Woman in Red (8 page)

Jeremy felt the pressure to respond in kind, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. She wanted something—he
could feel it radiating off her like heat—something he didn’t have to give.

“Where are we going?” he asked after a bit, as he stared out the window, slouched down in his seat.

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

Jeremy cast about in his mind, trying to think of a place where they were unlikely to be spotted by anyone he knew. “Dad and I saw this bald eagle’s nest when we were hiking in the park last summer.” He said the first thing that popped into his head. “I could show you, if you like.”

“Sounds good.” He had the feeling she would’ve said the same thing had he suggested a trip to the moon. “I’ve heard that in parts of Alaska bald eagles have made such a comeback, they’ve actually become pests. I saw a show about it on TV, ” she remarked, as she made the turn at the intersection.

He wondered if it was a show she’d watched in prison, and that made him realize how little he knew about her life at Pine River. He had only sketchy memories of going to visit her there as a kid—a room with tables bolted to the floor and gray, cinderblock walls; guards in uniform buzzing him through a series of doors. There was so much he was dying to ask, all the things she hadn’t told him in her letters. But he didn’t dare. She might get the wrong idea, and think he gave a shit, and the last thing Jeremy wanted was for this to turn into some tearful mother and son reunion. The truth was she was a stranger to him.

They drove in near silence until they reached the turnoff for the state park, where they began the steep climb up the hill, through a tunnel of evergreens thick with ferns the size of small trees. The road ended in a parking area near the summit, and they got out and hiked the rest of the way along a marked trail. The eagle’s nest was right where he remembered
it, at the top of an old-growth Douglas fir that had lost most of its foliage. “Looks like no one’s home at the moment,” Alice said, shading her eyes as she peered upward.

“They’re probably out hunting for food,” Jeremy said.

“They?”

“It’s a pair. There were babies in the nest the last time I was here.”

She gazed out at the sound below, where small islands wreathed in mist were strewn like so many scattered stones, some scarcely more than a knuckle of rock with one or two trees clinging to them. “I haven’t been up here in years. I’d forgotten how peaceful it is,” she said. She turned to him, her eyes bright with unshed tears. “Thank you. You don’t know how much this means to me.”

He dropped his gaze, feeling embarrassed, knowing she wasn’t talking about the scenery. “Yeah. No problem.”

“I hope we can do this again.”

Jeremy went on staring at the ground. With the autumn rains had come the moss that blanketed everything around him in a thick green fuzz. Right now he wanted nothing more than to sink down onto all that furry softness and close his eyes. “I don’t know,” he hedged. “I’m pretty busy these days. You know, what with school and my job.”

“I see.”

“My boss wasn’t too happy when I told him I needed the afternoon off.”

“Well, maybe we could have dinner one evening then.”

“Maybe.” Jeremy spoke dubiously. “But that’s usually the only time Dad and I get to hang out.”

He glanced up and saw the hurt on her face. But she did her best to cover it, asking, “How is your dad, by the way?”

“Good. They made him district manager.”

“I’m not surprised. He’s worked hard for it.”

“The only bad thing is that it means more time on the road.” Randy’s territory covered most of western Washington, many of the doctor’s offices and clinics he regularly called on separated by hundreds of miles. “What about you? What’ll you do?” Jeremy asked.

“For work, you mean?” She smiled. “I don’t know yet. First, I have to find a place to live.”

“So you, like, plan on sticking around?”

She seemed surprised by the question. “Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”

He shrugged. Part of him wanted her here; another part of him wished she’d stayed the hell away. Mostly, he just felt confused.

“The only reason I’m here is because of you. I want us to spend some time together,” she went on, the raw need in her voice making him cringe. “You’ll be in college before long, and I’ve missed so much already.”

Yeah? Well, whose fault is that?
he felt like saying. He frowned, struggling to keep from giving in to the tears pressing behind his eyes. “I don’t know about college. I might take a year off, do some traveling.”

She gave him a quizzical look. “Aunt Denise tells me you have a shot at the Ivy Leagues.”

He snorted in derision, pretending it was no big deal, though he’d sent for all the catalogues and had been thinking of little else for months. “Let’s see how I score on the SATs.”

“Maybe I could help with that. I was sort of the unofficial tutor at Pine River. They nicknamed me Teach.” She smiled, which shocked him a bit—he wouldn’t have imagined she’d have any fond memories of that place. “It wouldn’t be the same with you, I know. The ladies I worked with were just
studying for their GEDs, and you . . .” She paused. “You could probably teach me. But I could quiz you on the stuff you’ve learned.”

“I don’t need your help.” He spoke more harshly than he’d intended.

Alice fell silent. All around him the woods crackled as if with static in the stiff breeze blowing in off the water. Violent slashes of yellow stood out amid the deep green—the laurels and poplars his boss, Mr. Barbour, called weed trees—marking the passage of Indian summer into autumn. Overhead, bands of cirrus clouds stippled the sky, and on the ground below boulders and fallen tree limbs lay like the ruins of an ancient civilization.

“I’d be doing it as much for me as for you,” she said at last, her voice so soft he almost didn’t catch the tremor in it.

“Thanks, but I’ve gotten along just fine without you all these years.”

She shook her head, her eyes filling with tears. “I’m still your mother.”

“Yeah? I had a mother once,” he shot back. “She used to bake me cookies and tuck me in at night. You? I don’t even
know
you.”

She looked so bereft, Jeremy almost felt sorry for her. “I never stopped loving you, not for one minute,” she said.

