Diane Chamberlain - The Lies We Told

“I’m okay,” I said. I’d be strong for him. I wanted his admiration, not his pity.

Adam turned his hand to lace our fingers together. “You know,” he said, “it was so crazy in there, that when you disappeared, I was afraid you’d been shot. I even looked under the table for you. It scared me.” His voice was heavy with emotion, and I knew he still loved me. Only then did I realize how much I’d come to doubt that love.

“I’m okay,” I said again, getting to my feet. “I can talk to them now.”

The ride home two hours later was quiet and dismal. We were talked out from the interviews with the police, and Brent, now stone-cold sober, drove.

He dropped Adam and me off in front of our house. We started walking up the curved sidewalk to our front door, but I turned as I heard a car door slam and saw Rebecca running toward us.

“Just want to talk to my sis a minute,” she said to Adam.

He nodded, pulling his keys from his pocket. “I’ll see you inside, My,” he said.

We’d left the outside lights on, and I could see the worry in Rebecca’s face. “Are you all right?” she asked.

I nodded. “Fine.” I looked toward my house, hoping the sight of the light-filled windows and overflowing planters by the front door would erase the image of bloody flan from my mind.

“I was afraid when we picked that restaurant that you wouldn’t want to go,” she said. “I know you don’t like going to that part of town. But it seemed great at first. We were having so much fun. And then this had to happen.” She shook her head. “It was terrible.”

“I’m okay,” I said.

Rebecca looked toward Brent’s car, then faced me again. “We haven’t had a chance to talk about the baby since I got back. I mean, you and me alone. Let’s make time before I end up on the road again, okay?”

I wasn’t thinking about the baby at that moment. I didn’t want thoughts of my baby—my son —to be connected in any way to this horrible night, but she was waiting for some response from me. “Okay,” I said. “I really …” I looked toward my house once more, thinking of Adam inside. “We have to figure out whether to try again.”

“Or adopt.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think Adam ever will.”

“What is his problem? ” She sounded annoyed. “I want to pound some sense into that man’s head. ”

“No. Don’t. He and I have to figure it out. Okay?”

Rebecca ran a hand through her short hair, glancing again toward Brent’s car. “This is a terrible send-off for Brent,” she said, “but then, you get kind of used to the unexpected when you work for DIDA.” It was the wrong thing to say to me now that Adam had signed on as a volunteer, and she caught herself. “But nothing like this has ever happened in all the years I’ve worked for DIDA,” she said. “Really, Maya.”

I didn’t want to talk about DIDA. What I wanted to say was, Did tonight remind you of the night Mom and Daddy were killed? But I would never say those words. Our relationship was so complex. We were close in so many ways. Distant in others. If tonight had reminded her of that other night, I would never know.

“You get some sleep,” she said. “Do you have some Xanax lying around?”

“Somewhere,” I said.

She touched my cheek with the back of her fingers, the way a mother might touch her child. She was not usually tender, and I was moved by the gesture. Then she pulled me into a hug.

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you, too.”

We stayed that way, holding on to each other, for close to a minute. No matter how tightly I held her against me though, I felt that long-ago night wedged between us like a solid wall of stone.

REBECCA SAT IN HER FAVORITE RED VELVET CHAIR AT Starbucks, shoes off, feet tucked beneath her, a double Americano on the table next to her. She was reading a book written by a guy who’d worked with the Red Cross after the quake in China. Even though she’d worked in China after the quake herself, she couldn’t concentrate on the book today. She was impatient and the coffee wasn’t helping.

The devastation from the earthquake in Ecuador was much worse than anyone had realized, and she was itching to go down there. Brent had been working thirty miles from the epicenter for a week now, and he’d finally managed to call her on a satellite phone the day before. “Tell Dot we need you here,” he’d said. They were extremely shorthanded, but Dorothea didn’t want her to go.

“Not until we see what these devils in the Atlantic have on their minds,” she said when Rebecca relayed Brent’s message.

The tropical storm that had been wallowing a good distance off the coast of Bermuda was now Hurricane Carmen. She barely deserved the name hurricane, in Rebecca’s opinion. She was nothing more than a puffy white amoeba on the weather map. No one seemed sure where she would make landfall—if she made landfall at all. Possibly South Carolina. Possibly farther north, along the Outer Banks. But the storm was so pathetic that evacuation was voluntary, and Rebecca knew that most people would stay to watch the waves swell and the wind howl and enjoy being as close as they could get to danger while remaining perfectly safe. Durham and the rest of the state were promised buckets of rain and a little wind, but so far, nothing more than that, and Rebecca couldn’t believe she was stuck in North Carolina because of potential rain. She had to admit, though, that Dot had a sixth sense about storms. Rebecca sometimes thought she had missed her calling and should have been a meteorologist. She wondered if, when it was her turn as DIDA’s director, she’d be able to determine who was needed when and where with Dorothea’s precision.

“It’s not just Carmen I’m concerned about,” Dorothea had said to her in her dining room-slash-office that morning. She’d pointed to the weather map on her computer. “See these two guys north of Haiti?” She ran her finger over two other amoebas. “I don’t trust them one bit.”

“Okay.” Rebecca had given in. “Whatever.” So now she was biding her time—working out at the gym, running, catching up on e-mail and helping Dorothea with DIDA’s mind-numbing administrative tasks.

She’d finally had a couple of hours alone with Maya the evening before. Over their Frapuccinos at this same Starbucks, they’d talked about the baby. They’d sat in the courtyard outside so Rebecca could smoke, and she’d loaded Maya up with advice: It was too soon to make a decision about trying again, she’d said. Maya needed to put the whole baby thing out of her mind for a while. She had to give Adam time to grieve before reintroducing the topic of adoption. Maybe by then he’d be ready.

Maya listened in that patient way she had, looking more at her mug of coffee than at Rebecca. And when Rebecca had offered every last bit of sisterly advice she could come up with, Maya leaned toward her.

“I know you have my best interest at heart, Bec,” she said, “but you can’t really understand how this feels.”

Rebecca didn’t know why the words hurt her so much, but they did. Maybe because they were the truth. She couldn’t understand. She was out of her league, and that was a feeling she loathed. She thought of telling Maya about that weird fantasy she’d had in Brent’s hotel room of holding the baby, that powerful sense of loss, but caught herself in time. Maya’s loss was real; hers was imagined.

“Well,” she’d said, “I want to understand.”

“It’s creating issues between Adam and me,” Maya said.

Rebecca frowned. What did she mean by “it”? Maya could be so vague. She had a way of talking around a subject instead of coming out and saying what she meant. “What do you mean?” she asked. “Because he won’t adopt or what?”