The Winters in Bloom (29 page)

“Thank you,” Kyra said. “I majored in math. I hope I learned how to separate my feelings from the facts.”

“Then tell me this, if you had to choose Zach or Amy to be the primary caretaker for little Hannah, which one would you choose?”

“I wouldn’t. I think Hannah deserves to have both of them in her life.”

“Certainly joint custody is desirable whenever possible. The court has been very clear about that. Since both Zach and Amy seem to be fit parents, I see no reason why they wouldn’t be given joint legal custody, which simply means that both of them can be involved in decisions in Hannah’s life. And joint physical custody makes sense as well. However, the bulk of physical custody is usually given to one parent, especially in the case of a child Hannah’s age. This parent we call the ‘residential custodian,’ and the other parent is the ‘non-primary custodian.’” She paused. “So my question still stands. Which one would you choose to be the primary caretaker?”

For the rest of her life, Kyra would remember this moment. Of course she had no idea how important her answer would become, how it would sway Wendy Jenkins’s recommendation, which would turn out to be the sole criterion the second, less-conservative judge would use to decide her sister’s fate. Even so, she took it very seriously. She tried to consider only what was best for Hannah.

Did she have dreams of being in a family with Zach and the baby she adored? She would have said no and meant it, but deep down, she already felt that they were acting like a family. They shopped together, cooked together, played with the baby together, even sang Hannah a lullaby that Kyra had invented for the little girl to the melody of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”
Go, go, go to sleep, my sweet little one / happily, happily, happily, happily, you have all our love.
Neither Zach nor Kyra could carry a tune, but that just made it better. They were so much more alike than he and Amy ever were.

But did she think that if Zach no longer had custody of Hannah, her relationship with him would suffer? Not at the time, but later, she thought some part of her must have been worried about this—and she prayed that part had had no role in answering the psychologist’s question.

She wanted to be objective. She wanted to be fair. Oh, she wanted so many things. She wanted Amy to be happy again. She wanted her sister to be stable, and normal, and a much better mother than their own mother had been. And she wanted Zach to love her. She was so desperate for him to look at her the way he’d looked at Amy. She thought she would never need another thing if only she could go to sleep each night snuggled up to Zachary Barnes.

She was barely twenty-two years old. She had no idea what would be best for Hannah forever, but for now, it seemed clear that Zach was the better parent. Amy traveled with her band at least one week a month. And her obsession with Gregory hadn’t diminished despite all his broken promises to leave his wife. Whenever she wasn’t talking about Hannah, she was talking about him: when he was coming over, when he didn’t show up, when he acted like he loved her, when he seemed like he was losing interest. She had so many problems, and Zach just didn’t.

Kyra couched her answer in those terms. Only for now. And the psychologist nodded. Kyra hoped that nod meant that custody orders weren’t hard to change. She hoped that maybe by the time Hannah was two, they could switch it and Amy could have her for a year or so. By then, Amy and Gregory’s relationship might have settled down. Or Amy would have a new guy who wouldn’t put her through the emotional hell of dealing with his marriage.

It was a little over a month later when the judge ruled against her sister. Kyra would always remember that day, July 12, as one of the worst of her life. Though Amy knew what Kyra had told Wendy Jenkins—it was all in the report, unfortunately—she didn’t scream or call her sister a betrayer. In fact, she said “it’s not your fault” so many times that Kyra knew she was trying to convince herself of that.

Zach had to be happy with the results, but Kyra hadn’t had a chance to talk to him. She stayed with her sister, who took to her bed when Gregory claimed he had to be with his family that evening, for a barbecue. It was the first of many gigs Amy would cancel for emotional reasons. By the time Amy finally fell asleep, it was after midnight, and Kyra was exhausted from trying to calm her down. But she still rushed over to Zach’s apartment to spend the night. She had her own key, so she wasn’t worried about waking Hannah. She hoped Zach might be awake, but if he wasn’t, she planned to wake him. Or perhaps she would just slip into his bed. She hadn’t decided.

