But it was recognizably me with Natty perched on my hip, bending over William Ashe on the gurney. I could see my palm resting on his chest, near his shoulder on the unshot side. They’d cut his shirt off, and his chest had been sprinkled with khaki colored hair, sun-bleached a shade lighter than his warm, tanned skin. My hand balled into a fist, closing over the remembered feel of him. It had been like touching the top of my dresser; there was no give to him at all.
The reporter was talking over the footage, saying, “. . . ended after twenty minutes when one of the hostages rushed the gunman . . .”
So strange, watching myself touch William, hearing a newscaster tell a distant version of a thing I’d actually lived. I knew the real soundtrack, though.
Good job, I was telling William. Like nine hundred times. As if William Ashe was a professional robber-thwarter instead of some kind of scientist.
Walcott blew a raspberry. “You look like you’re about to kiss his dying lips and then set him on fire in the parking-lot version of a Viking funeral.”
I hadn’t realized how every muscle in all my whole body had bunched up, watching this, until Walcott made me smile. I knuckle-punched his arm and glanced up, saying, “Shut up, you,” but he didn’t have on his joking face.
On the screen, Natty leaned down to touch William, too, pat-pat-patting his arm. I knew what he was saying. He was telling William, You did what Batman would have do’ed.
Then the talking head of the news anchor replaced the shaky footage of us by the ambulance, but I knew what had happened after that. They’d loaded him in and closed the doors and drove him away from us, because I didn’t really belong in the wife slot. Not yet, anyway.
“Shandi?” Walcott said. He sounded weird. He said my name in a strained tone I’d never heard before.
The talking head was replaced with a picture, an informal thing, snapped at a park. It was William. But he wasn’t alone. He was holding a baby. He was sitting by a woman.
All at once I was intensely interested in what the talking head might say, so of course this was the moment that Bethany decided to finally take up yelling, after years of snow-soft, well-modulated, disparaging comments.
“Are you goddam kidding me?” It was almost a shriek. “You mean you were literally held up, in a holdup, you were held up, and you stood there, you stood there in the foyer and you let me go on and on! You made a joke of it, you—”
“Shut up!” I hollered back. On TV a bubble-haired blond lady was saying vital things about William, and I couldn’t hear her over Bethany. Then my dad joined in.
“Bethany! Stop! Shandi is in shock. Go get her some water! Go get her some wine!”
“Hush, hush,” I said, even more desperately. “Walcott, turn up the TV.”
“Okay, okay!” He turned and began digging around in all the Bethany-inflicted silken throw pillows that were infesting the couch.
“No, I will not hush!” Bethany was talking over Dad and me and the TV, too. “Do you think I am some kind of monster? I never would have said those things to you if I had known! But you, you let me!”
In the picture, William Ashe was sitting on the grass. He had a good, sharp-looking haircut and a serious, reserved smile. A baby girl, maybe eighteen months old, was flopped barefoot and happy-sleepy in his lap. Her hair was gathered into a ridiculous sprig of strawberry-blond floss on top of her head. Beside him, leaning into his broad shoulder with her legs curled under her, was a smiling redheaded woman. The anchorman was talking now; I heard him say “William Ashe” and “hero of the hour,” and “tragic accident.” Did he mean the shooting? Was William all right? But I couldn’t follow because Bethany was yelling now. Really yelling.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were in a robbery? You hid it! Deliberately! To make me look bad. What kind of a conniving person does that?” She was right. It had been low, and I was getting a hard and instant karma-slap for it.
The red-haired woman was Mrs. Ashe. No doubt about that. I could see it in the way she leaned her head toward him and tucked her shoulder close against his. I hated her, a little, for existing.
“Walcott!” I hollered over Bethany. “Remote?”
“—stuck in this house all day waiting and then she comes here knowing—”
“Shandi, honey, you need to sit down,” my dad said. “Shut up, Bethany.”
“Everyone, shut up!” I screeched.
