Fractured

by Catherine McKenzie

  When I got back to the tree, neither of them were there. I walked back into the field. Julie was standing at the broken memorial. Sandy was running laps around her.

  Julie made no sign that she heard me approaching, but when I got closer, she said: “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Emerson.”

  “That’s lovely.”

  “It is. Where’s Chris?”

  “He drove off.”

  “Oh, no. I’m so sorry, John.”

  I sighed heavily. “Hopefully, he’ll turn up at home soon. Where’s Ashley?”

  “She took off, too.”

  “Did she say anything to you?”

  “Just to fuck off.”

  I reached for her. Her hand rose reflexively to the disk hanging from her neck.

  “What is that?” I asked. “I’ve always wondered.”

  “My panic button. If I press it, the police come running. Theoretically.”

  “Because of Heather?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you going to push it?”

  “Should I be panicking?”

  I dropped my hand. “You have nothing to fear from me.”

  “And yet, a couple of hours from now, we’re supposed to be in court.”

  “We should settle.”

  Her eyes lit up with hope. “Really? You mean it?”

  “I’ll talk to Hanna. This has all gone way too far.”

  “Thank you, John.” She leaned into me quickly, letting her lips brush against my cheek. I breathed her in. She smelled sweet that morning, like clover. Like the woods Chris and Ashley had been doing God knows what in. She pulled back. “Whatever she wants. I mean it. I’ll pay. I need all of this to stop.”

  “Me too.”

  “We really messed everything up, didn’t we?”

  “I think we did.”

  “You should go. Maybe Chris is home by now. And Cindy will be worried about Ashley.”

  “Thank you.” I touched her shoulder briefly, then turned and left.

  Though my legs felt weak, I ran home as fast as I’d come. Cindy and Paul were standing outside their house with Becky.

  “Did you find them?” Cindy asked in a panicky voice.

  “Yes. They were in the park.”

  “Why aren’t they with you, then?”

  “They ran away.”

  “What?” Paul asked. “Why didn’t you stop them?”

  I explained briefly about finding Chris and Ashley in the woods. How Chris had bolted. How Ashley was gone when I got back.

  Cindy was crying into Paul’s shoulder by the time I finished.

  “They were in the woods?” she said in a muffled voice.

  “They’re okay,” I said. “In a lot of trouble, but okay. I think they were having a rough patch and—”

  She lifted her chin off Paul’s shoulder. “My daughter never got into trouble before she started hanging out with your son.”

  “Come on now, Cindy. I know they’ve done a couple of stupid things in the last year, but they’re teenagers. Teenagers do stupid shit.”

  “Da-ad!”

  “Sorry, Becks.” I glanced at my watch. It was a quarter to seven. “You should get home and ready for school. Where’s your mother, anyway?”

  “She ran after you.”

  “What? Why?”

  Becky shrugged. “She ran off. In her rain boots.”

  “Not funny, Becks.”

  “Sorry, Dad.”

  I hugged her to me. There was a loud clatter as one of the garbage bins in front of Susan Thurgood’s house clattered to the ground.

  “What’s he doing here?” Cindy asked, pulling away from Paul.

  Brad Thurgood was trying to lift a large black bin into place.

  I jogged across the street, nearly tripping over the newly installed speed bump.

  “What’s going on?” I said to Brad.

  He jumped, knocking the bin over again. Alcohol was coming off him in waves.

  “I got it,” he slurred, reaching down.

  I bent quickly and raised it up. “What are you doing here, Brad?”

  “I want to talk to my wife.”

  His eyes were unfocused. I’d heard that he was in AA, trying to clean up his act. Perhaps I’d heard wrong.

  “Then why are you outside?”

  “She won’t let me in.”

  I looked at the house. Susan was standing in the window, a phone in her hand. She waved it at me. Mouthed 9-1-1? I shook my head.

  “It’s not even seven in the morning, Brad.”

  “I knows thats,” he slurred. “What’s your point?”

