Snapshots

If Rick had learned anything in his thirty-two years, it was that life had a way of rearing up in your face or skidding along in unexpected twists and turns, like now. And the worst of it was that you couldn’t go back and change any of it afterward.

Chapter 2: Rick

2004

After Martine’s accident, Trista and Rick alternated shifts at the hospital, and Rick was thankful that Trista could stay on in Miami to help him out. They didn’t see each other often, mostly brief hellos and goodbyes as one left Martine’s bedside and the other arrived.

Though Martine was more alert by the third day after the accident, she didn’t talk to him much. The nurses told him that she needed her rest while her body healed. Rick suspected that Martine was more forthcoming with Trista, and he considered whether she might be filling her sister in on their personal situation during the long hours when Trista sat at her bedside. Even if that was what was going on, he knew that Trista would respect Martine’s confidence and that she would never speak of their marriage difficulties with him.

Rick returned to work in Homicide, but his heart wasn’t in it. More than anything, he wanted to patch things up with his wife, but he was reluctant to broach the subject while she was recovering. He was still wallowing in guilt. In his heart, he believed that the kidnapping would never have happened if he hadn’t gone against Martine’s wishes by choosing police work as a career.

Five days after the accident, Rick was sitting in the backyard of their house, watching the light from the moon dancing in the dense tropical shrubbery and thinking things over. Not that he got very far with it—his mind kept playing back the scenes with Padrón and the horror of watching the car roll over and explode into flames. When he heard the glass door behind him slide open on its track, he snapped out of his reverie and swiveled quickly in alarm. Since the break-in, he’d remained jittery and on edge. He sagged in relief when he saw that it was only Trista advancing toward him through the shadows.

“Hi, Rick. Martine practically pushed me out of her room and told me to get lost,” she said.

It struck him how pretty she was, and though her features were the same as Martine’s, Trista’s were softer somehow, as if they were the same picture captured by a more flattering lens.

“She seems to be feeling better today,” Rick said. He’d been encouraged by the color in Martine’s cheeks and the fading of her bruises.

“So what are you doing out here all by yourself?” Trista asked.

“Thinking,” he said.

She paused, skewering him with a glance. “About?”

He sighed. “A lot of things.”

“Do I have to drag it out of you?” she asked with an impish grin, but he wasn’t in the mood to be teased.

“I need to figure out where to go from here. I thought I could do a lot of good by working in law enforcement, and yet I endangered Martine. I can’t forgive myself for that.”

Trista’s expression changed, became serious. “You didn’t cause Padrón to do what he did. He’s responsible for his own actions.”

“Tris, I’ve learned the hard way that when you’re dealing with the criminal element, you open yourself to things that should never happen.” He was more than serious. Somber, even.

“We both figured that out a long time ago, didn’t we?” Trista said, and he knew she was remembering her father, a prominent South Carolina attorney. Seven years ago, Roger Barrineau had been murdered by a former client, gunned down in cold blood on the steps of the Richland County Courthouse.

He nodded. His father-in-law had been Rick’s friend and role model, and the shock and grief of his murder had never completely gone away. Now, years later, to be faced with nearly losing his wife in a similar situation had not only been terrifying, it had brought him up short. He didn’t want to live his life like this anymore. He wanted things to be peaceful, calm, nice.

Of course, the case could be made that Rick had lost his wife before Padrón ever forced her into his car, but he wasn’t about to discuss that with Trista unless she brought it up first.

Thankfully, she didn’t. She stretched, smiled at him and stood. “That chair in Martine’s hospital room has put a permanent kink in my spine. I could use a glass of wine to start the unwinding process. How about you?”

“I’ll get it.” He started to rise, but she stayed him with a light hand on his arm.

“No, let me. I’m going inside to change shoes, anyway. I’m ready to kick back some.”

He looked at her feet, small for such a tall woman. She wore espadrilles with cork wedge heels that made her ankles seem impossibly slim.

“All right, if you insist. I like the Delicato chardonnay. It’s in the refrigerator.”

“I’ll try it,” she said.

