“I only did one lap around the block,” I say but I am caught. My brief, late-night parental negligence has been secret. Now my impropriety will be known, will be questioned.
“I should go,” I say, hiking my purse over my shoulder. “Chloe and Wyatt are sleeping in their beds.” I go for the door, then turn around. “Listen. When I leave, keep the doors closed and locked.” I dig my keys out of my purse and rattle them, stalling, considering what I want to share with Valerie. “My neighbor is a suspect in a criminal case.”
Kidnapping.
Although, at this point, five months in, it has probably turned into a murder case. But I don’t want to say murder. I’m not ready to say murder.
My disclosure feels stagy and unnecessary, but my neighbor’s criminality has been a cloud of noxious fumes—something godawful like burning PVC—trapped inside my mind for days, and I have been desperate to vent. And Valerie should keep the doors locked. What if she was planning to lie on my couch with the front door open, warm summer breeze breathing through the screen?
“What criminal case?”
“Ava Boone.”
“Oh my God, Grace. Ava Boone? Oh God. That poor angel.” Valerie claps her hands to her cheeks and drags the skin down, nudging her glasses straight in the process. “That poor baby should be starting kindergarten like my Max. This is crazy. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I only found out a few days ago.”
“Why is your neighbor a suspect?”
“I don’t know all the details,” I say, which isn’t exactly a lie. “He’s probably innocent. They haven’t arrested him, right? He’s probably a good guy.” I’m trying for optimistic, I’m championing devil’s advocate, but my voice wavers because he’s not a good guy. “I’m just being on the safe side.”
“Safe side? Ditching your kids to go for a jog? What were you thinking?” She’s not patronizing me or being a dick. It’s a fair question.
I have several answers, each of them honest.
1. Thinking? I was barely thinking. These past four days my mind has been sticky with cortisol spooge and desperate for an eleven-minute brain-bath of dopamine clarity.
2. I have not slept in four days. I was hoping physical exertion would lead to sleep.
3. I haven’t had sex in six months and needed some form of physical release.
4. Chloe took a photo of me last week. Actually, she took twenty-five. A series of snapshots beginning with sneaking my phone off the counter as I washed dishes and ending with her getting a purely joyful tickling on the couch. I thought I was pulling off forty. These photos were a slap in the face, twenty-five of them. The first few photos showed my ass sagging in gray yoga pants and the outline of my underwear inches below where said ass is supposed to end. The next dozen photos highlighted underarms so pale, doughy, and mottled, they made me want to give myself plastic surgery with a butter knife. The final shots showcased my oily, creased forehead and greasy hair and this lumpy scrotal-like sac under my jaw I had no idea existed. That sac was the worst of surprises. That I appear happy in the photos, deliriously happy, as I tickle my pint-sized trouble-maker, counts for nothing. The ugliness her photojournalism displayed whites out everything. I remind myself, Mom ranks as “most searched” on porn sites. Doesn’t work. Nothing will boost my ego. Bottom line: exercise was needed.
I go with the easiest answer. “I haven’t slept in four days, Val. I was trying to knock myself out.”
“They got drugs for that. Or why not polish off a bottle of wine? That’s what I do.” She shakes her head, dumbfounded, same as the long-haired teenage boy. “Didn’t you check the neighborhood before you bought?” There is support and concern in her voice, but also judgement. What kind of idiot mother are you?
“I checked the predator site, but what else can you do? Go door to door, asking if anyone’s a suspect in a kidnapping? He’s not convicted of anything. She’s still missing.”
“Missing?” she says. “You know seventy-six percent of kidnapped girls are murdered in the first three hours.”
Seventy-four percent, according to my Google search. “I know. I should go, Val.” She’s put me on the defense, which I hate. And my neck stings. Images of the water-fearing, rabies-infected Indonesian teenage boy I saw on YouTube resurface.
“You’re right, you should go,” she says. Then, “Do the kids know?”
“Not yet, no.”
“OK, you go.” Avoiding the mangled side of my neck, she hugs me quickly, but generously. A good hug. One that makes me realize I am in serious need of adult contact.
