The Children

by Ann Leary

  “That’s not true.”

  “Could you murder Spin? Could you stab him in the heart or bash his head in with a brick just because you were drunk?”

  “No.”

  “So I think you could have thrown her out of your house. You could have told Spin. You could have told me. Oh, now I understand why you’ve been so loving and caring ever since. It wasn’t because of your feelings for me. It was guilt. It was because of your guilt about Spin. You said he was like a brother to you. Even Perry wouldn’t do a thing so low.”

  “You know what I don’t understand right now?” Everett said.

  “What don’t you understand? Basic human decency? How to be honest? What? What is it?”

  “I don’t get why you’re so upset for Spin. I’m sorry that I did that to Spin. But I’m more sorry about doing it to you. I’m not drinking. I’m not smoking weed anymore. I’m doing this for you. I hate myself for what I did. But not just what I did to Spin, it’s what I did to you.”

  I opened the door to leave.

  “I have to tell Spin,” Everett said.

  “Everett, no.” I turned to face him. “Take it to your grave. I’m serious.”

  “Charlotte, I’m telling you, Sally’s right about her. She’s evil.”

  “Oh, she’s evil. Maybe she was drunk, too,” I said. But I don’t drink, and I hadn’t noticed that she was in the least bit tipsy that night.

  “I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I mean pretty much nonstop since they left. It wasn’t just a drunken thing. She e-mailed me. She sent me a selfie … she and Spin on the beach.”

  “What?” I said.

  He logged on to his computer. “I couldn’t figure out why Snacks lets her pick him up, why the dogs are so casual around her. I think Sally was right. Dogs bark at strangers because of the smell of adrenaline that people, almost all people, emit in new situations. Dogs smell that. It alarms them, they bark, and the person pumps more adrenaline out for the dog. She doesn’t have that.”

  “Everett, I don’t even know what to say. The dogs? What on earth?”

  “Nobody’s hacking me from a remote location. She was sneaking in here. The dogs wouldn’t have even barked at her. It would be like if you or Sal walked in. Look. Look at what she sent me. She’s trying to scare me.”

  I looked at the screen.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Sally’s car was gone when I awoke the next morning. She had left us a note. She knew a guitarist in the city who could play Spin’s part. She needed it done that day. She planned to stay with friends and deliver the music to the director the next morning. She might stay in the city for a couple of nights; she would let us know.

  “I think it’s the best thing right now,” Joan said while we drank our morning coffee. It was raining out, a hard, steady summer rain.

  “Yup,” I said. It was hard to talk, I was so depressed about Everett.

  Spin and Laurel arrived home around two o’clock that afternoon. The rain had eased up, but the sky was still dark, more showers were expected. The lake was as still as glass; it had taken on the color of the sky, so when I looked out from my attic window, there was no horizon, just a wall of gray. I heard Spin and Laurel drive up and then come inside. I heard them chatting with Joan in the kitchen. Then I heard Joan let out an excited scream.

  “LOTTIE!” Joan called out. “Lottie, come downstairs quick!”

  I ran down the back stairs to the kitchen and found Joan hugging Spin. She was actually wiping away a little tear from her eye.

  “Tell Lottie,” Joan said.

  Spin and Laurel looked at each other, grinning.

  “Well?” Spin asked Laurel.

  “You tell.” She giggled.

  Spin took a deep breath and said, “Laurel and I got married yesterday. In Southampton. Right on the beach.”

  I was able to make my tears look like happy tears. I ran over and hugged them both.

  “What? How?” I asked. “Oh, how exciting. Congratulations to both of you.”

  I made coffee while they gave us the details. My back was to them, so they couldn’t see how shaky my hands were. They realized they didn’t want a big wedding. It wasn’t just the tension with Sally. Marissa was also being crazy, trying to go all overboard with the plans. They just wanted to get married. They went to a justice of the peace. Perry and Catherine and the kids were the only attendants.

  “It was spur-of-the-moment and very romantic,” Laurel said, hugging Spin.

  “I want to see pictures,” Joan gushed. I knew she was happy for Spin and Laurel, but I suspected that her real joy sprang from the realization that there wouldn’t be a wedding at Lakeside.