  “Maybe you should go home and sleep this off?”

  “What I was trying to do.”

  “This isn’t your house anymore.”

  Brad’s lip quivered. “Why you think I’ve been drinking?”

  I looked around. There didn’t seem to be any cars I couldn’t account for.

  “How did you get here?”

  He shrugged. “Walked, I think.”

  “Why don’t you come to my house? You can sleep on the couch, and I’ll drive you home later.”

  “That’s awful nice of you.”

  I called across the street. “Becky, walk home on that side of the street.”

  “Okay.”

  I motioned to Susan, trying to mimic what I was going to do with Brad. She seemed to understand, lowering the phone and nodding her approval. I put my hand on the small of Brad’s back and directed him up the hill. He looked up at the church that sat overlooking our street. He raised his hand to his eyes.

  “Too bright,” he said.

  The sun was always bright at that time of day, shining like a spotlight at the church.

  “Let’s go.”

  It only took a minute to get to our house. Becky walked inside, leaving the front door open. I maneuvered Brad into the living room. He sat on the couch and belched. The stink of him was awful, the room already stale. I walked to the window and cracked it open. Brad shoved off his shoes and turned to lie down, tucking one of the end cushions under his head. Hanna was going to be pissed.

  Where the hell was she, anyway?

  “Becky?”

  “Yeah?” she called from upstairs.

  “Stay up there, okay? In your room.”

  “Not dangerous,” Brad said.

  “Go to sleep, Brad.”

  He snorted and pulled the corner of his shirt up over his eyes. He was snoring in less than a minute. I watched him for a second. When I met Brad, he was a vice president at First Financial. Now, he looked almost homeless. Which I guess he was, in a sense.

  “What happened then, Mr. Dunbar?”

  I reach for the water again. My mouth feels like it does after I’ve drunk half a bottle of wine. Like my tongue has extra layers.

  “This . . . this next part is hard for me.”

  “I understand that, Mr. Dunbar. But it’s getting late. Let’s finish this, shall we?”

  I make eye contact with the woman juror again. She nods, briefly.

  I take a deep breath. “I found a blanket for Brad. And then I heard a scream.”

  Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off

  Julie

  One month ago

  Before they made the arrest, the police came to see me again. The same two who’d been haunting our street for weeks, mismatched in terms of looks, and probably fulfilling some good-cop/bad-cop protocol.

  The older one, Detective Grey, tall and fit-looking under his dark-blue suit, did most of the talking. He tended to pinch the tip of his nose, as if he was rubbing a spot where his nonexistent glasses were bugging him. The younger one, Detective Fowler, just into his thirties, was already on his way to accumulating a TV cop’s body—too much flesh around the middle, and a slackening along his jaw. He was the note-taker, his left hand wrapped around a pen in a way that convenien
tly hid what he was writing.

  They sat on one couch in our living room; Daniel and I sat on another. The summer heat had stretched into September—the air looked wavy out our front windows. But the air-conditioning kept the inside of the house at a pleasant temperature, the cycling hum of the compressor filling our silence. The twins were in school. Susan had taken pity on us and was driving them in the morning and picking them up at the end of the day. They were mostly oblivious to what was going on, only asking, sometimes, why they couldn’t play outside when they wanted to.

  Daniel and the twins had flown home the day after the accident. I’d called him, hysterical, as soon as I was able. Words tumbled out of me, mostly nonsense. It took me days to be able to tell him the entire story, despite the fact that I’d increased the meds I was taking. I felt like I was jumping out of my skin, a constant tinge of panic that started in my chest and radiated to the tips of my fingers and toes. I couldn’t run. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t think. But I’d tried to convince Daniel to stay where he was, anyway.

  “I’m coming,” he’d said. “There’s no question.”

  “But your mom. She shouldn’t be alone with only your dad to take care of her.”

  “Martha’s here.” I was surprised. His sister lived in New York and visited infrequently. “She was going to stay for a while, anyway. And Mom’s . . . Mom’s okay.”

