Ten minutes later she cruised past Lacey’s, checking the parking lot for Emma’s car, but of course it wasn’t there. Lacey’s wouldn’t be the kind of place Emma would choose for her drinking. Too low class. Andi thought about stopping in for a burger and fries herself, a craving she’d developed in the last few weeks—one she understood better now—but with nutrition high on her mind, she turned off the lake road and onto Sunset Highway toward a place near the Wren Development offices simply called The Café. She ordered a chicken salad sandwich on thick-sliced wheat bread and ate half of it at the bistro, taking the second halfback with her to her house, where she spent the next three hours packing up the last of her boxes.
She then whiled away the rest of the afternoon and evening reading her myriad of baby books, the ones she’d initially packed away but had now dragged from their boxes, dreaming about renovating the second bedroom of the cabin into a nursery. Edie texted her around four to say she’d sent someone to the cabin to check on the lock and that she would call her in the morning. Andi gingerly pulled the envelope with the note from her purse, then put it in the bag she used for her laptop. She ate the second half of her sandwich for dinner and then packed up the meager items left in her refrigerator, putting them in another empty cardboard box: ketchup, mustard, a small carton of half and half cream, and ajar of dill relish. The rest of the refrigerator detritus she tossed out, ready for the last collection of her garbage.
Lying in bed that night, she pushed thoughts of the disturbing note aside and concentrated on the joy of her pregnancy. She would go over everything with Dr. Knapp soon enough. Her thoughts turned to her friends and family, her brother Jarrett, her mother, Diana, who lived across the country in Boston, and of course, her closest friend, Trini, whom she was seeing the next day. She wondered when she should tell them about the baby. She almost didn’t want to say anything at all, worried that it would break the spell somehow.
With no clear answer in mind, she drifted off to sleep.
*
She was awakened by a summer storm and flung back the covers and crossed to the window, watching lightning streak across the sky before hearing the rumble of thunder. Electrical storms were rare in Oregon and thrilling. Fascinated, she eagerly waited for another flash.
The storm reminded her of one evening vacationing at one of the cabins with her mother, father, and brother. Jarrett had shaken her awake to watch the lightning with him. Their parents were already on the back porch overlooking the lake, each with a glass of scotch. It was the summer before her parents split up, but she was blissfully ignorant of any familial disharmony as they all waited for the next brilliant flash.
Jarrett had pointed to the black water. “If you were out there in the middle. you’d get zapped and you’d be dead.”
“It’s a good thing we’re not out there, then,” her father rejoined, his voice slightly slurred.
“Like in a boat,” Jarrett stressed, “all by yourself.”
“I’d never do that,” Andi told her brother indignantly.
“Of course you wouldn’t,” Mom responded.
Jarrett had ignored them both. “If you wanted to get rid of somebody, that’s how you’d do it, and no one would ever know. Take ’em out in a boat in a lightning storm.”
“Timing wise, that would be impractical,” her father said, though it came out impragdigal. “You want to kill somebody you’d need a better plan.”
“Jim,” Mom warned.
“Come on, Diana. We’re just talking. Your coddling knows no bounds.”
And then he’d tossed the rest of his drink onto the ground, splashing Mom’s pant leg in the process before stomping off to bed.
Now, Andi crawled back into her own bed and wondered at the vagaries of memory, how sharp that one was, though her father had been out of their lives for years, succumbing to liver cancer five years earlier. Her mother called sporadically from Boston, where she’d moved after the divorce from Andi’s father. Soon, thereafter—too soon, in Andi’s opinion—she’d married a man named Tom DeCarolis whom Andi barely knew. Her mother had given birth to two more children with him whom Andi knew mostly through dutiful Christmas cards. Diana Sellers DeCarolis had drifted out of Andi and Jarrett’s life and into a new one across the country. Jarrett had moved to California for a while, tried a few different colleges but had returned to Oregon several years earlier and now worked for a wealthy restauranteur. She didn’t see much of him either. He’d called her after Greg’s death, but the conversation had been stilted, more because he’d once dated Trini and, after their ragingly dysfunctional relationship’s blowup ending, he didn’t seem to know how to deal with his sister any longer.