I quickly close that footage and bring up the one from the baseball field again. The bottom half of a man walks into view, coming from the parking lot.
“Is that him?” Dean asks.
“The boots are the same,” I note. We keep watching. For a brief moment, he is fully in view as he walks onto the sidewalk heading down the main road. I quickly pause the feed. “There he is.”
“Where do you think he’s going?” Sam asks.
I shrug. “Any number of places. There’s a moving truck rental place next door. A convenience store. A bit down the road, there are neighborhoods.”
“And there’s no footage from any of those?”
“No. But maybe Eric can get some. A lot of these places use cloud-based cameras now, so the footage should still be accessible.”
I have no idea who the man is, but I want to find out. If nothing else, he talked to Mary before she went into the doomed building. I’d like to find out what they talked about and if he saw anything else.
Chapter Sixteen
“Tell me about your mother,” I ask Dean a little while later as I pull a slice of pizza out of the cardboard delivery box onto a plate.
We are waiting for Eric to get back to me about any footage that might be available from further down on the street. He didn’t seem terribly optimistic about the prospects when I asked him about it. It’s been several months now, and even if the footage was saved on the cloud, it’s possible the business owners deleted it or don’t pay for access to longer-term storage and retrieval. But he said he would try, and that’s as much as I can ask. Only now, it leaves us sitting around waiting, which hovers very close to the top of my list of least favorite things. I’m right on the edge, tense and sharply aware, just waiting for something to happen.
That’s not an unusual feeling here. After my father left, that was my predominant state of being for a long time. I constantly waited for something. I wasn’t even entirely sure what it was I was waiting for. At first, it was for him to show back up. Then it was just to get a phone call from him or a postcard, something to give me an indication that he was alive, and I would see him again. That turned into a simmering sense of anxiety and fear that came from wondering why he left, and if it wasn’t actually on his own volition. Maybe he was running from something, and whatever it was would show up here.
But all that eventually faded as the months turned into years. I learned how to make peace with the tension, to not let it rule my every waking moment. But now it’s back. The uncomfortable feeling of wondering and waiting and wanting to be ready but not knowing how is threatening to take over my mind.
I have to distract myself. There’s no telling how long the wait will be before Eric calls back or something changes, and the game starts up again. Ever since Dean first told me about his mother and we made the disturbing link to what I convinced myself was a recurring nightmare, I’ve wondered about his mother, and how deep that link actually is. He talked about my father, and now we know my mother was instrumental in the rescue of his mother, but all this is yet more confusing puzzle pieces I can’t quite fit. Yet more things my parents never told me about.
“I’ve already told you pretty much everything,” he says.
“What was her name?” I asked.
“Natalia,” he tells me.
“That’s pretty,” I say.
“I never liked it much,” he admits.
“Why not?”
“It sounds too young if that makes sense. I wanted her to sound more like a mother. To sound more nurturing and… I don’t know, more like other mothers. Maybe because most of the time she didn’t act very motherly. I thought maybe if she sounded more like a mother, it would help. Now that I’m an adult, that sounds ridiculous and selfish.”
“No, it doesn’t,” I reassure him. “I think all of us have things we come up with about our parents when we’re young and they don’t always make sense to other people. Why do you say she wasn’t very motherly? You seem to adore her.”
“I do,” Dean says. “Her death ripped me apart. I love my mother. But everything she went through when she was younger really messed her up. Growing up in Russia wasn’t easy. She came here with the hopes of having a better life and being able to help her family. But she, like far too many other women, got wrapped up with the wrong man, and he made her life a living hell. When she escaped, the only thing she took with her was her life. And she barely had that.”
“How long was that before you were born?” I ask.
“About two years,” he says. He gives me a knowing look over the slice of pizza he’s bringing to his lips. “He wasn’t my father.”
Savoring the indulgent combination of spicy pepperoni and sweet pineapple against the richness of a thick layer of cheese, I finish my first bite and swallow it as I nod.
“I figured as much. You said you didn’t know your father. I assumed your mother wouldn’t escape from a man only to go back to him
