Somewhere Out There (37 page)

“Mom?” Hailey’s voice snapped Natalie out of her daze. Her daughter had entered the kitchen unnoticed.

“What is it, honey?” Natalie said. She sniffed and used a paper napkin to wipe the dampness from her cheeks.

Hailey gave her a puckered, doubtful look. “How come you’re crying?”

“Oh, it’s complicated, sweet pea. Just grown-up stuff.” She closed the box and pushed the paperwork to the side. Hailey climbed into Natalie’s lap, and Natalie wrapped her arms around her daughter and hugged her close. She put her face in Hailey’s curls, breathed in the strawberry scent of her shampoo, and wondered how many times her birth mother had held her like this before she let her go. “Where’s Henry?”

“In the playroom, still. I made him wash the dishes.” She paused. “Is Aunt Brooke gone?”

Natalie frowned, feeling a fresh round of tears gathering behind her eyes. “She is,” she told Hailey in a quiet voice.
Maybe for good,
she thought as she sat in her kitchen holding her daughter, wishing she knew how to fix what had gone wrong—hoping that she hadn’t found her sister only to lose her all over again.

•  •  •

“It’s my fault,” Kyle said when he got home that night and heard the details of the fight Natalie and Brooke had had. “Should I go talk with her? Explain that you had nothing to do with it?”

Natalie could have blamed him for what happened—for running the report in the first place—but hearing the ragged edge in her husband’s voice, she knew just how sorry he was. And it was Natalie who had forgotten that the file was on the kitchen counter—she’d meant to shred it but kept getting distracted by the kids and work—so the fact that Brooke had stumbled across it was just as much Natalie’s fault as it was Kyle’s. “I don’t think so,” she said. “ ’But thanks for offering.”

“Are you sure?” he said. “Maybe it would help.”

“I wish it could,” Natalie said. She’d sent Brooke a text before Kyle had come home from work, in which she apologized again, and asked her sister for another chance. She didn’t receive a reply.

A month passed without a word from Brooke. The plumber finally arrived—four weeks after he’d promised he would. He completed his task in a couple of days, and then Alex and his crew got back to work, managing to finish the job a week before Christmas. The holiday was quiet, and Natalie couldn’t help but wish that Brooke had been there, too. Natalie had yet to contact her birth mother. It was strange, how deeply she’d longed to connect with the woman, but now that she knew where she was, Natalie was hesitant to reach out. Terrified, in fact.

Kyle’s murder case finally closed after the first of the year—his client was found not guilty—and after that, he made it a point to work from home as much as he could, taking the kids to the trampoline park or swimming on the weekends to give Natalie enough time to do her job without interruption. Natalie had both Logan and Ruby over to her house for a playdate, and invited Katie out for a cup of coffee when she came to pick her son up.

Now, the second week of January, Natalie glanced at her watch and wondered when her mother, who had offered to pick up the kids so Natalie could work, would arrive. A few minutes later, Hailey came bursting through the front door, Henry trailing behind.

“Hi, Mom!” she said as she raced inside. “Gramma said to tell you that she didn’t come in because she and Grampa have to go to a fancy dinner tonight and she has to get ready.”

“Okay,” Natalie said, as Henry launched himself against her legs, causing her to stagger backward. “Careful there, buddy. You’re so strong, you almost knocked me over!” She reached down and ruffled his soft hair. He giggled, and let her go, dropping his bag on the floor.

“Hang that up, please,” Natalie said automatically, watching as both of her kids put their jackets and backpacks on the hooks by the front door. “How was your day?” she asked as they walked together toward the kitchen.

“Good,” Hailey said. “But Chase said my hair looks like Medusa. Like snakes!” She frowned and crossed her arms over her chest. “He’s such a butt.”

“Such a butt! Such a butt!” Henry chanted.

Natalie had to work hard to restrain herself from laughing. “Hailey, you know it’s not okay to call people names.”

“But he called me Medusa!” her daughter protested. “It’s not fair!”

“I know,” Natalie said. “But we can’t control how other people act. We can only control ourselves. I know it’s hard, but the best thing to do is treat Chase how you want to be treated. If you don’t react to his teasing you, eventually he’ll stop.”

