She Lies Close

by Sharon Doering

  Yeah? What about Lou’s daughter?

  Maybe a misunderstanding. Lou seemed easily triggered, which might make him prone to misunderstandings.

  I shouldn’t have bought this two-story, three-bedroom house. Yes, the rooms are all tiny, but still, it was indulgent. I should have bought a two-bedroom townhome. I just, well, I wanted a yard for the kids. When I was a kid, I had a yard.

  * * *

  Back home from grocery shopping, I sit Chloe in front of the TV so Wyatt and I can bring in the groceries. He brings in the milk, but gets distracted by Chloe’s show, The Backyardigans. Wyatt loves the songs. I don’t bother nagging him because it will take too much effort. Besides, they’re sitting side by side on the couch, their shoulders touching, and that gives me a sense of peace. With the cheery backdrop of cartoon music, I bring the groceries inside and put away the food. I set a pot of water on the stove. Spaghetti night. Most nights are spaghetti night.

  “Hey, Chlo, would you like a piece of cheese while you’re waiting for dinner?” I say, turning on the flame.

  She doesn’t answer.

  “Yoo-hoo, Chloe?” I sing, trying to up my game to compete with the TV. “Chloe, are you hungry?”

  No answer.

  I walk to the edge of the kitchen and scan the TV room. Wyatt is upside-down on the couch, his head resting on the carpet. Chloe is gone.

  “Where’s Chloe, Wyatt?”

  “What?” he says. “She’s not here?”

  Relax. This happens all the time. But my heart is racing as I move to the stairs. “Chloe, are you up there?” I say, keeping my voice even and upbeat as I take the stairs two at a time. She’s not in her room. “Chloe?” Ditto for Wyatt’s room, my room, and the bathroom.

  “Chloe, please answer me. I’m worried.” I don’t bother keeping it upbeat anymore. I move down the steps too quickly, slipping on a stair near the bottom. I grab the handrail and keep my balance, but feel a quick twist in my back muscles and wonder if tomorrow it will be hard to move.

  I jog to the kitchen.

  The sliding glass door is open.

  How did I miss that before? She must have walked out when I was making a trip into the garage for more groceries. That was ten, fifteen minutes ago. My pulse is drumming and my neck is slick as I imagine the danger a three-year-old can get herself into within the span of fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes is like a lifetime. Like the end of a life.

  I rush out, no need to slide the screen because I busted that off the track yesterday and it’s still leaning against the siding.

  Chloe’s on her belly on the swing. Her legs dangle, and she’s bent her knees so that her bare feet don’t touch the ground as she swings. She’s fine. See. You don’t always have to go apeshit. Things are almost always fine. Trying to catch my breath, I cross the grass to her. She has something squeezed tightly in her hand. It’s sticking out from her closed fist.

  A metal-on-metal gliding swoosh catches my attention, and my eyes follow the sound to Leland Ernest’s back porch. His glass door sliding open. He’s stepping inside. My eyes catch his bare calf and bare foot, skin pale, before he’s gone. His glass door swooshes shut.

  My heartbeat picks up again. “Hey, Chloe, what do you have there?”

  “Nothing,” she says, her mouth full, her saliva crackling.

  Her dirt-dusted toes push off against the ground. There’s a wrinkled candy wrapper there in the dirt, the waxy paper white and brown, and her toes graze it.

  “Can I have a piece?” I say.

  Lifting her face to me, she smiles. She loves sharing. “Sure, Momma.” She opens her tiny sweaty hand and holds out three Tootsie Rolls for me. I take one.

  The Tootsie Roll always struck me as an inferior candy. A cheap candy that grandmas kept in lidded bowls, uneaten, uncoveted, hardening over months, years. A chocolate-bar wannabe. A rugged, unmeltable, unbreakable candy suitable for war and being whipped down onto asphalt like a Pop-Its snapping firecracker. If I were a deviant, if I were mentally warped, if I were a suspect in a child kidnapping, the candy I would always have handy in my pocket? The fucking Tootsie Roll.

  I don’t keep Tootsie Rolls in my purse or my house. It’s possible my mom does. It’s possible that Chloe’s got a stash of Tootsie Rolls in her room, courtesy of Grandma.

