“Emma, can you unlock the door?”
“It’s locked,” Emma says.
“Is there a key, honey?”
“A key?” She sounds genuinely confused. I can’t waste time trying to explain to her.
“Emma, honey, you stay right there, okay? I’m going to go around to the back of the house and try to come inside that way.” I run and unlatch the back gate, nearly tripping over a coiled hose as I make my way around to the porch steps, where I leap over them to get to the sliding glass door.
Fuck, also locked! I cup my hands around my eyes and squint through the sliding glass door. The kitchen is immaculate again, napkins neatly snug in their holder in the center of the kitchen table, apples and oranges stacked in a blue bowl on the counter. What the hell is going on? I bang on the door, calling for Emma.
“Emma!” I pound my fist. “Emma, come on, it’s Waverly.” I watch through the window and Emma finally turns the corner into the kitchen, clutching a ratty stuffed bunny. “Honey,” I kneel down so that we are eye to eye through the thick-paned glass. “Tell me, can you wake your mommy up?”
“Mommy’s upstairs,” the little girl says, holding one palm up like she’s a tiny cocktail waitress holding an invisible tray. “I told you, she’s sleeping.”
“Okay, honey. Can you wake her up for me?” I pull my phone out of my pocket and dial the home number again, hoping the sound will wake Amy.
“She’s night-night upstairs.”
“Emma, are you okay?”
The little girl stares back at me, holding her bunny and rubbing one of the tattered ears between her thumb and forefinger. This isn’t right. Emma should be at preschool and Amy should be sitting across from me at Paulsen’s, halfway through the tuna melt she always stuffs with potato chips.
I look out at the yard, and then to the identical, desolate, treeless backyards of the neighbors, tapping my fingers against my chin. Am I crazy to do this? Before I can talk myself out of it, I dial the three numbers—911. I hit “send.” Emma stands silently watching me on the other side of the door, so close to the glass that her tiny potbelly almost touches it. I force myself to smile at her. I wave, bending my fingers at the knuckles, and she waves back.
“Nine-one-one. What’s your emergency?”
“Uh,” I start. I hold the phone with my right hand and shake my left one at my side, trying to work out my nerves. “It’s my friend. I’m outside her house and I’m worried that something has happened to her. Her daughter, she’s three, she’s just standing on the other side of the locked door, telling me her mother’s asleep.”
“Do you hear noises? Is there anything else that gives you reason to believe that something has happened to your friend inside the house?”
Even the 911 operator makes me feel like I’m overreacting. “Yes, I have reason to believe that something has happened to her.”
“Please continue.”
I close my eyes. “I know that there’s a history of physical abuse in her home.”
“What’s the address? We’ll send someone out.”
I give the operator the information and then shove the phone back into my pocket. “Emma, honey, hold on,” I say. “People are going to be here to open the door any minute.”
When the policeman pulls up in front of the house and gets out of the car, the first thing I think is that he looks like a teenager dressed in an officer’s costume. I need someone serious, somebody with experience, not some kid who looks like he drives around all day telling fart jokes over his two-way radio. “You’re the woman who called?” he says, slamming the door of his cruiser and walking up the driveway.
“Yes.” I wring my hands to keep them from trembling. “My friend’s daughter is inside and she says her mom’s upstairs asleep but I think something’s wrong.”
He stops halfway up the driveway and flips open a notebook, where he starts writing down notes—slowly. “And you told the operator that you believe that there’s a history of abuse in the home?” He doesn’t look up when he says it, just continues his methodical, careful scratching.
“Yes, my friend has told me that her husband abuses her. Or abused her, I guess.”
He keeps writing and then taps the end of his pen against his notebook, as if he’s trying to find the right word before he continues. “Which one?” he says, looking up at me.
“What?” I say, confused.
“Abuses her or abused her? You said both.”
“Oh.” Despite the baby face, he’s wearing a badge and has a gun holstered to his waist, both of which intimidate me, as I’m certain they’re supposed to. I force myself to hold his gaze, reminding myself that I have to get this right for Amy. “She told me that he stopped but to be honest, I don’t believe her.”
He starts writing again. “Okay,” he finally says. He puts his notebook in his front shirt pocket and walks up to the house.
“Her daughter is on the other side of the door,” I say, walking close behind him. I don’t want him to scare her. He knocks and rings the doorbell twice.
“Her little girl, Emma, she’s right on the other side of the door,” I say again over his shoulder. “Or she was just a minute ago.”
He tries to peer into the windows as I had before he arrived. “There’s noth—,” I start.
He knocks again, this time louder. “Police!” he shouts. “This is the police!”
I hear Emma whine from behind the door.
“Emma, honey?” I step forward and press my ear to the door, ignoring the look that I can feel the officer giving me. “Emma, honey?”
Nothing.
“Emma, baby, come on, say something,” I say again.
I look at the officer. “She must have gone somewhere. I don’t hear her.”
The officer turns from me and pinches his mouth with his thumb and forefinger. He’s apparently trying to determine what to do next. Why doesn’t he just force the door open, break a window—something?
“Emma!” I bang loudly on the door. “Isn’t there something else you can do?” I say to him.
