Live to Tell Read online

  But after the tragedy, her dark hair—always kept sleek and chic—grew long and straggly. Her face, preternaturally bare of makeup, became gaunt; her figure dangerously skeletal.

  For a while, she honestly thought she was going to die, even if not by her own hand.

  Brett and all those therapists were right, though, about her needing to find a new purpose. When she did, she slowly came back. Not back to life. But back.

  Dr. Hyland was wrong. There are other options. You can curl up and die, or you can go on living…or you can, as Elsa has, settle on something in between.

  Every night when Nick Walsh walks into Grand Central Terminal at rush hour, he has a single objective: getting right back out again, on a northbound train, as quickly as possible.

  More than ninety-nine percent of the time, that’s exactly what happens. But once in a while, things go wrong. A car gets struck at a suburban crossing, a tree falls across the tracks, there’s flooding in the Bronx, a power failure, ice…

  You never know when you’re going to be stuck here for a while, waiting for service to resume, or forced to rely on a bus or car service with tens of thousands of other stranded commuters.

  That’s why, on nights like this, when everything is moving like clockwork, you don’t hang around and thus increase the odds for something to go wrong.

  There’s a 6:22 leaving in ten minutes from track twenty-nine, but by the time Nick detours down to lost and found on the lower level, grabs Sadie’s lost toy, and makes it onto the train, there likely won’t be any seats left. He’ll have to wait twenty-three minutes for the next one, and by the time he’s walked to his building, taken his car from the garage, and driven up to the house in Glenhaven Park and back, it’ll be well past nine o’clock.

  Well, if things go well in the lost and found, maybe he can still make the 6:22. Better to stand around on a moving train than in the station, right?

  Having lied to Lauren earlier about having a late day meeting, he just hopes karma won’t come back to bite him in the ass.

  But it just slipped out. He couldn’t help it. He was irritated that she’d been in the neighborhood with Sadie, hadn’t bothered to tell him, then had the nerve to call him up and start ordering him around. She seemed to assume he had nothing better to do in the middle of a workday than go on a scavenger hunt to retrieve something that shouldn’t have been lost in the first place.

  Aren’t you being a little hard on Lauren? asks an annoying little voice in the part of his brain reserved for postmarital guilt.

  Maybe. But not nearly as hard as she is on me.

  When he reaches the small lost and found office, several people are there ahead of him. One, a blond teenage girl about Lucy’s age, is standing at the service window, scrolling on a hot pink iPod, accompanied by an equally blond friend who’s busily texting into her phone. Behind them, a middle-aged businessman impatiently checks both his BlackBerry and his watch.

  Taking his place in line, Nick thinks back to what the world was like in the good old days before everyone was plugged in; tries to recall whether people actually interacted with one another in public places.

  At forty-five, he’s plenty old enough to remember the pretechnology era, but he’s never given it much thought. It all must have been terribly inconvenient and inefficient—communication, entertainment…

  Then again, if you don’t know what you’re missing, you can’t miss it, right?

  Nick thinks of his marriage.

  Right. Absolutely right. All those years spent stagnating in suburbia, thinking he was content, and he had no clue.

  Then he met Beth.

  Well—not exactly. He knew Beth. Casually. He’d seen her around town, and on the commuter train. But she didn’t travel in the same circles. Her kids are older than his; in fact, Beth is a few years older than he is…not that she looks it.

  He never really knew her, though, until that snowy December night a year and a half ago, when they found themselves sharing a double seat on the late local home after their respective corporate holiday parties.

  Glenhaven Park is almost at the end of the line. By the time they reached their stop, the rail car was all but empty. They were both tipsy. Flirting shamelessly.

  He’d been too distracted to call Lauren to come pick him up. Beth had her car; she drove him home. It was snowing. Springsteen was on the car radio, singing “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” and it reminded him of college, and snowy nights after bars in cars with girls.

  He didn’t kiss Beth good night when she dropped him off, but he wanted to. Damn, he wanted to. Out of the blue, he, Nick Walsh, husband and father of three, wanted to kiss a woman who wasn’t his wife.

