Noah groaned.
“Yeah. That’s what I told him,” Moses quipped. He sounded good. Light. And then he got to the purpose of his call, and the heaviness returned to his young voice.
“So, Doc. Cora . . . I’m seeing her again, all of a sudden.”
Noah braced himself. Lately, every sentence that started with Cora’s name brought him grief. He rubbed at his beard.
“What do you mean, Moses?”
“She keeps showing me Lopez.”
“Mercedes?” Noah gasped.
“Yeah. Your little friend.”
Noah almost laughed out loud. He pictured Al Pacino in Scarface saying, “Say hello to my little friend,” as he wielded a grenade launcher. Somehow, the comparison of Mer to a grenade launcher wasn’t too far off the mark. But Moses wasn’t laughing.
“Did Lopez show you the pictures I drew the day she came to see me at Montlake, Doc?”
“Yeah. She did.”
Moses cursed, his relief evident across two continents and an ocean. “Good. I didn’t know how . . . shit.”
“Moses?”
“The paper dolls. You saw those?” Moses pressed.
Noah thought about the drawings, the connected figures. Him, Mer, and Cora. Him, Mer and Gia. Almost like Cora was giving them her blessing. The thought eased something inside of him. He hadn’t allowed himself to interpret the picture that way. But maybe . . . now he could.
“The man in the one picture? Cora keeps showing me that man.” Moses interrupted Noah’s thoughts.
“The man?” Noah didn’t understand.
“Yeah. Uh, you know. The paper dolls. The picture I drew with Cora, the little girl, and the man. Together. Cora keeps showing me his face. Do you . . . know who he is?” Moses asked, his words so constricted it made Noah’s throat tight.
“Cora’s showing you images of Mer with a man?” Noah asked.
“Yeah, but not . . . together. I think Lopez is in trouble.”
Noah was silent, thoughts whirling. Moses hadn’t ever called him. He wouldn’t have called him unless he was seriously concerned.
“Doc, I gotta go. I’ll try to call tomorrow. But no promises. We’ll be on the train for most of the day. If I don’t see her again, then that’s the best I got. I can’t tell you anything more. But I’ll call when I can . . . just to make sure everything is okay. Tell Lopez hello.”
“Thank you, Moses,” Noah said, but the line was already dead.
It took Noah ten minutes to get out the door. It was bedtime, but he couldn’t wait for morning. Gia’s clothes needed to be changed, she pulled off one sock before he could put on the other, and she squalled when he tried to make her wear shoes.
“We’re going for a ride, Gia Bug. Come on, help Daddy,” he begged.
“No wide,” she grumbled. “No sooz.”
“We’re going to see Mer, and you have to wear shoes if you want to walk.”
“Meh!”
“Meh,” he whispered. He didn’t know whether to be angry or afraid. He settled on both.
* * *
He didn’t tell Mer they were coming, and she was surprised to see them. Happy to see them. Her teeth flashed, and her right cheek dimpled, and the weariness he saw in her face lifted. Her pleasure hurt Noah’s chest and made him even angrier. She was holding a cup of coffee, and she stepped back from the door to let them in and reached for Gia, who reached right back. Noah brushed past her and set Gia down in the middle of her living room instead. He was there for a reason, and he didn’t want either of them getting comfortable, though Gia had plopped down and was already tugging at her shoes.
“Is there a reason you’re being a baby hog, Boozer?” Mer asked, surprise underlining her teasing. Noah moved in on her immediately.
“I need to see the pictures Moses gave you at Montlake. All of them.” If he’d had any doubt she’d kept something from him, he didn’t have any now. Mer’s eyes widened, and her mouth tightened. Her poker face snapped into place a second later, but he’d seen enough. She pivoted obediently, walking to the china cabinet in her dining room. Noah followed on her heels. Setting her coffee cup aside on the dining room table, she opened a drawer in the cabinet and withdrew a thin folder. Noah yanked it from her hands.
“Noah!” she cried. Blood welled up in a long, thin line across her fingers. He’d pulled the folder too hard and sliced her finger. He set the folder down and took her hand in his, pulling her toward the kitchen sink. He ran her fingers under the cold water, still angry, still confused, but disgusted with himself. She was bleeding, and it was his fault.
“It’s a paper cut. I’ll survive,” she clipped, but he could hear the fire beneath the ice.
“You didn’t show me all the drawings, Mercedes.” He turned off the water and tugged a dish towel from the rack. The towel was red and wouldn’t stain. He wrapped it around her hand and moved to her medicine cabinet to the left of the fridge where he knew she kept her Band-Aids.
“So you come in here, stomping and barking and withholding baby hugs?” she snapped.
As if on cue, Gia strolled in, shoeless. “Meh!” she squealed.
“Mercedes,” Noah said, feeling the walls closing in. “I need to see those pictures.”
“Suit yourself.” She pointed to the dining table where he’d set the folder and stooped to pick up Gia.
