The Lies We Told (21 page)

“I can read palms,” she said. “Gran taught me.”

I laughed, half relieved, half disconcerted. “I don’t believe in palm reading,” I said.

“It’s not like tarrit.” She sounded reassuring.

I considered pulling my hand away, but thought better of it. “Don’t tell me anything bad that can happen,” I said. “Don’t tell me how long I’ll live or anything like that.”

“I thought you don’t believe in palm reading,” she teased, and I laughed again.

“I just…that predicting the future kind of thing gives me the creeps.”

“Palm readin’ don’t have nothin’ to do with predictin’,” Simmee said. “It’s about what’s already happened.” She traced a line on my palm. “See here? This says you been in a helicopter crash.”

I smiled. “Charlatan,” I said.

“What?”

“Fake, it means. I called you a fake.” I turned my head toward her and caught her smile.

“You got a double lifeline,” she said.

“What’s that mean?”

“It’s good. They call it a sister line. It means you got someone in your life watchin’ out for you. Like a guardian angel.”

“My sister.” My eyes instantly filled. Surely by now, Rebecca thought I was dead.

“She’s a doctor, like you. Right?”

“Yes.” My voice was thick.

“Rebecca,” she said.

“Yes.”

“She older? Like somebody who looked out for you?”

“Exactly.” Rebecca had put her own life on hold for me. I would never have survived my adolescence without her.

Simmee studied my palm, but I had the feeling it was no longer the network of lines she was seeing. Her mind seemed far away.

“I lost everybody,” she said sadly.

“Your mother and your grandmother,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

“My mama died havin’ me,” she said.

“Simmee!” I sat up abruptly, pulling my hand away. “I didn’t know that!” I suddenly understood the bits and pieces of anxiety I’d picked up from her surrounding the birth of her baby: Lady Alice had delivered Simmee, and Simmee’s mother had died during that birth. In a few weeks, Lady Alice would deliver her own child. No wonder she was afraid.

Simmee tried to sit up, and I had to help her. Her body seemed too cumbersome for her to manage. She took my hand back, holding it palm side up in her lap, not reacting in the slightest to my words. “That’s why my gran brung me up my whole life,” she said. “She was sick a while before she passed, but Tully was here by then, livin’ in the tent between our house and Lady Alice’s. Gran loved him. She said he was my guardian angel, even though I ain’t got no double lifeline. Gran said she
felt like it was okay for her to pass then, knowin’ I had Tully with me.” She fell silent for a moment as though lost in a memory, then looked down at my palm again. Squinting, she moved my hand a little away from her until it rested beneath another puddle of sunlight. She touched a spot on my lifeline, then shook her head.

“What?” I asked, in spite of myself.

“Just this little square,” she said. “Don’t fit. I’m probly lookin’ at it wrong.” She touched another line. “Anyway, I can see where you miscarried them babies.” She touched the line, counting. “Four of them, right?”

I pulled my hand away. “No,” I said, shaken. “Three.”

“I must’ve mistook one of them little lines, then,” Simmee said, but she looked hard into my eyes and I wondered if she saw them there, the four children I had lost.

T
HE WALK BETWEEN THE SCHOOL AND THE TRAILER WAS SHORT
, but very, very dark. Rebecca and Adam aimed the beams of their flashlights on the sidewalk ahead of them, not wanting to miss the steps to the parking lot.

She was not herself today. She was not herself lately at all, and she wasn’t crazy about the brittle, addle-brained, lily-livered woman she felt herself turning into. It didn’t matter that she had a good excuse—a missing sister. Even her patients were getting to her, and she’d nearly always been able to keep the personal Rebecca and the professional Rebecca separate. Today, though, she’d had to work hard to prevent one from tainting the other. First, there was the asthmatic boy, Tristan. Then two little kids with broken arms. A frightened old man whose wife had disappeared in the move from the airport. And worst of all, a woman who delivered a stillborn infant on the floor of one of the abandoned classrooms. She hadn’t let Adam take care of that poor woman; she’d done her best to keep him from even learning about her. He didn’t talk about the recent
loss of his own baby, but she knew it had to be tearing at him, so as soon as one of the volunteers gave her the news about the woman and her baby, Rebecca swept into that classroom and did what needed to be done. It had taken a toll on her, though. The woman. The beautiful, still infant. Afterward, she went out to the track to clear her mind. She’d considered running through the parking lot and the streets instead of the track, not tempting the threesome on the bleachers again, but she pulled herself together. She wasn’t going to let the ghosts of the past get to her in that way, and she was relieved that, this time, they left her alone.

Now, Adam pointed his flashlight in the direction of the stairs. “When I signed on with DIDA, I never expected I’d have to be a pharmacist as well as a physician,” he said. They’d been restocking the pharmacy with replenished supplies all evening.

“I warned you,” Rebecca said. “You just didn’t believe me when I told you we had to do a little bit of everything.” The conversation was insipid, a good camouflage for her jumbled thoughts. On top of everything else, that weird fantasy of her and Adam comforting a child together kept slipping into her mind. It had returned to her unexpectedly throughout the day, doing nothing to ease her disorientation.
I need a shrink,
she thought each time she imagined herself holding a child between them. Sometimes they were in the child’s bedroom. Sometimes in a bathroom, their son or daughter—it
was
their son or daughter—battling a stomach virus. Sometimes the child was a boy. Other times a girl. Sometimes he or she was ten years old. Other times two.

