I raised my hands and walked around her car toward the school’s front entrance.
“Julie. Julie, stop right there.”
Cindy hustled around me, her friend in tow.
“I need to get my kids.”
“You can’t . . . threaten me like that and walk away.”
“I did no such thing.”
“You wouldn’t let me out of my car. You saw. Right, Leslie?”
Leslie bit her lip. “I’m not sure . . . I didn’t hear her say anything.”
“I was asking Cindy to help me out with something. I would never threaten anybody.”
“What’s going on here?”
Now Susan had joined us, and I could sense others watching as well. A circle was forming around me as more kids started schooling out the door, weaving their way to the line of SUVs. They all looked so similar in the rain. Did anyone ever pick up the wrong child? Or was I the only one for whom that seemed like a possibility?
“I told you this was a bad idea,” I said to Susan.
“What?” Cindy said. “What’s a bad idea?”
The women pressed closer, forming a circle around me. Cindy’s face was close enough to mine that I could smell the garlicky hummus she must’ve had for lunch. I could feel the claustrophobia set in, the kind I felt in crowds or shopping malls.
“I just want it all to stop.”
Susan put her arm around me. I leaned against her, feeling faint, my ears ringing.
“Where are the kids?”
“I’m not sure . . .”
I spotted them in their matching raincoats and boots splashing in a puddle near the entrance. That moment of relief I’d never quite overcome coursed through me. Only this time, it made me feel weak in the knees.
“There. They’re right there,” I said to Susan. My voice sounded strange, like I was speaking underwater.
“I’ll go get them. Go back to your car.”
“I’m okay. I can handle it.”
“I don’t think so. Go back to your car, and I’ll bring the kids over.”
“What’s wrong with her?” Leslie asked.
“Ignore her, she’s a drama queen.”
Susan gave me a nudge. The women parted, and I walked shakily back to my car. I leaned against it, feeling light-headed. One of my therapists told me I had a mild form of PTSD. I wasn’t sure that was right, but this wasn’t right, either. The world was snapping in and out of focus like a pair of cartoon goggle eyes.
“Momsy!” Melly cried, throwing herself against me. “We were jumping in puddles!”
I willed myself to concentrate. “I saw that, honey. How was school today?”
“Bo-ring,” Sam said. “And my painting is melting.”
He thrust a watercolor drawing of a house at me. The rain was washing away the black he’d used to mark the outline.
“Let’s get this in the car.”
“You okay to drive?” Susan asked.
“I think so.”
“We could leave your car here and all pile into mine.”
“I’m fine. I’ll be careful.”
“I’ll follow behind you, then.”
I started to protest, but I knew it was no use. Besides, we were going to the same place. She’d be behind me, anyway.
I strapped Melly and Sam into their booster seats, making extra sure their seat belts were tight against their precious chests, and sat behind the wheel. I made eye contact with Cindy in the rearview mirror; she was waiting for me to pull out. We were all caravanning back to Pine Street.
Though I knew the way, I hit “Home” on the built-in GPS. It was so easy to get turned around in Cincinnati; no route was ever as the crow flies. And though I’d studied and studied the city map before I moved there, no flat image could capture the pop-up reality.
As the mechanical voice guided me, I drove carefully, making sure I stopped at every stop and signaled every turn. Melly and Sam were chattering in the backseat, peppering me with the usual series of questions. “Why, why, why,” Sam always started, stuttering because his brain was processing too many things at once. I answered their questions patiently, and when I pulled into my driveway, I sighed in relief. I’d be safe inside soon, all better.
Sam and Melly unclipped themselves and jumped from the car. There were more puddles in the driveway, and they started jumping up and down in them. I grabbed their things from the backseat, picking up Sam’s muddled painting from the floor. I held it up; it really was, for a six-year-old, a good likeness of our house. Stick figures, who I assumed were Daniel and me, stood near the front door with Sam and Melly in front of us. There was another stick figure on the side of the house where we parked the cars, holding out its arm like it was pointed right at me.
A car horn hooted. It was Susan. I waved to her, letting her know all was good, and made a walking symbol with my fingers. She nodded yes and started backing down the street.
When I turned back around, I caught a flash of something yellow just past my car, near the entrance to the back deck. I took a step forward, blinking the rain out of my eyes, but it was gone.
And when I looked down at the painting again, the extra person I’d thought I’d seen there had also disappeared.
Eye of the Tiger
John
Six months ago
I was lacing up my running shoes when my phone dinged with a text.
Come around back, Julie wrote. Will explain when you get here.
K, I wrote back. There in a sec.
I tucked my phone and key into the special pocket in my running shorts and zipped up my rain jacket. The rain was relentless. The wettest April on record already, and there were still nine days left. There was concern about erosion for the houses on the hillside. A house a few blocks over had lost part of its back deck when the footing was swept away after a particularly violent burst. Our street had turned into a river.
