Together Alone Read online

  “Like what?”

  She sighed. “Like getting old.” It was true, in a sense. That was what life after kids was about, deciding how to spend the rest of one’s days.

  “You have a while to go.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me. I said it for my benefit, seeing as I’m the same age as you.”

  He gave her a sweet smile and returned to work, leaving Emily to wonder why Doug never smiled at her that way. But then, Doug was her husband. They had been married for twenty-two years. They had a life together, had shared a major trauma.

  Traumas either brought people together or drove them apart. Since she and Doug remained married, she had always assumed the former. Now she wondered.

  By dusk Wednesday, the painting was done. Early Thursday, they sanded the wood floor. By the end of the day, they had lacquered the planks and left to allow them to dry.

  “This calls for a celebration,” Brian said. “Got any beer in your fridge?”

  Emily did it one better, uncorking the bottle of champagne that had come so long ago with her book. Since Doug didn’t want to drink it, much less acknowledge its existence, she saw no harm in sharing it with Brian.

  He raised his glass. “To a job well done.”

  She took a sip, then sat back against the rocks. They were in the backyard by the pond. The late afternoon was serene.

  “This captures what I first saw in that apartment,” Brian said, looking out over the pond. “The peace. It’s what Julia and I both need.”

  “I’m glad. I hope it works for you.”

  “And you?”

  She looked at him, bemused, but only for a minute. His eyes—those penetrating eyes—said that she couldn’t fool him. “Maybe for me, too, some day,” she confessed and felt a lump form in her throat.

  “Not now?”

  She waited for the lump to shrink. “Now’s a difficult time. Things are changing.”

  “With Jill?”

  “And Doug.”

  “Are there problems between you?”

  Problems? She sighed and looked up at the leaves. “I suppose you could say that.” The lump in her throat returned.

  “Want to talk about it?”

  She didn’t look at him, afraid that if she did, she would cry. He was such a nice man. He was gentle and understanding in ways she hungered for.

  “You don’t have to,” he said. “We haven’t known each other long. But we have the makings of a friendship. I respect what you’ve done with your life.”

  She had no idea why. “I haven’t done much.”

  “You don’t call making a home much? Or raising a child much? Or waiting around for your husband much?”

  “It’s not like having an occupation. Not like what your wife did.”

  “There was a trade-off. She wasn’t a mother or wife like you are. She didn’t have the patience for it, or the self-confidence.”

  Emily did look at him then. “Self-confidence? From what you’ve told me, she could handle herself in any situation. If she was invited to London for two weeks, she would have had plenty to say at dinner.”

  “She needed a paycheck. That was the only way she could judge her success. She wanted a child, but she couldn’t give up the other. She didn’t have the self-confidence to say to her colleagues, ‘Okay, guys, it’s family time.’” He paused. “No self-confidence. No desire.” He rubbed his eyebrow. “No desire. The bottom line.”

  Like Doug, Emily thought, and sure enough, looking at Brian, whose face was a work of kindness etched in strength, she felt her eyes fill. Doug didn’t want to spend time with her. No desire. The bottom line.

  She looked away.

  “I’m a good listener,” Brian coaxed.

  She nodded.

  “It’s gotten worse as the week has gone on,” he remarked.

  “Just thinking more,” she managed to say.

  He grew quiet. She knew that he wouldn’t force her to talk, if she didn’t want to. And she did. But it was hard.

  “I’ll be moving in tomorrow,” he said on a lighter note. “It’s kind of exciting.”

  Yes. It was. But after two weeks in a flurry, the work was done. She didn’t know what she would do with herself come Monday.

  The upstairs bathroom, probably.

  But why? Doug was never there. She had picked out paper with him in mind. If the bathroom were hers alone, she would have made a different choice.

  She could choose different paper now. And put it up. Then see what Doug had to say about it when he deigned to visit.

  Fuck you, probably. No, that was wrong. More likely, he wouldn’t even notice. He was past caring about bathroom walls. He was past caring about her. He had moved on.

