by Sara Shepard
They went to a new, trendy restaurant in Tribeca. Neither had been before, yet all night, Andrea sat stiffly, terrified someone from her Vandermeer life might spot her. But the gods smiled on them; she saw no familiar faces in the crowd. Roger enjoyed the night thoroughly, savoring the food, rubbing his hand over his newly cropped hair, peeking at himself in the dark window reflection. Isn’t this something? he whispered across the table. I feel so alive. I feel like . . . me.
Andrea had been thrilled, too. The waiter called her ma’am; Roger, sir. They’d been able to talk about their hopes and dreams. After graduation, Roger said, he was getting the hell away from his strict parents. Moving to California, maybe. People were cool there. Maybe meet the person he’d spend his life with.
Andrea talked about her own situation. Roger knew she was a Vandermeer; he understood the pressures she felt, the media scrutiny, her tyrannical, unaccepting father. She talked about how much she adored her baby son and how, in a perfect world, she could take Arthur away somewhere and transition, too.
“Maybe I’ll come to California with you,” Andrea had said, her eyes twinkling. “We’d have each other.”
“I have an idea,” Roger then said. “Let’s go somewhere overnight. Try to be . . . us . . . for a whole day.” He grinned. “There’s this hotel upstate that’s right on the water. We could go by train?”
Now, the memory made her feel melancholy. She walked into Pages, the little bookshop on the corner. Bookstores, especially indie ones, had always calmed her. When she was young, she used to hide out in a tiny bookshop around the corner from her family’s town house, reading Tolkien, escaping the things normal teenagers did—getting burgers after school, having sex in the park, doing drugs, whatever. The proprietor let her stay all hours, never said anything when she didn’t spend a dime.
“Andrea?”
She whirled around. Reginald the landscaper stood at a table by the register. He held a paperback but placed it back on the table and walked toward her, all smiles.
“Hey!” Andrea said, still flustered. “What’s up? How are you? What are you doing here?” She was babbling. “I mean, buying books, obviously.”
“I’m looking for a new thriller.” He pushed his hands into his pockets. “One of those junk-food paperback sorts. I’m an addict.”
“I won’t tell.” Andrea winked. Was it weird to wink? Did people wink anymore? She felt so discombobulated. “Have you noticed how much other stuff they sell in bookstores these days?” She waved her arm around. “Board games, collectibles, Belgian chocolate . . .”
“The toy section is impressive, too.” He shifted his weight. “Then again, maybe you aren’t looking for toys . . .”
“I’d love to see the toys!” she said, her voice too loud.
“I’ll show you. There are some Hot Wheels sets that seem right up Arthur’s alley.”
He walked toward the back of the store. Andrea followed, taking in his straight spine. Reginald was still wearing his Blue Iguana Landscaping T-shirt. His strong, tanned legs strode with purpose.
He said something she didn’t catch. “What’s that?” she asked.
“I was just saying that Arthur is a great kid. He seems so happy.”
“I hope so.” Andrea’s smile wobbled. But all at once, she could feel herself cracking. Her knees buckled. She stopped and leaned against a table of calendar journals.
Reginald whirled around. “You okay?”
Andrea stared at the swirls in the carpet. “I don’t know if he is, actually. Happy, I mean.”
“Why would you say that?”
It just spilled out of her: she hedged what Arthur’s drawing was of, exactly, but she did give details of the terrible meeting with Piper the day before, and the way that somehow, by the end of it, she’d agreed to finding a therapist for her kid. She’d accepted that Arthur was the artist, and she’d acknowledged that he was a bully in training and probably a detriment to the school and should perhaps consider other schools to attend. When she was finished, Reginald looked appalled. “And you believed her?”
The question surprised her. “She’s the director of a school, so . . .”
“Yeah, but you’re the parent. You know him best. Have you asked him his side of things?”
Andrea shook her head. “I don’t want to know. It would break my heart.”
