Fractured

by Catherine McKenzie

  Daniel caught my eye in the review mirror, a large grin on his face. It was impossible to feel anything other than happy around Leah and Rick. They radiated fun the way some people sucked it away.

  “That’s so weird,” Leah said. “Isn’t it weird?”

  “It’s not that weird,” I said.

  Leah pushed my hair out of my face. “You need a haircut.”

  “Probably.”

  “I’m thinking of shaving my head.”

  Leah had thick brown hair that she’d worn short for as long as I’d known her. She had the face for it, gamine, with large brown eyes. It was a face that invited men to help her, even though she was more than capable of taking care of herself, and everyone else for that matter. We’d met in the birthing class I signed up for when I was pregnant with the twins. She’d been pregnant, too, but not for long. She’d had a second-trimester miscarriage, the only time I’d ever seen her and Rick laid low. While some people would’ve pulled away from a woman in my hugely pregnant condition after going through that kind of loss, Leah did the opposite. She threw herself into my pregnancy as if it were her own, bringing little Owen around frequently to help me put together furniture, or stack meals in the freezer for us to eat once the babies came.

  “You are not.”

  “Don’t goad her,” Rick said. “Then she’ll do it just so she can prove she can.”

  “That sounds like me, doesn’t it?” Leah said, laughing.

  “It sounds exactly like you.”

  “Oh, look! A horse.”

  Melly looked up from her screen.

  “Are you joking, Aunt Leah?”

  “Who would joke about a horse? Look!”

  She pointed to a grassy meadow. A horse stood in the middle of it, its brown coat glossy under the hot sun.

  “What’s he doing there?” Melly asked. “Where are his parents?”

  “I think he belongs to that barn over there, honey,” I said. “But he looks like a grown-up horse. So he’s okay on his own.”

  She gave me a skeptical look. “I would like a horse, I think.”

  “You would?”

  “Yes. We read a story at school about a girl with a horse. She mu . . . mu . . .”

  “Mucked out?”

  “Yeah. She did that every day.”

  “Do you know what that means?”

  “I think I do.”

  “It means cleaning up all the horse poop. Like we have to do for Sandy, but way bigger.”

  “Oh,” she said, her head falling back toward the screen. “Every day?”

  “Twice a day.”

  “Oh,” she said again, and I knew there’d be no more talk of horses. Melly knew that starting in the fall, she and Sam would be responsible for one of Sandy’s walks, the one on our street, and that they’d have to pick up after him. She was already trying to get out of it, coming up with increasingly elaborate plans to get her brother to do it for her, or Daniel. “I’ll tickle your back,” I’d heard her tell Daniel the other morning. Since this was her favorite thing, she thought it had currency with everyone.

  “So,” Leah said, “what’s our first stop?”

  “McDonald’s!” Sam answered her.

  “Yes,” Owen said. “Good idea. I want French fries.”

  “Oh, yes, please, Mommy?” Liam chimed in.

  “Their grandparents take them to McDonald’s,” Leah said, rolling her eyes. Not that she had a problem with an occasional Happy Meal—only that Rick’s parents were adamant about being involved with the kids but then never seemed to know what to do with them. Leah and Rick lived near both of their parents. Mine were scattered in two different directions, and Daniel preferred visits on the High Wasp Holidays only, as he put it. Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. We hadn’t seen them for any of those since we’d moved. They’d been replaced with monthly Skype conversations.

  “We’ll see,” I said.

  “Oh, navigator,” Leah said. “What says the giant map?”

  “It says we’re about two hours away, and that there’s lots of stuff to see once we get there.”

  Leah pouted. She always wants to stop at every ridiculous World’s Biggest Whatever along the way to anywhere we’ve traveled together.

  “Looks like we might be going to McDonald’s, kids!” she said.

  “Yeah!” came the chorus from the back.

  “World’s Biggest Hamburger?” I said.

  “Now you’re talking.”

