The ambulance carrying the body drove away with no siren, no lights. There was no hurry, no urgency to do anything for whoever was in that bag. Without the ambulance around, Casey didn’t have much to see, but the alternative was going home. So she stood and watched. She had thought that perhaps she’d take a photo to share on social media, but standing there it seemed like the wrong thing to do. A person’s life had ended tragically, and they deserved respect. So she kept her phone in her pocket, not even pulling it out to check the texts coming in on the regular from Eli, who was still freaking out about what had happened.
“Your mom hates me now,” he’d said in her room before he left.
“She wasn’t a huge fan before,” Casey had quipped, making Eli look more mournful.
A cop approached the group, looking tentative and apologetic. He held his hands up. “We’re gonna have to ask you guys to move along,” he said, his voice shaking from nerves. He was a rookie; he looked to be around her age.
Casey studied him, recognition niggling at her. He looked back at her, recognition dawning in his eyes, too. She knew him from somewhere, but where? He hadn’t gone to her high school. He wasn’t a neighbor. She could see that he was trying to place her as well. They smiled at each other, and she felt something else, too. Something surprising. Attraction. A stirring inside of her in a place she thought that Russell Aldridge had snuffed out. It was one thing to want Eli. To want him was to want to get back to herself, before, back to the comfort of someone who knew her then. But to want someone strange and new? She found it unexpected, and welcome. She was not dead inside as she had feared. She’d felt it partially with Eli, but that had felt like going backward, regressing. This felt like going forward, daring to hope.
She stepped closer to him, waited for him to finish addressing the crowd. “You look familiar,” she said.
He nodded and motioned for her to move over to the side of the crowd. Together they took a few steps, creating enough distance that no one could eavesdrop. Satisfied that they were out of earshot, he spoke. “You do, too.” He looked at her like she was the only person there. The crowd made no move to obey his dictate, but he didn’t turn back to them. He’d forgotten his duty. “Have you been here all afternoon?” he asked.
She shook her head. “No, I just walked over.” She hoped that would make her seem less nosy. “From my neighborhood.” She hitched her thumb in the direction from which she’d come. “I like to walk,” she said, the word walk triggering a memory. “Wait. I know where I’ve seen you before. You were at my neighbor’s.”
He squinted, thinking. “Who’s your neighbor?”
“Norah Ramsey. She got arrested?” She didn’t say what she had been arrested for; it was too embarrassing.
“Oh yeah,” he said, smiling widely. He had dimples. “You walked by. You were concerned someone had been murdered.”
“And now someone has,” she said, her eyes straying to the lake.
“Now, we don’t know that,” he said, caution in his voice. He’d been instructed to do damage control, keep the peace as much as possible. “Could easily have been an accident.”
She crossed her arms. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”
“I believe that the medical examiner—and the evidence—will determine the truth. In the meantime we shouldn’t try to guess. It can only lead to rumors and fear.”
She laughed. “They told you to say that.”
He laughed in spite of himself. “Maybe.”
“Dixon,” a warning voice intoned from several yards away. In response, his eyes strayed to the crowd, still gathered. He was falling down on the job.
“I gotta go,” he said apologetically and walked back to the front of the crowd.
She watched him go, feeling interrupted, as though, if given more time, something would’ve happened, something significant. She wondered if this was what adult life was going to be: a string of moments that leave you wondering what might’ve been. He repeated his admonishment to the crowd, this time more forcefully, making up for his screwup in front of his superior. She stood for a moment longer to look at him, then turned and walked away.
She had almost reached the woods when she heard the swift footfalls of someone running up behind her. It scared her and she froze, which was the worst thing she could do. She should’ve broken into a run, but her instincts seemed to be working against her lately. She couldn’t trust herself to do the right thing. She turned around, ready to scream as loudly as possible in hopes that someone back at the scene would hear her.
But it wasn’t a criminal chasing her into the woods; it was the opposite. The cop stood there, breathing heavily from his sprint to catch her. He held his hands up, indicating he meant her no harm.
“You left.” He panted out the words.
“You told us to,” she teased. She felt that flicker of attraction again, the thrill of wondering if this person could be something more.
He made a face. “I kinda had to.”
She shrugged. “I need to get home anyway.”
“Yeah, I need to get back there,” he said. “We’re packing it in soon. It’s gonna get too dark to do much more.” He shrugged. “And there’s not really any more to do anyway.”
She nodded, studying him as he talked. If he had already graduated from the police academy, that meant he had to be older than her, though by how much she couldn’t guess. He had a baby face, the kind of handsomeness that bordered on pretty. She thought about Eli’s wider masculine features compared to this guy’s aquiline nose and prominent cheekbones. He also had a thinner frame, but toned from police training, she guessed. Eli had been a football player and was broader, bulkier. Not fat, but not exactly built.
When she pictured a future with Eli, she could already envision the beer gut he would likely develop as some men do. She’d told herself his broadness made her feel safe, comforted and comfortable at the same time. But this guy made her feel something else, something daring and new. She felt instantly guilty for comparing the two of them like that, for this small, private betrayal of Eli, who loved her so much. But did she want to be loved like that, or did she want to have fun? She had a thought: What if she didn’t have to choose? What if, just while she was here figuring things out, she could have both?