I stepped close to the TV, staring at the wife for the few seconds they left the picture up. She had freckles and a long, bony Irish face, but a really good smile. Her thick, wavy hair was flat gorgeous, but she was no Mimmy. She was like me; pretty enough for real life, but not television pretty. She looked happy, though. They all three looked happy. Still, I didn’t think William Ashe was married to her now. In the Circle K, he had showed all the signs of being a recently, but not too recently, divorced male.
The picture was replaced with the blond anchorwoman, with an I’m-making-a-sad-face-but-not-the-kind-that-leaves-a-wrinkle expression.
“If you think I am going to apologize!” Bethany raged on, with Dad talking over her, saying, “Well, Shandi is not going to apologize. No one needs to apologize,” and me saying, “Just stop yelling for one second,” and Walcott digging in the pillows.
“Got it,” Walcott said, and the volume bar appeared and shot from left to right, filling all the way in.
As the sound came up, the anchorman blared, “. . . killed in a tragic auto accident, exactly one year ago today.”
It was so violently loud, everyone did finally shut up, and I rocked back from the TV, blinking, as if the words had literally slapped me.
In my peripheral vision, I saw Walcott come up beside me, but he wasn’t looking at the TV, he was looking at my face.
“Walcott, please,” said my father, very loud over the TV, and Walcott turned the volume down.
The camera backed up, showing the blonde beside the man anchor. She was making complementary what-a-damn-shame eyebrows.
“It’s so ironic,” the woman anchor said. “To become a hero, to save other people, on such a sad anniversary.”
In that moment, I understood his wife was dead. As understanding dawned, I realized that I’d read the shaggy hair and the pale band of flesh on William’s ring finger wrong. He was not divorced, and I was standing here curling my lip and checking a dead woman’s looks against mine. I was selfishly wishing her out of the picture, only to find out she was. Really, really out of the picture. I felt exactly like the piece of crap I was. I glanced at Walcott, my eyes swimming with tears, and saw him swallow, his Adam’s apple hopping up and down once in his long, narrow throat. His eyes on me were, for maybe the first time in our lives, unreadable.
Bethany was staring me down with fury written in every line of her face, but she kept her yap shut, and my dad just looked shaken.
The anchor kept talking, reporting about Stevie now, showing what looked like Stevie’s old mug shot. The man anchor said he had a long criminal record, no shock there.
Yes, I was a lowly worm, but I hadn’t willed his wife into being dead. They said the accident happened a year before I ever laid eyes on him. His heart must be broken, and I would never have wanted that. I’d only wanted, desperately, for him to be a thing that I could have.
Which he was. Feeling like an awful person for being glad of it couldn’t stop me wanting him for me and Natty. Couldn’t stop me wondering about him. Maybe he was a single dad, like me. Maybe he was lonely, like me. An inadvertent tingle buzzed in my belly. Maybe he was really good at sex. Unlike me. But sweet damn, I was so willing to learn.
That weird predestined feeling that I had run smack into the love of my life intensified. He was sad and tragic, and helping a girl like me hunt justice might be exactly what he needed.
Then it occurred to me th
at the baby, the daughter, could have been in the accident as well. I had that mom-reaction I think every parent gets. A fast Please, never, not my kid, aimed at heaven, combined with the red-hot slicing empathy that cuts you when you understand a nearby soul has already fallen into your worst fear, and for them it is real and forever.
I felt a clenching of the mother-node inside me. That little girl with the silly, flossy sprout on her head? She was gone, too, with her mother. That was why William had moved so immediately, putting himself between the gun and Natty. He’d leaned in to make a human tent with me over Natty, too, without even thinking about it. He had lost his child; he knew how fast things could spin out of control. He knew a person could lose anything in half a heartbeat. William understood. The tears spilled all the way out of my eyes, and I brushed them fast away.
“Baby,” Dad said, and he came over and took me in his arms. “What a day you’ve had. Of course you are staying here. Bethany, go get some sheets for the couch downstairs, for Walcott.”
