Fade to Black Read online

  Oh, yes, Elizabeth can relate to Manny.

  Still, she’s aware that the alternative to his grandparents’ custody—a foster home—might be no better for him.

  She knows this, too, from experience. There was a time, when she was around Manny’s age, when her grandmother was hospitalized for over a month after a sudden, serious heart attack—a prelude to the massive one that came later, ending her life.

  There was no one to look after Elizabeth in Vera’s absence, and she had been temporarily placed with a foster family. It wasn’t an experience she had ever wanted to repeat, or would wish on anyone else. The foster parents made no bones about the fact that they were in it for the subsidy money, and the place was overcrowded with problem kids who lied and stole, including a teenage boy whose leering glances gave her the creeps.

  No, she doesn’t believe Manny would be better off in a foster home.

  Nor does she want to file a report against his grandparents and risk attracting the attention of the authorities. She won’t do that unless she absolutely has to—if she feels the child is truly at risk.

  So when Manny turns up with a fresh slap mark on his cheek or a halting walk due to an aching behind, she simply nurses him tenderly and listens as he pours out his heart.

  More than once, he has asked, “Can’t I come live with you, Elizabeth? Can’t you be my mom?”

  What can she say to that but a gentle, wistful no? She certainly can’t admit to the child that she has often fantasized about taking him in, about raising him with the maternal love and affection he so sorely needs … things she, too, had once sorely needed.

  But that’s impossible—more so now than ever before.

  Now that she is no longer sure of her obscurity.

  “Did you call me last night, Manny?” she asks abruptly, switching gears.

  “Did I call you? Unh-unh. How come?”

  A chill steals over her, despite the hot August sun beating down from the cloudless sky.

  “I just … I heard the phone ringing and I couldn’t get to it in time,” she says, trying not to give away her inner alarm.

  Because if it hadn’t been Manny, then it must have been …

  “Well, it wasn’t me,” Manny says. “I was real busy last night. I had a special day camp meeting to go to.”

  “On a Saturday night?” she asks absently, her mind careening over a thousand and one terrifying scenarios.

  She can’t stay here and let him come after her like a hunter closing in on a pathetic animal snared helplessly in a trap. She has no choice but to get away....

  “It was about the Labor Day play,” Manny is saying.

  “Hmmm?”

  “The meeting last night,” he reminds her, and adds proudly, “I got the lead role.”

  That captures her attention. She knows how desperately Manny, a child who has never had any kind of attention or encouragement at home, longs to be in the spotlight.

  She has been coaching him with his lines for the audition, and has noticed that he seems to have a flair for acting.

  “You got the lead?” she squeals, and gives the little boy a hug, lifting him off his feet. “Oh, Manny, that’s fantastic.”

  “No, it isn’t,” he says dejectedly when she sets him down. “I can’t do it.”

  “Why not?”

  “I would need two different costumes—a frog one and a prince one. Grammy says there’s no money to buy them, and she doesn’t know how to sew.”

  “Well, I do,” Elizabeth says spontaneously.

  “You do?”

  “Sure.”

  Of course she sews.

  Sort of.

  Hadn’t she taken home economics classes back at Custer Creek High? Hadn’t she been graded a respectable C-plus on her junior project? It was a ruffled prairie blouse that had been a real pain because of all the gathers, but she had not only completed it, she had actually proudly worn it—until two of the buttons simultaneously popped off one day as she was lifting her arm to wave to the mailman.

  “Then, Elizabeth, would you make me my—oh—” Manny interrupts his own excited question.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Grammy doesn’t have any money to buy the stuff for the costume even if someone else makes it. She doesn’t have any money at all.”

  “I’ll buy the fabric, Manny. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it for you.”

  Even as she says it, she knows it’s a mistake. She’s boxing herself into staying here, when only minutes ago she was planning her escape.

  But his young face is already lit up. “You’ll do that for me?”

  She hesitates only briefly before saying, “Sure I will. I’ll have to stitch it by hand because I don’t have a sewing machine, so it’ll take some time, but it’s no problem.”

  “You sure? Because the show’s in two weeks, and—”

  “Manny, I’ll have the costumes ready for you by then. I promise.”

  Vera taught her, so many years ago, never to break a promise. “If you don’t intend to do something, Cindy, then don’t ever give your word to someone that you will.”

  And so she had learned, very young, never to make promises. Because you never knew what life was going to toss your way.

  Like with Brawley. “Don’t ever leave me, Cindy,” he used to say, usually late at night, in the dark, as they lay in the sagging full-sized bed in the apartment they shared. “Promise you won’t ever leave.”

  She never promised him that. Never promised him anything. She knew better.

  So what’s happened to you now? a disdainful inner voice demands. What makes you think you should start making promises now, to a little boy who’s depending on you because he has no one else?

  Cindy O’Neal didn’t make promises.

  Nor did Mallory Eden.

  But apparently, Elizabeth Baxter does.

  Whether she keeps them remains to be seen.

  “What’s the matter, Jason-boy?” Pamela Minelli reaches into the bouncy seat that sits in the middle of the kitchen table and picks up her whimpering son, hugging his little body close. Then she makes a face.

