Page 122 of Nobody's Fool

“And you?”

“I tried to ignore it. Like I jammed it into a box in the back of my closet. But our daughter is dead now. And I need those answers.” Talia Belmond doesn’t wait for him to say more. “Have you learned something new?”

“I need to talk to you,” I say to her. “Alone.”

“No,” she says.

“Mrs. Belmond—”

“Talia,” she says, correcting me. “And you can say whatever you need to with Archie here.”

“I was just with Judith Burkett,” I say. “I think it is better if we talk alone.”

But even as I say it, I can tell that won’t be necessary. Their faces say it all. They both know. They both know what Judith Burkett told me. Without conscious thought, or so it seems, they take each other’s hand. I can’t say who initiated it or if they both just moved at the same time. But there they are, standing together, ready to face me as one.

“It’s not better alone,” Talia says.

They stand there, steadying themselves as though they are standing on the beach awaiting a wave that they know will sweep them away. I flash back to Anna’s last request that I protect them, and I want to tell her that I don’t know how.

“Judith told you why I went to Chicago,” Talia says.

Again I’ve learned to use silence. I simply nod.

Archie says, “I don’t see the relevance. How long have you been married?”

“Not quite a year.”

“You’ll have ups and you’ll have downs. Our youngest child was about to leave home for college. Empty nest syndrome. We didn’t tell Thomas or Victoria, but we had decided on a trial separation. It wasn’t for us—we realized that pretty fast. In the end I think it made our marriage stronger.”

Did it? I wonder. I don’t say this out loud.

“I didn’t go through with it,” Talia says. “I might have. I was still in the lobby, almost five in the morning, trying to work up the courage to go to his room. I kept crying. And suddenly Archie was there. He wasn’t supposed to come. He was supposed to stay home. But, I don’t know, maybe he sensed something. Either way he stopped me from making a huge mistake. His arrival felt like a blessing, like we’d been saved.”

I see Archie shut his eyes as she speaks as though warding off blows.

“We talked that whole next day. And the day after. We saw that we were both still in love with one another. We saved our marriage and came home in the best place we’d been in in years.”

And, I think to myself, you took your eye off the ball. Again, no need to say it. They know. It explains a lot about their guilt. It explains why they didn’t see the warning signs when their daughter didn’t contact them.Protect them, Victoria had asked, and so I won’t point out that their neglect had probably contributed to what had happened. Isuspect they had already pointed it out to themselves every morning for eleven long, hard torturous years. What pain. What horror. I wonder what it must have been like to live with that kind of guilt for those eleven years, and again I think I’m starting to understand why Anna—I notice I’m going back and forth on what to call her—wanted me to protect them.

“I’m sorry to bring this up,” I say.

“It has nothing to do with what happened to Victoria,” Talia says a little too firmly. “It helped make us what we are today.”

Which is what? I ask myself. I believe what Victoria told me. That they were happy. That they are good, decent people. But I think about it from another perspective too. Their marriage suffers a rupture. They claim that they fixed it in Chicago and maybe they did, but then the aftermath—their daughter’s disappearance—had to change everything. Was the renewed marital bond based on the idea that they still loved one another—or was the bond forged in tragedy?

And does it matter?

I try to put it together. New Year’s Eve 1999. Talia goes to Chicago to meet a man. Victoria leaves her party in New York City. Are they connected? Add in that Thomas drives Victoria to McCabe’s Pub and then heads home to sulk. And then there’s Archie, who stays behind because he was worried about Y2K—but ends up in Chicago blocking his wife’s possible cheating rendezvous.

Something isn’t adding up.

“Who was the man?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Archie says.

“It doesn’t,” Talia adds. “He was a college boyfriend named Steven Ricci. He moved to Miami. He died four years ago.”

I look at Archie. “You were supposed to stay home that night,” I say. “Because of Y2K worries.”