But she was happy to share them with Lauren, the blessed grandchild, Karen thought sourly. Even when Mom and Lauren argued, as they were now, she was abandoned on the periphery.
After getting no answers from her mother, she’d gone upstairs to bang on Lauren’s door and demand them from her instead. But Lauren had only told her, “It’s between me and Nana.”
Karen wished she could draw the words from her daughter’s throat, force them to emerge purely through the effort of her own will.
No matter how long she stared at the grainy wood of Lauren’s bedroom door, her child did not emerge and tell her what was wrong. And it was difficult not to feel that she had failed, that if Lauren loved her better, trusted her more, this would not be. Lauren should have run into her mother’s arms if she was weeping, but she’d run past her instead.
It was always that way. Even when Lauren was small she’d choose her father over her mother if she skinned her knee or bumped her head. Lauren had never wanted Karen, would twist away from her if Karen tried to console her or kiss her cheek.
When Karen had David, his behavior had been a miracle. He always wanted to cuddle with her, always wanted to be held by her or walk next to her and hold her hand. He’d spent so much time right next to Karen that Joe had muttered darkly about David being a “mama’s boy.”
“What’s the matter with that?” Karen had demanded. “Why can’t he prefer me to you?”
“Don’t want him to grow up to be a sissy, that’s why,” Joe said.
Privately Karen didn’t care if David was a “sissy,” but all she’d said to Joe was, “He’s still a baby,” and Joe had subsided.
Part of Joe’s irritation had stemmed from the fact that David had steadfastly refused to be interested in the tiny baseball glove and soft rubber baseball that Joe bought him when he was three.
The boy didn’t have any interest in trying to catch the ball when it was tossed or chasing it around the yard when he missed it. Joe had watched in increasing frustration as David had been distracted by the bees buzzing in the clover and worms pushing through the surface of the lawn. Nature was not a thing a proper boy should be interested in, in Joe’s opinion. The only thing a boy should be doing outdoors was getting dirty playing football or some such thing.
But Lauren had been happy to catch the ball when Joe threw it, and to throw it back hard enough that Joe gave her what he considered to be a great compliment—“You don’t throw like a girl.”
Lauren’s face had glowed when he said that, but Karen had wanted to say, “What’s wrong with throwing like a girl? What’s wrong with being a girl and liking girl things? Why are we less than you? Why is Lauren better for not behaving like me?”
But she never said those things, because Joe never listened. And even if he had listened, he wouldn’t have understood.
Karen left Lauren to her own devices until dinnertime.
“Can you go and tell your sister dinner will be ready in ten minutes?” she asked David. He sat at the kitchen table coloring.
“Okeh,” he said, and hopped off the chair. His bare feet tapped along the hallway and up the stairs.
Karen collected his coloring book and crayons and put them on the sideboard so she could set the table. She wiped sweat off her forehead with her forearm as she placed the last fork. She had roasted a chicken with carrots and potatoes even though it was hot and having the oven on made the kitchen unbearable.
But a chicken means leftovers, which means I can get two or three meals for the price of one.
Chicken salad, chicken soup. Or maybe chicken enchiladas? Depends on how much chicken is left, really.
She would never forgive Joe for canceling his life insurance without telling her. Never.
And she would never forgive him for continuing to take the life insurance payment out of their checking account and using it on God knows what. Hotel rooms for the slut he was fucking, probably.
Now she had to make their meager savings stretch until David could attend kindergarten and she could get at least a part-time job.
Although maybe Sofia would babysit, Karen thought. But does it make sense to pay out half of your salary to a sitter?
Whenever she thought about money or the future, her lungs felt tight. Everywhere she looked, the options were limited and terrible.
Lauren hated it when Karen told her she couldn’t have the same jeans as Miranda, or the sneakers that would mark her as one of the in-crowd. But Karen couldn’t justify the cost when they needed to eat.
And when she told her daughter that, Lauren would give her that look, that hateful look that she saved just for her mother—the one that let Karen know that Lauren thought she was inadequate in every way.
David’s little feet tap-tap-tapped down the stairs and down the hall again. He stopped in the doorway.
“Lauren said she’s not hungry,” David said.
No, we aren’t having any of that, Karen thought. She said to David, “Okay, honey, I’ll go talk to her.”
The chicken was supposed to come out in a few minutes so Karen jogged up the steps and arrived, out of breath, in front of Lauren’s door again.
“You will come down to dinner,” Karen said.
“I’m not hungry,” Lauren said. Flat. Disrespectful.
Karen took a deep breath so she wouldn’t start kicking the door. Sometimes she felt so helpless in the face of her daughter’s attitude that she wanted to break everything in sight.
“I am not going to stand here arguing with you through this door. You will come down or you won’t get your allowance for the next month.”
She turned on her heel and went back downstairs, just in time for the timer to start beeping that the chicken was done.
And when Lauren had dropped her butt into her chair a few minutes later, Karen had congratulated herself for managing the situation so well. Even if Lauren did have an expression on her face that would be more appropriate if the world were ending, or perhaps a member of Duran Duran had died.