When Trista returned wearing bedroom slippers, which were incongruously fuzzy and pink, she carried two glasses on a narrow tray. “I couldn’t find any crackers or cheese. Maybe I should stop by the store on my way back from the hospital tomorrow.” She sat down beside him and eased the back of her patio chair down a notch.

“I don’t expect you to do the shopping. I’ll be happy to pick up some food tomorrow. You’ve helped so much with Martine, and I’m grateful you’re here, believe me.”

She regarded him over the top of her wineglass. “Where else would I be?” she asked. “I belong with you and Martine at a time like this.”

“I appreciate everything you’re doing,” he said, thinking back to all the other occasions when he and Martine had depended on Trista. The time they’d won a Caribbean cruise in a raffle and she’d house-sat, overseeing the building of their new Florida room while they were gone. Trista had rearranged her vacation days in order to accommodate them. And a few years ago when Martine had injured her knee while skiing, Trista had uncomplainingly occupied their guest room for two weeks, doing all the cooking and keeping Martine company. Martine declared that she would have gone stark raving mad sitting around the house by herself all that time.

“So what do you think of the Carolina Panthers’ chances when they play the Dolphins next season?” Trista asked, and since this was something on which Rick held a well-thought-out opinion, he gratefully entered into a discussion. It amazed him that he was capable of this when he was hurting so much inside, but it had become second nature to pretend everything was okay when it wasn’t.

The conversation progressed to updating her about his parents and their work in China and inquiries about Virginia Barrineau, who now lived with her sister in Macon, Georgia. It was easy talk, unchallenging and comforting because it required no thinking, no decision making.

“I like this chardonnay,” Trista said when the conversation began to wane. She swirled the pale liquid in her glass, studying it. “You have good taste in wine.”

“You used to be disappointed that wine didn’t taste like Kool-Aid,” Rick reminded her, recalling their first foray into alcohol together. When they were high-school juniors, he’d snitched a bottle of pinot grigio from his parents’ bar at Sweetwater Cottage, and they’d drunk every last drop from paper cups on the beach. The wine had given them only a mild buzz, and Martine had declared that she liked beer better, so what was all the fuss about?

He and Trista had jumped all over Martine, demanding that she tell them when she’d had occasion to drink beer, and she’d laughingly informed them that she and her current steady date customarily downed a six-pack every weekend; they’d park in the lover’s lane overlooking the lake behind their subdivision in Columbia and chugalug until the beer was gone. Then they’d make out.

If Trista recalled that long-ago discussion, she gave no indication of it now. She smiled. “Not much can beat cherry Kool-Aid, even today. I’ve considered adopting a kid so people won’t tease me about having it in the refrigerator.”

He cut a sideways glance in her direction. “You really mean that? About adopting a child?”

Trista shrugged, almost too casually, and avoided his eyes. “I’ve thought about it, usually when I’ve overwound my biological clock. Then I get sane again and realize that with my job, I wouldn’t be a great single parent.” She sounded sad or perhaps reflective, and he could only imagine what was running through her mind.

He infused his voice with what he hoped was encouragement. “You’ve got a great job. Don’t knock it.” After he said it, he realized that refocusing the conversation on her job rather than her wish to adopt could be construed as unfeeling, but it was too late to take back his words.

Trista pushed a strand of cornsilk-pale hair back from her forehead and adroitly changed the subject. “Martine’s getting out of the hospital on Sunday. I’m planning to leave that morning,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone.

He was surprised at the disappointment that washed over him when he thought of her leaving. “Don’t you want to be here when she comes home?”

“I did, but Martine insists that she won’t need someone around the house 24–7. And let’s face it, I’ve got a job I should be tending. Anyway, Martine said she’d call Esmelda if she can’t handle being by herself.” Esmelda had been angling for more working time due to the fact that she was expecting her fourth child and could use the money.

Rick didn’t say anything. He supposed he couldn’t ask Trista to stay in Miami any longer, considering that she had her own life. For a few brief seconds, he wondered if it was a satisfying one. Her talk about adopting a baby seemed to indicate that she wasn’t completely happy.

