“So I’ll turn it down. Will that suffice?”
“Just turn it off. Jesus, Abby, you carry it everywhere. You don’t need it.”
He goes to grab the monitor and she whirls away with a snarl. “I said I’d turn it down,” she snaps.
“What the hell, Abby?”
She fixes him with a blank stare and doesn’t answer.
“Fine. Leave the fucking thing on if you want.” He stomps into the kitchen, the echo of Brianna’s wails following him in, and grabs a beer from the refrigerator. Maybe if he drinks a few, he’ll care a little less.
* * *
At a small café halfway between his office and his sister’s, Jackson slides into a booth and waits for her to arrive. She’s a few minutes late, as always, and the first thing she says is, “You look like hell.”
“I love you too.”
“I assume the screaming mimi is still screaming?”
“Like nobody’s business.”
“It’ll pass, I promise. Just like a kidney stone.”
He groans. “That’s not even funny. You have no idea what a mess it is.”
After they’ve ordered, she traces her finger in the condensation from her water glass. “Everything else okay?”
He shrugs.
“Come on. ’Fess up. I can tell something’s bothering you, something else anyway.”
“It’s Abby.”
“And? You have to give me a little more than that to work with here. I’m not a mind reader.”
He rakes his fingers through his hair. “This is going to sound stupid or weird, but she carries the baby monitor around all the time. I mean all the time, even when Brianna’s in the same room.”
“Uh-huh. And?”
“And that’s it. Don’t you think it’s weird?”
She flicks her hair over her shoulder. “Did you ask her why?”
He drops his chin and peers up through his lashes. “Of course I did. She said she likes keeping it close.”
“Don’t you believe her?”
“No. Yes. Hell, I don’t know. It’s just … It bugs me. It’s like a kid with a security blanket. And every time it turns on, right before it picks up Brianna’s cries, this weird static thing goes on. It’s making me crazy.”
“Well, there you go.”
“What? The static?”
“Okay, we’ll blame this on a serious lack of sleep, but never mind the static, you just explained the whole monitor thing to yourself. Brianna cries all the time, right?”
“Pretty much.”
“So instead of a precious newborn to cuddle, you have a little crymonster. I mean, it can’t be easy to hold her when she’s crying, right?”
“No, but …”
“So, maybe Abby is transferring that wish to the monitor.”
He sits back in his chair. “That has to be the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Really? It makes perfect sense to me. I bet once the colic is gone, Abby’ll be fine. I bet you both will, or, at the very least, you’ll manage to get more sleep. Let her carry the damn thing if she wants. In a few months, it’ll all be over.”
“Yeah, yeah, I guess you’re right. It’s a ridiculous thing to even worry about.”
“I agree, it is, but you’re a first-time parent. Everything is something to worry about.”
* * *
The pediatrician, a middle-aged woman with a kind face, frowns as she measures Brianna and it deepens after she puts the baby on the scale. “She’s eating well?”
“Yes, very much so,” Abby says. “From the breast and when I pump it in a bottle so Jackson can feed her. Either way.”
The doctor nods and re-measures Brianna’s head. “Yes, yes, we can hear you, little one. Just a few minutes longer.” She bends close to the baby’s face and shines a light in her eyes.
Jackson’s gut clenches, but when the doctor finishes, the frown is gone. “Okay, she’s a little smaller than I’d like, but she’s healthy,” she adds. “Let’s try supplementing her daily feedings with eight ounces of formula. Four sometime in the morning, and four again at night.”
“Okay,” Jackson says.
Abby is chewing her lower lip.
“Not to worry, Mom,” the doctor says. “You’re not doing anything wrong and I’m not overly concerned. She might just be a slow grower, but we’ll see what happens with the formula. And you—” she turns back to Brianna “—I’ll see you back in a month. Maybe we’ll get lucky and your colic will be gone. That will make everyone happier, won’t it?”
* * *
He wakes in the middle of the night alone. The house is quiet, the monitor missing from the nightstand. He sneaks down the hall and sees Abby standing beside the crib, her head bowed, rocking slowly from side to side even though Brianna’s not in her arms. She’s whispering, but whatever she’s saying, it’s too low for him to hear, and, feeling like an eavesdropper, he creeps back into their room before she notices him.
