She had been thinking exactly that. She’d wondered if going to the park would help purge some of the pain she still felt inside. After Missy’s murder, she’d never walked through the park again. She took the long way to school in the morning. She hated walking alone, so she tried to blend in with some of the older girls in the neighborhood. She’d wait just inside the front door until the girls passed her house, then she’d run out and follow them. They ignored her, but that was okay. She felt safer just because they were there.
“Do we have time?”
“We have a few minutes. Since we’re here-if you want to.”
She nodded and directed Zack to continue west, instead of turning north onto the freeway.
It surprised her how much things had changed, and how much they’d stayed the same. Everything seemed more. More houses, more stores, more businesses. But the streets were the same, and she had no doubt how to get home.
Home. She’d never thought of her house as a home, not after Missy was gone.
A couple of turns later, Olivia said, “Stop.”
Zack pulled over and looked at the houses on either side of the street. “Did they build over the park or something?”
She shook her head, her chest tight, her mind thick with competing emotions. She pointed to a house directly across the street, its brick front stately even though the house wasn’t large, the white shutters freshly painted, the drapes open to bring in light.
Her mother had never opened the drapes after Missy died.
“That’s where we lived.”
To her, the house had been lifeless, large, and forbidding, cutting off warmth and light as well as love.
She stared at the modest two-story on Eucalyptus Street. The magnolia tree in the front, a mere sapling in her youth, had matured, its trunk thicker than her embrace, the dark chunky leaves and huge white flowers arching stiffly over the freshly mowed lawn. A grouping of three white-trunked birch trees gathered at the southernmost corner of the house, partially shielding a healthy clematis that had reached the top of an eight-foot trellis. Meticulously groomed rosebushes in every shade from white to peach to vibrant red lined both sides of the property line. Her father had spent at least three hours a day tending his yard.
The new owners must have appreciated that, because they kept the garden thriving.
Her heart pounded so loudly she could hear its thump-thump vibrating in her ears. Her vision narrowed until the beautiful garden disappeared and all she saw was the hostile face of her childhood house. The upstairs windows glaring at her, accusing her. The shut door like pursed lips. Her mother’s rage and gut-wrenching grief.
She hated coming home.
It was the house itself that terrified her. She still heard her mother’s sobs, as if the walls themselves had recorded five years of maternal agony to replay every anguished cry for her.
Olivia’s shaking hand reached for the door handle. “Let’s walk,” she said.
Zack jumped out and opened her door for her, extending his hand for support and comfort. She felt like such an invalid, an albatross. She saw the house as it was in her memory, not as it was today.
But standing there, staring, she saw that some things had changed.
There was a minivan in the driveway.
A tricycle on the front porch.
Children’s laughter flitting through open windows.
As she watched the door opened and two small children, maybe four and five, ran from the house. They giggled, the sound sliding over Olivia’s ears like an oasis in the desert.
The giggles brought back memories of before. Before Missy died and the world changed. When they used to run down the street to the park, laughing and teasing each other. When they planned Daddy’s birthday party or surprised Mommy with flowers. When they played with dolls and set up house.
The mother, an attractive brunette with wide hips and a smile on her lips, quickly followed her children.
“Hold it!” she called as she locked the door.
The kids stopped in their tracks, a boy and a girl. “Please can we get ice cream?”
“If you’re good at the store,” she said.
“We’ll be good! Promise!”
The mother smiled wide, hoisted a large purse over her shoulder, and slid open the minivan door. The kids scrambled into the car and she buckled them into car seats. Moments later they drove away.
“Liv?” Zack said softly, using his thumb to wipe away tears she hadn’t known were there.
“I’m glad the house found a family.” She squeezed his hand. “Let’s walk. The park is around the corner.”
They rounded the corner and faced the park, the memory of Missy’s abduction so vivid Olivia could feel the bruise on her face from Driscoll’s assault. It had healed before they knew for certain Missy was dead.
She walked up to the memorial plaque the city council had erected a year after Missy’s murder and ran her fingers over the recessed letters.
Melissa Anne St. Martin Memorial Park.
The rickety metal jungle gym had been replaced several times over the years. The current bright red-and-yellow play structure had three slides, a bridge, and a pole to slide down. Four separate horses were cemented into the foundation under the bark so children could gallop in place.
The trees were triple the size, in height and width.
Bark had replaced sand.
The swings were gone.
How many families who enjoyed this park knew who its namesake was? How many people remembered that a little girl had been abducted at this spot?
“Let’s sit,” Zack prompted, urging her toward a bench in the middle of the park.
Zack’s presence was comforting, like being wrapped in a down blanket in the middle of winter, snow falling all around. She’d always felt so cold, so alone, but with Zack she didn’t feel bleak, and her loneliness was fading.
“They took away the swings,” she said. “I used to love the swings. I always wanted to go higher.”
“My sister loved the swings, too. When she was a kid,” Zack said.
“How did Amy die?”
Zack didn’t say anything, and for a minute Olivia wondered if she’d overstepped an invisible barrier between them.
Then he said, “She was killed in a drug bust.”
“She was a cop, too?”
“No. She was a recovering drug addict.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
Zack had never spoken about Amy to anyone. It hurt too much. But Olivia would understand, and it felt right to tell her everything.
“Mae died when Amy was fourteen. I was a rookie cop and moved back to Mae’s house as her guardian. Amy had a lot of built-up anger. I’d left the house when I was eighteen, a borderline hoodlum. I was hanging out with the wrong guys, didn’t want to go to college or get a job or really do anything except race my bike and hang out.
“When I found out about my mother, I did a lot of soul-searching and knew I didn’t want to end up like her, caring only about myself. I felt helpless to bring back the lives of the two people she killed. Alcoholism is an illness, but dammit, I felt she should have had more control over herself.”
Zack looked out at the kids playing, small children because it was a school day, and the mother who watched them. Neither he nor Olivia had had a “normal” childhood, but nowadays, what was “normal”? Maybe it was a feeling, the sense of being loved and cared for, more than a structured environment. He had been loved and well cared for, even without his mother.
Olivia had not.
And in many ways, neither had Amy.
“Mae and Amy butted heads constantly. Mae didn’t want Amy turning into her mother, and Amy had our mom up on this pedestal. I’d made a big mistake early on. I never told Amy what really happened with our mom; I didn’t want to hurt her. I wonder if I’d been honest at the beginning if things would have been different.”
“The what if scenario.” Olivia squeezed his hand. “I know that one well.”