Hailey sighed. “I don’t think so. He’s just not normal.”

Again, Natalie had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep her amusement in check. “Want to help me make the cookies for the bake sale?” she asked. She’d volunteered to provide eight dozen chocolate chip cookies for the PTA fund-raiser at Hailey’s school, which would happen the next day.

“I want to help, too!” Henry said.

“You can’t,” Hailey informed him in a haughty voice. “It’s not for your school.”

“Sure he can,” Natalie said. “We have to make a lot, so there’s plenty for both of you to do. Why don’t you both wash your hands while I get the ingredients out?”

Her children made their way to the sink, vying to be the first to use the soap and get their hands under the water. “Don’t
push
!” Henry said as the two stood together on the footstool.

“I’m
not
!” Hailey replied, and Natalie watched as her daughter shifted her weight away from her brother, as though to prove her point. But her motion tilted the stool, and before Natalie could stop it, Henry lost his footing and fell to the floor. He landed on his side on the hard wood, and Natalie saw his head bounce when he hit. He was quiet a moment, likely stunned, trying to register what had just happened, and then began to wail. She rushed over, dropping the bag of chocolate chips she’d taken from the pantry onto the counter.

“Hailey!” she said in a sharp voice. “You have to be more careful!” She knelt down next to Henry and gathered him into her arms. “It’s okay, baby,” she murmured. She ran her hand over his entire head, checking for blood, but found only a bump above his right ear, about the size of a quarter. He cried on her chest, rubbing his wet face against her.

“I’m sorry!” Hailey said, and Natalie realized that her daughter was crying, too. “I didn’t mean to, Mommy! It was a accident!”

“It’s okay,” Natalie said, feeling panicked. She could feel her heartbeat hammering inside her skull. She stood up, still holding Henry, grabbed her cell phone from the counter, and quickly found the number for the nurse line at their pediatrician’s office. “Hey, Susan,” she said, when the nurse answered. Over Henry’s now-whimpering cries, she explained what had happened. “Do I need to bring him in?”

“Probably not,” Susan told her. “Just watch him, and make sure he doesn’t seem too drowsy or disoriented. If he does, or if he vomits, you can take him to the ER to have him checked for a concussion. Otherwise, it’s probably just an old-fashioned bump on the head. Put some ice on it, and give him a little children’s Tylenol if he’s hurting.”

Natalie thanked her and hung up, turning to see that Hailey had gone upstairs to her brother’s bedroom, coming back with his favorite blue fleece blanket. She held it out, and Natalie couldn’t help but think of Brooke and her lavender “soft side,” and the muscles in her throat thickened. Henry snatched the blanket from her, no longer crying but still snuggled tightly against Natalie.

“That was very nice of you,” Natalie told Hailey, whose bottom lip stuck out and was still trembling.

“It was a accident,” she said again, sniffling, and Natalie nodded.

“I know, baby,” she said. She sat down at the table with Henry in her lap and her daughter pressed up to her side. Natalie put her free arm around Hailey. “I’m sorry if I snapped at you. I was just scared when I saw your brother fall. You didn’t do it on purpose. You don’t need to feel bad.”

Hailey nodded, but in that same moment, Natalie thought about Brooke. She wondered if her sister would ever be able to get over seeing the background check—if she would believe that Natalie never meant to hurt her. But Natalie feared that the damage was done. Whether a window is shattered by accident or by a deliberate strike, its jagged pieces cut just as deep. The injured party still bleeds.

Before Brooke left for her dinner shift at Sea to Shore, her cell phone buzzed. She glanced at the text message, having guessed correctly that it was from Natalie. Over the past month, since the day of their argument in Natalie’s kitchen, her sister had left messages and sent her multiple texts, begging Brooke to please call her. “I’m so sorry,” Natalie said in her last voicemail. “I can only hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me. Please. Can we just talk?”

Too little, too late,
Brooke thought as she climbed into her car and began her short drive to work. She was doing well at her new job. Nick was happy with how quickly she’d caught on to the way the restaurant functioned, and her fellow employees seemed to like her.

