Fractured

by Catherine McKenzie

  “I am. You know that. I thought we agreed I could take the time to do it.”

  “I didn’t think it would take this much time.”

  I bit back that it hadn’t even been six months. What if she knew, somehow, what I’d been offered two hours before? My run had clarified one thing: whatever happened, I couldn’t go back there.

  “What do you want me to do?” I said. “Go back on the job market?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “What, then?”

  “When we agreed to you staying home, I didn’t think you’d be spending your days hanging out with another woman and surfing the web.”

  I counted to three in my head before I answered her. “That’s a complete distortion of my days. And my job is about surfing the web. What’s going on, Hanna? Why are you acting like this?”

  “I told you. I want to sue.”

  “And that’s going to make this all better? You’re always telling me how awful litigation is for your clients. How much stress it creates. How you take that stress off them. Who’s going to take the stress off us?”

  “Don’t do that. Don’t use my own words against me.”

  “I’m trying to make you see reason. Money isn’t going to fix Chris’s face.”

  “It might get her to take those cameras down.”

  “Why don’t we start by asking her?”

  “I already did.”

  “When?”

  “Two days ago. When the van first showed up.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I was waiting for you to say something.”

  “Seriously? What did Julie and Daniel say?”

  “I didn’t speak to Daniel. Only her.”

  “What did Julie say, then?”

  “You swear you don’t already know?”

  “This is the first I’m hearing about any of this.”

  “She said the cameras were going to take in the whole street, and all the way around her property, too. That it was the only way she was going to be able to get the evidence she needed. If the harassment stopped, then that proved it was someone who lived here. And if it continued, then she’d have them on tape.”

  “But that would only work if people knew about the cameras.”

  “Right. Which is why she’s going to tell everyone they’re there.”

  “How’s she going to do that? Oh, iNeighbor?”

  “You got it.”

  “That’s . . .”

  Genius? Diabolical? Stupid?

  “It’s pretty smart,” Hanna said. “I never said she wasn’t smart. So are you with me on this or not?”

  “She really refused to take them down?”

  Hanna looked at me. “Why haven’t you been running with her this week?”

  I was about to tell her Julie was injured. But she’d spoken to Julie. I didn’t know when.

  “She’s been putting me off. Probably because she’s upset about what happened. You really think a lawsuit is the only way to go?”

  “We’ll start with a letter of demand.”

  “I think this is a mistake. But I’ll back you.”

  Her lip quivered. “You will?”

  I took her in my arms. “I will. I always will.”

  I looked over her shoulder out the crack in the drapes that didn’t quite obscure the view. A man was standing on a ladder, fiddling with something black and oblong attached to the front of Julie’s house. A camera. He was holding an iPad. Looking at it. Adjusting the oblong. Looking at the iPad again.

  It might have been a trick of the light, but I could swear the camera was staring right at me.

  Today

  John

  1:00 p.m.

  When I get through security and ride the slow elevator up to the fourth floor, I’m too late to catch Hanna before she’s called in to testify. All I see is the back of her going through the doors to the grand jury room. She’s standing erect, her shoulders back as if she’s waiting for morning muster.

  I wish I’d had a moment to talk to her before her name was called. I wish I knew what was going on in that brain of hers.

  I’ve known Hanna my entire life. We grew up on the same street in similar red brick houses with large trees creating a canopy over the front lawn. We ran through sprinklers in each other’s backyards. Went through the same haunted house the neighbor down the street set up at Halloween, complete with a skeleton that sprang from a coffin that scared her every time. Elementary school. Middle school. High school. I can pick literally any moment of my life, and there’s Hanna. Sometimes front and center, sometimes a little out of focus. A constant.

  There’s something about knowing someone like that. We didn’t start dating till the second year of college—we both attended Ohio University—but we just got each other. We didn’t have to create history, although we did.

  We were history.

  I cherish that. I really do. But I took it for granted. I took us for granted. And so, when an attractive stranger moved across the street and we connected on a different level—not better, not worse, just different—my head was turned. I forgot about history. I made room in my heart for more than Hanna and Becky and Chris. I dwelled on thoughts I should have banished.

  And that day in the rain on Julie’s back porch, I don’t know what I would’ve done if she hadn’t pulled away. How far things would’ve gone.

  I live with that every day.

  They say that if a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian rain forest, it can change the weather half a world away. Chaos theory. What it means is that everything that happens in this moment is an accumulation of everything that’s come before it. Every breath. Every thought. There is no innocent action. Some actions end up having the force of a tempest. Their impact cannot be missed. Others are the blink of an eye. Passing by unnoticed.

  Perhaps only God knows which is which.

  All I know today is that you can think that what you’ve done is only the flap of a butterfly wing, when it’s really a thunderclap.

  And both can result in a hurricane.

  Hanna’s always told me that lawyers make the worst witnesses. They think they know better. That they won’t fall into the traps they warn their clients against. But they can’t turn off their lawyer brain. The one trying to figure out why they’re being asked a particular question. What’s the lawyer’s strategy? What are they hoping to achieve? How am I being perceived by the jury? Have I said too much? Not enough?

