“Did you need diapers?” Winston asked.
For a moment, Janelle appeared betrayed, as if Winston had not believed what she’d just said, but Colleen watched Janelle’s face settle again, perhaps thinking, This man has no idea how many diapers you need. “Yes, we needed diapers,” she finally said. “We always need diapers.”
“Which store did he go to?” Winston asked.
“The Food Lion,” she said. “Up on Beach Road.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Winston said.
“It’s right up the road from the airport,” Bellamy added. “He probably saw that plane come in.”
“Did he seem strange or worried or upset when he left?” Colleen’s father asked.
“No,” Janelle said. “He seemed normal. He seemed like himself.”
“Did he have any friends who were in trouble, or had he started to hang around with anybody who seemed like trouble to you?”
“Oh, come on,” Bellamy said. He shook his head and looked at the front door for a moment.
“It’s okay, Ed,” Janelle said. She looked at Winston. “No,” she said. “No new friends, no one who seemed like trouble.”
“Did you get the sense that he was scared of anyone?”
Bellamy stood up from the armchair. “Excuse me,” he said.
“It’s okay, Ed,” Janelle said again. “These are just questions.”
Bellamy stepped around the coffee table, his back turned to the three of them. He had his hands in his pockets, and Colleen could see that he was clenching and unclenching them, the cotton fabric of his pants tightening and untightening around his thighs each time his fingers moved. He stared down at the carpet.
“Ed,” Janelle said.
Without turning, Bellamy raised his head as if he were going to speak, but he must’ve decided against it. Instead he took one of his hands out of his pocket and opened the front door.
“I’ll wait outside,” he said before pulling the door closed behind him.
Colleen, her father, and Janelle all sat in silence for a moment.
“I’m sorry,” Janelle said. “He’s just—” But she stopped talking as if unsure of how to explain what her father-in-law was feeling and what had just happened.
“It’s okay,” Winston said. “I can’t imagine what he’s been through, what y’all have been through.”
Janelle nodded her head as if she’d heard what Winston had said, but Colleen knew she wasn’t really listening. Janelle had kept her eyes locked on the door after Bellamy closed it behind him, and Colleen knew what she was thinking: Ed Bellamy was now her only link to this place. Sure, Janelle had her baby, but the baby would keep her at home, anchored there, marooned away from the world. Colleen couldn’t help but think about her own life back in Dallas, especially her life after they lost the baby: the long, interminable hours of daylight between the time when Scott left for work and the time he returned home, Colleen wandering the house that now seemed more like a fortress of solitude than a home, all the while feeling alternately enraged and forlorn at the idea that she and Scott could have ever made a life—much less had a family—there. Colleen shifted in her seat and shook her own life from her mind. Winston had returned to his questions, and Janelle’s eyes had left the door and settled again on his face.
“Did you ever get the sense that Rodney was in debt, that maybe he owed people money?”
Janelle laughed a little, not at the absurdity of the question, but at the absurdity of what it seemed to imply.
“No,” she said. “Absolutely not. Rodney had a great job with Brunswick Electric. They loved him, and he loved it. That job was what brought us back home.” She stopped talking for a moment while her gaze took in the small living room around her as if she were making an inventory of the things inside it. “I wouldn’t have let him take me out of Atlanta for just any job.”
“Is that where y’all met?” Winston asked.
“Yes,” Janelle said.
“At Morehouse? He went to Morehouse, right?”
“Morehouse is a men’s university,” she said.
“Oh,” Winston said. “Is there a women’s?”
“Yes,” Janelle said. “Spelman. But I graduated from Emory.”
Janelle kept her eyes on Winston as if the mention of the university might carry weight or mean something to him, but Colleen knew it wouldn’t, not because he didn’t believe in education or wasn’t impressed by credentials, but because he didn’t know enough about that world to extrapolate any differences between Morehouse and Spelman and Emory. Colleen knew that to people like her father college was a place where one went to learn something particular, perhaps peculiar, and one school was as good as another. But Colleen knew better. “What did you major in?” she asked, her voice coming out too clear, too bright.
“I double majored,” Janelle said, “in journalism and communications. I was either going to write about the news or deliver it on television.” She laughed and looked down at her hands, the tissue still clenched tight. “I got an internship at CNN, and I thought I was on my way. And then I met Rodney, got married, had the baby, and we moved here instead.”
She raised her eyes to Colleen, and Colleen wondered what to read in her face. Irony? Sadness? Resignation? Colleen had the urge to tell her that it would all be okay, that she could go back to work in the career she had not yet begun, but she fought the urge because she knew how it felt to hear those things when people said them to her as if it were easy for women to start and stop, to have children or to lose them, to rely on a husband who might be out of the house for twelve hours a day or for the rest of your life. Janelle didn’t need to hear any empty consolations from people like Colleen any more than Colleen needed to hear them.
Instead, Colleen offered an affirming nod at what Janelle had said, and her face slid into an apologetic smile as she asked Janelle if she could use the restroom.
“Of course,” Janelle said. She turned in her seat and pointed at the hallway behind her. “It’s the first door on the right, just down the hallway there.”
Colleen stood and excused herself.
She heard Winston resume his questions as she closed the bathroom door. When she flipped the switch, the light over the sink came on, as did the exhaust fan, drowning out the sound of her father’s voice.
Colleen ran a trickle of water in the sink and sat down on the closed lid of the toilet. She put her elbows on her knees, dropped her head into her hands. How did she get here? How had her life taken this turn? She heard something coming through the wall to her right, something low and muffled moving just beneath the purr of the exhaust fan in the ceiling above her. It was music.
She stood and turned off the water, and then she flushed the toilet and flipped the light switch so that the room was quiet and lit only by the glow of sunlight that came in through the closed blinds on the window behind the toilet. She recognized the song coming through the wall, although she couldn’t place it. She wondered if Janelle had left the music on or if someone else was in the house.
She opened the door into the hallway, expecting to find the source of the music, but instead, directly across the hall, she saw a powder-blue wall peeking out from behind a cracked door. And then she heard the soft and unmistakable coo of a baby. She shuffled the three or so feet across the hallway, opened the cracked door a little farther, and peeked inside.