Wyatt’s eight-year-old hugs are few and far between, and when he gives them, he turns his face away from my eyes and my clothes as if the smell and the sight of me is unbearable. Before the hug even begins, he is pulling away.
Chloe’s three-year-old hugs are communion, all fluttering butterfly hands and moist skin, but they are also greedy. Chloe is known for holding my face between her grubby palms and squeezing hard. If she can’t reach my face, she is on my leg, her small hands grabbing the cellulite on my thighs.
Kids are takers. They poke their little straws into your Capri Sun soul and they suck.
I drive myself to St Joe’s hospital with my window down. Warm breeze blows at my face, cooling my cheeks, but my scalp is sweaty and tingly.
Hospitals make me nervous. It’s a phobia, really. Driving to one is akin to nearing the front of the line for a haunted house. Not a cutesy haunted house targeting a wide-eyed middle-school audience, but one that indiscriminately employs thirty-year-olds with criminal records and runs extension cords to power real chainsaws.
The last time I went to a haunted house, I elbowed a zombie in the jaw and knocked him over a coffin. I hope I can keep my hands to myself at St Joe’s.
3
SHRINK THIS WOMAN
The soapy, metallic scent of Betadine is up my nose.
I am on my back, shirt off, bra on, shivering. The hospital air is chilled. Plus, I’m anxious.
The ubiquitous white tissue paper crinkles beneath me as I wiggle slightly on the narrow bed. My ER room is partitioned by a modern sliding glass door behind a curtain.
“These don’t look like bat bites. More like scratches,” the woman doctor says. She told me her name a minute ago, but I’ve forgotten. Blue gloves on, she wipes my broken skin with Betadine, which is shockingly cold, and sets the yellowed cotton ball refuse on a tray.
My doctor is slender and has straight blond hair with seemingly natural highlights. Like a child. Her gorgeous hair is swept back into a ponytail so smooth and flawless, I am mystified. She is not conventionally beautiful and has no curves to her body, but her complexion is clear, her teeth are white, and her nose is petite. These features—natural highlights, dainty nose, small pores—are the bland features women like me covet as we get older and have to exert effort to keep masculinity from creeping into our faces.
“Yes, scratches,” I say. “That’s what I was thinking.”
“You could get rabies if one of the bats had saliva on its claws and that bat also had rabies,” she says. “Those are very low odds. Only six percent of bats have rabies.”
She finishes cleaning and bandaging my neck, then palms the garbage and throws it away. “Sit up, please,” she says, lifting the top of my gown off my lap and holding the armholes open. I do as I’m told. I sit, then slip my arms through.
She pulls a penlight from her lab coat pocket, clicks it on, and aims it at my eyes. “Follow my light. You say they attacked you?”
“I know. I know,” I say, tracking her light, “it sounds nuts. I must have been in their way as they flew by.”
“Hm.” She clicks her light off and slips it into her pocket.
“Two teenagers saw it happen.” Why do I feel like a child trying to prop a lie?
She shrugs like maybe she doesn’t believe me, but also doesn’t care. She finishes the standard six-point inspection checklist (respiration, pulse, eyes, ears, nose, throat) whil
e she continues, “A dozen bats in the area have tested positive for rabies so we need to be on the safe side. We’ll give you the first vaccine tonight along with an antibody shot to prime your immune system. This is all standard post-rabies exposure protocol. You will make appointments before you leave for follow-up shots. You need to get them all within one month.” She makes eye contact and widens her eyes. Sclerae as white and healthy as her teeth. “I don’t want to scare you, but untreated rabies is fatal. If you finish the series of four shots, you will be fine. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever had an allergic reaction to a vaccine?”
“Not that I know of.”
The nurse who typed my information—name, birthdate, reason for visit—into her laptop minutes ago starts typing again, presumably recording my answer. The nurse is my age, maybe older. Her hair is curlier and messier than the doctor’s, the skin around her jaw and neck is sagging, but she has the same clear, efficient, kick-ass look in her eyes as her colleague.
“Have you ever been diagnosed with cancer?”
“No.”
“Heart disease?”
“No.”