“All I know is that you weren’t around! I used to cry myself to sleep every night, I missed you so much.” His own tears came now, hot and fierce, betraying him. He gave his runny nose a furious backhanded swipe. “I was just a kid. Shouldn’t you have thought of that before you . . . you . . .” His throat closed up before he could finish the sentence.

Her own face contorted, as if in pain. “I’m sorry, Jeremy. I never meant for it to turn out this way.”

“You make it sound like an accident. I was there, remember? You weren’t thinking of me when you ran down Mister White. You were thinking of David. You chose
him
over me. A dead boy.” The memory he’d done his best to bury reached up now like some hideous, decayed thing rising out the grave.

“It wasn’t like that,” she said, the tears in her eyes spilling down her cheeks. “I wasn’t in my right mind at the time. I know that sounds like an excuse, but it’s the truth.”

“If you really cared about me, you’d go away and leave me alone!”

“Jeremy, please . . . ”

She placed a hand on his arm, and he shook it off, abruptly turning around and stalking back toward the car. He hadn’t gone more than a few dozen feet when he slipped on some wet leaves and lost his balance, pitching backward to land on his rear end. Alice cried out in dismay and came rushing over, but Jeremy only glared up at her from his sprawled position on the ground, as if it were her fault that he’d fallen. Ignoring her proffered hand, he scrambled to his feet, slapping at the dirt and leaves that clung to his jeans.

By the time he straightened, his face was wiped clean of any emotion. “Are we done now? I’d like to go home,” he said in a queer, dead voice he scarcely recognized as his own.

After she’d dropped her son off at his house, Alice drove slowly back toward the motel where she was staying. She replayed the meeting with Jeremy in her mind. Could she have handled it better? Been more up front with him instead of following Denise’s advice to take it slowly? Somehow she didn’t think it would have made a difference.
Jeremy was hurt and angry, and no amount of explaining was going to change that. It would take time for those wounds to heal. Meanwhile, she would just have to be patient, let him know by her mere presence alone that if she hadn’t been there for him before, she was now.

Still, the rejection hurt. In a way, Jeremy seemed further away than when she’d been in prison. Back then, she’d at least had the hope of a happy reunion.

He was so different from his brother. David had been a happy-go-lucky kid, hurtling through life as if he’d somehow known he needed to cram everything into those few short years. Jeremy, in contrast, had been watchful and sensitive. She recalled one time, when he was around three, she’d walked into the living room and found him crying as though his heart would break, where moments before he’d been playing happily with his toys.

“Oh, sweetie, what is it? What’s the matter?” she’d asked, scooping him into her arms.

“It got hurts,” he’d finally managed to choke, pointing a chubby finger at the sliding glass door to the patio, where a sparrow that had flown into the glass lay stunned.

After his brother’s death, Jeremy had retreated into his own world, holing up in his room for hours on end with his comic books and action figures. So ghostlike she used to worry that he would one day simply fade away. She hadn’t been equipped to deal with it, though. She hadn’t realized it at the time, but both her marriage and her sanity had been gradually coming undone. Randy and she, though they were sleeping in the same bed, might have been in separate universes. Even in their shared concern for Jeremy they’d been at odds, disagreeing on everything from which psychologist would be best for him to whether or not Jeremy should be
forced to finish what was on his plate when he said he wasn’t hungry.

The motel was situated on Whale Watch Lane, a short walk from the outlook known for its frequent whale sightings. It catered mostly to the summer crowd, so it was fairly deserted this late in the season. But Alice didn’t mind that her cabin smelled musty or that the wind, when it was blowing in off the bay, filtered in through the cracks around the door and window frame. For the time being it was home. Best of all, the manager, a middle-aged man who’d reeked of nicotine, hadn’t looked askance at her when she’d checked in; as long as her money was good, she could be Jack the Ripper for all he cared. The hot shower she yearned for would have to wait, though; there was something she needed to do first.

She turned onto Bellmore Road instead, headed in the direction of the church where she and her family used to attend services when she was growing up. Pulling up in front, she saw that it was exactly as she remembered, a century-old white clapboard structure with a modest spire sitting in the middle of what had once been an apple orchard. Alice recalled wandering through the orchard with her sister after services, hunting for apples amid the stunted trees that remained, while their parents had lingered on the front steps of the church, chatting with fellow congregants. Now she scarcely noticed the trees as she made her way along the narrow path that led to the small churchyard in back. It was where her father and grandparents, Nana and Grandpa Joe, were buried. And her son.

David’s grave, tucked all the way in back, under an old maple tree, would have been difficult to locate if she hadn’t known the way by heart. There was only a simple bronze
marker engraved with his name and the dates of his birth and death. She’d wanted a proper headstone, but Randy had insisted on something simpler.

“You think advertising it to the world is going to change the fact that our son’s dead?” he’d shouted at her, when their disagreement had flared into an argument. “I don’t need some fancy inscription to remind me. He’s
gone
, Alice. That’s the only thing that matters.”

Looking into his grief-stricken face she had seen that he blamed her. For not being more vigilant, perhaps—if she’d been a better mother, David would still be alive. And she’d given in to Randy then because she’d known he was right: She
was
responsible for their son’s death. If not directly, then through her negligence. Reflecting on it now, Alice saw that moment as the turning point. In the immediate aftermath of their son’s death, she and Randy had clung to each other like survivors of a shipwreck, but in mourning they’d gone their separate ways. Randy wanting to move on, Alice unable to.

Yet however many times she played it back in her mind, she could never see a different outcome. It was as if she had been heading down a steep slope, picking up speed along the way, until she’d finally lost control.