Finding Purgatory (17 page)

“Hello?”

“Emily?”

“Could be worse. Mom said even when she was pregnant with me all the maternity-wear was hideous. All pink and bows and ew.” Emily scrunched up her nose.

“I really don’t care. It’s not like it’s cutting in that much to my personal style. I’m just not looking forward to looking like—” Tori caught herself before she could put her foot in her mouth.

The other girl gave her a knowing smile and gestured down at her ginormous belly. “What? You don’t think you’re going to like shopping at the tent and awning company?”

“Tent and awning? That’s clever. I thought I was going to have to find the muumuu store.”

Emily giggled. “So we’re feeding me soon, right?”

It was no surprise Emily was hungry. The smells from the food court had hit Tori the second they got out into the main part of the mall. “I smell Mongolian.”

“Oh, no. I smell crepes.” Emily looked like she was about to start salivating at any moment.

“Divide and conquer,” Tori said, and Emily nodded her agreement.

Some minutes later, they were both sitting across from each other, tucking into their lunches. Tori looked up and caught when Emily’s expression of utter, food-induced bliss faded. They both chewed, and Tori had a feeling she knew what her friend was about to say. Emily seemed to be fixated on one uncomfortable subject in particular.

“So when you talked to your sister about her family, did she answer everything?”

“Why are you so damn curious about her? It’s really not that fascinating.”

Emily squirmed in her seat. She shrugged. “I just don’t get it, that’s all. And it’s interesting. It’s messed up, like you said.”

Tori had been around enough liars, and Emily wasn’t very good at it. She had about a thousand tells. What she couldn’t figure out was why the other girl was lying and why she was so interested in Tori’s family drama. It was probably nothing more than another teenage girl being nosy, but it still unsettled her.

Sitting back, suddenly not as hungry as she had been five minutes ago, Tori pushed her noodles around. “She answered everything I asked, but she may as well not have answered at all.” Ani had offered up no details. Her clipped answers made it obvious how much she didn’t want to talk about her husband and daughter. It was awkward. As much as Tori was trying to wrap her head around Ani’s off behavior, she could see the conversation was hurting her sister. Tori was no sadist, so she’d dropped it.

“Did you ask her about her husband’s family?” Emily asked.

Tori shrugged. “They won’t let her see them.”

“What? She told you that?”

“She said she couldn’t see them.” It was the question that had gotten the most emotion out of Ani. Tori remembered how her eyes looked tortured before she looked away, whispering the words,
I can’t. I can’t see them.

“That’s really crappy.” Emily looked upset.

Her friend was a little strange, but strange boys and girls didn’t bother her. Tori shrugged. “Death does weird things to people.”

Emily looked like she was about to argue, but she nodded. “Yeah. I guess.” Her tone sounded raw, like she was about to cry. When she noticed Tori staring, she rolled her eyes. “Don’t mind me. It’s just the hormones again. You know, I saw one of those commercials about cats and dogs in need of homes? I sobbed for an hour and begged my mom to go get one. And I’m allergic.”

While Tori was out shopping, Ani asked Shane to come over. She’d tried to talk herself out of it. Really, she only had the one question. The same question she’d asked her sister.

“I just don’t understand how you could have let this happen.” She was pacing. All the energy that had torn her in different directions the last couple weeks, her guilt, the fog that had taken over her thoughts, was concentrated now on her anger.

She’d trusted the system to take care of Tori, but that didn’t mean she’d abandoned a three-year-old to a place where she would be hurt. Tori had been fine. She was supposed to be fine.

“How did you not know about that boy? What he could do? What he was capable of?” Ani shook her head. “Tori said it happened to him. It’s a cycle. Even I know that.”

Shane, sitting on the edge of her couch, hung his head. “When a child is placed, we work with the information we have.”

“And the information you had should have told you he was capable of hurting her that way.”

He raised his head so he could look her in the eyes. “It’s just not that simple.” His
tone was gentle, it was also firm. “Ani. By your own logic, we should have kept Tori away from the other kids because she might repeat the cycle of abuse. Do you think that would have helped her?”

