by Nicole Baart
I didn’t want to forget.
Trinidad U.
24, Native American, 1 yr college
Tall, weight lifter, full sleeve of tattoos (right arm). Born-again Christian.
Cousins know.
CRIM HARASS, 27m, 1yr pp
CHAPTER 11
JESS WOKE UP the boys when it was still dark.
“But it’s night, Mama,” Gabe complained, rolling over and taking the blankets with him.
“We have to go to school early today,” Jess said. She tried to draw him to her, but he was curled into a tight, immovable ball. “We’ll stop at the bakery on the way. The doughnuts will still be warm.”
That got him moving. He groaned, but he scooted toward her and offered his arms for the sweatshirt Jess was holding. Gabe slept in nothing but his football pajama pants—summer or winter—so dressing him was easy. Not that he needed to be dressed anymore. And yet, Jess held out his joggers and then helped him into his socks, pulling them all the way up to his knees. It was a tangible sort of love.
While Gabe was lacing up his tennis shoes in the entryway, Jess went to knock again on Max’s door. He had refused to talk to her when she came home the night before, and his bad mood still hung in the air like grease smoke. Jess could feel it in her hair, against her skin. It made her feel sick and slightly nauseous.
“We gotta go,” she said, pushing open his door. Thankfully, Max was fully dressed and putting a notebook into his backpack. He zipped it closed and swung the bag over his shoulder. The motion hit Jess in a tender place. “You ready for this?”
Max turned to her but didn’t meet her gaze. “Sure,” he grunted. “I’ve always wanted to be a janitor.”
Jess flinched. “Don’t forget an extra set of clothes.”
“Whatever.”
He brushed past her and jogged lightly down the steps, disappearing before Jess had a chance to make sure he had everything he needed.
The head custodian had sent an email outlining what Max would be doing and how he should dress for the job. A scaffold had been set up against the side of the building, and Max would start at the top then work his way down. The school had bought an entire box of a special graffiti remover and sent the bill to Max, and he would spend the next several mornings getting rid of the evidence of his crime. Spray, wait, scrub, pressure wash, repeat. Raincoat recommended, as well as old clothes, warm gloves, and boots. It was wet, messy work, and not much fun in the thirty-degree weather they were currently having. Jess felt a pang of sympathy for her son. Even if his punishment was entirely justified—and much less than he deserved.
They picked up doughnuts at Melly’s, a half dozen in a variety of flavors, the entire lot still warm from the oven. It was a small perk of having to get up before the crack of dawn, though Max didn’t appreciate it. Jess bought him two raspberry jelly–filled, but he refused them.
“I’ll eat ’em!” Gabe said as he reached into the box that sat between them on the backseat and grabbed one of the glazed long johns. Jess’s eyes flashed to the rearview mirror and she witnessed the exact moment when he took a big bite and a blob of ruby-red jam spilled out of the end and onto the knee of his gray pants. “Oops!” he said cheerfully, then leaned over to try and lick it off.
“Don’t!” Jess said, catching his gaze in the rearview mirror. She was just pulling into the roundabout in front of Auburn Middle School, and could soon put the car in park and clean up Gabe’s mess with something more sanitary than his tongue. “Let me get a wet wipe. I think there’s one in the glove box. Max—”
Her words were cut off by the slam of the car door. She hadn’t even fully stopped moving, but Max was already gone.
Jess sighed heavily as she threw the car in park and rummaged for the plastic pack of wet wipes. She wondered if she should follow him. Could she trust him to go to the janitor’s office? They were supposed to meet there at six thirty so Darren could give Max his marching orders. Darren was a nice guy; he’d been the head custodian at the Auburn school district for as long as Jess had worked there. He was quiet and hardworking, and when he had confronted Max about the graffiti, it was done with a gentle disappointment. No shouting or shaming, but Auburn was his castle, and Max had defaced it.
“Should I go after him?” Jess wondered, and didn’t realize she had said it out loud until Gabe replied, “He’s a big boy, Mom.”
