In the Blood

by Lisa Unger

  I checked my e-mail and saw a note from my aunt:

  Call me, honey. We need to talk about something. And I heard about that missing girl at your school. I want to check in with you, okay?

  She was a good person, my aunt. I thought that my mother would be so appreciative of how hard she’d worked at her relationship with me. And I thought she’d be a little angry with me for how hard I worked against her. I was a terrible and ungrateful child. But, of course, that wouldn’t be news to anyone.

  There was an e-mail from Ainsley, too.

  I’m going home. I can’t be here right now. My teachers said that I could take my classes online, so that’s what I’m going to do until things are settled. Sorry to leave you here alone. I just can’t go through this again. Tell Beck I’m sorry when she comes home. If she’s hurt or worse, I’ll hate myself. But if she’s fucking with us, I’ll never speak to her again. I totally mean it.

  I was surprised by a powerful wave of sadness and fear. I didn’t want to be in that room without either of them. And I had no home to escape to; I certainly wouldn’t go to hide in my aunt’s perfectly lovely guest room. It wasn’t home and it never would be. I had always envied Ainsley her goodness, and her nice parents.

  P.S., she wrote. I hate to tell you this. But some people are talking shit about you on Facebook. You might want to check it out. I’m sorry. I really am. I know I’m a sucky friend for abandoning you like this.

  I didn’t blame her. If I had a real home, and loving parents who would nurture and protect me, I’d leave, too. But I was used to being on my own. (It would really hurt Bridgette’s feelings to hear me say that.)

  Next stop: Fakebook, Beck’s misery page. Oh, the outpouring of sadness and love. We are praying for you, Rebecca! Please come home safe, wrote a girl I’d never even seen before. You hot, girl, wrote another moron. What I wouldn’t do to see you again :(, wrote a girl whom I knew Beck had once experimented with sexually but whom she now hated passionately.

  What was it about a situation like this that brought out all the drama queens and glommers-on? How could people live with it, injecting themselves into an event that had nothing whatsoever to do with them? They were nightmare chasers, sucking up other people’s tragedy, anesthetizing their own boredom for a few days or weeks.

  I scrolled through about a hundred posts that varied little from one another. Until I came to one that must have been what Ainsley was talking about.

  What does Lana Granger know about Beck? What were they fighting about the night Beck went missing? And wasn’t she fighting with Elizabeth the night she went missing, too? And, naturally, people jumped at the chance to dish.

  That girl’s a freak. She looks like a boy. (Nice.)

  I hear they were lovers. (No.)

  Don’t argue with Lana Granger or you go missing or dead! (Moron.)

  Aren’t her parents dead? (Shit.)

  She’s got problems, and she’s fugly. (Really? Fugly?)

  You guys don’t know what you’re talking about. They’re best friends and have been forever. Shut your stupid mouths!!!! (Ainsley, of course.)

  Didn’t her father kill her mother? (That one made my blood chill. Who knew that? The poster’s profile image was blank, and his page had no information at all. His name: Lester Nobody.)

  Whaaaaat??? Is that true? That’s fucked up.

  Google that shit, yo.

  I let my head fall into my hands. I thought of the newspaper article I’d found in Beck’s drawer. It was all coming out. After a second I felt myself shutting down inside, the fear, despair, and panic disappearing down the big drain I had in my center. I closed the lid of my laptop and all that idiot chatter was gone, and the waves of emotion I’d been feeling since last night, gone, too. When you’ve been exposed to massive psychological trauma, Dr. Cooper explained, your mind learns how to do this. It’s survival. But those feelings don’t really go away. You can’t repress them forever. They will demand that you deal with them, one way or another.

  After a quick glance outside for any sign of Luke, I found myself drifting up the stairs. There were still ten minutes before he was due home and I wondered if it was enough time for me to get a leg up on the whole scavenger hunt thing.

