The Winters in Bloom (32 page)

“She didn’t mean any harm,” Courtney said. “She’s only seventeen and a little impulsive, but she’s a good person.”

“This is such a relief,” Sandra said. It was the third or fourth time she’d said this, but her voice still sounded a little tight and airless, as if her feelings hadn’t caught up with her words.

Courtney’s head throbbed as she thought about what her former mother-in-law and David and his wife had been through. She couldn’t help feeling that if she hadn’t told Hannah that her mother was dead, none of this would have happened.

“One other thing.” Courtney rubbed her left temple. “I hope the police won’t have to get involved . . . With Hannah, I mean. I think that’s a very bad idea.” She paused. “She may be afraid to drive up to the house if she sees a police car. Could you stress this to David and his wife?”

Sandra said she would. Then she said, “Thank you, Pumpkin. You have done so much for us with this phone call. David is going to be so grateful.”

Sandra always called her “pumpkin,” because she had red hair, but she smiled hearing it this time. And the part about David—it would be great if it turned out to be true. If only her ex-husband would see her as a decent person. A wrecked-up mess maybe, especially now, when she’d torn off every nail on her left hand on the drive to the Ocean Nights, but at heart, not that bad.

The lowlife next to her at this bar, now,
he
was a bad person. First, he kept bugging her while she was trying not to panic as she kept thinking about Hannah’s note; then he ordered her a drink she didn’t want; and now he was telling her how uptight she was after she’d ordered another Diet Coke.

“I can’t deal with this.” She scooted her stool as far away from him as she could go without crowding the gray-haired woman on the other side. “Please, I have to do something.”

If only she hadn’t canceled her phone Internet service when she lost her job. If only there was someplace else with Wi-Fi around, a normal place like Starbucks or McDonald’s. The Wi-Fi connection here was slow of course, but she’d finally loaded Amy/Hannah’s Facebook page. Amy’s friend list had always been hidden; Courtney had originally liked that, because it meant no one would know that she’d friended Amy. But now her wall was hidden, too. There was nothing except her name and her profile picture: a sea turtle.

“I’m not going to leave you alone until you drink that margarita,” the creep said. “A pretty gal like you deserves to have some fun.”

A pretty gal like you?
The guy was older than she was, but he couldn’t be more than fifty. The last person who’d called her a “pretty gal” was her grandfather.

He was clearly drunk, and probably a regular at the fabulous Ocean Nights bar. On a normal day, when Courtney wasn’t stressed beyond belief by the fact that she might have just told Sandra something that wasn’t true, it would be bad enough. But this was no normal day. She was going to have to break into Hannah’s Facebook account. Of course she wasn’t some hacker mastermind, but she didn’t need to be. In one of her emails, Hannah had said something about her password, some hint. Unfortunately, Courtney no longer had those emails, but she might be able to remember what Hannah had said if this jerk next to her would just shut up.

“You gotta tell me why you won’t drink it,” he said. “Come on, I bought it just for you.”

She got out her ChapStick and bathed her lips. This was why she hated bars. If you didn’t drink, you were treated like there was something seriously wrong with you. Which there was, actually, but she wasn’t about to tell this stranger the truth about why she hadn’t touched alcohol in almost fifteen years, since the night her baby died.

Joshua had been asleep in his crib when she took out the bottle of scotch. The doctor had told her she couldn’t have any more pills, and she hadn’t slept for seventy-two hours. Not for one minute. She had a terrible ache inside her skull. Her eyes felt like they were bleeding. She thought if she didn’t sleep soon, her brain would explode. So she sat at the kitchen table and quickly downed one shot after another, until the noises finally stopped. The noises were part of her “postpartum psychosis,” according to the doctors at the hospital, but whatever the cause, they were unbearable. Tiny noises, like papers being blown across a room. A buzzing that seemed so real, like a bee had flown into her ear, and she dug into her ear canal until it bled, trying to get it out.

She didn’t remember bringing Joshua into bed with her, but the police said she’d passed out and rolled on top of him. Her own body had killed her baby.
You should never take a child into bed with you when you’ve been drinking!
The officer told her this as if there would be more children in Courtney’s future: happy, healthy children who would be saved if only she understood.

She put her ChapStick back in her pocket. Her hands were trembling, but she wrapped them under her knees and forced herself to concentrate on the present. If only she could figure out Hannah’s password, she could find out if there was somewhere else the girl might have decided to go.

The first time she’d read Hannah’s note, she thought it was clear that Hannah was taking Michael back to David and Kyra:
He’s been crying and I think he needs to be with someone who loves him. Don’t worry, we’ll be home soon.
But something was off. Why would Hannah say “someone who loves him” rather than “his family”? And would she really have considered her aunt’s house
home
, given how mad she was at Kyra?

The lowlife was still watching her. “Don’t tell me you’re in AA.”

“I am,” she said, wondering why she didn’t think of this before.

“Why are you in a bar, then?”

He sounded whiny, but he looked a little suspicious. When she didn’t offer any explanation, he stood up so quickly that he stumbled, and rushed away like she was an AA counselor about to perform an intervention on him.

Without his constant prattle, it didn’t take her long to remember what Hannah had said about her password. It was when they were just getting to know each other; Courtney had mentioned that she’d forgotten her password again, that she was so paranoid about privacy that she always used some impossible to remember combinations of letters and numbers. Hannah wrote back that her password was only six letters, and it was easy to remember because it was a word.
I’m a really superstitious person. I know it probably sounds weird, but I really believe if I type this word enough, it will bring me luck.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t much of a hint. A lot of the obvious choices—
luck, lucky, happy
—weren’t six letters. She tried
Hannah;
then she tried
turtle.
When those didn’t work, she just sat there, staring at the screen, because she knew if she kept putting in the wrong password, the account would lock up.

