Evidence of Life. Barbara Sissel Taylor

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СКАЧАТЬ few months after they married, she had been gathering clothes from their bedroom to do a load of wash, and when Nick had found her emptying the pockets of his jeans, he’d been upset. It had startled her to have him pull the pants out of her grasp, to have him say he would wash his own damn jeans and stomp out of the room. Within a minute or two, he’d come back.

      His mother had done it to him, he’d said. She’d been furious when Nick’s father, Philip, had disappeared, and she had taken out her anger on Nick. He was no more trustworthy than his father or any other man, and as long as he lived in her house, she’d felt she had a right to search his belongings and pry into his personal business whenever she felt like it. If Nick had objected, she’d cut off his privileges, made his life hell. Abby had already known by the time Nick shared this with her that Louise was a strong-willed, difficult woman with impossible expectations. She had known Nick’s relationship with his mother was complicated, and that he was conflicted about it. She’d sensed it was a source of pain, even resentment. That day she’d gone to sit beside him on the edge of their bed. He’d taken her hand, and it had been as if he was grateful she was there. Abby remembered telling him she couldn’t imagine the kind of pressure he was raised under. He hadn’t answered, and she hadn’t pressed him about it. It just wasn’t in her nature to pry.

      Now Abby pulled open the top middle drawer of Nick’s desk and passed a shaky hand over the contents. Even with so much at stake, she felt somehow disloyal.

      “Mom?”

      Her glance bounced as if on a string, finally settling on Jake in the doorway.

      “What are you doing?” he asked.

      “I didn’t know you were coming home.”

      “You sounded pretty freaked the other day when you called about the DNA.”

      “Dennis just left.”

      “Are you okay?”

      “I’m fine, honey. You didn’t have to come home. I don’t want you worrying about me.”

      “I’m not. I’ve got a chemistry final tomorrow; I came here to study. It’s too loud in the dorm.” He sat in one of the wing chairs. “What are you looking for anyway?”

      Abby ducked her chin. She thought of saying it was none of his business.

      “Mom?”

      “Just there might be something, you know? To say where they were going exactly.”

      Jake dropped his keys onto a small table between the chairs.

      Neither of them spoke. Morning sunshine from the window behind Abby heated her shoulders. On an ordinary morning in May in her old life, she would have been out in the vegetable garden, maybe with Lindsey, maybe weeding around the tomato plants she’d set out. How long ago was that? March? There wouldn’t be much of anything left of them now.

      Jake propped his ankle on his knee, picked at his sock. “I doubt Dad would leave evidence where you could find it.”

      “Evidence?” She looked sharply at him. “What do you mean?”

      “Nothing, except if somebody’s up to something and they don’t want you finding out, they aren’t going to leave stuff lying around so you can.”

      “What could he have been up to?”

      Jake stood up, flinging his hands. “How do I know? It’s not like he ever discussed anything with me.”

      Abby leaned back and crossed her arms. “I’ll be glad when you and Dad iron out your differences.”

      “There’s not much chance of that now, is there?” Jake said.

      Abby swiveled the chair around and stared out the window. “I guess you can give up if you want to. I can’t stop you.”

      “Mom, Sheriff Henderson didn’t take DNA samples so he could match them to somebody alive.”

      “I know that, Jake.”

      “Do you? Because it sure doesn’t seem like it to me.”

      * * *

      Abby began losing time. She would waken on the sofa assuming it was morning only to discover it was three o’clock in the afternoon, or she would find herself in the barn with no memory of having gone there. Every day she would try to follow a routine, but then she would come to and find herself balled up in a corner of Lindsey’s room or standing outside the door of Nick’s study, and her face would be wet with tears and she would not know how long she had been there.

      One morning in the first week of June, two months after the flood, she was huddled on the kitchen floor by the stove clutching a wooden spoon when her mother appeared. Abby squinted at her. “Mama? You didn’t drive on the freeway, did you?”

      “Never mind that, sweet.” Abby’s mother pushed lank strands of hair from Abby’s eyes. “What are you doing?”

      “Making oatmeal, the long-cooking kind. It’s what I should have fixed for them before they left. It’s healthier than French toast.” Tears flooded Abby’s eyes as if more of her tears could make a difference. As if anything she’d done or left undone could have prevented her car from rocketing off the road in wet slick darkness with Nick and Lindsey inside it. As if cooked-from-scratch oatmeal made from steel-cut oats packed with natural goodness and touched with honey would bring them back.

      Abby’s mother pulled her up from the floor by her elbow—Abby was always mildly surprised at her mother’s wiry strength—and led her upstairs and into the bathroom she and Nick had shared. While Abby undressed, her mother drew water in the oversize tub and tested it with the inside of her wrist. “Jake called me,” she said, adding bath beads to the water, stirring them with her hand. “He says he can’t come here anymore.”

      She turned away, and Abby slipped off her robe and stepped into the tub. She drew up her knees.

      Her mother opened a cabinet, running her eye over the assortment of linen stacked inside. “It’s hurting him to see you this way, honey. He’s found a job near campus; he says he’s staying there with friends this summer.”

      “I don’t blame him,” Abby whispered. “I can hardly stand to look at him either.”

      Her mother found a washcloth and handed it to Abby, and while she busied herself at the vanity, Abby soaped the cloth and moved it over her breasts and down her torso. She lifted each foot, soaped her calves and in between her toes, and as she worked, the tight icy core of despair in her belly thawed a bit, and the sense of her desolation shallowed in the warmth and dampness of the steamy lavender-scented air. She let out the water, turned on the shower and washed her hair, and when she was finished her mother handed her a towel.

      She helped Abby out of the tub and into her robe. “I’m taking you home, Abigail,” she said, sitting her down on the vanity stool, drying her hair, “and I won’t have an argument about it. I spoke to Charlie. He’ll look after things, the horses and so forth, for a while. You can’t go on this way. You just can’t.”

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