“Katie!” Rick paused, suddenly cut off by the ringing telephone. He turned to answer it. “Hello? Yeah, this is Rick Ballard. Everything’s okay here. No, you don’t need to send a man out. My daughter came home and didn’t shut off the alarm system in time…”
The girl was still staring at Maura with open hostility. “So you’re his new girlfriend.”
“Please, you don’t need to get upset about this,” Maura said quietly. “I’m not his girlfriend. I just needed a place to sleep for the night.”
“Oh, right. So why not with my dad?”
“Katie, it’s the truth-”
“Nobody in this family ever tells the truth.”
Downstairs, the phone rang again. Again Rick answered it. “Carmen. Carmen, calm down! Katie’s right here. Yeah, she’s fine. Some boy drove her over to pick up her backpack…”
The girl shot a last poisonous glance at Maura, and went back down the stairs.
“It’s your mother calling,” Rick said.
“Are you going to tell her about your new girlfriend? How can you
“We need to have a talk about this. You need to accept the fact your mother and I aren’t together anymore. Things have changed.”
Maura went back into the bedroom and shut the door. While she got dressed, she could hear them continue to argue downstairs. Rick’s voice, steady and firm, the girl’s sharp with rage. It took Maura only moments to change clothes. When she came downstairs, she found Ballard and his daughter sitting in the living room. Katie was curled up on the couch like an angry porcupine.
“Rick, I’m going to leave now,” Maura said.
He rose to his feet. “You can’t.”
“No, it’s okay. You need time alone with your family.”
“It’s not safe for you to go home.”
“I won’t go home. I’ll check into a hotel. Really, I’ll be perfectly fine.”
“Maura, wait-”
“She wants to leave,
“I’ll call you when I get to the hotel,” said Maura.
As she backed out of his garage, Rick came out and stood by the driveway, watching her. Their gazes met through her car window, and he stepped forward, as though to try once again to persuade her to stay, to return to the safety of his house.
Another pair of headlights swung into view. Carmen’s car pulled over to the curb, and she stepped out, blond hair in disarray, her nightgown peeking out from beneath a bathrobe. Another parent roused from bed by this errant teenager. Carmen shot a look in Maura’s direction, then said a few words to Ballard and walked into the house. Through the living room window, Maura saw mother and daughter embrace.
Ballard lingered in the driveway. Looked toward the house, then back at Maura, as though pulled in two directions.
She made the decision for him. She put the car into gear, stepped on the gas, and drove away. The last glimpse she had of him was in her rearview mirror, as he turned and walked into the house. Back to his family. Even divorce, she thought, cannot erase all the bonds forged by years of marriage. Long after the papers are signed, decrees notarized, the ties still remain. And the most powerful tie of all is written in a child’s flesh and blood.
She released a deep breath. Felt, suddenly, cleansed of temptation. Free.
As she’d promised Ballard, she did not go home. Instead she headed west, toward Route 95, which traced a wide arc along the outskirts of Boston. She stopped at the first roadside motel she came to. The room she checked into smelled of cigarettes and Ivory soap. The toilet had a “sanitized” paper band across the lid, and the wrapped cups in the bathroom were plastic. Traffic noise from the nearby highway filtered in through thin walls. She could not remember the last time she had stayed in a motel so cheap, so run-down. She called Rick, just a curt thirty- second phone call to let him know where she was. Then she shut off her cell phone and climbed in between fraying sheets.
That night she slept more soundly than she had in a week.
NINETEEN
Worms, worms, worms.
Stop thinking about that!
Mattie closed her eyes and gritted her teeth, but she could not block out the melody of that insipid children’s song. It played again and again in her head, and always it came back to those worms.
Oh, think about something else. Nice things, pretty things. Flowers, dresses. White dresses with chiffon and beads. Her wedding day. Yes, think about that.
She remembered sitting in the bride’s room at St. John’s Methodist Church, staring at herself in the mirror and thinking: Today is the best day of my life. I’m marrying the man I love. She remembered her mother coming into the room to help her with the veil. How her mother had bent close and said, with a relieved sigh: “I never thought I’d see this day.” The day a man would finally marry her daughter.
Now, these seven months later, Mattie thought about her mother’s words and how they had not been particularly kind. But on that day, nothing had dampened her joy. Not the nausea of morning sickness, or her killer high heels, or the fact that Dwayne drank so much champagne on their wedding night that he fell asleep in their hotel bed before she’d even come out of the bathroom. Nothing mattered, except that she was Mrs. Purvis, and her life, her real life, was finally about to begin.
Oh, this was worse than thinking about worms eating her. Change of subject, Mattie!
No, not Dwayne. If he wanted her dead, why keep her in a box? Why keep her alive?
She took a deep breath, and her eyes filled with tears. She wanted to live. She’d do anything to live, but she didn’t know how to get herself out of this box. She’d spent hours thinking about how to do it. She had pounded on the walls, kicked again and again against the top. She’d thought about taking apart the flashlight, maybe using its parts to build-what?
A bomb.
She could almost hear Dwayne laughing at her, ridiculing her. Oh right, Mattie, you’re a real MacGyver.
They squirmed back into her thoughts. Into her future, slithering under her skin, devouring her flesh. They were out there waiting in the soil right outside this box, she thought. Waiting for her to die. Then they would crawl in, to feast.
She turned on her side and trembled.
TWENTY