The bar was noisier than before, but at least no one was bothering her. She didn’t notice that the bartender was annoyed with her for taking up space with her laptop and drinking only Diet Coke. She watched the cursor blinking for what felt like a long time—and then she felt stupid, because the answer was so obvious.
Of course
Hannah’s password was the word
Mother.
And the girl had capitalized it because it was a tic with her, even when it wasn’t grammatically correct.
Are you going to see your Mother today?
She treated the word like it stood for something sacred: the good Mother who would never leave you, who would never hurt you, who would even protect you from the devastating truth that you were never good enough to be a mother yourself.

Sandra was the only person Courtney had ever met who came close to the kind of mother Hannah was dreaming of. Only Sandra had been willing, when Courtney came out of the hospital, to stand with her as she faced the blighted ruin of her life. And now, oh God, she had stupidly given Sandra and David false hope that the little boy was on his way home. Because, as it turned out, Hannah was not driving to Mt. Airy. In fact, she’d planned this part of her trip before she left Missouri. Why she hadn’t mentioned it on the phone, Courtney had no idea. But she knew exactly why the girl had taken Michael with her, even if her original kidnapping of him had been an impulse. And she knew why she’d said they were going home, though after reading all the messages, she felt almost positive that Hannah was setting herself up for another crushing blow.

Since Courtney had found out that “Amy” was really just a teenager, she’d been forced to rethink everything about their brief, intense relationship. In retrospect, there were so many signs that the person writing those emails was very young. Courtney felt a little foolish, but what bothered her more was the sense that she’d failed to be responsible. “Amy” had frequently alluded to something traumatic that had happened to her last year. She was vague about the details, but she often talked about going to a “shrink,” and she clearly needed one:
A few months ago, I took a kitchen knife and cut my wrists. I hope you’re not shocked. I guess I just couldn’t take being me anymore.
Courtney had thought she was doing a good thing by reassuring her that she wasn’t shocked. How could she be, given what she’d tried to do to herself after Joshua died? However, knowing that a seventeen-year-old girl had done something like this was very different and yes, shocking—and Courtney couldn’t shake the feeling that she should have known. If only she’d been the adult for a change and protected this kid. If only she hadn’t made it so much worse by killing the girl’s dream of finding her mother.

She wrote down the address where Hannah was going, put ten dollars on the bar, and headed out to the parking lot. She threw her laptop in the backseat and climbed into her car. Her jaw was aching but she couldn’t stop grinding her teeth. She was dreading calling Sandra again: dashing their hopes, having to explain all the things she’d left out the first time about why Hannah had done this, but mainly she was worried about Hannah and David’s son. She desperately wanted to believe the two of them were all right, that the little boy was safe with Hannah, but how could she be sure when Hannah might not be safe with herself?

TWENTY-SEVEN

B
y the
time Kyra and David discovered where their son was going, the police had been gone for hours. Detective Ingle had called off the investigation after Kyra had twisted the truth to get him to believe that her niece had contacted them and Michael was absolutely fine. She had to promise to bring Hannah by the station tomorrow. “I’m going to have a talk with her about what she did,” the detective said. “Make sure she understands she’ll be in serious trouble if she ever pulls another stunt like this.” Kyra mumbled agreement, whatever it took to get him off the phone. Then she sat down with her husband and his mother, and they waited and waited until Courtney called for the second time, with the depressing news that Hannah was not bringing Michael home.

Now they were on the Pennsylvania Turnpike heading west, still at the beginning of the 180-mile trip to Maryland. David had insisted on driving, though he was just as exhausted as she was. But, as he said, Kyra had had a very rough night. She’d had multiple blows, one after another: discovering that Hannah, the first child she’d loved, had taken her baby; hearing that Hannah was very angry with her, and then hearing the reason—because Kyra hadn’t told Hannah that her mother had died.

Over the years Kyra had had many sleepless nights, worrying that something might have happened to her sister, but every time she screwed up her courage to look in the social security database of deaths, she’d come away able to breathe again because Amy wasn’t there. Of course it had occurred to her that Amy had gotten married and changed her last name, and she’d often wondered if Amy might have changed her first name, too, to make it impossible for Kyra to find her, but it had never crossed her mind that Amy had changed her social security number. In her entire life, Kyra had never done anything illegal other than take Hannah to Amy, but that was back when she was young and dumb and incapable of believing that her friend Zach would actually have her arrested.

She’d been wrong about Zach, and apparently, she’d been wrong about David’s ex-wife. Sandra had told them how much Courtney had done to help. She’d broken into Hannah’s Facebook account and figured out where the girl was taking Michael. Another shock for Kyra, as it was the last place she would have expected to be driving. The one place she would never have voluntarily gone, if her niece hadn’t forced her to.

It was after midnight, the highway was almost empty, and David was making good time. Courtney would be there first, because she’d had a head start, but they would all be there by three or three thirty at the latest. Courtney had told Sandra that she was going for Hannah sake’s, that Hannah had confided in her about some problems she was having. Kyra had barely thought to wonder why Hannah was involved with David’s ex-wife or even to worry about her niece. She was focused on Michael, but she was also haunted by the news about her sister. All those years of thinking that Amy was punishing her, feeling that
this
was the worst thing that could happen, and yet the truth had turned out to be far, far worse. It was shocking and yet brutally ordinary. The reason she hadn’t seen Amy wasn’t some intricate grudge played out over time. For Amy, time had ended in 1996, the year that she died.