  Instead of heading to Luke’s room, I wandered into Rachel’s. It was a peaceful, pretty space. The watery-gray afternoon light washed in. She had folded the throw blanket over the right foot of the bed. The radio had been left on and some kind of ambient, New Age music was playing. The room smelled like her perfume as I walked in and stood at the foot of her bed, then to the bedside table where her books and reading glasses sat in a tidy pile. At the low armless chair and ottoman by the window, I took a quick peek outside. The street was empty.

  I ran my hand along her dresser. It was spotless, the surface shining and free from dust. Like everything in the house, it was perfect—a study in style and cleanliness.

  “I am obsessively clean,” Rachel had admitted to me. “I clean to relieve stress.”

  I felt so comfortable with her that I almost said, My mom was like that, too. But I had managed not to mention my parents at all. And she, maybe sensing my cues, had never asked.

  “She scrubs and scrubs even though nothing’s ever dirty,” said Luke. We’d been eating dinner together when she made her admission. “It’s like she’s trying to wash something away. Something no one else can see.”

  Rachel didn’t say anything, just pushed some chicken around her plate.

  But Luke kept looking at her, pinning her with his gaze. “So what is it, Mom? What are you trying to get rid of ?”

  She swallowed her food. And I thought how reversed were the roles between them. He seemed like the parent, leaning forward, looking for eye contact. She was the bullied child, shrinking into herself.

  “Just dirt, darling,” she said, not looking up from her plate. “Just dirt.”

  It was then that I realized she was afraid of him. Who could be afraid of their own child?

  On a simple silver tray, there was a simple silver locket. I found this odd. She wasn’t a locket type of person. It wasn’t her. I saw Rachel as practical, unsentimental. Then again, she was opening a bookstore in the electronic age. Maybe she was prone to fits of nostalgia. It was a nice piece, platinum, from Tiffany & Co. I opened it carefully with my fingernail, but not before catching sight of myself in the mirror.

  What are you doing? I asked the pale person in the mirror. She’s fugly. She looks like a boy. You’d think at this point in my life, I’d have been immune to schoolyard taunts. My whole life, I’d been enduring bullies and their nasty, slicing words. I’ve never understood why some people seem to delight in cruelty, in making people feel bad about who they are. I ran my hand through my hair—which looked like pitch in the dim light, short and messy. Not styled messy, but like actually messy since I hadn’t bothered to draw a brush through it today. I didn’t spend a lot of time in mirrors. In fact, I actively avoided them. I wasn’t one to primp and preen. I was more of a wash-and-go kind of person.

  If I looked at myself, I had to think about who I was, how I was moving through the world. And that’s the last thing I wanted. Still, I picked up Rachel’s brush and ran it through my hair. I looked, really looked, at my face. I was too much like my father. Why couldn’t I have been more like her? I thought.

  I was aware in this moment that my actions constituted a terrible breach of privacy, something I would have railed against. I, who keep so many secrets, was poking around in my employer’s bedroom. I put the brush down quickly.

  Inside the locket was, predictably, a picture of Luke. In the opposing frame, there was a chiseled-looking blond man in his thirties. Was it Luke’s father? They looked nothing alike.

  Luke’s father, like my parents, had been conspicuously absent and unmentioned. And I, naturally, had never asked about him. There was no mention of divorce, ugly or otherwise, or warnings about his showing up at the house. Luke never talked about him—no discussions about
weekends with his father, no phone calls or cards that I saw. I knew it was a sore spot, since our first back-and-forth. Maybe he had died. You wouldn’t keep a locket on your dresser with a picture of someone you’d divorced. Would you? But wouldn’t Rachel have mentioned it if Luke’s father had died? I usually didn’t like to pry. But maybe it was time, since Luke was clearly prying into my past.

  There was a slim, low-profile desk in a little alcove behind the master closet. Rachel’s silver laptop sat open. I pressed the touch pad and the screen came to life with a blooming, purple lotus flower. But the box itself was password protected.

