Erica shook her head firmly.
“Debbie tells me your mother saw you with Nick Stromboli, the cocaine dealer,” Ron continued. “That you’ve visited him at his house.”
“Nick Stromboli!” Erica said. “Jared’s visited him in his house. Many times. With your approval. He worked for the Nassau Family Clinic, remember? He ran a Safe House.”
“Yeah, my mistake,” Ron said. “But what’s your excuse?”
“Debbie?” Erica said. “Let me explain.”
Debbie stared at her with an expression she couldn’t quite categorize: disappointment, perhaps, sadness, fear, and a touch of sanctimony. “You’ve lied to us, Rikki,” she said.
Anger coursed through Erica, lightning bright. Forget about explanations. She wanted to spit on their white linen upholstery, their matching rug stiff with vacuuming, their glass table without so much as a water stain marring it, the thick blue drapes hiding the sky, the snow globes enclosing their imaginary landscape. Possessions did speak—they did have meaning—and these possessions spoke a lie.
“How can you talk to me about lying!’ she screamed. “Both of you! You lie all the time. You lie about your saintly lives. So I’ve smoked pot with Jared—so what? We were just having a good time. I was just trying to be his friend.”
“We’re not his friends. We’re his parents. You have four children. You should know the difference,” said Debbie, in her prim PTA-presentation voice.
“What kind of parents are you? You send him to a zillion stupid doctors. You make him carry a green sheet around in school. You give him all kinds of drugs prescribed by doctors, but you hassle him about smoking pot. You send him to a school in the middle of nowhere that you don’t know anything about, that you read about in a pamphlet, because the director of a clinic who employs a coke dealer as a teen counselor thinks it’s a good idea. “
Erica paused for a ragged breath. Sophia clung to her shoulder, screaming.
“The baby,” Ethan muttered. “I’m telling you—hand me the baby.”
Erica handed her over, and Ethan stepped back toward the glassed cabinet where Debbie kept her ceramic bunny collection. Debbie’s eyes grew wide, moist with tears, her well-tweezed eyebrows faintly lifted, her fine hair curling softly around her shoulders, her feet in black pumps and nylon peds, pinned to the carpet, unable to move. She reminded Erica of one of the bunnies.
“Don’t tell me how to be a parent,” Erica continued. “I’d risk everything for my kids. I’d lay down my life for my kids. I’d lay down my life for Jared.” She paused, her breath painful in her chest. She scratched her neck, reinflaming the scabs that were there. She looked down at her nails, chewed and bloodstained.
“Done ranting, Rikki?’ Ron asked.
“I’m sure we can discuss all this reasonably like rational human beings,” Ethan said, cradling Sophia protectively.
Ron cleared his throat, commander of the room. “It depends on the terms, Mr. Wall Street,” he said. “I think Rikki’s gone way beyond rational.”
“Now you just wait a minute,” Ethan said.
“Now you just wait a minute, Mr. Wall Street, for a change. You aren’t the know-it-all here. I wanted to bring legal charges against Rikki, and I can readily do so. Kidnapping is a federal crime. She traveled across state lines with a minor.”
“I told you she didn’t do it, Dad,” Jared said softly, scuffing his heels on the carpet.
“Why don’t you listen to Jared?” Erica pressed her shaking knees against the hard edge of the coffee table.
“I think I’ll stick with Mr. Rossiter’s version, thank you. Jared’s told us quite a few stories in the past few months, haven’t you, young man?” He ruffled Jared’s hair. Jared scowled and shifted away.
“Plus, the drug charges alone are not insignificant,” Ron concluded. He paused for dramatic effect. “But as I said, Debbie convinced me not to involve the cops. She insisted I have this family conference with you. As a preliminary.”
“Now, I’m not sure we have all the facts here.” Ethan tried again. “I think we should all calm down and sit down and talk together on an equal footing. And I think you can stop calling me insulting names. I’ve done pretty well for myself and my family on Wall Street, Mr. DJ.”
