Page 117 of The Chain

“Why don’t you do something fun, if you’re feeling up to it? A spa day. Send me the bill.”

“Maybe I will. You know, as ex-husbands go, you’re not too bad.”

“Damning with faint praise.”

Rachel says goodbye and goes upstairs to tell Kylie the plans.

“You goofed, Mom. Stuart’s supposed to stay here this weekend. His parents are going to his stepsister’s graduation in Arizona,” Kylie says.

“Oh, crap, yeah.”

She calls Marty again. “We can’t do it. I’m an idiot. Sorry. Stuart’s staying with us this weekend. His mom is going to Phoenix.”

“Stuart? That weird freckly kid? He can come too. Ginger won’t mind.”

“You’ll have to ask Stuart’s mom. I doubt she’ll say yes. She doesn’t completely trust me, and therefore, by association, she won’t trust you.”

“No, it’ll work the opposite way. She’ll see that I am the dependable one. Text me her number and I’ll call her.”

Rachel texts him the number and of course Marty works his charms with Stuart’s mom. The weekend is Rachel’s.

Any other chemo patient would spend that time taking it easy and recovering.

Rachel is going to hunt for the monster’s lair.

She goes downstairs to Pete.

“I mean, it’s sensible, right? If we find them with Erik’s app, they won’t be able to track us or anything, will they?” she asks, looking for reassurance.

“I guess as long as you don’t piss them off too much, we should be fine. We’re just doing the equivalent of a phone trace. They won’t even know we’re looking for them. I doubt we’ll find them, but if we do we’ll let the authorities take care of it. An anonymous call to the FBI should do the trick.”

“So we’ll be safe?” Rachel asks again, thinking more about Kylie than herself.

Pete nods.

“OK,” Rachel says and she knocks the wooden tabletop as a charm against the possibility of something going wrong.

60

Ahouse in Watertown, Massachusetts, in the late 1990s. It’s another one of those Spielbergian suburbs filled with kids shooting hoops, riding bikes, playing street hockey. There’s the sound of trash talk, skipping rhymes, laughter…

But 17 Summer Street is a house of mourning, not a house of mirth.

It’s been six months since the Princess Cruise from Nassau. Cheryl isn’t over it. How do you get over something like that?

She’s been going to therapy and she’s on several different antianxiety medications. None of that helps.

What helps is being numb.

Every morning, as soon as Tom and the twins are gone, she makes herself a vodka tonic that is mostly vodka. Then she puts on the TV and swallows a Klonopin and a Xanax and zones out.

The morning creeps by.

At eleven thirty, the mail will come. When she was a little girl, there were two deliveries a day. Now there’s only the one, at eleven thirty.

She knows what the postman will bring.

A few bills, some flyers, and another one of those letters.