“So the drugs in your bag…”
“Drugs?” Jenna snorts. “That’s a nice touch. No, you know me. Only ever had one true love.”
So that had been Damien too. Planted the drugs, placed the call to Fauver, knowing the assumptions Callie would make.
“I found your chip. From AA. I’m sorry I didn’t believe you, about being sober.”
“Well, hard to believe a drunk person about that.”
“What made you relapse? Did something happen?”
Jenna sighs. “I ran into Lorraine at the store. Clickety clacking her big bracelet, hair perfectly done. She told me you were having dinner with them. Made a big show of pointing out the mascarpone for the tiramisu she was making. Said she knew how much you liked it. And I realized… I didn’t know that about you. That there was just a lot I didn’t know.”
It’s the shame of my life that you’ve become one of them.It was the last thing Jenna said to Callie, and it hits differently now that she knows the facts. Jenna had been ashamed that the Caputos claimed Callie, that it looked like she was more theirs than Jenna’s.
“Does Lorraine know? About you and Luke? About… me?”
“Ah. She knows. In her way. I don’t think any of them ever really tell her a goddamned thing. But she’s not stupid.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Jenna looks around the room for a minute, long enough that Calliethinks she might not answer her. “I didn’t want to tell you at first, because it was painful. And then when you got older, I didn’t want to tell you, because I knew you’d choose them. Stable jobs, pillars of the community. I mean, look at you. Chief of fucking Police. I guess you chose them anyway.”
“And… Baby Doe. There was a test done, Mom, and they found out that…”
“Luke’s too. With Annabelle.”
“You knew that too?”
Jenna clears her throat, looks up into the corner of the room for a moment. “He used to come pick me up, when my mom first got sick and my dad was driving her to treatments and I was alone a lot. Those were his cop days. He’d put on the siren in his patrol car, say stupid shit through the PA system to make me laugh.” Jenna shakes her head, lets out a sigh. “I was young. I thought, hey, this guy is giving me attention, I thought it would give me something to write songs about. How stupid is that? But that’s what you’re taught, when you’re that age, especially back then. The thing you write about is love, a guy. And none of that had happened to me yet.”
It breaks Callie’s heart. Because it was so true. Somewhere along the line that was what girls learned. Experience meant men. They had the keys to the rest of your life.
“When did you know about Annabelle?”
“That she was pregnant? I heard Miss Hamilton, the history teacher, talking to the guidance counselor. I was there, waiting around in the hall outside the office, I was in trouble for cutting class. Anyway, she was saying something like, maybe she had it all wrong, but that she wondered…”
So Hamilton had her suspicions. No wonder she didn’t want to mention it to Callie when she visited her that day at the school. Not when she knew how the story turned out. Hamilton was trying to protect Annabelle after the fact, because she failed her when it counted.
“What did the guidance counselor say?”
“That unless they had proof, or Annabelle told them something,there was nothing they could do. Not like they could take her to the doctor or make her lift up one of those big sweatshirts she had started wearing.”
“But how did you know she had been with Luke?”
“He told me about it. He and I met first. He picked me up that same afternoon. He was always doing that, playing one girl off another. I was fifteen, the first time.”
She winces. Fifteen years old. Callie, in all the ways she was strict with herself, had never so much kissed a boy then.
“Jesus, Mom. But then why… if you knew about Annabelle, did you get back together with him?”
“Get back with him,” Jenna says, her mouth puckered like she’s bitten into something sour.
A chill works its way up Callie’s spine. She’s keenly aware of the quietness around them, no sound but the occasional crackle of the logs in the fireplace. “Mom?”
“Like I said. Never a good thing when anyone in that family says they want to talk.” Jenna tries to manage a smile that reminds her of the way Annabelle tried to make the mood light in her living room. “But. I thought, I don’t know. That I would be good at it. Being a mother. I thought it might make me become good enough. We know how that worked out.”
“You went through a lot. It must have been really, really hard.”
