In Things Unseen Page 8

  How could she explain such an abrupt embrace of faith—something neither of them had ever found much need to discuss, let alone share—to a committed atheist like Elliott without losing him? What words could she use that wouldn’t make her sound like a lunatic both beyond his help and unworthy of his love?

  Such words did not exist. If nothing else became crystal clear to Laura in this hushed, immaculate little church on California Avenue, that much did. For all the reasons Diane Edwards had laid out for Laura to accept that Diane had asked her Christian god for a miracle and actually received one, Laura had one reason to do exactly the opposite, and it trumped all the others: Elliott.

  She couldn’t risk losing Elliott.

  This was not the great epiphany she had come here halfway hoping to experience. This hour had been God’s chance to speak to her, to turn aside all her skepticism with a sign she could not ignore. And no such sign had come. She had entered this house unconvinced of God’s existence, had all but dared Him to show Himself to her face, and His response had been to do nothing. She was just as bewildered now as she had been at the door. What more proof did she need that the God of Diane Edwards was only a myth?

  She went to her car and drove home. She didn’t know what was happening or how any of it was possible, but she was more resigned than ever to make sense of it all without resorting to the smoke and mirrors of blind faith. She would talk to Elliott tonight, tell him everything she had seen and heard at Diane Edwards’s home. Elliott would know what to make of it. Elliott understood things she did not.

  Even things that seemed beyond all explanation.

  * * *

  Allison had been too excited to go to work. She passed on a driving assignment Uber tried to give her and went to a coffee shop to transcribe her recorded interview with Betty Marx. She wanted to start writing while everything was still fresh in her mind.

  It had all happened, apparently, exactly the way Marx had described it on Facebook. The teacher had gone batshit in a classroom filled with second graders because she believed one of them was a dead boy she’d seen buried at Forest Glade Cemetery.

  It would have been funny were it not so sad. Carrillo’s poor students must have been horrified by the experience and Carrillo herself, depending on what the cause of her breakdown turned out to be, might never teach at Yesler again. If the frantic scene Carrillo had created in her classroom wasn’t proof enough that she needed professional help, the crazy story she told everyone afterward, of car accidents and funerals that only existed in her own mind, surely did.

  Oh, yes. There was a story here.

  The teacher was the most obvious choice for Allison to interview next, but something about Marx’s description of the child—she’d used the words serene and imperturbable—piqued Allison’s interest more than everything else. According to Marx, the boy had said very little about what happened, and Allison had no idea why he would say anything more about it to her. But she was compelled to talk to him nevertheless. All she had to do was find him, with nothing but a first name to go on.

  Another driving assignment came in for her while she was still at the coffee shop, and she didn’t dare decline two in a row. Flo was already running out of patience with Allison’s propensity for squandering what little employment she could scrounge up, and Allison wasn’t anxious to give her partner anything more to grouse about.

  For an hour or so at least, solving the mystery of little Adrian’s last name would have to wait.

  * * *

  Betty Marx regretted talking to Allison Hope almost immediately.

  She had thought she was being smart, undoing the mindless mistake of sharing Laura Carrillo’s breakdown online by putting Hope off a story that could ruin Marx and Carrillo both, but instead, she had probably only made things worse.

  She had told the writer too much. Her plan had been to say very little, to admit there had been an incident in Laura Carrillo’s class yesterday but make it sound unworthy of anyone’s attention. But as her interview went on, she’d gotten caught up in the story all over again, just as she had the night before, posting to Facebook with too many glasses of wine in her. What happened yesterday was fascinating, and not as easily explained away for Hope’s benefit as Marx had wanted to make it. Drug use was often explanation enough for all kinds of bizarre behavior, but the more she thought about it, the less she could see drugs being the sole cause of Laura’s state of mind the day before. Try as she might, Marx couldn’t make a convincing case for the reporter to leave the story alone.

  Now she was looking for ways to cover her ass.

  The first step had been to tell Howard Alberts what she’d done before Edie could beat her to it. The office administrator hadn’t said anything to her face, but she’d made it known with a frown how unwise she thought Marx had been to speak to Hope at all. Edie was puppy dog loyal to Alberts and could always be counted on to keep him informed of things she felt he needed to know, especially any act committed by a member of his staff that could be viewed as an attempt to usurp his authority.

  Practically dogging Alberts’s steps into his office as soon as he returned from his lunchtime campus rounds, Marx offered the principal a brief summation of the conversation she’d had with Hope, painting the writer as a shrewd interrogator who had tricked her into revealing more about Laura Carrillo’s breakdown yesterday than she had intended.

  “Did she say who put her on to the story in the first place? Somebody here must have talked to her.”

  “I asked, but she wouldn’t say. Citing confidential sources and all that.”

  Which was exactly what Marx was praying Hope would do, should Alberts ever pose the question to the reporter.

  “We have to warn her.”

  “Laura?”

  “Yes, of course. This Hope woman will be trying to talk to her next. And if Laura isn’t ready for her. . . .”