“Have you ever had surgery?”
“No.”
“What medications are you currently taking?”
“Adderall.”
“For attention deficit?”
I nod.
Shame slides in like a sliver under a nail. It’s small, but poignant.
If I were on a cholesterol-lowering drug, would I feel ashamed by the profuse globular fat molecules bobbing slothfully through my blood? If I were taking asthma medication, would I feel ashamed by my melodramatic bronchioles?
I’m not sure, but I don’t think so. Lungs and blood are just lube and gaskets. The brain is a window into a person’s soul, their true state of being, internal strength, trustworthiness, and integrity. My brain, stripped down, without meds, is inadequate.
“How often do you drink alcohol?”
Would this question ordinarily come later in the questionnaire, but she moved it up in the queue in light of my attention deficit admission?
“Once a week, tops.”
“When you do drink, how many do you consume?”
“One or two glasses of wine, I guess.”
“Any other medical issues you worry about?”
This question bloats inside my head.
This would be a good time to tell her I haven’t slept more than a few hours in four days. This would be a good time to tell her that when I gazed out the window over the kitchen sink yesterday morning, the tip of a blue spruce tilted thirty degrees toward the ground before it righted itself. That hours ago when I was sitting on the toilet lid while the kids took a bath—with their ear-piercing laughing and shrieking amplifying off bathroom walls and water tsunami-sloshing out of the tub and onto a mess of towels and balled clothes on the floor—something inside me, some working part that’s supposed to remain fixed, free-fell for a moment. That I sense the vibrating strings interlacing the universe on the verge of ripping apart.
If I said these things, the doctor might document some tidbit that could force me to undergo some sort of mental therapy for which I don’t have the money or time.
You just need sleep.
“I haven’t been sleeping well lately so I don’t feel myself.” She waits, in case I want to reveal more. When I stare dumbly at her, my shoulders slouched, she says, “You can talk to your primary about a sleep aid like Ambien, but there are side effects. If you think your sleep difficulties are temporary, I would stick with Benadryl for a short-term solution. Always knocks me out.”
“Me too, but if I take Benadryl, I’m hungover in the morning and can barely make a sandwich for my son’s lunch.”
She smiles politely, but this is the ER. It’s all about turnover and, like a waitress already thinking about her next table’s tip, she wants me out. She rolls off her blue gloves and tosses them in the trash to indicate we are almost done here. “I’m going to grab the syringes, and then you’ll be all set. Do you have any questions?”
“I teach preschool. Can I go to work Monday?”
“Yes. You’ll be scabbed over by then. To be cautious, keep your scratches covered with bandages.” She smiles. “Were you hoping I’d ban you from work for the week?”
“No.” Her joke draws a nervous sweat from my skin, cutting to my insecurities regarding how I am perceived. Do I give off that white trash vibe? “Are the shots painful? In the stomach?” I’ve heard urban legends about rabies shots.
“No. Rabies shots haven’t been given in the stomach since the eighties. Just a shot in the arm. And I’ll inject antibodies near the wound. You’ll do fine.” She taps my knee once. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.” She pulls open the curtain, then the sliding glass door. She exits quickly, graceful as a dancer.
My kids’ vaccines are always injected by a nurse. That the doctor is preparing my vaccine makes the situation seem dire. Iodine soap stink hangs heavy in the air. My stomach is tight, my skin is cold and clammy. The ER is freezing.
“I am not making this up,” I say to the nurse.
She smiles and gently backhands the flab on my upper arm like we’ve been sitting at a bar together for hours. “You wouldn’t believe how many times we hear that in the ER. Guy came in last week with a peanut butter jar up his ass. Said he fell on it. Swore up and down he wasn’t making it up.”
My eyes go wide.
“It was a sixteen-ounce jar, but still. Men. They’re sick, I tell you.”
“The bats weren’t attacking me, per se. I think I was in their way.”
“I believe you,” she says. “I heard they found bats inside several homes in Arbor Ridge Ponds. I bet some deranged, bat-loving lunatic is behind the population climb, roosting them in his house, carving bat houses and setting them about his yard, fantasizing he’s going to become a vampire. Bats are supposed to be dying off, I thought. White-nose syndrome, my ass.”
