Catching Air (9 page)

Chapter Six

DAWN TUCKED HER NEWLY
darkened hair behind her ears as she walked through the doors of the Apple Store. The wind had picked up in the last hour or so and the air held a bite; she needed to find a thrift store so she could buy a coat. It would push the total amount she’d spent to close to eight hundred dollars, including the twenty-nine bucks she’d been paying nightly for a bunk in a youth hostel, but she was keeping track so she could repay it someday.

“Can I help you?” A young guy greeted her, his index finger poised over an iPad.

“Just looking,” she said, slipping past him. The store was busy, but she found an empty computer with a stool positioned in front of it. She sat down and pulled up a fresh Google search. Typing her name felt a little risky, but it was a chance she had to take.

She waited, her heart thrumming, but the search turned up only two hits: the brief newspaper obituary for her parents she’d paid for years earlier, and the investment banking firm’s employee list. Maybe her crime wasn’t big enough for the papers to pick up, given all the murders and robberies out there—or maybe the firm hadn’t reported it to the police. Perhaps it was being kept quiet in order to prevent clients from panicking.

She erased her search history. Now it was time for her big gamble. She was going to write an e-mail to John Parks, the man Tucker had pretended was his father. She’d tell him everything, including the fact that she still had almost all of the money. She’d offer him her entire inheritance as penance. She’d be fired, of course, but maybe they’d let her walk away.

They could probably find a way to trace her e-mail if the police were involved, but it seemed safer than sending an actual letter with a postmark, especially since there would be no way for her to get a reply to a physical piece of mail without giving away her location.

Her fingers shook as she called up her personal e-mail account, and she had to retype her password twice.

Someone slid into the seat beside her, and she reflexively hunched over, trying to hide the screen. It was just a guy in a pair of dark hipster glasses almost identical to the ones Dawn now wore. His were probably cosmetic, too. The guy was too busy staring at his own screen to notice hers.

Dawn reached into her pocket and pulled out the folded piece of paper containing her confession. She started to type the first line—
Please read this all the way through to the end
—into a new message, then hesitated.

A flurry of new e-mails were waiting in her in-box. Most were junk or from concerned friends with subject lines like
Are you okay?
There was one from her landlord—her rent was overdue—and another, similar message from Visa.

And one was from Tucker.

She recoiled as violently as if snakes were striking out of the computer screen.

“You okay?” the guy next to her asked.

She nodded. “Just . . . thought I saw a bug.”

“You mean a mouse?” the guy said, laughing as he pointed to the one attached to her computer.

She swallowed against the nausea rising in her throat and opened the e-mail, which was dated and sent the night that she’d fled from New York.

Dear Ms. Zukoski,

I’m writing this to ask that you please stop sending letters and cards to my home. I was alarmed and disturbed to find you on my doorstep this afternoon. It’s obvious you’ve developed a fixation on me for some reason, but let me assure you, it’s not reciprocal.

I don’t want to have to go to Human Resources to report your harassment or the fact that you must have accessed company records to get my home address, but if this continues, I will.

You obviously need help. It’s clear you are on a dangerous path. I expect your assurance that you will comply with my request, and if I don’t hear back from you with your explicit agreement, I will be forced to take action.

Sincerely,

Tucker Newman

It was a code. He was threatening her.

There was one unread message just beneath it, with the subject line
Mr. Wonderful.
Her nickname for Tucker. He was the only one who knew about it.

With shaking fingers, she clicked on it. It was from an unfamiliar address. It contained a single line:
I will find you.

She logged off the computer and burst out of the store, looking wildly up and down the street, half-expecting Tucker to leap out at her at any moment. He must have saved the dozen or so notes and cards she’d mailed to him. Of course they’d never corresponded through their office e-mail accounts, because of Tucker’s “father.” She’d written flirty, sweet things, like “Your eyes light me up inside” and— oh, God—“I can’t wait to watch your cute butt when you walk down the hall at work tomorrow.”

He was using her love letters to craft an alibi. Maybe he’d already told John Parks that Dawn was obsessed with him, about his concern that she seemed to be becoming unhinged.

