The last secret_ a novel - Mary McGarry Morris [57]
“Mom.” For a moment all she could say. “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry,” she surely must have said. Sorry for everything, she meant. All the lies and disappointment. And poor Mr. Blanchard, though she couldn't say it then.
“Just come home. Please. Please, come home.” That, she remembers with the same urgent clarity of her mother's voice. Dusk when he dropped her at the bus station. Her mother wired money ahead for the ticket. And for food along the way. A few days after she got home, her mother insisted she write him a thank-you note. Imagine the etiquette of a proper thank-you note from a fugitive, fleeing a crime scene. Her stomach turned writing it. She was too ashamed to tell her mother much of anything. Just that Eddie Hawkins had turned out to be a lot different than she'd first thought. And that there'd been a fight. In his call, Tom had alluded to it, so she had to.
“Did he hurt you?” her mother asked.
“No.” She cried.
“Should I make an appointment with Dr. Reisman?” Might she be pregnant?
“No!” She didn't think so.
Her mother must have mailed the thank-you note. Where to, though? It was never mentioned again.
And so it's always the same. Hazy, unfocused. She'd been so young, and certainly intoxicated, drinking all day in the brutally hot car. In needing to forget, had the details slipped away? Or been altered to suit her conscience? Secrets, dreamed so many times, the dream is now both defense and barrier. Her head pushed down, the car door opening; then Eddie shoves him back, the man swings the pipe, and Eddie knocks it away. But now whose hand wields it? Eddie's? Or hers? No. No. She wasn't capable of such an act. Not then or now.
Edward Hawkins, she types, eyes burning wide on the screen, breath held. Nothing. None of the Edward or Eddie Hawkinses match. The Nevada prison system has one Hawkins. Francis. Eighteen years for armed robbery—wrong age, though. He is thirty-three now, so Francis Hawkins would have been seven then. If she only knew the name of the town where they stopped then she could check local police records. Arrests that night, injury reports. Murder. Phil, Eddie said, but she needs more than that.
The roadhouse seemed to be in the middle of the desert. They'd driven for hours, and for most of the time if she hadn't been asleep, she hadn't been especially awake either, fuzzy in the illusion of love and being loved. Certainly not observant.
Clayborne Hotel, she types into Google. Lake George. One of the last big wooden hotels, built at the turn of the twentieth century. Too expensive to renovate, torn down years ago. A water park in its place. Pee parks, Ken always called them whenever the children teased to be taken. That's what she's remembering now over the keyboard, the dank smell of urine in the old floorboards when she scrubbed the toilets clean. Even if the Clayborne still existed there'd be no record of any Eddie Hawkins ever working there. She seems to remember New York plates on his car. Her fingers fly over the keyboard. Reporter's instinct, knowing where to dig. Yale. Census records. Hawkins, a few names. No Eddies. California. His supposed elderly uncle. Probate records. Nothing.
Carol,” she says too quickly too urgently when her sister answers the phone. And as always Carol's response is distant, reserved, tentative in her fear that something might be expected of her. Seventeen-year-old Nora might have run away for a week, but it was cautious, serious Carol, the mature RN, who hadn't been able to get away from home fast enough, marrying right after nursing school and moving to California.
A few years later, when Nora was in college, she asked Carol if she could come spend spring break with her and Les. Carol said their apartment was small, but Nora offered to sleep on the couch or on the floor even, she