Carole smiled and slipped into the kitchen, keeping Charlie in her sight through the window. “How’s this?” she said into her phone.
“Loud and clear,” the adjuster answered, “but I don’t think you’re going to like what you hear.”
“Well, I don’t think you’re hearing me,” she said, and then, although she loathed such trivial confrontations, she spent the next few minutes reiterating her husband’s position on the damage.
The fact was, she felt sorry for the contractor who had done the work. She considered him conscientious and meticulous. As far as she could tell, there was no blame to be placed anywhere. “Shit happens,” she’d told David when he dumped everything in her lap.
“Not to us,” he said. “Not anymore. We’re done being anyone’s patsy. People take advantage of people like us because they look right at us and all they see are dollar signs. I’m done with that.”
She knew he was referring to a Lexus that had been nothing but trouble. It took a year of back-and-forth—heated phone calls, nasty e-mails, and a face-to-face at the dealership that could have made the news—to get the dealer to concede the car was indeed a lemon and make good on the warranty.
But this situation was not that situation. Besides, they had the money to fix the problem themselves. They had more money than they needed in a lifetime. Her position at Google had been very good to her. It had funded the house. The restaurant. The cars. Their entire lifestyle.
Carole walked from the kitchen to the living room, her eyes fastened on her son’s blond hair, a golden bouncing ball.
“You don’t really want this to escalate into some legal battle,” the adjuster said. “Do you?”
Carole didn’t. David had kept pushing for her to make a stand, but it didn’t feel authentic to her. She knew what things were reasonable and worth fighting for. This wasn’t one of those.
“Can’t we just forget this?” she finally told the adjuster.
“No, ma’am,” he said. “Once you open a claim, we have to see it to the end.”
“Please. Just never mind,” she said. “I wish to un-report this, or whatever the term is.”
“Not able to do that,” he said. “Has to go through headquarters.”
Carole was ready to pull the plug on the whole thing. Although she probably wouldn’t tell—definitely wouldn’t tell—David about this attempted change of heart, she was all for giving the insurance company and the contractor a free pass, absolving anyone of any wrongdoing. She just wanted to get the pipe fixed, make the damaged drywall repairs, and get back to a life unencumbered by details that took her away from what was really important. What she most wanted to do.
“I’m so tired of all of this,” she said, running her fingers over a weaving of Jacob’s sheep wool that she’d finished the previous week. There was something lacking in the piece, and she wondered about it just then. Needs more black fibers, she thought. Maybe birch twigs?
“I hear you,” the man said. “I’m sorry. It’s a process. Like everything.”
“All right,” Carole conceded, a sigh leaking from her lungs as she disconnected the call.
No one seemed to hear her at all anymore. At Google she had led four international teams over a seven-year period. She was the glue that held everything together. No one made a move without her—not because she demanded submission, but because she’d earned respect from team members and suppliers.
Respect had been elusive lately. The Jacob wool weaving was her latest project. She longed to be taken seriously for her art, but it was slow going. Her weavings were good but not special enough. One time she overheard someone call her the “millionaire artist wannabe” at a dinner party, and it had crushed her. David encouraged her to keep on with her dreams, but sometimes she wondered if he really held the same view as those party snarks.
“Good work,” he’d said one time when she was working in her studio. “Too bad you can’t sell this for what you’ve put into it.”
“It isn’t about the money,” she said.
He ran his hand over her weaving. “It’s always about the money.”
“It’s about the creating, David.”
The ice in his drink tinkled as he tilted the glass of soda so he could get the last drop. “Sure,” he said into the glass. “Creating.”
Carole had turned away and returned to her work, ending the conversation the only way she knew how: by ignoring David. He would never understand her need to make art. He could never see what she saw in the white, russet, and black fibers that she wove, tufted, and twisted into something only she saw in her mind’s eye.
Now she went back to the deck and called out to Charlie. “Where are you?”
She scanned the yard, the riverbank. The heron had vanished. So had her little boy.
CHAPTER THREE
MISSING: FIFTEEN MINUTES
Liz Jarrett could not escape it. It hadn’t been a dog or a cat. It had been the little boy next door. She’d felt the air drain from her lungs as she threw herself to the driveway and cradled Charlie Franklin in her arms.
“Oh, God,” she said in a controlled whisper. “Charlie. No. No. Charlie.”
Every synapse in her nervous system was firing. A carpet-bombing. She tried to breathe, but it was as if her lungs had been sealed off with something impenetrable. Though she didn’t let out an audible cry, tears streamed down her cheeks. Liz gently twisted Charlie’s shoulders as if by doing so she’d revive the boy so that he could open his eyes, so that he could speak.
Peekaboo. Come on, Charlie. Snap out of this!
Liz held him close. She kept her voice low. “Honey, wake up! Wake up now!”
Yet nothing happened. Charlie’s lips stayed immobile. His eyes stayed shut. The thin fabric of his Mickey Mouse shirt appeared motionless across his chest.
“Wake up!” Liz said, more command than plea.
But nothing. Nothing at all.
Everything was spiraling around her.
No, it was Liz who was spinning. She was a washing machine. She was a Ferris wheel. A blender. She’d only known such disorientation once in her life—the flood on the highway to Diamond Lake. She tried to stand up, but she couldn’t force her legs to lift her. She pressed her hands against her breasts. Maybe this was a dream. Maybe she was dead. She wasn’t sure if she was really breathing just then.
She let it pass through her mind as she knelt there that none of what had just happened had occurred at all. But there was the proof. The limp body of the little boy next door was right there. Liz called over to the Franklins’ house, but a plane passing overhead swathed her words in a blanket of noise. She reached for her phone to call 911. Her fingertips trembled so much that she couldn’t hit the right sequence of numbers.
This can’t be happening. This didn’t happen. I didn’t do this.
Liz crawled around the car, trying to lift herself up.
What’s wrong with me?
Charlie needs help.