Safe in My Arms

by Sara Shepard

  She checked her email again. Still nothing. But then, she had a thought. She tapped the “Junk” tab; sometimes, messages got stuck there. Sure enough, there was a response from Piper Jovan from early the day before. Her heart did a flip.

  She opened it quickly, the one hand she was using to operate the phone suddenly trembling with excitement. But as she read, her smile faded. The email was a reply to her original message, but Lauren wasn’t supposed to be the recipient.

  Carson—

  Get a load of this. I swear, these bitches get crazier every year.

  —P

  Nine

  That same Thursday morning, Ronnie pulled into the Silver Swans lot right next to Lane’s silver Honda. Morning drop-off was in full swing. Parents stood on the blacktop unloading their kids. Mothers chatted, sipping Starbucks, making sure hair bows were straight and shoes were tied. They drove vehicles like Volvo wagons and Subaru SUVs and sleek little BMWs; there wasn’t a single rust spot in the parking lot save for Ronnie’s rotting Toyota with the taped-on side mirror.

  “Guess what happened on Ponies today? You missed it ’cause you were in the shower.” Esme was still in a five-point harness car seat, and the straps cut across her shiny pink raincoat. “It was awesome.”

  “Oh yeah?” Ronnie murmured absently, her gaze still darting across the parking lot. “What happened?”

  Then her phone chimed. It was Andrea: We’re running late, she said. Won’t see you at drop-off. Sorry!

  Ronnie gritted her teeth. She’d hoped to walk in with Andrea so she wouldn’t have to go in alone.

  Her phone alerted her again—this time a ring. Bill, read the caller ID. On instinct, Ronnie hit Ignore, then felt guilty. She’d never ignored her boss before. Moments later, a text pinged. Now Bill was texting her, though at least the number didn’t come up with the business’s name.

  Brett Ackerman asked for you again this afternoon, it read. He’s over on Elmore. You remember the address?

  Yes, Ronnie typed quickly. On it.

  But her cheeks were red as though Bill had been on speakerphone with the volume cranked to ten. It wasn’t as if any of the passing parents could see the text. It wasn’t like any of them knew.

  After she deleted Bill’s texts—making a mental note of the time Brett Ackerman wanted her to arrive—she sat in the car for a beat, trying to figure out what to do. Her hands were trembling. Her gaze fell to Esme’s My Little Pony backpack on the seat. It felt like a ticking bomb. What if another note showed up today? This morning, as they’d had breakfast, she’d casually asked Esme a few questions. Was she excited about going back to school? Yep. Nobody had been mean to her, right? No. And how about her ABCs? Maybe you could show Mommy how you might spell a few words. Of course Esme didn’t have a clue. When she printed the letter E, it looked more like a garden rake. She had no concept of the letter Y whatsoever.

  Ronnie was 99 percent sure Esme hadn’t written that note that was uploaded on the device. But how did it get there?

  “. . . And so then all of their cutie marks got scrumbled,” Esme was saying. Scrumbled was her way of saying scrambled. “And Rainbow Dash was trying to talk to the animals and Fluttershy wasn’t funny and Applejack couldn’t make apples! Isn’t that crazy, Mommy?”

  “Uh-huh.” Ronnie watched all the moms approach school. Every woman who passed could have been the culprit.

  “Do you know how they got all their cutie marks back?” Esme chattered.

  Except Ronnie really didn’t want this to be the work of a mother. She wanted to be friends with the parents. Let Esme go on playdates and to birthday parties and frolic with kids in the park. Esme deserved as much. And also, how could a mother have executed such a complicated technological plan? Unless she’d hacked into Esme’s device? And all the moms had been at the breakfast—who’d had the time?

  So what did that mean, then? According to Lane, all the teachers were saints.

  “Mommy!”

  Ronnie peered at the little girl in the car seat. Both her pony toys lay on their sides now, and Esme was showing her what Ronnie called her “bossypants face.”

  “Firstly, you didn’t answer me,” Esme said. She did this when she was angry: talk even more like an adult. Since she’d learned to talk, people had marveled at how her verbal skills were years beyond her age. “And also, why aren’t we going into school?”

