“I’m happy for you,” Sarah said.
“Thank you.”
“I’m also not buying it. But we can deal with that later. Let’s go.”
“Why, what’s up?”
“Burroughs just left St. Barnabas Hospital in New Jersey. That’s where his ex-wife works.”
*
“I just wanted to have a normal day,” Hayden said. “Is that too much to ask? And you should have seen him, Pixie. Just a boy at an amusement park. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Theo so happy. It was all so wonderfully”—Hayden looked up at the ceiling as though searching for the right word before settling on—“normal.”
Normal, Gertrude thought. Nothing about this family or their lives was normal. No one wanted normal. Not really. She remembered when she brought Hayden’s father and his siblings to Disneyland a million years ago. She paid the park a ton of money, and so the park opened early for them. The Payne family spent two hours alone, the park closed to the “normal,” and then, when the park opened for real, a senior vice president took them around the grounds and moved them to the front of any line.
No one who waited two hours to go on Space Mountain wanted to be “normal” on that day.
“I wish you had told me you planned to take him.”
“You would have stopped me,” Hayden replied.
“And now you know why.”
“I was so careful. I wore a baseball cap and sunglasses. I didn’t tell anyone I was coming. I kept him away from all the company photographers. And come on, Pixie, what are the odds? He was a little boy when I rescued him. Even if you were looking dead straight at him, there is no way you’d know. And it’s not as though he’s a missing boy. The world believes he’s dead.”
Gertrude flashed back to that night five years ago. Hayden hadn’t consulted with her first. He hadn’t warned her either, because he’d known she would never allow it. It was almost morning when he’d brought the little boy here to the Payne estate.
“Pixie, I have to tell you something…”
It is startling what the human mind can justify. We all live via self-justification and self-rationalization. Pixie was hardly immune. Morality is subjective. She could have done the “right” thing that night, but we only do the right thing when it doesn’t cost us. It reminded her of the old chicken-extinction question. There is an argument that if we didn’t eat chickens, they’d go extinct, ergo it would be bad for chickens to stop eating them. A vegan friend of hers had told Gertrude that this was nonsense, but that wasn’t the point. Certainly, millions of chickens get to be born and live, however briefly and brutally, because they will eventually be eaten. Is that life better than none at all? Is it better for the chicken to have a life of, say, six weeks than never exist? Who are you to decide that for the chicken? Is it better to stop eating chicken altogether and let the chickens go extinct? Are we actually doing a good thing by eating chicken? On and on, like that.
The point isn’t that one side is right or wrong. The point is, if you want to eat chicken, you’ll use this argument, even if you don’t care in the slightest about chickens or their survival as a species. Because, well, you want to eat chicken.
Apply that tenfold to the family. Family matters. Your family, that is. Rich, poor, ancient times, modern days—that’s a constant. We all know this. Those who deny it are either delusional or lying. We pay lip service to a vague greater good, but only when it serves our interest. We don’t really care about others, except when convenient. Don’t believe it? Ask yourself this: How many lives would you trade to save your child or grandchild from being killed?
One person? Five? Ten?
A million?
Be honest with that answer and perhaps you’ll understand what Gertrude did that day.
She chose Hayden. She chose her family. We all know the saying that you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. That was true, of course, but in most cases, as in this one, the eggs were already broken, so the question becomes, Do you make an omelet or a mess?
“And yet,” Pixie said, spreading her arms, “here we are. It’s time for you to go, Hayden. Both of you.”
Hayden was looking off. “The red stain,” he said in a soft voice.
Gertrude closed her eyes. She didn’t want to hear this again.
“There was a reason God gave him that on his face.”
“It’s a birthmark, Hayden.”
“It’s how they spotted him. There’s a reason.”
She knew that wasn’t so. It wasn’t fate or God’s will or any of that. You see a street crossing. Millions of people cross that street every year. Nothing happens. Then one day, a combination of things—ice on the road maybe, a driver texting, too much drink, whatever—and a pedestrian gets hit and killed. It’s a one-in-ten-million thing, but it isn’t a coincidence. It happens. If it doesn’t, there is no story.
That photograph was their one in ten million.
Or perhaps Hayden was right. Perhaps a higher entity wanted it to happen.
“Either way,” Gertrude said, “it’s time for you both to leave.”
“It will look suspicious,” Hayden said. “Rachel asks me for the amusement-park photos, and I suddenly end up out of the country?”
“Pixie, I have to tell you something…”
He’d sounded like such a little boy that night, but that’s what men always sounded like when they were in trouble and needed to be saved. So she saved him. She saved her family. She saved them all. Again.
And had she saved Theo?
It didn’t matter. She would keep this secret. Again.
She had also created a fresh secret, one about the boy, one that no one, not even Hayden, knew.
That didn’t matter now. None of it did. Once again, Gertrude Payne was left to save the family. And so, no matter the cost to others, she would.
*
Max and Sarah were entering St. Barnabas Medical Center to question Cheryl Burroughs when Max’s phone buzzed. He saw the incoming call was from Lauren.
“Give me a second,” he said to Sarah.
He moved away from her so she couldn’t hear. Sarah still eyed him. He put the phone to his ear and said, “What’s up?”
“I got the paternity result,” Lauren said.
She gave it to him. Then she said, “Do you want to tell me what the hell is going on?”
“Maybe nothing. Give me an hour.”
He hung up the phone and came back to Sarah.
“Who was that?” she asked.
“Uh, my new guy.”
“Again? He’s kind of needy.”
“Sarah—”
“Did you two meet at summer camp? Does he live in Canada?”
“Huh?”
“Who called, Max?”
“You’ll see in a minute.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Where’s Burroughs’s ex-wife?”
“She’s in her office.”
“Let’s go.”
“Her new husband is here too,” Sarah said. “Ronald Dreason.”
Max thought about that. “Should we divide and conquer?”
“No, Max. I think we should stay together on this. I have him cooling off in another room.”