He walked back to the folder, Mercedes snuggling Gia like none of it mattered. Maybe she held her too tight or maybe it was just the attention span of a toddler, but Mercedes radiated a tension Gia wasn’t used to, and Gia squawked and demanded to be released. Mercedes complied, and Gia scampered off, most likely to unload the basket of toys Mer kept for her visits. Mercedes approached him, her arms folded defensively, waiting for him to find what she’d hidden.
The picture was on the bottom of the small stack of drawings, like she’d tried to bury it and forget about it. It had the same flavor and flow as the other paper doll drawings, but it was not Noah’s face or form attached to his tiny family. He stared at it in horror, recognition dawning.
“Do you know what this means?” he whispered, raising his eyes to Mercedes.
Her eyes were wet and wide, her teeth clenched to keep her mouth from trembling. When she spoke, her voice was soft, but she made no excuses for herself and gave no apology.
“When Moses drew that picture, I knew . . . I knew it couldn’t mean anything good. Not for Cora, or you, or Gia. So I put it in that drawer, and I haven’t looked at it again. I can’t help Cora anymore. But I can protect you and Gia.”
“You can protect me?” Noah scoffed.
“I can try.”
“Moses drew this picture months ago. And you kept it from me. All this time.”
“Yes. I did,” she said, defiant.
“Why?”
“Why?” she repeated, incredulous. She laughed, but the laugh broke and shuddered like a sob. “You’ve been through hell. Cora didn’t just die. That’s hard enough. There’s a good chance she killed herself. That’s a thousand times harder. And just when I was starting to come to terms with it—when you were coming to terms with it—she gives you that?” She pointed at the picture. “Cora wasn’t ever cruel. But that is cruel, and I didn’t want any part of it. If she had a confession to make, too bad. She missed her chance, and I was not going to make it for her. Not this time. Not ever again.”
Tears were streaming down her face, and she swiped at them, frustrated. Mercedes had never been prone to tears. Anger, passion, laughter, but rarely tears. In the twenty-two years he’d known her, he’d seen her cry only a handful of times. That had changed with Cora’s death. In the last year, she’d cried more than all the other years combined. And more often than not, they were tears for him.
“Mer . . . you can’t make those kinds of choices for me. How am I supposed to trust you?” he rasped.
“Trust me?” She pressed her hand to her chest. “Me?” she cried. “I would do just about anything for you, Noah. Haven’t you figured that out yet?”
“This is Keegan Tate. This is a picture of Keegan Tate with my wife and daughter.” Noah shook the paper in her face, so incensed he could only stare, trembling, at the innocent rendering. “You should have told me.”
“Told you what? That your wife had an affair with Keegan Tate? Why would I do that?” she asked again.
“Because I deserve to know!”
“You’re right. You did deserve to know. But I didn’t want to be the one to tell you.”
“Who else was going to tell me, Mer?” he choked.
“After I saw that picture, I went to Keegan, and I asked him if he had an affair with Cora. He admitted to . . . to sleeping with her . . . a few times. He said the relationship was short. Not serious. And she broke it off with him before you left for Afghanistan.”
“I see. So you went to Keegan, but you didn’t come to me.” Noah was so upset he was shaking, and he set the picture down, unable to face it any longer.
“I couldn’t . . . protect you . . . or Gia . . . if I didn’t know what I was dealing with. I had to know.”
“You didn’t protect me! You betrayed my trust. I feel like a fool, like everything between us is pretense. I don’t need you to take care of me, Mer. Okay? I need you to love me enough to tell me the truth, even when it’s ugly.”
She stared at him numbly, tears dripping from her chin. She shuddered and turned away, a sob escaping from her lips. When she spoke, her voice shook and her words were strangled.
“You knew she was unfaithful, Noah. Don’t pretend you didn’t. It was the thing you wouldn’t say in the cemetery. And I respected that. I understood it. And I left it alone.”
“I didn’t know it was Keegan Tate! Hell, I don’t even know if Keegan was the only one. I found out at Gia’s well-check last March that Gia couldn’t be mine. Our blood types don’t jive. Did you know that, Mer? Did you know Gia isn’t my daughter?” He was crying now too, and Mercedes spun to face him.
“Oh, Noah,” Mercedes moaned, reaching for him. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why didn’t I tell you?” he gasped. “Because it was none of your business! I wasn’t withholding information about you.”
She dropped her hand immediately and stepped back. “Okay. I see. So that weekend, when I came over and you were in a bad way, that was just after you found out. And everything that happened next—everything that has happened since—was about you getting back at Cora. You were mad at Cora, so you had sex with me.”
“This is not about you!”
“Then why are you so angry with me?” she shouted back. “What have I ever done to you but love you? My entire life, I have loved you and Cora. And now I love your daughter as if she were my own. So don’t you dare tell me this is not about me!”