Page 33 of All These Beautiful Strangers
“I know,” I said. “I saw them.”
“This was different, Charlotte,” Claire said. “Not just arguments. It got physical.”
“Are you saying . . . are you saying my father used to hit her?” I asked. My stomach clenched and I felt dizzy. No. No. I shouldn’t have been asking these questions. I didn’t want to know this.
“I believe he did, yes,” Claire said.
“You believe he did, or you know he did?”
“Your mother was very protective of your father and their relationship,” Claire said. She reached for a towel and dried her hands. “She didn’t want people to know that they weren’t happy. There was this one fight, a few days before she disappeared, that got worse than the others. Grace showed up at my place one night with bruises up and down the left side of her body and a gaping cut a few inches wide on her shoulder. I bandaged her up myself.”
“My father did that to her?”
When I reached for the counter to steady myself, I realized my hands were shaking.
“Grace told me her version of events,” Claire said. “There was a disagreement. Things got heated. She said she fell.”
“So it was an accident,” I said. People fight. People lose their tempers. Accidents happen.
It didn’t make sense. None of this made sense. Claire had gotten the story wrong, somehow. If something like that had happened, I would have known.
“He would never do something like that,” I said again. “He wouldn’t.”
“Grace—she was an outsider,” Claire said. “She didn’t come from their world. She wasn’t one of them. They always treated her like she didn’t belong. They were cold—his whole family was cold to her.”
“That’s not true,” I said, because it wasn’t. I would have known. “My father loved her.”
“Maybe so,” Claire said. “I know he used to, in the beginning anyway.”
It had been stupid of me to start this line of questioning, because what did Claire know about my parents’ relationship? She hadn’t really been there; she hadn’t really seen anything. Not the way my mother would perch on her tiptoes so she could reach to straighten my father’s tie before he left for work. Not the way my father slid his hands into the back pockets of my mother’s blue jeans as she grilled the potatoes on the back patio, the way she leaned into him. If Claire had seen the things I saw, she wouldn’t ever be able to believe my father would raise a hand against my mother. He loved her. He loved her. And it ruined him.
“So, even though you believe all of that—that my mother was unloved, mistreated, and physically beaten—you still think she didn’t leave us?” I asked.
“When I found out about the safety-deposit boxes, I wasn’t shocked,” Claire said. “If you ask me, she withdrew all that money with the intention of leaving your father, but she was going to take you and Seraphina with her, start a new life.”
“So then why didn’t she?” I asked.
“Because Alistair Calloway isn’t a man you just leave,” Claire said. “Especially when you’re a working-class girl from Hillsborough. I think he found out what she was planning. He found out and—well, he punished her for it. He made it so she could never leave.”
Her words turned me to ice. She was no better than Uncle Hank with her crazy theories. No, she was worse than Uncle Hank, because she said it out of jealousy. She hated my father. She was jealous of the way my mother had loved him.
“They may not have found Grace’s body when they searched the woods or dragged the lake,” Claire said. “No, Alistair is too smart for that. But somewhere, your mother’s still out there, waiting to be found. And when we find her, he won’t be able to hide what he did anymore. The whole world will know what he is.”
“You’re a liar,” I said. “You’re lying. Why don’t you just tell the truth? I saw you. I saw you that night with my mother by the lake.”
I had never told anyone that. Not the police when they did their initial investigation, or my father, or even Uncle Hank. I had told them everything but that.
There had been a storm the night my mother disappeared, I remembered. The whole day, the sky had been gray and dull, the clouds heavy. My parents had a fight late in the afternoon; my father left. Around seven thirty, my mother put Seraphina and me to bed in the room we shared on the second floor, and then she went out back to take her nightly swim in the lake, a towel tossed over her shoulder, a rubber cap concealing her hair. I fell asleep but woke to rain slicking the windowpanes. I had the distinct memory in my dream of my mother calling out to me. I got up and went to the window. And I saw them, down in the water, my mother, and her—Claire.
Claire was facing my mother, so her back was to me, but I recognized her familiar blond hair, tied up in a knot at the back of her head. I didn’t think it was strange that she was there. She and my mother were constantly together and it was not unusual for the two of them to sit out back on the screened-in porch on an evening like that, and drink a glass of wine. But there was something in the way they were holding each other—how desperately they clung to one another in the water—that made me look away, embarrassed. I felt something twist in my gut.
It didn’t mean anything, I told myself, the way they were holding each other. My mother loved my father. She loved him. She had screamed, and he had left, but she hadn’t really meant it. I knew she hadn’t meant it. I climbed back into bed.
In the morning, I woke to see that the storm had ravaged the yard—tree branches littered the back lawn—and had whipped the lake into a placid pane of glass. I got up and padded down the hallway to my parents’ room, looking for my mother, but she wasn’t there. Her bed hadn’t been slept in.
“I saw the two of you together that night,” I said. “I saw you in the lake. I know that you and my mother . . . you weren’t just friends.”
Claire leaned back against the sink as if she needed its support to keep upright. “Charlotte,” she said, “I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about.”
