“Who, Ashley?”
“I meant Julie.”
I looked up at the moon. It was big and full, a flashlight beaming onto our street. I thought there was something about Julie, too. But I was 100 percent certain Hanna didn’t want to know about my morning bouts at the window. How I waited with my coffee for Julie to leave. Or how I timed my runs to catch a glimpse of her. I’d been asking myself for a month what I was about, but I wasn’t waiting long enough to listen to the answers. Something about the whole situation had a power over me. Part of it was her, but there was more to it than that.
Regardless, I was enjoying the feeling too much to unpack it or put it away.
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
Chris reached our front door. He stood there, patting himself down, looking for the keys I knew he’d forgotten because he was always doing that.
“Just how intense she is, I guess.”
“Are you forgetting the Peanut Butter Cookie Incident?”
“Are you suggesting I’m that intense?”
“I would never be that stupid.”
“Uh-huh. I mean, who makes peanut butter cookies these days? Honestly?”
When Chris was ten, someone brought peanut butter cookies to the school’s bake sale and didn’t identify them properly. Two kids ended up in the hospital with anaphylactic reactions, including Chris. We knew he was allergic, but we’d been told it was mild. Hanna had insisted on carrying an EpiPen at all times just the same. Something I was immensely grateful for as I stabbed it into Chris’s thigh while I told him to breathe, breathe, breathe! When we knew Chris was going to be okay, Hanna’s anger knew no bounds. She and Cindy even launched an “investigation” to try to find the culprit. It was unsuccessful. The only way she was able to calm herself down was to write a detailed Statement of Claim with the “Defendant” left blank. It was tacked to the corkboard in our kitchen until the edges began to curl. As far as I knew, it was still sitting in Hanna’s desk drawer, ready to be served the moment the perpetrator was identified.
We stopped in front of our house.
“I’m just saying, if someone was hurting her kid, it stands to reason she’d get protective.”
“That Melly kid was the bad one, though,” Chris said.
“How would you know?” Hanna asked in a teasing tone. “I thought you were too busy sucking face to notice anything.”
“Yuck, Mom. Sucking face? What does that even mean?”
“Is that not what it’s called these days?” I asked. “Hooking up, right? Or is it hanging out?”
“Whatever. Anyway, that little girl is evil.”
“Christopher!”
“She is, Mom. She was totally goading the other kids to do crap. Ashley had already given her, like, two time-outs.”
“So what happened?”
“They were just roughhousing, throwing pillows, stuff like that. But that girl, Melly, she kept making the other girls cry. So Ashley put her in a time-out, and then she’d be let out, and she’d apologize in this sweet way. They’d start playing together again, you know the way little kids do, and then that other girl was yelling, and Melly’s brother was there, and then everyone was coming down the stairs.”
“Remind me not to hire you as a babysitter,” I said, putting the key in the lock and opening the door. Chris scooted into the house, his phone already out of his back pocket.
I hadn’t wanted to give him that phone. But he’d saved up the money from his paper route, and Hanna preferred to be able to contact him when she worried. I gave in. You didn’t stay married for twenty years without knowing when to do that.
I turned to close the door. Hanna was still on the front step.
“Han? You coming in? It’s cold out there.”
She was looking across the street at Julie’s house.
“What kind of person writes something like that?”
“Like what? The Murder Game?”
“Yeah. I read it the other day.”
“You did?”
“I had a slow day at work. Anyway, that main character, Meredith, she seemed so passive, and then . . . and she’s totally based on Julie, right? They look alike, anyway.”
“What the hell are you saying?”
Hanna shivered. “I’m not sure. But something’s not right.”
Sent: November 1, at 11:28 p.m.
From: Cindy Sutton
To: PSNA mailing list
Re: Block Party rule amendment
Pine Street Friends!
Effective immediately, all children under 10 who attend our monthly block parties must be accompanied by one—if not both—of their parents at all times. Group babysitting will no longer be provided.
See you all soon!
Cindy Sutton
PSNA Chair and Founder, 2009–present
Today
John
8:00 a.m.
The short drive down to 9th Street is a tense affair.
Hanna, Chris, and I are in my car, a Prius we bought a couple years ago when we had enough optimism to care about our impact on the environment. We’d ended up ordering it in a bluish teal, not the color any of us imagined it would be from the brochure. We’d had a good laugh when we went to pick it up. Becky called it our “ocean car.”
Life tip: when a car dealer tries to talk you out of a car color, you should take that advice.
Becky wanted to take a ride in the ocean today. Our “no” was emphatic. Instead, she’s spending the day at home. Sending her to school seemed a cruel addition to everything we had gone through in the last two months.
We’re in the thick of rush hour, crawling along the twisty side streets. A route I picked out years ago to avoid the worst of the traffic. My hands are tight on the wheel. The seat is too close, though I don’t bother adjusting it. Chris was the last one to drive the car. A short drive around the block to see if he could do it. A step I’d both encouraged and dreaded. I’d been happy when it was over.
So, adjusting the seat feels like it would be a slight. A reminder of something he should’ve done differently.
He’s had more than enough of that.
