Little Threats

by Emily Schultz

  He peered inside the large envelope and pulled out a small baggie, which contained something clunky and white. He held it up. There was a small speck on it, like a bug trapped in wax.

  Written in black marker on the other side of the bag:

  Fetal tissue, Kimberson, July 6, 1993.

  He glanced up from the bag to see Dee struggling to open the door of the gas station store, balancing two coffees and a handful of creamers.

  Ted knew this, Everett thought. And this, a piece of Haley, had sat in his garage all these years with his decoy ducks and swans.

  Dee placed the coffee cups on top of the car roof and shook her hand as if the heat of the cups had burned it. Everett stared dumbly at her through the window, knowing he was supposed to open the door for her. He felt paralyzed and didn’t move. Her gaze went to the baggie, and unlike him, it was clear she registered what it was without reading the label.

  October 20, 2008

  Assignment 4:

  Write about the place you grew up.

  My mom and dad argued a lot in the first years in the “new house,” despite their insistence that problems were for other people—people who couldn’t hold on to their jobs, who couldn’t maintain their relationships, who looked a mess. They weren’t for people like us—ones who color-coordinated which Fair Isle sweaters they would wear in their Christmas card photo. (Blue for Gerry and me; white and gray for Laine and Carter.)

  The space was big, just big enough to hold the rise of voices. You could pretend not to hear. Carter’s room was farther from the living and dining rooms than mine was, and it may have been why we spent more time in there. Also hers was cleaner.

  The day I got my period we’d been in Blueheart for a year. I was twelve. I stared down at the long scrape of brown on my underwear and for a second stupidly thought I’d somehow pooped. Then I realized it was blood. Crusty, dry, disgusting. I felt nothing like the heroines in the Judy Blume paperbacks Carter and I had whispered about and traded as currency with the girls at Liberty Junior. I edged downstairs to tell my mom, hoping that the moment might blossom into something better. I walked in on her crying. Her shoulders shook silently, and it took me a moment to understand, with her standing where she was with one fist on the kitchen counter, that she was sobbing. I looked around but no one else was there. I wondered if she cried because she secretly knew what my body was doing. Then I wondered if Carter might have gotten her period too at that same moment, locked herself in a school bathroom stall. But neither was the case, of course.

  Carter was at French Club, and I didn’t take French. I lay on my bed upstairs, waiting for her, listening to my mother cry—my walls at that time freshly painted and clean except for a picture of the Olympic figure skater Brian Boitano, arms out, gold leaf on his velvet jacket. In retrospect, I wonder if my love for velvet began that year, lying there under the figure-skating icon.

  It wasn’t long after that Laine began to blame Gerry’s long hours, saying he wasn’t “present” when he was with us. When I heard them argue she said the house in Richmond had finally been exactly how she’d wanted it and he’d picked us up and moved us to the suburbs to curry favor with Doug Macaulay and try to climb up a little more in social status. She’d had to start all over again, decorating, joining committees, building friendships. She said the women were snotty, shallow, and their politics were maddening. She felt she couldn’t leave the house without spending an hour on her hair, lest she be judged. She made us watch The Stepford Wives on cable one night, Carter and I falling asleep and her nudging us awake, saying, “Wait for it.”

  My dad did seem to have a shorter fuse after we moved, to treat Mom as simply the person who handed him his dinner plate. As much as he lectured my sister and me about how we could become doctors or lawyers, he didn’t always respect us. Once, one of our black cassettes fell under the gas pedal in the car and he was so perturbed it was in his way that he picked it up and threw it out the window as he drove us home from tennis. It was Debbie Gibson, Electric Youth. Years later he got confused between her album and another band we liked, Sonic Youth, which made us collapse in hysterical howls. But at the time, we were devastated by the loss of the tape. “Go back for it,” we pleaded. He refused to apologize and told us, “You have to learn to behave like guests in my car.”

  We were only half an hour from where we used to live, but it was another world. Most of the time Carter and I exulted in the freedom—people who didn’t know us yet as nose-pickers or nerds. There were new friends and we were allowed to roam in a way we never had been in the city, to stay out until ten at night. But I remember my mother staring out the window a lot in those years. Lonely, like the women I would later wind up waiting on in the card shop downtown.

  I didn’t think it was fair of her to blame Blueheart Woods for everything, but then again, I never asked her what made her cry.

  —Kennedy Wynn

  Heron Valley Correctional Facility

  Chapter 23

  Gerry stepped across the placed stones in his Japanese garden, assessing the land behind the house. There was a low wooden fence all around the property, the kind of thing he realized now could be easily hopped. With the exception of what happened with Haley Rae Kimberson, Blueheart Woods had so little crime, it had never been an issue. The alarm on the house had always seemed enough to him.

  Although it was December the pump in the decorative pond was still going, and he could hear it softly fizzing as he wandered throughout the garden, touching the various plants. The only yellow plants in the yard were the hostas and the Japanese forest grass, but the hostas had leaves as large as his hand. And the grass was long and wispy. Both were drastically different from the leaf Kennedy had found in the kitchen.