  “You don’t really think she’d talk to her?”

  Alberts gave her a get-serious look. “You did, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, but,” Marx tried not to stammer. “I was trying to protect the school.”

  “And Laura will want to protect herself. She isn’t likely to agree with your account of things, Betty. She’ll want to set the record straight where she feels it’s warranted, and that will be a mistake, for her and for everyone else. The best thing she can do in her own defense is turn this writer away at the door and not talk to her at all.”

  Marx nodded.

  “You said Hope doesn’t know Adrian’s name. Is that right?”

  “Yes.” It was a half-truth at best, but Marx wasn’t overly concerned about it. She’d let slip only the boy’s first name, and as long as no one else at the school spoke to Hope, Marx doubted the reporter could discover Adrian’s full identity on her own.

  “Okay. I’ll give Laura a call right now,” Alberts said. “In the meantime, you start making the rounds and let the rest of the staff know this reporter’s been snooping around and we don’t want anybody talking to her. Right now, if you could.”

  “All right.” She was about to offer him yet another apology, but he already had his phone to his ear.

  FIFTEEN

  MICHAEL OPENED HIS EYES again after what felt to him like only minutes, but the alarm clock on his nightstand told a different story: he’d been asleep for almost two hours. He didn’t know what had awakened him, but he was glad for it. His sleep had been restless and fragile, perforated by bits and pieces of a dream that was joyful one minute and disquieting the next. In it, he made love to Diane and spat insults in her face, watched Adrian being born and lowered into the grave. He saw things both real and unreal. He heard Diane’s voice as she said the rosary and gave him the news: “He’s back, Michael. Our son.”

  He lay on the bed, in no hurry to go anywhere. His eyes took in the bedroom as he asked himself the same question he’d been asking
for many hours now: What did he believe? What faith in God—any god—did he have left?

  For the majority of his life, he had considered himself a good Catholic. It was what his grandmother Emma, more than anyone else, had raised him to be. He bought in to all the rituals and doctrine of the religion because of her, and even after Emma died, he’d kept on believing. Not without question, but with the resignation of a man who’d weighed all his other options and decided none of them fit him as well as the belief system he already had. He went to Mass when he felt the need, confessed his sins and asked for forgiveness, and dealt with proclamations out of the Vatican with either respect or derision, depending on how well each aligned with his conscience.

  This was who he was that day eight months ago when he’d taken the frantic, almost unintelligible phone call from Diane that would burn his world to the ground in the space of an instant.

  He’d been grateful to have his faith in the immediate aftermath of Adrian’s death. How else could he have hoped to survive it but with the knowledge he could call on an all-powerful, loving God to grant him more strength than he could muster on his own? Alone he was helpless, hurtling down a chasm of grief without end, but with the mercy and grace of God, maybe he could save himself. Maybe this day or the next, he’d find a reason to go on living.

  Michael had yet to find that reason, but he’d gone on living anyway. If peace had come in response to his prayers, it had not come fast enough. Though he had never said the words—I don’t believe in you anymore—his faith had withered in tandem with his marriage, so that now he barely knew how much of it still remained. He still went to Mass occasionally, and sometimes walked out afterward feeling something he hadn’t felt going in. But he had no idea why. Once he would have said it was the grace of the Holy Spirit he was feeling.

  Now?

  Pondering the question, Michael let the minutes roll past, his gaze assessing the minutiae of his bedroom. He was drifting off to sleep again when something caught and held his attention: a pair of brightly colored objects on top of his dresser, nestled among a cluster of cologne bottles and the remote control to his television.

  Superhero action figures. Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk.

  Michael didn’t leave the bed until he was sure he wasn’t imagining them. He made his way to the dresser and took the figures into his hands, brought each in turn right up to his face for a close inspection.

  The familiar burn mark on Spider-Man’s right calf was there. A memento from the night just over a year ago that Adrian had left the poor devil too close to the stove while Diane was making dinner.

  But the Hulk. . . . To the best of Michael’s recollection, Adrian had never owned a figure of the Hulk. And this one looked relatively new, devoid of all the scars and bruises the boy’s toys generally bore after only a week in his possession.

  Michael moved to the bathroom, superheroes still in hand, and only now spotted the extra toothbrush on the counter near the sink, and the tube of fruit-flavored toothpaste resting beside it. He’d been too much in a fog to notice them before, the shower the only thing in the room he cared to see. Now that he was taking the time to look for them, however, clues to Adrian’s presence were sprouting up everywhere.

  In the bathroom, a blue bathrobe hanging on the back of the door; on the floor in the bedroom, on the far side of the bed, a coloring book and a box of crayons; in the kitchen, Adrian’s favorite foods and drinks in the cabinets and refrigerator. The second bedroom Michael had never used as such was exactly that now: a bedroom. Adrian’s bedroom. Michael’s desk and computer, his bookshelves and filing cabinet, had all been shuffled around to make space for a small bed strewn with his son’s pajamas, a nightstand, and a dresser.

