Read Kiss Her Goodbye Online

Authors: Wendy Corsi Staub

Kiss Her Goodbye (7 page)

BOOK: Kiss Her Goodbye
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A feeling of helplessness seeps in. Instinctively, she does what she was taught to do all those years ago at St. Brigid's.
She prays.
She prays that God will bring her daughter home safely.
And she prays that He'll give her the strength to do whatever it takes to make sure it never happens again.
FOUR
Hearing the front door slam, Maeve hastily returns her half-full pack of Salem Lights to the drawer of the end table. Damn. After fighting off temptation for the past hour, she was just about to light up at last.
As far as she knows, Erin thinks she quit smoking last spring. Maeve isn't about to start smoking again in front of her. After all, her daughter is at the age when she might decide to pilfer a few cigarettes to sample.
That's how Maeve herself got hooked—about twenty years ago. You'd think seeing her own mother wasting away from lung cancer would destroy her own recent craving, but it hasn't.
“Mom?”
“In here,” she calls, frowning as she notices a film of dust covering the table. Sissy was here all day yesterday. For what Maeve—ahem,
Gregory
—pays her an hour, you'd think the place would be spotless.
To be fair, Sissy is far more efficient than Marta, who broke her leg in a car accident back in—when? September? August? Time has been rushing by, as usual.
And unlike Marta, Sissy doesn't eat Maeve out of house and home while she's here. She never even touches the Atkins-friendly store-bought tuna salad Maeve keeps on hand and offers the cleaning lady weekly for lunch. Marta used to devour it, along with whatever else she could find in the fridge and cabinets.
Erin pops her blond head into the den.
“How was the biology tutoring?” Maeve turns down the television volume with the remote.
“It was good. What are you watching?”
“Judge Judy.”
Erin rolls her eyes. “I'm going up to take a shower.”
“Why don't you wait until later? I thought we could go out for salads at Ernesto's.”
“I'm not hungry.”
“You're not?” That's a switch. Erin is usually starved when she gets home from school at her regular time, let alone more than two hours later.
“Nah. I had a big lunch. It was spaghetti day.” Her daughter disappears, her footsteps pounding up the stairs.
Damn. Maeve craves a chicken Caesar salad almost as much as she craves a cigarette. She could always drive over to the restaurant alone . . .
No, she can't. There's something pathetic about a divor-cée dining out solo. Especially in a trattoria filled with couples and young families.
The phone rings just as she turns up the volume again. She presses Mute and trades the remote for the cordless phone on the end table. It strikes her that if she weren't so hungry, she could spend the rest of the night in this spot without having to get up.
“Hello?”
“Maeve?”
“Kathleen. Hey, want to go get chicken Caesar salads? It could be girls' night out.”
Ignoring the invitation, her friend asks, in a low voice, “Is Erin home?”
“You want to talk to Erin?” Maeve asks, puzzled.
“No, it's just . . . Jen got home a few minutes ago . . .”
“So did Erin.”
“Where did she say she was?”
“At school, getting extra help with biology. Amber's mother brought her home.”
“Did you see her?”
“Who?”
“Amber's mother dropping her off.”
“Kathleen, I did back-to-back spinning and Pilates classes this afternoon. I haven't moved from this chair since—”
“Maeve, I think they lied to us. Jen said the same thing Erin told you. But I was watching for her to come home, and I didn't see a car dropping her off. She walked down from the main road. She said Amber's mother left her at the end of the cul-de-sac but why would she do that?”
“I don't know . . . maybe she's lazy?”
Kathleen is silent.
Maeve shakes her head. “Kathleen, they're fourteen.”
“Jen's not.”
“She will be in a few days.”
“Weeks.”
“You're nitpicking, you know that? Maybe they did lie. But how are we supposed to prove it? And what could we do about it? Anyway, who are we kidding? We did the same thing at that age. Worse.”
All right, Kathleen wasn't that bad. Her father was too strict, and she just didn't have it in her to break rules the way Maeve did. Not back then. Kathleen's rebellion came later.
“Jen's not going to lie to me.”
“Don't let yourself get all worked up over it, okay, Kathleen?”
“Too late,” comes the bitter reply, followed by terse “bye” and a click.
Maeve stares unseeingly at the television. Oh, cripes, should she be more concerned about Erin? It never even occurred to her that her daughter wasn't at school working on her biology. But Erin wasn't hungry when she came in . . . so okay, maybe she went someplace to get something to eat.
And maybe somebody other than Amber's mother dropped her off.
Maeve isn't about to call the woman. She's only met her once or twice, and got the impression that she's one of those uptight family values types who frown upon divorce. The last thing Maeve wants to do is call someone like that to check up on her own daughter. That would give the impression that she's one of those single parents who has no idea what's going on in her child's life.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Erin tells her everything.
No. Not
everything.
Not anymore
.
The truth is, she found out through the grapevine at the gym about her daughter going out with that pothead character, Robby Warren.
“Mom, God! Nobody says pothead,” Erin laughed when Maeve met her with that accusation.
“I don't care what they say. And you're not dating him,” Maeve retorted.
Actually, she
does
care. She likes to think of herself as more hip than the average mom—if hip is a word “they” say these days. She's certainly younger than most of Erin's friends' parents, who are in their forties. Only Kathleen is Maeve's age—but these days, she's about as cool as Sister Margaret, their old sixth-grade teacher at St. Brigid's.
The phone rings again.
Still holding it, Maeve presses the talk button. “Hello?”
“I've got it, Mom,” Erin's voice says from the upstairs extension.
“Already?” That was fast.
Maeve hangs up—then wonders, belatedly, who is on the other end of the line. Erin must have been right on top of the receiver, expecting a call. For a second, remembering what Kathleen said about the girls lying about biology tutoring, Maeve is tempted to eavesdrop.
But Erin would hear her pick up. And even if she didn't . . .
Well, it just isn't right.
Teenaged girls are going to tell the occasional lie. That's just the way it is. They're going to lie, and sneak around with their friends, and with boys. With any luck, they'll survive and become upstanding citizens, like Maeve. And Kathleen. With any luck, they won't hurt themselves—or anybody else—in the process.
Yup. That's the way it is. It doesn't give their mothers—or anyone else—the right to eavesdrop or snoop. If her own mother wasn't always checking up on her, Maeve might not have felt such a fierce need to grow up so fast. She's determined not to make the same mistake with Erin.
Still, she has a feeling she's going to have her hands full for the next few years.
Damn Gregory for walking out on her, making her a single parent when that was the last thing she ever wanted to be. Hell, that's why she married him in the first place—because she wanted her baby to have a daddy. A daddy with a lucrative profession.
Not that she'd welcome Gregory back now, the selfish SOB—but when it comes to child support, it would be nice to get something other than the financial kind. Not that the money that she does get is enough. Not by a long shot.
Maeve sets the phone on the end table again, then—with a sigh of resignation—reaches into the drawer for her pack of cigarettes.
 
