store, and Angus lost his Binky. You were right about the pacifier; he loves that thing.”
Chloe snaps the phone closed in her hand. So they didn’t give the baby back. Heather must have been mistaken, about the crying. Chloe swallows again, nausea rolling her stomach. Maybe the baby she heard belonged to Jason’s brother and the crackie girlfriend. It could be any baby.
Sitting in Francie’s driveway, she replays the conversation with Heather, all the way back to the beginning. What is still bothering her? The thing about Heather and Eric, about Heather realizing she was trying to make Eric into something he wasn’t, about her being big enough to see that it wasn’t fair to him. I boxed him in.
Chloe puts the car in gear, passing the street where Paul and Eva Nova live, the fluttering tails of a ragged yellow police tape straggling around a pine tree like a forgotten ribbon to bring the troops home. Paul, Chloe thinks, driving toward Strohecker’s. He is everything she wishes Dan would be.
Using her thumb on the keypad, before she can stop herself, Chloe sends Dan a text, sets him free:
CHANGE OF HEART, CHANGE OF PLANS. No Maui. Love you too.
INSIDE THE STORE, SHE checks the coffee shop seating area, dark, empty, at five o’clock on Valentine’s Day, before she has to dash for the cold beverages, a Perrier, ginger ale, something bubbly and cold, maybe Sprite. She knows Dan will accept her text without a struggle, maybe even relief (Why do you keep hitting yourself with the hammer? ’Cause it feels so good when I stop), and this makes her gag on her bile, slipping up and down her throat like oily salad dressing. Right in the aisle, she glug-glugs from the fizzy drink, the bubbles burning her nose, making her eyes water. She takes a shortcut down a side aisle and grabs a box of saltines too, a trick of the trade she learned from hanging out with forty-seven nauseated pregnant women the past two years, the only tip she may ever get from the job…
And then it hits her, standing by the dark coffee shop where she and Paul used to meet, chugging from a half-downed club soda with a box of saltines under her arm, desperate to quell the pervasive queasiness of the past few weeks…
Like paparazzi at a premiere, twin lightbulbs flash—one, and then another.
The baby!
A baby?
She flips open her cell phone, pushes the buttons to call 911.
But she doesn’t hit Send. She grabs a pregnancy test and heads for the checkout.
47
Anonymous I
Night has fallen in shades of lavender and graphite, the end of Valentine’s Day in Portland. She cannot stop staring at the objects in her hands: the plastic stick with two lines and the blank face of her cell phone. In one hand, an answer to a very big question; in the other, no reply.
Then her phone rings, but it is not who she hoped.
“I saw you today, at the other apartment.”
It takes her a minute to place the woman’s voice; they haven’t spoken in months, and she sounds different, stronger.
“Who is this?”
“I think you care, and I know you got plenty of money. So I’m asking for help.”
“What do you mean?” But she knows.
“It’s about to get real bad. He thinks he can pull this off, but he can’t, and the baby, something’s wrong with it. It’s sick, doesn’t keep nothing down. And he’s, well, it’s bad. You know how he is…”
She does. She puts the plastic stick down, eyes on all the dark windows, showing nothing but her panicked reflection as she runs through the empty house to the front door, checking the locks.
She pulls the phone away from her ear, to hear if they’re still connected. No sound, no baby crying.
“Are you there?” she asks.
“Hurry” is the urgent answer.
48
Anonymous II
It is pitch-dark now, and pouring rain, when she runs uphill through the quiet, moss-slick streets. The strands of police tape tied around the trees flash yellow as she passes breathless, sick. There is a light on downstairs, and his van in the driveway. A door is open on the side of the house, and she follows the cobbled path, pushing wet ferns and dripping hemlocks out of the way.
He is sweeping, the shushing of a broom, tinkling broken glass out the kitchen door, and there is blood on his hands.
“Vicious house cat?” she asks. He doesn’t seem surprised to see her.
“Steak attack.” He comes out into the night, the rain, closing the