  Of course, in the scheme of Michael’s new reality, it all made sense. He didn’t know how often he had custody of his son—he didn’t even know why he and Diane had decided to separate, now that they didn’t have Adrian’s death to blame—but it was clear this was now Adrian’s home as much as Michael’s. From the look and smell, the feel of things, it had been that way for a while.

  He went back to his bedroom and quickly got dressed. It was a few minutes after two; he still had time. He found his cell phone and called Diane, told her he’d like to pick their son up from school today and bring him home to her.

  “I think that would make him very happy,” Diane said.

  * * *

  A reporter. Allison Hope, Howard Alberts had said her name was.

  Laura had finally answered one of the principal’s phone calls twenty minutes ago, and she received the news of Hope’s visit to Yesler with abject terror. Someone at the school had betrayed her; Alberts claimed to have no idea who. It had been mortifying enough to become what she was certain was a laughingstock at Yesler, among parents and staff alike, and now the whole world was about to hear of what she’d done yesterday. One reporter would inevitably turn into two, then three. . . . The school district might have ultimately forgiven her, left to handle her “nervous breakdown” on its own terms behind closed doors. But once the media got hold of the story, the district would feel compelled to let Laura go, citing the safety of the children and sending a clear signal to other potential employers that she was too high a risk to ever trust in an elementary school classroom again.

  Only after some time had passed did Laura’s sense of outrage and impending doom begin to give way to more mixed emotions. On one hand, the idea of being thrust into the public eye scared Laura to death, but on the other—who better to help her uncover the truth than a reporter? Alone, Laura was getting nowhere trying to piece together the events of the last twenty-four hours in a way that made any sense. Maybe if she spoke to this Allison Hope, wrested control over her own story while she still could, the two of them could get to the bottom of the hoax Diane Edwards was perpetrating. And oh, yes, this had to be a hoax, by any definition, because no other explanation better fit these bizarre circumstances.

  Still, Howard Alberts had made himself very clear: Laura was not to say a word to Allison Hope should the reporter contact her. Nothing good could come of going public about what had transpired at Yesler the day before, he said, so the best policy for everyone was to withhold comment. He even suggested Laura’s return to the classroom might be delayed or worse if she failed to adhere to such a policy.

  An hour after talking to her principal, Laura still didn’t know what she would do. It was damned if she did, and damned if she didn’t. Everyone thought she was crazy; others at Yesler were bound to talk, oath of silence or no, and if theirs was the only version of events Hope got to hear, how else could the reporter portray Laura but as a loon? At least in an interview, Laura could prove herself to be sane and levelheaded, posing no threat to young children or anyone else.

  In the end, she decided the question was yet another she’d be better off letting Elliott sort out for her, if he could.

  Since he’d left for work, they had spoken only once, right before she’d turned into the driveway at St. John the Baptist, but beyond her repeatedly telling him she was fine, their conversation had been painfully brief. Now she couldn’t wait to talk to him again, in the flesh. Another telephone call would not do.

  Elliott got off work today at four. Returning to the shelter of her bed, Laura turned on the TV and settled in to wait.

  * * *

  “Daddy, are you okay?” Janet asked.

  “Of course. I’m fine.”

  “Lisa told me—”

  “I know what she told you. She thinks I’m getting senile. Or I’m drinking again. But she’s wrong, and so are you for listening to her.”

  The minute Lisa had dropped him off at home after breakfast, Milton had known his older daughter would check up on him. The two compared notes about him with the thoroughness and zeal of Homeland Security agents. But he had hoped Janet would make do with a phone call. Instead, she’d left work early and sh
own up at his door around three, confronting him face-to-face so he would find it hard to lie to her. Janet was smart like that.

  “She said you think you were involved in an accident. A car accident that killed a little boy, in March.”

  “I’m tired,” Milton said, lowering himself onto his recliner. “I don’t want to talk about this right now.” And it was true. He was tired and didn’t want to talk about the accident. Not now, maybe not ever again.

  “Daddy, you have to tell me. Is that what you said? Is that what you really believe?”

  He couldn’t understand it. She was talking just like Lisa had, like somebody who didn’t know what he’d done, like it was all just a story he’d made up in his head.

  “I believe it because it’s true. I don’t know why you and your sister are acting like it didn’t happen.”

  “Tell me about it. Tell me everything you told Lisa. Please.”

  She sat down on the couch across from him, leaned forward with her hands clasped in front of her like one of his doctors. When she set herself like this, there was no moving her, she was just like her late mother in that way, so he spared himself the wasted breath of further argument and gave her the short version, describing the accident and its ensuing impact on his life in only enough detail to make it clear it was real. It had happened.

  “No, Daddy,” Janet said, shaking her head. She was on the verge of tears.

  “What? What do you mean, no?”

  “I mean it didn’t happen. None of it. I don’t know where you got the idea it did, but it didn’t, I swear to you.”

  “You’re crazy. Both of you. You’re both crazy!”