“True,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t worry about him.”
Because it didn’t make sense for them to go back home, Jess took Gabe to her classroom. He liked to color on her marker boards and play with the costumes. Sometimes he set up the textbooks like dominoes and then giggled as he watched them fall. Jess had a deep affinity for books, but Gabe was happy and that was all that really mattered right now. Her heart was too battered to expend even an ounce of worry on something as trivial as a textbook being toppled. She didn’t complain except to say, “Be sure to pick them up when you’re done and put them back where you found them.”
Jess tried to mark papers and watched the clock, telling herself that it would be overbearing to call the middle school to find out how Max was doing. Was he freezing? Was it hard work? Jess had nothing against hard work, but there was something about the thought of her son out in the cold, dark morning that made her stomach twist painfully. Max’s sentence was so public, so glaring. Anyone who came early to school would see him there, scrubbing the wall. Alone.
At seven forty-five Jess decided it would be okay to walk over to the middle school. She had to deliver Gabe to his kindergarten room, and cutting through the high school meant that they would only have to walk a short distance outside to cross the campus. And it would give her a great excuse to check on Max.
“Get your coat on, babe,” she told Gabe. “And don’t forget your backpack.” Jess slipped her arms into her own coat, and as she did so she felt her pocket buzz with an incoming call. Max?
It was Meredith.
“Hey,” Jess said, tucking the phone between her cheek and shoulder so she could button up her coat. She turned to Gabe and helped him with his zipper. “What’s up?”
“I know it’s a hard morning,” Meredith said. “I just wanted to say hi. I’ve got your back.”
Jess felt her shoulders relax the tiniest bit. “I know you do. He’s out there right now. At least, he’s supposed to be.”
“He is. I had to drop Jayden off for basketball practice and I saw him on the scaffold.”
“Ugh.” Jess felt a burst of righteous indignation. “It’s so public. Do they have to make it so public?” She took Gabe by the hand and led him out of her classroom. The halls were still quiet—the doors wouldn’t unlock for students until eight. Jess was grateful for a few more minutes of peace.
“He should have spray-painted the baseball backstop or something,” Meredith said. “No one ever sees that.”
It was true. Auburn didn’t exactly have a stellar baseball team. But Jess got the point: Max had done this to himself. He had covered the side of the gym—a tall swath of wall that everyone drove past at least twice a day as they dropped off and picked up their kids—in fifteen-foot arcs of fury and fire. Unless he worked in the middle of the night, there would always be someone who would see him righting his wrongs. And the afternoon and evening would be infinitely worse because people would have time to linger on their way to and from practices and basketball games.
“I hate this for him,” Jess said, her voice cracking. She squeezed Gabe’s hand tighter until he pulled it out of her grip and skipped ahead down the hallway. “It’s not fair. Not so soon after Evan . . .”
“Maybe it’ll be a good thing,” Meredith said. “Healing.”
“I hope so.” But Jess didn’t feel very confident.
“So,” Meredith said, changing the topic. “I hear Gabe had a playdate with Sawyer Tisdale yesterday afternoon.”
“Wow.” Jess knew that word traveled quickly in small-town Auburn, but this was a little over the top. “How
did you know that?”
“Cara and I have spinning class together. Remember? I’ve been trying to get you to go for months.”
“Oh.” Jess remembered, but she had absolutely no desire to go to Summit or Crunch or any of the other workouts Meredith frequented. And it bothered her that she had been a topic of conversation at a gym class. What else had they said about her? “What did Cara say?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, did she say anything about Gabe? Was he good for her? Did it go okay?”
“Didn’t you ask her that yourself?”
Jess paused in front of the set of doors between the middle and high school. She needed her fob to unlock them, and she dug around through the tissues, lip balm, and other odds and ends in her pocket trying to find it. “Well, I would have,” she admitted slowly, “but I had to run an errand. I missed her.”
“You weren’t there when Cara dropped him off?”
