The Light Through the Leaves Read online

  River and Jasper were already arguing about who got middle and who got back. Ellis hated to do it, but she gave easier-going Jasper the short straw as she often did to minimize conflict.

  “But River got middle on the way here,” Jasper said.

  “Did he?” Ellis said. “Go on, get in.”

  “But, Mom, it’s not fair. It’s my turn.”

  Of all days for him to start challenging River’s authority. But Ellis liked his sudden confidence.

  “Okay, River in back.”

  “I don’t want to sit in back!” he said.

  “She said!”

  “But first she said I had middle!”

  The raven added its throaty kraa, kraa, kraa! in quick succession.

  “Get in!” Ellis shouted.

  River climbed in back. Jasper went to the middle. Ellis put the bag with the nets on the floor and held Jasper’s jar while he buckled his seat belt.

  A howl rose out of the back seat. “My tadpoles!” River screamed.

  Ellis set the baby carrier on the ground and leaned into the van, seeing River’s entire jar poured over the back seat, tadpoles wriggling in the thin veneer of water left.

  “Why wasn’t the lid on?” she said.

  “I was trying . . . I was trying to get that other thing out of there. That big, scary bug!” River cried.

  Probably a dragonfly larva. The predatory insect was scary looking.

  “Mom, they’re dying!” Jasper said. “Mom! Help them!”

  Jasper’s pronouncement made River wail louder.

  Ellis ran around to the other side of the van so she didn’t have to lean over Jasper. She grabbed Jasper’s jar, crawled over the middle seat, and tried to pick up the tadpoles. But she couldn’t get a grip on them.

  Both boys yowled, the raven squawking along with them.

  Using a rag from the supplies, Ellis swiped as many tadpoles as she could into Jasper’s jar. But some were beyond sight on the dark carpet. And one was wedged in the crack of the seat. If she tried to get it out, she’d probably squish it. Seeing it dead in the jar would upset the boys more. They protested loudly when she closed the jar.

  “You didn’t get all of them!” River said.

  “There’s one stuck in the seat!” Jasper said. “It’s dying! You have to get it out!”

  “We’ll try to get it at home,” she said.

  “It’ll die!”

  “I want to go back and get more!” River said.

  “No! You shouldn’t have taken the lid off. We’re going, and we still have plenty.”

  “We don’t have enough!”

  “There’re two on the floor!” Jasper shouted.

  “Mom!”

  The raven was still croaking along with the boys as Ellis started the van. When she turned out of the lot, River burst into melodramatic sobs.

  “It’s okay,” Jasper told him. “Maybe they’ll still be alive when we get home.”

  “They won’t!” River cried.

  “If Dad is home, he’ll save them,” Jasper said with certainty.

  Ellis could almost taste the bitterness of her thoughts. Why was Jonah their hero? How did being so rarely at home bestow him with noble qualities? Jasper wouldn’t be glorifying his father if he’d seen the son of a bitch kissing another woman that morning.

  Ellis was dizzy thinking about what he’d done, what he’d been doing.

  River’s crying ebbed by the time they came to the main road.

  “Mom?” Jasper said.

  “What?”

  “You forgot Viola.”

  Ellis pushed the brake and looked back. She stared at the empty seat next to Jasper. Not possible. She wouldn’t have left her baby behind. But the carrier wasn’t there. She’d forgotten to put the baby in the van when the tadpoles spilled.

  Everything inside felt frozen. But it was more like she didn’t have a body. She couldn’t feel the steering wheel in her hands. She didn’t have a face or arms or legs.

  Somehow, she’d turned the van around, and her foot must have been pressing the accelerator.

  It’s okay. She’ll still be there, still sleeping. It’s okay. It’s okay.

  She pressed harder on the pedal.

  What she’d done was normal. She wasn’t used to putting a third child in the van. For more than four years, there had been only two. New parents did this. She’d heard stories about leaving the baby in the house. In the car. Just for a few minutes. Nothing dangerous. It would be okay.

  The one and a half miles of winding road felt like ten.

