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The realization made my stomach choppy. But then, it could have been the ice cream. Just a half hour earlier, I had felt at one with the entire world. How could I describe the deep heaviness that had washed over me? It wasn’t fear. At the time, I had no reason to suspect anything was catastrophically wrong.
Dr. Jones looked perplexed. “It strikes me as odd that you wouldn’t have reacted after the incident at the diner. I know if it were my wife…it wouldn’t have gone down quite calmly. Which will make it hard to prove James Dunaway was certain of the affair. We’ll need a way to explain this to the jury…”
She makes a good point. I wasn’t thinking about that at the time. I was mostly thinking that I’d put my job in jeopardy.
To avoid the freeway, I had taken the long way home, winding through the city. The afternoon was slowly fading, but the heat of the day radiated off the pavement, creating a mirage. I passed the care home, and the park across the street, and finally the coffee shop a few blocks down.
In November of the previous year, it was there that it had all began. I wondered, if I could go back in time, if I might have done things differently.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Laurel Dunaway
Journal Entry
I’ve been thinking a lot about writing my life story, with some of the inconsequential parts taken out. Dr. Miller says I could write it as a novel or a screenplay—that either would do. The point is just to get it out. Sometimes after James is asleep, I take my notebook down to the living room, put on a pot of tea, and I write. Usually I write about grown-up me, present day stuff, but Dr. Miller asked me to write from the perspective of my younger self. It seemed weird when I first tried it. But Dr. Miller taught me something. She taught me the importance of backstory. She says it’s easy to predict the future once you can clearly see the past. She says that most people can’t, and that’s why so many of us just end up repeating the same mistakes.
The little girl swims. She swims and she swims. For twenty-six hours, she is later told, the little girl hid in the woods. She was afraid to come out because of the mommy. The mommy called for the girl, the little girl swears, even though the daddy tells her, mostly at night when she can’t sleep, that it isn’t possible.
Divers searched the lake. The little girl was presumed dead, until she was found on a rural road, very much alive.
A nice lady explained to the little girl that the mommy couldn’t hurt her. She’d gone to heaven.
Overnight the little girl became a star. She was thrust into the spotlight. Her picture and her story were everywhere. She became a household name. It was a miracle she was alive. Donations poured in from all over the country. Some even from other countries. Places the little girl had yet to hear of. Even now, people still send gifts to her father’s address on her birthday.
Everyone said the fact that the little girl survived had to be ordained by God. The little girl is proof that miracles can happen. Who doesn’t want a miracle? Who doesn’t want to believe? She gave them a reason. She gave them hope. Her life became evidence that God and angels and all things holy exist.
The little girl liked the attention. It made her feel not so sad, like maybe there were nice people in the world. Like maybe there were mommies in the world who care. Just not hers. She liked being special. But deep down, she always knew the truth: what had really saved her that night was that when worse came to worse, she’d learned how to swim.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Dr. Max Hastings
AFTER
“Do you ever recall Laurel being upset with you…did you ever give her cause to say…want to get back at you?”
“How do you mean?”
“I’m asking if she seemed upset with you, especially toward the end?”
“Upset?”
“Yeah…you know…bitter. Resentful. You know how women can be.” Dr. Jones posed the same tired questions, even though we’d been over this. I assume my attorney hired her because she’s good, but I’ll admit, she’s a bit of a bore. She has a low opinion of women, and it showed.
“I don’t think so.”
“How do you know for sure?”
“She thanked me once,” I told her. I pictured Laurel all those months ago. She had seemed to mean it. She said finding me again had been one of the best things to ever happen to her. She looked humble when she’d said it, if not a bit shy, almost like a little girl.
“I’ve wanted this for forever,” she said.
I didn’t think much of it. Forever could mean a lot of things. It could have meant since last week, or since yesterday afternoon. But then she clarified things when she said, “You remember that big girl…the one with the birthmark on her face?”
“Who?”
“I think her name was…” Her nose was twisted up toward her brow in the funny little way it did when she was unsure. “God, I can’t recall.”