* * *
On Saturday afternoon, with Brianna’s cries reaching every corner of every room, Jackson takes Abby gently by the shoulders. “Why don’t you go out for a little while? Go to the coffee shop or the bookstore. Just get out of the house and give yourself a break? You just fed her so she’ll be okay for a while, and if she isn’t I’ll just give her some formula.”
Her face shifts with indecision, but finally, she says, “I haven’t been to the bookstore in ages.”
“I know you haven’t.”
“If you’re sure?”
“I’m positive.”
“Okay, maybe I will. It’ll be nice to get out of the house and be a grownup for a change instead of just a mom.”
He watches as she gathers her keys and purse, saying nothing as she slips the monitor into the latter, but when she goes into the powder room, he pulls it out, rearranging her things so its absence won’t be immediately noticeable. Her face wreathed in relief, she heads out the door, and once the car is out of sight, he sinks down on the sofa, surprised his plan worked at all.
The monitor is about the size of a walkie-talkie. Plastic, with two switches on top. One to turn it off and on, the other to adjust the volume. He exhales through his nose. His hands are shaking and he doesn’t know why. A hunk of plastic is nothing to be afraid of, but still, unease settles into his chest as he turns it off. The house falls silent instantly, as though Brianna’s cries were severed with a knife.
He turns it back on. There’s the too-long crackle of static before Brianna begins to cry again, but it doesn’t sound like a fresh cry. It sounds as though she paused to take a breath and the monitor picked it up right in the middle. If that were the case, he still should’ve heard her; the door to her bedroom is open.
He flips the switch again. Silence. Is it possible something in the monitor itself is making her cry? There are people who can feel electric wires hum in the amalgam fillings of their teeth. Maybe it’s using a frequency that hurts her ears. He puts his ear near the monitor and turns it back on. Listens to the hiss of static and hears something else faintly in the background, something he can’t define, can’t explain, but then Brianna cries and the static is gone. His arms go all over goosebumps.
He turns the monitor off again and takes the steps two at a time. Something’s not right. That cry, that cut-off cry. He’s heard it before. And what he heard behind the static … He walks into Brianna’s room and his mouth goes dry. Her crib is empty.
* * *
Abby comes home with a bag full of new books, her smile wide and easy. Jackson has Brianna in his arms and the monitor, with the volume turned down, in the middle of the coffee table.
“How long have you known?” he says, his voice velvet soft.
The bag drops from her hands. Her mouth works. Guilt brings red to her cheeks and a tightness around her eyes.
“But the more important question is, how many times have you done it?” He presses a kiss to Brianna’s forehead and places her gently on the sofa. Stares at Ab
by while he closes the distance between them with long, lazy steps. He curls his hands into fists, but what he really wants to do is grab her by the shoulders and shake her. The only thing that keeps him from doing so is the fear that if he starts, he won’t stop. Won’t want to stop.
She drops her gaze. “I only did it a few times, I swear,” she says in a rush. “You have no idea what it’s like to be with her all day, every day. You have no idea how awful I felt that I couldn’t fix her, that I could make her feel better, and then I—”
“You shut her off. You sent her away.”
Abby wrings her hands. “Jackson, I swear, I didn’t mean to—”
“How could you? How the hell could you do that to our daughter? You have no idea what it’s doing to her, let alone where she goes when she’s not here. Maybe this is why she’s crying all the time. Maybe she’s terrified we’ll send her back. Did you even think about that? Did you even fucking think?”
“No, I didn’t. I didn’t think. You get to go to the office all day so you don’t hear it. I can’t think, I can’t sleep, I can’t read, I can’t even take her for a goddamn walk!”
Brianna’s wails grow even louder.
“And she’s fine. She isn’t hurt. She comes back perfectly fine.”