 
Taking a deep drag of filtered menthol, Lucy remembers a film strip shown in her seventh-grade health class more than three decades ago. She visualizes the smoke filling her lungs, turning them hard and black, snuffing out healthy pink tissue.
They say smoking will kill you.
So why hasn't it?
Why is she still here, still breathing in and out, day after dismal day?
Gazing down at the faint pink scars that criss-cross the blue veins of her wrists, she tugs the sleeves of her green sweater so that they reach almost to her palms.
What was she thinking that day? Suicide, like divorce, goes against everything she was raised to believe. No matter what kind of life you've lived, killing yourself means being condemned to eternity in hell. Father Joseph said so.
Lung cancer isn't suicide. Emphysema isn't suicide. If you've lived a good life and you confess your sins, then get sick and die, you'll go to heaven.
Father Joseph said so.
Lucy started smoking the morning she was released from the psych ward.
If Henry noticed that his cigarettes were dwindling after she returned from the hospital, he didn't say a word. He was just damned glad to have her back home, where she belonged, the whole ordeal behind them. As long as she was under his roof, making his meals, doing his laundry, all was right in Henry's world.
He did complain when she started buying her own brand. He claimed they didn't have the money for that. But she persisted, with uncharacteristic obstinacy, and he relented.
That was years ago. Thirteen years; no, almost fourteen.
Fourteen years ago.
Sometimes, it seems like yesterday.
Other times, it was a lifetime ago.
The very eternity in hell she's forbidden by the church to escape through suicide or divorce.
Lucy taps her the ashen tip of her Newport against the rim of the ashtray on the kitchen table, then pushes her chair back. Time to start Henry's dinner and pack his “lunch”—a sandwich he'll eat at two in the morning in the break room at the plant.
She glances at the clock. In ten minutes, the alarm will go off in the bedroom upstairs, and he'll get up for work.
One more week of third shift, and then he'll be back on days.
And so it goes, the familiar rhythm of their existence.
As far as she knows, Henry has no idea that something has changed. That her life was altered forever with the shocking phrase whispered over the telephone, confirming what she already suspected—or perhaps, deep in her heart, already knew.
It's her.
It's her.
It's her.
The words have echoed in her mind ever since, seeping into her every waking moment, into her dreams, into her nightmares. The nightmares never subsided, but they're back now, far more ferocious than they were fourteen years ago.
That's why she's thankful Henry's working third shift. She's had the bed to herself; there's nobody to witness her fitful sleep; nobody to hear her screams when she wakes in a cold sweat in the dead of night.
If Henry were here, he might guess. He might look at her—
really
look at her, for the first time in years—and read it in her eyes. He's perceptive—rather, he can be. He was, in that other lifetime.
And if Henry knew . . .
She shudders. He won't know. He can't know. She'll make sure he doesn't find out.
It's her.
Yet how can it be? It doesn't make sense.
She's not supposed to be here, nearby, living in Woodsbridge. Orchard Hollow, of all places.
No, she's supposed to be dead. Dead fourteen years . . .
And she didn't go to heaven, as Lucy always believed she did.
Then again . . .
Orchard Hollow isn't heaven—but it's pretty damned close.
 
