Safe Keeping. Barbara Taylor Sissel

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СКАЧАТЬ in both hands. “Do you know how much I love you?” Her eyes were swimming with tears.

      Lissa nodded; her own throat knotted.

      “Sometimes, I think we get so focused on Tucker, we forget about you. Forget to tell you how special you are. Please say you know how much we love you.”

      Lissa slid her palms over her mother’s hands. “Of course I do, Momma.”

      She gathered herself and gave Lissa’s cheeks a final pat. “Don’t pay any attention to me. I just need to hear from your brother. Once he’s home, and he and your dad have mended their fences, we can get back to normal.”

      “What’s normal?” Lissa asked, and she was glad when her mother smiled.

      * * *

      She stopped outside her dad’s office door on her way down the front hall. “Daddy?” she called softly, but he didn’t answer her, and she didn’t call out again. Passing the dining room on her way out of the house, her path was diverted when she caught sight of the collection of family photos arrayed across the top of her mother’s baby grand piano. Some were casual shots that her dad had taken back when she and Tucker were little. Others were formal studio shots. She picked one up, a five-by-seven framed in wood. It was of the four of them sitting on a sofa. Her mother was holding Tucker on her lap, and Lissa was leaning against her daddy’s good leg, smiling, gap-toothed. Tucker was in shorts and had a Mickey Mouse Band-Aid on one chubby knee.

      Setting the studio portrait down, she picked up another, a shot her father had taken that her mother had framed in silver. It was from Easter Sunday. Lissa remembered the year was 1981. Tucker turned three that year, and she turned seven. They were outside on the front porch, dressed in their church finery. Lissa’s outfit, a ruffle-hemmed sheath made of pink dotted swiss, with pink patent-leather Mary Janes and a purse to match, had been a favorite. Her mother had corralled her glossy, straight, dark hair into a French braid that hung midway down her back and ended in a tied puff of pink chiffon. Lissa wore it in a French braid to this day, to keep it out of her face, especially when she was working or painting. Growing up, Tucker called the braid her donkey tail to annoy her. He’d grabbed it and held it to his chin, letting the end dangle, making a long beard of it, teasing her. She’d wanted to clobber him.

      She touched the tip of her finger to the image of his face, then put the photo back. Looking at it left her feeling some nostalgic mix of happy and sad. She guessed it was because life had never been as simple again after that year.

      * * *

      She was almost to the interstate when her cell phone rang.

      “Where are you?” Evan asked when she answered.

      “Why? What’s wrong?” She knew what he would say. Still, her heart paused when Evan said, “Tucker was here, at the office, and not fifteen minutes after he left, the police showed up, looking for him.”

      She put on her signal, turned right into a gas station and parked. “Do you know where he went?” she asked, and she almost couldn’t hear her own voice over the hammer of her pulse.

      “He didn’t say. He wanted to see you, and I said you were at your folks’, but I don’t think he’ll go there.”

      “No.” Lissa pressed her fingertips above her right eye where the pain had settled into an ache dulled by the medication her mother had given her.

      “He’s driving some girl’s car, an old Volkswagen. He says his Tahoe broke down on the freeway last night, and she helped him out. He said he’s been in Austin.”

      “That’s nowhere near—”

      “Where the dead woman was found. Yeah, it’s a relief.”

      “Can he prove it?”

      “I don’t know. He didn’t say, and all the cops would tell me is that they wanted to question him, but not what it was about.”

      Lissa rested her head against the seatback. “Well, it could be anything. An unpaid speeding ticket. Lord knows he’s gotten a slew of those.”

      “Yeah,” Evan said, because, like her, he wanted it to be that simple. They both did. And maybe it was.

      “I wonder if he’s called Mom and Dad,” she said.

      “I don’t think so. He lost his cell phone.”

      “Figures. Is he getting another one?”

      “He says he’s busted.”

      “You didn’t give him any money.”

      “No, and to his credit, he didn’t ask.”

      “Did I ever tell you you’re my hero?” Lissa ran the tip of her finger along the lower curve of the steering wheel, biting her lip, trying not to cry.

      “Yeah,” Evan said, “but I can always go for hearing it again.”

      They decided Lissa wouldn’t call her parents until she knew something concrete. She was on her way to the office when her cell phone rang again. Glancing at the caller ID, she saw her own home phone number, the landline, and her heart faltered.

      “Tucker?” she said when she answered, because it could only be him.

      “That’s me,” he said.

      “What are you doing in my house?”

      “Hiding?” He laughed.

      Lissa didn’t. “Not funny. So not funny,” she repeated, and the breath she drew bumped over the renewal of tears, the hot mix of relief, aggravation and outright fury that jammed her throat. If Tucker were here, she would pull off the road, she thought, and kill him.

      “Can you come home?” he said. “We need to talk.”

      “What is it, Tuck?” Something in his voice deepened her sense of disquiet. Even when he answered that it was nothing to worry about, she wasn’t mollified. Instead, what rose in her mind was the image of the two of them from that long ago Easter Sunday in 1981, and this time it brought with it a colder, darker memory of how quickly life could change, just the way it had then, in the space of one single, terrifying afternoon.

      3

      THE I-45 INTERSTATE that bisected the heart of town wasn’t really an interstate at all given that the entire length of it, some 294 miles, fell inside Texas borders. It was anchored on its northern end by the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex and on its southern end by the bay-front city of Galveston. The drive down to the beach wasn’t bad. If you started out early enough, it made a nice day trip. As children, Lissa and Tucker went with their parents, and when Lissa was older, high school age, she went with her girlfriends.

      The last time was twenty years ago, the weekend after her high school graduation. She wouldn’t ever forget it because it was the same weekend she realized Evan wasn’t just some guy who worked for her dad. That weekend she went with a girlfriend to a party in a bay-front condo where cocaine was heaped in a bowl on the coffee table. It scared the shit out of her, but her girlfriend was all over it.

      Lissa СКАЧАТЬ