The One I Left Behind (32 page)

“I’ll be careful,” Reggie said. “Look, Charlie’ll be here any minute. I’ve gotta go. I’ll call you later, okay?”

“Promise?” he asked. “Because if I don’t hear from you, I’m coming down there.”

“I promise,” she said, hanging up before he could say any more.

Chapter 34

June 22, 1985

Brighton Falls, Connecticut

“W
HERE’S
L
ORRAINE?”
R
EGGIE HAD
come down to the kitchen to find George doing the dishes. His clothing was rumpled, his eyes red and puffy. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days.

“She went to lie down. Is your friend gone?”

Reggie nodded.

George pulled the plug in the sink, sending the soapy water in a whirlpool down the drain. “Your aunt doesn’t think much of her. I’m afraid Lorraine’s put off by her fashion sense. All that black. The lace and safety pins.”

Reggie shrugged. “At least Tara has a fashion sense.” She left off what she was thinking: not like Lorraine with her stinky old fishing vest. She didn’t want to hurt George’s feelings—he apparently liked the fishing vest, maybe even found it attractive. Reggie stopped that thought before it went any further. The whole idea of Lorraine and George having a secret romance made her stomach hurt.

George smiled. “You two find anything interesting up there in the attic?” He looked at her with searching eyes, and for a split second, Reggie was sure he knew about the cutting. Her leg twinged with pain and felt damp. Tara had gone deep. The cut was now covered with a gauze pad and layers of medical tape that itched and pulled at her skin.

“Not much,” she said, looking away from him.

“Come have a seat,” he said, pulling out a chair at the kitchen table. She sat across from him. He looked at her a long time, then lifted his glasses and rubbed his face with his damp, pruny, dishwater hands. He replaced his glasses carefully and looked out at Reggie. His eyes looked big and sad. “Reggie, your mom—”

“I know. Neptune’s got her. It was her hand they found. I knew before Lorraine did—when I first heard the description of the hand. I even went to the police.”

George’s eyes got bigger behind his glasses. “You did? Does Lorraine know?”

Reggie shook her head. “She’d kill me. Please don’t tell her.”

He gave a wan smile. “Our secret, then.” They were silent a minute, both shuffling their feet on the floor. Reggie looked down and saw the linoleum was strewn with crumbs.

“Reggie,” George said. “If you want someone to talk to . . . about your mom, I mean . . .”

“Thanks,” Reggie said, standing up like she had someplace to hurry off to. George looked relieved that she wasn’t going to take him up on his offer right then and there.

“Hey, I was thinking I might head back to my place and work on Lorraine’s fishing cabinet. It would be good to have something to do. Something to help me keep my mind off all this. Want to join me?” George said, eyebrows raised. Sometimes George reminded Reggie of a hopeful dog, one it was impossible to disappoint. She liked this look a whole lot better than the all-seeing X-ray vision look he’d just given her.

Reggie nodded and followed him out to his van.

“Beautiful afternoon,” George said. The air smelled like fresh cut grass and grilled meat—one of their neighbors was having a cookout. The charred scent hit Reggie hard, sending waves of nausea through her. She was sure that behind it, she could detect the faint odor of her own blood as it leaked from her leg. She leaned back against George’s van, steadying herself before climbing in.

G
EORGE HAD MADE A
lot of progress on the fishing cabinet. The sides, bottom, and top were all done but lying in a neat row on a quilt on the basement floor, waiting to be assembled.

“Want to see something cool?” George asked, eyes gleaming.

“Sure.”

He reached down to the bottom of the cabinet: a small platform of sanded oak with decorative molding around the edges. He pushed on the floor of the base, and it popped open like a door.

“It’s got a secret compartment,” he said. “This part wasn’t in the plans. I added it myself. Don’t you think she’ll love it?”

Reggie smiled. It was pretty cool. But still, she had a hard time imagining what Lorraine might use a compartment like that for—her extra-special top-secret best trout-luring flies? “It’s great,” Reggie said.

“Can I ask you a question?” Reggie said, eyes on the secret compartment.

“Shoot.”

“Are you and Lorraine . . . you know, are you a couple or something?”

