Rebecca frowned. “But then it happened for real. To Kristin. Ted went out on the lake with his parents, and he never came home. She said the worst of it was that she wasn’t up waiting for him. She usually did, but that night she fell asleep on the couch. The police knocked and woke her up, hours beyond the time she should have missed him.”
Clara cradled the ceramic warmth of her coffee, imagining a day Benny failed to walk through the door, home safe. She couldn’t fathom how Kristin had been able to bear it.
“I think she had some survivor’s guilt too,” she continued. “She would’ve gone along that day, but she wasn’t feeling well. It wasn’t long before she found out that the reason she’d felt sick, and the reason she’d been unable to stay awake that evening, was that she was pregnant with the twins. Ted never even knew he was going to be a dad.”
A wave of sadness washed over Clara. The twins hadn’t been babies when their dad died—they’d been babies in progress. The time line made more sense now. So, too, did the fact that Kristin had never mentioned Ted.
“I don’t know if that makes it better or worse,” Clara said, shaking her head.
“Neither. It’s the same amount of awful either way.” Rebecca sighed. “I tried to stay close to her those months. She didn’t live far from me in Dayton. I had a baby and a toddler of my own—they were all-consuming—but I really did think I was trying. I did a rotten job, though. I think about how I should have handled things differently after she met Paul, but really I had already failed her by then. Those months were when she needed me most, and I just … I was there, but I wasn’t there enough. Mom was already in the Alzheimer’s facility, hardly knew us, and I was struggling with that, and I—” Her voice broke. “I didn’t want to see my own perfect little family damaged the way Kristin’s had been. I was worried about them being affected if I spent too much time with her, or had her around too much in the state she was in, but I should have been far more worried about her. I was horrendously selfish.”
“I’m sure that’s not true,” Clara said, though she knew what Rebecca meant about how people seemed to think grief might be catching. It had proved true enough back in Cincinnati, after the incident that, while a far less intimate loss, had devastated Clara in other ways. “How did she meet Paul?” she asked. Rebecca had seemed to be almost shrinking into herself, but she sat up straighter then and tossed her hair back.
“He was her OB,” Rebecca said.
Dots connected in Clara’s mind. How had she not drawn the lines sooner?
“I think he felt sorry for her at first—took her under his wing, gave her his cell number to call any time, that sort of thing. She’d been so overwhelmed to discover that she was pregnant, and then that it was twins. I tried to tell her what a gift it was, to have these pieces of Ted now that he was gone, but it never outweighed her sense of overwhelm. Not that I blame her.” She looked over at her boys, then back at Clara, and lowered her voice, though the children didn’t seem to be listening. “It was ‘Dr. Kirkland says this’ and ‘Dr. Kirkland says that.’ No one but him seemed to be able to make her feel better about anything. She developed a sort of unhealthy attachment. I thought it was unhealthy, anyway. She thought it was romantic.”
“Isn’t that in violation of some kind of patient-doctor code or something?”
“Or something. He transferred her to another doctor before the birth. They were an item by then. He was promising that her twins would have a father, saying the things she wanted to hear.”
Clara hesitated. “Didn’t that seem a little fast?”
“It seemed a lot fast. I told her as much, but it was not a popular opinion. She used all the typical lines—you can’t control when love strikes, he was there when she needed him, how could she turn away this second chance at happiness, you name it.” Rebecca shook her head. “She’d been close to Ted’s family. They were high school sweethearts, had been together forever, and I think things would’ve been different if his parents or sister had been around to help her. But they were all gone, all on the boat that day. And Kristin—she’d always had Ted. It made sense that she was more afraid of being alone than she was of getting involved too soon. I’d like to think I wouldn’t have made the same mistake, but in her shoes, who knows?”
Clara nodded. She knew better than to judge.
“They got married quietly, soon after the twins were born.”
“What was he like with the twins back then?”
Rebecca frowned. “I remember thinking that for an OB, he didn’t seem all that enamored. But then I thought, Well, it’s not like he’s a pediatrician—he’s caring for the mothers. And that’s about how it was at home too. I wasn’t surprised to learn he never adopted the children, because he seemed to think of them as hers. He was helpful enough, but even when everyone else in the room was focused on the kids, he only had eyes for Kristin. And I don’t necessarily mean that in a sweet way. I saw less and less of her, which of course is understandable when someone has newborn twins. Only—” She stopped.
“Only what?”
She shrugged. “My husband thought I was being paranoid. But I had a feeling there was more to it. She stopped going to see Mom, and she’d always been better about that than I was. I mean, our mom raised us all by herself. We never knew our dad. When my kids were babies and my own visits started to taper off, Kristin was the one lecturing me: ‘After everything Mom sacrificed for us, you can sacrifice an hour and go see her.’ I would’ve thought she’d be taking the babies to see their grandmother every week, even once they moved to Yellow Springs—the twins were a year old then. It wasn’t that far. But nothing.”
She sipped her coffee in silence and seemed to be steeling herself against whatever she was about to say next. “One day she showed up at my house unannounced, maybe a year after she’d moved—and I was kind of annoyed, honestly; it was one of those days I had so much to do I didn’t know where to start—and she alluded to feeling trapped in the marriage. I look back now and realize how much courage it must have taken for her to try to open up, after I’d basically criticized her for getting remarried too soon.”
“Did she say she felt trapped?”
“Not exactly. But she said she might have made a mistake. And she looked trapped. Her eyes—” She shuddered.
“So what happened?”
“I basically said, ‘I told you so.’ Not very sisterly of me. By then I was resenting all the extra time I was putting in at the nursing home. There was a barrage of calls at all hours of the night: Mom was being disruptive, refusing medication … Alzheimer’s doesn’t just affect your memory, you know; it’s your whole personality. Awful disease. They always said there was no answer when they called Kristin, and she always had some excuse when I’d ask her about it—as if she were the only one with kids. She’d say it was a longer drive for her, and I’d point out that she’d chosen to move away, and she’d say that Paul didn’t have the same opportunity to fill a real need in Dayton, and off we’d go on this circular argument. Once she actually said, ‘It’s not like she knows who I am, Rebecca. It’s not like she even knows if I’m there or not!’”
Rebecca bore the weariness of someone who had lost her sister long before her sister had disappeared.