  “Maybe she’s wrong.” Gerry tossed aside the strand of grass in his hand. “Or maybe she’s lying.” Perhaps Kennedy had run that morning or the day before, winding through the subdivision or to the woods. She could have tracked in anything. It was much more probable than a ghost, or an intruder. But just in case, he wanted to know where the yellow leaves in the neighborhood might be, from which direction the person would have come.

  Gerry placed his hands firmly on the fence as if testing it, then vaulted himself over, landing uncertainly and putting his arms out, the inside of his thigh only stinging a little where he’d scraped it. He strode across the grass that divided his place from the house where the Halls lived, knowing they were never home during the day. Anyway, it was one in the afternoon and if anyone spotted him, they would know him. The Halls’ place had no fence at all; they had opted for large junipers to line the property, reminding him somewhat of a golf course. If that was what it was, then Gerry was in the rough. He found he could walk all the way around their property with ease, as well as the Wilsons’. The Cains had a heavy-throated boxer that barked at him from behind their tall backyard fence, but if one wasn’t intimidated there was still space to walk between their property and the garage belonging to the Johnsons. Then there was a large gap: a field almost, with the Macaulay mansion at the top of it.

  From across the grounds, Gerry eyeballed the enormous stained-glass arch above the door, the multiple rounded rooms with windows everywhere, the turret where he recalled Doug had had his library office on the second floor. It was something in between a manor and a church in terms of its design. Ostentatious, Gerry saw now.

  Doug Macaulay didn’t live there anymore. His second wife had been from Maryland and he’d moved there after he retired. He had struggled with cancer, Gerry heard, but didn’t know or care if he’d survived it. Rather hoped he hadn’t, if he was perfectly honest with himself. Jim Stone, Gerry’s onetime partner, would have known, but Gerry never spoke to him anymore. Someone else in the Macaulay family had taken up residence in the house and everyone still called it the Macaulay Castle. Gerry had always wanted to impress Macaulay, and maybe that showed weakness. The man had paid him back in the worst of w
ays.

  Gerry remembered the Christmas parties he’d been invited to there, earlier, when they were still friends and peers. The children of lawyers all cloistered themselves away in the game room while the adults slurped bourbon milk punch and old-fashioneds until they could barely stand. Only Laine ever stayed sober. The crackers and caviar, calamari, spinach dip in a pumpernickel bowl, salads with strawberry-poppyseed dressing that the girls went bananas for, and pesto crostini, a new thing that left everyone feeling continental but trying to humbly check their teeth for green flecks. “It’s great stuff, but I look like I went down on a mermaid,” Macaulay joked loudly. He could get away with saying anything. Gerry recalled his saying, “Hey, look, the barely legals are here!” when two of the female paralegals arrived together.

  Macaulay had everything once promised by 1970s subscriptions to Playboy: money and brains, hi-fi equipment and character, a wife and a mistress, and one of the mistresses eventually became his wife. He was the kind of guy people both remembered and resented. If one wanted to hate somebody, Macaulay made a good target.

  Especially for Gerry. And yet, Gerry had never thrown a punch.

  * * *

  —

  He might not have believed it if he hadn’t seen it himself: Laine walking down the cul-de-sac that led up to Macaulay’s house. It was a gray February afternoon and she held her arms around herself as though she was cold, and she may have been, dressed as she was, in a blouse and a thin sweater, as if she had thrown it on and run across the fields. Gerry had stood watching her, hand on top of his Cadillac Seville, her own vehicle still parked there in the driveway. It was four o’clock, so who knew where the girls were—it was Laine’s job to keep track. He’d planned to work through the evening but had come home to get a floppy disk with some files—the phone having rung and rung through the house and no Laine picking up. He saw the guilt on her face before she’d reached their driveway. She could have come up with a lie, and he wished she would.

  “Let’s go inside,” she said, and walked past him quickly into the house.

  Neither of them said anything. Laine turned to face him and perhaps there would have been an apology if he hadn’t reached out and slapped her. He hadn’t known he was going to; it happened before he could stop himself. He’d never lifted his hand to her before. But the slap was more than a slap—it was a cuff, and she went down and then held her hands over her head to defend herself. The anger didn’t subside and Gerry kicked over the ornamental umbrella stand instead of hurting her. It hit the wall with a clang and Laine flinched and began to sob.

  “Him? Anyone else out here but him. This is my business, my life.”

  “I’m your life.” She lifted her chin. “And you never listened when I said ‘I hate it out here. I don’t know you anymore. I want a divorce’?” Her lip quivered on the last word, and he could see the pain and fear in her eyes. Her cheek had reddened along one side where he’d struck her.

  A half hour later they were sitting at the dining room table, as civilized as possible, him with a whiskey and her with coffee, when she told him everything. It was worse than he’d thought. She protested that she hadn’t slept with Doug, only fooled around. That indicated to Gerry it was not a onetime mistake but something that was ongoing, a thing she’d considered, kept hidden, returned to off and on. She had thought about Macaulay while showering in their house, thought about Macaulay while serving Gerry supper, thought about Macaulay when Gerry attempted sex and she rejected him. It filled his mind with the worst of images.

