“Mr. Winters? Are you still there?”
She turned, then, maybe ten feet from the front of his car, braced her feet on either side of the white line and gave him two middle fingers. Then she cut right and ran into the woods.
“Mr. Winters.” The man on the phone was stern now, angry about having his time wasted. “Are you still there? Do you still need someone to come out?”
“I don’t know.” He felt sick. No matter what happened now, everything had just gotten worse. All the pieces he’d been clinging to had flown apart, scattering what was left of his life in a million directions. He was in trouble, he’d been in trouble, but now he was more than in trouble, he was as dead as a person could be while still being alive. In one heartbeat, he envisioned Alecia and Gabe huddled together on the couch, himself in prison, a 20/20 special. His dinner rose in his chest and he took a deep breath to quell the panic.
He had no way of knowing that this moment would become the linchpin, the moment that all the moments after would hinge upon. The papers would call him a murderer; the police would come to him; his ex-friends, his gym buddies, the guys who knew him for God’s sake; and say, Nate was the last one to see her alive, right? The last one is always the guilty one.
He couldn’t know all this. But he could still feel it, like something physical chasing him and gaining ground, his heart beating wildly, a skittering pulse up the back of his neck. It was more than a feeling. It was a portent, something tangible, almost corporeal.
“She’s gone,” he said quickly, and hung up, dropping the phone on the seat. He should have just driven away. Everything in his body told him to just drive away.
He opened the car door and stepped into the rain.
CHAPTER 2
Alecia, Tuesday, April 21, 2015
A month before Nate was fired, nearly a thousand starlings fell from the sky. Not fluttering to the earth like snowflakes, but plummeting, like quarter-pound raindrops. They fell hard and fast in the middle of the third inning of opening day at Mt. Oanoke High field. The first one Alecia saw bounced off Marnie Evans’s shoulder and hit the gravel with nothing more than a soft rustle. She screamed, her fingers threaded through her hair, get it out! Get it out! Get it out! Like it was a trapped bat. Alecia didn’t mind watching Marnie Evans freak out; in fact she kind of enjoyed it, so she just covered her mouth with her palm. Marnie Evans treated minor hiccups—missing basket bingo cards and off-color varsity jacket orders—like national disasters all while chewing Xanax like Pez.
But adversity builds muscle, and since Alecia chipped and clawed her way through every day, it took so much more to rattle her than the Marnie Evanses of the world, and a few little birds weren’t going to do it. So she didn’t mind watching Marnie at all. She hadn’t even expected to be at the game. Nate had asked her out of the blue. It felt nice to be so spontaneous. The day had a fresh-air, college-kid-out-on-the-green feel to it, summer break looming, with all its newness.
It was just a regular Tuesday, except that it was a good day. And all of Alecia’s days were divided clean down the middle, it seemed. Good Days (capital G, capital D) and Bad Days. The deciding factors were variations on a theme: whether they were able to get through a grocery trip, whether Gabe got through his therapy without freaking out, whether she got a call from a bill collector.
Gabe actually did remarkably okay with change, perhaps because Alecia didn’t fight against every wrong turn, every slight schedule adjustment, like some of the women in her special-needs-moms’ group. But it was always easier when things went according to plan. Today there had been no tantrum, no horrific trip to the store, no bill collector. When the phone rang at two, after Gabe’s nap (a record thirty minutes), she picked it up, sort of excited and breathless.
“Hey.” She thought it was amazing that her heart still skipped when she saw Nate’s name come up on caller ID, and on a Good Day, she might count herself as belonging to the apparently few happy marriages left.
On a Bad Day, she thought about packing a bag, leaving Nate to deal with Gabe, to let him see, for once, how it really was. To fully recognize Gabe and all his cracks and scrapes and bruises and bumps and imperfections. No more I’m sure you’re overreacting, hon, or, He’s just his own person, that’s great! To understand her frustration when everyone, including Nate, said, but he looks normal! Or are you sure kids aren’t just kids? To live with autism in a way that wasn’t a blue T-shirt or a charity walk or a foundation, but to live with the ugly. On a Bad Day, she wished all the ugliness on her husband and nothing but windblown freedom for herself.
“Hi!” Nate exclaimed, both happy and surprised that she was happy.
Alecia pulled the phone away from her ear and adjusted the volume.
“Good day?” Nate asked, a note of caution in his tone that lit a quick fire under Alecia’s skin and then settled. The answer to that question would dictate the rest of the conversation: whether Nate would stay on the line and chat, or scamper off with some well-thought-out excuse.
“Yep, so far. He’s just waking up.” She could hear Gabe, his too-heavy-for-a-five-year-old stomps around his bedroom.
“Come to my game this afternoon? Please?” He pleaded with an unusual edge of desperation. Nate asked so little of her, always wanting to be mindful of her time, of her energies, worried about her stress levels and how he could make her happy, to the point of dancing on eggshells. She knew that she couldn’t say no, this one time, even if it meant dragging Gabe into unfamiliar territory. He’d know some of the people but not all. In Mt. Oanoke, people never change: the baseball crowd, the dressed-to-the-nines gym moms, the coaches’ wives, the athletic association groupies. Nate’s mother would probably be there, too.
Maybe Bridget would go. It had been months. Bridget Peterson was one of Alecia’s only friends who didn’t stem from a support network. She was a teacher, with Nate. She wasn’t a special-needs mom, or even a regular-needs mom. She wasn’t a therapist or a sympathetic nurse or a doctor. She was just a person, and sometimes Alecia forgot what that was like, to have friends who were just people.
Years ago, before Gabe, when she and Nate first got married and moved to Mt. Oanoke, Bridget and Holden Peterson were Nate and Alecia’s first real couple friends. They’d spent long, boozy nights at local pubs, laughing till their sides hurt, drunk on cheap rum and Cokes and the golden, sparkly potential of their infant marriages. Before infertility (for Bridget) and special needs (for Alecia) and then, later, the unspeakable.
“We’ll see how it goes,” Alecia said to Nate, noncommittal, because anything could and sometimes did happen at the last minute. We’ll see was a standard translation of yes, unless I let you down.