Before he questioned my behavior anymore, I did as he said.
Whenever Clementine spent the day at Erin’s, she came home exhausted. Nap time there was spotty, and she was used to getting her full two hours each and every day. Without complaint she let me give her a quick bath. She usually liked to play in the water, but not tonight. Within twenty minutes we were in the rocker in her pink fairy-decorated room and I was reading her Goodnight Moon.
The sparkle on the walls was supposed to look like fairy dust and every time I was in here, I wondered if my sister had come up with the idea. In a way, it looked like dandelion weeds blowing in the wind. I’d never asked Michael about it. Sharing that part of my past was too intimate. I already knew he was very unaware of what Lizzy’s and my childhood was like because when I first arrived in Boston, he asked me if my parents had heard from my sister. Lizzy hadn’t even told him our mother had died.
“And good night to Clementine,” I said, putting our special spin on it as I tried to reel in my scattered thoughts.
She clapped.
Closing the last page of the book, I hugged her tightly. “I love you,” I told her.
She wrapped her little arms around me in a hug that melted me. She was what I needed to help ease the ever-growing gap in my chest. Logan’s abandonment of me was starting to settle in, the anger wearing off, and grief becoming a screaming wound opening deeper and deeper.
After a long while, I brought her to her crib and settled her beneath a blanket. “Good night, sweet girl,” I whispered and kissed her, not once, but twice.
Her eyes were closed before I even backed away from the crib and I had an overwhelming urge to go bury myself under the covers and go to bed myself, but I knew I couldn’t.
Quietly, I tiptoed down the hallway. The house was old, but all the rooms had been remodeled with a distinguished elegance. Michael had owned the house for a few years and although I’d never asked, I was certain it had been decorated before my sister moved in. With its parquet wood floors, white walls, and different shades of blues throughout, it looked like something out of Martha’s Vineyard.
My sister had been more wild child. The sixties “peace, love, not war” was her philosophy. Her drug use went along with her disposition. It was just who she was. How she rebelled, I used to think, but maybe it was more how she coped.
As I passed Heidi’s former room, something about its disarray caught my attention. This room had navy drapes and a white bedspread with blue doves embroidered all over it. It was typically kept neat, as was every room in the house. Today it was anything but. The bed was unmade and the blue-and-white striped carpet was thrown back. I found that strange.
Inside the room, it was apparent that Heidi had left in a hurry. The drawers were all pulled open. And as I glanced around, everything seemed slightly disheveled—not just the rug or the dressers, or the bed, but the closet door was wide open, with hangers on the floor.
I kicked the rug back into place, and that’s when I saw a yellow piece of paper in the wastebasket. It was from the type of pad Michael used all the time. With a quick glance behind me to make certain I was still alone, I uncrumpled it. It read, Pick one. Below those words was a web address: www.evanmarks.com.
That was all.
I’d never heard of the site.
Didn’t know what it meant.
But I’d seen the words before in Michael’s ex-secretary’s drawer.
I was curious and continued to glance around looking for something else.
Footfalls on the stairs alerted me that Michael was coming up. Tossing the paper back into the trash, I began to straighten the bed.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
I pretended to be startled and grabbed my chest. “Oh, you scared me. Sorry, my OCD kicked in. Heidi seems to have left a mess. I thought I’d straighten up a bit.”
Michael stepped inside the room and glanced around.
My heart was pounding.
His eyes landed on me, and for a moment I thought he might have seen how perplexed I was by the way Heidi had cleared her things out, but then he shoved a drawer closed. “She wasn’t the neatest houseguest.”
I tugged the corner of the bedspread. “No, she wasn’t.”
He was behind me, his arms around me reaching for the spread. “Another reason she didn’t work out,” he whispered in my ear.
I smelled liquor on his breath. Images of my father came to mind, and I tried not to shudder as I ducked out from under his body and made my way to the other side of the bed to straighten it.
Michael walked toward the door and stopped just short of it. He held out his hand. “Come on, dinner’s ready.”
After a few seconds of silence, I stepped toward the dresser, not him. “Let me just finish.”