Janie took the stairs carefully, but Solo couldn’t bring herself to offer assistance, to literally help her wife out of their home. Janie picked up her purse and paused after she’d opened the door. She took the key off her keyring and placed it on the nearby side table.
“This is still your house. You’ll need that key to come visit the girls… Youwillvisit, won’t you?” Solo heard the cry catch in Janie’s throat, and she launched herself down the stairs, three at a time, the sudden glimpse of hope almost levitating her. “You don’t want to do this, JJ. Please.” She sank to her knees at Janie’s feet; she wasn’t beneath begging if it’d keep her family together.Fight for it, Gabe yelled inside her head.
Janie stepped outside, her body shaking with her sobs. “I can’t… I just can’t.”
She pulled the door shut behind her, leaving Solo staring at the slab of wood, another impenetrable barrier between them. She fell to her side and let the tears come, body-wracking cries that shredded parts of her soul. Through the watery membrane in front of her eyes, the liquor cabinet beckoned her.
Upstairs, the giggles subsided, and Chloe shouted out in distress.
Solo took a deep breath and pulled herself up from the floor. She flipped the bird at the cabinet, making a mental note to donate the contents to RB and Woody the next day, and climbed the stairs to her girls. They had to be her priority now. She couldn’t afford to fall into old patterns to cope with new conflicts. Hey, maybe she’d learned something from the therapy sessions after all.
CHAPTER 2
Janie hungonto the door handle longer than she should. Was she holding it so Hannah couldn’t follow? Or because she couldn’t really bring herself to leave her beautiful little family? She rested her head against the doorjamb. The answer was beyond her, andthatwas a huge part of the problem. She didn’t know who she was anymore, what she wanted, what she was capable of. She caught sight of herself in one of the dining room windows and barely recognized herself. But even that wasn’t the biggest issue… She couldn’t bring herself to eventhinkabout the core problem, the thing that was really wrong with her. And if she couldn’t do that, then telling Hannah about it was all but impossible.
She let go of the handle and backed away, dragging her bag with her and not bothering to lift it down the stone steps. If it broke, so be it. She didn’t deserve anything perfect, not a piece of luggage and definitely not the three beautiful children she’d just closed the door on. Or her doting wife. They’d all be happier andsaferwithout her.
Janie threw the case into the trunk of her car, got in, and pulled out without paying much attention to any of it. She drove down the block and took a right onto Warner Avenue before swerving into the first available space curbside. And then the tears came, hot and free-flowing down her cheeks, and she wailed. The sound startled her at first, one so loud and uninhibited, so unfamiliar in expression that it had to be coming from someone else. She hugged herself tightly and dropped her head against the steering wheel. Here seemed as good a place as any to finally dissolve into the mess she’dbeen trying to disguise for over a year and a half.
She didn’t know how long she’d been like that when she heard a gentle tapping on the passenger window. She stared into the kind-looking eyes of a gray-haired woman, her forehead marked with decades of life. When she smiled, her skin creased like folds of silk to give her an even more gentle appearance, making Janie hit the button to retract her window almost instantly.
But the old woman opened the door and sat in the passenger seat without saying anything, and Janie simply sighed. If she was about to get carjacked, it would be the most polite and least violent theft in history. Janie should just step out onto the road and leave the elderly matriarch to it. There was nothing in Janie’s luggage she couldn’t replace, and her Lexus being stolen would be light relief right about now.
“One of the benefits of being old is that you get to disappear,” the woman finally said. “I walk all around this neighborhood—have for thirteen years, whatever the weather—and no one ever asks what I’m up to. They’re all too involved with their own lives. Everyone’s zipping from meeting to meeting, dropping off their kids, picking them up from soccer, racing to that next date with the guy…or girl,” she said and winked, “who’s going to bethe one.”
Great. A rambling homeless woman has just gotten into my car.But she was right. Janie and Hannah had lived in that house for two years, and she’d never seen this woman before… Or had she seen her withoutseeingher? Janie pulled a tissue from the center console and dried her face. “Is that a good thing? Being able to disappear?” she asked.
“Sometimes it is, yes.” She patted Janie’s thigh. “I used to be someone who couldn’t go anywhere without being recognized, but as soon as I got old and wrinkly…” She laughed, a joyful and deep sound, and tugged the skin of her neck to the left, where it stayed a while before slowly returning to sag below her chin. “Well, then they’d look away.”
Janie gave the woman the benefit of the doubt and narrowed her eyes to study her face, but she couldn’t place her as a moviestar of a bygone time or some other type of celebrity. “What’s your name?”
The old woman chuckled and patted Janie’s thigh again. “You can call me Maria.”
“Is that your name?”
Maria shrugged. “No, but I’ve always wanted to be Maria. I look like a Maria, don’t you think?”
Janie frowned. This conversation was beyond bizarre, but it had given her something else to focus on rather than her spiraling thoughts. And it’d stopped her keening like a mythic Greek widow. Temporary though both might be, she welcomed themandthis unusual passenger. “Would you like to go for coffee?” she asked, mainly because being with someone she had zero connection with and who had no knowledge of her would be a pleasant break from her reality.
Maria smiled widely. “I’d love to.” She fastened her seatbelt and pointed ahead. “I know just the place.”
Maria indicated left and then another left. When she wanted Janie to turn left back onto Greenfield, Janie froze. Her home wasn’t “just the place” for coffee, and how could Maria know where she lived anyway?
Maria patted her hand lightly again. “Don’t worry. It’s a ways away yet.”
Fighting against her desire to turn right instead, Janie took the left and drove past her home, keeping her eyes on the road ahead, hoping that Hannah wasn’t looking out of the window. She turned south onto Ashland after another vague instruction from Maria and drove on.
After five or so miles, Janie glanced at Maria, but she just waved her forward.
“It’sreallygood coffee,” Maria said and smiled, her eyes twinkling as her silky wrinkles deepened around her cheeks.
Several miles and a couple of turns later, Janie pulled up just before a corner café in Pilsen, a neighborhood she’d never gotten around to visiting. The café was on the ground floor ofa grand-looking, multi-story building that had seen better days and needed a little love, if not a whole lot of gentrification. The mainly red-brick building was still beautiful though, with the corner edge featuring a white, two-story oriel window and topped with a gray-tiled turret. If someone plucked it from its foundations and planted it near her own home, it would likely quadruple in value.
Maria got out of the car and stood to the side of a bench, which was scrawled with the words, “No human is illegal” and “Borders are imaginary.” Janie was reminded of an idiot colleague who’d advised her to avoid Pilsen in case she was bundled into a deportation van by accident.
Maria didn’t close her door until Janie had joined her on the sidewalk.
She hit the lock button on her remote. “Did you think I’d bolt?”