  “Laurel-lee, get your phone. Let’s see the photos,” said Spin. Laurel-lee.

  We had coffee and some stale cookies that Joan had kept from the Fourth. We looked at the photos of Laurel and Spin on the beach in front of the setting sun. Laurel wore a lovely white summer dress, not a wedding dress, just a lovely slightly sheer dress that was blowing around her knees. Her feet were bare. So were Spin’s. He wore a pale linen suit, the trousers rolled up above his ankles. In some of the shots, they were standing in the surf. There were shots of them together and with Perry, Catherine, and the children. Perry and Spin seemed to be wearing almost identical suits. Laurel had a delicate bouquet of white and blue flowers. Little Emma carried a smaller bouquet and had white and blue flowers woven into her blond curls. It had all been thrown together on a whim, and somehow, it was more perfect than if they had planned it for months.

  After we had admired all the photos, Spin and Laurel went upstairs to unpack and I went up to the attic to finish my work. About a half hour later, there was a gentle knock on the attic door.

  “Come in,” I said. Laurel walked in first, followed by Spin. Spin always has to duck to get through the door to this room. It was framed up over a hundred years ago, when most men weren’t six-two like him.

  “Oh, guys, hi,” I said. I closed my computer and pointed to the little twin bed. “Sit down.”

  Spin came over and gave me a big hug. “We wanted to talk to you about the other day. With Sally.” He held on a little longer than normal. Then they sat on the bed.

  Spin said he was sorry about the way he had shouted at Sally that day. I assured him that we had all lost our tempers with her at various times over the years. Me, Joan, Everett. Even Whit on occasion. It wasn’t Sally’s fault; it’s just exasperating for family members.

  “It’s like living with an alcoholic,” Laurel said. “My best friend’s mom was an alcoholic. It’s really a similar dynamic. It’s like walking on eggshells.”

  “Yes, those were exactly your words, weren’t they, Spin? Walking on eggshells?” I said.

  “When?”

  “When you were so angry at her the other day,” I said.

  “I can’t even remember. I was so furious.”

  “I know,” I said. “So tell me more about Southampton.”

  Laurel showed me some photos she had taken of Perry and Catherine’s beautiful house. “Look how cute that little Emma is,” she said, pointing to a photo of Emma holding a kitten. She held the little kitten against her chest, both of her arms crossed over it. She was being so careful not to drop it.

  “I keep telling Spin, I only want daughters.”

  “What’s wrong with sons?” I asked.

  “Yeah!” said Spin. “Not even one boy?”

  “I hadn’t really thought about it until this weekend, but now I know I want daughters. Three or four. Just like Emma.”

  “Emma worships Laurel,” Spin told me.

  “No wonder she’s so fond of her,” I said, but added quickly, “Perry and Catherine are lucky with their two kids. That’s what I’d want. A little girl and a little boy. I mean, in a perfect world.”

  We talked about the weather forecast for the next few days. It was supposed to be gloomy. I was amazed at how I was able to maintain a calm demeanor. I had been crying on and off all day. N
ow when I sniffed and got teary, I complained about my allergies. The pollen count was out of control that week. They planned to go into the city in a few days and spend some time with Marissa. She was upset that they’d eloped. Now she wanted to really get to know Laurel.

  Finally, they went downstairs and I e-mailed Everett. I had been trying to reach him all day. He didn’t respond to my calls or e-mails. He’d left with his dogs in the early-morning hours. I had told him I’d be happy never to see him again.

  I had several e-mails from Washington. They were cryptic. Just: “Is it done? Did you end it?” He really wanted me to close the blog. I knew he was looking out for me. I knew it had to be done.

  I opened the administrator’s log-in for the blog. There was no reason to look through any of it again. I had read through hundreds of posts the night before. I hadn’t read the early entries in ages.

  I started the blog a couple of years ago, when I happened upon a Web site for mothers. I found it enthralling. I’ve always loved the idea of being a mother; I look forward to having children of my own. When I read the sometimes funny, often poignant accounts of new mothers, I started to fantasize about what Everett might be like as a father—what our children might be like. So I started the blog.