What was the same every time was the deep sense of contentment, of love, between them. Mother, father, child. She’d never fantasized about being a mother before. Maybe when she was very young, before her parents’ deaths. But playing mother
to her teenage sister had wiped away that fantasy with a massive dose of reality. Now, it was as if her falling-apart mind was pouring a lifetime’s worth of maternal fantasy into this one day. It was overwhelming.

More bizarre had been her need to see Adam during the day. Not to talk to him. Just to catch a glimpse of him. She saw him with new eyes. She’d always thought of him as slender, but now she saw that his shoulders were actually broad—as broad as a swimmer’s. How could she never have noticed them before? His eyelashes seemed to have grown thick and dark overnight. She watched him bandage a cut on a man’s leg, mesmerized by the movement of bone and tendon beneath the skin of his hands, by the angular shape of his fingers, the dusting of dark hair on his forearms.

Your sister’s husband,
she warned herself.

“There’s nothing wrong with fantasizing,” Dot had told her years ago, “but do you have to act on every whim?”

This was one whim she wouldn’t act on. Ever.

Her cell phone rang, the jangling sound shaking her from her thoughts, and she pulled it from her uniform pocket. She recognized the number for Brent’s sat phone and slipped the phone back into her pocket without answering.

“Brent,” she said to Adam. She was interested only in calls from Dorothea, the S and R team, or any unfamiliar number that might belong to someone who had found Maya.

“What’s with you and him?” Adam asked.

The beam of her flashlight caught the top step and she reached for the railing. “I don’t want to get married and he wants to,” she said. “I try to feel what he wants me to feel, but it’s not there.”
Was
she trying? Did she care anymore? The past couple of weeks had altered everything.

“You’re good together,” Adam said.

“Are we?”

“Well, yeah. Except that ever since we got here, I can tell you’d just as soon not talk to him.”

At the bottom of the steps, Rebecca shined her flashlight toward the trailer and they headed in that direction. “I have other things on my mind,” she said.

“I don’t think you have to marry the guy, but it
is
cool how you both love DIDA,” Adam said. “You don’t want a family, so together you—”

“I think that may be changing all of a sudden.” She cringed. She couldn’t believe she’d said it out loud.

“What do you mean? He wants kids?”

She hesitated. “Me,” she said. “I mean, I might.”

He stopped walking. “Since
when?
” He shined his flashlight directly into her face and she pushed his arm away.

“I know it’s crazy,” she said. “Probably just a…I don’t know. A phase. It started with—” she hesitated again, unsure if she should bring up the loss of his child “—Maya’s miscarriage.”

“How so?”

“I started having these…it’s not conscious. It’s not like I’m thinking, ‘Oh, I want a baby’ or anything like that. But I keep thinking about how good it would feel to hold a baby. And I get this weird…this
longing
.”

“Whoa.” Even in the faint light, she could see Adam smile. “Rebecca Ward wants to be a mom. Will wonders never cease?”

“I don’t think that’s it,” she said, backpedaling. “What I really wanted was for you and Maya to have a baby for me.”

He nearly laughed. “I beg your pardon?”

“A niece or nephew. I didn’t used to care, but I knew I’d have none of my own and I loved the idea that I’d still get to hang out with a cool little niece or nephew.”

He lost his smile, and Rebecca could have kicked herself. She touched his arm. “I’m sorry. My fantasy nephew was your real baby. I’m really sorry.”

“No sweat,” he said, and he started walking again. Silence enveloped them, and she wished she could rewind their entire conversation and start it over again.

After a minute, he put his arm around her shoulders in what felt like a show of forgiveness. “Maybe it’s time to have a little chat with Brent,” he said. They had nearly reached the trailer. “See if he might be harboring the same secret interest in having kids.”

“You know,” she said, “I shouldn’t have said anything.” She was acutely aware of the pressure of every one of his fingertips, and wished the skin on her shoulder was bare. “I don’t really want kids. You have kids, then you die and leave them to fend for themselves.”

Adam had let go of her shoulders to reach for the trailer door, but he stopped to stare at her. “Hey, drama queen,” he said. “Did you get any therapy after your parents died?” His voice was half teasing, half serious.

“Oh, leave me alone,” she said. “Just open the door.”

Inside the trailer, she sat down at the table. “I can’t have kids,” she said.

He had opened the refrigerator, but he turned to look at her. “You
can’t?
” he asked in surprise.

“Oh, I suppose I could physically, but DIDA’s my life, Adam. I’m totally committed to it. And DIDA and kids don’t mix. Plus, I know Brent doesn’t want them. And anyway, I don’t love Brent. Not the way I should. Not the way Maya loved you,” she added. The past tense hung in the air between them. She didn’t correct it and neither did he. “From the start, it was right with you two,” she said. “I constantly measure what Brent and I have against what you and Maya had, and Brent and I come up short.”