Reginald slapped his sides. She’d never seen him so worked up. “My sister had this happen once, with her son. She puts him in preschool at two years old, a tiny thing, and suddenly the preschool teacher’s calling her up and saying that she needs to have him tested for developmental problems because he wasn’t quite like the other kids. Said that if she didn’t get him tested, they wouldn’t be able to take him at the school the following year. But he was two! The teacher had only known him for a month!”
Andrea blinked. “Did she get her kid tested?”
“Nope. He grew out of all his idiosyncrasies, like most kids do. The point is that that teacher jumped to conclusions and made my sister feel bad for weeks.”
“I’m really sorry to hear that,” Andrea said quietly.
Above them, drawn on the wall, was a peculiar caricature of Oscar Wilde. He’d been one of Andrea’s favorite writers in high school, but the drawing didn’t look much like him. Maybe Reginald was right. Was she really letting Piper override her instincts? She and Arthur had talked about her transition ad nauseam. He was brutally honest about other things that bothered him—even things about her, like when her breath smelled like bologna, and how it was weird to cuddle with her now because of her boobs. And yes, okay, he was a four-year-old, and obviously four-year-olds didn’t understand the world like adults did, but it just didn’t fit, Arthur making that drawing.
“Look, I know I’m only seeing this from ten thousand feet, but he’s one of the most well-adjusted kids I’ve ever known,” Reginald said. “Way more mature than most kids his age.”
“So you think I shouldn’t worry about it, then?”
“Dude, if it were me, I’d file a lawsuit. That’s what I said to my sister, too. These preschool people, they think they know everything just because they have an early childhood education degree or whatever, but so often they do more harm than good.”
“Should I worry about who actually drew the picture?”
Reginald thought a moment. “I mean, I already told you that you should sue. So if you don’t want to do that, I don’t know, maybe blow up the building? When Arthur’s home, of course.”
“Right. I’ll get on that.” Andrea sighed. “But that director. She seems to, I don’t know, expect something of me.”
“Honestly?” Reginald leaned forward then, his face so close to hers that Andrea almost wanted to giggle. “Fuck her.”
He smelled like woodsmoke. Andrea could feel heat radiating from his skin. Something unexpected rose up in her, and then she did start laughing. “Well,” she said, pulling away slightly, ducking her head so he couldn’t see how red her cheeks were. “Thanks. Thanks for listening. You certainly know a lot about kids. Do you want them?” It just popped out of her mouth. The question felt so personal.
Reginald looked wistful. “Sure. That would be great.”
“Well, you still have time.”
They stopped by a table of stuffed animals, and Reginald touched a plush panda’s black nose. “I’m not sure. I just turned thirty-five. Do men have biological clocks? Because mine seems to have kicked into high gear.” He pointed at a shelf marked Vehicles; just as he predicted, there were boxes of Hot Wheels sets. “Anyway, Arthur’s a blast. You guys are my favorite clients.”
Andrea didn’t dare look at his face, but inside, her chest swooped. He hadn’t just said Arthur was his favorite client—he’d said you guys. Or was she reading into that? Really, she shouldn’t be going down this road at all.
The Hot Wheels items were compri
sed of miniature cars and sets of tracks and obstacles. Andrea marveled at them; she’d never played with this kind of stuff as a kid. She touched a large plastic shark toy; apparently, the car would fly across the track, trying to avoid the shark’s biting jaws. Arthur would love it, and she wanted to get something for him, suddenly, as if he’d been the one to endure this emotional crisis, not her. Andrea rapped overenthusiastically on the top of the Hot Wheels box. “I’m going to get this.”
Reginald followed her to the register, snaking around tables of travel mugs and warm socks and magnetic poetry sets. “Do you want to get dinner sometime?” he blurted.
“You want to go out with me?” Andrea felt heat rise to her cheeks, but the question truly surprised her . . . and pleased her, too. “Well . . . sure. Yeah.” She dared to smile. “That would be nice.”
Reginald beamed. “Does this Saturday work?”
“This Saturday is great.”