  LoneStarLisa (with an s) had actually been commenting for two years, almost since the beginning. She had three sons; she was a homeschooler from Austin, Texas. She had posted a link to photos on her Facebook page. In fact, she and I had become Facebook friends in 2013. Well, she and Susan had. Susan is my mommy name. I guess I can reveal it now—my blog is called Lazy Susan.

  My name is supposed to be Susan Fields. Initially, I just posted funny stuff about how lazy I am as a mother; that was my whole gimmick. It was easy. I would post the opposite of the veiled brags I saw other moms post on parenting Web sites. Apparently, conscientious mothers limit the amount of time their kids watch TV and play computer games. I bragged that I limited my kids’ screen time to their waking hours. The minute they went to sleep, electronics off! I asked my followers if six months of age is too young for sleep-away camp. I did one controversial post about how I was so exhausted from lack of sleep (Mia was very colicky as a baby) that I watched Rosemary’s Baby and thought, Some moms have all the luck.

  In the beginning, I used to just take ordinary aspects of mothering and turn them into humorous anecdotes. But soon I started writing about more serious stuff, like my postpartum depression after Mia’s birth. That had been what prompted me to start the blog. The loneliness. That horrible loneliness and despair I felt after she was born. So many people could relate to that. It was after that entry that the blog really took off. There was no reason to scroll through the entries again now. I had done it the night before—all the birthday parties, all the school trips and bake sales. Mia’s first steps. Wyatt’s first words. The way their warm bodies felt when they crawled into bed with us at night. The way that Wyatt’s cowlick was exactly the same as his father’s, and how I loved to trace the swirl of it with my fingers. They were beautiful, my children. But they weren’t real, and when I typed in the commands to take the blog off-line, I was fine. It was when I went through the steps of deleting the blog completely, using some tricks I had learned from some online friends to try to wipe it from the Internet entirely, that I became sad. I needed to remove the URL from the most common search engines; I couldn’t remove it from the entire Internet, but I did the best I could. Later I went down to help Joan get dinner ready.

  Laurel came in while I was cutting up peaches for a pie.

  “Hey, has anybody seen my phone?”

  “No,” Joan said. She immediately started looking around the kitchen.

  “You had it when you were in my room. Maybe you left it up there,” I said.

  “No, I had it after that. I had it in our room. I took a nap. I just don’t know where I put it before the nap.”

  Spin shouted down from the second floor, “I’ve got it, Laurel! You left it in the bathroom!”

  “Oh, thank God,” Laurel said.

  I put the pie in the oven and checked on the roast. Spin and Laurel set the table for dinner and then came into the kitchen.

  “Is Everett coming?” Spin asked.

  “No,” I said. “He’s not home.”

  “Should I set a place, just in case he shows up?”

  “No,” I said. “He’s not having dinner with us tonight.”

  When we all eventually sat down to dinner, Joan asked if they’d had any traffic on the way home from Long Island.

  “It was a little slow when we first got on the Hutchinson Parkway, then it eased up,” Spin said. Riley was sitting next to Spin’s chair, wagging his tail. Spin could always be counted on to slip him treats from the table, something Everett and Whit hated. Suddenly, Spin stood and looked out the window.

  “Now I know what’s strange. Where are Everett’s dogs? They didn’t come out when we came home. And they didn’t bark. The house is so dark.”

  “Everett might be moving,” I said.

  “What?” said Spin, laughing. “You’re joking, right?”

  “No,” I said.

  Joan said, “Charlotte, what do you mean? What’s going on?” She went and looked out the window at Everett’s dark house.

  “We had a fight,” I said.

  “What happened?” Joan asked. “He took the dogs? Where?”

  I couldn’t talk without crying, so I just ate my food. I really didn’t feel like getting into the whole thing. I just wanted to eat my food and watch Laurel. She gave me a little sympathetic smile and cut into her meat.

  “Sweetie, what happened?” Joan persisted.

  “I found out last night that I have no idea who Everett is. He’s not who we thought he was.”