  A few days before Leah and Rick arrived, I’d been searching for some beach towels in one of the closets when I knocked over an old box of mine I hadn’t opened since law school. It was full of memorabilia, most of which I didn’t even know the provenance of anymore. Why, for instance, had I held on to a place mat from a diner, one of those paper ones you throw away after every meal? Or what was the significance of the baseball hat with no logo? Was it Booth’s, or some random piece of clothing that got cast into the box? Part of me was disturbed I didn’t remember, but part of me was glad, too. There was a time when those three people seemed to take up all the space in my life; it was good to see I’d moved on.

  I spent an hour sifting through the contents. Laughing at photographs, crying at a few of Kathryn, taken on our last weekend together. At the bottom was a black book with a spiral binding. It was the diary I’d tried to keep back then, a habit I was never good at and abandoned not long after Kathryn died.

  It was full of things I didn’t remember: fights, ideas, flights of fancy. Near the end was an entry that made me pause.

  February 3, 1998

  It’s late and I’ve been drinking but I said I’d write every day and so I’m writing.

  Was out with Booth and Kevin and Kathryn again. That same corner booth at McKibbin’s, the one we’ve scratched our name into. Booth and Kevin were particularly drunk, gulping down pints like they’d spent months in the desert. I ran into Heather in the bathroom. I invited her to join us, hoping she’d say no. I was feeling mean, a hollow feeling, but one she seems to bring out in me. She thanked me and left, but later I saw her watching us through the mirror behind the bar.

  What is her problem?

  Around ten, Kevin pulled out his notebook, the one we’ve been playing the game in, and turned to his “magnum opus,” as he called it. He was talking quickly, like I imagine someone on coke might, sped up, almost unintelligible as he threw out ideas, potential problems, but only a few solutions.

  “You’re so drunk,” Kathryn said.

  “Me? What about you?”

  She held her head carefully. “I am perfectly fine.”

  “Ha,” Kevin said. “You should see what she’s like when she gets home.”

  Kathryn punched him in the side of his arm.

  “What? It’s true. Last time she passed out so hard I wasn’t even sure she was breathing.”

  “Fucker,” Kathryn said. “Don’t talk about me like that.”

  “I’m worried about you, babe. I mean—Oh. Oh, oh, oh.”

  “What now?” Booth asked. He’d been tracing circles on my thigh under the table, making me squirm.

  “That’s perfect, that is.”

  “Out with it.”

  “I could kill Kathryn.”

  She shook her head. “Right. No motive there.”

  “But that’s the beauty of it, see?”

  “I don’t,” I said. “I really don’t. You’d be the prime suspect.”

  “Exactly, but they’d never be able to prove I’d done it. That is truly the perfect murder.”

  “So tell, us, genius,” Kathryn said. “How are you going to do it?”

  “You’ll have to wait and see.”

  I took the book downstairs to the kitchen, turned the burner on the gas stove on, and held it there until it caught hold. Then I took it out onto the back porch and tossed it into an empty metal wheelbarrow that belonged to the kids.

  I watched the flames lick away the words until all that was left was ash. And then I went back ins
ide, packed the box away, and went about the rest of my day.

  We pulled up to our cabin with our bellies full of fat and nitrates.

  Uncharacteristically, the kids were happy to walk to their new bedrooms and collapse on their beds for a nap. Leah’s kids had been traveling for more than a day; I wasn’t sure what our kids’ excuses were—maybe they were putting sleep waves in iPads now?—but we were all too happy for the quiet in which to unpack and get familiar with our four-bedroom house.

  I’d imagined a quaint cottage by the lake with a nautical motif. Instead, we’d ended up in an ultramodern house that had been renovated the year before. It might have been made of old logs on the outside, but on the inside it was all maple cabinets and stone floors and fresh white paint. I was fairly certain the owners were going to regret renting the place to us when we were done.