  “Thank you for sharing,” I say sweetly, my heart jack-hammering. “Did you get those from our neighbor?”

  “Uh-uh.” She shakes her head. “I’m not supposed to take candy from strangers.” She looks up at me, her eyes wide and questioning. She’s testing me. Fuck.

  I smile and say sweetly, “Where’d you get it, then?”

  “I forgot.”

  “Did you get it from your room?” This is altogether possible. I have found chocolate chips inside Chloe’s jewelry box, crackers and crumbs in one of her little kid purses, and a sandwich bag of Dum Dums under her pillow.

  The Fourth of July parade was two months ago. It seems unlikely that she’d exercise the restraint to keep a small bag full of candy. It seems entirely likely that she lost her bag of parade candy in her cluttered room and recently discovered it. There’s nothing more joyous than finding something you thought you’d lost or better yet, forgot you’d lost.

  Her face is aimed down again as she swings. Her wispy, blown hair is snow white and shiny as the silky, moist seeds bursting from a split milkweed pod. Air breathes through her hair, lifting it, letting it fall. Her little toes arch and press against the oval dirt patch below the swing where grass won’t grow. “I think so,” she says.

  “Is it the candy from the parade we went to?” I sound steady, but my shoulders quiver.

  “Probably,” she says, her voice rising to a question.

  “Did you talk to our neighbor?”

  She gazes up with questioning eyes and says, “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”

  “That’s right, but you can tell me if you did. Did the man in that house,” I point, “come over and say hello?”

  “I don’t think so,” she says.

  Fuck. I shouldn’t have asked her leading questions. I put ideas in her mind and gave her an easy way out.

  What upsets me more, brings me to the verge of tears, is that I’ve failed her as a parent. She’s either scared of breaking the rules or scared of the repercussions so that she, as a tiny three-year-old, doesn’t feel at ease speaking the truth. She’s only three.

  “Chloe, can I take those other two candies and save them for after dinner?”

  “Sure, Momma.” She hands me the other two candies, and I put them in my pocket.

  “Thanks, Chloe. It’s fine if you play in the backyard, but you need to tell me before you go outside. OK?”

  “I know,” she says, a stubborn bossiness creeping into her voice.

  I open my mouth—about to ask her well then why didn’t she?—but stop. They tune me out when I talk too much. I turn toward the house, unwrap the one she gave me, and pop it into my mouth.

  I am checking for a chemical taste, for a taste that’s anti-freeze sweet or rat-poison bitter. I am assessing if I should rush her to the hospital. If it’s poisoned, then you’ve poisoned yourself too.

  It tastes fine. Fresh. Better than I remember Tootsie Rolls tasting. When’s the last time I ate a Tootsie Roll? A decade ago? Two decades ago?

  I bite into it, severing it with my teeth, not sure if I’m comfortable with the fact that I’m probing for a small bit of razor or some sickly oozing poison that he injected inside. My teeth sink into firm chewy chocolate with a hint of plastic. No razors. No bitter poison.

  She found the candies in her room or in the car or in Wyatt’s room or behind the couch. That’s the obvious answer. No adult is going to walk over and give a toddler candy. Not in this stranger-danger, food-allergy-aware, personal-space day and age.

  Of course he didn’t give her candy. Of course he didn’t. You need to calm the fuck down, Grace. It was a complete coincidence that he was outside at the same time as Chl
oe. What, your family is the only one allowed outside? It’s a gorgeous day, sunny, not hot, slight breeze, no mosquitoes. If anyone were going to sit outside, this would be the day.

  Still, I gaze one more time at my neighbor’s house. If you talk to my daughter again, if you give her candy again, I’ll slit your throat.

  * * *

  We eat spaghetti and a big bowl of peas for dinner. I fight the screen back onto the door’s track. We play hopscotch in the driveway.

  I try to tell myself, It has been a good day. The kids are happy and healthy. You get to be with them way more than Nate does. You have done nothing to deserve any of it, yet here it is, but it doesn’t stick. My breathing is jagged.

  With the bathroom door open, Wyatt relaxes in the tub: humming, creating bubbles between his fingers, and blowing a bird whistle. When he’s finished, he hangs his towel on the hook instead of tossing it on the floor to mold and—bonus—he brushes his teeth.

