No River Too Wide. Emilie Richards
months. Just.”
“I’ve wondered every single day since you told me you were pregnant.”
“I could have told you myself if I had been allowed to call.”
Janine heard the note of disapproval, but she understood. “Right after you left, your father did everything but hire a detective to find you, Harmony. If you had called while he was there? He would have started searching all over again, beginning with the number you called from. That’s how I found you. The people who helped me get away also helped me trace the last number you used, and eventually they traced you here.”
“I was careful never to call when he was there.”
“You couldn’t know for certain. After you left he took to dropping in on me unannounced during the day, sometimes two or three times, to make sure I was doing what he told me to. I memorized that number, and I was able to delete it from our caller ID that last night we talked. But I might not always have been able to do that before he got to it.”
“Why didn’t you leave him right then? If things were getting worse? If it was possible for things to have gotten worse?”
Too much was at stake. Janine couldn’t hedge the truth. She saw the moon peeking over a stand of trees, between two mountaintops, and she watched it for a moment before she looked back at her daughter.
“Because if I had just walked out the door without a good plan, a foolproof plan, he would have killed me. He still might if he finds me, and that’s why I can’t stay longer than a night. Because if your father traces me here—and he still could, no matter how careful I’ve been—then he might hurt you and the baby, too.”
Her hands were trembling. Harmony looked down at the spoon grasped in her right hand and watched it wave gently side to side. If she had needed proof she was shaken to the bone by her mother’s arrival, there it was. Of course, Janine’s surprise appearance was especially dramatic, considering that just moments before Harmony had believed she was dead.
In the living room Lottie was laughing as she and Janine played peekaboo. The sound was silvery and unfettered. Harmony loved to make her daughter laugh. She was never sure which of them was the most delighted afterward.
Gripping the spoon tighter, she stirred the milk and sugar she’d managed to get into each mug; then, better safe than sorry, she decided to carry them one at a time.
Despite good intentions, she didn’t move. Her mother was here, but only for the night. And once she left? While she hadn’t said so exactly, Janine had made it clear that once she moved on, she would have little or no contact with her daughter.
All because of the devil who had fathered her.
Harmony caught a glimpse of herself in the glass cabinet front, and for a moment she stared. Did she look anything like Rex Stoddard? She had never seen any outward resemblance, except her coloring. Buddy had looked more like him, a rounder face, one eye that drifted subtly despite two costly surgeries, a high forehead that, at least for Rex, had climbed slowly higher as he began to go bald.
Of course, her brother had died well before he had the chance to lose his hair.
She didn’t want to think about Buddy.
Looks were one thing, but more frightening, did she have any of her father inside her? She had been angry enough at the way he treated his wife and children that she had, as a girl, lain awake at night fantasizing ways to rid the world of Rex Stoddard. They had been childish thoughts, and she had never acted on them, but was that the way her father’s sickness had begun? Had he, too, lain awake at night plotting revenge and destruction?
Rex had never been able to forgive even the smallest slight. A gesture, an offhand remark, an opinion he didn’t share. Rex held on to those things forever and waited. When he finally had the opportunity to get even, he took full advantage of it.
Harmony knew that most of the time she wasn’t that way. She knew from living with her father just how damaging revenge was to the soul. She had witnessed demonstrations again and again, and each time she’d vowed never to be like him.
Sadly, though, in one way they were alike, because there was one person she would never be able to forgive and didn’t even want to try. She was grateful beyond measure that her mother had not died in the explosion that had leveled her childhood house, but a part of her was sorry her father hadn’t been locked inside and unable to escape.
Had he been, she and her mother could finally stop living in fear.
More laughter erupted from the living room, and she knew she had to stiffen her backbone and start a discussion about the future. She gripped the mug handle. Then she turned the corner of her tiny kitchenette and stood in the wide doorway as her mother whisked a blanket from her face and cried “Peekaboo!”
Janine was so thin. That was the first thing Harmony had noticed, followed by shock at how old she looked. She was only forty-five, but she looked at least ten years older, her skin sallow, her hair salted with gray and pulled back in an unflattering low ponytail. She walked like someone in pain, each foot placed carefully in front of the other, as if she wasn’t sure the ground wouldn’t rise to swallow it. Now she was smiling at her granddaughter, but even that smile seemed tentative, as if admitting she was happy might bring down disaster on all of them.
Janine looked up and saw her. “Need help?”
“No, you take this one. I’ll get mine.”
“Lottie’s okay in the bouncer while we drink it?”
“She’ll let us know if she’s not.” Harmony went back for the second cup, then joined her mother on the sofa. Before she sat back, she sprinkled Cheerios on the bouncer tray so Lottie could practice feeding herself.
“Just the way I like it,” Janine said, joining her against the cushions and turning so she could eye her daughter. “You didn’t forget.”
“I haven’t forgotten anything, Mom. I missed you so much.”
“I thought about you every day, but I...” Janine sipped a little tea before she finished. “The only thing I could be proud of was helping you get away.”
“Please tell me what happened. You said you were planning to leave yourself, only not so soon?”
Janine sipped and didn’t answer. Harmony hoped she was figuring out how to tell her story.
Finally she put the mug down on a side table. “I wanted to leave for years. Now it seems like forever, only that’s not true. There was a time...”
“When you...loved him?” Harmony had trouble getting the words out.
“I did. Even despite, well, everything.”
Harmony waited for her to go on, but Janine changed tack. “Then a time came when I knew if I stayed, he...” She shrugged.
“He would kill you.” It wasn’t a question.
Janine gave a short nod. “But it wasn’t just that. I realized I was shrinking. Literally. Because I was always hunched over, trying to protect myself. In other ways, too. Nobody knew me anymore. After you left, for a while your father got more and more possessive and paranoid.”
“I didn’t know he could get more of either.”
“It seemed to multiply every week. I couldn’t go anywhere or do anything without him, not pick up a library book or a quart of milk. My set of car keys went missing one day, and I never saw them again. And even leaving the house with him was rare. Strangers looked right through me when I did, like I wasn’t there.”
Harmony’s throat was raspy from unshed tears. “Nobody who ever really knew you would have looked through you.”
“I’m