 
“Everyone asleep?” Matt asks from his recliner, looking up from the television as Kathleen sinks into the couch, her hair damp from the long, hot shower she just took.
“Riley and Curran are. Jen is finishing her homework. I told her lights have to be out at ten.”
“Good.” Matt turns his attention back to the episode of
Third Watch
.
“Matt?”
“Hmm?”
“We've got to talk.”
“About what?” His gaze is fixed on the television, where a screaming ambulance is rushing to an accident scene.
“Jen. She lied to me today about where she went after school.”
“What?”
She has his full attention now. Taking a deep breath, she fills him in on this afternoon's drama.
“So what did you say when she came home?”
“I didn't say anything. I didn't want to accuse her until I was sure.”

Are
you sure?”
Kathleen shrugs. “Why wouldn't her friend's mother drop her off in our driveway? I think she's sneaking around with older kids who drive. And she smelled like cigarette smoke when she came home.”
“Maybe her friend's mother smokes in the car.”
“Maybe Jen is smoking.”
Matt, the militant antismoker, cringes. “Get her down here. We're going to ask her about all of—”
“No. Not like that. She'll just get defensive.”
“All right . . . then let's just hope you're wrong. Or that if you're right, it won't happen again.”
“We can't ignore it.”
Matt squeezes his eyes closed, rubs his temples. “What do you want from me, Kathleen?”
“Some helpful input would be good.”
“I gave you my input. You didn't agree with either thing I suggested. So . . . I don't know, do you want me to . . . what? Go up and talk to her? Leave you out of it?”
BOOK: Kiss Her Goodbye
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