  So where was she? she cried and felt a catch deep inside. She put her head to her knees and tried to erase the thought.

  She felt Brian’s hand on her shoulder. “Things work out,” he said, but it wasn’t his voice she heard. It was John’s, saying the same thing nineteen years before, only it was a crock. Things hadn’t worked out. Things hadn’t worked out at all.

  She pushed up to her feet and away from Brian. “I have to go.” She took off across the grass.

  He was beside her in an instant. “I want to help.”

  But she couldn’t talk, couldn’t think. Guilt, fear, despair resurged inside her. Why now? she cried fleetingly, and though she didn’t have the wherewithal to formulate the answer, she felt it.

  With Jill gone, she was alone.

  An hour later, Brian marched into the Grannick Police Station, strode through the squad room, and burst into John’s office without so much as a knock. Julia was on his hip, utterly silent, seeming to know not to fuss, just as everyone he passed knew not to speak.

  John looked up in surprise.

  “Tell me about her,” Brian ordered.

  “Who?”

  “You introduced me to Emily Arkin. You went along with the idea that I could get her apartment ready, and you knew I’d be working with her. Well, I have, and I’ve seen sad, even haunted looks. There’s more to her than meets the eye, but I don’t know what it is. I want you to tell me.”

  John stared at him. His mouth was tight, but it was the sorrow in his eyes that made Brian uneasy. “Did you ask her?”

  “I’ve been asking her all week. Her prick of a husband is abandoning her, and that’s part of the problem, but my gut says there’s more. I want to know why he doesn’t want to be with her. I want to know why she only has one child, when she clearly makes children her life. I want to know why she’s so interested in my work. She asks direct questions, always around the same theme. My gut tells me you know what that theme is, plus a whole lot more. I could turn this place upside down looking for answers, but that’d be pretty messy, and it would take a hell of a lot of time. Spare me the effort, huh?”

  John stared at him for a minute longer. Finally, looking sadder than ever, almost defeated, he curved his hands around the edge of the desk and pushed off from his chair. He went to a corner file cabinet, opened the lowest drawer, and pulled out a folder. It was inches thick. He tossed it on the desk. Brian was staring at it, his heart batting against his ribs, when a book landed on top.

  “Might as well take that, too. It’ll tell you where she’s at.” When Brian raised his eyes, he added, “If you get any suggestions, I’m all ears. It’s been a guilty time for me, too.”

  For a split second, Brian wasn’t sure he wanted any part of either the folder or the book. Then he thought of Emily and the promise of serenity that she had come to epitomize in his jumbled life, and he knew without knowing a goddamned thing else, that if he didn’t try to save the promise, he would be guilty, too.

  seven

  EMILY ARKIN WAS NINETEEN WHEN HER FIRST child, a boy, was born. He was named Daniel, after his paternal great-grandfather, and she and Doug doted on him. Doug, who owned a farm on the outskirts of town, often stopped home midday to see him. For the rest of the time, Daniel w
as his mother’s constant companion and, as such, became well known around town.

  A reluctant napper, he often fell asleep in the car while Emily did errands. Such was the case one October day when the boy was two. She pulled into the parking lot outside the local post office, saw that Daniel was sleeping, and, knowing that she wouldn’t be long, left him in the car while she ran inside. She was there for five minutes. When she returned, she found the straps that had held him in his car seat neatly unfastened and Daniel nowhere in sight.

  The local police arrived within minutes. While Emily swore that Daniel couldn’t have freed himself from the seat on his own, they searched the parking lot and the surrounding areas on the chance that he had done just that, and had wandered off. They questioned the other patrons at the post office, as well as those who had emerged while Emily was inside. They canvassed the local shops. They combed the center of town and fanned outward.

  Daniel was gone.

  The police dispatcher phoned the state police and the neighboring police departments to alert them to Daniel’s disappearance, but without description of either a vehicle or a suspect, there was little to go on. Photographs of Daniel were passed around. The FBI was notified.