“You can’t do that.” Adam took a bottle of iced tea from the refrigerator and sat down across the table from her. “You can’t compare one relationship with another. That commitment to DIDA you and Brent have? That’s worth a lot.” He pulled a protein bar from his pocket and began unwrapping it. “I
like
this work. It’s challenging and different and I’d like to do a lot more of it. Maya, though? The only reason she came here was to try to please me.”

Rebecca thought of the protein bar she had in her own pocket, but felt too tired to eat. “Maya told me…” She hesitated, unsure whether she should reveal a sisterly confidence. “She was worried about the toll the miscarriages were taking on your relationship.”

“She said that?”

“Uh-huh.”

Adam looked out the window toward the dark parking lot, and she watched the muscles in his forearm flex as he took a swallow from his tea. “It’s true,” he said. “Things weren’t great with us. It was the whole…not-being-able-to-get-pregnant thing. Then the miscarriages.”

“You seemed really good together at the airport,” she said, remembering the night she’d watched them beneath the conference room table. The closeness between them. The envy she’d felt.

He shook his head. “I was trying,” he said. “I was proud of her for coming. But…” The dim kitchenette light carved deep lines around his eyes as he played with the wrapper of his protein bar. “There was something else,” he said. “I still don’t quite understand it, and I figured we’d have time to deal with it later. I didn’t want to talk to her about it until she was more together emotionally from this last miscarriage.” He shook his head, and Rebecca caught a glimpse of his sadness. “Sixteen damn weeks,” he said. “This was a hard one.”

“I know. I know it was hard for you both,” she said. “But what else was bothering you?”

“Maya never told me about the abortion she had,” he said.

“Maya? An
abortion?
” Rebecca laughed. “She probably never told you about it because she never had one. What made you think she did?”

“Oh, she had one. She told me, but only when her doctor asked her about it in front of me.”

It was as if someone had told Rebecca that the color red was actually green. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “While she was married to you?”

“No, when she was a teenager.”

“I…Adam, that’s
insane
.” She leaned toward him across the table. “I would have known. She would have told me. She never even
dated
when she was a teenager, at least not in high school. When she was in middle school, boys were always calling her because she was so pretty. But after our parents died, she became this total introvert. So it doesn’t make sense. And she would have turned to me with something like that. She knew I wouldn’t be judgmental. Who did she say it was? The father?”

“She didn’t. We never got a chance to talk about it. Her obstetrician said she had some scarring in her uterus and asked if she’d ever had an abortion, and Maya said yes, when she was a teenager.”

Rebecca stared at him, her mouth open.

“She was so upset about it that I didn’t want to press her. I figured we’d talk about it later.” He raised his hands in frustration. “It’s in the past anyway. Nothing can be done about it. The thing that bothered me isn’t that it happened, but that she never told me. Don’t you think that’s the kind of thing a wife would tell a husband, especially if you’re trying to have a baby? If you have a decent relationship with your husband, don’t you think you’d want to talk about the baby you aborted? How you
felt about it?
Something?
It just seemed so crazy that she never said anything about it to me.”

“I feel like you’re making this up.”

He frowned. “Why the hell would I make this up?”

Rebecca pressed her hands to her temples, trying to make sense of what he was saying. “She didn’t date,” she repeated. “She was a bookworm. But…” She remembered back to those years. After their parents died, she and Maya moved to an apartment. Rebecca had been accepted to George Washington University in D.C., but she’d had to put those plans on hold to prevent Protective Services from sticking Maya in foster care. Instead, she worked as a nurse’s aide to bring in money. She tried to time her work schedule so she’d be there when Maya got home from school, but it had not always been possible. Could Maya have had a secret boyfriend?

“Oh, Adam,” she said. “Why didn’t she tell me? I thought she knew she could trust me with anything.” She wondered if Maya had been afraid to burden Rebecca with yet another complication in their lives. “She must have gone through whatever it was all alone. Why didn’t she come to me?”

“Maybe it happened when she was in college,” Adam said. “Maybe when she was eighteen or nineteen. She was in the dorm, then, right? So you wouldn’t have known.”

The thought gave her some comfort. Maya had the abortion when she was older, surrounded by friends at school. Yet it still bothered her that Maya had felt, for whatever reason, unable to confide in her about something so life altering.

“There was this one guy she dated when she first went to college,” Rebecca recalled. “She would have been seventeen then. I know they were lovers because she told me about it. Not in any great detail, but she said they were sleeping together and she was going to go on the pill. Maybe she got pregnant before
she went on birth control. I could see her having an abortion then. Just starting school. Knowing she was way too young to be a mother. But I still don’t know why she wouldn’t tell me.”

“Or me.”

Rebecca heard the edge to his voice. “You’re angry with her,” she said.

Adam stood and tossed his wrapper in the trash can near the sink. “You know I don’t want to be.” He started straightening the sheet on the built-in couch where he’d been sleeping. “I’m not angry now. I love her and I want her to be miraculously safe and for us to have a chance to work things out. But I
was
angry when I realized she’d had an abortion and never told me about it. I hated that she kept something so important a secret from me.”