I felt Bethany’s cool gaze on me growing even cooler, but she turned away and went to get the sheets. The sports guy came on then, and a whole new terrible thought occurred to me.
“I have to call Mimmy. I didn’t think it would be on the news. We were only in there, what, half an hour?”
“It was a long half hour, though,” Walcott said darkly.
“I can imagine,” my dad said, snuggling me closer.
I said, “Oh God, Mimmy can’t see it on TV before I’ve talked to her. She’ll lose her mind.”
Bethany came back with her arms full of bedding, passing through on her way to the basement stairs, but she paused when I said “Mimmy.”
“You didn’t call her from the car?” asked my father. I shook my head. He rubbed my back, and he couldn’t help but smile faintly. “Don’t worry. Your cell phone would be ringing right now, if she had seen this.”
I knew then that he would never hold it against me, the fact that I stood in the foyer and let Bethany yell at me, because I hadn’t called Mimmy. He had been the first to know. In fact, Mimmy might hold a grudge, because I had come here to him instead of having Walcott drive me two hours back to her place.
Bethany said, “You should definitely call.” She looked like she had a whole alive mouse trying to scrabble its way up her throat and out. She was trying to choke that mouse back down. Now that she had banked her temper, she knew I was a solid ten points up in the endless game of Who’s the Asshole? that we’d started playing the instant she married my father. He was the show’s host and the judge, as well as our lone target demographic. “You should go call her right now.”
But Dad didn’t let me go.
Well, I’d had a crap day. I’d been held at gunpoint, been so scared for my kid, fallen in love with a shotten-up stranger with a tragic past, and had decided to risk everything, even Natty’s peacefully fatherless childhood, to stop being a coward. Sometimes, on a day like that, you need a victory. Even a little one. Even if it is thorny and vicious and small-minded.
So. For just a few seconds more, I made The Mimmy wait, and I stayed right damn where I was, smiling beatifically at Bethany from inside the circle of my father’s arms.
Sometimes karma takes years to pay a person back, but that day, it had a fast backhand return; I snuggled in, and that’s when Natty started screaming.
Natty was up and down all night, chased out of his sleep by a spider, by a ninja, by a silver gun with human legs and feet.
I’d moved him into my bed, so I didn’t have to leap across the room to wake him all the way out of the scary dream and pet his sweaty hair back from his face. When he was a tiny baby, he’d work himself into such deep and earnest sleeps that he would sweat hard like this. The side of his head that had been pressed against the mattress would smell a little bit like a foot. Baby Foot Head, Walcott called him back then, and remembering this, my heart lurched around and got wobblety against my ribs. I could have lost him today. I nestled him in close, crooning, “Hush, baby, hush.”
His eyes gleamed huge in the dark. Walcott appeared again in the doorway. The last three times, he’d been in boxers and his T-shirt, but I clocked that he was fully dressed now. Shoes even, though the clock by my bed said three A.M.
“I had a bad dream,” Natty said in an aggrieved voice, like he was accusing someone of something. “That gun camed back. It chased me on its legs.”
“That’s terrible,” I said. “What a terrible gun. I hate that bad gun. But now it is just you here safe with me and Walcott.”
“Want me to pet your feet some more?” Walcott said.
“Yes, please,” said Natty.
Walcott sat down on the edge of my bed, his long fingers petting and petting the bottoms of Natty’s feet. Natty was the least ticklish child on the planet.
“I think a bad thing,” Natty said.
“What bad thing?” I asked.
“I think Stevie shotted William into being dead now,” Natty said, barely a whisper, and it worried me that those effed-up baby verbs had stuck.
“It’s not true,” I said. “William is very strong, like a big, smart lion.”
“Seriously?” Walcott muttered, his hands going still. I made questioning eyebrows at him, but he wouldn’t look at me at all.
“Natty, do you want to go and visit William at the hospital? So you know he is okay?”
“Yes,” Natty said, and then, “Walcott, you didn’t pet my feet now.”
Walcott resumed.
“You want to take him some balloons?”
“Yes, please,” Natty said.