  And suddenly he, Nick Walsh—who had been estranged from his own mother for decades because she’d left his father for another man—got it.

  What are you supposed to do when you meet the right person—and realize you’re married to the wrong one? Suffer on indefinitely? Or seize a chance at happiness?

  That night, for the first time in years, he considered reaching out to his mother. He’d lost track of her—hadn’t even bothered to find her and let her know when his father passed away a few years earlier—but if you really want to locate someone in this day and age, you probably can.

  He climbed into bed beside Lauren, sound asleep in flannel pajamas, and he thought about his mother, and then he thought about Beth.

  It was the first time he ever wondered what he might be missing. And so, Beth later told him, did she.

  And now I know.

  Good old pretech days forgotten, Nick checks his BlackBerry.

  There’s a text message.

  He smiles.

  Did you find Sadie’s toy? Are you on the train yet?

  “Not yet,” he texts back to Beth, and “I wish.”

  A woman behind him emits a phlegmy cough. Hoping she covered her mouth, though it doesn’t sound like it, Nick looks up to check the progress at the counter.

  “This is it,” the teenage girl decisively informs the very patient middle-aged woman behind the counter. Then the girl turns to her friend and adds, less decisively, “Don’t you think, Miranda?”

  “Huh?” Her friend looks up from her phone.

  “Like, don’t you think this is my iPod?”

  “Check the playlists.”

  “Yeah, but everyone, like, has the same playlists as me, you know?”

  “I don’t have the same ones as you.”

  “Yeah, but you’re a freak.”

  Miranda sticks out her tongue. “Brat.”

  The businessman makes the impatient sound Nick was just about to make, sparing Nick a couple of dirty looks from the two blondes. Behind him, the woman coughs again.

  “So what’s the consensus, ladies?” asks the lost and found woman.

  The one who isn’t Miranda shrugs. “I guess it’s mine.”

  “Great.” She hands over a form. “You’ll need to fill this out, and I’ll need to make a photocopy of your ID.”

  Photocopies? Paperwork? No way is Nick going to make the 6:22. Unless the paperwork is only for valuables?

  Apparently not. The businessman, it turns out, left a five-dollar folding umbrella on a New Haven local the other morning. It takes him forever to figure out which of the couple dozen black folding umbrellas in the “July: Umbrellas” bin belongs to him, and when at last he does, he, too, has to fill out a claim form.

  Finally he’s on his way, and it’s Nick’s turn.

  It’s 6:20.

  “My daughter lost her stuffed animal in the station,” he tells the woman, admiring the patience in her chocolate-colored eyes. If he had to work here and deal with people all day, he’d want to kill them or himself.

  “When did she lose it?”

  Good question.

  “Recently.” He’d assume today, considering that Lauren told him Sadie couldn’t live without it—if his ex-wife didn’t have an annoying habit of turning even minor household issues into urg
ent crises.

  “Recently as in this week? This month?”

  He nods. For all he knows, the toy has been missing for a month, but…

  “She lost it in the station?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know where, exactly?”

  Nick quells the urge to challenge her exceeding patience and remind her that if he knew where, exactly, he most likely wouldn’t be here.

  “I have no idea. She was with my wife. Ex-wife,” he amends hastily…and is rewarded with, not a dirty look, but not exactly a pleasant one.

  “Do you know what the toy looks like?”

  “It’s pink,” he tells her, “and it answers to Fred, and if I don’t get it back to Sadie, then, believe me, life as we know it is over.”

  She smiles, God love her.

  “You have kids,” he guesses.

  “You bet. Hang on a second.”

  She turns to peruse the shelf behind her, and returns to the counter with a large blue bin marked “July: Misc.”

  “It’s pink, you said? Is it a pink flamingo?” She pulls one out.

  “No. Not a flamingo.”

  The woman behind him hacks away like she has tuberculosis.

  Repulsed, he tries to remember what Lauren said about Fred. Was he a cat? A duck? Whoever heard of a pink duck?