  With all those questions running around, it’s no wonder they often fuck up.

  And that’s what we’ve all been worried about from the beginning. That one of us will slip. Say too much or not enough. That what we agreed on—our story, if you will—won’t be believable or enough. That the jury will sense the missing moments because the rest of them, the ones we do reveal, don’t quite cover the others over.

  Traces will remain.

  I search the waiting room outside the grand jury chamber for Chris. He’s sitting in a chair with his back against a wall covered in beige wallpaper. There’s a police officer sitting two seats over. A dozen others are scattered around the room. I don’t recognize any of them.

  Alicia told us that there are always two grand juries sitting at any given time. They usually hear many cases in a day. Our situation is different. Because of Alicia’s strategy, our grand jury will take longer. So the rest of these people—that man chewing his fingernails, and the one who looks strung out, and the lawyers reviewing their notes—they must all be involved in someone else’s tragedy.

  I take a seat next to Chris. The multicolored fabric chair is surprisingly comfortable, though the finish has been rubbed off the curved arms. Worried away. Chris turns his body away from me. I catch a look from Alicia across the aisle. I shrug, teenagers. She bends her head back to her legal pad. I think she’s trying to write the future there. But it’s the past Hanna’s talking about now.

  That day.

  I wait out the minutes, counting to s
ixty in my head again and again. It’s been thirty minutes that Hanna’s been in there. I try to do the math on that, how many seconds it’s been. My mind feels stiff, an unused muscle.

  I cannot take this anymore.

  “Chris,” I say, keeping my voice low, “what did you mean outside?”

  “Leave it, Dad.”

  “I can’t. Whatever it is, I want you to tell me.”

  He shifts back and forth in his seat. I’m not sure why I’m pushing him for an answer. Why I can’t take my son’s word for it that I don’t want to know.

  “I didn’t say anything,” Chris says.

  “I know. You said.”

  “No, about . . . I didn’t tell anyone what I saw.”

  “What did you see?”

  “I saw you, Dad. You and her.”

  My hands start to tingle. I look at Alicia again, but she doesn’t seem to have heard us.

  I take Chris by the elbow and raise him up. I put a finger to my lips: Don’t talk. He nods and lets me lead him out of the room and into the hall. We walk past the elevators toward the bathrooms. The hall is narrow and smells antiseptic. But I’m close enough to Chris to smell his nerves. Or maybe that’s me. A man walks out of the bathroom and wipes his hands on his pants. I watch him turn the corner.

  “What did you see, Chris?” I ask.

  “I was coming home the back way. From Ashley’s. I wasn’t supposed to be out. It was . . . really early in the morning.”

  There’s only one possible morning he means. I plot it out in my mind. There’s a path that runs along the edge of the backyards on the river side of our street. It’s beautiful, really, with the trees forming an archway above the path.

  A lover’s lane.

  “I started climbing the hill to get up to the lane next to her house, and that’s when I saw you.” His voice cracks. “You were kissing her!”

  “No, Chris, we weren’t—”

  “Dad, come on. I’m not Becky, okay? I know what I saw.”

  “That was a mistake,” I say. “A mistake.”

  “How do you kiss someone by mistake?”

  Each time he says the word “kiss,” it’s as if he’s kicking me in the gut.

  “It’s complicated. I . . . I can’t explain this to you. It’s irrelevant.”

  “How can you say that? Did you . . . were you going to leave Mom?”

  “I would never leave your mother.” I put my hand on his shoulder. It’s shaking. “Chris. Please. You won’t say anything?”

  His disappointed look is worse than the guilt that’s been gnawing at me for months.

  “I thought I was supposed to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”

  “About what they need to know about, yes. But this . . . so many more people could get hurt by this. More than they already are. And it doesn’t have anything to do with what happened. So, will you keep it to yourself? Please?”

  He doesn’t say anything, just looks me in the eye in a way that makes me feel reversed. Like I am the son, and he is the father.

  His name is called over the loudspeaker. It’s time for him to go. I drop my hand from his shoulder, though all I want to do is hold him close. A horrible part of me wants to ask him again to keep my secret. But there’s nothing more I can say. Nothing more I should say. Either he’ll tell or he won’t. There’s so little left in my control. And all the things I’ve tried to manage—my thoughts, my heart, my actions—none of it made any difference, anyway.

  There are so many versions of the truth, I’ve found. One for each person.

  But the whole truth? No one ever tells the whole truth.

  Do they?

  On the Outside Looking In

  Julie

  Five months ago

  Is there anything worse than the shrill ring of a phone?

  I remember how I used to welcome that sound as a teenager, spending hours in idle chatter with my friends. But as May took hold, it became a sound I dreaded, then hated, then feared.

