It was that phone call, really, that pushed her into his closets, going through his things, looking over her shoulder as if he could walk in at any moment. God, she wished he would. She just wanted to find every piece of him she could, and was surprised at the little keepsakes, pictures of his high school graduation-a younger, grinning version of Zach looked at the camera, his arm around a woman who must have been his mother. God, she’d never even met his parents. Hadn’t even asked…
Who was the little boy in the next photo? Was that Zach? She smiled at his camera-grin. Here was the same little boy playing in the sandbox with a little girl with cornrows. Who was she?
God, they knew so little about each other, she thought, sifting through a box of photographs, her heart aching with the knowledge. Things had happened so fast.
Maybe too fast. A picture of a woman on the beach caught her attention-she was stunning, her skin like fine cocoa against the stark white of her bikini. She was looking over her shoulder at the camera, laughing. Lindsey turned it over and read the back:
And she remember the name. Of course she did. She could still hear the woman’s voice on the answering machine: “Hey, sexy man, it’s Alicia, I’m in town for a few days, I’d
Did they? She wondered. The thought stabbed at her heart like a knife and she dropped the photo back into the box as if it were on fire, shoving it back into the closet.
Argyle, who had been way too quiet behind her, had found one of Zach’s shoes and was busily chewing the laces.
“No!” Lindsey reprimanded, snatching it away. “Bad boy!” The puppy cowered, whining at her tone. She sighed, picking him up and apologizing with kisses. “Let’s go for a walk, huh?”
She needed to get out and clear her head.
* * * *
Alicia called just after she’d sworn to Argyle that she wasn’t going to snoop anymore. Her mother had just called, and Lindsey was sure it was her again and turned
up the volume on the episode of Desperate Housewives she was watching, wanting to drown out the sound. Instead, the voice that came from the machine was much younger, and the called was most definitely not for her.
“Hi baby, it’s Alicia. Can you give me a call back? You’ve got my cell number, right? I’ll give it to you just in case…”
Lindsey stared in the direction of the voice, listening to the woman rattle off a phone number. She got up from the sofa in slow motion, going over to the machine and staring at the blinking red light. Her mother’s message was on there-something about getting together and talking. She knew well enough how to erase them. One click would do it.
But now Alicia’s number was on the machine. Did Zach have it? Probably. Of course, he was nowhere near a phone. And Lindsey knew, if she wrote it down, “just in case,” it would sit like a growing temptation, and she would eventually break down and call it herself. She imagined the conversation that would ensue: so, how do you know Zach? Is that so? How long did you go out?
She snarled at the machine and stabbed the erase button, pressing it hard until it beeped. “You have no new messages,” the voice said.
Good. That was better. That, she could live with.
* * * *
The treefort looked exactly the same.
In some strange, convoluted way, it was the piling up of phone calls, from her mother, Zach, Alicia, that pushed her there, as if the world was turning backwards and she was traveling back in time. She wasn’t wearing her shorts-they were locked up in some cabinet as evidence, awaiting the upcoming trial-but she’d found a bag of her old clothes in the closet when she was going through Zach’s things, and a pair of Daisy Duke cut-offs and a black tube top had completed her transformation.
She didn’t take Argyle. She didn’t think he could walk so far. Instead, she drove the Camaro and parked it down the street, walking past her mother’s house, trying to ignore the way her belly trembled as she drew nearer. Her stepfather’s car wasn’t there.
Neither was her mother’s. The house looked the same, though, the same as it had for years. It was the place she’d grown up, where she had fallen and been picked up by her father, the place she had traveled to the moon and back, until her daddy wasn’t there anymore, and everyone forgot about her after that.
Her mother had forgotten her. Lindsey stood there, hugging her arms over her chest, thinking about Zach. What would she do if he never came home? How broken must her mother have felt after her husband hadn’t returned from the Gulf War where the causalities were so negligible people didn’t even think of it as a war? She shivered, shaking her head, and started walking again. She didn’t want to think about it.
