I slid over to her side of the bed and wrapped her up in my arms. She didn’t say anything, but smiled and pressed herself against me. Five minutes later, I was inside her again. The innocence was still there, but this time the sex was a notch closer to atomic. We were both wet with sweat when she reared back, tensed, and rolled off me. A little while later, she got out of bed without a word and walked slowly towards the bathroom. I enjoyed watching her as she walked. Her back and legs were well-muscled and her ass was a revelation. When I heard the shower, I got up to join her.
We came out of the shower and moved back into the bedroom, still playfully drying each other off, occasionally stopping for a hug and kiss. Then Mary looked away and the spell was broken.
“Your machine’s blinking,” she said. “You’ve got a message.”
I wanted to believe it was disappointment I saw in Mary’s eyes when she noticed the red light flashing on the phone machine. I wanted to believe she wanted the day to last and last the way I wanted it to. But that wasn’t what I saw in her eyes. What I saw in her eyes looked like guilt and that wasn’t lost on me. It was as if the unexpected red light had caught her off guard and she let her defenses down and beneath them was guilt. Guilt about what, I wondered? Was she married? Committed to someone else? Did I care? When I looked back, the guilt was gone and she was kissing my chest. Still, I wondered. That stopped when the phone rang.
“I better get this,” I said, stroking her damp hair.
“Of course, I’ll go make myself human.” Mary grabbed her bag and disappeared back into the bathroom.
“Hello.”
“Dad, where were you? I called about fifteen minutes ago.”
“Hey, kiddo. I was in the shower. What’s up? Did something happen to-”
“I need to talk to you.”
“Is it about Sashi?”
“In a way.”
“Go ahead, I’m listening.”
“No, Dad, in person.”
“Come on over.”
“How about New Carmens in a half hour?”
“Okay. A half hour. If you get there before me, get us a booth.”
“I love you.”
“I’ve waited a long time to hear you say that again, Sarah.”
The line went silent. I put the phone back in its cradle. I guess I was still sitting there looking at the phone when Mary came back out of the bathroom, a towel wrapped tightly around her, another covering her hair, and her face made up.
“Is everything all right?” she asked.
“It’s my daughter. She wants to talk to me. Would you like to meet her?”
There it was again, that thing in her eyes. “Someday, but I’ve got to get back to my apartment and get to an appointment in the city. I’ve got a presentation to prepare as well.”
Maybe that’s what I was seeing, guilt over blowing off her responsibilities.
“I hope last night and this morning were worth a little rushing around,” I said.
“Oh, it was worth a lot more than that.” She leaned up, cupped my chin, and kissed me ever so gently on the lips. Then, with the swipe of her thumb, she brushed the lipstick residue off my mouth. “It was worth a lot.”
“I have to get ready to meet her.”
“Go ahead. I’ll get dressed in the living room and let myself out.”
“Call me.”
“I will.” She waved, winked, and turned to the living room.
Sarah was waiting at a small corner banquette, a cup of coffee in front of her. She was nervously flicking her index finger against the thick white porcelain cup and watching the small ripples spread out along the surface of the steaming coffee. I had seen her like this only a few times in her life, always when she had something to confess. There was the time in second grade when she had shut the lights out in the gym, but her friend Megan got blamed for it. I found her that day after school, sitting at the kitchen table lost in thought, tapping her milk glass much as she was tapping the coffee cup now.
“What is it, kiddo?”
“I did a bad thing, Daddy.”
We went to the principal’s office together the next morning.
Then there was the time she was fifteen and had the drinking and pot party at the house when Katy and I were on a cruise. A few of the guys had gotten their teenage beer muscles on and got into a brawl and the neighbors called the cops. That time, like this time, she brought me to New Carmens to tell me what had happened. But the worst time was in her senior year in high school and her period was late and she wrongly, but understandably, thought she was pregnant by a boy she’d broken up with weeks before. Again, she’d told me here.
“I got a funny feeling you’re not gonna tell me that you got Megan Costello in trouble for shutting out the gym lights.”
She fought it, but couldn’t stop herself from smiling. “You remember that?”
“I remember everything about you, Sarah. You’re the most important thing in my life. You always have been. So what is it? What’s up?”
“It’s about what happened to Sashi.”
“That much I figured out.”
“Max and Candy lied to the police.”
“About what?”
“Candy made me promise not to say anything, Dad. I owed so much to her. She was like the big sister I always wanted. I couldn’t, you know… And Sashi is her kid, so I had to give my word.”
“Come on, Sarah, tell me. If I can keep it quiet, I will.”
“You can’t. It’s too big to keep quiet anymore. That’s why I came to you because you’ll know how to fix it.”
“I won’t know if I can until you tell me.”
She bowed her head and looked away. I could see Sarah wanted to say something; her lips moved, but she couldn’t seem to find the words. I figured I’d try to help.
“Did Max and Candy fake this whole thing?”
Sarah stared at me as if I were speaking Chinese. “No, Dad, nothing like that.”
“Do they know who did it?”
“No, but there was a ransom demand,” Sarah said.
“What?”
“There was a-”
“I heard you. How much? When? Did they-”
“That night, the night Sashi was taken, right after Candy called the police. The call came in on Max’s cell phone. The caller used one of those distortion boxes like in the movies, so they can’t even be sure it was a man’s voice.”
“But they think it was a man?”
“They think so.”
“What did he say?”
“I don’t know exactly. All I know is that he wanted money or he would do things to Sashi, horrible things. Candy couldn’t bring herself to tell me exactly what was said.”
“Did they pay?”
“Some of it,” she whispered.
“What does that mean?”
“He wanted two million dollars, but Max and Candy, they’re-”
“-broke. I know. They have about ten thousand dollars in the bank.”
“But how could you know that?” The look on my daughter’s face was a mixture of surprise and disgust, of pride and anger.
