“Really?” she said. “Because I stopped listening an hour ago.”
Blake asked her what she was drinking and ordered her another vodka soda. Then they just started talking, and he felt strangely familiar, one of those people who feel like an old friend before you’ve even exchanged names.
“Don’t look now,” Blake had said. He nodded in the direction behind her with a mischievous grin. “But I think your friend has found a more enthusiastic audience.”
She glanced over and saw Bruce (yes, that was his name) leaning into a woman from their short-fiction class. The woman was as talentless and dull as he was; they were a perfect couple.
“Good for him,” she said.
“You can’t keep the pretty ones all to yourself, Blakey.” Wolf had joined them.
Just the sight of him, even that very first moment, lit her up inside. Those silky curls, those glittering eyes, those muscled forearms. Something else, too, of course. What had it been in him that made her choose Wolf over Blake? Was it something good? Or was it something bad?
Whatever it was, Blake, however sweet and good looking, immediately receded from her view. And it was Wolf she wound up going home with that night. Blake and Claire had broken up, just briefly. (He was single for the first time since high school the night they met.) The following week, however, Blake and Claire got back together. And they were married before Blake had graduated law school. Merri and Wolf were married two years later. But there had been one night when she could have chosen between them. She’d spent a lot of time over the years thinking about how things would be different if she’d kept talking with the man she’d liked, instead of sleeping with the man she wanted.
But then there would be no Jackson, no Abbey. And that had always given her comfort because her children were the center of her universe, the right things that made every other mistake and mishap okay. Until. Until their failings as people and parents were harshly punished with the loss of Abbey.
It was that thinking, that mental maze that had led Merri to her nervous breakdown in the months after Abbey’s disappearance. This idea that if she could atone for all the mistakes she made, maybe she could stop the fall of dominos or even reverse it. It was easy to see from which parent Jackson had inherited his obsessive thinking.
Her phone pulsed on the table, startling her.
Mom! Aced my math test. 99!
Good job, Jacko!!
She scrolled over to see him on the little map on Find My Friends. There he was, at school where he belonged.
Are you okay up there? She could see his worried frown.
Don’t worry about your Mom, kiddo. Let me worry about you.
Okay. Love you.
She glanced back over at her computer screen. The missing man stared out at her. Merri’s psychiatrist told her that the most stressful condition for the human mind is simply not knowing. Even if the worst thing happens, the mind recovers eventually, returns to its natural baseline of happiness. But the wondering, the crushing weight of disappointments, the violent swing between poles of hope and despair. It’s almost more than a person can endure.
She was attuned now to the wobble, that edgy feeling that meant she was losing her grip. She forced herself to close the computer and lie down on the bed, breathe deep. Let go. Let God. It was such a simple phrase that did bring comfort if you let it. But not as much comfort as those smooth, fat white pills, which she still thought about every day.
ELEVEN
This Penny was different from the other ones. It took him a while to figure out what it was. He’d seen it the very first day when Poppa had noticed her in town. Poppa hadn’t said anything. He had just stopped his work and went very still, and Bobo followed his gaze to the family moving up the street. They drifted right past without even seeing Poppa and Bobo.
The pretty woman, with her raspberry-colored tee-shirt and faded blue jeans, holding the hand of a boy with white blond hair. The man had strolled up ahead, was looking in the window of a shop and pointing at something. The girl trailed behind, licking ice cream from a cone. She gazed up at the trees, spun around—daydreaming, in her own world. Then it was like she sensed him looking at her. She turned slowly, and she saw him. Looked right at him, not through him or over him or around him, like most people. She smiled, white teeth a little crooked. Then she ran ahead, back to her family, taking her daddy by the hand. She didn’t look back at him again, though Bobo kept watching her.