Something about the tone of Meredith’s voice made Jess believe that she already knew the answer to her question. Meredith was fishing. “Clearly you already know,” Jess said, her warm feelings for her friend frosting over a bit.
Meredith inhaled deeply. “Okay. I do. Why weren’t you there, Jess? Where were you?”
Jess thought about her visit to Promise Adoption. A part of her wanted to confess what she had been doing, but something held her back. Meredith already thought she was acting crazy; she didn’t need to give her more evidence to support her theory.
“Max was there,” Jess said. “He’s thirteen, Mer. He can take care of his six-year-old brother for ten minutes while I run to the store.” She finally found the fob and held it in front of the electronic pad beside the double doors. The lock popped and Gabe wrenched the door open, then took off running down the hallway ahead of her.
“Cara said she had to ring the doorbell four times.”
“It’s Gabe’s house!” Jess was getting exasperated. “He can walk into it anytime he wants to.”
“The door was locked.”
It was true. Jess had started locking her doors after it became obvious that someone had been in her house. “Look, I didn’t realize it was such a big deal. But if Cara has a problem with how the playdate went, she should talk to me about it. She has my number.”
“Hey, I didn’t mean to upset you,” Meredith soothed. “I just wanted you to know it was a little unnerving for Cara.”
“Then she should have told me so. We could have worked it out,” Jess said. “Look, I gotta go. The bell is going to ring any minute and it’s about to get really loud in here.”
“See you tonight?” Meredith asked quickly, trying to squeeze her words in before Jessica hung up.
Tonight? Jess racked her brain, trying to come up with any plans they might have made. “I don’t know,” she said, stalling. “We kind of have a lot on our plate right now.”
“You forgot.”
“No I didn’t. We’re just—”
The bell rang over Jess’s head, a squawking, tinny scream that signaled the floodgates were about to open. Jess jogged ahead and grabbed the back of Gabe’s coat, drawing him against her and away from the wave of preteens that would soon surge through the doors. “I’ll call you later,” she said, not waiting for a reply. She clicked off her phone and slid it into her pocket.
“I’m going to be late!” Gabe screeched, trying to pull away from her. Jess could feel the tension in his shoulders, his anxiety pulling muscles taut as he strained ahead.
“It’s okay, buddy,” Jess said. “It’s fine. The middle school bell rings before the elementary school bell, remember? We’ve got—” she jutted her wrist out of the arm of her coat and consulted her watch—“three minutes. That’s plenty of time.”
Gabe still held himself mannequin-stiff, but he allowed Jess to lead him as she parted the sea of middle schoolers hurrying past. They were going against the current, but they wove through the crowd to the front door and then hurried down the sidewalk toward the elementary school. As they rounded the corner by the flagpole, Jess’s gaze snapped to the scaffolding and the thick lines of spray paint that would soon (hopefully) be gone. Max was nowhere to be seen, but the highest corner of graffiti—a sweep of orange that looked like a flame licking up the brick—was smeared and faded. It was working. Sort of.
Jess deposited Gabe inside the elementary school doors just as the first bell rang. “Made it!” she said, smacking his cheek with a quick, comical kiss. At least, she hoped it was funny, lighthearted. His morning had been thrown off and she prayed that he would be able to find center before the rest of his day went careening off its axis. Gabe was shaking his hands a little, ticking his tongue in a click-click-click against the roof of his mouth. This was just the beginning, but he was learning to calm himself down before his tension erupted into a full-fledged fit. Jess made a mental note to text his teacher and suggest that the sensory room would be a good idea. Gabe could swing for a few minutes, or run his fingers through the colorful bins of dry rice and beans and water beads. That usually quieted him. She prayed that today it would.
