Ten years ago a birthday party meant a free afternoon. He’d drop Kip off and get some work done or run some errands. These days it seemed the parents were expected to stay. Calliope music was playing, and through the rear-facing windows of the house he saw that the backyard was set up like a carnival, with food stalls and game booths and bouncy houses. A dozen children were streaking from one attraction to another as a dozen women stood in little chatting knots to watch them. In the shade of an oak tree in the corner of a yard stood a pony with a daisy-chain halter, his head hung low like a boxer steeling himself for the next round.
“Go on down.”
The woman flung open a door, and the unmistakable roar of a stadium crowd came up from the basement. Pete followed the organ music downstairs and around a corner to the glow of a giant TV. The game was up on the screen—Orioles versus the Padres today—and three men sprawled in leather recliners in front of it. One of them squeaked upright to shake Pete’s hand and introduce himself along with the other two guys, who thrust out their hands without rising. The host handed Pete a beer and waved him into the fourth recliner.
Maybe times had changed for the better, Pete thought as he pushed back and watched his legs elevate before him. He popped the tab on his beer and took a cold swallow. This was as relaxed as he’d felt in two months. Sunday afternoon, kicking back and watching the game, no pressure to make conversation, just good ol’ silent male companionship. Mostly silent, anyway. The other two guys were divorced dads, too, and between their intermittent play-by-plays, they exchanged a few commiserating quips about visitation hassles. And all four men exchanged their job titles like business cards passed around a Japanese conference table. IT, for one. Government for another. Government IT for the third. “Construction,” Pete said when his own turn arrived. “Ah. Real work,” the host dad said, while the other two gave approving nods.
It was a respite to spend time away from St. Alban, with people who didn’t know anything about Kip or Chrissy or what their family was going through. Nobody was looking at him funny, wondering what it must be like, watching for him to crack under the pressure. Here he was just an ordinary dad with an ordinary kid. He finished his beer, dipped a few chips, and let himself relax. The Orioles were three up when his eyelids drooped to half-mast and the stadium sounds faded to a peaceful drone.
“Mr., uh—Mia’s daddy?” the lady ringleader shouted from the top of the stairs. “Could you come up a sec?”
He lurched out of the recliner and trotted up the stairs. “What’s up?”
The woman made a sad-clown face. “Mia’s not having very much fun, I’m afraid.”
He followed her outside into the whirling dervish of the carnival kids. It took a minute for him to pick out his own. She was huddled under the cake table, behind the flapping skirt of a pink paper tablecloth, her face hidden against her knees.
“Hey, sweetie, what’s going on?” His knees creaked as he squatted beside her.
She shook her head without lifting it.
“She’s afraid of the pony.” A little girl stood behind him with her hands on her tiny hips. “We’re supposed to take turns riding him, but she won’t do it.”
“Is that right?” he said to Mia. “Well, you don’t have to ride if you don’t want to.”
“But it’s part of the party,” the other child insisted.
“There’s other parts you can do. Do you want to come out and do some of those?”
Mia shook her head against her knees. “I wanna go home,” she whispered.
He reached for her under the table and she came into his arms and buried her face in his shoulder as he cracked his knees straight again. “I guess we better go,” he said to the hostess.
“I’m so sorry! I never would have guessed she’d be so scared. I mean, he’s only twelve hands high!”
“Thank you for having her,” he said and bore his sobbing child out to the street.
She calmed down after they were in the truck and he promised her ice cream. It was a bad reflex on his part, he knew, consoling her with ice cream every time she got upset. But it was a relief to see the tears subside, and even better to see a smile flicker over her face as she put tongue to chocolate cone.
“Mia—honey—I know you don’t like horses, and that’s fine. Lots of people don’t. I don’t much like cats.”
“Even Goodness and Mercy?”
“All of them. So I avoid them, and it’s fine for you to avoid horses and ponies, too. But here’s the thing. You don’t need to be afraid of them. You just say no thank you and do something else.”
“I was afraid they’d laugh at me.”
“So what if they do? You just laugh back. You don’t need to be afraid of those kids. You don’t need to be afraid of anything. I’m always going to protect you and keep you safe.”
She stared at him while a drip of melted ice cream trickled down her hand and puddled on the table. “You’re not always there.”
Neither was any dad, but Pete’s noncustodial guilt still made him flinch at the reminder. “But somebody’s always there. Mommy and Gary. Or Grandma, or your teachers. Right? You’re never alone. All of us are there to keep you safe. That’s our job.”
She considered that as she licked a trail up her hand. “For how long?”
“What do you mean?”
“Until I’m twelve, or fifteen, or how old?”
“Forever.”
Her stare turned suddenly accusing. “Chrissy was fourteen and nobody kept her safe.”
Fuck. Why did he not see that coming. His mind churned for a response. “Well, that was because something was wrong in her brain—”
“Kip’s eighteen, and he’s not safe. He might have to go to jail! Gary says—”
“No.” Goddam that Gary March. “He’s wrong. Kip’s not going to jail.”
“ ’Cause you’re going to protect him?”
