Let Me Whisper in Your Ear Read Free

about it in the new year. How’s that, kiddo?” he whispered as he began to kiss Gwyneth’s long, graceful neck.
    No, we won’t, thought Gwyneth. The decision is made. You just don’t know it yet.

3
    F ELIPE C RUZ’S HAND trembled as he hung up the white receiver onto the telephone mounted on the kitchen wall. Without seeing, he stared at the red tomatoes and orange carrots printed on the wallpaper they’d hung in an effort to cheer up the old kitchen.
    How was he going to tell Marta?
    The test results were back. The DNA testing, which he’d only first heard of during the O. J. Simpson trial, now solved, at least partially, the agonizing mystery that had plagued their lives for the past thirty years. Three decades spent in despair and depression, worrying and wondering. Half of their lifetimes. Lives that they marked as “before” and “after” Tommy disappeared.
    The DNA tests were done on samples taken from a pile of bones found by construction workers in early December as they dug the foundation out of the cold ground for yet another high-rise apartment complex scheduled to perch atop the prime real estate of the Palisades. The Cliffside Park police called the Cruzes to alert them that the examination had shown that the bones were those of an adolescent. Felipe and Marta had not slept through the night in the two weeks since they’d given their own genetic samples to authorities for comparison.
    Now they knew. After thirty years of living in a state of heartbroken anticipation, clinging to what became an increasingly desperate and faint hope, they finally knew. DNA, a human being’s genetic road map, ultimately marked the location of their only child. The bones were Tommy’s.
    God, forgive me. It’s a relief.
    Now, at least this Christmas, they knew that Tommy was not still out there somewhere. The years had just crept along. Tommy’s birthdays rolled by. The first without him had been the worst. Then his fourteenth, his fifteenth … his fortieth, forty-first, forty-second. Somehow, they had survived, always praying and wondering if their son would turn up one day. And, if he did come back into their lives, what horrors would he have lived through? Many nights, year after year, Felipe had rocked a sobbing Marta in his arms in the dark as they speculated on what could have happened to their son. And then they stopped speculating. Out loud, at least. They could not talk about it anymore. Not if they wanted to go on living.
    The pain was so great that at times they discussed how they might kill themselves. They agreed that they would—if not for their religion. Devout Roman Catholics, they believed that they must live out their lives, no matter how painful, according to God’s will.
    Felipe felt a tug in his chest. How could God have wanted this? he wondered.
    Marta would be home from the market soon. Felipe paced the kitchen floor, mentally rehearsing what he was going to say. But then he realized that the moment Marta saw his face, she would know. He would not have to come up with the words to tell the mother of his son that their boy was dead and had been rotting less than a mile from their house for the last thirty years.
    But Felipe was going to have to come up with a way to tell his wife that the examination of what was left of Tommy’s bones showed that almost every one of them had been broken and that the police held out little hope of tracking down the owner of the silver chain and marcasite cross that they had found lying among Tommy’s remains.

4
    Wednesday, December 22
    C OLD, GRAY D ECEMBER always brought the dreaded Yearenders.
    Three days before Christmas, Laura sat at her desk, yellow highlighter in hand, poring over a computer listing of all the people whose deaths had warranted an obituary in the New York Times over the past year. The printout was as thick as Gone with the Wind.
    Next year, I’m not doing this,