When She Left: A Thriller, page 16
“Where’d you get this?”
“I thought it was you,” Lucky said instead of answering. “I thought you were having an affair. I thought you were the one seeing William. I had no idea it was her.”
“Where did you get this?” Renee asked again. “Did you hire someone?”
“I saw his address in our maps app and I was so worried.” Lucky’s arms were wrapped around his chest, as if he was holding himself together. “I saw your car in his driveway and thought it was you. I thought you were leaving me.”
Lucky distantly realized he’d never been this honest with his wife before.
“William went to DC one night,” he lied. “I followed him to this hotel and thought you were there, but I couldn’t find him. I was so sad . . . I stayed overnight. I couldn’t come home.”
“Oh, Lucky,” Renee said. “It wasn’t me. Why would you think that?”
“I think work is getting to me. It’s been on my mind a lot. I feel like . . .”
Lucky paused, that sense of need growing in him like wildfire, the way he’d helplessly broken down in front of Chris Winters and his man Marley, the desperate hope for help from Heather Anders. Sadness eating his soul.
Renee looked small and miserable, sitting on the chair opposite him, knees pulled to her chest.
“I can’t believe this is her,” Renee said, and she glanced around the room, as if searching for a distraction. Looking at the walls, his desk, the floor, anywhere but at Lucky. As if she was mad at him, the way she would avoid his eyes and face during one of their rare fights.
Her palms pressed into her forehead.
“How could Bill do this?”
Lucky sidled over next to her and pulled her to the floor, and she leaned into him and cried.
For a few minutes, that’s all that happened. Her tears and sobs and his arm heavily over her shoulders. Lucky wondered, as he always did during Renee’s moments of sadness, if he was helping. There was something in Renee that seemed as if she didn’t fully need him . . . or she did, and he was only providing a basic level of comfort. Lucky wanted to be more for her. He wanted to offer her solace and intimacy, but he always felt as if there was some sort of emotional chasm, a part of her he could never reach.
“It’s not your fault,” Lucky said. “Or my fault. It’s his.”
“When did you find out?”
“About Marybeth? Hours ago.”
“We can figure this out,” Renee said, as if she was only speaking to herself. “This happens more than people realize. I mean, I was with an older man when I was younger.”
“You were?”
The hurt in Lucky’s voice surprised him.
She nodded. “When I was sixteen. He was twenty-six. Or, at least, he said he was. He might have been older.”
Renee had never told Lucky any of this.
“He was my first,” she added.
Lucky’s own jealousy surprised him. He withdrew his hands from hers.
“I’m sorry,” he said lamely. “I think I’m . . . I’m sorry.”
Renee touched his knee.
Leaned forward and caressed his face.
No words were said, but everything was understood.
And that small moment of affection was one of the most intimate Lucky had ever felt.
“I know what Marybeth’s going through,” Renee said. “I know what it’s like to think you’re in love, or be in love, with someone older. I can talk about this with her. And then I’ll let the school know. We can figure this out. I bet it’s him she’s been meeting up with. The ‘older’ guy.”
Lucky imagined staying out here with Renee the entire night, coming up with different plans on a dry-erase board, writing and wiping away terms like strangulation and gunshot and ice pick. It has to look like an accident, Renee would tell him, and Lucky would be impressed by her insight. You know, he’d reply shyly, I’ve actually done this before.
“Lucky?”
Lucky blinked. “Yes?”
“What are you doing? You’re just sitting there smiling.” Renee paused. “I’m angry, but Marybeth can’t feel isolated from us right now. We need to tell her she can’t see William, even if she won’t understand why. She won’t understand that being with a man so much older isn’t a healthy relationship . . . because he’s not a healthy person. And this can affect her later in life; it can completely destroy her view of relationships and trust.”
Cold’s coming, Renee said in his mind. So we pour water down William’s driveway at night. Let it freeze and turn icy. When he walks down the driveway, one of us pushes him down, and the other speeds by and runs him over. Blammo.
I’ve never heard you say blammo.
I’m just trying so many new things!
“If you yell at Marybeth and forbid her from seeing him,” Renee continued, “then you’re putting our daughter down this path forever. She’ll try and find what she lost in someone else. And it won’t be someone her age.”
What about this? imaginary Renee asked. We drug his food. Sneak into his house and put poison in his dinner.
If he’s eating sausage, Lucky would say, we’ll poison it and walk in and tell him, as he’s dying, William, you’re the wurst.
Imaginary Renee laughed. Lucky, when did you get so funny?
“We can tell her we’re mad,” Renee said. “Honestly, I don’t think that’s something we’ll be able to hide. Neither of us are that good with keeping secrets. But we can’t give her something to push back against. She’s going to be looking for that, something that seems unfair because, trust me, Marybeth’s going to want to justify it. And if she can justify it, then she’ll keep doing it.”
We shoot him in the back of the head, imaginary Renee suggested. Stab him in the stomach. Slit his throat. Hit him in the chest with a hammer until his ribs pierce his heart. Tape up his mouth and pour water up his nostrils until he drowns.
“Lucky?”
Renee, honey, good news. I’ve done all this before.