  I sat in the white leather desk chair and slid open the top center drawer. Inside, there was a book, bound in dove-gray cloth. Embossed in silver across the middle was the word Journal. As I ran my finger along the cover, I heard a car door slam outside. I shut the drawer quickly, leaving the journal unopened, and headed downstairs.

  15

  Dear Diary,

  It’s a silly thing to write, isn’t it? Dear Diary. It’s such an innocent, hopeful salutation. As if logging your feelings in a book, narrating your life, has any meaning, does any good at all. But, for me, this is the only place I can be really honest. Everywhere else I’m wearing a smiling mask, putting on a show of myself and my life. You are the only one who knows the totality of my feelings, the depth of my spirit, however dark and bottomless.

  It’s only in parenthood that we realize how truly powerless we are in this life. I imagine this is true for all parents. You cannot cushion every fall, soften every blow of disappointment. You can’t alleviate the sting of rejection or failure, mend every hurt. When your child suffers, there’s an ache that doesn’t go away until the tears are dry, and the smile returns.

  I imagine that’s what it feels like for the parent of a normal child. I am powerless, too. I am powerless to protect others from my son.

  There was the boy he bit so hard, so deep, that the tiny arc of teeth marks bled and turned purple before my eyes. His mother and I had been sharing a cup of coffee at my dining room table. I’d actually been enjoying myself. We’d met at preschool. And either she hadn’t heard the rumors about my son or chose to ignore them, but she said her boy had asked for a playdate. I was almost giddy with relief. Someone wants to play with my kid! We were sharing a laugh, just like normal parents, over how funny children could be sometimes when a shriek of pain and dismay rang out from the room where the boys were playing.

  I won’t forget the look on her face, or how hard she tried to be polite as she cleaned the wound, with my fluttering frantically around for Band-Aids, Neosporin, and my son looking on with an expression that could only be classified as malicious curiosity.

  “I’m so sorry. Really, I’m so sorry,” I said as she shuttled her weeping child toward the door, gathering up his backpack that looked like a cute little monster, his hat and scarf. To my son: “Can you say you’re sorry? You know we don’t bite our friends.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He clearly didn’t mean it. “Anyway, he’s not my friend.”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “Really, these things happen. We’d better go.”

  It would have been better if she’d raged and been angry. But on her face there was only concern for her son, and for me. I could see that she felt sorry for me. I watched silently as they drove away in their red Honda.

  “I didn’t like him,” he said. “He was stupid.”

  “Is that why you bit him?”

  “I bit him because he asked me to bite him. He wanted me to bite him.”

  I stood there at the door with him. He was lying and I knew he was lying. And he knew that I knew he was lying. It was a metacommunication that passed between us. He slipped his little hand in mine.

  “We don’t need any friends, Mommy.”

  “I’m glad you feel that way. Because we don’t have any.”

  My sister and nieces came to visit a few weeks ago. She and I have had our differences over the years, though admittedly it’s largely my fault. I have always been the prickly one, the one prone to temper and the one who holds grudges. And unhappiness hasn’t made me easier to get along with, I’m sure. But I was truly flooded with joy when she and the girls got off the plane. I waved and ran to them; my sister dropped her bags to take me into her arms while the girls ( just two and four) clambered around our legs. So wrapped up in my son and all the drama surrounding his life, I had badly neglected my family.

  The girls were cherubs, chubby and golden-curled, Gerber faces and sapphire eyes. They were so normal. They giggled, they cried, they played, they fought. They reached for their mother and clung, or ran off laughing. They were toddlers in all their wild beauty. They weren’t silent and watchful. Their tantrums weren’t rages. They were disorganized and messy; how I envied my sister.

  We had a lovely first evening. My mother was there, of course. We ordered pizzas, opened a bottle of chardonnay. Even my son seemed happy, charming and social, being so helpful, attentive to the girls. My mother and I exchanged looks: What’s he up to? But eventually we relaxed.