  John Davies, the officer assigned to the Arkins, questioned Emily and Doug extensively. Whatever dubious leads emerged from that questioning were thoroughly explored and discarded. Meanwhile, the Arkins held vigil by the telephone for a ransom call that never came.

  In the weeks that followed, largely at Emily’s prodding, appeals were made in an ever-widening radius of towns, cities, and states, but with nothing more than Daniel’s picture, the case grew cold as ice. After a time, other matters were occupying the Grannick police, and though the Arkin case remained open, it slid into inactivity.

  Brian read the “Dear Chief” that John had written, both the short report filed immediately after the child’s disappearance, and the later, more lengthy one that detailed the investigation in its entirety. He studied the pictures of Daniel, one alone, one with his parents. He pored over the questioning of Emily and Doug, their neighbors and friends, Doug’s employees, the owners of the shops Emily had visited that day prior to stopping at the post office. He waded through a cataloging of the efforts of other law enforcement agencies that the Grannick police had contacted.

  Then he opened the book Emily had written and read it from cover to cover. It was about the case she had mentioned to him, the kidnapping of Susan Demery, a local college student, by a disgruntled former employee of her father. The girl had been taken from her dormitory room late one winter night and stashed, bound and gagged, in a tool shed on the grounds of the local estate where one of the kidnappers worked.

  The Demery kidnapping had taken place five years before, fourteen years after Daniel’s disappearance. The handling of the case was a study of the advances in investigative technology that had occurred during those fourteen years, from computer hookups between police departments, to fingerprint matching, to fiber analysis of the carpet in the dormitory room from which the girl was abducted.

  The book was well-organized, the case clearly presented, the writing itself no less than brilliant, given the pain Emily had to have experienced in its course. Brian couldn’t begin to imagine that pain, or the pain she felt thinking of Daniel even now.

  He slept for a brief hour before waking to the sounds of Julia talking to her rabbit. Moaning, he threw an arm over his eyes and cursed whatever it was about childhood that began at dawn.

  Then he remembered all that he had spent the night reading, and his pique vanished. He pushed himself up on his elbows and watched his daughter play, and as he did, he saw far more. Since Gayle’s death, his feelings for Julia had been dominated by anxiety over her care. He had been preoccupied with minutia, blinded to the larger picture. He had forgotten that children were miracles—and it didn’t matter that he had originally wanted to wait longer before having a child, he had been in the delivery room when Julia was born. He knew the awe that came with the emergence of a fully formed, perfectly functioning, miniature human being that he had helped make.

  He had forgotten that awe. He had forgotten the pride, the possessiveness that had been a recurrent swelling in his throat during those first few weeks of her life, before the demands of his work had made him swallow it away.

  It returned now in spades. With the image of Daniel Arkin wavering in his mind, he watched Julia with a new appreciation.

  Her play was innocent. She was trying to make the rabbit sit, but succeeded only until she let go. Then the rabbit’s legs popped straight and it toppled over. She picked it up again, sat it down, watched it fall.

  She did it again and again, her cheeks pink, her tiny mouth moist, her hair a mess of curls, and all the while she was talking, saying things he couldn’t understand. Then again, maybe he could. He listened. He caught the repetition of sounds. Yes, indeed, there was a slurred “bunny” in there, a vague “sit,” and lots of ooooos of appreciation.

  Leaving the bed, he hunkered down beside the crib.

  She looked at him. Her eyes were softer in the morning, more baby blue than silver. He fancied she was pleased he was up.

  “Hi,” he said softly. “Playing with bunny?” He reached through the slats of the crib, picked the toy up, and sat it down before her. “Hi, Julia,” he bunny-voiced. “Want to play?” He hopped the bunny forward and tickled her tummy with its head.

  She scrunched herself around the tickling and giggled. It was a heavenly sound. He moved the bunny back, hopped it forward, tickled her again. The giggling was precious, both in its lack of guile and its spontaneity. He was amazed at how easily it had come.

  But that, like dawn risings, was what childhood was about. When Julia hurt, she cried. When she was tickled, she laughed. Her responses were impulsive. Nothing about her was intellectualized.