The sky is a slate gray, thick with the rain that’s predicted for later. The air around us feels dense. Full of thoughts we don’t express. Sighs we expel. Like that fug that frosts the windows in the winter. Like we’re covered in it too.
My mind is a junkyard of thoughts. The turns are automatic enough that I don’t have to concentrate. I wish I could. I wish we could be making jokes like we used to make in the car. Playing “Do You Want To . . . ,” our own brand of family fun.
Do you want to be a long-distance truck driver? (Said after passing a transport truck.)
Do you want to be a bank robber? (Said after a top-of-the-hour news story about a bank robbery.)
Do you want to be a . . . whatever mundane topic crossed our paths.
But what’s the point? I’d never said yes to one of those questions, not once.
Forty-six years old and I still don’t know what I want to be.
There’s only an infinite list of what I don’t.
Right when I can’t stand the silence anymore, I find a parking space in front of the building. I have a momentary wish to yell “Costanza!”—another joke between Hanna and me, based on that Seinfeld episode where George gets the perfect parking place. A completely inappropriate thought for today. Crowding in with all the others.
The Cincinnati City Prosecutor’s Office is located in an older building on East 9th Street made of chiseled gray stones accented by brick-colored ones. If it was designed to be imposing, it succeeds with me. I can only imagine what Hanna and Chris are feeling.
We sit in the car for a moment after I turn off the engine. Our lawyer, Alicia Garson, is standing a few feet away on the sidewalk next to a trolley stacked with banker’s boxes. She’s fiddling with the bungee cord that holds the boxes in place. Even from here she looks nervous. I count the boxes again. H
ow has this case gotten so much paper associated with it, so fast? And given that she’s not allowed in the grand jury room with us, why has she brought it all with her?
“I’ve never been in there, you know,” Hanna says. Her chin is trembling. She has the dark circles under her eyes she gets when she hasn’t been sleeping. Somehow, I didn’t notice them till now.
“In the building?”
“All these years, I’ve never done a criminal case. I don’t even know how to get someone out of jail. If they hadn’t let us surrender voluntarily, I wouldn’t have known what to do.”
She starts to cry.
I thought the time for tears was over. That’s what she told me when we learned they were taking the case to a grand jury. That at the end of it there could be an indictment.
We had to get serious, she said. We had to be resolute. As if it was the waiting for the next step that was the thing to mourn. Not the loss itself.
But here she is crying, and I’m not sure what to do. Chris is in the backseat, his suit already rumpled by the ten-minute drive. If things were normal, I’d take her in my arms and hold her until the tears went away. But my seat belt’s in the way, and our lawyer’s looking at us expectantly. There are journalists gathered by the front doors. Waiting for us, most likely. One of them could snap a photograph that will end up on the front cover of the Cincinnati Enquirer.
Family in Crisis.
Tears Come Too Late.
Guilty Tears?
Julie would do a better job at captioning our crisis.
I unclip my seat belt and reach across the bucket seat as it zings into place.
“The problem with the Costanza,” I say, “is that it sometimes gets you to your location sooner than you accounted for.”
Hanna looks right into me, the way only she has ever done.
“Is that the problem?”
“It is,” I say. “It really is.”
Christmas Cake
Julie
Ten months ago
Sometimes a cake is just a cake.
That’s what Daniel told me that snowy night at the beginning of December. I’d complained to him about the rock-hard Christmas cake I’d found on our front porch that afternoon when I’d taken Sandy out for her walk.
“It’s probably one of those ‘Good neighbors make good friends’ kind of things, Jules,” he said to me in the kitchen. We were making stir-fried rice with everything in the fridge that was about to reach the end of its life. We did this once a week. It was how most of the vegetables in our house got eaten. “What about this broccoli? Do you remember when you bought it?”
“It’s fine,” I said. “Toss it over. And I don’t think so—remember that terrible snack basket Cindy left us? I tried to give the twins one of the granola bars, and Sam almost broke a tooth. Anyway, we’ve been here for two months. The Welcome Wagon’s done. Thank God.”
He lobbed me the broccoli and I started cutting it up.
Daniel shook a carrot to check its limpness. It flopped easily. He tossed it in the trash. “Are you sure? Have you checked the fine print in the rule book?”
Daniel was teasing me, I knew, but he also should’ve known how I’d react when something unexpected turned up on our doorstep.
Heather used to leave things for me. Notes. Photographs. Even a stray sock once—laundered, but still, who does that?—but also, baked goods. The twins had plowed their way through two chocolate cupcakes each before I realized Daniel hadn’t brought them home as a treat. I called poison control, but the woman on the phone told me, in a reproachful voice, that no, they could not pump the stomachs of two five-year-olds, not unless I was 100 percent certain they’d ingested poison. She said to watch them carefully and, if they showed signs of anything, to bring them to the ER.