He keeps staring off into the distance, ignoring me.
“Emma!” I say again.
Finally, he turns to me and says, “I’m not supposed to enter a home without reason, but since there appears to be a child in the house alone—”
“She’s not in the house alone. She said her mother was sleeping.”
He nods but it’s not a nod of recognition. He obviously just wants me to shut up. “I’m going to call for backup,” he says and heads back to his car.
After an agonizing and awkward amount of time that is probably just a few minutes but feels like a lifetime, during which I continue to bang on the front door and peer inside all of the first-floor windows while the cop sits in his car texting his friends or doing God knows what, another police cruiser finally shows up. This officer is a relief. He’s older, with basset-hound jowls and the kind of posture that suggests a military background. He is both far more senior and far more capable than the guy I’ve been dealing with. He takes a tool out of his trunk and while I stand on the front walk, the two of them ram it against the door. I pray that Emma isn’t just on the other side. When it finally swings open, I want to sprint into the house. The younger cop lets the door fall all the way open before he takes a step inside, a move that looks so choreographed that I think he must practice it in front of the mirror at home. I wonder, despondently, if this is the first time he’s ever done this.
When the other cop enters the house, I start to follow behind them. “No, I’m sorry, ma’am,” he says, putting his arm out to stop me. “I need you to stay outside, just in case.”
I slump against the doorjamb, defeated. Just in case of what? My adrenaline is pumping so hard that I feel nauseous. My eyes fall on the table in Amy’s foyer, her keys in a dish on top of it, a picture of Emma covered in cake from her first birthday. It’s become a horribly windy afternoon, and I brush my hair away from my face, the wind echoing a low, hollo
w moan that I can feel in my ears. I try to concentrate on the sound of the officers chuffing their way up the stairs.
“This is the police,” one says. “Is everything okay in here? I’m here to help.”
Where is Emma? “Emma?” I call out. “Emma, it’s Aunt Waverly.”
Before I have a second to consider going in to look for her, I hear the thump-thump-thump of footsteps rushing down the stairs. I lean into the doorway. “You say that her daughter is in here somewhere?” the older policeman says, his expression and posture now even more charged.
“Yes, yes!” I shout. Something is wrong. Oh God. What’s wrong? “She was talking to me from the other side of the door! Just a minute ago!”
“Okay,” he says. He pulls a phone out of his holster and presses a button before speaking into it. “This is Officer Dillard. I’m at 42 Green Leaf Court. I’m going to need an ambulance.”
Ambulance.
I grab at the wall to keep from falling to the ground and claw toward the officer with my other hand. “Oh God, what’s wrong?” I scream, my voice vibrating with fear. “Oh no, oh God, please tell me she’s okay!”
He puts his hand over where I’d grabbed his forearm and gently peels me off of him. “Is there someone you can call?” he says.
Larry, who by a stroke of luck is working from home today to finish up a paper for a journal submission, pulls up to the house less than five minutes after the ambulance. I’m sitting in the front yard, holding Emma in my lap on the damp ground. She’d been in her room, hiding behind a mound of stuffed animals in a corner, and she hasn’t said a word to me since the officer brought her out of the house.
Larry jogs toward us. “What’s the latest?” he says to me in a low voice, glancing at Emma as he says it.
“They haven’t told me anything yet,” I say, winding a section of Emma’s hair between my fingers. “The paramedics got here and went into the house with the police officers and then they came back out and got a stretcher.” I feel dizzy, like I’ve just been spinning in circles, like when my mom and I used to twirl in the yard together when I was a kid. I kiss the top of Emma’s head.
“The police?”
“All inside.” A third car had come along with the ambulance.
Larry gets up and walks toward the house, craning to try to see inside without getting too close to the front door. I hear a car in the distance and pray that it isn’t headed toward us. I can’t imagine what could happen—what I’d do—if Mike shows up now. But he wouldn’t, would he? He couldn’t. Not since I’m certain he has something to do with this. The car I’d heard—a truck from a lawn-care company—passes by the turn into the cul-de-sac. I hug Emma closer. I haven’t seen any of Amy’s neighbors. If anyone’s home, they’ve apparently decided that they can get a better show from behind their curtains. I scan the windows, looking.
Larry walks back and kneels down next to me. “Have they called anyone else? Asked you any other questions?” He twiddles his thumbs in the same way that he does when he worries over his laptop when he works at home. I reach for him and curl my arm around the sleeve of his fleece jacket. He sits beside me, puts his arm around my shoulders, and gently pinches Emma’s upper arm, smiling at her.
I tell him that the younger police officer took a statement from me. He didn’t want to know anything but the basics—my name and age, how long I’d known Amy and Mike. When he asked me to confirm that I said that there was a history of abuse in their home and I started to answer, he cut me off and told me that he just needed a statement that I said that there was a history. Nothing else. Before I could convince him to let me tell him more, he turned and walked back into the house.
My eyes are fixed on the open front door. “No one’s said a word to me. The police officer brought Emma out after he talked to me,” I say. I rub her back softly. She’s pulling at the grass and lining up the blades in neat rows on my leg.