But she was already off on another tack. “Have you eaten?” she asked.

“Not yet.” In fact, it hadn’t even crossed his mind. He’d lost his appetite after the accident and it still hadn’t returned.

“I picked up some Chinese food at lunchtime, and there’s plenty left. I’ll heat it in the microwave and we can eat out here.” Trista set aside her empty wineglass before heading for the house.

“Need some help?” he called after her.

“No, it’s just a matter of dishing it out,” she called back. She disappeared inside, leaving him with his thoughts, not to mention regrets. Miami was a long way from Columbia, South Carolina, and he was a long way from the person he had been while he was growing up there. While they were growing up, he and Trista and Martine.

“Hey, Rick, can you get the door for me?”

Trista emerged carrying a tray loaded with plates of General T so’s chicken, moo goo gai pan and fried rice, and he hurried to pull their chairs over to the round patio table.

“I haven’t had Chinese for a while,” he said, watching her. She’d donned a loose cardigan over her top, but it didn’t obscure her curves. Trista had the well-honed figure of an athlete, thanks to her habit of running before breakfast. Back in high school and whenever they were home from college, the three of them had liked to run together.

“Spicy for you,” Trista said as she spooned a helping of General Tso onto his plate, “and bland for me.” She dished out a small portion of moo goo gai pan for herself. She didn’t like anything hot, but he and Martine did. Tabasco sauce on eggs, hot red pepper flakes on almost everything else.

Rick was hungrier than he expected. It didn’t take him long to devour all his food, after which Trista went back inside the house to get the rest of the moo goo gai pan, which he ate, as well.

“That was delicious,” he said, smiling at her across the table. She’d brought a candle outside and lit it, and its sweet vanilla scent combined with the fragrance of night-blooming jasmine from the surrounding shrubbery. For the first time in days, he wasn’t thinking about all he had to consider—his marriage, Martine’s injuries, neglecting work.

“There’s ice cream in the freezer,” Trista said. “I peeked.”

“What kind?”

She shot him a conspiratorial smile. “Our favorite. Mint chocolate chip.”

The three of them must have eaten gallons of the stuff in the course of their childhood. Trista had laughingly pointed out that it should be their official ice cream, comparing Rick to the mint, Martine to the chocolate chips and herself to the ice cream itself. This was because, she said, Rick provided the spark, the excitement to the synergy that the three of them generated. Martine was the richness, and Trista was the no-nonsense person, the base of everything.

That was certainly true, he reflected as he gathered up the plates. Trista was the one that both he and Martine consulted before they made a move, the reliable anchor in their lives. Which was probably why she’d been promoted so quickly to her position at WCIC–TV; her crisp but serious reporting of the news gave it weight and meaning for the thousands of viewers who regularly tuned in.

Trista took cut-glass bowls from the cabinet, and he scooped the ice cream. They sat at the kitchen counter to eat it.

“You’ll be glad to have Martine back home,” Trista said as she concentrated on scraping chocolate chips off the side of her dish.

What could he reply but, “Of course,” but he averted his face so that Trista wouldn’t read anything into his expression.

“I’ll change the bed linens tomorrow, and—”

“Don’t bother,” he interrupted much too sharply. “Esmelda will do it.”

“I’ll leave a casserole in the freezer for you. Martine won’t want to cook once she gets home. Did you like the chicken tetrazzini I made at the cottage last summer?”

“The best. Better than your mom’s chicken and noodles.”

“That’s saying quite a lot,” Trista offered with a smile. She got up and rinsed her bowl off in the sink. “I believe I’ll turn in early,” she said, but he couldn’t help wishing she’d stay in the kitchen and talk awhile. He hadn’t realized how starved he was for human companionship.

“Hey,” he said. “How about a walk around the block?”

Trista shook her head. “Not tonight,” she replied offhandedly. “Catch you in the morning.” She touched his shoulder briefly before retreating down the hall and closing the guest-room door.

Words sprang unbidden to his mind: Such a shame that Trista has stayed single so long. She’d make a fine wife, a good mother. He entertained the fleeting notion that it might be partly his fault that she’d never married, his and Martine’s, but he didn’t linger on it. There was no point in allowing even more regrets to enter his consciousness; no sense in twisting this situation into something it wasn’t.