Ani deflated. She fell into her chair, rubbing her temples. Her lower lip began to quiver, and she almost started crying. As she breathed in, she regained some semblance of calm.

Shane sighed. “It all happened five weeks after I started working at the agency. I thought I could help people. I thought I could help kids. Idealism isn’t easy to hold on to in that job, but what happened to Tori and Zach almost killed mine.”

“Poor baby.” Ani knew it wasn’t a mature response, but her nerves were raw. She didn’t care what the whole ordeal had done to Shane.

To his credit, Shane didn’t call her on it. “I’m just saying I understand what you’re feeling. For a long time, I thought it was my fault. I thought I must have missed something. I thought I could have stopped it.” He rolled his shoulders as he sat up. “Maybe I could have. Maybe I did miss something. Or maybe bad things happen to good people, good kids.”

Ani scoffed, and Shane nodded. “You know, my parents raised us Christian. Whenever we went through any hardship when we were kids, my parents would tell me, ‘God only gives us as much as we can handle.’ When I was younger, that thought gave me strength. West and I aren’t religious anymore, but I was back then. I believed there was a benevolent God, and everything happened for a reason.

“But when that happened to Tori, after everything else I had seen, I was so mad. That was why Zach’s father, his
father
, touched him like that? Because he could handle it, because he was strong enough? There was some divine plan that required Tori to be hurt the way she was hurt all her life?”

“It almost drove me crazy to realize, to accept I had so little control. I was about to quit. I couldn’t deal at all, but then West sat me down. He told me he’d been reading about reincarnation.”

“Shocker,” Ani muttered.

Shane glanced up. “Yeah. He’s fascinated with the subject. I don’t know if he believes it, but he likes reading about these kinds of things.” He waved his hand. “Anyway, he told me about this theory. There’s still an afterlife, which I personally believe in, but all lives here on Earth are a lesson. He said we choose. We choose our lives like choosing classes in college. Maybe we take one semester easy, get the life as the filthy-rich debutante, but then the next semester, we choose the class that’s just hell. Because we have to do it. We have to get it done.”

“Why?” Ani’s voice was a bark. She was getting irritated with this story. “Why do we have to go through hell?”

He looked down. “The point is it fit with what I can and can’t accept about the meaning of life, why we’re here, why bad things happen to people who don’t deserve it. It doesn’t have to work for anyone else. I don’t know what will work for you. For me, West’s story is what I fall back on to get me through the bad twists. And I need that strength, because I do help them. The kids. The parents who deserve to be reunited with their kids. I do help people. I just didn’t help Tori. I tried, but I couldn’t.”

Looking up again, he pointed at her. “But you still have the chance to help her.”

“I can’t help her. She won’t let me help her.”

“What do you call this?” Shane gestured around them.

Ani didn’t have an answer for that. She sighed. “I’m sorry. I know it wasn’t your fault. I shouldn’t have come at you like I did.”

Shane nodded. “It isn’t your fault either, you know.”

Ani scoffed.

“It isn’t.” His tone was firm.

“If I hadn’t left her alone.” She shook her head.

“If you hadn’t left her alone. If her first foster family hadn’t abandoned her. If other families hadn’t ignored her. If Zach hadn’t done what he did to her.” He waved his arms, his gesture clear. A lot happened to Tori that shouldn’t have. “Ani, you were right.”

“What?”

“She should have been adopted when she was three. What happened with the Welches wasn’t typical. It was cruel. It was cruel of them to promise to love her as their own and then go back on their word. If things had gone as they were supposed to, she would have been fine without you.”

Ani looked away, fighting tears.

“Before Tori can forgive you, it would help if you could forgive yourself. You were a kid who didn’t know what to do. You weren’t trying to be malicious.”

“I can’t forgive myself,” she whispered.

“What’s stopping you?”

“If I have to forgive myself, I have to forgive him.” Ani clapped her hands over her mouth, regretting the words as they left her.

Shane was lost. “Him who?”

Ani shook her head in a rough jerk, pressing the heels of her hands against her eyes. “No one. I’m sorry. I’m just upset.”

She moved to get up, but Shane reached for her, taking her hand to stop her. “Him who?” he asked again.