  I didn’t think to ask, then, how that was possible when he’d told me only the day before that he wasn’t sure how long he was going to have to stay. At least a week, he thought, maybe longer. I just cried with relief. Barring canceled flights, in twenty hours I’d have my family back. And then we could get the hell out of here.

  Only, we couldn’t leave. No one had asked us, formally, to stay, but we were trapped anyway. By the police and their questions. By the fact that no one else was going anywhere, so how could we? By the journalists camped outside the church, their cameras trained down the street, blinded every morning by the same sun that had blinded me as I turned the corner onto Pine Street the morning of the accident.

  “Yes,” said Detective Grey. “The sun. Everyone keeps mentioning that.”

  He said it with an accusing tone, as if I might be conspiring to describe the weather.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Daniel asked. He was almost as on edge as I was, feeling guilty that he’d left me to deal with the court case alone, and everything else that had happened instead. I’d told him again and again that he couldn’t have known, that he had to go, but he’d just shake his head and pour himself two fingers of scotch. We might both have to check into rehab if anything more happened.

  “Nothing, sir,” Detective Grey said. “Just an observation. You turned onto Pine from Church Street?”

  That was the unimaginative name for the short street the church sat on.

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s not the most direct route.”

  I squeezed Daniel’s hand. A few nights after he’d come home, I’d told Daniel everything, including about The Kiss, even though I was the one who made John promise not to tell. And in telling him, it had simply become a kiss, nothing worth capitalizing. “I know. I did a couple of street laps. I was trying to leave a bit of distance between me and John.”

  “Why is that?”

  “You know why.”

  “Do I?”

  I met his brown eyes. “Detective Grey, I promise I won’t underestimate you if you don’t underestimate me.”

  He waited a beat, then nodded his head.

  “That iNeighbor program is quite something.”

  “You could say that.”

  “Provides an interesting timeline.”

  “That, too, but don’t believe everything you read.”

  Daniel had taken it surprisingly well. In the grand scheme of things, a moment’s indiscretion, one that hadn’t even been initiated by me, and that I’d shut down almost immediately, didn’t seem so life changing, so in need of capitalizing. Not compared to me almost dying, the likely result if the car had tilted left instead of right when it hit the speed bump.

  “So,” Detective Fowler asked, “when you turned down Pine, what did you see?”

  “Besides the sun?”

  A ghost of a smile crossed his lips. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Cindy was outside of her house, yelling at Ashley. I could hear her all the way up the block.”

  “Did you see Chris? Or Mrs. Dunbar?”

  “No. Were they there? I mean before?”

  Detective Grey shrugged. “I can’t say.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “You were supposed to be in court that morning, weren’t you? You and the Dunbars?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Interesting lawsuit.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “What’s happening with that?”

  “I . . . I honestly don’t know. I haven’t thought about it since that morning. I guess . . . well, I hope we can resolve it.”

  “Was Mrs. Dunbar the one who wanted to sue?”

  “Why would you think that?”

  He raised his eyebrows at me. Now I was the one violating our pact.

  “Yeah, okay. I guess it was more her than John, but they both agreed to it.”

  “Was that a source of tension? Between you and Mr. Dunbar, I mean.”

  “Obviously. That morning was the first time we’d spoken since this disastrous dinner party we had several months ago.”

  Which was almost true. After the altercation with Ashley, we’d nodded at each other once or twice when we’d both been outside our respective houses, when it couldn’t be avoided, and once he’d sent a text asking how I was doing. But we hadn’t spoken. Not a word.

  “And what about Mrs. Dunbar? Do you think she hates you?”

  “It certainly felt like it when I read the lawsuit. But when we were together, it was more like we were constantly on the wrong foot with each other. Like we never connected. I never felt hatred. Anger, maybe, but not hatred.”

  Detective Grey cocked his head to the side. “That’s an interesting way of thinking about it. I’ll keep that in mind. Now, you’re a writer. You notice things. Set the scene for me, will you?”