I crossed the street and unlocked the gate on the side of Julie’s house. I pushed a lilac bush fat with rain out of my way. Water splashed against my bare legs. Pink petals clung to my arms. A few more steps brought me to her backyard, a series of decks and terraced patios built into the slope. A rusting swing took up much of the middle patio, puddles forming in the depressions left by two generations of children’s feet. On the deck next to it, a newer picnic table contained two left-behind plastic cups, filled to the brim. Daffodils hugged the ground. An empty bird feeder twisted in the wind.
But there was no sign of Julie.
I said her name softly, not wanting to wake anyone inside. It was just after six in the morning, the bongs of the church clock still lingering in the air.
“Here,” I thought I heard, but I still couldn’t see her.
I walked onto the upper deck.
“Julie?”
“Here,” she said again. A flash of white. A hand waving behind a wooden toy box.
She was cowering behind it. Her knees were pulled up under her raincoat. Her teeth were chattering.
“What’s going on?” I asked as I knelt in front of her.
“I thought I heard someone out here.”
I looked around. The same sodden landscape, empty of menace.
“I don’t see anyone.”
“There’s no one.”
“So why are you . . .”
“Huddled on the ground?”
She unfolded her hands. She held a child’s toy, a Barbie doll. A headless Barbie doll.
“This is Melly’s.”
She bit back a sob. Her hair was pulled back tightly from her face, slick from the rain. She looked young and tired and scared.
“Becky was always doing that,” I said gently. “Pulling the heads off her dolls. Cutting their hair so it stuck up in the air. We took it as a sign she was too old for Barbie.”
“Melly didn’t do this.”
“How do you know?”
“It was propped up against the back door. The head was sitting in its lap, like this.”
She
placed the doll on the deck in a sitting position and put the head in its lap. I swept the pieces up.
“You need to call the police.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“They didn’t take me seriously last time, and I’m sure they’re the ones who told the newspaper about it. What’s the point?”
“Was there any kind of note?”
“No. She’s too smart for that.”
“Who? I thought it wasn’t Heather?”
“The last thing wasn’t. This was.”
I dropped the doll as if it might contaminate me.
“My prints will be on that now.”
“It doesn’t matter.” She held out her hands. “Here, help me up.”
Her hands were frozen. Her bitten cuticles scratched at my palms. I rocked back. She sprang up and against me. She smelled like sweat, like she might at the end of our run, rather than the beginning. The rain spat down around us.
“I’m scared,” she said.
“Everything’s going to be okay.”
“It isn’t, it isn’t.”
I pressed her face to my chest, worried she’d hear my heart thrumming.
“There has to be something we can do.” I stroked her hair, twisting it through my fingers. “Something that will make you feel safe.”
“I’ve been through this. There isn’t anything. There’s nothing to do but run.”
“Don’t do that.”
She went still against me.
“You don’t want me to go?”
“No.”
She tipped her head back. Her eyes were rimmed red. It set off the flecks of gold in her brown eyes. Ones I hadn’t noticed before.
“Why? All I’ve been is trouble since I’ve arrived.”
I couldn’t put it into words. How she brought color into my life. Color I didn’t know was missing. How I woke up with anticipation, instead of a mild sense of dread. How I’d been complacent and happy, and now I was nervous and alive. It was too much to think. Too much to say.
So instead I kissed her.
I expected her to pull back. She didn’t. Her lips met mine with so much force our teeth clicked. We drew back for a second, then came together again. All slick tongues and hot breath and God, the thoughts in my head.
My hands were up and under her sodden shirt, my thumbs tucked under the edge of her sports bra when a sound broke us apart.
“Someone’s here,” Julie said.
I stepped away. It had sounded like a twig snapping. But the world was so full of sounds that morning, we both could’ve imagined it.
“Oh, shit, shit, shit. What have we done?” Julie said.
I turned back to her. Tried to take her in my arms again.
“Don’t. That was a mistake. A terrible mistake. It can’t happen again.”
“I know.”
“I love Daniel.”
“I love my family, too.”
“I mean it. He’s everything to me. Please don’t tell anyone.”
“I’m not going to tell anyone.”
“People say that, but then the guilt sets in and . . . promise me. Promise me you won’t say anything, no matter what. Not to . . . Hanna. Not to anyone.”
She held out her hand, the pinkie crooked.
“Seriously?”
“I know it’s stupid, but do it, okay?”
I tucked my pinkie into hers.
“This didn’t happen,” she said. “Now you say it.”
“This didn’t happen.”
She dropped her hand, muttering something under her breath. Like she was making a promise to herself. Or a wish.
“You going to be okay?” I asked.
“How would I know?”
“I mean right now. Right this second.”
“Are you leaving?”
“I think that’s a good idea, don’t you?”
“Yes. Go. I’ll be fine. I’ll wake Daniel.”
Her eyes met mine, and we both thought the same thing.
Why didn’t she wake Daniel in the first place?
She looked away.
“This doesn’t have to change anything,” I said.
