Clara and Kristin had shared the language of motherhood long enough for her to recognize that there was a story there, one to do with a stubborn child, and just the idea of it calmed her, that the reason it was left behind had been something as ordinary as all that. The flash of anger that she’d been worried over nothing was easily checked, disregarded. But still …
“You could have told me some of it—I mean, along the way,” she said quietly. “I feel like a horrible friend.”
“You would have thought differently of me.”
“I wouldn’t have.”
“You wouldn’t have felt sorry for a desperate widow who’d gotten herself into something scarier than loneliness, something emptier than grief? I’d already had enough pity, which was why I allowed myself to be brought to Yellow Springs in the first place. Though I’ll grant that I was a little too eager to leave everything behind. By the time I knew deep down it was time to leave again—farther and faster and forever—I was doubly scared to do it.”
Clara tried to ignore the bruise of her hurt feelings, dulled but still tender to the touch. She nodded with what she hoped looked like understanding but kept her eyes on the water. It was impossible in this light to guess at how deep it was.
“I did tell you the one thing I never told anyone else,” Kristin said more softly, her voice breaking.
“You told me the one thing that was important to tell.” It was true, and it was all that mattered. Glancing sideways at her friend, she caught her look of concern. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It worked. You did it. You’re officially a cold case, until and unless Paul manages to turn something up.”
Kristin nodded. “I don’t know if this feeling of looking over my shoulder will ever go away, but that’s one less thing to worry about, I guess.” She pushed her sunglasses tighter up on her nose and stole a glance back toward the beach, for good measure. “It’s been hard, not feeling guilty—even about that last night. I still can’t believe we actually went through with drugging everyone. I couldn’t stop thinking about Randi and Rhoda, sleeping through the baby crying.”
“A baby never died from crying,” Clara said almost automatically. “The same could not be said of your situation.” They fell into a companionable silence, and somber as it was, Clara couldn’t help smiling. She’d been imagining this meeting for months, wonder ing if it was really going to happen—if she’d ever see Kristin again—and worrying how, if it never came to be, she’d ever deal with the not knowing.
They’d predetermined this last checkpoint standing in Clara’s kitchen, just before the bonfire that night, as Kristin nervously watched Clara crush the pain pills and carefully distribute the powder into the wineglasses awaiting their guests.
“I’m not sure—Randi is nursing…” Kristin had begun to protest.
“These are left over from my C-section recovery. So I know they’re safe for the baby.”
“But maybe the wine by itself would be enough?”
Clara had been the firm one. She had seen firsthand what kind of crash could occur at the intersection of so-called love and simmering anger. She wasn’t going to see it happen to anyone else. She’d shaken her head fiercely. “This is what we agreed. Randi and Rhoda are up at all hours with Adele, and Izzy’s job has made her half nocturnal. We can’t risk anyone seeing anything, and you need the biggest possible head start. This is the only way.”
Seeing the look on Kristin’s face, she’d softened. “Where will you go?” But then she’d recovered herself, shaking her head. “Never mind. It’s better that I don’t know.”
Kristin’s eyes had filled with tears. “I’m ready to walk away from Paul. But leaving the rest of my life—and the kids’ lives—that’s going to be the worst part. Never seeing you or Thomas or Maddie again…”
Clara poured a splash of wine into a clean glass. “I know we decided on grape juice for you tonight, but a little this far in advance won’t hurt.”
Kristin downed it all at once.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to just tell the police when they come asking, assuming you’re long gone by then? Yes, he was violent. Yes, she ran. No, I don’t know where.” It wasn’t an entirely unselfish question.
But that’s where Kristin was adamant. “If you do, they’ll focus the investigation on me. What kind of wife I’ve been, what kind of mother, what right I had to disappear, what I should have done instead.” She’d already made this argument, that the uncertainty about where she’d gone and why would focus the scrutiny on Paul, where it belonged. “I’ve covered his tracks—and mine—too well. I don’t want him to get away with a simple he said–she said dismissal. I want there to be doubts about him, real ones. I want him to sweat it out. I want him to be branded with a warning.”
Clara wouldn’t press her again. “It’s going to be awful, not knowing for sure that you’re okay.” Once they’d been released into the kitchen air, the words seemed incredibly insensitive. “I mean, you will be. I know you will be. I just won’t be able to see it.”
“Maybe you can,” Kristin had said. “Once everything has died down. Name a time and place. I’ll be there.” Clara could tell she was bluffing. Not that Kristin herself wouldn’t want to arrange to meet, but that she didn’t believe Clara would care enough to travel so far, to risk so much, just to see her again.
How low Paul had managed to knock her sense of self-worth.
“My mother lives in Florida,” Clara said. “Not that you’ll be there, as far as I know, but you could treat the kids to a little vacation. Early December would be three months out.”
But then Clara had been so nervous she’d ended up drinking more than she intended that night. It went fuzzy—and nothing after it was clear, either.
Not until that letter had come in the mail before Thanksgiving, bearing only two cautious yet hope-filled words: We’re on. She’d wanted to cry from relief right there on the curb, but instead she’d let the tide of emotion sweep her into action. All along, Clara had dreaded the necessary excuse of visiting her mother, but by the time she’d found herself breathless in the kitchen, trying to seem cool as she floated the idea by Benny, she almost meant what she said, about making amends.
“Your sister misses you,” she blurted out now.
“She came to see you?”
She nodded. “I know she regrets pushing you away, judging you…”
Kristin didn’t say anything. Finally: “She’s used to me being out of the picture. She’ll be okay.”
“If you can think of a way you’d feel comfortable with me relaying a message…”
She shook her head. “I can’t risk it. I’ve come too far. I just wanted to survive, but Clara, it’s the most wonderful thing—we’re happy.”
Clara watched as Aaron put his arm sweetly around Abby, both of them perched on tiptoe at the binoculars, to steady her on the circular rail. What a good example he would have been for Thomas. Just last week she’d heard him complaining to Hallie that he still had to “train” Maddie. “We miss you,” she said softly. “Me, the kids, everyone.”
“Has Benny ever suspected, do you think? That you know more than you let on?”
She shook her head. “Much as I’ve hated keeping this from him, I never actually lied,” she said. “To him, the police, anyone. I was careful with what I said. But he’d be furious with me if he knew. He hates secrets. Also, he thinks I need to learn to mind my own business.” She laughed. “Which, in a way, I probably do.”
Kristin’s fingers circled tightly around her wrist on the railing between them. “I needed help,” she said. “And I’m glad I wasn’t flawless at making sure no one could tell.”
Clara clapped her own hand over her friend’s and squeezed.
“Breathe that sea air,” Kristin said, her smile broad, her eyes wet. “If it wasn’t for you, I don’t know if I’d ever have gone through with it. Who knows where I’d be. Or if.”
The twins came running, then, a mass of bare arms and legs, and Clara turned away, the wind off the Gulf whipping her hair and chilling the tears that had come into her eyes. She took one step away, then another.
“I’m glad we did this,” she said softly, not sure if Kristin could hear.