  What if she’d run her over as she pulled out? She might have killed her. What kind of mother did that?

  She slowed at the sign for the forest preserve, turned into the trailhead parking lot. All was quiet, the raven flown from its branch. There were two cars in the lot, parked far from where the van had been. Ellis stared at the empty space her van had occupied.

  No carrier. No baby.

  She had a brief thought that she’d never had a third baby. Hadn’t it felt like that sometimes? As if this life, three kids, was all a dream? She shut her eyes, certain everything would return to whatever was normal, two kids or three, when she opened them.

  “Mom?”

  She opened her eyes.

  “Where’s Viola?” Jasper asked.

  The baby was gone. Someone had taken her daughter.

  2

  The jangle of curtain rings woke Ellis. She sat up in the bed, muzzy from a sleeping pill, unaware of the time of day until the shades started going up. She used her forearm to protect her eyes from the light slicing into her vision.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Oh!”

  The woman hadn’t known anyone was there. Ellis squinted at the unfamiliar person, a silhouette surrounded by painful brightness.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” the young woman said. “I was told to clean this room.”

  “Who told you?”

  “Mrs. . . . uh . . . Bauhammer. Do you want me to leave?” Before Ellis responded, the woman added, “I was told to do everything in here. The bathroom. Strip the bed . . .”

  The woman was afraid to bring The Hammer down on herself. Most people were. Ellis and Jonah used to joke about the nickname Ellis had given his mother. But it was no joke since his mother had moved in to “help” with their crisis.

  Ellis wouldn’t give the cleaning woman more trouble when she’d already had to deal with Mary Carol. She dragged herself out of bed. Then the other hammer hit. The colossal one.

  Her baby was gone. Two weeks. Almost no hope of finding her now. She might be dead. Abused. Because Ellis had left her in a parking lot, offered her like a lamb to the slaughter to some crazy person.

  She fractured beneath the weight of it. Being hit with it over and over had changed her. She was broken pieces of the woman who used to be Ellis Abbey Bauhammer, wife of Jonah, mother of three children, leading a perfectly ordinary life in the suburbs.

  She pulled on her robe. Her breasts still hurt, but the milk was mostly gone now.

  The cleaning woman hadn’t moved. She stared at Ellis, her expression a mixture of curiosity and sympathy. No doubt she knew the whole story, as did most people who lived anywhere near that part of New York. Ellis couldn’t stand that look in people’s eyes, but she wouldn’t hold it against the woman.

  “Go ahead,” Ellis told her. “I’ll use another bathroom.”

  There was another cleaning woman in the boys’ bathroom. She would have to use the bathroom attached to Viola’s nursery.

  No, she couldn’t go in there. She never did anymore.

  She went downstairs, where two more cleaning women were dusting and vacuuming. She used the half bath, then entered the kitchen. Mary Carol was there, her shoulder-length, chestnut-dyed hair perfectly sleek, her jeans and button-down shirt close fitting to show off her figure. She was at the stove cooking breakfast—or was it lunch? The boys were seated at the table, absorbed in the new video gadgets their grand
mother had given them.

  Before either woman uttered one word, The Hammer, the human one, hit Ellis with a look of crushing blame.

  “Finally up?” Mary Carol said.

  “The cleaning woman woke me.”

  “Did she?”

  “I didn’t get to sleep until past six in the morning.”

  “The sleeping pills don’t work?”

  She could only know Ellis’s doctor had prescribed sleep medication if Jonah had told her. Mary Carol looked at Ellis smugly, as if to verify that her son was now more in her confidence than in his wife’s.

  Ellis went to the boys and touched their soft, dark hair with both hands. “Hi, guys.”

  “Hi, Mom,” Jasper said, glancing up from his game.

  “Hi,” River said, keeping his eyes on his screen.

  Her boys didn’t even want to look at her now—because of what she’d done.

  She pushed away the thought, told herself they were preoccupied with their games.

  She poured a cup of coffee and turned to face her mother-in-law. “I can clean my own house, you know,” she said in a quiet tone.

