When Kris reached the Jeep, Sadie was already in the back seat. Jesse stood beside the closed door, his arms folded tightly across his chest. He was shaking as if bitten by a gust of cruel winter wind. His tear-streaked cheeks glistened in the light of the Auto Barn’s security lamps.
Kris came to an abrupt stop. She reached out and grasped Jesse’s forearm, squeezing it desperately.
He slipped a hand over hers, gripping her hand so tightly that the knuckles of his fingers turned bone white.
Kris’s vision began to swim. Tears flooded to the edges of her bottom eyelids, but she pushed them back. This was not her pain. This moment was not for her.
The tears receded. Her vision cleared.
A face was staring out at her from within the dark car.
It was Sadie, her image distorted by the rain-streaked glass.
She was smiling.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
KRIS MADE THE appointment with Dr. Alice Baker for ten on Friday morning, two days after that horrible night at the Auto Barn. Kris had hoped to get Sadie in earlier, but the receptionist at the main office in Emporia informed her that Dr. Baker would not be back at her Pacington office until then. And so Kris had no choice but to wait.
She did her best to keep Sadie occupied until her appointment. They stayed out of the lake house as much as possible, taking walks in the woods or playing board games on the deck. Yet she often caught Sadie glancing back at the house, staring at the windows as if something were standing inside, just out of sight. She saw the longing in Sadie’s eyes, that desire to leave her mother and return to her games. Kris had to constantly remind herself that no one was watching them. She could not let herself be pulled into the little girl’s fantasy.
Part of her hoped, when she was looking across the cove, that she would see the dark-haired woman standing on her back deck, watching them, as motionless as a statue. But if the woman was there, she was tucked away in her cabin, peering out from the shadows.
The Xanax helped, although it wouldn’t for long. She could count the number of pills left on one hand. She was careful not to overdo it, only allowing herself one pill per day. Yet every time she swallowed one, it felt like a clock had ticked one minute closer to midnight.
On Friday morning, they left the lake house at eight o’clock and drove into town for a leisurely breakfast at Patty’s Plate. The presence of others comforted Kris. The smell of bacon and biscuits, the clank of silverware on mismatched plates, the murmur of morning chatter—it was all a constant reminder that real, live people shared their world.
Sadie held her mother’s hand as they walked down the street to Dr. Baker’s office. Soon the red-framed doorway to Clear Water Counseling materialized from the tan brick of the other buildings lining Center Street.
As had happened several times since arriving in town, Kris was overwhelmed with the odd sense that she was experiencing a memory but from someone else’s point of view. She was her father, walking a little red-haired girl to the doctor’s appointment.
She felt something tugging at her, trying to slow her down, and she realized it was Sadie’s grip on her hand growing increasingly tighter.
“There’s nothing to be nervous about,” Kris told her.
“What if I don’t feel like talking?” Sadie’s words were like timid little mice anxious to flee back down her throat.
“Then you don’t have to talk. But listen …” Kris knelt down so that she was eye to eye with her anxious daughter. “When I was your age, I talked to Dr. Baker.”
She saw Sadie’s scrunched-up expression loosen just a bit.
“I was going through something pretty scary, too. My mommy was really sick and … and she died, and I was really sad, so my daddy thought talking to Dr. Baker might help.”
“Did it?”
Kris nodded. “Yeah. It did. Dr. Baker is really nice. I think you’re going to like her.”
For a moment, neither of them moved. A few people drifted down the sidewalk, stepping around them with curious glances.
And then Sadie nodded.
“Okay,” Kris said.
She let Sadie step through the doorway first, following closely behind as they moved carefully up the steep staircase. At the top was a small landing. To their left was a door with a large pane of frosted glass at its center. A flaking decal was peeling away from the other side. It featured a yellow sun rising over a body of blue water. Beneath this, several letters were missing from the decal announcing the name of the practice as “C—ar –at-r Co-ns—ing.”
Kris raised a hand to knock, then paused, her own nerves fluttering like butterflies in her chest. She rapped lightly on the frosted glass.
Inside, a blurry shape moved by. A friendly voice called, “Come on in!”
Kris paused, giving Sadie’s hand a little squeeze. “There’s nothing to be scared of, okay?”
Sadie nodded, but her pale cheeks blushed pink and her eyes tilted down to stare at her shoes.
Kris opened the door.
Alice Baker was sitting in a chair upholstered with green-and-cream fabric featuring a menagerie of small woodland creatures. There was no waiting room. No receptionist. The door opened directly to a second-floor loft. On the wall facing Center Street, narrow windows ran from floor to ceiling. They were flanked on either side by thick, wine-colored curtains. These had each been drawn back and tied with a length of three-strand cotton rope, allowing the sunlight to fall in diagonal lines across the wood floor. The other walls were lined with heavy oak bookshelves, each shelf filled from end to end with medical journals, leather-bound novels, and random knickknacks—a Golden Gate Bridge snow globe, a small plate with a hand-painted illustration of Peter Rabbit fleeing Farmer McGregor’s garden.
Kris took in a breath through her nose in an attempt to steady her own jangling nerves, and in that air she smelled something at once familiar and foreign. That single inhalation was a time machine, flinging her back to the moment when her father opened this very door and ushered her inside. It was an odor of leather and old books, of sunshine and dust, laced with the slightest hint of a sweet floral perfume.
Dr. Baker smiled warmly and rose from her chair. She was tall, a good five inches over Kris’s own height of five six. As she watched Dr. Baker cross the room, she was hit with an image from her childhood of staring up at the doctor and thinking this was the tallest, most powerful woman she had ever seen.
“Kris?” Dr. Baker asked.
“Yes. Kris Barlow.”
Barlow was Jonah’s name, the voice in her mind scolded.
“I mean, Parker. It was … it was Kris Parker. Before I was married. I don’t know if you remember, but I came to see you when I was little …”
There was a moment of confusion as Dr. Baker tried to connect the name to a long-forgotten memory. And then her eyes widened, her face growing even brighter. “Oh my, yes, of course I remember!” There was a slight quaver in her voice. “Kris! Why didn’t you say something when you set the appointment?”
Kris shrugged. “I …” she began, only to realize she had no explanation. Perhaps there was part of her that was afraid to tell Dr. Baker.
You can tell her anything, she heard her father say.
Dr. Baker reached out and took one of Kris’s hands in both of hers, giving it a pleasant squeeze. “Look at you. All grown-up. It seems like yesterday …” Then her expression changed, just slightly, allowing for a hint of concern. “How are you?” The question did not seem like mere pleasantry. It was an invitation to speak honestly.