They looked at each other a long beat, and Andrea felt a thrill. She took in Reginald—his big ears, his lopsided smile, the T-shirt and long shorts and the threadbare Nike messenger bag he carried over one shoulder.
“Hey,” she said, pointing to it. “Arthur’s got the same bag. He begged for it. Didn’t want a backpack like every other kid, no way. I wonder if it’s because he saw yours fir—”
Something caught in her brain like a coin dropping into a jukebox. Messenger bag. Someone had recently described Arthur’s schoolbag to her that same way. It had struck her as odd then, and she hadn’t known why. Now she did.
She placed the Hot Wheels set on a random table and stepped out of line. “I-I have to go,” she told Reginald. “Sorry.”
She ran out of the store without saying another word.
Eleven
Lauren didn’t remember the drive to Silver Swans, only skidding into a far-off space in the lot and slamming the car door so hard she was afraid she broke it. Her nails dug into her palms as she marched toward the entrance to the school’s offices. The sounds of squeals could be heard from the playground, but that didn’t lift her spirits. She hated that her son was inside that building. She hated that she’d said nothing when Graham had dropped him off an hour before, gurgling about how much fun Matthew was going to have and how much he was going to miss him while he was away doing his big episode shoot with Gracie.
And yet, she had to keep her mouth shut. First off, Graham didn’t need the additional hassle right before a big opportunity. Second, she couldn’t tell Graham—that would mean admitting she’d spilled her postpartum-rage story to the school’s director in the first place, which she suspected he wouldn’t approve of.
She had to handle this on her own.
That bitch Piper thought she was crazy, and Lauren needed to make Piper aware that this was not how you treated parents who were paying you good money. And the way that woman postured at the breakfast! The way she said that she respected all families, that everyone was doing their best, that we were all in this together! What a joke.
But halfway across the parking lot, she came to a halt. She stared down at her hands. They were knotted into fists. She could already feel herself slipping, the edges of her consciousness going blurry. She needed to breathe. She needed to get a hold of herself. It couldn’t be like that night this past summer. That time in the kitchen. When everything had gone so wrong.
They’d been arguing about Gracie Lord in a roundabout way: since Lauren met Graham, he hadn’t so much as tried the rosé wine she sometimes brought home. It was too girly, he complained. Too sweet. But then, all of a sudden, he loved rosé. Couldn’t get enough of it. That night, it came out that that was because Gracie drank it, too. “So her opinion matters more than mine, then,” Lauren said. She thought she’d said it jokingly, but Graham stiffened and rolled his eyes.
“Have you two hooked up?” Lauren dared to ask, surprising herself.
Graham got a weird look on his face. “No,” he said quickly. But he was lying. She thought she could tell.
Lauren had felt herself getting worked up. She’d felt all the fear, the helplessness, the hopelessness, the inadequacy—all those things rolling and twisting and metastasizing into fury. And then, just like that, the rage boiled over. She recalled Graham’s placid expression as he tried to talk her down, but that just made it worse.
In a finger snap, she was across the kitchen, next to the fridge instead of by the island. More lights were on, different ones. The faucet was running when it hadn’t been before. And Graham was staring at her with a horrified, damning expression, and now he was holding the baby. But hadn’t she been holding the baby? When had she passed him over?
It was so disorienting that she started to panic. It felt like she’d blinked and it had become the next day. She watched as Graham held the baby to his chest. There were tears running down his cheeks.
“What?” she’d said to him. “What?”
Graham looked at her with pity. Matthew was crying that terrible, silent baby cry, when they didn’t breathe for long, agonizing seconds. “Lauren,” he’d said. It was a doomed sort of tone. “You don’t know what you just did?”
She knew Graham hadn’t meant for the police to come. A neighbor had called, someone across the street who heard them screaming. When they’d shown up, she’d seen, scribbled on his pad, Woman shouting. Abuse?