  Ronnie took a breath. “Sorry, ladybug. I was just thinking about something.”

  She had a choice. She could peel away from this parking lot and never look back, not unlike what she had done in Cobalt. Except that would be to Esme’s detriment. Also, what would Lane say when he didn’t see Esme on the playground later? And how would Ronnie explain that she’d pulled Esme from school on her second day?

  Another option, then: she would walk Esme in with her head held high. What had the girls at Kittens told her? You’re as good as anyone else. Don’t let those assholes make you think you’re nothing.

  “Let’s go,” Ronnie said, and grabbed Esme’s backpack from the passenger seat.

  She didn’t make eye contact with a single person as they crossed the blacktop to the red door. Inside, parents and kids crammed the school hallway. No one was looking at Ronnie, per se, but if whoever wrote that note was there, they’d see she hadn’t backed down.

  Esme pulled Ronnie to her cubby in the hallway and helped the little girl out of her coat. “Excuse me, Miss Stuckey?” came a polite voice behind her. Piper’s assistant, Carson, approached. He wore a fluorescent crossing-guard vest and a petulant expression. “Um, we stress that Silver Swans is a walking-only zone, except on the playground. Can you try to remember that next time, in the parking lot?”

  “Oh. Sorry,” Ronnie muttered, feeling her cheeks flare. She had been running.

  “No problem!” Carson chirped.

  Ronnie’s hands shook as she hung Esme’s coat on a hook. Now a few moms were looking at her.

  At Esme’s classroom door, her teacher, Miss Barnes, grinned at Esme’s approach. Her smile was so guileless that Ronnie was pretty sure she could cross the woman off her suspect list. “So nice to see you! We’re going to have a great day today!”

  Ronnie pressed her hands to her heart. Then she turned to Esme, who was already pulling away. “Hickory dickory dock,” she murmured into Esme’s little ear.

  “The mouse ran up the clock,” Esme answered back, serious if a little rushed. It was their little shorthand, the way they always said goodbye.

  Esme ran off. Miss Barnes gave Ronnie a smile and was about to move on to the next mom, but Ronnie cleared her throat. “Um, sorry, this might be a weird question, but is it possible I could sit in with Esme today?”

  Miss Barnes looked apologetic. “I’m afraid we don’t allow parents to be in the classroom except for birthdays. We find the kids are a little freer to express themselves without their parents around.”

  Ronnie felt a pinch of annoyance. “Okay, it’s just, if you noticed Esme was unhappy during the day, or if anyone was being mean, you’d let me know, right?”

  “Has she said someone was mean?” Miss Barnes’s mouth made an O.

  “No! Of course not. I just get nervous . . .” She decided to change tacks. “Also, her device. That iPad thing?”

  “Oh, yes!” The teacher beamed. “Esme’s so excited about it. All the kids are.”

  “Do the kids share them? Like, does Esme play on another kid’s, while they play on hers?”

  A crease formed between Miss Barnes’s brow. “If you’re worrying about germs, absolutely not. Only Esme is in possession of her device. That’s a rule we have in class.”

  More kids pushed through the doorway. Ronnie moved away slightly to let them pass. Once a fresh batch of kids was settled, Miss Barnes looked back at Ronnie with a tiny expression of not exactly exasperation, but certainly the pull that she
needed to be somewhere else. “Can I help you with anything more?”

  Ronnie glanced across the room at Esme. She was already settled on the floor with a group of little girls; they were playing with a plastic tea set. There was no way she could sell the idea that she needed to hang around the classroom because Esme was having a hard time.

  “Never mind,” she decided. “I’ll see you later!”

  The hall was emptying out, mothers walking toward the door in pairs, others giving last-minute kisses and reassurance to reluctant kids. At the door to the three-year-olds class, a mother stepped away from her sobbing child, exchanging a helpless glance with the teacher. “I’m not sure I should leave her.”

  “She’ll be fine,” the teacher assured her. “Really, go.”

  The mom looked like she was going to burst into tears, and she caught Ronnie’s eye before she could rearrange her features. Ronnie quickly smiled reassuringly. “I get it,” she said. “I really do.”