“Maybe we could hang out sometime?” She blurted it out before she lost her nerve. “I mean when you’re not working?”
She saw him visibly relax. He smiled again, and she could tell he knew that that smile opened doors. He’d used it before and he would use it again. And she didn’t care. She didn’t need love. She needed something else. She wasn’t sure what yet, but she wanted to find out. “Say when,” he said.
She smiled back at him. For a moment they were just two good-looking people smiling at each other at the edge of the woods. She could see that he recognized the same thing about her smile, that she knew how to use it. Or she did once. She’d forgotten about it, or given up on it. She’d become someone else for a while. But perhaps now she was coming back to herself. It felt good to flirt without fear, to feel in control of a situation for the first time in a long time. Because, at least for now, for this moment, she was in control. She could see it in his eyes. She could steer him any way she wanted, and he would allow it. He would follow wherever she led. She felt the power just as sure as if she were holding it in her hands. It felt like taking in oxygen, pure and sweet, for the first time in a long time.
“When,” she said.
Bess
She was closing down the house for the night, turning out the lights in the kitchen, when a flash of movement in the backyard caught her eye. She reached to turn out the last remaining light, the one over the sink, so she could see out better. She leaned closer to the glass, squinting to make sure her eyes weren’t playing tricks on her. She watched as Jason slipped into the shed and closed the door behind him. She stood stock-still for a moment as relief filled her. His wasn’t the body from the lake. He was alive and in her she
d.
“Bess?” Steve, back from his short trip, called from the den. “You going up?” This, she knew, was his indication that he was retiring for the evening and that she should join him.
When she tried to speak, her voice came out in a croak. “Y-yes.”
But she made no move to go. She stood in front of the sliding glass door that led into the backyard and took in her reflection. She wore her white nightgown, the one Steve called her “Ma Ingalls gown,” but she loved it. It made her feel feminine and unconventionally sexual. Long white nightgowns weren’t exactly featured in the display windows of Victoria’s Secret, but it made her think of gothic romances, long sweeping lawns behind dark gabled mansions, the white nightgown standing out against the black night. She wondered if Jason would think so, or if he would tease her, too. Then she shook her head at her fanciful imagination and went to join her husband in their bed, where she belonged.
She woke up from a nightmare, sitting bolt upright with her heart in her throat and the blackness swirling all around her, as if it were alive. She sat there for a moment, waiting for her heart rate to slow down, her breathing to return to normal, the blackness to start to recede. She looked at the clock on her bedside table. It was 3:27 a.m. . . . her birthday was March 27, but she tried not to attach too much to the numbers.
The dream had been, of course, about the body in the lake. And why not? She’d thought of little else all that day. It made sense that her subconscious would keep processing it even in sleep. That’s all the dream was: a manifestation of her obsessive thoughts. She told herself this to reorient, bringing her mind back to reality. It was just a dream, albeit a disturbing one. She recalled bits and pieces. In it, she’d been at the lake. An officer had told her she could open the body bag and so she had, finding Casey’s face just underneath the wide black teeth of the zipper. She’d screamed and zipped the body bag closed again. Then she’d opened it again, this time finding Nicole’s face. She’d done this again and again, seeing the faces of those she loved each time. Not one of the faces had been Jason’s.
She looked over at Steve, but he slept on. She slipped from the bed, needing to go and look at her girls sleeping safely in their beds to reassure herself. She padded across the room, barefooted, and opened the door without a sound. She looked over her shoulder before she left the room to see if perhaps Steve had felt her leave their bed. He snored in response. She rolled her eyes and closed the door behind her.
Nicole’s room was closest, but Bess went past it to check on Casey first. She had seen Casey’s face first in the dream, so she felt more compelled to check on her. She wondered if she would’ve had this same dream if Casey had stayed at school like she was supposed to, if she hadn’t found her and Eli in bed, if she knew what was really going on with her older child. She opened the door quietly, the door moving across the carpet the only sound. For a split second she wondered if she’d find Eli again, the two of them spooned together in the bed Casey had gotten for her fourteenth birthday, covered with the quilt Bess’s grandmother had made that Casey had decided was “retro” and therefore cool to have on her bed. Bess thought it was ugly, but she never said so.
But Casey was alone, sleeping on her stomach just like when she was a baby. The doctors had strongly admonished Bess to put her baby on her back to sleep, but Casey knew what she wanted. She would fuss until Bess put her on her stomach, going against her better judgment in order to make Casey happy, not knowing it would become a metaphor for parenting. She stood and listened to Casey breathe, not daring to move any closer lest Casey wake up and find her there, watching her. In high school Casey had dubbed her “Stalker Mom,” a play on the term soccer mom. Eventually even Steve had started calling her that. Bess didn’t appreciate the negative connotation for what she felt was just involved parenting. She didn’t know why her family couldn’t see her concern for what it was: love.
