him before Yvette had dragged her farther into the kitchen. No kids. But there were games for kids to play with here. Frank had shown her the closet that held toys. She couldn’t picture him playing with them himself — it was an aunt and uncle’s house, then.
She smelled smoke on her hair and decided to take a shower. Carrying the plastic bag that held the basic toiletries she had purchased at the drugstore, she gathered up a towel and a washcloth from the stack of linens Frank had left for them and went into the bathroom.
It was there, for the first time, that she became acutely aware of the fact that Frank’s wife lived in this house. Not that she had expected that Irene Kelly lived somewhere else, but Elena had been feeling too numb to really study her surroundings. In the moments when the numbness briefly faded, she was caught up in thoughts about the funeral and the fire, in worries about the future, in questions about whom she should trust.
Now, on the counter, small items became a visual alarm, declaring her an interloper on another woman’s ground. No, a couple’s ground. Two toothbrushes, a man’s comb, a woman’s hairbrush. A small bottle of scent, almost full. She opened the mirror door on the cabinet over the sink and saw the his-and-hers mix of deodorants, makeup (very little, she noted), mouthwash, razors, shaving cream, aftershave, hand lotion, cotton balls, aspirin, a box of bandages.
She felt a fierce stab of jealousy toward Irene Kelly. This was not because she had long considered Irene a potential rival or even because she had, at some point during the afternoon, decided that she liked the color of Frank Harriman’s eyes. It was because Irene Kelly had this male presence in her life.
Would she think of Elena as a poacher?
Elena began shrugging out of her clothes. Irene had nothing to worry over, she decided. Frank was attractive, but Elena never went after married men. Hell, she really didn’t spend a lot of time with men, period — although she had always liked the company of men more than of women. She didn’t have women friends. Her friendship with Yvette had been a first, and that one probably wouldn’t have been formed without Seth.
She shook her head. No, that wasn’t it. She liked directness, and most women weren’t as direct as Yvette.
As for men friends, most of the single men she met didn’t seem to be able to give up using the pointers between their legs as the compasses for their lives. Telling a man she was a single mom was usually enough to send his compass needle due south.
She’d met a few men she liked, and she had dated, but nobody ever got more than a good-night kiss from her. For a while, she had wondered if she was actually as frigid as the jerks at the LPPD had said she was. But she knew that was not the problem. The problem was, no one ever measured up to her memories of Phil Lefebvre.
She knew it wasn’t healthy to cling to memories this way, but it was no use trying to let go. She need only look at her son and the memories of Phil were there, inescapable. In a number of ways, she was more faithful to him than many women were to their living mates. She had said this once to Yvette, who had scoffed and said, “A dead husband is very easy to get along with. He doesn’t even snore.”
Maybe Yvette was right. Maybe they would have come to despise each other. Maybe they would have already been divorced, and she would have become a single mom anyway, and moreover, had to watch him date other women.
That was too hard to think about. Maybe, after all, they would have been happy, the way Harriman seemed to be with his wife. She had seen the way they supported each other at the funeral. She had envied Irene Kelly for that, too.
What would it be like, she asked herself, to have someone like Frank Harriman as your husband? There was a faint scent of aftershave, of maleness, in the room. She touched a towel hanging over the shower door. It was slightly damp. She brought it closer to her face and inhaled the combined scents of the soap and shampoo he used. She suffered a small shock, a sudden reacquaintance with the distantly familiar, and opened the shower door to see that Frank used the same brands of soap and shampoo that Phil had used.
She felt a chill. It was almost enough to make her close the shower door again, to let her hair stay smoky, to tell the Harrimans that she’d rent a hotel room somewhere.
She laughed at herself. A hotel? She didn’t make enough money to set herself up like that, not even in a rathole of a hotel. The afternoon shopping spree had almost maxed out her one credit card. “And this is just day one,” she said aloud, turning on the shower and stepping in.
Once the warm water began to sluice over her, she reached for Frank’s shampoo, leaving her own in the plastic bag, leaving the one she knew must be Irene’s on the tile shelf above her. She washed her hair with it, and as its scent rinsed across her face, the knot that had been tied so tightly somewhere in the middle of her chest loosened and the tears began to flow. She couldn’t remember ever crying so much in a single day, and she despised herself for it, even as she let long-denied grief take her where it would go.
So she let herself think of Phil and of what might have been. She fantasized, as she had so often, of Phil at the hospital on the night she gave birth to his son, holding Seth as an infant, how proud he would have been.
She thought of being held by him, of sharing warmth with him.
And as she had done so many, many times, she wondered if he had suffered before he died, if he had been scared, or cold, or lonely. If, from within the wreckage, the very marrow of his bones had tried to call out, asking to be found, only to be utterly abandoned.
“Stop it!” she said aloud, but the scolding only made her cry harder.
Irene had been sent into downtown L.A. on a story that the greenest reporter in the newsroom could have covered, on orders from Wrigley, her boss’s boss. She had watched while Judge Lewis Kerr was handed a plaque from the Southern California Women in Law, thanking him for organizing a series of Tomorrow’s Women in Law days in six counties. Tomorrow’s Women in Law days allowed girls to learn about the legal system by touring courtrooms, meeting with judges and attorneys, and generally being scared out of their wits by the inmates in the women’s jails.
Irene liked the program, and liked Kerr, but she was a veteran reporter, and the assignment had been a bit of petty office warfare. She had, not for the first time, considered finding other work. She loved her job, especially on the days when she was allowed to do it. Today wasn’t one of those days.
Although the press conference was over at two-thirty, Kerr had been flattered that the
The traffic was only beginning. Knowing she was never going to make it back in time to file the story, she called