  “From when I heard Ashley scream?”

  “Yes, please.”

  So, I set the scene.

  It was a few minutes before seven. I stood on the corner of Church and Pine and looked directly into the rising sun. I knew it was a bad idea, something stupid I used to do in childhood when I needed to escape for a minute. I’d look long enough for a gray spot to appear over my eyes, then away, leaving my eyes closed, watching the sparkling show. I looked away earlier than I did when I was twelve. I was out of practice. But my vision was blurry just the same.

  A car drove by me. A nondescript sedan. I never notice the make of cars. Perhaps I wasn’t so observant. I rubbed my eyes as I heard what I thought was a scream. I turned the corner. Three figures stood outside of Cindy’s house. Ashley was yelling at her mother, her voice a high pitch. John bolted from his house and ran down the street. I jogged after him.

  Cindy’s voice carried. “You get inside right this minute, young woman.”

  “No!” Ashley said. Her arms were crossed, and her feet were planted far apart. She looked like Melly, about to throw a fit. “I won’t.”

  “You will. You will, or else.”

  John arrived at the group.

  “Or else what, Mom? You gonna report me to your public? Your perfect little Ashley. You’re such a hypocrite.” Ashley looked at John. “Do you know what? She was the one who brought those cookies to school. The ones that nearly killed Chris all those years ago? I bet you didn’t know that, right?”

  “Stop it,” Cindy said. “Stop talking like that.”

  She shook her head. “No. You’re going to listen to me for once. Because I’m not perfect, okay? I break your stupid rules and you don’t even notice because you’re too busy spying on everyone else. Trying
to make your pathetic life more interesting. Trying to control everything! But you can’t control me, Mother. You can’t.”

  Cindy raised her hands over her ears. “Stop it. Stop it.”

  “Don’t talk to your mother like that, Ashley,” Paul said as I arrived. I hadn’t noticed him there before, but that wasn’t so unusual. No one noticed Paul, almost never.

  “Stay out of this, Dad. Besides, I know you think she’s as crazy as I do.”

  I felt as if I should look away then, but I couldn’t.

  “I’m not crazy. How could you say such a thing?”

  “Right,” Ashley said, “because it’s okay to make everyone else’s life miserable? To control everyone? That’s totally normal? Well, guess what? I’m not a baby anymore. I’m not about to die. And you want to know what I was doing out all night? What Chris and I were doing in the woods? We were f—”

  Crack!

  Cindy’s right hand slapped the side of Ashley’s head so hard I saw it turn in my direction.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” someone said.

  Not me.

  Heather.

  When the police got up to leave an hour later, I felt wrung out, as if someone had taken me by both ends and twisted as hard as they could.

  I’d answered every one of their questions, but that didn’t mean I hadn’t left anything in reserve. I’d caused enough trouble—I could see that now—and there wasn’t any point in making things worse.

  “This was all a terrible accident,” I said, not for the first time. “I know you have to take everything seriously given what happened, but this was a tragedy. Nothing else.”

  “That’s very magnanimous of you.”

  “It’s what I think.”

  Detective Fowler walked out of the house, but Detective Grey lingered.

  “Was there something else?” I asked.

  “You should be careful. You may still be in danger.”

  “I can’t believe Heather would be stupid enough to try something now. Not with all the police and cameras around.”

  Heather was arrested at the airport for violating the terms of the restraining order. But she’d been released on the promise she’d return to Seattle or face jail time. She never explained what she was doing on my street, but I was, amazingly, okay with that. I saw something break in Heather as she helped me with my useless CPR attempts while we waited for the ambulance to come. Whatever bubble of madness Heather had been living in, whatever thoughts she’d been harboring in her head about me, about what she thought I’d done, seemed to seep away with every breath I blew into the limp mouth of the person I was trying to save. When the ambulance arrived and the EMTs pushed me out of the way, I’d tumbled into Heather. We made eye contact, and then I pulled back from her, feeling sick at the thought that she’d touched me.