When she got there, she discovered how right she’d been about Zach being careful during the custody case, afraid that if anyone knew he had a girlfriend, it would affect the outcome. He was so cautious that he hadn’t even told her that he’d fallen in love with Terri, the woman who babysat Hannah during the day, while he and Kyra were at work.

Though Zach and Terri were only sitting on the couch together, holding hands, she instantly knew she’d been a fool. Indeed, she was so full of self-loathing that she almost threw up. Zach said something vaguely apologetic, but she couldn’t find her voice. She ran out of the apartment and drove back to her sister’s condo, which she’d left unlocked because she’d planned to be back in the morning, before Amy woke up.

She didn’t start to cry until after she’d crawled into bed with her sister. Amy didn’t fully wake up, but she put her arm around her and said the same thing she used to say when they were kids, sleeping together to hide from imagined monsters or their real losses. “I’m here. It’s okay. I’m here.”

TWENTY-FIVE

A
ll evening,
David kept thinking he heard Michael’s voice coming from the backyard. Again and again he’d headed outside, clutching his flashlight though it wasn’t yet dusk, to look for his son. He walked the perimeter of the fence and checked the latch on the gate; he stared into his wife’s tomato garden and pushed back the bushes behind the green ash tree. When he came back inside, he was too depressed to care that neither of the police officers would look him in the eye; he didn’t even care when he overheard the taller one whisper, “He’s losing it.” But now, standing alone in the hall outside his wife’s study, he wondered if it could be true; if he was, in fact,
losing it.
How else to explain his sudden conviction that his wife would not have fallen apart if his mother hadn’t told her Courtney’s version of that night?

Kyra had been holed up with Sandra for almost an hour—and crying for what seemed like a very long time. Thanks to the strange acoustics of their old house, the sound could be heard all the way in the kitchen, where the two officers were still stationed by the coffee machine. When the older one suggested that David might want to check on his wife, he’d headed for the stairs, relieved to have an excuse. But when he opened the door of the study, what he witnessed made him back out quickly without making a sound. To say he was surprised to see Kyra curled up on his mother’s lap was an understatement. His wife was a very reserved person. Though she was openly affectionate with their son and with David himself, with everyone else, including Sandra, her embraces had always been a bit formal. Yet there she was lying in his mother’s arms, with her face buried in Sandra’s neck, sobbing like a desolate child.

On some level he was aware that Kyra’s odd behavior didn’t have to mean that Sandra had told her, but his mind was unable to hold on to this. Now it seemed obvious why Kyra had wanted to be alone with his mother. Earlier, when she’d said
there are things you haven’t shared with me
, David had refused to discuss it. But Sandra wouldn’t refuse. Sandra would tell Kyra the truth, for Kyra’s sake but also because she’d think that David would be better off if his wife could help him with his “unresolved feelings” about the past.

He wondered why he didn’t feel furious with his mother, why he didn’t feel anything but more panicked. Kyra’s crying seemed to be quieting down, but the idea of being there when she came out, full of questions—no, he couldn’t bear it, not while his son was missing. He turned down the hall and rushed to the nearest bathroom, the only place where he knew he could be alone until he figured out what was happening to him. The nearest bathroom was Michael’s, and his son’s white terry cloth robe was still lying in a heap on the rug from the child’s morning bath. David picked it up and clutched it against his chest as he crouched down on his knees.

He thought about his conversation with Detective Ingle earlier. The man had kept coming back to Courtney’s possible motive, even though David had already explained that his ex-wife hated him. Wasn’t that enough of a motive?

She’d taken his son because she was trying to hurt him, obviously. It was the same reason she’d befriended his mother. The same reason she must have told Sandra about the phone calls that night and anything else she thought would make him look bad. Admittedly, he couldn’t explain why she’d waited until now to take Michael, but even when he was married to her, he couldn’t have explained most of what she did. She’d told him she was unstable on, what, their third date? Actually, the descriptions she’d used for herself were
hypersensitive
and
a
drama queen.

