I wipe the tears as Jack’s back is turned. He faces me, holding out my long jewel-green mohair coat. It’s a little big because I bought it with pregnancy in mind even though I wasn’t pregnant at the time. I spent more than I should have, but it’d been so easy to picture the shape of my pregnant stomach beneath the soft, fuzzy fabric.
Jack leads me toward the back steps until we’re through the sunporch and into the winter air, cold and cleansing. He drops the spare key in one of the many empty flowerpots.
I can’t move.
I took Ester out for fresh air once but decided against it and hurried back inside our “oven house” as Jack calls it, since I now keep it at a cozy seventy-four degrees.
No one wants to see you make your baby cry.
“You should get a latte,” Jack says. “Go see Cynthia at Chip.”
I’ve been avoiding my good friend and her bakery, and that will have to continue for now. “That’s not where I’m going.”
“Yeah.” His head dips to the left as if I’ve punched him.
“Alec is our friend,” I say. “He’s mourning Belina too.”
Jack’s mouth is slightly open. His tongue taps against the back of his teeth. It’s a tell that there’s a lot he’s not saying, likely can’t because updates on Belina’s investigation would have been given in confidence during a briefing with his boss, the mayor. “The investigation is almost over,” he says finally.
“Then it won’t hurt to check on Alec.” I hope Jack sees the old me. Realizes she’s still here.
“We’ll talk tonight.” He kisses my forehead before hurrying to the garage.
Leaving his wife and baby.
This is the best part of his day.
I scrunch my chapped lips into my teeth until I draw blood.
Enough.
“We’ve got work to do,” I say to Ester. With a cautious first step, testing our weight together, I hurry toward Blackstone Boulevard.
Chapter 3
The bank sign on Hope Street says it’s just above freezing, and I open my coat to double-check that every inch of Ester is covered for our walk. Her arms and legs are beneath the fabric, and her cozy hat is pulled down, covering most of her soft black curls. I slowly zip my coat back up.
You took this tiny baby from her home.
Worried more about your fat ass than your baby freezing to death.
I push myself to walk faster, hoping to exhaust the voice and the rising panic at the thought of Belina’s death.
Because Ester’s cries aren’t the only thing keeping me awake at night. The radio voice from the operating room before I was put under plays in a constant loop during every dark hour: “Murder rocks the East Side of Providence tonight. A woman, identified by exclusive sources as twenty-seven-year-old Belina Cabrala, has been found at Swan Point Cemetery off Blackstone Boulevard.”
A week after I was out of the hospital, Jack agreed to talk about Belina. I had a nap and then a shower and felt as if I could focus on something other than Ester. She was asleep in the living room for her late-afternoon nap. We shared a beer and finally spoke like two adults for the first time since she was born. Jack had saved some articles from the paper, which I’ve since underlined and analyzed, hiding them all in Ester’s room.
We sat in silence as I read over them, searching for answers in the few facts: At approximately 7:30 p.m., Belina was stabbed in the chest inside a mausoleum at Swan Point Cemetery. Her body was dragged to the river, where her right arm was cut, most of her blood drained. A cemetery guard found her shortly after. There were no witnesses. No suspects. Jack added only that the mayor needed an arrest.
You could have done something.
I hold Ester tighter, trying unsuccessfully to focus on her instead of my grief. I see Belina everywhere on Hope Street, one of the main roads on the East Side of Providence. “That’s capital E and S,” Belina would say as she rolled her large brown eyes.
I made her laugh when I told her the story of when Jack and I moved here, newlyweds fresh from our ten years in DC. I was ready to jump into being a Rhode Islander. The cab driver asked where we were headed. I proudly said, “East Side,” because it made me feel local. Jack cringed.
The cabbie quirked his thin lips and said, “East Side, huh? Good for you.”
Belina explained that in Rhode Island, good for you (pronounced as one word: guh-fa-yoo) basically means go fuck yourself. “Just say you live in Providence now, if anyone asks,” she said with a smirk.
Assumed snobbery aside, I loved strolling with Belina through the neighborhood. I’d grown up in what I’d classify as a ghost town, a former mining metropolis long abandoned by the companies that took anything valuable from the land and didn’t even bother to clean up after. All that was left were people too stubborn and poor to leave. But Providence and our East Side house are the opposite. Not only is our home a charming butter-yellow Cape Cod, but it’s only two blocks from quirky local shops and packed restaurants. A place with a pulse and vibrancy. A place worth living and raising a family.
I cross Hope Street, heading toward Blackstone Boulevard, both large streets that run parallel to each other with a swath of neighborhood blocks in between. Closer to Hope Street in our section of the East Side, homes are somewhat more affordable. It’s easy to picture the happy families in them, front yards cluttered with bikes and red plastic wagons and water tables abandoned for the winter.
They’ve got real love in their homes.
Mothers who know how to take care of babies.
Babies that don’t cry all the time.
I pause at the turn I’d usually make to head toward Swan Point Cemetery. After the moment by the dogwood there, when I realized Belina was the new nanny for my friend Alec’s son, we took a walk together. She asked me a lot of questions about her new employer. My friendship with him went back to college.
After a while, she revealed a few things about herself.
She’d taken the job nannying Alec’s son, Emmett, because it was time to change. Not for a change. It was time to change.
I nodded as if she’d hardly said anything, but the words were powerful. They were key to who I’d become. What I’d had to do.
Then I asked what else she’d done for work.
“I was raised in Newport but not fancy. I worked in boutiques on Thayer Street. Was a hostess for a while. What you’d expect of a college dropout. Smart enough to talk to rich people but not enough to become one. I did finally get away. From my mom. From that gossipy town.” Then she said softly, “I should have finished college.”
That was when I knew: We were the same because we had wanted to be different. We wanted more.
On the surface, we might appear to be poor social climbers trying to make it up a few rungs of the ladder. But it’s not about money, not that type of wealth. It’s about people with fully lived lives, artistic points of reference, and happy Sunday plans with smart, boisterous families. Playing the piano at Christmas. Making a real cheese soufflé and arguing about a review in the New Yorker. That’s the “more” worth leaving your mother behind in Newport for. Worth never looking back at your parents and their abandoned Kansas town.
College is a passport for people like us, people who want to be different. When we aren’t born with much and need more than a shitty high school education to get somewhere else. The difference between Belina and me is that I made it out. She had still been treading water, focused on the sunny shore of “more.”