“We need to do this together,” Renee said. “Marybeth has to know we’re on the same page, but, instead of us angry with her, she has to realize we’re worried about her. That’ll get through. It won’t be overnight, but it will happen.”
“Okay.”
Renee pulled him toward her, and he lay down on the office’s hard floor, his head in her soft lap, her hand stroking his hair. “A lot of young girls have stories like this. That’s the problem. And it’s wrong. It’s disgusting how these men take advantage of young girls. It was wrong what happened to me. Men need to be adults, and they need to be held accountable. William needs to be held accountable.”
“I promise you,” Lucky said grimly, “he will be.”
“Well, I mean, Jesus, Lucky,” Renee replied, as she absentmindedly ran her fingers through his hair. “Let’s not kill him.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
RUBY
“Are you working with the Winterses?”
Eric Liu stared at Ruby, shocked to see her, one hand still on the front door that he had just opened.
“Jake’s mom?” he asked.
Ruby didn’t wait for an invite. Pushed past him into his apartment.
“I saw one of their cars down the street.” Ruby closed the door. “Lexus with DC plates, tinted windows. The kind of car that would definitely get stolen in DC, except everyone knows not to touch it. So, let me ask you again, are you working with the Winterses?”
Eric stayed by the front door, as if unsure what to do.
“What happened to Jake?” Eric asked. “Is he okay?”
Ruby stared hard at him. “So you did talk to them.”
“Yes.” Eric’s voice dropped to a whisper. She hadn’t seen Eric since he was a child, but he was the same reed-thin boy she remembered, shaggy brown hair that always looked unkempt and too big for his face. Strange how men only have two or three hairstyles through their entire lives.
“They made me.”
“Made you,” she said with derision. “How?”
Eric lifted his shorts, showed her his thighs. The insides were dotted with reddish-black circles close to his groin. Cigarette burns.
“Don’t tell Jake,” Eric said. “He’ll feel terrible.”
And he looked down at the burns, his chin pressed into his chest like a little boy.
Only those who seek the Lord, Ruby thought, understand justice.
She glanced away from Eric, around the apartment. The layout was the same as she remembered from the last time she’d been here, years and years ago. Highland Towers, her first home after she’d left her mother.
“They shot Jake,” Ruby said. “He’s with a doctor now.”
“Jake was shot, and you’re not with him?”
His surprise was an accusation.
“I’m here,” Ruby told Eric, “because I need to know exactly what you said to the Winterses. Because that’s why Jake got shot.”
Tears had swum up to Eric’s eyes. “Is he okay?”
Somehow, Ruby hadn’t expected to see this sadness. Love always surprised her.
“He’s going to be.”
“I told them Jake and Melissa were in Wharfside,” Eric said softly. “That’s what Jake said when he called. After the diner.”
“Who talked to you?” Ruby asked, trying to refocus. “Was it a big man? Covered in scars?”
“Yeah. Two women, these twins, came by the day earlier. Then he showed up.”
The Rusu twins and then Seth. Ruby remembered the impact of the car slamming into Seth, the reverberation, his head smacking down on her hood, and Seth stumbling back, collapsing. Lying so still Ruby had thought he was dead until Seth started crawling toward her, one of his legs dragging uselessly. His face a mask being torn off.
“I didn’t want anything to happen to him and Melissa,” Eric said.
Ruby still didn’t want to look at Eric, so she turned her attention elsewhere. Glanced at a framed picture next to the TV. Eric with his mother, his arms wrapped around her waist, his head only as high as her chest, beaming proudly.
Tiffany.
Ruby had been pressed by memories of Tiffany from the moment she’d slipped back into this apartment building. And she didn’t want to think about her, desperately didn’t.
But Ruby couldn’t stop herself from remembering.
Ruby couldn’t stop herself from crying. She was in the throes of exhaustion, Jake’s constant wailing frustrating her. Jake’s father, James, had taken a job working construction in Minnesota, ostensibly because the pay was too good to turn down, and he’d never returned.
Ruby hadn’t been entirely surprised. Her pregnancy had been unplanned, and she’d suspected that James wasn’t as infatuated with her as she was with him. They’d been dating for half a year but in secret. He only came over at night, a booty call joke they both laughed at but, privately to her, seemed exactly what their relationship was. James never wanted to go out, content to order food and have it delivered, watch movies on her couch, stay at her place and never take her to his.
He was embarrassed of her, Ruby gradually realized.
But she liked James so much and spending time with him was so nice that she didn’t care. She wondered if spending more time together would change how he felt about her. Sometimes she wondered what he saw in her. She wasn’t thin, didn’t have the delicate, cultivated features of other young women—glowing skin, effortlessly tossed hair, a sensuous appeal to the curves of her lips and cheeks.
Instead, Ruby had always been overweight, with big hair meant to distract from her face, a face full of round features, cheeks pressed into her mouth, small eyes. She’d never had a serious boyfriend, and she didn’t want to call James one either. At least not to his face.
But she couldn’t help thinking of him that way.