  “Mom,” he says, standing outside the bathroom in his robe, “I can unload the dishes before I go to bed.”

  “Thank you, kiddo, but I’ll take care of the dishes.” I press my lips to his warm, moist forehead. I hold his cheeks and smile at him. “You’re such a good boy.”

  After one book in the rocking chair, Chloe tells me she loves me and falls asleep quickly.

  Occasionally I think I have the most amazing kids.

  Just wait. They will turn on you. Under pressure, they turn into monsters.

  Under grave pressure, most people do.

  8

  I KNOW MORE THAN I SHOULD

  The papers mentioned, offhandedly, Ava Boone is such a lovely name—a great actress’s name!—but all I could think of was the cheap flavored wine we drank in college. Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill. I swear we got a bottle for a buck and a quarter.

  To bottom-shelf hyperglycemic drinkers like me, Ava Boone sounds trashy. Makes me want to believe this girl lives on the edge of the city near the flat-roofed warehouses and railroad tracks. Makes me want to believe her hair is matted with knots, she’s playing unsupervised in the street, and she’s never been to the dentist. I would like to picture her dad in prison states away, and her mom having too many visitors (stringy women and dirty-jeaned men).

  But this isn’t Ava. Her parents are married, her family is well-rounded and whole, a crisp-apple family. Railroad tracks are closer to my house than hers. In all the photos, she has a buoyant, genuine smile on her face and her hair is clean and combed. Solid middle class, borderline upper class. Cute slate-blue ranch-style house with an octagon window in the cathedral foyer. Clean vinyl siding. Two-car garage. Skyline cedar playset in the backyard with one of those yellow-and-blue striped canopies over the platform slide.

  A sweet, shiny-apple family.

  It happened on a Friday night. Ava’s older siblings, Mason and Lila, were kicking off their spring break vacations by having sleepovers at friends’ houses. Ethan and Natalie tucked Ava into bed around 9pm and when they woke in the morning, the little girl’s window was open, the screen was cut, and Ava was gone. No sign of a struggle. Carpet near the window wet with rain, puddles on the sill.

  No one heard anything or saw anything.

  There was a small party next door, maybe a dozen kids. Teenagers walking in and out the front door, vaping on the curb beside the car-crowded street, hugging and handshaking, all long arms, poor posture, and quick movements. Their quiet talking punctuated by eruptions of laughter.

  There was a larger party across the street. Adults drinking sweet wine and bottled ale around a fire pit in the backyard, talking loudly, moving slowly. Kings of Leon playing in the house where the women who couldn’t get warm huddled, gossiping in their socks and sweaters, stuffing vegetable sticks in their mouths, fingering the little decorative rings hooked to the foot of their wine glasses so they could tell their glasses apart.

  Both parties broke before midnight because it started raining.

  Police interviewed everyone who attended the parties. Nothing peculiar was reported.

  Strangers account for less than five percent of child abductions. Statistics point to family members in most cases.

  Kilkenny police never mentioned they suspected the parents, but everyone knew they did, assumed they did. It’s always the parents. Except police didn’t find evidence indicating Ethan or Natalie. If they had, something would have happened by now. As far as we knew, neither Ethan nor Natalie had a motive. The Boones were a happy family. No skeletons. No prior run-ins with the law. Squeaky clean. A waxy, light-reflecting, perfect apple.

  Ethan Boone is a middle-school social studies teacher in Talilah, the town west of ours. He coaches girls’ basketball. On the news and in the papers, his co-workers and students described him as humble and goofy, two key traits to being well-liked by mercurial thirteen-year-olds.

  Natalie Boone is a social worker. She counsels troubled teens at a non-profit organization called Talilah One-Eighty. Part-time, so she can be around for her kids. Ava, 5. Lila, 13. Mason, 16.

  The papers painted Lila as a straight-A student, a basketball star with a good group of friends. They portrayed Mason as a C student. A little bit of a troublemaker, but in a good-natured way. He got an occasional detention in order to draw a laugh from a schoolmate.

  Natalie Boone has a sister, Sarah, who lives an hour south and works the night shift as a hospice nurse. She worked that Friday night, providing in-home care and pain relief for cancer patients. She was eliminated as a suspect.