  The tip of the mother’s nose was red now. “Thanks. It’s so hard, you know?”

  This could still be her community. Maybe these parents weren’t bad people—when it came down to it, they were all the same: worried mothers. Whoever had written that note, then, was not like the rest of them. Whoever had written that note needed to be exposed for who he or she was.

  She started toward the door, shoving her hands deep into her pockets, frustrated that she’d come away empty-handed. Then, she spied a little alcove down the hall. She figured it led to a bathroom, but when she reached it, she realized it was a supply closet. The door was ajar. Glancing back and forth, she pushed it open with her toe. Inside were extra picture books, art supplies, and bins of stuffed animals and toys. A dangling string was attached to a switched-off lightbulb in the ceiling.

  Ronnie slipped inside, then huddled behind the door, avoiding stepping on some big reams of drawing paper on the linoleum. Doors slammed. Down the hall, she heard a teacher say in a singsong voice, “All right, boys and girls!” Floating from another direction were the first few bars of a song from Frozen. Ronnie shifted her feet, feeling a deep sense of shame. She could just imagine one of the teachers flitting out to this closet to grab a stack of books or some modeling clay and—what? How would she explain this?

  She immediately thought of the last time she’d been caught somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be. That last night in Cobalt fled back to her. Things had been building for a while; Ronnie had an innate sense a crescendo would be soon. Even as she’d turned onto the street, she had a tickly sense something was really wrong.

  She skidded into the driveway and entered the house through the garage. The den smelled like stale booze. A chair had been turned over. A lamp without a shade blazed an ugly yellow. Another fight, Ronnie had thought with terror. Then she noticed all the beer bottles. The little vials. Her heart sank.

  “Vanessa?” she called out.

  An appliance dinged in the kitchen, unattended. Then Ronnie heard whimpering sounds from the back bedroom. Esme.

  Esme, who was just about two, was clutching the bars of her crib, crying, Mommy, Mommy, Mommy. By the looks of her sagging diaper, it seemed she hadn’t been changed in a while. And when Ronnie touched her forehead, it was warm. Was she sick? She cursed her long hours at Kittens. She should have never left Esme alone.

  “Come on,” she whispered, reaching in to pick up Esme. “We’ll get you changed. And some Tylenol.”

  Then she heard a click. She swiveled around, catching sight of the cold, silver tip of a rifle at her back. Jerrod stank of alcohol, the toxins seeping from his pores.

  “What’re you doing here?” he slurred.

  “Please,” Ronnie whispered. “Put that down.”

  Jerrod pushed the rifle forward. It was an old hunting rifle, heavy and stained, crusty with dirt and animal blood. Ronnie swiveled and set Esme back down, which just sent the baby whimpering again. “Please,” she repeated. “Jerrod. Esme.”

  Jerrod lowered the gun and set it on the bureau. A strange smile tugged at the corners of his lips, showing off his grayish teeth. When he came toward her, she knew what he wanted. She’d seen the look on his face plenty of times. She felt trapped. He placed his big, rough hands on her shoulders. Ronnie froze. Slowly, his hands moved from Ronnie’s shoulders to around her breasts. She wanted to scream, but she was worried about the gun.

  “Yeah,” Jerrod said, a smile in his voice. “You’re up for it, aren’t you? Pretty slut like you, shaking your ass for everyone in town.”

  He pushed her so that she was facing the wall, a movement so fast and powerful Ronnie had no chance to get away. He held her there with one strong arm at her shoulder blade as his other hand fumbled for the button at his jeans. Ronnie must have made a strange sound Jerrod decided was a moan. “You like that, bitch?” He chuckled. “Course you do.”

  Something inside her snapped then. She couldn’t let him do this. Ronnie whirled around and brought her knee up hard. It landed square. Jerrod jolted back with a howl, which gave Ronnie just enough time to grab the rifle and whip the butt end into his jaw. She had no idea if it was loaded or how to cock the thing, but it was heavy and solid, and when it cracked against his bone, it made an impact.