  “Oh, Christ, did you go again? I just changed you,” she says with a groan. “Why couldn’t you wait until later, when Daddy gets home? Maybe I could have talked him into doing diaper duty for a change.”

  Jason coos, looking at her with his solemn, infant-blue eyes.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” she mutters. “He probably would have come up with a good excuse to get out of it, as usual.”

  He looks so much like his daddy, Jason, with all that dark hair and the quick, dimpled grin.

  Maybe that—and the fact that this one’s a boy—will help Frank to take more of an interest in parenting this time around, Pamela thinks hopefully as she balances the baby in one arm and goes back to the sink to turn off the water she’d left running into the bowl of chip dip she’d just polished off.

  Maybe the reason Frank has left so much up to Pamela in the past is that he simply doesn’t know anything about girls.

  How would he? After all, he’d been raised single-handedly by his father after his mother had died giving birth to him.

  That happened to people, back in the fifties.

  Of course, it happens now too, but hardly ever. You rarely hear of a woman going into the hospital to have a baby and not coming out.

  Still, a few weeks before Pamela had Hannah, she had seen an episode of that television program, E.R., where a woman had died having a baby because of something the doctor did or didn’t do—she can’t remember how it went now.

  At the time, she hadn’t wanted to watch it; she had read somewhere earlier that week that pregnant women shouldn’t see that particular episode. But Frank loved the show; he had insisted on turning it on that night in bed, and she had been too tired to get up and go into the next room. So she had watched it. And it had been a nightmare.

  That program—combined with the knowledge that her own mother-in-law hadn’t made it
through childbirth—had made her a basket case over the next couple of weeks before giving birth to Hannah. She had been terrified that something would happen to her and the baby, or just to her, or just to the baby.

  Frank had tried his best to calm her down, she supposed—by trying to shrug the whole thing off. He had told her that she was paranoid, that it was those crazy pregnancy hormones, that hundreds of women had babies every single day and there wasn’t a thing to worry about.

  He made it sound so easy.

  A flicker of anger darts through her even now, almost three years later, as she remembers his laid-back attitude.

  The nurses had commented, as she went through labor with him as her coach, at how remarkably unruffled he was. And Pamela, huffing and writhing and wailing as eight-pound Hannah ripped into the strained, tender flesh of her perineum, had wanted to scream, “Of course he’s unruffled! I’m the one being tortured!”

  In retrospect, she figures it’s probably a good quality, being unflappable, when you’re married to someone as high strung as she has always been.

  Frank makes everything sound easy, shrugging off problems with a wave of his hand and a calm, “it’ll be okay.” He’s casual about the kids, the house, their marriage …

  Especially their marriage.

  Especially lately.

  Her obstetrician gave her the green light to resume their sex life weeks ago, and the new birth control pills—prescribed at Frank’s insistence—had become effective immediately after she started them.

  Still, Frank has shown absolutely no interest in sleeping with her.

  It’s a wonder we managed to have you, Pamela tells Jason silently, planting a kiss on his still-tender head, feeling a tuft of downy baby hair tickle her lip.

  It’s been nearly a year since they made love.

  And it hadn’t been easy convincing Frank to make love to her back then—let alone, to have a second child. He had been adamant that he wanted only one.

  “Let’s quit while we’re ahead” was how he put it every time she brought up the subject. He would remind her of how freaked out she had been before, during, and after giving birth to Hannah, and how he didn’t ever want to put her through that again.

  “You said yourself that one was enough, Pam,” he would tell her over and over again.

  It was true. She had said that … in the delivery room while she was in agony, pushing, and again when the doctor was stitching her episiotomy, and even days later, when she was home, attempting to go to the bathroom again, like a normal person, without crying from the acute, irrational fear that her insides were somehow going to drop out into the toilet bowl.

  But the more time that passed after Hannah’s birth, the more she longed for another child.

  Motherhood is the greatest fulfillment she has ever known. It is intensely pleasurable to be the center of someone’s world, to see how your child lights up when you come into a room, to hold that warm little body close in your arms and know utter contentment.

  Unfortunately, Frank doesn’t seem to see it quite that way. Pamela knows he loves his kids. He just doesn’t have much time to spend with them, after putting in so many hours at work, especially now that he’s a detective. And anyway, maybe men in general just aren’t great with diapers and spit-up and sleepless nights.

  Jason was an accident, at least as far as Frank was concerned. He had been too out of it that night to realize she hadn’t put her diaphragm in when they’d come home from the policeman’s ball, where she had fed him martinis and made suggestive comments in his ear as she rubbed up against him on the dance floor.

  She had known from a slightly crampy feeling in her lower belly that she was ovulating that night, had realized it was the perfect chance to conceive another child, since they rarely got a romantic night out alone together.

  They had left Hannah with the teenage girl down the street, who has since gone off to college, and they had gotten dressed up and gone out to the ball. It was almost like old times, that night—like when they were dating.

  Back then he had never been able to get enough of her. Frank had always had a strong sex drive. Their encounters would leave her feeling sore and achy, but certain that her man was crazy about her.

