Night Road

“Of course. Have you even been listening to me?”

“Lexi is your granddaughter’s mother,” Dr. Bloom said gently. “You tell me you used to put a lot of store in motherhood.”

Jude reeled back. “I need to get out of here.” Without waiting for a response, she headed for the door. As she wrenched it open, she heard Dr. Bloom say, “She was eighteen years old, Jude. Think about that.”

Jude slammed the door behind her.

Twenty-two

Jude called Miles and asked him to meet her at Zach’s; then she drove straight down to the ferry dock. Her timing was impeccable. They were loading the boat when she got there.

The thirty-minute Sound crossing seemed to take forever. She tapped her fingers nervously on the steering wheel.

She wasn’t sure about anything except this: she had to get to Grace. All she wanted to do right now was gather her family together, as if her arms were the safe place they’d once been. What was left of her family, anyway, what Lexi had left of her family.

Off the ferry, she drove through town slowly, her eyes peeled for a dark-haired girl in Bermuda shorts and a drugstore T-shirt. She thought she saw Lexi a dozen times, and she stomped on the brakes so often that horns honked behind her.

She veered onto Turnagin Way and drove past the elementary school to the day care. There, she got out of the car and strode up to the pretty little A-frame house that was the Silly Bear Day Care. Inside, she found an empty playroom full of brightly colored plastic tables and bean bag chairs.

She went out to the backyard, where a dozen kids were playing on Lincoln Logs–type swing sets, in sandboxes, and in a playhouse. She took it all in at once, and then began looking for Grace, who she knew would be alone.

“Hi, Jude,” said the day care’s owner, Leigh Skitter. They had known each other for years. Leigh’s youngest son had played soccer with Zach. “You’re here early.”

“I don’t see Grace,” Jude said, realizing too late that she hadn’t said hello and that her voice was sharp.

“She’s with Lexi,” Leigh said. “She sure looks different, doesn’t she?”

Jude felt a chill go through her. “You let her see Grace?”

Leigh seemed surprised by the question, or maybe it was Jude’s raised voice. “She said you’d agreed to it. And there’s no restraining order in place, is there? I mean, I know she doesn’t have custody, but we all knew she’d come back someday…”

Why hadn’t Jude thought of this scenario? Leigh Skitter had known Zach and Lexi in their high school days. She’d said on several occasions how much she liked Lexi. No doubt she even felt a little sorry for her. So many people did—when Dateline did their segment on the show, plenty of people piped up to say that Lexi’s punishment had been too harsh. Yeah. Poor Lexi.

Jude felt the start of panic. Why hadn’t they gotten a restraining order against Lexi, just in case? At the very least, she should have told Leigh and the school that Lexi was not to be allowed near her daughter. Didn’t full custody give them that right?

“Jude? Is something wrong? Zach never asked me to keep Grace away from her mother.”

Jude pushed past Leigh and ran across the sawdust-strewn backyard. At the childproof gate, she manipulated the latch and kept going, racing through the trees toward the beach. There, she shuddered to a halt.

There were kids everywhere, laughing and playing. The day care’s other supervisor was over by the driftwood, watching the kids.

Calm down, Judith.

She scanned the shoreline.

There she was—a little blond girl alongside a dark-haired young woman.

Lexi.

Jude ran forward, almost falling in her sudden fury. She grabbed Lexi by the arm, spun her around.

Lexi paled. “J-Jude.”

“Hey, Nana,” Grace said. “This is my new friend.”

“Grace. Go over to Tami,” Jude said tightly.

“But—”

“Now,” Jude yelled.

Grace flinched at the harshness of the command. Her little shoulders hunched forward and she shuffled away, her head hung low.

“You have no right to be here,” Jude said.

As Lexi looked up, Jude noticed several things at once: Lexi was hard looking, almost stringy, but she was still very young. And when she noticed the girl’s frizzy, curly, untamed hair, she thought of Mia saying, she’s like me Madre, is that coolio or what? Jude stumbled back at the memory. She shouldn’t have come here, shouldn’t have approached Lexi. She wasn’t strong enough. “Go,” Jude said weakly. “Please…”

“I needed to see her.”

“And you have.” Jude felt frail enough to drop to her knees. It took concentration just to keep standing.

“She’s lonely,” Lexi said, looking toward Grace, who stood apart from the other kids and stared back at them.

“What do you expect?” Jude said bitterly. “She’s grown up in a broken family.”

“I told myself I’d see that she was happy and I’d leave. But she’s not happy.”

Jude opened her purse, reached in for her wallet with shaking hands. “I’ll pay you to go. How much? Twenty thousand dollars? Fifty? Just tell me how much you want.” Lexi’s face changed at that, but Jude was shaking too hard to focus clearly. A dull thudding squeezed her chest and she had the terrible thought that she might pass out. “A hundred thousand. How about that?”

“I gave her to Zach,” Lexi said. “Gave her. Do you know how hard that was? Can you imagine?”