I smile, and tension eases in my shoulders. Even though hospitals and their staff make my skin crawl, women like this make all of life’s problems manageable. I need to shrink this woman and put her in my purse so she can blurt amusing aphorisms throughout my day and depreciate my worries. Politicians and diapers should be changed often and for the same reasons! In forty years, thousands of old ladies will be running around with tattoos!
She continues, “People are crazy, I tell you. My neighbors, I’ve known these people ten years; I’ve shared an ungodly number of wine bottles with these people, as you do with neighbors. Last month my neighbor lets it slip they’re into suspension.” She smacks my arm flab again. “Like, suspending from their body piercings.” She’s shaking her head. “This couple, they’re in their fifties. You think you know your neighbors, but you don’t.”
My stomach clenches. Inside thirty seconds, I come up with four unlikely but possible scenarios resulting in one of my sleeping children dying, and I have a fifth idea in the works.
I want out of here. I hoist my purse into my lap and reach inside for my cell phone, overwhelmed by an urge to check on Valerie and the kids.
4
THE SKIN PEELED BACK
The kids are sleeping, same as when I left.
Of course they are. Why would you expect otherwise?
After Valerie leaves, I stand over Chloe’s bed and listen to her breathe. She’s on her front with her knees tucked under her chest, balled up like a baby, and I match my breathing to the rise and fall of her small, curved back. I hover too long, waiting for her rhythmic breathing to falter, waiting to catch her case of sudden unexplained death in childhood, SIDS’s ugly cousin. I reluctantly retreat and peek in Wyatt’s room. The pale bottom of his big foot, soft and flawless, sticks off the end of his loft bed. I want to kiss it.
Healthy and safe, I tell myself in the voice of a seasoned cop who is trying to calm a frantic parent. I head into my room, grab my laptop, and climb into bed.
&n
bsp; It’s going to be another restless night. My pulse is acute, and my worries are rolling downhill like a cartoon snowball, gaining bulk and urgency.
I open my laptop and search Leland Ernest. Nothing comes up. Well, three obituaries pop up, but those are unrelated to my neighbor, obviously. My neighbor has no online presence. No Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. No school history, work history, or reported arrest. I’ve searched online the past few nights, hoping the Kilkenny police will report on suspects, hoping someone will mention my neighbor.
My neighbor.
When you buy a house, you have a pre-made list of questions—How long is the commute? How much you will have to spend on repairs? How old is the roof? Has there been mold? How much traffic is there on the street out front? How many showers? Does the house emanate a pleasant feng shui vibe?—but the huge question mark, the major unknown, the one thing you absolutely can’t control or fully investigate is your neighbors.
To each of your days, they can add sudden, unexpected joy or debilitating terror. They can provide an onion in a pinch or they can steal your sense of freedom. Since I moved into this house months ago, I’ve only talked to five or six people on my street. Creepy Leland and Scary Lou are two of them. While I managed to nab a house with two bathtubs, my neighbors suck.
It’s been five days since I met Lou.
I’d been fetching Wyatt’s bicycle from down the street.
Wyatt’s chain had twitched off, and he’d fallen. He’d abandoned the bike and limped home with scrapes on his palms and knees like mashed strawberries.
Damn second-hand, third-rate bike.
I was stretching the bike chain back onto the chainring, my fingers and palms sticky with gear grease, grass pressing into my knees, when a man said, “Hey,” his tone loud and crotchety like he was going to let me have it.
Feeling at once bold and exhausted, I turned toward him. “Yeah?”
He wore slides over black socks pulled up high and a white T-shirt tucked into khaki shorts. His old man outfit clashed with his turquoise sweatband, which cinched his flyaway, graying hair. He must be a sweater. The hair above his sweatband lifted a little in the evening breeze. I didn’t peg him for an expressive guy who wanted a splash of color to mix things up. Had to be a penny-pincher who’d found a use for his wife’s decades-old sweatband. His hand was bandaged. I aged him around sixty so I assumed he’d had a biopsy of a suspicious mole.
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