The Darkest Evening of the Year

blocked.
    Brian didn’t reach for the receiver.
    “It’s her,” Amy said.
    “I haven’t spoken to her in ten years.”
    No matter how much he wanted to spring Hope from her mother’s control, the prospect of taking another step back into Vanessa’s universe was daunting.
    The phone rang again, then a third time, and when he picked it up, he said simply, “Yes?”
    “Bry, have any of the buildings you designed fallen down yet?”
    “Not yet,” he said, determined not to let her anger him or frustrate him into a response that might jeopardize his chance to recover Hope.
    “It’s only a matter of time, Bry. We know what happens when you conceive something.”
    He had forgotten the extraordinary quality of her voice, an instrument of smoke and steel.
    “I think it’s time,” she said, “for you to take responsibility for the consequences of your funky sperm, don’t you?”
    He glanced at Amy, but then he felt that somehow he sullied her merely by looking at her when he was on the phone with Vanessa, and he averted his eyes.
    “Whatever you want is all right with me, Vanessa. No negotiating on my end. Full transparency of my savings, checking, investments—you’ll know I’m not holding back anything.”
    “I don’t want your money, Bry. You live above your offices. If your folks weren’t dead, you’d probably be living with them. Whatever you’ve got, what would it buy me? A nice coat, some shoes?”
    She couldn’t have inferred his living arrangements from anything he had said in the e-mails they had exchanged over the years.
    “You said you wanted something from me,” he reminded her.
    “I have this guy now, he’s got more money than God. He’s even richer than the creep your baby would have gotten me if she hadn’t been a freak. Money’s no problem. You know, Bry, there was a time when what I wanted was you dead.”
    “I think I knew that.”
    “And not slow by cancer. Since then, I’ve been with some guys who would’ve done it for me, and done it good. But I got over that pretty early.”
    If his nerves had been piano wires, nothing but high notes could have been struck from them.
    He had taken his left hand off Nickie. He returned it to the back of the dog’s neck—and was surprisingly calmed by the contact.
    Vanessa said, “It’s been more satisfying to just leave you hanging out there all these years, taking pokes at you.”
    “Nobody can play piñata with a man better than you.”
    He had forgotten that she could laugh and that her laugh had a throaty and yet appealingly girlish quality.
    “This guy I’m with now,” she said, “with all his money, when he has problems with people, he doesn’t punch their tickets, he just deals them out of his way. He’s got pockets so deep he can put his arms in up to his shoulders.”
    “All I want is my daughter.”
    “And my guy, he doesn’t want old Piggy. Other guys, they had fun watching me tweak her all the time, but not this one. She just turns his stomach, he wants her out of here.”
    “So do I. Bring her to me. Or I’ll come get her. Whatever.”
    “Thing is, my guy now, he plays everything by the rules. He’s a straight arrow. First one like that since you. Way too horny for his own good, which is why he’s so totally mine, the poor baby. You remember how that was, don’t you?”
    “Yes.”
    “But he wants you and me to sign papers saying that old Piggy is ours, yours and mine, and you found Jesus or something and want full custody, and you don’t hold me liable for anything, I’ve been a really good mother, in fact morally you owe me ten years of child support and you’re grateful I’m forgiving you that responsibility, yada-yada-yada.”
    “I’ll sign anything.”
    “It’s like a foot-thick stack of documents, ’cause he doesn’t want you coming back on him someday or, worse, he doesn’t want to see in the newspaper how he somehow did wrong to a poor little freak girl. He’ll even set up a trust fund for her care.”
    “I don’t need that. I don’t want money.”
    “He insists on it, Bry. He worries about his reputation, so he covers his ass at all times. And since I am going to be Mrs. Deep Pockets, he’s covering my ass, too.”
    This was a turn of events he didn’t like. On the other hand, if anything happened to him, the trust fund would guarantee Hope’s care.
    He said, “A trust fund needs directors to manage it, invest the money, pay it out. That’ll put you in my life, Vanessa,