“No one’s called Mike?” Larry says quietly into my ear, so closely that it tickles.
I shake my head, and he pulls me closer.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Larry and I are singing with Emma, trying to remember the words to “Mockingbird,” when they finally bring Amy out of the house. The paramedics hold tight to each side of her stretcher with the grim, dutiful expressions of pallbearers. I lose control when I see her, forgetting that I’d promised myself just a few minutes earlier that no matter what, I would stay calm for Emma.
I sprint toward Amy, stumbling awkwardly, my legs as weak as twigs. I scream her name and her head falls in my direction. She’s barely conscious. She squints at me as if she can’t exactly place me. Her stare is as dim as pond water.
She’s wearing the same paint-splattered, fraying UNC sweatshirt that she’s had for as long as I’ve known her, and probably longer. I’ve seen her in it a million times. The memories flash by me, sharp and quick, like in one of those flip books I loved as a kid: eating takeout and watching Will and Grace in our apartments after work, taking a lasagna to her house on the day that she brought Emma home, painting furniture together in the bakery before it opened, a few weeks ago when she was limping.
Her mouth gapes open like it froze midsentence. When I get closer, squeezing myself as close as I can between one of the paramedics and the stretcher, I notice the mottled, black skin around her right eye and the blood crusted around her nostrils, her eyes, her mouth. There’s a sheet over her lower half that flaps in the wind, and when it balloons up, I can see that she is bare from the waist down. Her thigh is covered in a sickening swirl of bruises: black, purple, and red, a hideous rainbow of colors. There are other marks along her neck, all yellowed at the edges, like paper left out in the sun.
“Is she going to be okay?” I scream out, to anyone who will answer.
“We found her like this in her bed,” says a voice behind me. I turn. It’s the young police officer that’d first arrived after my 911 call.
“Tell me more. What else?”
“She’s not totally with it, confused really, so she may have some sort of brain injury.” He says it as casually as if he’s describing the plays in a football game.
I scramble toward the ambulance and grab the back of one of the paramedic’s jackets. “I’m coming with you,” I say.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he says. “We can’t let you. You’re going to have to follow behind.”
I’m frantic. I turn to where I was sitting with Larry and Emma and see that he already has her in his car. I run to the passenger-side door he’s already opened for me.
On the ride to the hospital, the ambulance’s siren screaming in front of us like a wailing animal, I hold tight to Emma in the backseat. It’s hard to tell how much she understands, but my guess is that it’s more than we think. Back at Amy’s house, while we were waiting on the paramedics to bring Amy out, I’d told her that her mommy was sick and that those nice people were just going to give her some medicine to help her feel better. There was nothing childlike about the somber way that she nodded, nor the way that she simply turned back to playing with the grass without asking any other questions. It made me suspect that she’d already witnessed more than anyone should ever have to, much less a three-year-old.
In the rearview mirror, I catch Larry’s eye and he smiles at me but it’s the kind of worried, closed-lip smile that people offer when they have nothing else to give. I saw it plenty in the weeks after my parents died and never wanted to see it again.
The siren screeches, its menace filling my ears as we careen over the wooded ribbon of the highway hugging the Potomac. I grip the underside of my seat with my free hand, bracing myself as if I’m sitting in a raft and plunging down the river that rages just beyond us.
I’ve been to Georgetown Hospital once since my parents died. Just once, when Emma was born. It took every ounce of my will to hold it together during our thirty-minute visit, to smile and coo over the baby as I was meant to instead of hurl myself out the window like I wanted to. There is fa
r too much to remember here, and it all comes rushing back the moment I step out of Larry’s car and into the glaringly bright hallway of the ER. I see the check-in counter where I once stood, asking how to find my parents, and the crowded waiting area that reminds me of a bus depot. One of the paramedics tells me that Amy’s been taken to the trauma bay and that a doctor will come and find me.
Larry’s taken Emma back to our house, and for twenty minutes, I stand alone near the nurse’s station in the main treatment area. Two barrel-chested surgeons in scrubs and caps stare me down as they hurry past me before disappearing into one of the curtained rooms along the periphery. A nurse looks over the high counter that separates the nurse’s station from the rest of the room and asks me if I need anything. I’m clearly in the way but I’m not going anywhere. The nurse points me toward the waiting room but I cut her off; I know where it is. I know its nubby upholstery and the sweet-rotten snack-machine smell. I know the cafeteria, the coffee shop, and this very nurse’s station, where you’re met with openhearted sympathy or sheer annoyance depending on who’s on duty. In two months it will be the sixteenth anniversary of my parents’ death and it’s still too soon to be back here. I didn’t need to see any of this again. Ever.
I stand in my spot as if there is an X taped onto the floor beneath me. When the doctor finds me, I’m relieved that I don’t recognize her. I’d dreaded that it would be somebody who’d cared for my parents. She’s rosy and plump, with a sensible short haircut and a mauve turtleneck underneath her scrubs. She looks like a woman who might run a church preschool. She smiles kindly and extends her hand to introduce herself. Her name is Dr. Meyer. She points me toward an alcove where we can talk.
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