“You guys got any vodka?” Jackie asked.
Claire was convinced that happy marriages were only really appreciated by those who’d been married, badly, already. She’d met Jay, her first husband, at Yale Law School, and at the time he’d seemed such a good match. He was good-looking, seemingly easygoing (though in reality wound tighter than a clock spring), tall and blond and slim. He’d paid her the kind of attention no man had really paid her before, and that alone-for an insecure young woman whose father had abandoned the family when she was nine (she’d been in therapy; she recognized the issues)-was almost mesmerizing. Jay was as career-oriented, as hardworking as she was, which she’d mistakenly thought made them compatible. After her clerkships, when she was hired to teach at Harvard Law School, he’d moved to Boston to take a job at a high-powered downtown firm, and also to be with her. They were married. They worked, and talked about work. On the weekends Jay would unwind by getting roaring drunk. He also became abusive. He was, it turned out, a deeply unhappy man.
Though she was about to turn thirty, neither one of them was ready to start a family. Only later did Claire realize that her reluctance was an early-warning signal of a bad marriage. When she’d gotten pregnant by accident, Jay started drinking regularly, on weekdays, then at lunchtime, then pretty much all the time. His work suffered, of course. He didn’t make partner. He was told to begin looking at other firms.
He didn’t want a child, he said. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to be married to her. He admitted he was threatened by this high-powered woman he’d married. By the time Annie was born, Jay had moved in with his parents in Austin, Texas.
Here she was, a young star on the Harvard Law School faculty, a great success by most conventional measures, and her personal life was a train wreck. Without the help of her sister, Jackie, she didn’t know how she’d have made it.
Jackie, and a guy named Tom Chapman, the investment adviser Jay had chosen to manage their small but growing portfolio of stocks. Tom became a friend, a support, a shoulder to cry on. When Annie was six months old, Jay, the daddy she’d never known, was killed in a car accident. Drunk, naturally. And Tom Chapman had been there, at Claire’s house, almost nightly, helping her through it, helping make funeral arrangements, counseling her.
Five months later, Claire and Tom started seeing each other. He’d nursed her back to emotional health, forced her to go out to Red Sox games at Fenway Park and Celtics games at the old Boston Garden. He explained to her the mysteries of basketball, the fast break and the pick-and-roll. When she was morose, he wheedled her with jokes, mostly bad ones, until she laughed at their badness. They’d go for picnics in Lincoln, and once, when they were rained out, he set it up on the carpet of the front room of his South End apartment, with picnic baskets stuffed with sandwiches and macaroni salad and potato chips. Tom was as emotionally attentive as Jay had been unavailable, distant. He was gentle and caring, yet at the same time fun-loving, with a mischievous streak she adored.
And he loved Annie. Was in fact crazy about her. He would spend hours playing with Annie, building castles out of blocks, playing with the big wooden dollhouse he’d made for her. When Claire needed to work, Tom would take Annie to the playground or the pet shop or just walking around Harvard Square. Annie, who didn’t understand what had happened to her real father, was at once drawn to him and instinctively resentful of him, but by the time Claire had fallen in love with Tom, Annie had too. A year and a half later Claire and Tom were married. Finally she’d found a man to build a life with.
All right, so the first husband had been a mistake. There was an old Russian proverb Claire had read once and never forgotten: The first pancake is always a lump.
She brushed her teeth twice with a new baking-soda-and-peroxide toothpaste, but her mouth still tasted like an ashtray. How come it never used to bother her when she smoked a pack a day? Tom hated it when she smoked and had gotten her to quit.
A little woozy from the vodka she and Jackie had drunk, she settled into bed and thought.
Where could he be right now? Where could he have gone?
And why?
She picked up the phone to call Ray Devereaux, the private investigator she often used. The dial tone stuttered, indicating that there were messages on their voice mail.
Nothing unusual about that, but maybe Tom had left a message. It made a certain sense: only the two of them knew the secret code to access their voice mail.
Then again, if the FBI was really monitoring their phones, they’d hear anything she did.
She speed-dialed voice mail.
“Please dial your password,” invited the friendly-efficient female automaton voice.
She punched the digits.
“You have two messages. Main menu: to hear your messages, press one. To send a message-”
She punched one.
“First message. Received today, at six-fifteen P.M.” Then a woman’s voice: “Hey, Claire, long time no speak. It’s Jen.” Jennifer Evans was one of her oldest and closest friends, but she liked to gab, and Claire had no time for it now. She punched the number one to get rid of the voice, but instead it started the message from the beginning. Frustrated, she sat there listening but not listening to Jen’s long and involved message, until finally Jen wound it up, and then the friendly female automaton gave her the option of replaying or erasing or forwarding a message, and she erased it, and the next one came on.
“Received today, at seven-twenty-seven P.M.” Then a male voice, Tom’s, and her heart jumped.
“Claire… honey…” He was calling from someplace out of doors, the sound of traffic roaring in the background. “I don’t know when you’re going to get this, but I don’t want you to worry about anything. I’m fine. I’m… I had to leave.” A long pause. The throaty snarl of a motorcycle. “I-I don’t know how much to trust the security of this voice mail, darling. I don’t want to say too much, but don’t believe anything you’re being told. I’ll be in touch with you one way or another, very soon. I love you, babe. And I’m so, so sorry. And please give my little dolly a great big hug for me. Tell her Daddy had to go away on business for a little while, and he’s sorry he couldn’t kiss her goodbye, but he’ll see her soon. I love you, honey.”
And the message was over. She played it again, then saved it by pressing two, then hung up.
Alone in their bed, she began to cry.
CHAPTER FIVE
She woke up, reached for Tom, and remembered.
A bit hungover from the booze, she made breakfast for Annie and herself, a four-egg omelet, nothing else in it or on it, but it came out okay, which was nearly a miracle. Tom was the family’s master chef, and eggs were pretty much the outer limit of her culinary ability. She flipped it onto Annie’s favorite plate, then cut it neatly in two, taking half for herself.
“I don’t want it,” Annie said when Claire set it in front of her. She was still in her pajamas, having refused to get dressed. “I don’t like eggs like this.”
“It’s an omelet, honey,” Claire said.
“I don’t care. I don’t like it. I like it the way Daddy makes it.”
Claire inhaled slowly. “Try it, honey.”
“I don’t want to try it. I don’t want it.”
“We’re going to share it, you and me.” Claire pointed to the omelet half on her own plate. “You see?”
“I hate it. I want it like Daddy makes it.”
Claire sat down in the chair next to Annie’s, stroked her incredibly soft cheek. Annie turned her head away sharply. “Babe, we don’t have any more eggs left, so I can’t make you scrambled eggs like Daddy does.”