  When was the last time he even touched her, Pamela wonders now. Maybe, if she hadn’t been pregnant for the past year …

  But …

  “I wanted you so badly,” she whispers into Jason’s small, perfect ear as she carries him through the dining room and down the toy-cluttered hallway. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

  He gurgles happily.

  “Shhh,” she whispers as they pass Hannah’s closed door. “Don’t want to wake up your sister. Lord knows she needs her nap these days, now that she’s hit the terrible twos. Here we go.”

  She uses her shoulder to shove open the door to the nursery, which used to be two closets before they knocked the dividing wall down and added a window last spring. Now the house is without a coat closet and linen closet, but so far they’ve managed.

  Of course, it’s summertime. Pamela doesn’t know where they’re going to keep their jackets and hats and boots once the weather changes—which, in New England, could be any day now that August is winding down.

  She has painted the tiny room white and pasted up a wallpaper border: yellow ducks splashing cheerfully through bright blue puddles. She sewed the yellow and blue madras changing table pad and cradle comforter herself, and painted the white knobs of a wicker yard-sale dresser to match.

  The room is bright and lively, if a little cramped. It’s big enough for a crib—almost time to pull Hannah’s out of the basement—but not for a bed.

  “Don’t worry, Jason-boy,” she tells him. “By the time you’re ready for that, maybe we’ll be moving into a bigger house. Maybe your daddy will get a nice raise now that he’s a detective.”

  She lays the baby down on his table and begins to unfasten the snaps that run up the legs of his stretchie. Her fingers work automatically, and she hums absently as she works, her mind on what to make for dinner. Frank will be home late—she hates when he works on Sundays, but that’s the way it is when you’re married to a cop. Weekends, holidays, midnights—she’s used to being alone with the kids.

  She hears a sound and looks up, out the window. It faces the yard and the house next door.

  She sees Elizabeth Baxter quickly getting out of her car. The woman, who appears to be in a hurry to get inside, as usual, is wearing large sunglasses, along with a pair of worn jeans and a cropped pink top. Her long hair is braided and hangs down her back.

  Envy darts through Pamela as she watches her neighbor stride quickly from her car to her door.

  Suddenly, she’s conscious of the fact that her hair needs to be washed, and of the yellowed breast milk stain on her own white T-shirt, and the uncomfortably snug fit of her maternity jeans.

  She hasn’t been able to get back into her regular jeans yet....

  Oh, hell. Who is she kidding? She never got back into them after she had Hannah. She had lost only fifteen of the forty pounds she had gained with her first pregnancy. And with Jason, she gained another thirty-five.

  He had weighed nearly nine pounds at birth.

  When she came home from the hospital, she had lost seven.

  “Relax … it’s fluid” was what the nurse had said when Pamela called in a panic. “It’ll come off gradually. Don’t be so hard on yourself. You just had a baby.”

  But now, two months later, she has lost only two additional pounds.

  No wonder her husband isn’t interested in sleeping with her. No wonder he’d rather spend nights on the couch, pretending he’s all caught up in watching boxing matches and baseball games on ESPN. But Frank has never been much of a sports fan; she knows he’s just avoiding her.

  Again she looks at Elizabeth, who is unlocking her door, looking so damned good from behind in those tight, faded jeans.

  “God, how I hate you,” Pamela says aloud, watching h
er neighbor intently.

  Then she sighs and looks away, unfastening the tapes on Jason’s smelly diaper.

  Elizabeth eats her solitary dinner in front of the television set.

  A grilled cheese sandwich and Campbell’s tomato soup.

  Gran often used to make this supper on rainy days. The two of them would sit together at the old round wooden table in the cozy kitchen with the rain pouring down outside. The television would be on in the living room, of course, even though no one was watching it—Gran hated a silent house.

  That was why she was always singing and talking to herself, Elizabeth supposed, although Brawley later told her that a lot of people in town thought her grandmother was a little nuts.

  That hurt, even though Gran was dead by then; even though Elizabeth herself realized, in retrospect, that her grandmother had certainly had her eccentricities.

  But back in that comfy, rambling Nebraska farmhouse, Gran was all she’d had, and Elizabeth had loved her fiercely despite her old-fashioned method of discipline.

  Spare the rod and spoil the child.

  How many times had Gran said that?

  And yet …

  How many times had she pulled her granddaughter onto her ample lap, stroked her hair, and said, “I love you, little girl. Don’t you ever forget it.”

  She spoons some of the creamy red soup from her bowl to her mouth and swallows it, hard, as a sudden wave of longing comes over her.

  Oh, Gran, I miss you, she thinks, staring unseeingly at Mike Wallace, who is grimly discussing a political scandal on 60 Minutes.

  What she wouldn’t give to have her grandmother there with her now. The memory of Vera O’Neal’s loving companionship fills her with an unbearable ache.

  Lonely … she is so damned lonely.

  Not just for Gran, for anyone.

  How much longer can she go on like this, living every day in solitary confinement, afraid to smile at a stranger or greet a neighbor?

  How much longer? Forever. You have no choice, especially

  now, she reminds herself, remembering again the chilling card she’d received in the mail.