“She’s fine? Do you remember what the doctor said about her being too small? And her eyes? Do they really look fine to you? Because let me tell you, they don’t look fine to me. They look scared. Wherever she goes, wherever it sends her, it isn’t a nice place. And tell me this, were you ever going to tell me, or was it going to stay your little secret?”
“I don’t know, okay? I don’t know.”
“Well, no matter. It’s over now. Do you hear me? I’m going to put an end to it.”
With Brianna back in his arms, he races up the stairs, Abby at his heels. “What are you going to do, Jackson? What are you going to do? Please, don’t do anything. Please. We can figure something out, okay? We can …”
He shuts the door to Brianna’s room in her face and locks it.
“Jackson, no, please. Let me in. Let’s talk about this some more. Please.”
The monitor’s nursery unit is plugged in the outlet behind Brianna’s bureau. Ignoring Abby, Jackson slides the furniture away from the wall. “Don’t worry, sweet face, everything is going to be okay now.” With one quick move, he pulls the cord free, and Brianna stops crying. Abby falls silent as well.
He wipes Brianna’s cheeks dry, and her rosebud lips quirk into a smile. “See? You’re all better now. Daddy fixed it. Daddy fixed everything.”
He unlocks the door. Steps out into the hallway. Abby’s face is streaked with tears and her mouth opens, but all that emerges is a steady hiss of static.
Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice
First of all, the whole thing was Madison’s idea. All of it. She saw that movie, the one with the prom and the pig blood. And no, before you ask, we weren’t going to hurt any pigs. We’re not psychos. Where would we find one in Edgewater anyway? A pig, I mean, not a psycho. It was just the idea of doing something like that. Something big.
She wanted to cut off Tara’s hand, that’s what, and that’s all she wanted to do, nothing else.
Why? Because she wanted to know if she was right about what Tara really was. See, after the first week of school, we—me, Ellie, and Madison—knew something was wrong. In ninth grade, Tara was normal—we hardly even paid any attention to her. She wasn’t in any of our classes or anything, but we saw her so we knew what she looked like and stuff—but when tenth grade started? We didn’t know what was wrong at first, but we knew something was. For one thing, she smelled.
Yeah. Obviously you never met her or you’d know what I was talking about. She kind of smelled like a hospital. It was barely there, the way perfume is when it’s mostly worn off. You almost didn’t notice it, but when you did, you couldn’t not smell it. Except Ellie couldn’t smell her at all, so maybe some people couldn’t, you know? Then Tara started wearing perfume, so I guess someone said something, probably her mom since she was the one who did everything to her. Oh, and also, she had a weird walk. It’s hard to describe. Kind of a limp, but not really. I guess weird is the only way I can describe it. Ellie asked her about it—her locker was next to Tara’s this year, that’s how come we knew everything, I guess I should’ve said that before—and she told her she twisted her ankle over the summer.
Well, yeah, Ellie believed her. Me too, mostly. It was Madison who said it was bullshit because when she twisted her ankle it didn’t leave her with a limp. So she said we should keep an eye on Tara. No big production about it, just sort of watch the way she walked and talked and stuff.
No, we didn’t talk to anyone else about it. We kept it to ourselves. Anyway, since we were watching her, that’s how Ellie saw the stitches, but we already knew from what happened with Tyler—
Okay, sorry, I’ll try not to confuse you. It’s hard to tell it right. Forget about the stitches for now, then. I’ll tell you what happened with Tyler.
Yeah, Tyler Braxton. He has a thing for grabbing girls’ asses. Total middle school stuff, but he’s always been creepy-ass weird, like live in his mom’s basement for the rest of his life weird. Anyway, a bunch of us were in the hallway by the computer lab, right? And Tyler grabbed Tara’s ass. There weren’t any teachers around. Tyler might be creepy but he’s smart creepy. So he was laughing and the rest of us there were trying to ignore it. It’s the only thing you can do. But Tara’s face got all weird. I don’t know how to describe it. Like angry, but calm, too. And she pushed him, not even that hard, and he went all the way across the hallway and hit the wall on the other side.
No, no one did anything or said anything either. We were all too surprised and I was trying to figure out how she was so strong because she was kind of skinny, maybe not model skinny but still small. I think it seriously freaked Tyler out, and I thought he might hit her, but he didn’t and then Miss DeMeester showed up and we all split.