  Jerrod sank to the ground. Blood spurted at his lip. He clutched his face, writhing, and Ronnie knew he’d be up again if she didn’t act fast. She raised the butt of the gun high in the air and brought it down at his temple. The crack was deafening.

  Ronnie didn’t wait around to see what he’d do next. She grabbed Esme and ran, this time circling to the front door. It wasn’t until she was nearly tripping over the figure in the front hallway that she realized someone was lying there. Ronnie looked down and screamed. Her sister, Vanessa, was in a battered heap on the ground. Her bruised eyes were crusted shut.

  No, Ronnie gasped. How had she missed Vanessa? She cursed herself for not being here when things went wrong. This was why she’d quasi-moved in with the couple, after all. To watch over her sister. To watch over the baby. To make sure Jerrod didn’t get too drunk and beat her sister to a pulp. To make sure Vanessa didn’t use so much that she couldn’t care for her kid. To try to . . . save her and Esme somehow. You have to leave him, she’d said to her sister, when Jerrod had broken her arm, two months before. Before he hurts you or Esme. We can leave together. And Vanessa had nodded, her eyes big and sad, nails digging into the skin around her knees. I know, she said. Okay, I’ll think about it.

  But Vanessa never made any moves. Excuses piled up—she shouldn’t be so moody around Jerrod. She did this or that the wrong way. Jerrod worked long, hard hours; he was tired; he was hungover; he was hungry; he wanted sex but she was too tired; he was frustrated by how the baby kept them both up; he’d never do it again.

  But now here Vanessa was, not responding. Ronnie held her sister’s baby in her arms, trying to figure out what to do next. Whatever decision she made would change her life.

  A click broke her from her thoughts. Ronnie straightened up, pressing her fingers against the wood grain of the supply closet’s door. How long had she been crouched here? It felt like hours. She was being ridiculous. What did she think she would discover, hiding out here? And then she considered something else—what if the drawing wasn’t even meant for her? What if there had been some sort of technical glitch and it had been uploaded to Esme’s device when it was really meant for another child’s? Ronnie hated the idea of any kid saying they hated their mother . . . but it was possible it was a mistake.

  But when she poked her head out the door, there was someone there. A slip of a figure kept close to the wall, creeping by one of the far doors that led to the rooms for the under-two toddlers and babies. Like Esme’s class, these children also kept their coats and backpacks and other items in cubbies in the hallway. The figure scanned each cubby as though looking for something, then hunched over one in particular.

  Ro
nnie heard the scritch of a zipper, then the rustle of fabric. A tiny raccoon-shaped backpack came into view. Then came the crinkle of paper, and then she saw it—a folded piece of paper sliding into the backpack’s front pouch. She clapped a hand over her mouth to keep from calling out. And then, as the figure turned, the light hit things in just the right way, and Ronnie’s heart just about stopped.

  She couldn’t believe who it was.

  Ten

  After Andrea dropped off Arthur a few minutes late—they’d both overslept—she walked a few blocks away to Raisin Beach’s main street, which had a variety of upscale shops. Shopping still felt like a luxury after so many months of not being allowed; she didn’t need anything, but she was too antsy to stay at home.

  At the crosswalk were a group of women. They were all her age, and they all seemed to know one another. They wore shiny diamond engagement rings, and their lips were glossy, and while a few of them were very dressed up—heels, silk, a Chanel bag on a chain—one in the bunch wore Lululemon leggings and a soft, cream-colored cowl-neck sweater. Their chatter was about a book they were reading, and something about kids’ club lacrosse, and if they were going to order a glass of chardonnay or rosé at brunch.

  One glanced at Andrea pleasantly. “Cute purse.” She pointed to the patent-leather number Andrea carried under her arm.

  Andrea nodded coolly but couldn’t find anything to say. Even now, she felt she saw Roger everywhere. One of the women had Roger’s haunting gray eyes. Another one had Roger’s turned-up-at-the-corners mouth.

  She thought of the only time she and Roger went out for dinner together. It was taboo. Their age difference was one issue—Roger not even eighteen, Andrea almost thirty. But it had been his idea. Let’s go out, he’d said. Let’s just see what it feels like, you as Andrea, me as Roger.