“I am,” he said. “Absolutely.”
Kip was in the dining room when Pete got back to the site, his fingers clattering at hyperspeed over his fancy new ergonomic keyboard. Pete was still amazed that Karen had sprung for such a high-priced setup and even more amazed that Gary let her.
“What are you working on?” School was out.
“My manifesto,” Kip answered with a smirk and kept on typing.
“Funny man.” Pete headed for the kitchen for a drink of water.
“Hey, Dad? Can I make a charge on your card?”
“How much?” he hollered back.
“Nineteen-ninety-nine.”
“What for?”
“There’s this new app I need.”
“What for?”
“It increases the functionality of the graphic interface and facilitates incremental updates to improve system stability. Let me show you—”
Pete was already lost. He tossed his credit card on the table as he passed through the room again. “Talk to your mom?”
Kip made a face and reached for his phone.
Chapter Thirty
Leigh’s meetings with Stephen became a standing appointment. Every Saturday at eleven she drove to his cottage and he met her at the Snuggery door with tea—iced tea, now that hot weather was upon them, topped with a sprig of mint from his garden—and she settled deep into the worn upholstery and they talked. About everything. Current events. Gun violence, of course—the subject was unavoidable with all the shootings in the news and Stephen with such a personal stake in the debate—but they also talked about books and movies and whatever was on last week’s Must-See TV. And mostly they talked about Leigh’s grief and how to chart her course through it.
She could talk to him about it in a way she couldn’t with anyone else. Here was someone who understood her loss, who’d suffered his own and somehow endured it. She told him the worst of her thoughts, the ugly, bitter ones, and he told her all the times he’d thought and felt the same after Andy’s death. There were no platitudes, no Time heals all wounds from Stephen. He never shied away f
rom her pain. He never shied away from speaking her daughter’s name either.
“Tell me about Chrissy,” he said as he always did.
As always she felt the swell of grief billow in her chest. “I can’t. I don’t know—”
He took her hand and gave her fingers an encouraging squeeze. “Not about her death. Tell me about her life.”
But her life led to her death. They were all of a piece. Leigh had a million beautiful stories to tell about Chrissy, but every story led to the same unbearable ending. What was the point in telling a story, any story, when the ending was all wrong? She didn’t understand how he could talk so cheerfully about his son. Andy was meant to become an advocate for the poor and make his mark on the world. He was meant to be a husband and a father and a grandfather, too, but none of that ever happened. His murder in his parents’ home that awful night deprived him and everyone else of the man he was meant to be.
Chrissy was meant to be—what? Alive, long enough to figure that out for herself. Long enough to have the ending she deserved. “I’m sorry, Stephen,” she said finally as she always did. “I can’t.”
He relented and asked about the twins instead, and that was easy. They were such all-American boys, ordinary in the best sense of the word. Being twins made them special enough, so they never felt any need to prove themselves in other ways. Even when they played sports, it was without that bloodthirsty competitive drive that many athletes possessed. They didn’t play to win; they played for fun. They were happy with who they were, and she was happy with who they were, too.
“It’s the children least like ourselves we’re able to enjoy the most,” Stephen said. “Sarah, my artist, has nothing in common with me, and all I do is glory in her differences.”
“I suppose that’s true.” She took a thoughtful sip of her tea. She never had anything like Chrissy’s sparkling cheer, yet how richly she enjoyed it.
“Kip, now, he sounds the most like you.”
She put the glass down with a clunk. “He isn’t mine.”
“No, of course. Not by birth. But he sounds most like you in intellect and disposition. And—dare I say it? He has the same irreverent sense of humor.”
Was that true? No one could make her laugh the way Kip did, and no one laughed at her own jokes more than Kip did either. They always seemed to understand each other. You get it, don’t you, Leigh? he’d say during every disagreement with his father, and even when she couldn’t say so, she always did. But—“No. I was a good kid. Not a hell-raiser like Kip.”
“Never?” A smile pulled at Stephen’s mouth. “I can’t believe there weren’t a few hijinks in your otherwise well-spent youth. Some elaborate prank?”
A memory stirred. That time she tucked a note inside the gas tank door on her boyfriend’s car. Please help me! I’m being kidnapped! it read. The gas station attendant had poor Sammy in a headlock and the manager was dialing 911 by the time she clapped her hands and hollered April Fools!
“Ha! I knew it!” Stephen laughed, and she gave up and laughed along, too.
It was always past noon by the time they finished their talks, and he always persuaded her to join him for lunch at the Acropolis. He liked to sing as he drove, with the radio or not. One day he felt inspired to sing what seemed like the entire Beach Boys songbook, belting out the tunes in the same rich baritone he used for “Hail Thee, Festival Day.” And because every Beach Boys song begged for harmony, Leigh had no choice but to join in. What a sight they must have presented to the people passing them on the road. Two middle-aged people in an old Saab, pretending they were in a T-Bird as they belted out the lyrics to “Fun, Fun, Fun.”
John Stoddard called on Monday. He’d come up with some intel he hoped might help his chances on custody. He asked if he could come in and show it to her.