  “Is it a dog?” She shows him one. “It’s the only other pink toy in here.”

  He nods vigorously. “Yup, that’s Fred.”

  “You sure? Because it’s been here for a week.”

  “Positive,” he lies. “That’s when she lost it. About a week ago.”

  Maybe not, but it’s pink, and it’s furry, and there are no other pink toys, and the woman behind him is coughing up God only knows what, and he’s desperate to get out of here. If it’s not Fred, Sadie will probably never know the difference.

  “I just need your driver’s license so that I can make a copy, and I need you to fill out this claim form.” The woman slides a clipboard across the counter.

  “You actually keep a record of every single thing people lose and find around here?”

  She smiles and nods. “Every single one.”

  “Do you have a feeling, one way or another?” The therapist’s voice intrudes on Elsa’s melancholy thoughts.

  She looks up to see Joan watching her.

  “A feeling about what?” she asks.

  “About whether Jeremy is alive?”

  Or dead.

  Ever tactful, Joan doesn’t complete the question.

  The wisp of hope drifts, as it does from time to time, like a helium balloon whose string was swept beyond her grasp by a cold, cruel wind.

  “What do you think, Elsa?”

  In this particular moment, she doesn’t think. She knows.

  A mother knows.

  There’s no mistaking the aching emptiness; the sense that you will never again cradle your sweet child in your arms.

  “He’s dead,” she says resolutely.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Do you want white or red? I brought both.” Holding a paper bag from the wine store, Trilby McCall follows Lauren to the kitchen, her heeled sandals tapping across the hardwoods.

  “Is the white chilled?”

  “Yep.”

  “Definitely white then. Maybe that’ll cool us off.”

  Lauren steps around comatose Chauncey on the floor in front of the fridge, pushes her sweat-dampened hair back from her forehead, and looks up to make sure the paddle fan is still turning. It is, but does little to stir the sultry night air.

  “It feels good in here, actually,” Trilby comments. Her long, dark ponytail has plenty of bounce and she looks cool and crisp in a linen top and capris, making Lauren wish she’d changed out of her dated, pleated, too-big khaki shorts.

  “Are you kidding? It’s a thousand degrees.”

  “Well, Bob keeps our AC cranked so high I need mittens at home.”

  Air-conditioning—yet another thing Lauren and Nick didn’t want when they moved here. Too sterile. They both enjoyed fresh air through screens, falling asleep to the hum of crickets or the loamy smell of rain.

  Toward the end, though—last summer—Nick looked into installing ductwork for a central cooling system. Gnats were getting in through the screens, he said, and the house felt too damp with all the humidity, and it wasn’t good for the allergies he claimed to have developed…

  Yeah, right. Looking back, it’s pretty clear that Nick was allergic to one thing only: marriage.

  “What are Bob and the kids doing tonight?” she asks Trilby.

  “Right now?” Trilby checks her watch. “Either arguing about bedtime, or snooping around in the cupboards for some kind of crap to eat because all we had for dinner was salad.”

  “I can top that. All we had for dinner was apples dipped in peanut butter. And that was hours ago.”

  It’s almost eight-thirty now. When Trilby called earlier wanting to stop by tonight, Lauren almost told her no. She’s tired, and Sadie is weepy and needy, and Nick has yet to call back about Fred. She’d been planning on tucking her daughter into bed—hopefully Sadie’s own bed, with Fred on the pillow beside her—then collapsing in front of some mindless television show.

  But it’s always hard for Lauren to say no to Trilby. In fact, it’s always been hard for her to say no to anyone. But she’s learning.

  “There’s nothing like divorce to help you discover your inner bitch,” Trilby likes to say, and she’s right. Lately, Lauren has gone from feeling defeated and depleted to feeling like she’s not going to let anyone push her around. Particularly Nick.

  “Hey, there, how’s it going?” Trilby leans over Sadie, who’s hunched over a coloring book, scribbling a Disney princess a moody shade of dark gray.

  “Bad.”

  Trilby shoots a questioning look at Lauren over Sadie’s blond hair.