Since Gabe wasn’t with her anymore, Jess cut straight through the parking lot and made a beeline for the middle school. She was late. She’d miss a few minutes of first period, and by the time she settled her class down they’d be behind schedule. There was nothing quite so frustrating to Jess as throwing off her lesson plan—each day was already filled to overflowing—but as she retraced her steps through Auburn Middle School, she found that she just didn’t care. She had to see Max. Had to. Jess was terrified that this experience would be the end of him. It would break him in two.
Max’s locker was down a side hallway near the science classrooms. The lab always gave off the slightly clinical smell of Bunsen burners and formaldehyde, and Jess found herself breathing shallowly through her mouth as she peered over and around students, trying to catch a glimpse of her son.
“Hi, Mrs. Chamberlain,” a petite girl with cropped hair called. Jess found her almost instantly. She was wearing leopard-print leggings with a chic black tunic, and though she looked like a teenager, Jess knew she was barely twelve.
“Hi, Avery.” Jess smiled a little. It felt fake. “Have you seen Max this morning?”
“Yeah, he was scrubbing the wall before school.”
Jess heaved an inward sigh. “I know. Have you seen him recently? I was hoping to catch him before classes start.”
“Nope.” Avery shrugged. “Sorry. Have a good day, Mrs. Chamberlain!”
Jess watched as the girl all but pranced off down the hallway, clearly oblivious to her distress and unconcerned about all that had happened to the Chamberlain family. Is this what Max had to put up with every day? No wonder he was so angry. The world was moving on without them, already forgetting all that they had lost. Avery had lived down the street from the Chamberlains for most of her life. Her mother had brought a pan of brownies when Evan died. But clearly their pain was already old news.
Max wasn’t at his locker and the crowd in the halls was beginning to thin. The final bell would ring in a minute or two and anybody not in their assigned seat would be given a tardy. Three tardies equaled a detention. Jess wondered for a moment what happened to teachers who were late. It had never happened to her before.
She hated giving up, but Max was nowhere to be seen and she didn’t have his schedule memorized. There was no way that Jess could find him without peeking her head into each and every classroom. Even in her current state she knew that was utterly out of the question.
But the route back to the high school ran right by a pair of bathrooms, and as Jess rushed past she nearly stumbled right into Max. He was coming out of the boys’ restroom, head down and hands thrust deep in the kangaroo pouch of his black hoodie. His blond hair was mussed and flecked with bits of debris, his sweatshirt dusty and damp. Jess pulled up hard and caught his upper arms in her hands to stop herself from bowling him over. He hadn’t seen her coming.
“Hey,
” she said, tugging him close. It wasn’t hard to let their momentum press them into a sort of hug, but Max yanked away almost instantly.
“What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you,” Jess said, trying not to be hurt by his rejection. “I wanted to ask you how it went this morning. I wanted to see how you’re doing.”
“Fine,” he spat. But he was clearly not fine. Max’s eyes were rimmed with pink and the chemical odor of industrial-strength cleaner clung to him.
“You don’t look fine.”
He just glared at her.
“This is ridiculous,” Jess said, something inside of her splintering. She blinked back hot tears. “This is never happening again. You’re not doing this.”
“Whatever.”
Max moved to sweep past her, but Jess caught his arm. “Look at me,” she said. “You do not get to just run away from me. I’m so sorry that you had to do this. I won’t let it happen again. We’ll find another way, okay?”
“It’s not a big deal,” Max mumbled. He flicked his gaze to hers for just a second; then he stared at his shoes. They, too, were filthy. “Really. It’s fine. I don’t mind doing it.”
“Then what in the world is wrong? What is going on with you?” Jess felt stupid the second the words left her mouth. Max had just lost his father. It was obvious what was wrong with him. And yet, this behavior had started months ago. Long before Evan passed away, Jess had lost her son.
“Is it the book I found?” Jess whispered. It felt dangerous to bring up the book here, in such a public place. Never mind that the halls were empty or that in the moment she paused to take a jagged breath the final bell rang and they were both officially late. “Does this have something to do with Gabe’s birth mom?” Her voice gave out on those final two words, but Max was looking at her when she mouthed them. He knew what she said.