George closed the secret door. Without turning to look at her, he finally answered. “In a sense.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means we’re two adults who enjoy each other’s company.”

“You’re not gonna get married or anything, are you?”

George made a sound that was half laughter, half snort. “Good heavens, no! I think we’re both happy enough with the arrangement as it is.”

“But why be so secretive?”

“What we do is nobody’s business but our own.”

“Does my mom know?”

“I’m not sure.”

“So you never told her. Never talked about it?”

“No. Why should I? I don’t need Vera’s permission to have a private life.”

Reggie laughed. “You know, she thought you were hanging around all the time because of her. That’s what she told me. She said you’d taken her on dates, but you just weren’t her type. She thought you were kind of sulky and heartbroken.”

George’s eyes got wide. “I’ve taken her out, yes. But not on dates! We went out as friends.”

“I don’t think she saw it that way,” Reggie said.

George turned back to the platform of the cabinet, fiddling with it unnecessarily. “I guess you never know what other people are thinking, do you?”

Understatement of the year.

“I guess not,” Reggie said.

“Do me a favor,” George said, getting back to business. “Grab the tape measure, square, and a pencil. We’ll cut the pieces for the door.”

Reggie walked over to the bench with its neat rows of tools, picked up the twenty-five-foot measuring tape, the metal square, and the carpenter’s pencil with its rectangular lead.

George had a six-foot piece of oak on the sawhorses. “Mark it at sixty-three and five-eighths,” he instructed. Reggie measured the board, making a pencil mark first on the left side, then again when she measured from the right. Then she lined the square up perfectly and drew a line, connecting the dots. She wished everything in her life was as simple and sensible as this. If only tools and measurements would help her to find her mother. Reggie heard Tara’s voice echoing in her head:
The point is that we’ve gotta keep trying, right? If we stop looking, it’s over.

“Good,” George said. “Do you want to do the cutting?”

Reggie nodded, reaching for the clear safety glasses. “George,” she said as she placed the glasses on. “Did my mom say anything to you about this new play she’s in? Like the name of the theater company or anything?”

George shook his head, seemed to hesitate before speaking. “There are things you don’t know. Things Lorraine and I feel it’s time you learned. With your mother’s—disappearance—well, a lot of stuff is apt to come to the surface. And I’d rather you heard it from me than from reading it in the paper.” George straightened up and faced Reggie.

“What kind of things?”

“Your mother hasn’t been in a play since before you were born, Reg.”

“What?” Reggie stammered. She peered out at him through the scuffed plastic lenses of the safety glasses. She suddenly felt like she was underwater, sinking fast.

George was wrong. He had to be. Vera had been doing plays for years, that’s what kept her so busy all the time.

“But she’s been doing a play in New Haven. With Rabbit.”

He shook his head. “There is no play in New Haven. There may not even be a Rabbit. If there is, he’s no director.”

Reggie’s heart hammered. She wanted to cover her good ear, stamp her feet like a toddler having a tantrum, refusing to listen anymore. Instead she cleared her throat and asked in a meek voice, “But what’s she been doing if she’s not off rehearsing?”

George turned back to the wood, lifting onto the chop saw, lining the blade up with the line Reggie had made. “I don’t know exactly. Drinking, mostly, I think. Spending time with her friends. With
boyfriends
.” He spat the last word out bitterly, sounding as prudish and judgmental as Lorraine.

“Oh,” Reggie said, the word a hollow sound.

She thought of the filthy, wrecked room at Airport Efficiencies, the cockroach, and the package of condoms.

Her breath was coming hard and fast now. Tears stung her eyes behind the glasses, which were now fogging.

Everything she thought she knew about her mother was a complete lie. A lie that they’d all fed to her, year after year, thinking they were protecting her from the truth.

“Go ahead and cut it, Reg,” George said, and Reggie flipped on the saw, and brought the blade down across the line, biting into the wood, making a screaming sound. Once she’d finished, Reggie turned off the saw and stepped back, taking the glasses off and rubbing her eyes.

“Your mother was wonderful onstage, Reggie. I wish you could have seen her. She had this . . . this presence. It was spellbinding, really. Lorraine and I still talk about it. About what might have happened if she’d stuck with it, if she hadn’t just given the whole thing up.”