At the time, he’d just felt bad for her. She was upset about an argument she’d had with her family at Thanksgiving, but also upset that she kept “overreacting” to things. They’d ended up having a long talk about what it means to overreact. David had tried to convince her that women were often belittled for their intense feelings, while guys were celebrated for theirs. He wasn’t being politically correct—or trying to get her into bed—he believed this. One of the things he hated most about his father was how Ray liked to say women were “crazy bitches who got upset over nothing.” This from a man who treated his own attacks of self-pity as the deepest expressions of sadness since Tolstoy.

David would never have used the phrase
drama queen
. Then and now, he thought it was sexist. But after they were married, when she was about four months pregnant, he found himself wondering if some of Courtney’s reactions were in fact overreactions, just as she’d said. She’d talked her parents into paying for a cell phone service for herself and David so she could reach him anytime. This was the mid-nineties; no one he knew had a cell yet, and he heard his share of comments about his wife having him on a very short leash. But that wasn’t what bothered him. Courtney had said the phones were necessary in case something went wrong with her or the baby. Fair enough, except that her definition of “something wrong” was nothing like his. He tried to remain sympathetic no matter how often she called, even when she interrupted his historiography lecture because she was hysterical about a form rejection letter she received for a story she’d written. He reminded himself of what his mother had said about first pregnancies being very hard, especially if the woman was sick. And Courtney had moved away from all her friends and her family. He just needed to be more patient.

Joshua was due on July 30, but he was born early, on July 8. Though it was summer, David was in the middle of teaching three classes at a local community college, tutoring five high school students to take the SAT, and writing revisions for a long, complex paper on the role of economic causality in historical theories of work. Luckily, his mother came up to help with the infant, though that caused some problems, too. Courtney called at least once a day to complain that Sandra was driving her crazy. He tried to be sympathetic, though his mother’s only real crime seemed to be that Joshua was so much easier when she was taking care of him. The one time he hinted that the baby might be picking up on how tense Courtney was, she snapped, “Are you’re saying I’m a bad mother?” “No,” he said quickly. “I’m just saying you and I are new at this.” He kept his voice gentle, though his jaw felt tight. Most of the time when Courtney called, she would end up apologizing, but he didn’t feel like hanging on, waiting for her mood to change. He had ninety-two tests to grade before the end of the week. He was so stressed that it was hard not to be jealous of his grad school friends who didn’t have colicky babies and upset wives and ninety-two students waiting for grades, friends who did nothing but study all day and hang out at bars most nights.

All of it—the classes, the tutoring, and the revisions—was over by the beginning of August. He had a full month off before the fall semester began, which was a good thing, as his mother had to go home and back to work. She promised to come up again as soon as she could, but in the meantime, they would be on their own.

After only a day and a half, they were already overwhelmed. Joshua was cuter than any baby David had ever seen, so cute it seemed impossible that David had had anything to do with creating him, yet he was exhausting to take care of, primarily because he seemed to hate sleeping. Because he was three weeks premature, he was born very small, only 5 pounds and 2 ounces. David assumed that had to be part of the reason he woke up every hour and a half all night long, screaming to be fed. Courtney was breastfeeding, not because she wanted to, as she frequently admitted, but because she was afraid the pediatrician, and especially her mother, Liz, would disapprove if she didn’t. David wasn’t sure why she refused to try pumping milk so he could handle one of the nightly feedings. She also wouldn’t discuss why she’d decided to stop waking Joshie during his long afternoon naps, though Sandra had told them they needed to do this until the baby learned to save his longest continuous sleeping period for the nights. David suspected that she was too exhausted to think straight, but it was becoming a vicious cycle. The more tired Courtney was, the more reluctant she became to listen to suggestions, much less let him make any of the decisions. So he did the only thing he could think of. He changed diapers when she told him to, grabbed another spit-up cloth if she snapped her fingers and pointed at her shoulder, took Joshie for walks when she yelled that the crying was driving her insane. Whatever she wanted.