  Mary Carol put on a wounded countenance. “I was only trying to help. I know it’s difficult for you—to keep up—under the circumstances.” As proof, she said, “The boys said they were hungry. I’m making grilled ham-and-cheese sandwiches. Would you like one?”

  Ellis looked into the frying pan. “Ham? You know this house is vegetarian!”

  “Jonah isn’t.”

  “He is when I cook. And River and Jasper are.”

  “But you aren’t cooking, are you?”

  The little thread that had been keeping Ellis attached to civility broke. She grabbed the grilling sandwich out of the pan and threw it in the trash can. She burned her hand, but the pain hardly registered. She opened the refrigerator and found the deli ham.

  “That’s expensive meat,” Mary Carol said.

  “I don’t care,” Ellis said, thumping the wad of flesh into the can.

  “Boys, I’m sorry to say your lunch is gone,” Mary Carol said.

  The boys had stopped playing their video games. They looked almost as if they were frightened of their own mother.

  “I’ll make grilled cheese, okay?”

  “Okay,” Jasper piped up.

  River said nothing. He had that new look in his eyes, the resentful stare that made Ellis want to weep. He was angry that everything had changed. All the crying. Police. Detectives. Everyone in the house on edge—especially since Mary Carol had arrived. Almost daily, friends and neighbors came over with food or just to lament with them. River hated it. He hated her. He hated her for losing Viola and ruining his perfect life.

  Ellis turned away from the three piercing gazes. She was dizzy from lack of sleep and near vomiting, but she got to work on the sandwiches. “Where is Jonah?” she asked.

  “He had to run to the office,” Mary Carol said.

  On a Saturday. He was probably with Irene. Being consoled by her. Because he got no comfort from the increasingly deranged wife who’d left his baby daughter in the woods.

  Mary Carol took a seat at the table with a cup of black coffee. She drank coffee all day to keep her appetite low. Attendance to her figure, to anything related to her appearance, had been Mary Carol’s main occupation most of her life. Ellis could imagine how her mother-in-law viewed her current state. Ellis didn’t even look in the mirror anymore.

  She added apple slices to the boys’ lunches, set the plates down, and sat across from them. “Put the games away and eat,” she said. When they continued playing, she said, “Now.”

  River shot her another look. Ellis wondered what poison Mary Carol fed them when she wasn’t around. And Ellis often wasn’t around lately, she had to admit. She tried to keep herself, her increasing instability, away from the boys. She knew how it felt to see a parent lose her mind.

  “Tomorrow the boys and I are going to church to pray for Viola,” Mary Carol said. “You’re welcome to come with us. If you get up in time. Service is at eight.”

  Talk about kicking someone when they were down. Mary Carol was unloading all her ammo on her this afternoon.

  Ellis set down her coffee, looked into the steely-blue gaze of the woman who had accused her of deliberately “trapping” her son with pregnancy. She and her husband had bitterly opposed Jonah marrying a plant biology student who’d grown up in a trailer. With an addict mother and unknown father, no less. Ellis assumed his mother often used the words trailer trash to describe her, though Jonah would never have told her. Mary Carol even warned Jonah that his marriage to a woman who’d taken part in Pride marches might bring negative attention from the media and cause trouble for his father, a renowned conservative senator.

  Ellis held The Hammer’s challenging gaze. She saw it clearly. The woman who’d waged battle against Ellis since the day Jonah told her of their engagement would now do everything in her power to win that war. Ellis’s shield wall was down, and Bauhammer was charging at her in full armor.

  Ellis rose, pushing off the table with shaking arms. “Will you please come talk to me in the office?”

  “Jonah’s office?” Mary Carol said. “He prefers that room to be private.”

  “It’s my goddamn house, my office!”

  Mary Carol raised her eyebrows at her language, or perhaps to remind Ellis that she and her husband had given Jonah the down payment for the house as a wedding gift.

  The boys had stopped eating, distressed by the conflict.

  “Will you talk to me in private or not?”