You mean if she hadn’t gotten pregnant
, Reggie thought.
Hadn’t had me
.

Reggie was feeling worse by the second. Her leg throbbed. The bandages felt damp and sticky. But somewhere behind the pain, another thought was coming to the surface. Something that had been there all afternoon, quietly festering and now refusing to be ignored.

“We found something else in the attic,” Reggie said. “An old theater program from the fall of 1970. She did
The Crucible
at a little theater in Hartford.”

George was over by the wood, moving another oak board to the sawhorses for measuring. He turned and stared at her blankly. “I don’t think I saw that one,” he said.

“But everyone always said she’d been in New York that fall, just before she moved back to Monique’s Wish. That was a lie too, wasn’t it?”

George sighed. “She
had
been in New York. Left just after high school graduation. But then, at the end of the following summer, she came back.”

“Why?” Reggie asked.

George sighed. “I guess I can tell you. Since we’re letting all the skeletons out of the closet today. Bo Berr asked her to come back. He set her up in a little apartment, promised he’d leave his wife, marry Vera instead.”

George’s voice had an angry edge to it, but Reggie couldn’t tell who it was directed at: Vera or Bo.

“Bo? Charlie’s uncle?”

“He had a real thing for Vera, always did. Even back in junior high. Hell, elementary school, probably. Anyway, it didn’t last. He dumped her pretty soon after and moved back in with his wife.”

“But if she was with Bo, living with him that fall, then that means . . .”

George stared at her, poker-faced.

She didn’t dare say the rest out loud.

R
EGGIE RODE AS FAST
and hard as she could to the center of town, right to Berr’s Ford. She arrived sweaty and out of breath, the bandaged cut on her leg burning.

“You’re a little young to be out car shopping, aren’t you, Regina?” Bo eyed her skeptically as she moved across the floor room toward him. He was leaning against a brand-new F-150 pickup, the candy-apple-red paint blindingly glossy. His suit was dusty gray, the fabric worn and shiny in places. Another salesman sat at a desk in the corner; he looked up briefly from his paperwork, but got right back to it.

“I have some questions,” Reggie said, stopping right in front of Bo, watching the way he smiled down at her so smugly, so dismissively. It was a smile that told her she was nothing to him. She was so close she could hear his breathing, see his nose hairs and that his shirt was stained yellow around the collar. His tie had something that looked like grape jelly on it. He licked his lips, tongue touching his overgrown mustache.

“About the fall of 1970. When my mother came back from New York.”

There was a little twitch at the corners of his mouth, and the smile fell away. “Let’s go to my office,” he said, gesturing with one of his big, blockish hands. He’d been a football star in high school; she remembered her mother mentioning it when they watched him on TV, in one of his stupid chicken commercials. He’d planned to go to college on a football scholarship but had ruined his knee senior year.

Reggie followed him across the showroom to the big office at the end with the plate-glass window overlooking the showroom. His desk was littered with papers. There was a framed photo of Stu, his wife, and Sid. There was another shot of Bo and Stu out on a boat, holding an enormous fish with a pointed, spearlike snout—a marlin, maybe. They looked young and tan and happy. There were young women in the background, their wives, maybe, or girlfriends they’d had before they met their wives. Reggie’s eye went to the Dealer of the Year plaques on the walls. Framed letters from charitable organizations thanking Bo for going above and beyond to help raise money for everything from cancer research to saving the Connecticut River from pollution.

He took a seat in the upholstered chair behind his desk. Reggie stood.

“What did she say?” he asked, his big, meaty face beginning to flush.

“Who?”

“Your mother. Whatever it was, you can be damn sure there isn’t a grain of truth to it.”

“She didn’t say anything to me.”

If only,
Reggie thought. If only she’d trusted me enough to tell me the truth. Not just her, but Lorraine and George, too. They’d treated her like some kind of doll, too delicate to bear the weight of the truth.

Maybe they were right. Maybe she was.

She could feel little cracks forming already, turning rough and ragged in places, opening up in the place where Tara had run the razor blade along her skin. Sweat dripped into the cut, burning like acid.