When the cops knocked, she and Graham downplayed it. It had struck them sober, snapped them out of their moods. One of the officers glanced cautiously at Graham’s bleeding skin near his eye, but Graham had shrugged it off, claiming it was an accident. The cops had looked at the baby, too, who was still crying hysterically, but both parents made a mealymouthed excuse that he was teething and this was just his “witching hour.”
“So no one wants to file a complaint, then?” one of the officers asked, looking more at Lauren than at Graham.
Lauren shook her head. Graham did, too, though no one had been paying much attention. She was shocked that Graham was covering this up. She’d hurt their baby. Graham had had to wrest Matthew from her grasp. She almost wanted to surrender herself to the police then and there. I think I did a terrible thing. I don’t deserve to live, she wanted to say.
Someone appeared on the other side of a Range Rover that seemed to always be parked in the same spot. After a beat, Lauren realized it was Andrea. Her face was gray, and her hair was mussed, and she was walking with purpose toward the loft.
“Andrea?” Lauren called out. If there was one mom she was okay with seeing, it was her. “You okay?”
Andrea jumped and gave Lauren a distracted wave. “Hey,” she said gruffly. She approached the large locked door that led to the staff’s offices. She stopped and looked at the intercom system, which had no buttons.
“Jesus Christ,” Andrea said through gritted teeth. “I was just here yesterday, and I can’t remember how you buzz in.”
“You’ve had meetings today and yesterday?” Lauren shifted uncomfortably. “Why?”
At first, Andrea’s face was shuttered, but then she slowly licked her lips. “Today’s meeting isn’t exactly arranged. I don’t want to make assumptions, but . . . but I think someone on staff doesn’t want Arthur at Silver Swans.”
Lauren’s mouth dropped open. “W-What makes you say that?”
“Because . . .” Andrea looked cowed. “I found this . . . note in his bag. This drawing, of me. It was cruel. Angry. I swear Arthur didn’t draw it, but the school is insisting he did. Except there’s something fishy. Something they’re hiding . . .” She trailed off and then pressed the lower part of the intercom’s plastic covering. A buzzer rang. “Finally.”
Lauren couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You got a drawing? In your kid’s backpack? And you’re sure your son didn’t draw it?”
“Positive. I know my son. I know him better than anyone. But that director lady, Piper? She tried to convince me that
I was wrong.”
“Then I need to tell you something,” Lauren said.
Andrea pressed the buzzer again. “What?”
“The note you got? I—”
“Did I hear something?” Andrea interrupted. She pressed her ear closer to the intercom’s speaker. “For how much money they charge us, this thing is a piece of crap.” She hit the buzzer one more time. A long silence passed. No answer.
Andrea turned back to Lauren then, a strange look on her face. “What were you going to say?”
“I-I got one, too,” Lauren admitted, and then watched as Andrea’s face fell. “I mean—sort of. It was more of a note. But it said I wasn’t wanted here.”
“So did I,” a voice came from behind them.
Ronnie was walking across the lot from the classroom building, her steps slow, her eyes wide and haunted. She walked up to Lauren and Andrea and blinked at them hard. “I didn’t mean to overhear. You both got notes? Do either of your kids have a backpack shaped like a raccoon?”
Lauren gasped. “My son does. Matthew. Why?”
Ronnie’s eyes were wet now. But they weren’t filled with sadness, more like disbelief and anger. “I think you’re getting another one. And I just saw who put it there.” Her gaze drifted to the office door, still shut tight. “Piper herself.”
Twelve
Ronnie wasn’t sure how she’d gotten out of the classroom building or how long she’d been standing in the parking lot, reeling from the shock of what she’d just seen. Piper in a black jumpsuit that probably cost hundreds of dollars, leaning down and shoving a folded-up piece of paper into a darling backpack shaped like a raccoon. And then walking out of there like she’d done nothing wrong.
Lauren and Andrea were moving closer to Ronnie now, asking her to repeat what she’d just said. Ronnie tried to explain. When she was finished, Andrea was nodding vehemently. “Oh my God. Same here, more or less.”