Ron pulled up to his full Marine bearing. “That all depends on your perspective,” he said.
Erica swept her right hand along the coffee table, knocking snow globes over like dominoes. They toppled onto the table’s brass leg, shattering into thousands of shards of glass, fragments of plastic, and colored water.
“How dare you threaten us!” she screamed. “How dare you! Jared’s told me some things too, you know. Some things that I could tell the cops. Like how you’ve beaten him up for years. You think I didn’t see you throw that plate of food at him at Lauren’s bat mitzvah?”
Ron growled like an angry German shepherd.
“And that’s not all,” said Erica. “You beat my sister too. Jared didn’t have to tell me that, although he did. You think I don’t see those bruises she hides under her clothing? You think I believed her cockamamie story about that blood disease? Who the hell do you think you are? Debbie should have left you a long time ago.”
“Ron, honey.” Debbie disengaged herself from Ron’s grasp enough to stroke his cheek. He pushed her away, gruffly. She shifted to Erica’s side of the coffee table.
“You don’t even love her,” Erica continued, close enough to her sister that their hips brushed. She placed her hand tentatively on Debbie’s back. Ethan, cradling Sophia, leaned against the glass-fronted cabinet with the ceramic bunnies. Jared sidled toward the dining room. That left just her and Debbie, facing down Ron.
Erica raised herself on her tiptoes, staring directly into his yellow-flecked, enraged eyes. “You think I don’t see the way you look down my chest, you lecherous creep! I don’t know how Debbie lets you touch her. I wouldn’t sleep with you if my life depended on it. You look like an emaciated weasel, you, you and your sucky music and sucky Mets!”
Ron’s face swelled up, red and bulbous, like a perverted balloon. Guttural noises emerged from his throat. He leaned over the coffee table, six inches away. Erica leaned her face into his, so close she could feel his breath.
“You don’t scare me, you stupid asshole,” she said.
Ron’s arm lashed out, his tight fist headed directly for her face. Erica leaped away, a strong, agile bound, a leap she’d known since she was a little girl springing across the playground, a leap honed by track team and step aerobics, and smashed into Ron’s La-Z-Boy armchair.
At that instant, there were only the two of them in the room. She grabbed a cracked snow globe from the floor and aimed it at his cheek. It missed. She heard it crash against the wall unit. Ron fell over the table, stretched long like a cobra, and slithered toward her. She lunged after his stupid ugly mug again, connecting, hearing his skin split, his cartilage bend.
An odd alarmed noise rose from Ethan: somewhere between a moan and a shriek. Erica turned to see her sister Debbie lying still on the ground, Ethan leaning over her, and Sophia opening the glass case of ceramic bunnies.
Jared’s face collapsed as if it had been punctured. “Mommy!” he cried.
“Deb?” croaked Ron, in a tone Erica had never heard before. “Deb?”
And even though Erica was the CPR-trained nurse and Ethan plugged numbers into computers for a living, it was Ethan who opened her mouth, checked her tongue for obstructions, pressed her chest, and breathed air between her lips.
“Call 911,” he gasped.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The 911 operator kept asking Erica questions whose answers were obvious or irrelevant. The address. Her name. The injured party’s name. The injured party’s age, her relationship to Erica. When Erica finally broke through with the reason for her call, she phrased it clumsily. “My sister fe
ll. She’s unconscious. I’m not sure she’s breathing. There’s blood on the side of her head.”
“Has she been ill?” asked the operator.
“I don’t know,” snapped Erica. “Just send someone! This is an emergency!”
“They’re on their way,” said the operator.
When she returned to the living room, Ron and Jared were also kneeling over Debbie, though Ethan was still doing the compressing and the breathing.
Debbie’s pupils floated about her irises, uneven and murky, like the triangle inside of an eight ball. Her neck lay at an angle. Her arms and legs flopped limply. Blood dripped down her pale cheek. Erica searched her rusty nurse’s brain: it looked like a head injury. She was breathing, though. Erica took her pulse: rapid but steady.