He wasn’t pleased by her sudden pregnancy. A week of unsettling stops by her apartment and, once, an angry visit to her job at the DMV. Loud accusations of her getting pregnant on purpose. Pushing her toward an abortion that she couldn’t bring herself to do. His disbelief that this could have happened, even though James despised condoms, and she’d never insisted. Urges for her to test herself over and over, sometimes while James watched, the humiliation of urinating in front of him while he glared.
When he told her about the new job and his move across country, Ruby wasn’t surprised.
Or, by then, disappointed.
And so Ruby found herself alone and overwhelmed, living in this building, her small apartment filled with unwashed clothes and boxes of cheap diapers and small plastic bottles and containers with mismatched tops. James sent money for the first two months. But he never met his son, and the money soon stopped.
Ruby was holding the framed photo of Eric with his mother, one of her thumbs absentmindedly rubbing a smudge off the glass over Tiffany’s face.
She quickly placed the frame back.
Eric was saying something.
“You’re not going to tell me where Jake is?” he asked desperately. “You won’t take me there? I need to see him!”
“I can’t,” Ruby said. But she wasn’t sure if he heard her.
The situation had changed. She was no longer in control, emotionally or morally.
Sins carry more weight than wounds.
She was at the breaking point, crying every day, lying in bed while five-month-old Jake screamed in the living room, when she heard someone walk into her apartment.
“Hello?” a woman asked.
Ruby dried her eyes.
“Do you need help?”
Ruby pulled herself out of bed, peered into the living room. A woman she didn’t know, but recognized, stood in the doorway. Jake had stopped crying and was grabbing the bars of his crib and staring at the stranger.
“I’m Tiffany,” the woman said, “from down the hall. I heard crying.”
“Mine or his?”
Tiffany smiled, but it hadn’t been a joke. “May I?” she asked and pointed at Jake.
“Okay.”
Tiffany held Jake, and he quieted. A few whimpers, but the screams were gone.
Tiffany had a child as well, a one-year-old named Eric, which seemed to Ruby a wondrous distance from having an infant. The two women became instant friends, constants in each other’s apartments. Both women were single mothers of only children. Both were under thirty—Tiffany, twenty-five and Ruby, twenty-three. Both had been left by the fathers of their children. Tiffany’s family lived down south and was well off and sent her money, enough so Tiffany could be a full-time caregiver to her child while they begged her to return home.
But they’d never accepted her boyfriend, Tiffany explained. Couldn’t abide her having a child with someone Asian and had really only started talking with her after he left. Ruby could see her resentment, although she couldn’t help but notice that Tiffany still accepted the money they sent.
Not that she judged her for it. Ruby wished she had family.
Except for Jake, she’d been completely alone since James had vanished.
But with Tiffany, Ruby was able to manage stress without feeling overwhelmed. Able to enjoy motherhood, despite its complications. Able to do it without being alone.
The two women made a habit of sharing a bottle of wine in the evening after the babies were in bed, sitting on one of their couches, watching some reality television show and trash-talking all the people on it. Even when they weren’t together, they talked on the phone or texted, Ruby automatically smiling whenever a message from Tiffany appeared.
Ruby got Tiffany a job at the DMV, and, although the work was drudgery—standing at counter number eleven for eight hours a day, helping angry people with their license issues—Tiffany was delighted, grateful for the opportunity to do something other than parent. And Ruby was excited to spend even more time with her friend.
“I remember asking Mom why you two never talked. Why Jake and I could play together, and you never once saw each other. She said she was mad at you. She said you broke her heart.”
“It was mutual.”
Eric’s eyes flashed. “So you’re saying it was her fault?”
“No.” Ruby took a moment, forced herself to look away from Eric. She stared down into her hands.
“How did Jake end up involved with the Winterses?” she asked.
“It was a coincidence.”
“No such thing.”
“It was! He was taking photos, and this woman started talking to him. She loved his work, told him she was looking for someone to take a picture of her for her husband. Her husband was connected, but Jake didn’t know that.” Eric rubbed the back of his neck. “Melissa saw the photos and contacted him.”
“He should have known better.”
“You mean like you should have known better when you got my mom involved?”
That wasn’t what had happened, but Ruby didn’t correct him.
“This is Gabe,” Tiffany told her one day during lunch at the DMV.
He was charming, and Ruby appreciated that he at least acted interested in meeting her, smiled warmly, gave her a quick hug that she wasn’t expecting but didn’t mind. He told Ruby that he worked in finance. He dressed nicely, a slim suit and a sizable watch glinting on his wrist, shiny shoes and belt. Tiffany was infatuated, touching his arm and laughing too much at his jokes, a constant smile on her face.
“So finance?” Ruby asked. “Like, in a bank?”
“Not exactly. I work for the Winters Corporation.”
How had it started? Ruby really didn’t know, couldn’t remember exactly how she and Tiffany ended up printing fake IDs from their apartments for Gabe. Was it her or Tiffany who seemed to have the idea once Gabe brought it up one night, somewhere along the three-month mark of his relationship with Tiffany? She remembered Gabe saying something about a struggling undocumented family who needed papers, or they were going to be deported.
“You know,” Gabe said casually, “you can get a lot of money by making fake IDs. I know someone who’d pay a lot. And it’s not even that risky.”
Ruby and Tiffany looked at each other.