She couldn’t contain her nausea any longer. She found a trash can by the street corner and leaned over it and threw up. She straightened and fumbled in her purse for a tissue, her mouth tasting foul and her body shaking.

“You okay, lady?” A Boston cop was approaching her. He looked at her closely. Did he recognize her from some APB? The police could have already traced her here.

The cop was frowning. Maybe he thought she was on drugs. Oh, God, if he searched her purse and found the brick of cash . . .

She nodded. “I’m fine. I’m just . . . pregnant.”

It scared her, how quickly the lie formed on her lips. Who was she becoming?

“Ah,” he said, a smile slicing across his beefy face. “I don’t know why they bother calling it morning sickness. My wife had all-day sickness, too. She carried around these ginger chew things she got at a health-food store. Maybe you should get some.”

“Good idea,” Dawn said.

He continued on and she felt her legs nearly give out, but she forced herself to begin the nearly three-mile walk back to the hostel, hoping the cold air would clear her mind.

Tucker was sealing off the few avenues she had left. She visualized him sidling up to other assistants—her former work friends—as he delivered mail around the building, speaking her name and asking if they’d heard the news:
She’s nuts . . . Oh, you haven’t heard? Yeah, she had this crush on me . . . really creeped me out . . .

The firm would never be safe for her again. And neither would anywhere else, if Tucker was still chasing her.

A car blared its horn, and she leapt backward. She’d almost walked into traffic.

For a wretched, fleeting moment, she contemplated doing it: closing her eyes and stepping off the curb and into oblivion. But she thought of her parents, and knew she couldn’t. How heartbroken they’d be to know her life had turned out this way.

She thought about Tucker’s swollen eye, and the small man with the cold smile. Maybe he owed money to drug dealers, or gambling bookies. He’d invested so much time and energy into duping her; he was probably growing more desperate with every passing day.

Dawn wrapped her arms around herself as she walked, ducking her head into the wind as it picked up. It was dark now, and she was heading through a seedy section of town. She passed by a liquor store, and a few men sitting on the stoop hooted at her, but she ignored them.

She finally reached the hostel and went to the women’s dorm room and crawled into her bunk. Two girls from England were giggling and chatting as they got ready to head out on the town. They wanted to meet American men, and dance, and flirt the night away.

Be careful,
Dawn yearned to tell them. But they were vibrant and happy; they expected the future to hold only good things. They hadn’t even looked at her when she came in.

Maybe that was why she’d fallen for Tucker’s lies so easily—because he’d seemed to really see her, rather than skimming his eyes past her the way others did. For as long as she could remember, she’d been the girl standing against the wall at school dances, the one chosen last for kickball. Once in elementary school—it must have been third or fourth grade—a substitute teacher had taken over the class. After circle time on the rug at the front of the room, the sub had called the names of the students from the roster one by one, dismissing the kids so they could go back to their desks to read.

The students were listed alphabetically, which meant Dawn was last. She was always last, with a name like Zukoski.

Because she was sitting to one side of the sub—or, let’s face it, because she was Dawn—the sub didn’t notice she hadn’t called Dawn’s name. She simply stood up and went to her desk and began marking papers while Dawn sat there, unsure of what to do, hearing the titters of her classmates as she drew in her arms and legs, trying to make herself smaller.

Now she turned her head into the pillow to muffle her sob. The worst part, the most pathetic, awful part, was that she missed Tucker. She hated him and felt shamed by him, but she couldn’t erase the memory of how he’d held her, his breath warm against her ear as he’d whispered that he loved her. She hadn’t felt so safe or special since her parents died.

It had been so wonderful, even for a brief stretch of time, to feel her loneliness lift and believe she was loved again.

• • •

Kira stirred nutmeg into a pot of simmering mulled cider and wondered how the day had slipped away.

She’d spent more than an hour talking with Jessica this morning—or, technically, listening—before Jessica settled on dinner entrées: salmon filets with an option of pasta primavera for the vegetarians.