“I think you can stop the CPR,” she told Ethan. “Get her a blanket. They’re in the linen closet.” Ethan rose to a standing position, cutting his thumb on a shard of snow globe.
“Fuck a duck,” he mumbled.
“Mommy, Mommy!” Jared cried, collapsing like a toddler in tears on the floor.
“She’s had some sort of attack,” Ron croaked. “It must be that blood disease.”
The bogus blood disease could not be the truth, but the truth was lost in a fog of rage and panic, and try as she might, Erica could not bring it into the light of day. She’d connected with Ron’s nose with a satisfying crack. She’d always hated his piggy little nose.
Debbie’s chest rose and fell in short shallow breaths. There was a gash at her left temple. She’d evidently hit her head on the sharp metal corner of the coffee table, corners that Erica had always resented out of fear that one of her children would split their heads open on it, and Debbie’s main concern would be the resultant bloodstains. But it was droplets of Debbie’s blood that puddled like polka dots on the white carpet.
Maybe when Erica leaped out of his way, Ron’s fist had missed its mark and hit Debbie instead, just enough to make her wobble. Maybe her heel had caught on a strand of carpet. Maybe Erica, leaping, had banged her ankle into Debbie, knocking her completely off balance. Erica’s package of Kleenex lay on the floor by Debbie’s feet, along with her bottle of nasal spray. She should have kept her hand on Debbie’s back; she should never have let go of her.
Erica replaced the ceramic figurines that Sophia was methodically pulling from their glass case, turning the chipped part of a rabbit’s ruffled underpants discreetly to the other side.
“Wake up, Deb,” Ron pleaded.
: : :
The shrieking of fire sirens tore through the air, soon followed by the eerie squeal of an ambulance, and suddenly the house was flooded with people in uniforms tramping mud across Debbie’s spotless living room.
“She collapsed,” Ron told a tall, blond paramedic with a bowl cut as he checked her vitals. “She’s been ill. There’s something wrong with her blood.”
“Did she hit her head?” he asked, taking note of the spreading bruise on her left temple.
“She must have hit her head on the coffee table when she fell,” said Ron.
“No, no, she fell after he hit her,” Erica said, pointing at Ron.
“My brother-in-law here threw a punch,” Ethan said. “I think he was aiming at my wife, but he missed.”
“She has a blood disease, I told you,” said Ron.
“What disease?” the paramedic asked.
“They were still doing tests,” Ron said.
“I’m a nurse, and I can tell you she doesn’t have any disease,” Erica said.
“What happened to your nose, sir?” asked a different paramedic, a short, fat one with a bald spot.
“This crazy woman hit me,” said Ron, pointing at Erica.
“Self-defense,” Erica said.
“Can you tell me what happened, young man?” the tall, blond one asked Jared.
“I don’t know!’ Jared wailed. “It all happened so suddenly.”
“Call the police,” Tall Blond said to Short-and-Fat. “Then let’s get this lady to the hospital.”
“What the hell,” said Ethan. “What a horror story.”
“Ethan,” Erica said. “You gotta get the twins. The bus must have dropped them off a while ago.”
“Don’t I have to wait for the police?” Ethan asked.
“The camp bus came at least half an hour ago! For all I know, Jesse and Jake are wandering around the neighborhood. They’re just five-year-old boys! You gotta get them, okay? I’ll meet you at home. Take Sophia.”
“All right, all right,” Ethan said.
It took a long time to position Debbie on the stretcher. She was still unconscious. Erica couldn’t bear to look at her dilated pupils, black and bobbling. Her limbs hung limply, occasionally vibrating like the spring of a broken toy. The paramedics were preparing to carry her to the ambulance when the police arrived. Ron was following them out the front door when Tall Blond waved him off.
“You gotta stay and talk to the police, sir.”
Ron tried to regain his former authoritative bearing and sway, but his body refused to obey. “I need to be with my wife,” he said.