Leigh had done her own homework since they last met. Research on Maryland custody laws, of course, but also on Stoddard himself. The details were classified—very little information on Delta Force operations was ever released to the public—but between survivor accounts and reporters’ blogs, she’d pieced together some of the story. Last year ISIS captured more than forty reporters, Kurdish fighters, and foreign aid workers and held them hostage in a makeshift prison in the northern Syrian town of Al-Bab. Negotiations for their release were attempted, prisoner swaps were offered, but all efforts failed. The matter was at a standoff until one day last October when eye-in-the-sky surveillance photos showed backhoes at work, digging what appeared to be mass graves around the perimeter of the compound.
That night a team of Delta Force operators stormed the prison. Seven ISIS soldiers were killed in the firefight that followed, but all of the hostages were rescued. Those who spoke afterward reported that Master Sergeant John Stoddard led the charge and single-handedly took down five of the prison guards. The Pentagon would neither confirm nor deny those statements, but upon his return stateside, Stoddard was awarded the Silver Star for gallantry in military action against an enemy of the United States.
Leigh met him in Reception late that afternoon and brought him to her office. He was dressed as before, in a tight golf shirt and crisply creased slacks, but there was no earpiece today and no electronic dog tags around his neck. Instead he carried a cross-body courier-style briefcase, the kind with a built-in lock and a fire-resistant inner bag. He opened it and extracted a thin folder that he placed carefully on her desk blotter. Then he went to the window and stood with his hands clasped behind his back and waited for her to read it.
She opened the folder. Inside were two separate incident reports from the Bethesda police involving complaints of domestic abuse against William Gunder, forty-two, by Heather Gunder, thirty-three. Subsequently withdrawn by the complainant. Next was a rap sheet from the Metro Police showing Gunder’s DUI arrest in August and another from the Virginia State Police showing a second DUI arrest in September. Below that was a Maryland State Police report of a single-car traffic accident on the Capital Beltway in December. It included a lab report showing Gunder’s BAC level well above the legal limit, and the coroner’s report of the fatal injuries sustained by Heather. The final document was a nolle pros report: the government declined to prosecute Gunder for vehicular homicide in view of the intrafamily relationship.
Leigh looked up in amazement. Somehow Stoddard had managed to tap into the records of four different police departments in the space of only two weeks—records that were either exempt from public disclosure or required miles of red tape to dislodge. No one in her usual stable of investigators could have accomplished this.
“It’s not enough, is it?” he said without turning from the window. “That he used to drink and beat his wife. I have to show that he still drinks and he beats his kid.”
“Yes.” She was impressed all over again, that he’d figured this out on his own. He was fast becoming her favorite client. “Or something else to show he’s an unfit parent.”
“Then I’ll keep looking.” He was silent for a moment, staring through the glass over the rooftops of the city. “I saw him yesterday.”
“Gunder?”
“Bryce. He was in the park, by himself, kicking around a soccer ball.”
“No—John—you mustn’t approach him.”
“I was a hundred yards away. I had a scope.”
“Okay, but you have to be careful. You don’t want Gunder to suspect you’re investigating him, and you certainly don’t want to invite charges of trespass or harassment. You need to keep your distance. Stay out of sight.”
He turned from the window with a tight smile. “All due respect, ma’am, but I know how to conduct covert surveillance.”
She let out an embarrassed laugh. “Yes, of course you do.”
He gazed past her, to the credenza behind her desk. “He’s a big kid for his age,” he said. “He’s gonna be as tall as me.” He slipped the file in his courier bag, but he was still looking past her. “He seemed so lonely.”
“Maybe we can change that.”
She stood up and held out her hand.
He nodded as he shook it. “You have a beautiful family.”
She glanced back at the family photographs on the credenza. “Oh. Thank you.”
“I’ll be in touch.”
After he left, she sat down and slowly spun in her chair. There they all were. Dylan and Zack and Kip and Mia, and front and center, Chrissy, captured midair on Romeo’s back as they soared over a jump. She picked up the photo and held it close, so close her breath steamed the glass. She could see every drop of sweat on Romeo’s neck. She could even see the little pink tip of Chrissy’s tongue between her teeth. It was what she always did when she was concentrating hard on a task, whether it was homework or frosting cupcakes, though Leigh warned her again and again not to do it on horseback—one jarring bump and she’d bite right through it.
The things she worried about then.
The twins’ Honda was in the driveway when she got home that night. Their catering gig must have been canceled, which meant a whole evening to spend with her sons. They could order takeout and find something to stream on Netflix and she wouldn’t even care if they chose a superhero movie. They were sitting at the kitchen table when she came in, their handsome young faces so pinched and drawn that her heart did a skip. “What happened?” Somebody died, she thought. Don’t let it be somebody died.
“Everything’s fine. We just wanted to talk.”
“Sure!” With a relieved smile she pulled up the third chair at the table. They glanced at each other. Dylan gave a nod, and Zack cleared his throat. “Dad called today.”
House on Fire Page 25