  Laine clutched the ice pack against her face, weathering his outbursts but still spilling more details than he wanted, the kinds of things she ought to have told a girlfriend rather than a two-timed husband.

  “I gave you everything,” Gerry said hoarsely, “and you destroy me. My business. My social life. I can’t show my face at the club after this. I just phoned Doug yesterday, and I’m talking to him and you’re up there in that house, you can look out the window and practically see our place from there.”

  “I wasn’t in a position to look out the window,” Laine replied.

  “There’s mistakes and then there’s being a whore.”

  “You got a tax schedule for that formula? Have you filled it out yourself?”

  “Fuck you, Laine.”

  Laine’s face blanched, but it wasn’t the word. Her gaze was fixed on something over Gerry’s shoulder. When he turned, he saw one of the girls standing in the doorway.

  “Don’t gawk,” he said, standing up, taking the drink he’d poured with him. “All couples fight. One day you’ll see.”

  When the din of their conversation had turned down, Gerry heard other voices in the foyer.

  It was Carter who’d walked in on them, it turned out, and he apologized after. Laine made him. Apologies and shuffling seemed the way to deal with the biggest pains in a family. Laine had wronged him, yet Gerry was the one who had to say something. “I didn’t mean what I said,” he’d uttered, ducking his flaming face in, then out of her room, where the girls were curled on the bed flipping through music magazines.

  Later, he’d edged past Haley in the upstairs hallway on her way to the bathroom.

  “I’m sorry. I’ll pray for you and Mrs. Wynn,” she’d said softly, and he’d wondered if the apology was about more than just having walked in on a bad moment. If she meant she was sorry he was disregarded, sorry he was vulnerable. But of course she didn’t. She didn’t know anything.

  * * *

  —

  Now Gerry shook away the question and pulled a holly leaf from a shrub. He twirled it between his forefinger and thumb. So far he hadn’t passed any yellow foliage except two high autumn-turned oaks, which swayed and rattled. Their leaves were the wrong shape.

  He had hoped to make it as far as the woods, go in, see what was there. But his chest felt like it was on fire, and he’d only walked a mile and a half. Once he’d been able to walk the golf course all day. It was silly, anyway, he told himself, to hunt a leaf as if it could reveal something to him. And that missing knife? Gerry wondered. Knives go missing every day. Just like socks in the laundry. Or daughters at fourteen.

  He turned around and trod back the way he’d come.

  Chapter 24

  Berk taped the laser printout to the pharmacy counter: Butler’s Does Not Sell Plan B.

  “Like you could knock anyone up,” the shithead stock boy Liam said as he was walking by.

  Berk swore at him, mumbled something about having a kid, then turned to look at the sign again. He reached out and pulled it down, added another piece of tape to the back, and smoothed it back up on the wall.

  * * *

  —

  When he’d picked Haley up the night of the Fourth before Kennedy’s place, they’d driven around talking. She was wearing that transparent blouse as if it would distract him from what she had to tell him.

  “How late?” he asked, putting on his signal and pulling over to the side of Smoke Line. Cars passed them. Once in high school a girl had almost said the same words to him, but having heard the whispers, he’d avoided her, and eventually she’d stopped even making that pleading eye contact with him in the hall and he knew she’d managed on her own, as easily as hitting the Backspace button on a typewriter and going over the mistake. Berk didn’t know if Haley would make the same decision, and he felt a heavy feeling in his guts.

  Haley shrugged. “A month, maybe more.”

  Berk put the Jeep in park. His hands dropped off the wheel into his lap. He turned and met her eyes. His father had told him that if a man looked at a girl, really looked at her, she would almost always do what he wanted. “Are you going to take care of it?”

  Haley broke his gaze and looked down. “I can’t do that.”

  “Is it mine?” He had worn a condom, the free kind, generic and raspberry red, passed out on campus.

  “Righ
t now it’s all mine, isn’t it?”

  It wasn’t the answer he’d expected. They were supposed to drop later—Kennedy had told him to bring something. Maybe if Haley did, she’d realize it wasn’t the right thing, keeping it.

  “Do you want to try pennyroyal tea?”

  “Like in the song? That could kill me.”

  “No. It could just help you, you know, have your period. Lots of hippie girls on campus take it for cramps.”

  “I’m not having cramps.” She flipped down the visor and applied her lip gloss angrily, dipping her finger into the tiny canister and smearing it across her bottom lip. She ground her lips in toward each other, dragging the stuff across them both.

  “Would you try it? Maybe you’re just late.”

  She pouted and said she didn’t even know where to get it.

  “They have it at health food stores in the city. I’ll get it for you.”

  She said okay, and he said really it wasn’t the same, because he could see what she was thinking. She shook her head, her eyes shiny. “No,” she said.

  He pulled back out onto the road before she could cry.

  As they turned onto Silver Creek, he rambled, “I’m not saying it’s mine. Because maybe it’s not. But I have plans, you know. I’m not like these trash boys you got out here. My dad is going to give me the stores to run and I’m going to run a record label too. I’ll start with Kennedy’s band. They’ll be the next Breeders. Do you want to fuck that up for her?”

  He brought the vehicle to a hard stop before they came into sight of the Wynn house.