would believe me.