Still, he minded that Trista couldn’t stay for a few more days. On the other hand, if she were here, neither he nor Martine would be likely to initiate a discussion of the intimate details of their marriage. For the life of him, he couldn’t figure out if that would be good or bad.

He stared down at the melting ice cream in his dish. For a moment, it seemed like a metaphor for his life at present. Melting away, becoming something he didn’t recognize anymore.

In the morning, he expected Trista to show up in the kitchen for breakfast and intended to suggest running together before she headed for the hospital. But she’d already left in Martine’s car, so he gulped two cups of high-octane coffee, scribbled a note saying he was sorry he’d missed her and went to work.

He only saw Trista briefly on Sunday morning before she left for the airport. He would have driven her himself, but she’d already summoned a cab before he woke up. She seemed subdued, worried, but this scarcely registered with him. All his thoughts were focused on springing Martine from the hospital.

The night before, Martine had quizzed him thoroughly on the phone about what time he’d be there to pick her up. She’d remained all too quiet on his previous visits, barely replying when he spoke to her, but now he entertained the tentative hope that Martine was willing to give their marriage another chance. Maybe a couple of weeks at Sweetwater Cottage, just the two of them, would smooth things over.

As soon as Trista’s taxi disappeared around the corner, Rick started for the hospital. He bought a bouquet of flowers from a roadside vendor, and when he reached Martine’s floor at the hospital, he bounded off the elevator, smiling at the nurses and aides at the nurses’ station. Martine’s room was only a couple of doors down the hall, and he rounded the corner prepared to kiss her hello.

The bed was empty.

A cold hand clenched his heart. Of course he thought the worst. Visions of emergencies straight from TV dramas sprang to mind, all punctuated by doctors running down the hall, their lab coats flying, and someone yelling, “Stat! Hurry, she’s coding!”

He rushed back to the nurses’ station, losing a couple of daisies in the process. The flowers skidded across the highly polished tile floor as they scattered. Oblivious to his panic, one of the aides, a young girl named Kitty, glanced up from her coffee and doughnut. A scrim of powdered sugar trailed unheeded across her upper lip.

“Where’s my wife? Is she all right?”

“Yes, Mr. McCulloch, she checked out about an hour ago.”

This stopped him in his tracks. “She did?” He was incredulous. They’d discussed on the phone last night how he would be there to pick her up as soon as Trista left. He’d told Martine jokingly that he’d drive her directly to Star-bucks for a chai tea latte because she claimed that she was going through withdrawal; she usually treated herself to one every day.

“A man came to get her.” Kitty took another bite of her doughnut.

“A man—?” For one horrifying moment, a new picture of Padrón forcing Martine out of the hospital at gunpoint flashed through his mind. But Padrón was dead.

As this irrational vision faded, one of the nurses sitting behind the counter extended her hand, and in it was a white envelope. His name was scribbled on the front. It was Martine’s handwriting, distinctive and easily recognizable by its wide lower loops.

“Mrs. McCulloch left this for you,” she said.

He accepted the envelope, slitted it open and walked slowly to the waiting area in a nearby alcove, where he sank onto one of the chairs to read the message.

Rick,

I’m sorry, but I can’t go home with you. Steve is taking me to his apartment for now, and I’ll send someone to our house to get my things as soon as I can. I want out of the marriage, and we’ll have to talk about it. I can’t face hashing things over now. I need to heal first, and then I’ll be in touch.

Martine

Steve Lifkin, an attorney in the law office where Martine worked as a paralegal, was the guy who had written Martine those love notes. The letters had left no doubt in Rick’s mind that Martine and Steve enjoyed an intimate, ongoing relationship of almost a year.

He glanced up when Kitty passed by. “Mr. McCulloch? Are you all right? You’re so pale.”

