researched the herbs for her, telling her he thought Schaefer might actually be on to something. She’d sat with him in his tree house, studying the computer screen as he pulled up information about each herb from the Internet and translated the scientific descriptions of them into language she could easily understand. Lucas was the only person with whom she could speak rationally about the study, who didn’t scoff at the idea or belittle her for considering it. Her parents and Joe simply wouldn’t discuss Schaefer’s approach as an option.
Still, it wasn’t until Sophie suffered another crisis, one her doctors felt certain spelled the end of her short life, that Janine did something she hadn’t done in many years: she rebelled against Joe and her parents, that mighty, controlling three-some, and enrolled Sophie in the study behind their backs. Their fury had been quick to flare, and Janine would have backed down had it not been for Lucas. He’d lifted her guilt and rebuilt her back-bone. But look where that backbone had gotten her now. Look where it had gotten Sophie.
Long, long ago, Joe had appreciated Janine’s independence and daring. They’d known each other since their first year of junior high school, and back then, Joe had often expressed an admiration of her tomboyishness, her competitiveness and her spirit. Something shifted in their relationship during their junior year of high school, though, when Joe became attracted to her as something more than just the girl who could win any race and would accept any dare. They began to date, very quickly becoming a steady item in the halls of their high school. He grew less tolerant of her rebellious side, as he began to long for her to be more like the calm, faithful, feminine young women who dated his closest friends. One bonus of that wild streak, though, was Janine’s uninhibited sexuality. She’d wanted to lose her virginity, and Joe had been more than pleased to oblige—after first making certain she was on the pill.
She had been on the Pill, but as in most areas of her life, she was not terribly careful about taking it. Still, it wasn’t until the spring of their senior year that she became pregnant.
Her parents blamed her, not Joe, for the pregnancy, and they were quick to encourage Janine to marry him. The wedding took place the day after their graduation, in the garden at Ayr Creek, and Janine, a bit overwhelmed by all that was happening, allowed her parents to plan the event. The wedding was traditional in every detail, except, perhaps, for the bloated stomach of the bride, which pressed firmly against the fabric of her wedding gown.
Her parents adored Joe. He was the son they’d never had, and for Joe, the Snyders filled the lonely, empty space only an orphan could know. His mother had abused drugs and alcohol, deserting Joe and his father when Joe was only a year old. His father abandoned him in his own way, by dying in a plane crash when Joe was ten. Joe was then raised by his elderly aunt and uncle. Janine couldn’t blame him for being thrilled by her welcoming parents, even if she had never found them welcoming herself.
Her parents, who taught history in two different high schools at the time of the wedding, helped them out financially so that Joe and Janine were able to rent a small apartment in Chantilly. Janine’s mother bought them things they would need for the baby, and her father built them a crib from a kit. But all during that pregnancy, Janine had a sense of unreality. Her body grew rounder, yet she couldn’t quite grasp the fact that, in a few months, she would be a mother. She was barely eighteen, and not ready, not willing, to settle down.
She was good, at least as good as she could be. She didn’t swallow an ounce of alcohol once she learned she was pregnant, and she stopped smoking. But the physical risks she loved—climbing the cliffs at Great Falls, kayaking in the white water of the Potomac, canoeing the Shenandoah River—she did not give up. She wanted to learn how to fly, she told Joe. Maybe she would even be a stunt pilot or a wing walker. Joe told her to “grow up.” They had no money for her to take flying lessons, he said. He was working at a grocery store, trying to keep food on their table, and Janine thought he’d become remarkably stodgy overnight. It would be years before she understood that Joe’s quiet commitment to his job was a sign of his maturity, and that her wild streak was the hallmark of a self-indulgent, self-centered girl who had no business being married, much less a mother.
It was during one of her canoe trips that her baby decided to be born. Joe was not with her; he was working and would have been upset if he’d known she had gone off with her friends for a day on the Shenandoah. It was a weekend, and she didn’t see why she should have to stay home just because Joe had to work. Yet she knew better than to ask him if he minded. She simply went. She never would have gone if she’d known the baby would come six weeks early.
She was with three of her friends from high school: her best friend, Ellie, and two male friends who were simply that—friends. They were in two canoes, deep in the forest, battling a patch of white water, when the pains started. Quickly, Janine was bleeding, her terror mounting with each stab of pain.
They paddled to the riverbank, and Ellie stayed with her on a bed of leaves and moss, while the guys went for help. Ellie had no idea what to do, of course, and looking back on the event later, Janine barely remembered her friend’s presence. Instead, she remembered feeling completely alone, the trees a canopy of gold above her as she gasped from the pain and shivered in the October chill.
By the time the paramedics found her, she had delivered a stillborn baby boy, which Ellie had wrapped in her windbreaker.
The paramedics lifted Janine onto a stretcher and covered her with blankets.
“What the hell are you doing out here when you’re nearly eight months pregnant?” one of them asked her, as he rested a blanket on top of her.
She couldn’t answer, but she knew she deserved the hostile tone of the question. Once in the ambulance, she stared at the unmoving bundle where it rested in a clear plastic bassinet, and it was as if she were acknowledging for the first time that there had truly been a life inside her that she had taken for granted. A life she had, in effect, abused and neglected. She didn’t cry, at least not aloud, but tears washed over her cheek onto the stretcher.
Joe had been furious. He didn’t talk to her for weeks, and she’d felt alone and completely deserving of the isolation. She would mourn for that baby for the rest of her life. That had been her first true taste of guilt—a bitter, vile taste that was unfamiliar in her mouth. But it was not to be her last.
“Are you awake?”
She heard Joe’s voice in the darkness and drew herself back to the present.
“Yes.” She sat up straight, brushing tears from her cheeks. They were still in the car, somewhere on Beulah Road, and she saw the lights of the Meadowlark Gardens parking lot ahead of them. Leaning forward, she tried to make out the vehicles in the far corner of the lot.
“Looks like Gloria’s van,” Joe said. “And Rebecca and Steve’s Suburban. Your car. That’s it.”
They pulled into the lot, vast and dark in its emptiness, and drove to the corner. The four of them—Paula, Gloria, Rebecca and Steve—were sitting on small beach chairs set on the macadam. The Krafts’ two sons were no longer with them, and Charlotte had apparently gone home. Crushed bags and empty cups from Taco Bell littered the ground near the chairs.
Everyone stood up as Joe parked the car next to the Suburban.
“Any news?” Janine asked, as she got out of the car.
“Nothing,” Gloria said. “How about on your end? Did you see anything?”
“No clues,” Joe said. “But it was so dark up there, and the people working at the gas stations and restaurants are not the same people who were there this afternoon. So it was a little frustrating.”
“Plus, a lot of the shops and restaurants are closed,” Janine added.
“The police told us to go home and stay close to the phone,” Gloria said. “But we didn’t want to leave until you two got back.”
“Your parents called us a million times,” Rebecca said to Janine. “They’re so worried. You might want to give them a call.”
Rebecca and Steve no longer wore their wide, optimistic