I took off my shirt, hung my pants over the back of a chair. “Oh well,” I said. “That’s not a big thing.”
Tess had held off telling Cynthia about her health problems. She wouldn’t have wanted to spoil her own birthday celebrations for Cynthia. And while it was certainly up to Tess to decide when to break the news to Cynthia, it felt wrong to know this while my wife was kept in the dark.
But an even greater burden was knowing, for the first time, about the money that had been sent anonymously to Tess over several years. What right did I have to keep that information to myself? Surely Cynthia was more entitled to know about it than I. But Tess had held back from telling because she thought Cynthia was fragile enough these days, and I couldn’t disagree. And yet.
I’d even liked to have asked Cynthia whether she knew her aunt had paid a couple of visits to Dr. Kinzler, but then she’d want to know why Tess had mentioned that to me and not her, so I left it alone.
“You okay?” Cynthia asked.
“Yeah, good. Just kind of beat, that’s all,” I said as I stripped down to my boxers. I brushed my teeth and got into bed, lying on my side, my back to her. Cynthia threw her magazine onto the floor and turned off the light, and a few seconds after that, her arm slipped around me, and she stroked my chest, and then she took me in her hand.
“How beat are you?” she whispered.
“Not that beat,” I said, and turned over.
“I want to be safe with you,” she said, pulling my mouth down to hers.
“No asteroids tonight,” I said, and if the lights had been on, I think I might have seen her smile.
Cynthia fell asleep quickly. I wasn’t so lucky.
I stared at the ceiling, turned over on to my side, glared at the digital clock. When it turned over to a new minute, I started counting to sixty, seeing how close I could come. Then I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling some more. Around three in the morning, Cynthia sensed my restlessness and said groggily to me, “You okay?”
“Fine,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”
It was her questions I couldn’t face. If I knew the answers to the questions Cynthia would have about the cash-stuffed envelopes that had been left for Tess to help pay for her upbringing, I might have told her about it right away.
No, that was not true. Having some of the answers would only spark more questions. Suppose I knew the money was being left by someone from her family. Suppose I even knew which one.
I wouldn’t be able to answer why.
Suppose I knew the money was being left by someone outside her family. But who? Who else would feel responsible enough for Cynthia, about what had happened to her mother and father and brother, to leave that kind of money to care for her?
And then I wondered whether I should tell the police. Get Tess to turn over the letter and the envelopes. Maybe, even after all these years, they still held some secrets that someone with the right kind of forensic equipment could unlock.
Assuming, of course, that there was anyone still in the police department who cared about this case. It had gone into the “cold” file a very long time ago.
When they were doing the TV show, they had a hard time even finding anyone still on the force who’d investigated the incident. Which was why they’d had to track down that guy in Arizona, sitting out front of his Airstream, so he could insinuate that Cynthia had had something to do with the disappearance of her brother and her parents, the prick.
And so I lay awake, haunted by the information I had that Cynthia did not, and how it only served to remind me of how much we still didn’t know.
I killed some time in the bookstore while Cynthia and Grace looked at shoes. I had an early Philip Roth, one that I’d never gotten around to reading, in my hand when Grace came running into the store. Cynthia trailed behind her, a shopping bag in hand.
“I’m starving,” Grace said, throwing her arms around me.
“You got some shoes?”
She took a step back and modeled for me, sticking out one foot and then the other. White sneakers with a pink swoosh.
“What’s in the bag?” I asked.
“Her old ones,” Cynthia said. “She had to wear them right away. You hungry?”
I was. I put the Roth book back and we took the escalator up to the food court level. Grace wanted McDonald’s, so I gave her enough money to buy herself something while Cynthia and I went to a different counter to get soup and a sandwich. Cynthia kept glancing back over to the McDonald’s, making sure she could see Grace. The mall was busy on this Sunday afternoon, as was the food court. There were still a few tables free, but they were filling up fast.
Cynthia was so occupied watching Grace that I moved both our plastic trays along, gathered together cutlery and napkins, loaded the sandwiches and soup as they became ready.
“She’s got us a table,” Cynthia said. I scanned the court, spotted Grace at a table for four, waving her arm back and forth long after we’d caught sight of her. She already had her Big Mac out of the box when we joined her, her fries dumped into the other side of the container.
“Eww,” she said when she saw my cream of broccoli soup. A kindly looking, fiftyish woman in a blue coat, sitting alone at the next table, glanced over, smiled, and then went back to her own lunch.
I sat across from Cynthia, Grace to my right. I noticed that Cynthia kept looking over my shoulder. I turned around once, looked where she was looking, turned back.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing,” she said, and took a bite of her chicken salad sandwich.
“What were you looking at?”
“Nothing,” she said again.
Grace pushed a fry into her mouth, biting it into quarter-inch segments at a furious rate.
Cynthia was looking over my shoulder again.
“Cyn,” I said, “what the hell are you looking at?”
She didn’t immediately deny this time that something had caught her eye. “There’s a man over there,” she said. I started to turn around and she said, “No, don’t look.”
“What’s so special about him?”
“Nothing,” she said.
I sighed, and probably rolled my eyes, too. “For crying out loud, Cyn, you can’t just stare at the guy for-”
“He looks like Todd,” she said.
Okay, I thought. We’ve been here before. Just be cool. “Okay,” I said. “What is it about him that makes him look like your brother?”
“I don’t know. It’s just something about him. He just looks like Todd would probably look today.”
“What are you talking about?” Grace asked.
“Never mind,” I said. To Cynthia, I said, “Tell me what he looks like, and I’ll just casually turn around and get a look at him.”
“He’s got black hair, he’s wearing a brown jacket. He’s eating Chinese food. Right now, he’s eating an egg roll. He looks like a younger version of my dad, an older version of Todd, I’m telling you.”
I swiveled slowly on my backless chair, made like I was taking in the various food kiosks, thinking about going to get something to eat. I saw him, catching some sprouts with his tongue that were falling out of the half-eaten egg roll. I’d seen a few pictures of Todd from Cynthia’s shoebox of mementos, and I suppose it was possible that had he grown up to be in his late thirties, early forties, he might look a bit like this guy. Slightly overweight, a doughy face, black hair, maybe six foot, although it was hard to tell with him sitting down.
I turned back. “He looks like a million other people,” I said.
“I’m going to get a closer look,” Cynthia said.
She was on her feet before I could protest. “Honey,” I said as she walked by me, making a halfhearted