“It already has.”
I spent the week after the kiss running alone. I’d wait at the window every morning, drinking my coffee, looking for some sign from across the street that things could continue on as they had before. That a minute of thoughtlessness hadn’t set our lives spinning off into some wonky orbit. But it had.
On the third morning, I risked a text.
Is your injury any better?
I’m not sure what I was thinking, exactly. I was fairly certain she hadn’t gone running since that morning, though I’d been doing my best not to pay too much attention to her house. But maybe Daniel had noticed? Maybe she’d said she’d hurt herself? So that he didn’t ask any questions. Didn’t ask what had happened, why the sudden change in routine.
It’s what I would have done if Hanna had asked.
But Hanna didn’t ask.
I watched my phone. A bubble appeared below my text indicating she was writing. Then it disappeared. Then reappeared. Then disappeared again. I could feel her indecision as if it were my own.
I was about to put my phone away when it buzzed.
Lots of RICE.
?? I wrote.
Rest. Ice. Compression. Elevation.
Got it. Good idea. Take care of yourself.
Thanks. Have a good run.
I got the message. Carry on acting normally. Return to life as it was. Before.
It felt like a betrayal.
It’s hard to explain. I’d already betrayed my family, their trust. But I’d promised not to tell. And she was right. All the hurt and anger that would be caused by a moment. I was better off stuffing it down. Tucking it away. Forgetting it had happened.
But still. That she could shut me out so quickly. So completely. It was hard to take in.
So I ran. Harder, longer, faster than I had before. Up and down the hilly sections of Eden Park. Doing the stairs from Mirror Lake to the Playhouse over and over. That morning, and the next. Then I’d peel the sweat-soaked clothes from my body and wash the salt off as if it had leached something unclean out of me.
Friday morning, Kiss plus four, was cold and rainy, and I decided to skip it. The clouds parted around three in the afternoon, right after I received a depressing e-mail from my old boss at P&G asking if I wanted my job back. I was okay doing some contract work for them, but actually going back there was out of the question. Although we were financially fine with me not working, I felt that man-guilt tugging at me. Be the provider. Suck it up. If I couldn’t be right in my heart, at least I could do that.
I grabbed my running stuff and pounded some of the self-loathing out of my body. When I got home, Hanna was standing in my usual place at the window. She was dressed in one of her court suits. The ones that made her look strong and terrifying.
“Did you know about this?” she said.
“What?”
She pointed across the street. There was a utility van parked in front of Julie and Daniel’s house. It had been parked there on and off for the last several days, but I hadn’t paid much attention to it.
“What am I looking at?”
“That’s a security company.”
“How do you know?”
“I asked one of the workmen who he worked for.” She shoved her phone at me. The home page for Secure It! was showing. Alarms. Outdoor lights. Cameras.
“What’s the big deal?”
“They’re installing cameras on their house.”
“What?”
Her finger stabbed at the air. “There. There. There. And they all point at our house.”
“How can you tell?”
“Because I have eyes.”
She turned toward me. Her cheeks were mottled with anger. “What the hell is going on?”
“I have no idea.”
“Please don’t lie to me.”
>
“I’m not.”
“You guys haven’t been running together this week. And you’ve been acting weird, and now she’s putting cameras up on her house.”
My mind whirred. I’d promised. I couldn’t tell. I’d promised.
I’d promised Hanna, too. I’d promised her everything.
“When I went over there the other morning for our run, she was a mess. Someone took the head off one of her kid’s dolls and left it propped against the back door. It looked really spooky. She was freaking out. I told her to call the police, but she said they hadn’t done anything when she’d complained before.”
“Because she probably made it up.”
“Not this again.”
“You always defend her.”
“I don’t mean to.”
“That doesn’t explain why she’s installing cameras pointing at our house.”
“I honestly don’t know. But . . .”
“But what?”
“She said something about the other things not being done by Heather . . . her stalker. Maybe she thinks it’s someone in the neighborhood?”
“As in we’re the ones doing the made-up things that she’s complaining about?”
“Of course not. And I don’t think the cameras are pointed at us. It just looks that way from here.”
Hanna shut the drapes.
“I want to sue.”
“Wait, what?”
“I want to sue her.”
“For what?”
“For what happened to Chris. He’s going to have a scar. And now she’s got cameras pointed at our front door. Plus, I heard she almost assaulted Cindy at pickup the other day.”
“Oh, come on. That’s not what happened.”
“How do you know?”
“I read Susan Thurgood’s post. On that iNeighbor thing. Which is completely ridiculous, by the way.”
Susan had written an account of Julie and Cindy’s confrontation at the school in a now-let’s-everybody-calm-down tone. It had elicited a series of mixed comments before it was taken down. By Cindy, I assumed. Only to be replaced with a semicoherent post about school-pickup etiquette.
“You’re reading posts on iNeighbor now?”
“I have to fill my days somehow.”
“I thought you were building up a business?”
Fractured Page 16
