Page 45 of The Wrong Track

I was extremely worried about all that stuff and a lot more things besides, but when Monica left, I did get back to work. I talked to Ella about Lily, the wonderful girl who lived far away and was everything a person should be. I finished the slipcover for the ottoman, I made two throw pillows and started on a lampshade, I started on dinner, too. Mostly, I thought about that extremely sketchy life plan and I waited for Tobin to arrive.

I heard his car and maybe it was my imagination, but I thought that Ella did, too. “He’s home,” I told her, and she smiled at me. I realized that I had smiled at her, first, and I touched my lips, feeling the unfamiliar expression on them.

“Where is everybody?” his voice called, and I actually stopped myself from running toward it. We waited until he walked in from the garage. “Hi, you two.” He bent and kissed Ella, but he never liked to pick her up until he’d thoroughly washed and changed. He said that there were a lot of odd germs going around at a police station and he didn’t want them to rub off on either of us. “Whew, long day for me,” he told us. “I bet one of you laid around and got food handed to her, and the other one worked like a dog.” He smiled at me. “But you don’t look like you were up three times last night. You’re always so pretty.”

That couldn’t have been correct, because the last time I’d seen myself in the mirror, it looked more like I’d been through a car wash, and not while riding in a vehicle. But I hesitated, because his words felt so nice. “Really?”

“Really. You look beautiful.”

He was just being kind, throwing a bone to the dog, so to speak. But still…still, it did feel nice.

Ella squawked and he turned to her. “And you do too, peanut. Have you been a quiet girl today and let your mommy sew?”

“She’s been fine,” I said, which was true. I’d had to reset my expectations of her naps. Before, when I let myself think about it at all, I’d believed that babies slept a lot more—like that they slept during the day and especially at night. Tobin’s mom had apparently told him that he’d slept through at three weeks old, eight hours without waking once.

“But she’s also mentioned that I could speak in full sentences at six months. When my aunt Evelyn hears that, she rolls her eyes,” Tobin had told me.

We followed him into the kitchen where he stripped off his uniform shirt and stood in his white undershirt to wash at the sink. It wasn’t like he wore tight clothes, not skimpy or anything, but they did fit him quite well. If I were to tailor his shirts, for example, I wouldn’t have to do too much. The white cotton outlined the muscles in his back as he bent over to rinse his face and the sleeves were short enough to show a lot of his arms. Wordlessly, I handed him a towel.

“Did you make dinner already?” he asked me, wiping away the water. He reached for Ella and I was happy to pass her over.

“I started something, but we don’t have to eat it tonight. Why?”

“It’s Friday,” he said. “It’s Friday night. We should go out.”

“We should? What about the baby?”

“I meant the three of us,” he explained. “Just for dinner. She should be able to last through a meal.”

“Oh. Yeah, we could try it.” I heard the doubt in my voice.

“If it doesn’t work, we could bring the food home as take-out.”

“You really don’t like being here,” I said. “You’d rather be out of this house.”

“That’s not true. I got a little sick of looking at the walls when I had the big cast on, but now that I have my boot, I’m not antsy anymore. Don’t you want to get out, though? Have you really been anywhere in this town besides the library and the botanical gardens?”

No. Kilian hadn’t let me go anywhere and since he’d been gone, I hadn’t done much on my own. I should have been more adventurous, I thought. I should do that now.

“I’ll change, then,” I suggested, and he didn’t even glance at the sweatshirt I was wearing, which happened to be his.

“Sure. I’ll check her diaper and get the bag together. Right, peanut? We’re heading out for a crazy night on the town.”

A crazy night on the town, the three of us, I repeated in my mind. I’d thought, for just a second, that he’d meant that only the two of us would go together, like he was asking me out. That was silly.

It was totally silly and of course, and it wasn’t like I had anything to wear in any case. I looked at my clothes in the closet and hated all of them. Before we’d come here, before Kilian had known about the baby, he’d wanted me to dress in a certain way. He’d picked out everything, underwear to shoes, and he’d told me what to put on almost every day.

After he’d watched me take the pregnancy test, though, he’d changed his mind about how I was dressing. “You look a whore,” he’d mentioned casually. “You dress like a streetwalker.” Which was true, totally true. I’d been ashamed to go outside in some of the things he’d selected for me, but most of the time I’d been stoned enough that it didn’t get to me much.

But he’d told me that I was going to be a mother, the mother of his baby, so I had to dress like it. I’d managed to take a few things out of my former wardrobe that he deemed appropriate, and when we’d moved to Michigan, he’d come home one day with shopping bags full of more outfits that were motherly, not slutty. That was part of our disguise, too—we were supposed to be a normal couple, no one that any of our neighbors needed to pay attention to. Just a normal, married couple, living in Michigan in a condo with three kilos of various drugs stashed inside it, along with Kilian’s guns. The police had taken those; they’d been harder to hide than the taped up packages of pills and powder.

My wardrobe had been left behind, too. But after I was sure that he was really in jail, I’d rebelled. I’d taken all the clothes he’d bought me, the tight stuff with cutouts and the bras that made my breasts hurt so much, and put them in a bag and left it next to the dumpster. What was left were the “mother” clothes that Kilian had also chosen, and I didn’t want to wear any of that, either. I wanted to pick for myself, but of course I didn’t have the money for a totally new look. I’d mostly gotten baggy sweats that fit over my growing “medical issue” and things in five-dollar grab bags at the thrift shop. And there was a reason that they’d gathered those items and hidden them in garbage bags: no one else had wanted them due to ugliness, stains, size issues, or all of the above.

So I went back and forth over the clothes in my drawer before I picked out yet another baggy sweater, but at least it was a pretty green color, and put it on with some leggings that Hazel had given me after swearing that they were too small on her so she couldn’t wear them herself. I studied my face in the mirror briefly and then opened a bag of makeup that I’d worn before, in South Carolina. It was all so bright, and it all had so many memories attached. I thought of smearing on the pink lipstick, my hand shaking because I needed a hit, or using that concealer stick to try to cover a new bruise around my eye that had continued down my cheekbone so that my whole face throbbed with it. I took the bag and put it in the diaper pail and made sure the lid was tightly closed.

“Ready?” Tobin called, and I gave up and came out of the room. He was ready and so was Ella, and they both looked—well, really cute. Ella was a cute baby, and it wasn’t just me as a mother saying it, either. She was adorable, lovely. Tobin was more than cute in his blue shirt that brought out his eyes and with his hair wet where he’d combed it down. “Let’s go,” he urged. “I’ll drive, since now I can.”

He took us to a little restaurant and when we walked, I was relieved to see that we would order at a counter and that there were plenty of other kids. So it wasn’t fancy and no one should have noticed much if a baby started screaming. Tobin ordered extensively, because he always had an appetite, but I looked at the menu painted on the wall and felt at a loss.