  We woke the kids after a couple of hours, and they ran around on the lawn with Sandy while we made them an early dinner and got our own meal ready. The next several hours were occupied with our raucous families—eating, drinking, and catching up. When they were done with their pasta, the kids ran laps around the dining room while Leah and Rick filled us in on our old neighborhood. The little dramas and victories we’d missed since we moved away. Listening to them, I felt nostalgic, as if our move had been a mistake. For a moment, the fear that drove me to run away seemed distant, minimal.

  When the kids were down for the night, Leah and I decided to take a walk down to the lake. We found a picnic table near a sandy beach. The air smelled like conifers and lake water. Leah pulled the backpack she was wearing off her back and took out a bottle of white wine.

  “You naughty girl.”

  “Living on the edge, as always,” Leah says. “You’re drinking again.”

  “Clearly.”

  I took the bottle and poured myself a glass into one of the plastic wineglasses she’d brought along.

  “No, I mean, really drinking. Like morning drinking.”

  There wasn’t any point in denying it. Leah always knew what I was thinking and doing before I told her. Why should this be any different?

  “Just the last couple of days.”

  “Vodka?”

  “Yes.”

  “You can’t, Julie. It’s too dangerous.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you?”

  I held a sip of wine in my mouth. It was cool and tart. The night was still hot, almost as if we were sitting under an air dryer. I thought there’d be a break from the heat out here in the wilderness, but no such luck.

  “It’s been a tough year.”

  “It has, Jules. But you know what happens when you mix your meds and hard alcohol.”

  The thing was, I didn’t, exactly. To me, it had been a few hazy days on the couch, but to Leah, who’d found me and had to slap me awake, it had been a deeply scary experience. One she’d promised to keep from Daniel after I promised I’d never do it again.

  “Please don’t tell Daniel.”

  “Don’t make me tell him, then.”

  I rested my back against the picnic table. The rough wood dug into the space between my collarbones. The realtors weren’t exaggerating about the sky. It was as if someone had spilled out a box of glitter.

  “Everything’s falling apart.”

  I said the words in my head. Then I said them out loud. Then I fell apart.

  Leah let me break down for a moment, then gathered me to her. There was something in that act, something so familiar, that it made it worse, not better.

  I never used to be someone who cracked. I was resilient, I’d always said. Even the postpartum depression hadn’t changed that view of myself. That was something chemical, like cancer. I wasn’t going to blame myself for a chemical imbalance, and I wasn’t going to change because of it. The medication would fix things, and it did. That I hadn’t gone off it since then, well, that wasn’t something I thought about . . . much.

  But this felt different. This felt like failure.

  “What’s really going on?” Leah asked.

  I wiped my tears away. “What do you mean?”

  “This isn’t only about a lawsuit or a fight. There’s something else.”

  “It’s Cincinnati, I think. I can’t explain it.”

  “So why stay here?”

  “We can’t just pick up and leave again.”

  “Can’t you?”

  She gave me a deep look, one that told me it wasn’t any use pretending with her, or trying to cover over what I hid from everyone else. I needed to tell her . . . something.

  “I got close to the wrong person.”

  “Close? You mean an affair?”

  “No.” The Kiss, the Kiss, the Kiss. “I would never do that.”

  “How many people have said that over time, you think?”

  “I know, I know. But it’s true. Please believe me.”

  “So what happened, then?”

  “I got emotionally close to someone. We became friends, but he’s a man and I’m a woman, and he’s attractive, and I guess he finds me attractive. So. Well, it felt different.”

  “Exciting?”

  “Yes.”

  “And this is who? The guy who lives across the street?”

  I nodded.

  “That’s why they’re suing you?”

  “I don’t think so. I guess it’s possible his wife picked up on something, but . . .”

  “Oh, honey. If I picked up on something from across the country, I’m pretty sure she did.”

  “But I told you, we’re just friends.”

  “Friends with inappropriate feelings. Do you really think she doesn’t know that? That Daniel doesn’t?”

  “Oh, God, Daniel. He’s been so . . .”

  “Daniel?”

