In Her Eyes by Sarah Alderson (ebook reader for pc and android TXT) 📕

‘Are you OK to drive?’ I ask.

He frowns at me. ‘I’m fine,’ he mumbles, pulling a face like why wouldn’t I be?

‘Gene,’ I say, with the tone of a mother who’s caught their five-year-old by the empty cookie jar with crumbs down their shirt and chocolate smears all over their face.

‘I’m fine,’ he repeats impatiently. ‘I’m good.’ But he won’t look me in the eye.

‘You don’t look good.’

‘I’m just not sleeping, is all.’ He swipes at his nose. ‘I think I might be coming down with something.’

‘Gene,’ I say, walking over to him. I touch his wrist and he jumps in alarm, pulling away from me, but not before I’ve felt his skin. He’s clammy to the touch and up close I can see the capillary starbursts in his eyes and something else that surprises me. He looks afraid, like he’s seen a ghost. His eyes are darting all over the place, refusing to settle.

I glance down, looking for tracks up the inside of his arms, but his sweater covers them. Is he shooting up? Or smoking meth? There’s a big meth problem in the valley and I know of one or two kids from his year at school who have fallen into it.

Gene wrenches his arm free from my grip. ‘Can I borrow your car?’

‘What did you do with yours?’ I ask him.

‘I sold it,’ he says.

‘Why?’ I ask him.

‘We need the money, don’t we?’ he says.

I think about asking him where the money is, what he’s used it for, but I don’t because I’m afraid to know. I can’t handle hearing he’s on drugs. I have too much else to deal with. So I let Gene snatch the car keys from my hand and watch him scurry out the door.

Chapter 27

Dave meets me outside the hospital to give me a ride home so I can start packing our things and sorting out items to sell. Laurie, he tells me, has had to get on with some school work. Of course. I’m embarrassed at how reliant I’ve become on her. I should have realized it was too much for anyone, let alone someone who works full time and has her own life and own problems to deal with.

‘Don’t feel bad,’ Dave says, intuiting my discomfort. ‘She wanted to come. She just has a backlog of stuff to get through.’

He starts driving, glancing over at me a few times until he finally breaks the silence. ‘How are you doing?’ he asks.

‘Well, you know,’ I say, ‘I think I’d be doing better if my daughter woke up from her coma and our house wasn’t about to be repossessed by the bank and my husband wasn’t in jail for trying to murder me.’

Dave winces. ‘Yes, sorry, stupid question. I meant how’s your head?’

‘Oh,’ I say, reaching up to touch the thin line of stitches that are hidden beneath my hair. The bruise is still tender but the constant ache has gone. I get the odd slicing pain, as though someone is inserting a red-hot needle into the jelly of my brain, but otherwise it’s OK. ‘I’m fine.’

I sigh and, sinking back in the seat, close my eyes. The car smells as if someone has upended a can of Fanta over the upholstery, but beneath it is the unmistakable whiff of something else, something pungent: weed.

I reach down and grab the aerosol can I’ve just caught sight of in the side panel of the passenger door. Tropical Tango air freshener. I’ve found the source of Laurie’s paranoia about Dave having an affair. Not cheap perfume at all, but air freshener to disguise the smell of marijuana. I glance around the car. An SUV. Of course. How did it take me so long to figure it out? This is the car I saw outside the house the night of the break-in. The car Gene got into.

‘Have you seen Gene?’ I ask Dave, keeping my voice casual.

Dave grips the wheel tighter, his knuckles blanching. ‘Um, no. Well, earlier this week I drove him to the hospital. And to the jail to see Robert.’

‘Robert?’

Dave darts a glance my way, his eyes round. ‘Um, I thought you knew.’

‘He went to see Robert?’

Dave nods, eyes on the road. Damn it. Why didn’t he tell me? I can’t lie, it hurts that Robert agreed to see Gene but still won’t agree to see me or a lawyer. What did they talk about?

I’m sick to death of not knowing anything, of getting no answers. Not about June and her prognosis, not about my own husband’s involvement in what happened, not even about Gene and why he sold his car. Even Nate has kept things from me. I feel like I’m being swept along by currents outside of my control, hurled against rocks and boulders. I’m barely managing to stay conscious and to keep my head above water. I keep hoping that at some point someone will fish me out and haul me onto dry land and tell me that it’s all going to be OK, but perhaps that’s the problem. Perhaps I need to stop waiting to be saved and for someone to come along and provide me with answers, and instead I need to drag my own sorry ass to shore and start looking for them.

I stare at Dave out the corner of my eye. Maybe I should start right here.

‘Since when have you smoked weed, Dave?’ I ask.

He looks at me, eyes wide, before turning back to the road. ‘Don’t tell Laurie,’ he says. ‘You know how she feels about drugs.’

Laurie isn’t a puritan; it’s just that as a teacher she’s always had to be careful. Being caught in possession would have cost her job a few years ago, but now marijuana is legal in the state of California. There are two or three dispensaries in town selling everything from infused gummy bears to chocolate brownies to skunk. ‘It’s legal now,’ I say to Dave. ‘Why would she care?’

Dave