“Losing a child?” Jude said. “Yes, Lexi. I know how it feels.”

“I did it because I loved her. And because I trusted you and Zach and Miles to be her family.”

Jude saw the censure in Lexi’s eyes, and she knew it was warranted, and that only made it hurt more. “We are her family.”

“No. She’s afraid of you, did you know that? She says you never hold her or kiss her. She wonders why you don’t love her.”

Jude felt exposed suddenly; fear bled up inside her, bubbled out until she was shaking so hard she dropped her purse. “How dare you?” But the words had no bite, no venom.

“I trusted all of you.” Lexi’s voice broke. It was the first evidence of real emotion, and Jude seized it.

“Zach has given up everything for Grace. Everything.”

“You mean USC, don’t you? Your Holy Grail. You never cared that he was happy, just that he did what you wanted him to.”

“That’s not true.”

“He loved me. But that meant nothing to you.”

“You killed his sister,” Jude said.

“Yes,” Lexi said, her mouth trembling. “And I have to live with that every day of my life. I did everything I could to make it up to you and Zach and Grace, but there is no making it up. I gave you my freedom and my daughter—and still you want more. Well, fuck you, Jude. You don’t get any more. Grace is my daughter. My Mia. And I want her back. My lawyer filed the petition today.”

As Lexi walked away, Jude just stood there, eyes stinging, throat tight, hearing Lexi’s voice say over and over again, my Mia.

Once Lexi started walking down the beach, she couldn’t stop. She was going in the wrong direction; her bike was parked in the public area at the end of the dead-end road. But she couldn’t turn around, couldn’t watch Jude bundle Grace up and take her away, as if it were dangerous for Grace to know her own mother.

A cool summer breeze plucked at her hair. Her eyes watered in the wind. Still, she put her hands in her pockets and kept walking. She turned and looked back down the beach. Jude was still there.

Lexi wanted to be tough and hard, to feel that she was justified in coming here and wanting her daughter back, and she did feel it—justified, for all the reasons she’d given Jude. Mostly because the Farradays had had a chance to make Grace happy and they’d failed.

But Lexi’s guilt and remorse, always floating inside of her, were rising now. She had destroyed the Farradays. In the beginning, she’d hoped that her years in prison would heal them somehow, but she knew better than anyone that time and distance didn’t heal you. It had been naïve to assume that Grace could be raised as Mia and Zach had, in the bosom of love and happiness. So in a way, it was Lexi’s fault that her daughter was unhappy now.

All of that was true, and all of it weighed heavily on Lexi, but there was something else too, a lightness that she hadn’t felt in years. It was hope—a bright beam in the blackness of her guilt.

She could lift Grace up. She could be the kind of mother she’d dreamed of having. Maybe they wouldn’t have money or a big house or a new car, but Lexi knew better than most that love could be enough. Eva had proved that. She hated to hurt the Farradays—and Zach—again, hated it to her marrow, but she’d paid enough for her mistake.

The decision anchored her. Wiping her eyes, she looked around, surprised to see how far she’d walked. Behind her, the public beach was a gray comma of sand tucked tightly against dark woods. She couldn’t tell if people were still there or not.

She started to turn back when a flash of hot pink plastic caught her eye. She paused, looked up the beach.

It was the playhouse, with its fluttery pink pennant and mock stone turret.

She didn’t really make a decision to go that way. Rather, she just found herself moving toward it, walking, walking, and suddenly she was standing there, on the sandy beach, in the shade of a giant tree, looking at a little girl’s playhouse.

But in her mind, she was on another beach, years ago, standing under a different tree, in the glow of distant house lights, with her best friend and the boy she thought she’d love forever.

We’ll bury it.

A pact.

We’ll never say good-bye.

How shiny their naïveté had been, like polished silver, glinting in the darkness. She had never believed in anything as much as she’d believed in the three of them at that moment.

She bent down, peered through the small, plastic-shuttered window to the castle’s interior. Several Barbies lay in plastic beds, their clothes scattered around. An open Dr. Seuss book lay beside an empty juice box.

Here was where Grace played alone.

Lexi let her fingers trail atop the flat, mock stone roof as she moved into the yard. The grass was lush and green—summer hadn’t sapped its color yet or turned it crisp. A worn deck jutted out from the log cabin, clearly a construction afterthought. In one corner was an old picnic table with two benches; beside it a plastic-tarped barbeque. Along the split-rail fence line, roses grew wild, their leggy green branches climbing over one another like adolescent boys offering bright pink flowers to a girl.

The house—Zach’s house—was a rustic log cabin with a roof that sprouted moss along its seams. Gray stone chimneys bookended the place, seemed to hold it together. She remembered again the party they’d come to here, as juniors. That was before alcohol had taken over their class. Back then, only a few of the kids had been drinking. Mia and Lexi had spent most of the night on the beach, just the two of them, listening to music coming from behind them. Zach had been dating Emily Adamson then, and Lexi remembered how sharp her longing for him had been.