But if Lauren pushed her carrots around the circumference of the plate one more time Karen was not going to be held responsible for her behavior. Lauren acted like Karen was trying to force-feed her poison.
David watched his sister with a quizzical expression, although he ate everything with his usual relish. He’d always been a good eater. He hadn’t been one of those babies that didn’t want to transition from bottle to solid food. Whatever Karen had spooned out of the Gerber jars, David had happily eaten.
He’d always been her happy child. Lauren was a colicky baby, a tantrum-y toddler and a sullen grade schooler. Now she was an angry teenager and Karen half wished she could trade her for a different child.
In fairy tales fairies would take away a human baby and leave a supernatural replacement. Maybe that was what had happened. Maybe Karen’s real baby, a happy, smiling Lauren, had been taken away to fairyland and they’d left this forever-dissatisfied girl in her place.
She’s your daughter, and you love her.
Yes, she loved her daughter. But it had been a long time since she liked her.
“Do you believe in magic?”
Karen gave a little start. It was like Lauren had seen inside her brain, or heard the traitorous thought that a changeling had been left in her place.
Don’t be ridiculous.
Lauren glared at her, like whatever answer she gave would be the wrong one.
Karen gave a half glance at David, worried that Lauren might say something about Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny not being real.
“I think that we don’t know or understand everything in the universe,” Karen said carefully. “So magic is possible, I suppose.”
“Like spells and witches?” The words shot out of Lauren’s mouth like live ammunition.
This has something to do with her argument with Mom, Karen though
t. She’d have to tread carefully, because if she by word or deed offended Lauren, then any chance of discovering what was troubling her would be gone forever.
“I don’t know if there are witches like you see in the movies—”
“How do you know?”
Karen tried again. “Well, there isn’t any evidence of—”
“Oh, what the hell do you know?” Lauren shouted, slamming her fork down next to her plate. “Nothing. You know nothing about anything.”
“Watch your language!” Karen said. “You don’t talk that way in my house.”
“And that’s all you care about, isn’t it? How people act in ‘your house’ and where they put their stuff in ‘your house.’ It’s not even your house anyway. It was Dad’s money that paid for it,” Lauren said.
“And that’s where you know nothing,” Karen said through her teeth. “Your father’s business would never have come close to paying for a house this size, especially when it bled away money. He was always performing labor for free, or discounting auto parts for people. It was my money, my inheritance from my father that paid for this house.”
And it’s the only reason we stay here. Because there’s no mortgage to pay off and no rent to pay.
Lauren looked slightly chastened at that, but in the way of all teenage girls she decided to disregard the facts that didn’t suit her.
“Dad did that because he cared about other people. He was helping them out. Not like you. I’ve never seen you so much as help an old lady across the street.”
Every word was like a punch to Karen’s heart, her lungs, her stomach. Karen volunteered her time at Lauren’s school as a lunch monitor, had delivered meals to the elderly, had watched other people’s children for free so that they could go to jobs or run errands. There were so many things that she did, but Lauren didn’t know about them because she didn’t brag about them the way Joe had.
But it didn’t matter. She didn’t have to justify her behavior or explain herself to a fourteen-year-old girl.
“Go to your room,” Karen said, her tone as frosty as a midwinter wind.
“Get out of my room, go back to my room, make up your damned mind,” Lauren said, pushing her chair back from the table.
“You have lost your next two months of allowance,” Karen said. “Keep talking to me like that and you’ll be grounded for the rest of the summer. No more sneaking off to the arcade with boys.”
“I wasn’t sneaking!” Lauren shouted. “And Miranda was the one who brought those boys.”
“I don’t want to hear your excuses,” Karen said.
“You NEVER LISTEN!” Lauren said. “YOU NEVER EVER LISTEN TO ME! I HATE YOU!”
Well, there it was. Lauren had finally said the thing she’d been saying without actually saying ever since Joe had died. It wasn’t completely unexpected, and Karen knew that lots of teenagers said things they didn’t mean in the heat of the moment.
Yes, that was it. It was only the heat of the moment. Lauren was upset about some argument with her grandmother. This wasn’t about Karen at all. It couldn’t be, because the baby who’d grown to life beneath her heart couldn’t be looking at her with eyes that spewed venom a second before her mouth did.
“I WISH YOU DIED INSTEAD OF DAD!”
Karen felt part of her heart fall away then, plummet deep into some bloodied abyss.
This girl who she’d carried inside her body, this child who she’d sung over and dreamed of, this baby who she’d loved more than any other human being alive on the day she’d been born—this child, her only daughter, wished she’d been murdered in her husband’s place.
And there was nothing Karen could do as Lauren ran from the room with tears in her eyes. There was nothing she could say because her voice was stopped by the tears clogging her own throat, the ones that she would not let fall.
8
Mrs. Schneider stood at her kitchen window and stared out at the backyard. The police had, of course, cleared away the abomination that had soiled her property the previous day. But somehow every time she looked outside she thought she could still see it there, like an afterimage burned on her eyes.