She backed out of the room and quietly closed the door behind her, moving next to Nicole’s room. Nicole slept curled up on her side in the fetal position in her daybed. As a baby Nicole had slept in whatever position Bess had put her in, an easy baby. She’d been an easy kid, too. So her recent transformation into a demanding, sneaky, rude teenager had come as a shock to Bess. It felt like a betrayal. Her darling baby had turned into a stranger recently, talking and acting like someone she didn’t know. She stood in the doorway and recalled Nicole’s unacceptably harsh words to poor Violet Ramsey. She should’ve punished her, taken something away or grounded her. But the truth was, after Violet had left, she’d been too distracted and exhausted to deal with it. Nicole’s recriminations were always epic. To punish Nicole was to punish herself.
She closed Nicole’s door, but instead of returning to her bed, she decided to go downstairs to get a glass of water. As she took the stairs, her white nightgown flowed behind her, and she wondered if she looked like a ghost haunting her own house. If she was gone, she wondered, would they miss her? Sure, they’d miss the meals and the house management and the endless chauffeuring, but would they miss her? She thought of Norah telling her all those years ago that she should leave Steve. “I can’t do that to my children,” she’d replied. But since then, she’d often wondered if staying had even mattered to them the way she’d thought it would. She often wondered if she should’ve been more selfish. The more time went by, the more she had to admit that Norah had been on to something. And she had just been too scared to upend her careful existence.
In the kitchen she filled a water glass and thirstily drank it down. Then refilled it and drank a second glass. She put the glass down and looked out the window over the kitchen sink at the moon in a starless sky. He was out there right now, just feet away. She’d worried he was dead, but he wasn’t. If she was brave, she would go to him right now. She would wake him and ask him why he had never called her back. She’d tell him how worried she’d been.
And in telling him that, she would be admitting that this was more than her helping him get back on his feet; this was more than a simple good deed. It didn’t make sense: that she’d developed real, actual feelings for him of all people. Why not a father at the school? Why not a neighbor? Why not her self-defense instructor? These were likely suspects. Jason wasn’t. Why—and how—had she come to care about this man who may or may not be telling her the truth about who he was, this man who she knew next to nothing about save what he’d told her? He could be anyone. But he wasn’t anyone. Not anymore. Not to her.
Quietly, she unlatched the sliding glass door and slipped out of the house, telling herself she was just going to breathe in the cool night air for a moment. And she did. Then the moment stretched long, and longer, until she couldn’t deny the pull inside her. It drew her to the shed, and she let it. She’d been unselfish for so long. For one night, for one suspended period of time, she could be selfish; she could do something that was just for her and not think about the people inside her house sleeping unaware.
She opened the shed door, thinking that the noise would awaken him. But he slept on. The moonlight illuminated the room so that she could see him well enough. She stood watching his motionless form lying there on the pallet on the floor, flat on his back, his chin pointed to the ceiling, his breathing even and deep. Without thinking much about it, she moved closer to him, dropped to her hands and knees, and crawled up beside him, forming her body to his, smelling the earthy, outdoor smell of him. He reminded her of her garden—of dirt and weeds and roots. Perhaps that was why she had come to care about him. He reminded her of the thing that was most familiar, most natural, to her.
He stirred, then startled, pulling away from her with panic on his face. “What the hell?” he yelled.
“Shhh,” she said, scooting backward, away from him. “It’s just me. It’s just me.” She looked to make sure she’d closed the door, fearing his outburst had somehow woken her family.
He lowered his voice and pulled the blanket closer to his chest, like a modest woman, exposed. “What are you doing in
here?” he asked.
It was a fair question. One she didn’t have an answer to. “I don’t know,” she admitted. She thought about it. “I had a bad dream,” she said, which sounded silly and childish.
He gave her a bemused grin and settled back down on the bedroll she’d made for him. He held out his arm, indicating she should move back where she’d been before she’d woken him. She did, lying flat on her back beside him, her chin pointed at the ceiling like his, his arm as her pillow. For a moment they both lay there in silence, breathing in unison in the darkness.
“I was worried all day, about you,” she said. “They found a body in the lake down the street, back in the woods. I was afraid it was you. I called you a few times, but you didn’t answer the phone.”
He remained quiet for a few minutes. “My phone was stolen,” he said. “I was in town to get some food. I was in line, and I wasn’t paying close attention and, when I looked back down, my bag was gone.”
“Oh, Jason, I’m sorry. That sucks.”
He twisted slightly toward her as he reached under the quilt. He brought his hand back out, revealing a switchblade in his palm. He flicked his wrist, doing the complicated maneuver to open it up, like an actor in West Side Story. “I wish I’d seen the guy who stole it. I’d have used this on him.”
“Jason, you shouldn’t have that. It’s d-dangerous.” She ignored the thought that accompanied those words: He’s dangerous.
“I got it when I lived on the streets in the city. You have to have something there, just to flash around, you know, so people will know not to mess with you. I’ve just always kept it on me. You never know.” He shrugged, did the fancy maneuver again, and repocketed the knife. “I promise I’ve never used it. Not once.” He looked at her, made a sheepish face. “Sorry if it scared you.”
This Secret Thing Page 17