  Again, Spin laughed. “Is this a joke?”

  Laurel looked from him to me with an air of detached concern.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Charlotte,” Joan said. “I’ve known Everett since he was in kindergarten. He’s not perfect. He could be a little more … industrious, maybe.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

  I finished my dinner but told them I didn’t feel like dessert. I went back up to the attic. Now that the blog had been taken down, I needed to close Susan’s social media accounts.

  When I started accumulating a lot of followers on the blog, I had Susan join Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. She started a Pinterest page. Susan had five thousand Facebook friends, the maximum allowed, and over a million Twitter followers.

  I have thirty-one Facebook friends as myself. As Charlotte Maynard. Mostly people from town, old friends from school, some friends of Sally and Spin.

  Spin, Laurel, and Joan watched a movie, then Laurel came up to talk to me before she went to bed.

  “I just wanted to make sure you’re okay,” she said.

  “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “What happened? With Everett?”

  “He ended up in bed with somebody on the night of our party. She was somebody I know, somebody I considered to be a friend.” I looked her dead in the eyes as I said this. Her calm, sympathetic demeanor made my heart race. I wasn’t angry, though. The rush of adrenaline, my hot face, my shaking hands—they weren’t caused by feelings of rage. I wasn’t angry. I was afraid.

  Feelings aren’t facts, I reminded myself.

  “Oh no,” Laurel said. “How horrible for you. Well, I see why you two can’t stay living so close. I think it’s for the best. Once he moves his stuff out, we can get somebody in there who really wants to work. It always drove Spin and Perry crazy that he was living there rent-free. And Everett’s whole slacker persona? It’s an act. I’ve known guys like him. That glib charm. He takes advantage of others. He’s taken advantage of you and he’s taken advantage of Spin’s good nature for years.”

  “I see that now,” I managed to say.

  * * *

  I needed cell service, so I waited until everybody was asleep and then I pushed my old bik
e across the lawn and onto the road, just as Sally and I had done all those nights in high school. All those nights at Holden. I rode up to the beginning of East Shore Road and looked at my phone. Three bars. There’s a little grassy area there at the intersection, and if it hadn’t rained all day, I would have sat on the grass, but the grass was soaked. So I stood, my bike leaning against me, and tapped out Everett’s number. I got his voice mail.

  “Everett,” I said. “I’m sorry. Come home. We need you to come home. You were right about Laurel. She and Spin”—fitful sobbing and snorting here, I was really losing it—“they’re … married. Where are you? Come home. Please come home, Everett.”

  I shoved the phone back into my pocket and was just about to get on my bike when I saw a car approaching. I could tell by the headlights that it was a Jeep. A lot of people have Jeeps around here, but I knew it was Spin’s. I pushed my bike over to the passenger door.

  “Oh. My. God. I was so worried about you.” It was Laurel. I knew it would be Laurel.

  “Why?”

  “Because I heard you leave. I looked outside and saw you riding off on your bike.”

  “I like to ride my bike at night,” I said.

  “It’s dangerous, though. Put it in the back, I’ll drive you home.”

  I heaved the bike into the backseat of the Jeep and climbed in.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Whit loved the idea of survival. He had a romantic fascination with the idea that you might overcome any trial offered up by nature or fate, as long as you were prepared. He took every opportunity to teach us children survival skills. We learned how to make a fire without matches; how to collect drinking water from dew; which forest plants are edible and which are poisonous. Navigation was what he loved most—navigating without instruments—and we all knew how to tell which direction was north or south without benefit of a compass or cell phone. On hot summer nights, floating on our backs in the lake, he taught us how to find Polaris. We all tried to be the first to see it.

  Polaris. The North Star. It’s right there at the end of the Little Dipper, right there at the tip of the handle. If you face Polaris, you’re facing north. The most important thing to do, if you’re lost at night, is to find Polaris. Pick a landmark while it’s still dark. When the sun comes up, Polaris will be gone. Pick a distant hilltop, a cluster of trees; hopefully, you’ll see something that’s directly below Polaris. That’s true north. You can navigate from there.