Walcott petted, and I whispered a long list of get-well gifts that we could take William Ashe: flowers and a puppy, a new car and chocolate cookies, a giraffe in a nurse cap to fluff his pillow, a water pot of singing flowers or a mermaid in a bucket, either would do for lullabies, and on and on, replacing the awful footed gun that had chased him around inside his head with prettier friends, until Natty’s eyes closed and his body became a limp bit of boy-string in the bed.
When Natty was good and out, Walcott stood silently and tipped his head at the door. I got up and followed him out into the rec room. The bedding was folded neatly on the end of the sofa. I sat down, but he stayed standing, both of us facing the big flat-screen that dominated the room. There was also a Wii, a hundred thousand Legos in buckets, and a shelf full of board games. The basement smelled like popcorn and a full herd of little boys, though it was supposedly for me.
Once I’d had a room upstairs, but every time Bethany had a baby, I got moved into a crappier bedroom. When my third half brother was born, I got stuffed down here in what used to be the basement office, with Bethany saying, “Teenagers need their space!”
“The basement den and bathroom will be your own domain, too. Teenager heaven, right, Shandi?” Dad had asked.
The truth was, I would have liked to stay near Davie and Simon and giggly, round-bellied Oscar, who was barely a year older than Natty. I liked little kids, always had, and these three had my same dark, round eyes, and exact replicas of my dad’s long-boned, elegant feet. Not to mention there was still a huge, posh guest room, with trey ceilings and a California king. It had its own bathroom with a garden tub. It sat empty by the boys’ rooms, a showpiece reserved for Bethany’s parents or her sister.
But Dad had to live with her, so I’d said yeah, that sounded cool. He felt bad about it, though. He made Bethany grant me free rein in the bedroom—my first deco job—and set a budget generous enough for me to do the walls in a faux suede finish, have the curtains custom-made, and get a wrought-iron bed from Anthropologie. But “my” downstairs den had quickly degenerated into a playroom, and now my toilet seat was always sprinkled with little-boy pee.
Walcott had never rated the guest room, either. The few times he’d stayed here, he’d slept on this couch, not real
ly a guest. Or at least not Bethany’s guest.
“Where are you going?” I asked. It was obvious he was skipping out, though it was the darkest wee hours of the morning.
“Over to CeeCee’s,” he said. “Can I borrow your car?”
It took me a second, but then I got it. CeeCee could offer him all kinds of comfort that he wasn’t getting here.
“I’d need you to come back and take us to the hospital to see William in the morning.”
He said, “Seriously?” then rolled his eyes. “Whatever, I’ll be back by ten.”
Something was off about him. Way off. “What is it?” I asked.
He didn’t deny there was an it, just said, “Can we talk about it later? I need to go if I am going, before us yacking raises Bethany from her crypt.”
That sounded more like him. I grinned and got up to hug him, but he stepped back from me. Like, literally, took a step back and away.
“Walcott!” I said, really worried now.
He shook his head, his eyes hooded and unreadable, and then shoved his hands through his hair so it stood up in mad Beethoven tufts.
“I’ll call you,” he said, and went fast and quiet up the stairs.
It wasn’t right. He wasn’t right. Maybe he was having some kind of post-robbery meltdown, but why shut me out? It was my robbery, too. I started to go after him, to track him to the driveway and make him talk to me, but just then, Natty went off like an air-raid siren again.
I ran back to my bed and picked him up, said his name until he was all the way awake. The ninja had made another appearance. He had red eyes like a jawa and he was chasing Mimmy, chasing me. He had already ninja-starred Batman into pieces.
I back-burnered Walcott and climbed into bed to cuddle Natty. I heard my little VW start up, carrying Walcott away from us, to CeeCee’s.
Maybe he hadn’t wanted me to touch him because he was purely desperate for some sex. Earthquake syndrome. I’d read about it, how a herd of babies are always born in a little run nine months after a natural disaster. Death brushing past makes people hungry to connect to other people, to make even more people in a big push toward life, a celebration of surviving.
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