“It’s hard, isn’t it?” he said.
Karen looked at him as if startled that he could read her thoughts.
“It’s just not going to work,” she said.
“We’ll make it.”
She shook her head. “No.”
“It’s going to be tough, but it’s only two weeks.”
“Two weeks?”
“Before we get him back.”
“I’m talking about us, John. You and me. We just don’t work together. It’s not working out. It’s nobody’s fault.” Becker stared at her, trying to make sense of her words. They seemed to have torn right through his stomach and the rest of him was falling through the hole they had caused.
“You’re trying your best,” she said. “You always try your best at everything you do. I love that about you, but it’s just too hard. It’s asking too much of you to step into a situation where you have to deal with me and Jack both at the same time. I should never have expected you to be able to deal with it all. It’s my fault.”
It sounded to Becker very much as if she were saying it was his fault, and it still made no sense.
“I should have known better in the first place.” She was talking rapidly now, the thoughts tumbling out, as if she could prevent him from entering in the discussion if she spoke her words fast enough. As if she could summarize the situation all by herself, tie it off and end it without any messy loose ends.
“You’re a single man, single by nature. I know you’ve been married, but look how that ended up-not that a failed marriage means you’re a failure. I’m no one to suggest that-but you’re a loner, John, you know that, you’ve said as much yourself. You have your own way of viewing the world, your own way of dealing with it. It works for you and that’s fine, but it’s not fair of me to expect you to toss that aside. You’ve spent a lifetime developing it, you shouldn’t have to change just because something else is required when you’re living with a woman and her child.” Becker stared numbly at her as she drove the car. He heard the words, understood the message, but couldn’t penetrate the camouflage to discover the reason. There was a ringing in his ears, a hollow sound to Karen’s voice that made everything seem unreal, otherworldly, as if he was watching the whole thing happening to somebody else. Some other poor uncomprehending schmuck was being dumped without just cause, not him.
“It’s just the best thing all around,” she was saying, and Becker realized he had not heard her for a few moments. He felt he must have missed something crucial, the causative link that would interpret everything else. He wondered if he should ask her to repeat herself. “And the timing is right, with Jack away. This way he won’t have to watch anything messy, that doesn’t do a child any good to have to listen to fighting and yelling. We’ll just get it over with and when he comes home from camp everything will be as good as new. We really get along best by ourselves anyway. Jack and I. I know you tried, but I think he was getting conflicting signals. Kids like things simple.”
Becker wondered if it was something about Jack. Was she jealous of Becker’s attentions to the boy? Did she want Jack all to herself? Had Jack’s hand in his at camp affected her as strongly as it had Becker, but in the wrong way? He thought there was an idea there that needed examination and he must get to it if the sinking in his stomach and the roaring in his ears ever stopped.
Karen glanced at Becker, the first time she had dared to really look at him since she began talking. He had slumped down in the seat, his eyes staring at the dashboard. Sullen, she thought. Lumpish and silent and not even troubling himself to talk back. He doesn’t even care enough to argue. Male. So hopelessly male. And it was just as well; it made the job that much easier. Let him sulk. They were all good at that; it seemed to come naturally to them. Her ex-husband had been a master at it, jumping inside himself and battening down the hatches at the first sign of emotional distress. In his case he had always simply walked away, literally walked right out of the room rather than sit down and talk. Becker was a captive in the car now and couldn’t walk, but she could see he was doing his equivalent of it.
“Do you have anything to say?” she asked, annoyed.
He took a long time to respond, as if summoned from a far place. When he spoke he did not look at her.
“Can I keep Jack?” he asked.
He made another sound, deep in his throat, that Karen thought might be laughter, or a sob.
Reggie had watched the man and woman load their suitcases into the trunk, then hurried to the cabin as soon as the car was out of the driveway. As she had suspected, they were gone for good. The wastebaskets were empty, the room clean. Even the bed was made, the spread neatly in place and tucked in at the bottom with crisp hospital corners. Nothing had been defaced, nothing stolen. Reggie felt oddly cheated that they had left her nothing to complain about.
“They had four days of rent left,” she explained to the two FBI agents who had returned minus the boy in the backseat. “But I figure they owe me that much for sheer aggravation.”
“Nothing to justify a warrant then.” the female agent said. She looked to the man for confirmation. He was hanging back, staring at the ground. He reminded Reggie of George and his hangdog look after he’d been scolded for something. Moping, aggrieved, and withdrawn. There and not there at the same time. Reggie felt a pang of sympathy for the officious young woman. Working with men was not worth the trouble most of the time. It was just easier to do things yourself.
“And you saw them leave, you say,” the woman asked.
“That’s right. Bold as brass, this time. Went out in broad daylight, and he wasn’t wearing any sunglasses either, ‘bad eyes’ or not.”
“Just the two of them? The man and the woman?”
“Who else?”
“No sign of the child?”
“He could have been lying down on the backseat, of course.”
“That’s true,” the woman said, clearly not believing Reggie. “But you said you watched them pack the car yourself. You would have noticed if a child got into the backseat, wouldn’t you?”
“If I was looking right at that exact moment. I have other things to do, you know. I wasn’t studying them or anything. They might have slipped several kids in that car while I was tending to business for all I know.”
“That’s true,” the agent said again, and again clearly not believing it. “But you have no reason to suppose they did?”
Reggie looked briefly at George, who seemed to be hiding a smirk. He wanted to be here for the excitement, of course, but would he help her? Not in this lifetime. Stand there dumb as a post when he might be of some assistance, then strut around when they were gone and tell any fool who would listen about how he helped in an FBI investigation. Helped who? Not his wife.
Reggie shrugged. “I may have been wrong about a child, I never actually saw him, I told you that the first time. I just saw a toothbrush, but that doesn’t change the fact that something very strange was going on in that cabin.”
The woman agent sighed. “No, it doesn’t change that. They didn’t leave a forwarding address or mention where they might be going?”
Reggie snorted. “They didn’t even wave goodbye, but good riddance to bad rubbish, I say.” She looked meaningfully at George, who dropped his eyes to the ground and slumped his shoulders, just like the male agent. Like carbon copies of each other, Reggie thought. Lost causes, all of them.
“I guess that will be all, then,” the woman said. She looked once more toward her male partner, but he had already turned on his heel and was heading back toward the car.
Reggie watched them drive off with a sense of disappointment. She had won her battle completely, she had gotten rid of that Dee woman and her hideous “husband” without any loss of property, and had even had the satisfaction of siccing the FBI onto them, but still she felt oddly cheated. Just what of, she could not have said. When she turned to speak to George, he had already slunk off.
The silence in the car was so thick that Karen felt as if it sloshed back and forth with each turn in the road like so much liquid. Becker would not even look at her and she could think of nothing to break the silence except to turn on the radio, which seemed cold and insensitive. There seemed no point in even discussing the couple from
