‘Who else knew?’ he asked.
‘As far as I know, nobody. Me and Ashlynn. That’s all.’
‘Olivia?’
‘I don’t see how.’
‘Who was the father?’
‘Ashlynn didn’t say. I don’t think he knew.’
‘Did she say if it was consensual?’
‘She didn’t mention rape. I didn’t pursue the circumstances, but I don’t think that’s what happened.’
‘Olivia knows more than she’s telling us,’ Chris said. ‘I don’t know if it’s about the pregnancy or the abortion, but something else is going on here, and I want to know what it is.’
‘She won’t open up to me.’
‘Maybe she’ll open up to both of us.’
‘I wish that were true,’ Hannah said, ‘but you’re better off talking to her alone.’
‘You can read her better than me,’ he said.
‘She’s just like you. Come with me.’
Instinctively, he did what he’d always done in the past. He reached out to take Hannah’s hand.
That had been a ritual of their marriage. They would sit on the porch overlooking the lake. Talk. Laugh. Cry sometimes. When it was time to go inside, he would hold out his palm, and she would take it, and they would head upstairs hand in hand. There was a sacredness about the gesture that they both recognized. To hold hands was to be in love.
She flinched, and he pulled his hand back like touching a hot stove. He knew he’d made a mistake. You didn’t intrude on certain memories. You left them the way they were.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
Hannah said nothing, but she came with him into the house.
The uncarpeted stairs to the second floor were on his left. He let Hannah go first, and he followed. Upstairs, the hallway was dark. He recognized the lingering aroma of Hannah’s perfume. Everything here smelled like her, and it was disorienting, as if they were back in the past. She knocked on the first closed door on their left.
‘Olivia?’
There was silence from their daughter’s bedroom. Hannah knocked again, but there was no answer. She put her ear to the door, listening for Olivia’s voice on the phone or the noise of the television. They heard nothing.
‘Olivia,’ she repeated, her voice sharper.
She turned the knob to go inside, uninvited. The door was open. The two of them entered Olivia’s room, and Chris felt as if he were trespassing. With a sweep of his eyes, he recognized souvenirs from her childhood – the stuffed Gund bears on her dresser, a stone Aztec calendar on the wall from a family vacation to Acapulco – but most of the bits and pieces in the messy room revealed a girl he didn’t know.
The room was empty. The window overlooking the river, above the muddy rear yard, was open.
Olivia was gone.
12
When the ex-cop patrolling their house disappeared, Olivia opened her window and squeezed her body through the frame. She lowered herself slowly, clinging to the peeled paint of the window ledge with her fingers. The drop from the soles of her sneakers to the wet ground was only eight feet. She let go and landed with a hard, heavy splash. She waited, making sure that no one had heard her, before she headed for the river.
She ducked under the spindly branches of the oak trees behind the house and pushed through the dead brush. Foliage above the water was dense, but the weeds on the river bank had long since been beaten down into a path. She picked her way through black puddles that had gathered in the craters of the dirt. Wild brown grasses tipped with fur brushed against her skin on either side of the trail. Below her, no more than ten feet down the slope of the bank, she could hear the noisy slurp of the river.
Through the trees, she saw lights glowing in the houses of St. Croix. She recognized the voices of neighbors through open windows. She moved as silently as she could, like a deer, to avoid arousing suspicion. It was a small town. Everyone knew everyone else, and everyone knew everyone’s business. Keeping secrets meant not being seen, and she’d had plenty of practice slipping away.
Two hundred yards down the river bank, she reached the railroad tracks that paralleled the highway. Trains rarely passed here in this season. She stepped over the rail and stood on the crushed gravel in the center of the tracks. In the early days, when she’d first arrived in St. Croix, she’d wandered down here and thought about jumping onto a slow-moving train as it rattled south. She’d imagined lying on top of the cool steel of the freight car, watching the clouds and stars above her, feeling the jolts and vibrations and screech of the train wheels. She’d wanted to travel far away until home was a memory.
Back then, it had been Kimberly who talked her into staying. Running away was for cowards, she said.
Olivia followed the railroad tracks onto the bridge over the river. The criss-cross beams of gray steel made giant X’s on either side of her. Halfway between the banks, she stepped off the tracks and climbed onto the rigid frame above the water. She leaned against one of the diagonal steel beams. The deep water had a wormy smell, dank and dead.
She heard footsteps. He’d heard her coming. She saw a silhouette, and even without lights, she knew it was him. She felt a rush of joy that made her forget everything else. She climbed down and ran. He was twenty yards away, but she felt as if she covered the distance in two steps, and then she threw her arms around his neck and held on. She remembered how her face felt against his and how his skin smelled. It had been months since she’d touched him.
‘
He stood stiffly as she embraced him. He didn’t kiss her. He didn’t look into her eyes. He studied the darkness on the river banks as if it held threats.
‘We shouldn’t be here,’ he murmured.
‘I know, but I had to see you.’
‘What do you want, Olivia?’
‘What do I want?’ she asked, mystified. ‘How can you say that? We need to talk.’
Johan turned toward the far bank of the river. She walked beside him, feeling his distance. She brushed his fingers, expecting him to hold her hand. When he didn’t, she felt rejected and shoved her thumbs in her pockets. Her mother always said you could tell a man’s love by how he holds your hand like he never wants to let go.
They crossed the bridge to a wide-open expanse of fields that would be thick with corn in another few weeks. In the warm summers, you could get lost in the head-high stalks like a maze. This was their place. They’d played hide and seek here like children. They’d cried over Kimberly. They’d kissed. Later, during a hot August, she’d let him be the first and only boy to make love to her.
Now he was far away. Remote. Angry.
‘No one knows what really happened,’ she said.
‘Not my dad, not anybody. I didn’t say a word. Honestly. You’re safe.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I still love you, no matter what you’ve done.’
‘What
He kicked angrily at the dried, broken remnants of last year’s crop. Forgotten ears lay rotting in the rows. She wondered if he was remembering the previous summer. When they were in love. Before Ashlynn. Instead, his words dashed her heart.
‘Don’t you understand what she meant to me?’ Johan asked. ‘I loved her.’
Olivia felt bitter. She felt the way she had in the ghost town, seeing Ashlynn up close, realizing that this girl had taken everything from her. ‘Last year, you said you loved me,’ she reminded him. ‘You said I was everything to you. I guess you only wanted one thing.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘As soon as you had a chance, you dumped me for her.’