“I won’t change my mind again!” Jessica had said, giggling, and Kira was trying to forget the fact that Jessica had made the same promise, using those precise words, during their last conversation, when she’d settled on filet mignon with vegetable risotto.

Kira hoped the others liked fish and pasta, because she’d be making variations of them all week, searching for recipes that would marry the elegant with the easy.

She’d also gone to the Union Street grocery store in town, because Peter had updated their online reservations to include a line for guests to check if they’d like late-afternoon snacks and a hot beverage for an extra fifteen dollars per person, and two couples who were staying tonight had opted for the snacks. It was only sixty dollars, but every bit helped: She and Peter needed to start earning money, fast. Their health insurance was exorbitant, and she didn’t want to scrimp on coverage, since they’d need good care when she became pregnant.

She sighed. Last night she’d reached for her birth control pills in the medicine cabinet as they’d gotten ready for bed, and Peter had stilled her hand with own.

“Leave them there,” he’d whispered as he kissed her neck, his usual prelude to sex. She’d felt herself freeze.

“What’s wrong?” he’d asked.

“Nothing,” she’d said, trying to unclench her body. She could always take a pill later. She kissed him back, but this time he pulled away.

“You don’t seem as happy as I thought you’d be,” he’d said. “Don’t you like living here?”

For a moment she’d wished she’d married the type of guy who’d be happy to have sex under any conditions. Why did she have to get the sensitive one who wanted to talk first?

“No, I do,” she’d said. “It’s just that I’m not sure it’s the right time for us to get pregnant. Shouldn’t we wait a little while?”

“We’ve
been
waiting,” Peter had said. “You wanted to put it off until you made partner. That was our deal.”

“Well, I’m not a partner yet,” she’d said, trying to make a joke even though speaking those words made her flinch. But Peter hadn’t laughed.

“I just feel like we should get the B-and-B off the ground before we get pregnant,” she’d said. “What about waiting until we’ve been here a year?”

He’d been silent then, and she’d thought he was considering it, perhaps seeing the wisdom in her careful planning. But when he’d finally spoken, his voice was tight.

“Do you really want to have kids, Kira?” he’d asked. “Because I’m beginning to wonder if there will ever be a good time.”

He’d gone to bed then, yanking the covers up around his neck, and even his breathing had sounded angry.

She’d stared at his rigid back, knowing Peter yearned to create a family of his own, perhaps to make up for the one he’d lost. He’d probably been ready to become a father since shortly after his mother died. But he didn’t appear to understand that something seemed to be physically holding her back—something even stronger than fear.

The lean times after her father left had been bad enough. But once things got so bad that Kira actually went to her father’s house to ask him for money. She was in high school by then, and she and her dad were back in touch, mostly through phone calls on her birthday and at Christmastime, or quick visits. She’d never accepted an invitation to his home, though. Stepping over the threshold of the place he shared with a new family represented a line she didn’t feel able to cross.

He sent child support, but Kira’s mother had been hospitalized for nearly a week after catching pneumonia, and they didn’t have good insurance. Kira had seen her mom staring at bills stamped with a threatening-looking red ink, and she’d made a quick decision: If ever there was a time to ask for help, this was it.

She found her dad’s address on an old envelope and drove there in her mother’s beat-up Hyundai after cheer practice. It was early evening, and unusually warm out. Daffodils bloomed in his yard. She still remembered those bright pops of yellow.

He didn’t live far away, only about thirty minutes, but it may as well have been another country, because the difference between their homes was so dramatic. He lived in a cheap row house, but she could smell chicken roasting as she walked up the front steps. The front door was open, with just the screen separating her from the family inside, and light was pouring out. The steps were swept clean, and there was a welcome mat by the door. She could hear a child laughing.

As she lifted her hand to ring the bell, she overheard her father, just a dozen or so feet away, reading a storybook to his new stepdaughter—by now he was on his third marriage—and making a growling voice for the princess. Kira sank down onto the steps, listening. She could hear a woman’s low, melodic voice calling the family to dinner, and the little girl squealing. Kira imagined her father was flipping her over his shoulder.