  Ethan has a brother, Luke, who lives with his wife and two kids seven states away. Luke works for United. Twelve-hour night shifts, four days a week, sitting at a computer and managing plane routes. Again, eliminated as a suspect.

  All four of Ava’s grandparents are deceased.

  I don’t know everything about Ava and her family, but I know more than I should. I know Ava was a happy accident, conceived a week after Ethan Boone got a vasectomy. I know Natalie Boone took three months off work when Ava went missing, but now she’s back to working part-time. I know Ava liked to dig in the dirt for red centipedes and go fishing with her dad, that she had her own tackle box with pretty, feathery bobbers. I know she dressed as a ninja for Halloween last year. I know Mason got three-days’ suspension a few weeks ago for getting in a girl’s face, screaming at her, and grabbing her shoulders. I know Ava had been begging for a puppy, and her dad used to take her to Pet Supplies Plus on Sundays after church. I know she occasionally wet the bed. I even know their address. Of course I’ve driven by their house. Of course.

  How would I know all this unpublished, private information?

  Teachers’ lounge. The teachers’ lounge of a preschool is a rich source of neighborhood gossip. So many mothers dishing dirt on their neighbors and friends to their child’s teacher, trying to force a bond, show their value, win favor, earn private classroom details.

  These are snippets that co-workers and parents have told me, with eyes wide and voices hushed, leaning in so close with pumpkin coffee breath or a smear of moist, cakey lipstick across their front teeth:

  -My neighbor’s daughter plays basketball with Ava’s sister. She says Lila is kind of a bully. Not terrible, but that she’s all elbows on the court.

  -Did you know that Ava’s brother can’t stop crying? Isn’t that odd? I mean, I guess it’s not. It’s survivor’s guilt or something.

  -One of Ethan Boone’s students said he touched her shoulder inappropriately during class. But I’m sure it’s nothing. Everyone else, students and teachers, gush about him.

  -I wonder which one of them posted the video. Strange that no one knows, isn’t it?

  The first five days, officers and volunteers continuously raked nearby forests and prairies, wrapped in sweaters and mittens, armed with flashlights and water bottles. We had a lucky streak of warm April weather so it was possible the girl was lost somewhere nearby and not yet hypothermic. Divers trawled the two ponds in the Boones’ neighborhood. Police used a heat-see
king drone.

  Even when the warm spell broke and temperatures dropped dramatically, frost tipping the grass, search parties kept going out.

  It was right around the one-month mark when people slipped into past tense when they mentioned Ava’s name, and they stopped mentioning her every day. The PTA-organized call center was still running out of the local church, but there were only two or three working it; people had to go back to work, drive their kids to practice, shop for groceries.

  After two months the search for Ava Boone had the melancholic, deranged feel of Christmas decorations left out past April Fools’ Day, pieces scattered, cracked, and forgotten. No one said it, but everyone knew: Ava Boone was dead. And if she was still alive, well, that notion had the same scraped-out feel of things shattered and lost.

  9

  HOUSE BURNED TO THE GROUND

  Sweating, lungs stretching, I jog up my driveway in the darkness. Baby monitor and phone in hand, I type in the key code for the front door. Anxiety grips my spine as I take the stairs two at a time. You shouldn’t have gone for a jog. You shouldn’t leave them, not even for eleven minutes. I tell myself this every night, but every night the urge to flee is stronger.

  Chloe and Wyatt are peaceful in sleep, and the house is cool and still. I shower and put on pajamas. With my hair wet and my calf muscles sore, I grab my laptop.

  I get comfortable in the queen-size bed Nate and I used to share. When we were splitting things up, he said he didn’t want it. Actually, he didn’t want much, which implies generosity, but when I look around at our belongings—mountains of toys, second-hand furniture, boxes of old CDs and cassette tapes, an outdated TV—it’s obvious he has scammed me yet again.

  Our belongings are those of poor college students turned poor young marrieds turned child-safety-focused parents. In other words, everything we owned together is fairly shitty.

  Last Christmas morning, at a time when he was no doubt fucking one of his co-workers, as we regarded the messy afterbirth of opened presents—sparkly red pieces of torn paper everywhere on the carpet, couch, and stuck to our feet by strands of tape; little doctor instruments and little Legos everywhere waiting to slice our soles—he’d said, “Wouldn’t it be kind of nice if our house burned to the ground?”