Sam threw up in the middle of the night, but then he also admitted that he’d eaten three cupcakes, leaving only one for his sister. I spent a sleepless night composing vitriolic e-mails to Heather, which I knew I’d never send, and talking myself into finally bringing proceedings. But when Sam sprang from bed in the morning asking for pancakes, I knew he was fine. And I didn’t have any actual proof she’d left the cupcakes. The police didn’t find any fingerprints but the kids’ on the packaging. She’d grown smart since the sock incident, which had landed her a few hours in jail and a tightening of her restraining order because a passerby had seen her, but nothing more. But that’s when I’d first brought up moving to Daniel. A fresh start, I’d called it, excited by the possibility. A new life without any Heather in it.
“All Christmas cakes must be left between the hours of ten and two,” I said in a monotone, “wrapped in clear cellophane and clearly identified as nut-free, gluten-free, and dairy-free.”
“No way. It doesn’t actually . . . oh, ha. Ha, ha, ha.”
“I just think it’s weird, that’s all.”
Daniel closed the fridge door and walked over to me. He wrapped his arms around my waist. He smelled freshly laundered, even though it was the end of the day. “Are you worried? You haven’t heard anything from her lately, have you?”
“Not since that one Facebook post a month ago.”
“Maybe she’s moved on to other targets?”
“Do you think that’s possibly true?”
I felt guilty about how happy the thought made me.
“One can hope, honey.” He rubbed his thumb across a bruise on my forearm. “What happened here?”
I looked down. The bruise was green around the edges. “Not sure. You know I’m always bumping into things.”
“My clumsy klutz.” His hands moved to my face, winding into my hair.
“No kissing!” Melly yelled from the floor, where she was working on a massive Lego complex. She’d been saying that off and on since she was three. Mommy and Daddy were not allowed to kiss, never ever. We mostly ignored her.
“How do you think you’re going to get a baby brother or sister?” Daniel asked her, releasing me. He bounced over to her, grabbed her by the ankles, and dangled her in the air as she squealed in delight.
“Stop it, Daddy, stop it!”
He put her down, and she immediately requested that he “Do it again! Do it again.”
This went on for a few minutes. Her squawks were so loud I didn’t notice Sam enter the room until he tugged at the belt loop on my jeans.
“Someone’s at the door, Mommy.”
“You didn’t open it?”
“Course not. Stranger danger! Stranger danger!” He started running around Daniel and Melly, the noise now reaching epic proportions.
I left the kitchen and walked to the front door, wondering if someone really was there, and what they must think of the sounds coming from within.
I pressed my thumb to the lock panel. It beeped to let me know it was releasing. When I opened the door, Hanna was standing there in a dark-blue coat. Our front walk was lit up by the motion-sensor perimeter lights, a bright barrage that was intentionally dazzling. The snow swayed down slowly around her. With her blonde hair in a ponytail, no makeup, and a nose red from the cold, she looked only a few years older than her daughter, Becky.
“Hi, Julie. Sorry for dropping by unannounced.”
“No, that’s fine.” We both flinched as one of the twins let out a particularly high-pitched shriek. “You can see why I didn’t hear the door.”
“You know, sometimes I actually miss those days.”
“You don’t expect me to believe that, do you?”
“Only if you’re really gullible.”
We grinned. The common bond of motherhood.
“So, what’s up?” I asked.
“I was such a scatterbrain this morning. I realized I didn’t leave a card with the cake and—”
“You left the Christmas cake?”
“Yes, and . . . I know this sounds stupid, but Cindy’s particular about leaving a note with them to let people know they’re nut-free, and I have a kid with allergies myself. You were probably wondering wh
o left it. I know I would be.”
As happened too often, I wondered whether she’d been checking up on me, if she knew about Heather and all the things she’d left on my doorstep. I told myself I was being paranoid.
Only, what does paranoid mean when everyone is talking about you?
“I was wondering, to be honest,” I said.
“See, I knew it. Plus, Christmas cake. Who actually likes that stuff, right?”
I laughed. “You want to come in for a second?”
She glanced over her shoulder. All the lights were on in her house. It looked like a miniature home caught in a snow globe.
“I probably shouldn’t. Big drama going on at home.”
“Oh?”
“Our son, Chris. Have you met?”
“Yes, briefly. He delivers the newspapers in the morning?”
“That’s the one. Anyway, he broke up with Ashley, the one who was supposed to be watching the kids at last month’s block—”
“Party?” I finished for her. “Aren’t kids just awful to one another sometimes?”
I gave Hanna my public-persona smile.
When we’d asked Melly and Sam what had happened that night, Melly broke down in tears and admitted she was saying mean things to the other girls because they didn’t want to play with her. But she hadn’t shoved anyone, she swore up and down; the girl had tripped on a toy. We’d given them both a stern talking-to and then put it out of our minds.
This wasn’t the case for the rest of the neighborhood. At the December block party a few days earlier, which we’d attended in spite of Cindy’s e-mail about unaccompanied minors because Daniel insisted we not be cowed, it was clear that what should’ve been an unremarkable event—a bunch of six-year-olds fighting, good grief—had taken on a life of its own. Cindy had cornered me to ask whether I was “getting help for Melly,” and I interrupted not one, but two, conversations that were clearly about me, the room going silent when I entered, the words “that child” quickly hushed.
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