  Lauren shakes her head.

  A fellow mom, Trilby nods that she gets the message: Don’t ask.

  “I like your princess, Sadie. Even if she is a little…drab.” She watches Sadie hunt through the crayon box. “How about some pink? Or yellow, maybe?”

  “No.”

  “Who is that, Mulan?”

  Sadie nods grimly and exchanges her gray crayon for a brown one.

  “You know, nobody ever colors princesses in my house.” Trilby straightens and removes the bottle of white wine from the bag. “Our coloring books just have trucks. Or Spider-Man.”

  Sadie looks up with guarded interest.

  “Do you think Dylan and Justin would like a Mulan coloring book?” Trilby asks.

  The barest hint of a smile. “No.”

  “Yeah. I don’t think so, either. Oh well.”

  Lauren grins at her friend. The mother of two sons, Trilby is often wistful about Sadie’s—and Lucy’s—girly trappings. She frequently comments on what they’re wearing, right down to sparkly nail polish, and she reveled in Lucy’s tiara stage years ago. In fact, she took to wearing one, too, whenever she came over, so they could be princesses together.

  Lucy. The thought of her older daughter brings a pang. Lauren misses her, and Ryan, too.

  And Nick? Do you miss him?

  Yes—she misses the old familiar Nick, anyway. The one who was comfortable and steadfast and sweet. The Nick who had grown up in a broken home and was determined to make his own marriage last forever.

  Not New Nick, the midlife crisis stranger, who tossed aside his wife like a used tissue.

  “Did you call that guy I told you about?” Trilby asks.

  “What guy?”

  Trilby tilts her head meaningfully in Sadie’s direction.

  Oh. The child psychiatrist. Lauren had asked Trilby for a recommendation, thinking it might be a good idea for Sadie to talk to a professional. Trilby’s own kids are completely well-adjusted, but she’s plugged into the network of moms who rely on child-rearing experts for everything from kiddie yoga to sex education.

  “I haven’t c
alled him yet,” Lauren tells Trilby, “but I will.”

  “Don’t wait too long. You know everyone around here goes away in August—even doctors.”

  “I know.” Making a mental note to call first thing tomorrow, Lauren moves a pile of unopened mail—including a letter from her husband’s divorce attorney—from one end of the counter to another. She’ll get to that later, too. Much later. Ugh.

  “Hey, how was lunch with your sister today? Was it good to get out?” Trilby opens one of the glass-paned top cupboards and takes out two wineglasses. She knows her way around Lauren’s kitchen as well as Nick ever did.

  “It was pretty good, actually. Sadie hung around with the baby and the nanny while Alyssa and I went out to a sushi place.”

  “Grown-up food in the city. Lucky you. I ate two bites of Dylan’s corn dog at the pool snack bar for lunch. And about twelve Popsicles.”

  Sounds good to Lauren, who can just imagine what Nick would have to say about corn dogs and Popsicles for lunch. The man who used to order—and hoard—his own personal boxes of Thin Mints from the Girl Scout down the street is now adverse to pretty much anything that’s not natural or organic or whatever his new healthy standards require.

  “Did you see anyone interesting?” Lauren asks Trilby.

  “At the pool? What do you think?”

  “You never know.”

  “Right. I suppose our neighbors Bill and Hillary could pop over to do a few laps, or Martha Stewart could show up to work the snack bar.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I know it’s not.” Trilby hoists her butt onto the counter as Lauren opens a drawer to look for the wine opener. She casts a cautious glance in Sadie’s direction before saying, “I didn’t see her there.”

  Lauren nods, fishing out the corkscrew she and Nick used to use every Friday for an at-home date night when the kids were young. That, too, fell away.

  She might be past wishing Nick hadn’t left—she doesn’t want him back now—but that doesn’t stop her from wondering how this happened to them; when, exactly, it all went wrong.

  Was it when, out of nowhere, she found herself pregnant a third time? When Nick was struggling not to lose his job as most of his department was laid off in a corporate restructuring? When his father died? When he met Beth?