“The man who killed my family.” Her voice was shaking. “He wasn’t malicious either. He was abandoned and abused and he was desperate, which is more than I can say for me when I was nineteen.” She gasped. Her lungs felt too pulverized to hold air. “I don’t forgive him. I can’t. I can’t.

“And I don’t deserve Tori’s forgiveness any more than Stephen Leung deserves mine.”

Chapter 16: Sugar and Spice

“C
hrist, where is this asshole?” Tori mumbled. As requested, she’d drunk her weight in water before coming in for her ultrasound appointment. She already had to pee. Well, she always had to pee, but it was getting urgent.

Ani, who’d been spaced as usual to that point, smiled at her. “Pregnant woman torture, isn’t it? The, um, the baby.” She swallowed, and it looked like it took some effort for her to straighten out her smile again. “The baby already thinks your bladder is a pillow, and then they thrust that wand at you.”

Tori didn’t say anything. It struck her that as much as being pregnant sucked, her pregnancy had to be very painful for her sister. It wasn’t so long ago it had been her in Tori’s place. Good memories hurt more, and Ani’s pregnancy had probably been a good thing for her.

This was an important appointment—the one everyone waited for. Yes, the insurance paperwork would talk about all the particulars. They were measuring the size of her uterus and the baby, all the usual things. They were looking for possible health problems, looking at the position of the placenta, checking fluid levels, and other things Tori wished she knew nothing about. But no one asked about amniotic fluid levels.

Boy or girl—that was what everyone wanted to know.

Tori hadn’t thought about it, but she wondered if Ani had.

What Tori wanted was to offer some measure of sympathy, but when she opened her mouth, she had no words. She’d known darkness, but she couldn’t fathom the loss Ani had suffered. Tori didn’t have the words to say she was sorry for that, and sorry for the inadvertent pain she was putting her through.

And it was confusing because Tori knew damn well if Ani’s family hadn’t died, if she hadn’t suffered that huge loss, neither of them would be here. Ani would have continued on with her beautiful life, oblivious to what had happened to Tori.

“Do you want another girl?” Tori asked. She wanted to take it back when she saw Ani wince. She wanted to, but she also didn’t. Her last conversation with Emily echoed in her head.

“If I were you, I’d want to know what she was thinking. A baby isn’t like a puppy. Does she think she can replace your niece? If it’s a girl, and she wants to call her Mara, I’d take the baby and run away.”

Ani stumbled over her words before she could get them to come out right. “All I want is for the baby to be healthy. That’s the most important thing.”

“Isn’t it going to be weird for you? If it’s a girl?” She had to ask. She could see she was hurting Ani, but she had to. She was terrified this wasn’t going to work out, but she wouldn’t have been surprised. Her life was like that—a series of things that didn’t work out the way they should have.

But this wasn’t her life they were talking about. The parasite deserved every chance. If Tori couldn’t give it anything else, she wanted to give it a good start. Even she had the benefit of three good years before everything went straight to hell.

Ani looked away, rubbing the back of her neck. “She, if it’s a she, isn’t my Mara. She isn’t my little girl.”

“So what does that mean?” Tori pushed herself up. “She deserves to be loved like she’s somebody’s little girl. That’s the whole damn point. If you can’t love her because she’s not Mara—”

Before Tori could continue her diatribe, the door opened and the ultrasound technician came in.

If he noticed that the air in the room was thick enough to choke on, the technician didn’t comment. He smiled and asked the usual question.
How are we feeling
, as if Tori had any right to speak for this little creature she was housing. She told him they were fine though she really wasn’t sure if they were.

The blurry image of the baby, a lot more defined from the last time she’d seen it, appeared on the monitor. The technician pointed and narrated as he moved the wand along the swell of her belly. “Arm. Leg. And of course, the all-important question. Do we want to know the sex? This little one isn’t shy at all.”

Tori looked at Ani. “Well?” The word was a challenge.

Her sister looked like she was going to blow chunks. “Yeah, of course.” Her voice only shook a little as she spoke.

Please let it be a boy
, Tori chanted to herself. Maybe it would make a difference. Maybe Ani could love a little boy.