  Mary Carol saw that she was shaking, and Ellis thought she looked pleased. “If you insist,” she said, rising from her chair. “Don’t worry, boys. Everything is fine.”

  Ellis closed the door behind them in the downstairs study and faced her adversary. “You aren’t going to do this,” she said.

  “Do what?”

  “Erase me.”

  She looked amused. “I think you’ve taken a few too many of those pills, Ellis.”

  “Have I? Why did you give the boys video games when it’s against our rules? Why are you feeding them meat when you know I don’t want that? Why would you take them to your church when you know they already have one?”

  She made a skeptical face. “What’s it called, the Unitarian Universe . . . ?”

  “The Unitarian Universalist Church.”

  “The boys told me what they do in their so-called Sunday school. Learning about Buddha, Jews, Muslims . . . Jasper even has a picture of an elephant god in his room! This is not a ‘church.’ It’s more like a cult!”

  “You’d better not be telling that to my children. Jonah and I decided this together. We want them to find their own way with spirituality.”

  “Don’t involve Jonah in it. It was your idea, and you know it. If he’d married a Christian woman, those children would know Our Lord Jesus Christ as their one and only Savior!”

  Ellis supposed that was true. Raised by parents with implacable beliefs, Jonah had learned to go with the flow. If he’d married a woman with strong convictions about her children attending church—or synagogue, mosque, or temple—he’d have let her take them. His feelings about organized religion were ambivalent, and he was used to being steered.

  “Don’t you see what you’ve done?” Mary Carol said.

  Ellis certainly saw what she’d done. She saw it a hundred times a day. A little baby in a car carrier all alone in a forest.

  “This terrible thing happened because you have no faith in the only God that can keep those babies out of Hell! Because you steered Jonah into your impiety! God took your baby to punish both of you.” Tears, real ones, swelled in Mary Carol’s eyes. “God is punishing me, too. And my husband. We should have tried harder to stop our son from marrying you. We’ll never see our only granddaughter again. What she suffered in life or death will forever torment us. We’re all going to be punished for the rest of our lives!”

  Ellis could scarcely br
eathe.

  Mary Carol’s blue eyes blazed with anguish. Ellis had never seen her reveal raw emotion so openly. But her mother-in-law quickly turned away, weeping as she returned to the boys.

  When Ellis entered the kitchen, River and Jasper looked at their mother as if she were an evil witch. What else could transform their iron-willed grandma into that blubbering mess?

  “It’s okay, Mom. I don’t mind going to church with Grandma,” Jasper said, playing mediator. “She said we have to pray for Viola to bring her back.”

  “That won’t bring her back,” River scoffed.

  “River! Have faith!” Mary Carol said.

  “Why?” he said. “I don’t want her back. I hated her.”

  “She’s your sister!” Ellis shouted. “How could you say that?” Silver dots filled her eyes. She lunged at a chair to slow her fall, but her head hit the side of the table, knocking her into darkness.

  3

  Jonah strode into the bedroom with her new prescription. Some kind of sedative. He sat on the side of the bed, holding out a pill and a glass of water.

  “I told you I’m not taking that,” she said.

  “The psychiatrist said you have to sleep and start eating. You have to reduce the stress.”

  Ellis looked into his eyes. “A pill can’t fix what I’m going through, and you know it.”

  The coldness of his gaze made her want to cry. But she tried to understand. He was grieving for his daughter as much as she was. And she was the one who had left their baby in the forest. The media certainly hadn’t left out that part of the story: Senator Bauhammer’s Granddaughter Taken When Mother Leaves Her in Forest.

  Ellis tried to imagine what it was like for Jonah to go to the law firm every day. What could his coworkers say to him when his own wife had lost his baby? Maybe they avoided him because offering sympathy was too awkward.

  Jonah held out the pill. “You have to take it. What if you’d passed out while you were driving with the boys?” He gestured with his chin at the bandage on the side of her forehead. “They said you’re lucky you didn’t hit harder.”

  “I controlled the fall. I was only out for a few seconds.”

  “My mother said it was longer.”