This Secret Thing, стр. 47
“No,” Casey said again.
Bess felt her heart pick up speed. So it wasn’t because she missed the love of her life too much, and it wasn’t because she was having a hard time academically. Those were the two easy ones. She swallowed. “Did something happen?” she asked.
Casey’s eyes darted over to her, then away. Bess watched her look out the window, as if she’d suddenly taken an interest in birds. She knew her daughter was deciding what to say, weighing and measuring her words. Tread lightly, a voice inside her warned. Don’t push her.
Casey looked back at her, her eyes wide. “Can I talk about it when I’m ready?” she asked.
Bess exhaled, ashamed at the relief she felt. “As long as you promise that you will. If nothing else, we need to talk about your plans for school this semester. This can’t be good, you missing so many classes,” she said.
“I’ve been talking to the dean. I’m good on that end.”
Bess nodded, sensing that they’d just made progress and she shouldn’t push any further. Right now, she assured herself, she was right to relent. They both needed a reprieve. This wasn’t cowardice, it was striking a delicate balance with her daughter. “Just promise me we’ll talk soon.”
Casey gave her a small, sad smile. “I promise,” she said.
As soon as Casey disappeared up the stairs, Bess grabbed for her other phone, hidden in the deep recesses of her purse, down where the stray pennies and random pieces of gum hung out. She brought it to life and hoped for a missed call. There was none. She thought about dialing his number again but didn’t want to seem needy, or desperate, even though she was. She needed to know he was not the person they found in the lake; she needed to hear his voice.
She hid the phone back in her purse, but that didn’t mean she stopped thinking about Jason. She thought about him as she worked in the yard, giving her plants borders in a way she couldn’t with her own children. She thought about him as she cleaned her already clean house, scrubbing away the things she didn’t want to see. She thought about him as she used the elliptical upstairs, sweating and pumping her legs up and down in an effort to get it all out—all the stress, all the worry, all the nagging doubt. Of course none of it worked.
The more she worried about Jason, the less she worried about her daughter and what had happened to her. She felt the tug of guilt over that. She knew she should be thinking about Casey—about what she’d walked in on with Eli, about what had brought her home from college and why she wasn’t ready to talk about it yet. But those things seemed so huge, so insurmountable.
It was better, and easier, to worry about someone who mattered, but not that much. Someone who’d become important to her only recently, instead of nearly two decades ago. If she focused on Jason, she didn’t have to focus on Casey. If she could get ahold of him, if she could talk to him, maybe she’d tell him about Casey, about how worried and scared she was, how out of control she felt.
Jason would understand. He would say, in that way he had, “Oh, darlin’, I’m sorry.” Steve never said things like that to her. And that was why she needed Jason now, more than ever. She went back to her purse, fished the phone out again, and dialed. She listened to it ring and ring and, when he didn’t answer, she finally, after a long and valiant effort to keep the tears at bay, ended the call and went to the shed to cry alone.
Nico
He stood at the outer edge, banished from the action because of his potential connection to whoever was in that body bag. They’d told him to go home and wait for a call, but he knew they didn’t really expect him to. More like they had to say it for the sake of protocol. He saw them cast sympathetic glances his way from time to time. And he tried to respond with what he hoped looked like a brave smile.
He kept a safe distance, watching the investigators in an effort to keep his eyes from straying to that body bag, to resist the temptation to run over to it, unzip it, and see who was inside. The captain told him he didn’t want to see that. Matteo or not, whoever was in that bag no longer looked human after spending time underneath the water.
When they were kids, Matteo used to put algae on his head and chase Nico around the pond near their house, moaning, his arms outstretched in a zombie-walk parody. “I want to eat your brains,” he would say. Now it felt like Matteo had eaten his heart, devoured it all for himself, leaving nothing for Nico or his wife and kids. Now it was Nico who was the zombie. He glanced over at the bag, half expecting Matteo to sit up out of it, eye sockets empty, his open mouth a permanent yawn. Nico shook his head and pulled his phone from his pocket to distract himself.
Sure enough, he had a notification. Right on schedule, his daughter had come home from school. He clicked on the camera to watch her arrival, turning to walk a bit farther away so that he could listen. She usually sang as she ambled up the driveway and let herself into the house. Since the separation, Karen had been working part-time, gone when Lauren got home from school. He felt bad about another change for the kids, worse about the fact that his daughter was home without supervision, which made his monitoring of the family’s security cameras more important, he rationalized. And that wasn’t going to change.
Karen had emailed him last night to tell him she’d been