  There wasn’t any pattern to the calls other than the fact that the number was always blocked, so there wasn’t any way to block them in turn other than to take the phone off the hook. We did that for long stretches, but then we’d get panicked e-mails from our un-tech parents, who couldn’t absorb the fact that they could call our cell phones if the landline was engaged.

  Whoever it was seemed to have a sixth sense about the right moment to call to inflict the greatest impact: at the quietest time of the day, or while we were giving the twins their bath, that moment right before you fall asleep.

  On the other hand, the calls were the only thing that had happened since we installed the cameras.

  “It must mean it’s someone in the neighborhood,” I said to Daniel when he came into the living room after dinner one night. Weeks’ worth of footage had turned up nothing, according to the report we’d received from the monitoring company.

  “It doesn’t mean that at all,” he said. “Maybe whoever was doing things changed their mind, or went away or were dissuaded by the cameras.” His eyes shifted away from mine. “There could be any number of explanations.”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t know, Julie. What do you think?”

  “You don’t think I had anything to do with it, do you?”

  “Why would you ask that?”

  “Only because . . . last time . . .”

  Guilt clouded his face. He’d accused me of that in Tacoma, when the notes and messages first started, and they couldn’t find any trace of Heather, except those that led back to me. Because that was another thing Heather had done—she’d hijacked my IP address and my e-mail account and made it look like I was the one doing the harassing. She was so good at it, she even had me questioning myself. Maybe my medication was to blame? I did seem to have holes in my memory—not blackouts per se, but things I used to have no trouble remembering suddenly became hard. But could I have done something so bizarre? So strange? I don’t think I ever really believed it was possible, nor did Daniel. But he’d asked the question, and that had felt like a betrayal of everything we’d meant to each other since he’d scraped my heart back together all those years ago in Montreal.

  “Last time,” he said. “I didn’t understand what was going on. No one did. And you know how badly I feel about that. I thought we’d agreed not to bring it up again.”

  “You’re right. We did. Sorry.”

  “It’s fine, but I’m on your side, Jules. I wish you’d believe that.”

  “I do.” I wrapped my arms around his middle and pressed my face into his neck. “I don’t know what to do anymore. It feels like everyone here is against us.”

  “We can move again, if you want.”

  My stomach turned over, because I did want to move, but it was as much about what had happened with John as the fact that Heather—or someone like her—might be behind everything else going on. But how could I do that to my family again? To the twins who’d settled well into school? To Daniel, who liked his job and couldn’t find a new one every six months because of my crazy life.

  Because of my crazy.

  “No. We’ll stick it out here. Maybe . . .”

  “What?”

  “Maybe I should stop writing.”

  I felt, in a way, as if I already had. Despite my positive updates to my agent, my word count had dwindled to a trickle. My book was due in five months, and it was barely half-done. If I could even call the loose collection of scenes and characters I’d written a novel.

  “How would that solve anything?” Daniel asked.

  “It’s what started all this, isn’t it? So if I stop, then maybe it will go away.”

  “I don’t think it works like that.”

  “You’re probably right, but one can hope.”

  “No,” Daniel said. “I don’t want you to do that. Writing makes you happy. Before . . . remember how lost you felt? How overwhelmed? Which is totally normal. I’d be like that, too, if I was home wi
th those monsters all day. But then you started writing, and it helped.”

  “That and the medication.”

  “Who knows what worked. Let’s not upset the apple cart.”

  “Geez, Grandma. I won’t go poking around, neither.”

  “Har, har, har.” He kissed me. I tensed up, flashes of the kiss with John flitting through my mind. I pulled back.

  “What?”

  “Where’s Melly?”

  “She’s upstairs with Sam. I put them to bed half an hour ago.”

  “Right, sorry. I was distracted, reading the report from the alarm company. Don’t you think it’s too quiet up there?”

  “They’re getting older. Let’s enjoy it.”

  “And soon they’ll be teenagers and dating and . . . ugh.”

  “Speaking of teenagers, did you ever end up asking John if Chris had anything to do with the note or any of the other stuff?”

  “No, I . . . haven’t seen him around much lately.”

  “Oh? I thought you guys were running together in the mornings.”

  “We were.”

  “What changed?”

  I let him go and started picking up the kids’ things. Was there ever going to be a time when that didn’t take at least an hour of my day, every day, if not more?

  “I think I felt . . . embarrassed by the way I reacted to all that stuff. I really lost it when I found the note, and then again with the headless Barbie. He was around for both those meltdowns. Not pretty.”

  “Wait, so, you’ve been running alone since then?”

  “Um . . .”

  “What the hell, Julie? That’s really dangerous.”

  “I take Sandy, and I have my lanyard.”

  “That’s not enough. Not until we know the harassment has either stopped or they’ve caught who’s doing it.”

  “You’re telling me I can’t run alone?”

  He paused. We didn’t tell each other what to do. That wasn’t part of our bargain.

  He held out his hands, palms up. Our signal to each other that compliance would be appreciated and reciprocated. “I would really, really prefer it if you didn’t run alone. I don’t want to have to worry about you every day.”