—Only twice.
Rohan stretched out his arm and touched the flat head of the hammer to her abdomen, and began to press, gently at first, then with a slight springiness, as if stoking a fire.
—Only?
—Rohan. Please.
She tried to step back but he followed her belly with the hammer, taking slow steps toward her, and she could feel its cold metal against her tummy and its forked end sharp through her shirt. He was pressing with more force now and she was feeling nauseous and scared, really scared, but in that instant Raj shoved open the back door of the shop and came trundling into the kitchen, eating a dumpling of snow out of his woolly glove. Maya and Rohan watched him glide through and disappear into the seating area out front.
Maya believed that if Raj had not chosen that moment to come in from the alley, Rohan would have killed her then and there. Instead he dropped the old cup of coffee in the trash and went into the storage room for a new hairnet and a flashlight and a pair of the latex gloves he used for cleaning. When he came out, he was wiping the hammer’s handle on the sleeve of his coat.
—Where are you going? she said to his back.
He yanked open the shop’s rear door and became a dark silhouette against the glow of falling snow.
—Somebody’s daddy forgot his hammer, he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“Carol wasn’t supposed to be there,” Mrs. Patel said, pulling a Kleenex out from beneath her stretchy watchband and holding it to her nose. “I don’t know what happened in that house, Lydia, I don’t want to know. But I do know that Carol was supposed to be at your house. Not there. It’s all Raj talked about, being left out of your sleepover.”
Lydia leaned into the stainless counter, feeling like she’d swallowed her tongue. Across from her in the doughnut shop kitchen, Mrs. Patel picked threads off her bandaged hand and dropped them to the tiled floor. The sight made Lydia dizzy, as if she too were unraveling. She looked around and nothing was what it had always been. The buzzing industrial fridge, the dripping sprayer above the sink, the stovetop with its faint blue pilot lights—all of it was a grainy version of itself. The world she’d known for all these years was not the world around her.
“You need to sit,” Mrs. Patel said, and slid an upturned bucket toward her feet, but Lydia shook her head. Mrs. Patel opened the back door and propped it partway with a brick. Out there the alley was sloppy and dark. “Then you need some air.”
Lydia’s clothes were still damp and the fresh chill seeped through her skin. She thought about how so many people—Moberg chief among them—had spent years seeking an answer to the Hammerman, and the whole time it had been sealed in a file, waiting to be brought into the light: Birth Father’s Name: Bartholomew Edward O’Toole. This single bit of data could have broken the case, except it hadn’t even been recorded until Joey’s birth in Colorado Springs, six months after the murders. No wonder Moberg had missed it.
“You knew all along what your husband had done.”
“Only after,” Mrs. Patel hissed. “I had no idea what he was going to do. I’m not even sure he knew what he was going to do. Not exactly.”
The day after the murders, Mrs. Patel learned about them by gluing herself to the local news channel. Her first thought was to turn Rohan over to the police, but in a fog of fear and panic, she reasoned that doing so would only hurt Raj. She convinced herself that it would be better for her boy to live a false life under the adoring gaze of his father than to live under the odious shadow of what he had done, and equally important, what she herself had caused.
“Because make no mistake, Lydia,” Mrs. Patel said, “all of this was my fault. Their blood was on my hands. Make no mistake about that.”
Mrs. Patel seemed as if she was about to shriek, or curl into a crying fit, but instead she turned and brushed some remnant flour off the counter behind her.
“Please just let this go, Lydia.”
“I can’t do that.”
“You are alive,” Mrs. Patel said. “Maybe you’ve never thought about the risk he took by not killing you.”
He walked into that kitchen covered in blood, Moberg had told her, holding a dripping goddamned hammer, and let you keep your life.
“Of course I’ve thought about that,” Lydia said, sickened.
“And what about Raj?” Mrs. Patel said. “Do you understand what it will do to him if he finds out?”
“When he finds out. I do.”
“You say you do,” she said, shaking her head, “but you don’t. You have no idea how bad this will be for him.”
Mrs. Patel slumped forward, apparently resigned. Lydia could hear traffic splashing past on Colfax.
“You’re not protecting your son, Mrs. Patel. You’re protecting your husband. The Hammerman.”
“I am protecting my family,” she said, as if her silence were a maternal duty.
Mrs. Patel peered out to the alley, checking for her husband’s car. Then she moved the brick and closed the door and sat on a bucket near the dishwashing station.
Lydia’s mouth was parched and her ears were ringing, but she forced herself to focus.
“When did you decide to track Joey down?” she asked.
Mrs. Patel looked at her strangely and furrowed her brow.
“When did I decide? You’ve never had a child, Lydia, otherwise you wouldn’t ask me that. I decided the moment he left my arms.”
Something changed in Maya as she held her newborn in the delivery room in Colorado Springs. Joey had coppery skin and a head of soft black hair, and he smelled more lovely than any flower on earth. Though he’d only been outside of her body for minutes, he seemed so attuned to her presence, so alert. She knew that in giving him up she was doing the only thing she could; but after a few hours, when a pair of women came in and unpeeled him from her chest, she reached for him with horror, and her skin went cold in the empty air. And the thing was, her skin never stopped feeling cold, ever again, as if her infant Joey were some kind of phantom limb.
She needed to know that he was okay. That was all.
Which was why some years later, as his eighteenth birthday approached, Maya made a trip to the Vital Records office, without Rohan’s knowledge, to see if Joey had also expressed interest in meeting.
—It may never happen, Irene had cautioned her. It usually doesn’t.