“Disrespectful,” she muttered. “If someone wanted to murder some worthless girls, then they should have left them somewhere else. Not in my yard.”
She could only imagine what Mr. Schneider would have said about this. He’d fenced in the yard so they would be protected from this kind of harassment—from any kind of harassment, really. Mr. Schneider had understood that People Would Impose On You if you didn’t make it clear that under no circumstances whatsoever were they permitted to borrow your gas grill, let their children cross your property line or even accidentally toss a ball into your patch of grass.
Mr. Schneider had always dealt with lost balls (or Frisbees or whatever else the “noisy little bastards,” as he’d called them, had thrown) firmly by putting all such rubbish where it belonged—in the trash can.
This had not endeared him to the parents of the “noisy little bastards” but, as Mr. Schneider so often said, he was not there to make friends. He didn’t particularly care if the neighborhood families hated him. Mrs. Schneider supposed it would have been different if they’d been able to have their own children. But God had not seen fit to bless them with their own offspring. So there were no little Schneiders to carry on the family name, and Mr. Schneider made war with the children in the cul-de-sac instead of teaching his own son how to throw a baseball.
“And I would have been able to teach him properly, as well, so it wouldn’t end up in someone else’s yard,” he said.
He was unfazed by the eggs and toilet paper that decorated the front of their house every Halloween.
Unfazed because, as Mrs. Schneider recalled, he sat in the front window and wrote down the names of every one of the little brats who had the audacity to do such a thing and then brought that list to the chief of police. The chief was then forced to talk to the parents of all the rotten apples, which meant they were punished—very often by being forced to return to the scene of the crime and clean up their mess.
“As someone should clean up this mess,” she said, for when she glanced in the yard again she saw those girls’ heads, the shiny viscera scattered all around, and the buzzing cloud of flies hovering like a sending from a demon of hell.
But then she blinked and the vision was gone again.
“This never happened before those Mexicans moved into the neighborhood,” Mrs. Schneider said.
She felt a tiny flush of guilt at this, because that skinny little mother from across the street had called the police and then put her arm around Mrs. Schneider until they came. That was very neighborly of her—what was her name? Foreign-sounding name.
“Sofia,” she said. “Why can’t foreigners give their children good solid American names, like Elizabeth or Jennifer?”
The only Sofia Mrs. Schneider knew of was Sophia Loren, and she was definitely a foreigner.
“Italian,” she said. “Even if Loren isn’t a wop name. Trying to pretend she’s something she isn’t.”
She wondered what Mr. Schneider would have said if someone had tried putting dead bodies in their yard while he was alive.
“He would have called the chief of police,” she said. “But I talked to Van Christie already.”
Yes, she’d talked to Van Christie while that dirty Mexican policeman stood in her yard. His wife may have come inside her house (the woman had not been invited; she’d just barged her way in), but Mrs. Schneider would not lower her standards so far as to offer coffee to a man who represented everything she hated.
She was sure that the death of those girls had something to do with that family across the street. Never mind if one of them was a policeman.
“I should call the mayor,” she said.
But she knew Richard Touhy, and his father too, and they were bo
th the same. He wouldn’t want to hear about anything that made his town seem less-than-perfect. And on the telephone he could say anything he wanted while rolling his eyes at her.
“Disrespectful,” she said.
Yes, Richard Touhy was disrespectful. But he would have to listen to her if she met him in person. He wouldn’t be able to do the crossword puzzle instead of taking her concerns seriously.
“This never happened before those Mexicans moved here,” she muttered. “They’re probably over there sacrificing humans to their ancient gods in the backyard.”
She’d heard something about that once—that Mexicans used to sacrifice people to the sun. Was it on a program that Mr. Schneider watched—one of those National Geographic specials? She herself had never had any interest in primitive cultures, but he had enjoyed that sort of thing. Yes, human sacrifice. That explained many things.
Only people like that could have done the horrible thing that had been left in her yard. And the wife, the one who seemed nice enough (although Mrs. Schneider recalled then that the wife had slapped her and that was not acceptable, not at all) had been sent over to make sure Mrs. Schneider didn’t talk to anyone about it. And the husband was in the police force so he could cover it all up.
It all made sense now.
And she was going to explain those things to Richard Touhy, whether he wanted to hear them or not.
She should telephone a few other people, as well. She had friends who were also unhappy about the presence of foreigners in the cul-de-sac. If they knew what had happened to her then they would contact Touhy and complain as well. He would be forced to take action if a large group of his constituents approached him about the same issue.
He would have to get rid of those Mexicans.
“Yes,” she said, deciding to call Ethel Wagner first. Touhy could keep, for now. “There are going to be some changes around here.”
9
Lauren knew she shouldn’t have yelled at her mother like that. Mom was the revenging type. She was probably downstairs thinking up every possible thing she could take away from Lauren—her allowance, her telephone privileges, her television time.
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