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I was here, with this man, and I didn’t know how I got here, either. How well did we even know each other? We had met less than six months ago. I had changed so much since we met. How much had he changed, too?
“The memories I have of my mother,” Eddie said, “maybe I dreamed those, too. I remember her holding my hand at a playground, urging me to climb the ladder to the slide. I remember the feel of her hand in mine, the way I never wanted to let it go. I had no way to tell her that I just wanted to hold her hand, more than I wanted to play with the other kids, more than I wanted just about anything. I wanted to be wherever she was and hold her hand. And she thought I wanted to slide down the slide, like any other kid. So eventually, I did.” He paused. “Maybe that memory isn’t real. Maybe it’s a dream. Maybe it doesn’t matter.”
“I know you think it makes you crazy, but to me it sounds nice,” I said. “I don’t dream.”
He shifted next to me. “What do you mean? Sure you do. Everyone does.”
“Not me. I wish I did. I remember everything.” I blinked at the ceiling, thinking about my mother, the years of our life together. If that were a dream, I would gladly wake up, but it wasn’t. I remembered every gritty detail, every exhausted late night on the road, every cheap apartment, every time I ate a candy bar for breakfast. I remembered the face of every man my mother dated, no matter how briefly. The facts of my life were relentless, unending, and none of them would leave my head, even for a minute, to leave room for a nicer dream.
I remembered the churning fear in my gut that one day I’d come home and my mother would be gone. Then it had actually happened, and I remembered that, too.
So, yes, I remembered everything. Until I met Eddie, and for the first time my life slipped by me like water. Until we’d made the turn onto Atticus Line, which I didn’t remember at all.
“What brought this on?” Eddie asked me. “The question about my parents? It was the conversation with Carla, right? About Shannon leaving her son.”
I was supposed to be the calm one, the one that soothed Eddie through his panic attacks. I wasn’t supposed to quietly fall apart while he lay next to me. “It’s a coincidence,” I said. “The fact that she left her son, like your mother left you. Carla said he went into the foster system. It has to be a coincidence, right?”
“I know,” Eddie said. “As soon as she started talking, I wondered... I guess that’s how my mind works, how it’ll always work. Always looking for clues. I remember living out in the country—I don’t remember Midland. Even being there today, it wasn’t familiar to me.” He stared at the ceiling, thinking. “The math doesn’t add up. Shannon had a baby, not an eight-year-old in 1976. That was some other kid. Not me.”
His hand moved across the bed and took mine. Maybe it was supposed to be a gesture to comfort me, but it felt like a gesture to comfort himself. To reassure himself that I was still there.
“There’s nothing wrong with wondering,” I said.
He squeezed my hand. “I guess you think about the same things since your mother died. Wondering how things could have been different if she’d lived.”
I closed my eyes. They stung with guilt. “I don’t want to think about my mother,” I whispered.
“But you do think about her.” He sounded so certain. “You always will. You went through a lot with her.”
“Eddie.”
“I’m going to have a nap.” His thumb moved over the back of my hand, stroking it. “Then we’ll talk about it some more.”
When he had drifted off, I got up, showered, and dressed. When I came out of the bedroom I found Rose sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter, a magazine open and unread in her hands. She stared at me hard.
“Don’t give me that look,” I said. “We’re married.”
“I have to wash your sheets, missy,” she said.
“Fine.” I grabbed a glass from the cupboard to pour myself some water. “I’ll wash them myself. Weren’t you married to your precious Robbie for years?”
“You leave Robbie out of this. Where were you both this morning?”
This morning? It felt like a long time ago. “Midland,” I said, taking the cheap plastic ice cube tray out of the freezer and twisting it so the cubes would pop up. “We had a lead that the Lost Girl might be from there. We found out there’s a missing girl from Midland named Shannon Haller.”
“That hitchhiker from the seventies?” Rose said. “That’s what you’re up to? You’re not going to get anywhere. Robbie never did.”
I put my glass down on the counter. “Robbie investigated the hitchhiker murders?”
Rose made a sniffing sound that eloquently told me I was an idiot. “Of course not. I told you, they wouldn’t make him detective because he was Black. He was a beat cop. They give detective jobs to men like Quentin. Didn’t mean that Robbie didn’t know what was going on, though. It’s hard to miss a bunch of murders happening in your town. He had his own questions.”
“And what did he think the answers were?”
“If you think you’re going to solve it, you’re not,” Rose said without answering my question. “We don’t have a crazed killer running around Coldlake Falls. We have irresponsible kids who hitchhike to Hunter Beach and back, and sometimes they get in trouble.”
I sifted her words in my head. “So you think it’s random, but Robbie thought there was a killer.”
“He had to knock on doors and ask questions,” Rose said. “That’s what beat cops do. No one knew those kids, and none of them had family here. I always told him—they’re just kids who had bad luck.”