  But she did take cues from those around her. What was it Emily had said—that Julia could sense the tension in his arms when he held her? And he was tense. He was terrified when he thought of raising a child alone. He wondered if Julia sensed that, if her unhappiness had more to do with his own upset, than with Gayle.

  Needing to hold her close, he brought her out of the crib and into a hug. “I love you, Julia Stasek. I may be a bungling idiot when it comes to parenting, but I can learn.” He shifted her so that she could see him, and grinned. “We can both learn. How does that sound? Daddy screws up, you tell him. Julia screws up, I tell her. Either of us does good, we celebrate. Fair enough?”

  She didn’t smile, but there was a warming in those knowing eyes of hers, and she said something sweet.

  “Fair enough,” he interpreted. Then, feeling buoyant, because she was safe and sound and relatively content in his arms, he said, “Know what today is? Today’s moving-in day. I’m going to drop you at Janice’s—no, now don’t pout, because you know that you’re starting to like her. Didn’t you do finger painting yesterday? Wasn’t that fun? Didn’t you play in the sandbox? Didn’t you have an ice cream cone? Yes, you did do all of those things, and I have the dirty clothes to prove it, which I am going to wash tonight in that brand-new washer-dryer at our own brand-new place. I am very excited about that. Just think. No more running to the laundry room while you’re asleep, and shoving quarters in, and timing myself to be back before some no-good son-of-a-bee takes off with them. ’Course, I don’t know what any no-good son-of-a-bee would want with your sleepees, do you?”

  He kept up the monologue through a diaper change, and it worked. Julia was listening intently, seeming to understand everything he said. She was less pleased when he started to dress her. The jersey he chose had shrunk something awful in the wash—he didn’t know why—but it wasn’t fitting over her head, so he pushed and pulled, getting it half-on before he realized that it hadn’t shrunk at all, but was buttoned at the neck. He fought with the buttons, wondering how he’d gotten it off her, and by the time he realized that Janice must have taken it off and rebuttoned it, Julia�
��s hair was tangled around a button.

  The pulling started her crying. He fiddled with the tangled curls for a minute, but he was all thumbs, and in the end, for want of a scissors, he used his razor to cut her free.

  They never quite recaptured those earlier moments of communion, but Brian wasn’t discouraged. Once he and Julia were settled in the apartment, their lives would gain a semblance of order.

  This day, when he left her at Janice’s, he held her tightly for an extra-long minute before handing her over.

  • • •

  Fifteen minutes later, he walked into John’s office. The hollow feeling that had lumped in the pit of his stomach for most of the night was back. He slid into the chair by the desk. “I want to talk.”

  “Figured you would,” John said, tipping his own chair back. “Did you read the file?”

  “Every sentence. Same with the book. Were you the one who suggested she write it?”

  “I was the one who put the possibility into words, but it didn’t take any brains. From the minute word spread about the Demery girl, Emily was here. She watched the investigation unfold, and it wasn’t like we could kick her out. We all knew what she’d been through. I swear she kept us on our toes without saying a goddamned word.”

  “Did you know her before Daniel’s disappearance?”

  “As much as any small-town cop knows of people in his town.” He paused, self-conscious. “Well, maybe a little more. We’d had our troubles with the kids at the college protesting this and that, and then these two come along looking like hippies, wanting to grow alfalfa sprouts without chemicals. We watched them close. It wasn’t until the boy’s kidnapping that we learned they were nice people.”

  “Then you don’t think the husband had anything to do with it.”

  John recoiled. “Are you crazy? He adored the kid. You read the file. The guy was out in the fields at the time. Three separate people confirmed it. Why would you think he was involved?”

  Brian thought it because he didn’t like Doug Arkin. “The man’s strange, how he treats his wife, being gone so much. Besides, there was something Emily said, when she and I were doing the apartment. She mentioned the theory that Charles Lindbergh kidnapped his own son. She knew all the arguments in favor. I was wondering if there were parallels.”