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She didn’t hear the door to her room open, but when she looked up, she saw Seneca in the doorway, her smooth brow wrinkled, sadness in her near-black eyes. She didn’t ask the stupid, Are you okay? question, because obviously Remmi was not. “I’ll make you dinner,” she said in that calm voice, and for once Remmi wanted to lunge at her, to shake the taller woman and ask her how she could be so serene, so unemotional, so in charge when everything, every damned thing was falling apart. But instead she turned away from her, shunning Seneca as if Seneca was somehow behind that fateful and fatal exchange in the desert, or as if Didi had driven off into the desert in a state of enraged pique the next day when she’d discovered that she’d been conned, as if somehow, Seneca—ever sedate, ever collected and patient, the “cool head,” as Didi had referred to her—could somehow have prevented all the horror of the past few days.
That was ridiculous, of course. Seneca wasn’t to blame. All of the pain landed squarely at Didi’s feet. And yet, as difficult as living with Didi Storm was, Remmi missed her and was worried sick that something horrid had happened to her.
Blinking against a flood of tears, Remmi wiped her nose and rolled onto her back, crushing her pillow to her chest and trying not to wonder what had happened to her mother. It proved impossible, of course, and eventually, from sheer exhaustion, she fell asleep.
When she awoke, the house was quiet.
Too quiet.
She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and checked the bedside clock. Nearly midnight. She’d been asleep for twelve hours. Yawning, she stretched, made her way to the bathroom, used the toilet, and splashed water onto her face. She glanced at the shower, but waited. First, she had to make certain everything was okay. Well, as okay as it had been the night before.
She walked through the house on bare feet, but there wasn’t a sound. The living room and kitchen were empty, her mother’s bedroom untouched, the babies’ nursery as she’d left it, Adam not in his crib.
With each step, her heart sank a little further, and when she went to the room Seneca used when she stayed over, the daybed had not been slept in. “No,” Remmi whispered, “no, no, no! Seneca?” She yelled more loudly as she ran through the empty rooms. “Seneca! Are you here?” Of course, she wasn’t, and when Remmi went out to view the driveway, the green hatchback was missing, not parked where it had been the night before.
Remmi tried to tell herself that it was all right. Seneca had just needed to run an errand, go to the grocery store, pick up a prescription, buy diapers, whatever, and rather than wake Remmi, she’d taken the baby with her and . . . and . . . It was no use. No matter how she tried to buoy herself, Remmi felt totally abandoned.
She looked for a note, found none. Just some soup that had been congealing in a saucepan on the stove overnight. She went to the phone, frantically dialed Seneca’s number, but before the midwife’s answering machine clicked on, she knew in her soul that there would be no answer.
Then she noticed the blinking light on her own answering machine. She hit the button and heard a series of ever-more anxious messages from Seneca.
“Remmi? Didi? Please call me.”
Three audio messages, each sounding more panicked than the last.
So at least she didn’t lie about that.
How do you know? It’s not as if the calls are date- or timestamped.
Stomach in knots, she waited.
For two days.
Nothing.
Just another three harassing calls from Didi’s boss. Remmi thought once more about calling the police. She’d even walked to Seneca’s house and hadn’t been surprised when she, Adam, and her car were missing. She’d walked to Noah’s house and had intended on knocking on his door, but when she’d spied the police cruisers, lights flashing at the small ranch, she’d left.
The only good news was that Seneca had left her with all the items she’d packed hastily into the Toyota on the night she’d fled to the Star Vista. She had money, credit cards, and supplies. And the car, too, was returned from the tow shop, a mechanic friend of Seneca’s explaining that the temperature gauge had been shot and he’d replaced it. He dropped the car off, said the bill had been “taken care of,” and then had gotten a ride with a coworker who had followed him to Remmi’s house.
She took it as a sign.
So, disheartened, but burning with a quiet, smoldering rage, she’d repacked the Toyota, this time including the bulky computer as she didn’t have need of a car seat, and with her meager possessions and Didi’s credit cards and money in her pocket, she drove away from Las Vegas.
PART 2
CHAPTER 11
San Francisco
Now
Sick, Remmi stared at the scene in horror as the thick San Franciscan night seemed to close in on her. The world tilting, she heard the frantic voices as if from a distance. Screams of the crowd and shouts, the whomp, whomp of a helicopter’s blades as it hovered over the buildings, honks of traffic. People rushed and pushed, some to get away from the horrific, gory scene where the fragile space between life and death had been shattered, others to edge even closer. Remmi forced herself forward, peered over a man’s shoulder to the broken body of the woman, and saw that she’d missed the fountain by inches, her wig askew, a dark stain pooling beneath her frothy skirt.
“Oh, God,” Remmi whispered as a policewoman ordered the crowd to move away. Remmi was jostled and fell back; she shouldered and elbowed away from the Montmort Tower, now strobed in the lights of fire trucks, emergency vehicles, and police cars. A man, a police officer probably, was ordering everyone to “Get back. Move. Back up! Let us do our job here.”
Cameras and phones were clicking, footsteps echoing, and the dull roar of excited voices pounded in her head.
Had she really just witnessed her mother’s suicide? After all these years of not knowing what had happened to Didi, had it come down to one last, desperate, and flamboyant act?