Sure, people talked about it, but everyone said she got lucky and caught him off balance, you know? Ask him about it, I bet he’ll tell you, but it probably isn’t that important anyway. He left her alone after that. A couple weeks after that, that’s when Ellie saw the stitches. See, Tara dressed almost Amish, wearing stuff that went all the way up to here and down to the floor. Not Amish dresses, they were normal clothes—jeans and shirts—but the kind that cover everything up. And she never pushed or rolled up her sleeves. Ellie said Tara was getting something from her locker, and her sleeve caught on the edge and pulled back a little bit. Ellie said the stitches were blue and they were pretty small. She thought Tara had on a bracelet or something, but by the time she realized what they were, Tara’d already unhooked her shirt and closed her locker and was gone. So Ellie told Madison and me and we thought at first maybe she tried to kill herself and didn’t want anyone to know, but the stitches were in the wrong spot. They were on top of her wrist, not underneath where all the veins are. So Madison asked Alex, who lives on the same street as Tara, if he noticed anything weird over the summer at Tara’s house, and he told her that Tara and her mom—Tara didn’t have any brothers or sisters and her dad died in a car accident when we were in fifth grade—were gone until the week before school started. He said they told one of the other neighbors that they were spending the summer with Tara’s grandparents. Madison asked him if they ever did that before and he said no, not that he could remember.
No, she didn’t tell Alex about the stitches. Maybe everything would’ve been different if we knew right away what Tara was and what happened to her. The accident, I mean.
No, I’m not saying what we did was her mom’s fault, but maybe things would’ve been different, that’s all. What did her mom think would happen? For a super smart scientist, she isn’t very smart, and my mom always says just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. Why did her mom even send her to school? She should’ve homeschooled her or something if she wanted to kee
p it all a secret. Think about it, the only reason anybody knows the truth is because of what we did so people should be happy, not pissed off.
Well, whatever. After that, Madison wanted to try and see the stitches herself, so she started hanging out with Ellie at her locker, trying to bump into Tara and stuff. But nothing ever happened. I’m the one who saw them, but I swear the whole thing was an accident. A real accident. For my birthday last year, my dad gave me a charm bracelet, the one you found. I love it but it catches on everything. I even yanked out a bunch of my hair with it one time. So I was leaving school late—I was out sick the day before and had to take a make-up test—and Tara was leaving, too. We bumped into each other on the way out the door and our wrists hit each other. You know, like this, back to back? One of the charms caught on something and I pulled it the way I always do, not thinking about it. I heard this noise, a wiry boing, but my bracelet was still caught so I pulled it again. There was the boing again and then I was unstuck. She took a deep breath and that’s when I figured one of the charms had caught on her shirt or something and I said “I’m sorry” but she didn’t say anything. She was looking at her wrist so I looked too. The stitches were all the way around her wrist, and my bracelet had yanked a couple open. It was like two puzzle pieces but instead of clicking together, the stitches were holding them, and inside, there were other things connected. I didn’t want to know, not really—I can’t even watch gross stuff on TV, it makes me want to puke—so I looked away super fast. There wasn’t any blood, though. There was that weird hospital smell, but it was different, like it was mixed with a funeral home—my grandma died last year so I know how they smell—and I was all lightheaded and sweaty. I thought for sure I was going to puke. Tara’s eyes got all huge, and she took off, practically running. I almost didn’t tell Madison and Ellie about it, it freaked me out so bad.
What did I do? Nothing. I stayed there for a few minutes until I felt okay again and then I went home. Then I called Madison. I probably shouldn’t have because she loves horror movies and has a crazy overactive imagination. One time in fourth grade she was convinced that Mr. Barron was a zombie because his skin got all pale and he started walking slow. Know why? He had the flu. Normal flu, not brain-eating walking dead flu. After I told Madison what I saw, she told me not to tell anyone else, not even Ellie, and to act like nothing happened and to be nice to Tara.
Cry Your Way Home Page 19