“I’ll be fine,” he said tonelessly. He stood, pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, but shoved it back in again. His first instinct was to call Martine and ask her what the hell she was doing. If she was with Steve, though, she wouldn’t talk to him anyway. He wondered how she could have gone from joking about chai tea lattes last night to moving in with Steve today. He wondered what he was going to do with himself for the rest of his life, and he wondered why he cared.

In the days that followed, Martine’s belongings disappeared mysteriously, piece by piece, from their Kendall home, as well as furniture that she’d brought into the marriage. The grandfather clock that had always stood in the foyer of her family’s Columbia house, the engraved crystal wineglasses that were her mother’s. Blank spaces on the walls appeared where Martine’s beautiful watercolor paintings had been; the stained-glass window that she’d crafted so carefully was missing from where it hung on the screened porch. Every day when he arrived home from work, Rick would amble around the house, glumly taking note of the things that were newly missing, then sit down to a tasteless frozen dinner heated in the microwave.

At first he’d thought that before she left Miami, Trista must have known Martine wasn’t going to come home from the hospital with him, but when she called two days after Martine left the hospital, she seemed astonished when he told her that Martine was living at Steve’s place.

“Oh, Rick, I’m sorry,” Trista said, her voice low. Other women shrilled when they were upset, but not Trista. If anything, she became more centered.

He greeted this with silence. Though Trista and Martine had grown apart in recent years, he couldn’t imagine Martine’s embarking on such a course without running it past Trista first.

Trista sighed. “Rick, she told me on Saturday that she was going to file for divorce. She mentioned that you’d had a fight before Padrón forced her into the car, and she said she wanted to leave you. I couldn’t talk her out of it. I tried. She never mentioned that another man was involved.”

“She and Steve have been having an affair for almost a year. Maybe she’ll fill you in on what’s happened,” he said.

“She doesn’t talk to me,” Trista replied despairingly. “And I don’t understand her or the things she does sometimes.”

“Ditto for me.”

After they hung up, Rick buried his face in his hands. Through his pain, he was furious with Martine for putting them through this and angry with himself because his wife had felt a need to include another man in her life. He was well aware that it was too late to go back and change the way things were, and he didn’t much like the way they were going to be, either.

Shortly after this conversation, Rick descended into a depression the likes of which he had never experienced. As always when things got tough, he began to ruminate over his life as it was before things got so complicated. Before he had a job that was becoming increasingly difficult to perform.

Maybe that was because he was drinking too much, staying out later and later at one bar or another and avoiding one-on-one social situations of any kind. Still, he believed that he was performing his job to the best of his ability until his boss called him into his office late one Friday in early March.

“Rick,” Shorty said, walking around his desk and perching on the edge of it as he was wont to do when attempting to establish rapport. “You’ve been through a lot, and I think you need a break. I hope you don’t take this as a put-down, and I have great respect for your ability, but I’m going to put you on an extended leave starting today.”

Rick hadn’t seen this coming at all. “Extended leave?”

“Don’t worry, we’ll welcome you back after a few months. We’re giving you time to pull yourself back together, that’s all. I’ll keep in touch, and—”

“What have I done wrong?” Rick was in a state of bewildered disbelief; how could this be happening? On top of everything else?

Shorty sighed and stared out the window for a long moment. “Son, you’re not playing at the top of your game. People complain that you don’t call them back, you forgot an important meeting last week, and I suspect that your mind’s not focused on your work. I’m doing this for your sake as much as the department’s. I don’t want you finding yourself in an edgy situation and getting into trouble.”

I’m already in trouble, at looks like. “My divorce will be final this week. After that—”

“Please don’t argue, Rick. What’s the name of that place in South Carolina you go to every summer? Where your family has a vacation cottage?”

“Tappany Island,” Rick said in a low tone.

“Take a break—that’s all I’m asking.” Shorty paused at the door and appeared to be thinking something over for a moment, before abruptly leaving the room. Rick sensed that the conversation had been almost as hard on his boss as it had been on him.

Numb after this dismissal, still scarcely believing it, Rick cleaned out his desk and set about getting roaring drunk as soon as he got home. When he emerged on the other side of this binge with a nasty hangover, he tossed some things into a suitcase in preparation for leaving.