“You talk to the police here and answer anything they ask you, sir, and then you’re free to join your wife at the hospital. Tall Blond and Short-and-Fat maneuvered Debbie out the door. The ambulance sped off, sirens wailing.
“We’ve had the report of an incident,” one of the police said, staring at the blood spots on the floor. He pulled out a notebook while his partner strolled around the living room, peering behind the furniture and photographing the blood stains. “Can I have your full names, please?”
They gave their names, their addresses, their phone numbers, their dates of birth.
“What are you wasting your time with this claptrap for?” Ron barked.
“Just necessary information,” the officer said. “Can you tell me what happened here?”
“My wife collapsed. She had some sort of blood attack,” Ron said. In the presence of the law, he regained a modicum of equanimity. “An ambulance took her to the hospital, and I need to join her there.”
“And what happened to you?”
Ron’s nose was swollen and red, with drops of blood crusted below the nostrils. “She hit me!” Ron pointed his index finger in Erica’s direction.
“Is this true?” asked the officer
“Yeah, it is,” Erica said, and briefly that angry pride rose in her again. “It was self-defense. He knocked my sister into the coffee table.”
“Is this true? Did you hit your wife?’
“Of course not,” said Ron, radio voice back in full swing. “My sister-in-law, Rikki, has a very bad temper. We got into a little”—he paused, like a military spokesman struggling to come up with the proper term for the latest carnage—“altercation.”
“It’s Ron who has the bad temper,” Erica said. “He’s beaten up his son, Jared, here, for years. He’s beaten Debbie too. I can prove it.”
“Come with me into the kitchen,” the notebook officer said to Erica.
“Did Mr. Lassler hit his wife this afternoon?” he asked Erica, leaning against the refrigerator.
“Yes, I already told you so! I think he unbalanced her, and she fell and hit the table.”
“To your knowledge, is your sister suffering from a blood condition?”
“I don’t know. She’s a hypochondriac. She’s always going for some sort of test and seeing some kind of new doctor, and I’ve asked her about her bruises—”
“The bruise on her head?”
“No, other bruises. She has lots of bruises. And I’ve asked her about them, and she tells me it’s because of some obscure disease, but I’m a nurse, and I know better—those bruises are from Ron beating her.”
“What was your ‘altercation’ about?”
“It was a family
matter. About their son. About Jared.”
“Have you had these altercations before?”
“Not really. Not like this. Say, isn’t anyone going to ask Ron questions? And what about Jared?”
“They’re questioning both of them separately, ma’am. Can you conclusively say you saw Mr. Ron Lassler hit Debbie Lassler?” His pencil was poised at the ready.
“I know he did.”
“Date and location, please?”
“He does it in private. When nobody sees.” Of all the images floating through her brain, she couldn’t access that inconvertibly damning one. “Why the hell do you think she’s lying there unconscious?” she asked, her voice loud, high, and fast, nothing like Ron’s radio-friendly croon.
“Well, that is a very interesting question,” said the officer. “Let’s go back in the living room.”
“I have to get to the hospital,” Ron was saying. Jared sat with a third officer Erica hadn’t noticed before, crumpled against a sofa pillow, sniffling, his palms pressed together like he was praying.
“Do you wish to press assault charges against Erica Richards?” the cop who’d been with Erica asked Ron.
Erica’s mouth, dry and hot, felt disconnected from the rest of her body. She breathed quickly, sharp shallow intakes of air that did not fill her lungs. Her heart beat hard against her chest. Her right eyebrow pulsed.
“No, not currently,” Ron said. “I need to see to my wife.”
“Well, if no one remembers anything or wants to press charges, there’s not much we can do. We do have a new domestic violence division, and we’ll be reporting this incident to them. You all get to the hospital now. Have them take a look at your nose, Mr. Lassler. And, Mrs. Richards, we’re going to need to question your husband. We’ll be calling him.”
: : :
Erica walked rapidly back to the house. Ethan answered the door. His voice was different than she’d ever heard it before: tight, controlled, cool. It frightened her.
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