I remain completely still and imagine myself whipping out Betsey’s handwritten note.Oh, this? Did you want to see everything from the envelope? My bad.
The door opens. Perhaps it’s Candace and her security team coming to haul me away.
Phil’s administrative assistant enters, her voice ringing like a tide bell on a vacant, foggy shore. “Sorry to interrupt. Meredith, you’re needed on the phone.”
I shift my gaze back to Phil.
Phil scowls. “Right now?” Something seems to pass between Phil and the woman who has been coordinating his business life for decades. Phil nods at me and extends his hand to the door.
As I walk past Dave’s chair, I hear him mutter something about my leaving being for the best.
15
NONIE POINTS TO THE PHONEon the glass and chrome conference table in Phil’s office, offering privacy after obvious urgency. My heart flutters in my chest. Can’t be Betsey. They continue to screen all my calls.
“Hello.” I speak softly into the receiver as if warding off any more conversations I don’t want to have.
“Meredith, it’s me.” Clint speaks with haste. “Look, someone at Reid’s camp saw me taking pictures of the drop-off and the first event. I-I got a call this morning asking if I’d be willing to share some of the photos—”
“I’m sorry.” Although my tone indicates the opposite. He’s interrupting me to talk about sharing pictures he took? “I’m kind of in the middle of something. I’m going to need to call you back.”
Clint huffs. “You want in or out?” His words sound bitten off and like it cost him something to say them.
My fingers throttle the phone. He’s using another therapistmaneuver. Although I’m not sure his delivery was what she had in mind.
I give him credit, though. He remembered to ask the question.
And I get the message.
One night last year, I came home late to the kids and Clint already at the table. I shoot for two family dinners during the school week, but I’d missed my train. As I stepped into the kitchen, Dr Pepper shot out of Reid’s freckled nose. Erika laughed so hard the legs of her chair slipped to the side and she ended up on the floor. I started giggling just at the sight of my family having such fun. But when I tried to get them to tell me what had them in stitches, I got overlapping incomplete fragments. No one could explain what had created such an uproar. Later, alone with Clint, I tried to make him understand how much I wanted to feel a part of their tribe. This was a story I retold with our therapist. We established that it would take effort on both our parts.
If I wanted to be on the inside, I had to take time when I was on the outside. I couldn’t fall too far away while I was at work and then expect to be caught up later.
“I want in. Always,” I say into the phone. My fingers ache as I clamp down on the one thing connecting me to my family.
He breathes deeply. “So, I was pulling down the shots from our cloud and there was this, um, picture.”
A tingling sensation breaks out across my scalp, as if my body knows what he is going to say before I do. I turn toward the original Ansel Adams print of California redwoods on Phil’s wall—the rough trunks, the feathery leaves, and the stark contrast between the light and shadows. The image surrounds me.
I hear an almost strangling sound through the phone as if Clint is trying to swallow a too-big bite of my Mississippi pot roast.
“Did Erika take an inappropriate picture?” I whisper.
“How did you know?” Clint’s dull voice is devoid of its usual frustration with me.
“Oh, my baby.” I shut my eyes against the monochromatic forest pushing in.
“She wouldn’t tell me what’s going on.” Acid has leaked back into his tone.
“Do you know if she sent the picture?” I imagine her before she called me last night, sitting alone in her room, being harassed to send it. Did she send the photo and then call me, or did I fail as a mother to say the thing that would have stopped her? I should have skipped dinner. I should be home now. I glance toward Phil’s open office door and see myself marching past the conference and out of the building.
“I called her at school. She answered her phone but wouldn’t even acknowledge me and then...” Clint sucks in a large amount of air but says nothing more.
“And then what?” I sag against the table. The chrome edge bites into my upper thigh.
“Meredith, I don’t know what to tell you. I heard other teens yakking it up in the background. It just sounded wrong. Frenzied almost. Something was off.”
We sit in silence for what feels like minutes as I try to piece together Erika’s calls, her relief in coming home yesterday, but then our quiet, studious daughter being surrounded while on the phone with Clint. None of this sounded like Erika.