  “Yes, exactly. I don’t deserve him.”

  “No one deserves Daniel.”

  That’s what everyone always said, back in Tacoma, and it was true in so many ways. He was this generous, beautiful man who’d done so much for me in my life, more than I could ever repay. But he was, still, a man. He had flaws; he was better at hiding them than most. But this wasn’t about Daniel, this was about me. Me.

  “And yet, here we are,” I said. “Still together.”

  “What does he think about all of this?”

  “He’s angry. Probably angrier than I’ve ever seen him.”

  “Angry how?”

  “You know Daniel. He’d never really show it, but he’s definitely feeling it. Right now, it’s directed at the enemy.”

  “Heather?”

  “In a way that would be so much simpler. Hanna and John. He’s acting like a character in some conspiracy movie. He’s got an evidence wall up in the study. He’s taken every allegation in the proceedings and blown it up and pasted it on there, and he’s got all these note cards underneath them, how to refute this and how to refute that.”

  “That sounds like it could be helpful.”

  “Maybe. So long as he doesn’t think the radio is talking to him, or his fillings.”

  Leah refilled our glasses. Only Leah would give alcohol to someone she’d just lectured about drinking.

  “And what are you doing about it?”

  “Pretending it isn’t happening?”

  “I’m guessing that’s not a winning strategy.”

  “There’s not really anything for us to do. Every time I try to do something, it ends up making it worse.”

  I told her about the dinner party, and how my clumsiness had reared its head once again with disastrous results.

  “What did you do to her in the bathroom?”

  “I was trying to adjust the water temperature. I made it too hot.”

  “On purpose?”

  “Of course not!”

  She took a long sip. “I might have.”

  “You would not.”

  “Well, it’s fun pretending, anyway.”

  “The thing is: she’s actually a really nice person.”

  “You
don’t truly believe that.”

  “Well, okay, she hasn’t been nice to me. But somehow, I can’t blame her.”

  I tilted my head back and watched the sky. The Big Dipper was bright against the background of stars. A blinking object—a satellite? The space station? Perhaps a plane—moved lazily through the night.

  “So, what happens next?” Leah asked.

  “I wish I knew. Finish the book I’m writing. Go to court. Move, maybe.”

  “Would you come back to Tacoma?”

  “There’s a whole other set of problems there.”

  “There are problems everywhere, Julie. It’s called life.”

  A couple of days later, sunburned and feeling fat from too much vacation food, we drove the kids to Mammoth Cave National Park. In her quest to find the Greatest Whatever, Leah had declared that Mammoth Cave was something we had to see, so off we went.

  An early guide had called it a “grand, gloomy, and peculiar place,” and so it proved to be. With more than four hundred miles of it already explored, we would only see a tiny part, even though the tour was two hours long. Because of the kids, we decided to take a properly lighted tour, rather than the ones lit by paraffin lamps. Melly and Sam still slept with a night-light on, and sometimes even that wasn’t enough. Darkness meltdowns were to be avoided.

  As the tour guide explained what we were going to see, I flipped through a brochure, half listening. The caves had names like Grand Avenue, Frozen Niagara, and Fat Man’s Misery. That last feature had clearly been named long ago.

  If Cindy ever came here, its name would be changed within hours.

  As we entered Mammoth Cave, our guide told us that, despite its name, there had never been any woolly mammoth remains found within.

  “See, I told you,” I said to Daniel, who shrugged his shoulders sheepishly. “I hope the kids aren’t too disappointed.”

  “Are you kidding? Look at this place. When I was their age, you wouldn’t have been able to drag me out of here.”

  I caught his hand, imagining a six-year-old Daniel as we followed the group through the cave. The kids were awed into silence, pointing to one rock formation after another. The caves had been occupied by humans for six thousand years. I thought about the people whose remains were found there. All those families who sought shelter, gave birth, laughed, and died. They lived on the brink all the time: starvation, sickness, injury, but were their lives that different from ours?