Ryan had sent her a few texts as well. “I’m not just going to disappear,” he told her, and even though she didn’t respond, she didn’t block his number, either. If she had, he might simply show up at her apartment again, and she wasn’t sure how she’d handle that. After what had happened with Natalie, Brooke was less inclined than ever to take Ryan up on his offer of help. Other than her baby, she wasn’t going to let anyone close to her, ever again. Still, she thought about Natalie every time she delivered a beautiful dessert to one of her tables at work, but she decided it would be easier at this point if she pretended that she never had a sister at all.

Today, once she parked and entered the restaurant through the back door, Brooke punched in, then went to the bathroom to check her appearance and scrub her hands. She had purchased several work-appropriate outfits at a local thrift store, making sure all of her skirts had elastic waistbands and her tops were loose and comfortable. She wore her curls up in a twist with a few black tendrils down around her face and bought several pairs of supportive shoes so her back wouldn’t hurt so much at the end of her shift. According to the obstetrician at the clinic, her pregnancy was progressing well, but she still hadn’t found out the sex of the baby.

Now that she was twenty-three weeks, the biggest struggle she faced was how to hide her pregnancy under empire-waist tops. Nick hadn’t mentioned it, so Brooke decided to wait until closer to her due date to discuss the short maternity leave she would need to take. Until then, she would focus on being indispensable and saving up as much money as she possibly could. She’d been right about the flow of tips—on her weekend shifts, she was making up to five hundred dollars a night. Over the holidays, the restaurant had been so busy, Brooke couldn’t believe the amount of money she was bringing home. For the first time in her life, Brooke felt truly competent, grateful to be compensated so generously for the work she was doing. She decided she’d stay in her tiny apartment until the final weeks before the baby came, but she had begun looking on Craigslist for rental houses.

Now, Brooke made her way into the dining room to join the rest of the staff at a table so the chef could describe and let them taste the specials they would be serving that evening. A little while later, she took her first table of the night, a six-top that immediately ordered several cocktails, then asked to speak to the sommelier for assistance with picking out wines to accompany their meal. After putting in the order for their appetizers, Brooke found herself wondering if Natalie had already gone to meet their mother in Mt. Vernon; she imagined the two of them sitting together, clucking about how unfortunate it was that Brooke was too dysfunctional to forgive them both. The thought of this made her feel a little bit dizzy. In fact, she had to grab the edge of the counter by the pass to the kitchen to keep from stumbling.

“You okay?” another server, named Frank, asked. He was a bit older than Brooke, had been working at Sea to Shore for over ten years, and was responsible for training new employees like her.

“Yeah,” she said, trying to shake off the feeling. She wondered if she hadn’t eaten enough that day. She grabbed a roll from the warmer under the counter and took a bite. “Just hungry, I think,” she said to Frank, who nodded, lifted his diners’ plates from the window, and carried them out to the floor.

Brooke washed down the roll with a glass of water just as the hostess approached her and said that she had seated two more tables in her section. “Going to be a busy night,” the younger woman added. “Two hundred reservations on the books.”

“Wow,” Brooke said, still waiting for the food she’d eaten to make her feel better. As she made her way out to her section, she walked as straight as she could. She couldn’t get sick now, she thought. She needed to show Nick that he could count on her, no matter what.

She smiled at her new customers as best she could as she welcomed them and took their cocktail orders. Weaving her way through the tables back to the servers’ station, she quickly punched in their drinks and then grabbed her first table’s drink orders from the bar and set them on a large tray. She hiked it up on her right shoulder and carried a tray jack in her left hand, carefully balancing both. Beads of sweat popped out on her forehead, but with her hands full, she couldn’t wipe them away.

She was halfway across the restaurant, back toward the six-top, when a sharp spike of pain shot through her abdomen and down her leg, causing her knees to buckle. She fell hard onto the wood floor, and the tray she carried went flying. Luckily, there were no customers seated nearby.

“Oh, god,” she grunted as her muscles continued to spasm. A second later, she felt a rush of something liquid between her legs. Was her water breaking? Brooke thought in a panic. Was the baby coming early? She curled fetal on the floor, bringing her knees up to her chest, waiting for the pain to pass.

“Brooke!” she heard Nick say. “Are you all right? What happened?”

She shook her head, too scared to speak. The pain was excruciating, shooting through her belly into her hips. She was terrified to move, for fear of making things worse.