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She’s in room 411. Upstairs. I knock three times. I hear the chain slide, and then the door opens.
My brother’s widow looks less gaunt than she did the last time I saw her, but her eyes are as bruised as ever. Her hair is a silky brown tangle, and she’s wearing a tight black dress that I in no way deserve.
“You’re late.” She motions me inside and locks the door. Then she leans against it. Her hands and feet are bare, and I have to remind myself that she’s not a worker.
Her suitcase is open in one corner, and her clothes are spread across the floor. I move a slip off the one chair in the room and sit down. “Sorry,” I say. “Everything takes longer than you think it will.”
“You want a drink?” Maura asks me, indicating a bottle of Cuervo and a couple of plastic cups.
I shake my head.
“I knew you’d figure it out.” She drops a couple of cubes into the cup and gives herself a generous pour. “You want to hear the story?”
“Let me tell it,” I say. “I want to see how much I actually figured out.”
She takes her glass and goes over to the bed, where she lies down on her stomach. I’m pretty sure this isn’t her first drink.
“Philip and you had one of those relationships that was all ups and downs, right? Highs and lows. Lots of screaming. Passionate.”
“Yeah,” she says, looking at me oddly.
“Oh, come on,” I say. “He was my brother. I know what all his relationships were like. Anyway, maybe the fighting got to be too much for you, or maybe it was different after you had the baby, but at some point Barron got involved. Started making you forget fights you’d had with Philip. Made you forget you’d decided to leave him.”
“That’s when you gave me the amulet,” she says. I think of handing it to her in the kitchen of the apartment, my nephew howling in the background, Grandad snoring on a chair in the living room.
I nod. “He made me forget a lot too.”
She throws back a good portion of the liquid in her cup.
“And you’d already started to get some pretty bad side effects.” I think of her sitting at the top of the stairs, legs dangling off the edge, her whole body moving in time with a song I couldn’t hear.
“You mean the music,” she says. “I miss it, you know?”
“You said it was beautiful.”
“I used to play the clarinet in middle school—did you know that? I wasn’t very good, but I can still read music.” She laughs. “I tried to write down snatches of it—a few notes, even—but it’s all gone. I may never hear it again.”
“It was an auditory hallucination. I get headaches. Be glad it’s gone.”
Maura makes a face. “That is a very unromantic explanation.”
“Yeah.” I sigh. “So anyway. You realized what Barron and Philip were doing to you and you split. Took your son.”
“Your nephew has a name,” she says. “It’s Aaron. You never say it. Aaron.”
I flinch. For some reason I never connected the kid with me. He was always Philip’s son, Maura’s son, not someone with a name who’ll grow up to be another screwed-up member of my screwed-up family.
“You took Aaron,” I say. “Philip guessed that I had something to do with you two leaving, by the way.”
She nods. There’s a story there, one about the slow realization of how betrayed she really was, one where she jumped a little as she felt the amulet pinned under her shirt splitting. One where she had to think fast and not gasp, and keep pretending even when she must have felt drowned by horror. But she doesn’t move to tell it, and it’s her story to keep. My brothers did this to her. She doesn’t owe me anything.
“So you’ve got a big family, right? Or a best friend who moved to the South. Someone you thought you’d be safe staying with in Arkansas. You get in your car and just go. Maybe trade it in for another vehicle. You’re using your maiden name, and even though you figure Philip is going to freak out about you taking his son, you know that you’ve got lots on him. You’re sure that he’s going to be afraid of you going to the police, so you never even consider that he will.
“You’re careful, but not careful enough. Maybe it’s hard to find you, but far from impossible. So when the Feds call, looking for you, with stories about your husband going into witness protection and wanting you with him, you freak out. The Feds need you—Philip wouldn’t give them what they wanted until he saw you—so I’m sure they didn’t care about your feelings. Your country needed you.”
Maura nods.
“You realize you’ll never get away from him. Legally, with the Feds helping him out, he might be able to get joint custody of your son. You might even be forced to live nearby—and then maybe a couple of his friends would come over. Either they’d work you or they’d work you over, but you knew he could get you back. You knew that you were in danger.”