  I think it was when he realized how enamored I was of my younger niece. What a bright light she was, so funny and silly. She had such a warm, sweet way about her. She wasn’t talking much, and my sister was worried about it. I even envied her that, the small worry that her younger was less vocal than she should be at two. She’s fine, I told her. She’s perfect.

  I was feeding her pasta shells in butter with a spoon.

  “Self!” she said with a defiant little frown. I handed her the spoon.

  “No!” she said. “You!”

  “Silly,” I answered.

  And it was a game we played for a while. The game of the normal two-year-old, the internal struggle between wanting to do things for herself and wanting them done for her. I was, weirdly, in heaven, basking in the glow of normalcy. And so I didn’t notice at first. But then it was like the sun moved behind the clouds, and I felt a chill come over me.

  He was dressed for bed, as I’d asked him to do, standing in the darkened kitchen. My sister had taken her older for a bath. I was supposed to bring the baby when she was done eating.

  “Grandma helped me with my pajamas,” he said. He sounded like a jilted lover.

  “You’re a big boy,” I said. He was six going on seven, big enough to do things for himself. The teacher at his new school and his psychiatrist had both indicated, albeit subtly, that I was doing too much for him. “You shouldn’t need help with your pajamas.”

  “There was an old woman in my room,” he said. “She told me you didn’t love me anymore.”

  “That’s silly, darling,” I said. I fought to keep my voice light. Too often I was sharp and angry with him lately, stretched as I was to my limit with his visions, fantasies, and lies. “Go to bed. I’ll be there in a minute to read your story, after your cousin is done eating.”

  He was quiet. Then, “Is Dad coming home tonight?”

  “No,” I said. “He’ll be home on Saturday.”

  I realized that my whole body was tense. And the baby started to fuss, as though she sensed the shift in energy.

  “All done?” I said.

  “All done,” she confirmed. “Bath.”

  “That’s right,” I said. I gave her a kiss on the forehead and tousled her hair. She had piles and piles of hair. “Oh, I love those golden curls.”

  I brought her to my sister, and left them in the bathroom. I heard the music of their voices as I walked down the dim hall. High and low, singsong, then stern, then laughing. They brought laughter with them; something that we had far too little of in our house.

  I lay beside him on his bed, and started reading. He touched my shoulder lightly and I turned to look at him.

  “She’s not your baby,” he said to me. “You’ll never have another baby.”

  I was so immune to him that his words didn’t even hurt me.

  “I know,” I said. “I never wanted anyone but you.”


  I had hoped that would appease him. I should have known better.

  In the early, dark morning the sound of my sister screaming tore me from sleep. The run I made across the house felt like the longest distance I’ve ever crossed in my life. I was already praying before I even knew what was happening.

  I burst into my sister’s room and the scene revealed itself to me in bursts. She was holding the baby, cradling her as the child wailed. The child’s hair was shorn, cut ragged, with patches bald to the skull. On the ground around my sister’s feet were those golden curls I’d so admired, confetti from a party. And glinting in the lamplight a long, silver pair of kitchen shears.

  16

  I managed to get myself back to the kitchen and behind my laptop before Luke let himself into the house, bringing the cold air with him. He looked flushed and expectant, dropped his bag by the large standing vase by the door, and walked toward me. I pretended to be engrossed in my schoolwork.

  “Were you upstairs?” he asked, standing in the kitchen doorway.

  “Hmm?” I said, pretending not to have heard. Then, looking at him with a welcoming smile, “Upstairs? No,” I said.

  “I thought I saw a shadow,” he said.

  “Trick of the light, maybe,” I said. “Would you like a snack?”

  “Yes, please,” he said. He shed his jacket, hung it neatly in the hall closet. He was a tidy little boy when he wanted to be, precise and orderly. He came to sit across from me, and I closed the lid on my laptop.

  “How was your day?” I asked.

  “Horrible,” he said mildly. “Just like every day there.”

  I went over to the refrigerator, took out a bowl of green apples, a block of white cheddar cheese, and some of the hard black bread that I knew he liked.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I know it’s not always easy there.”