“Good point,” I say. “I will investigate the dead wife’s cause of death thoroughly. Good night.” I walk to my door without glancing back.
My knees are weak, and the butterflies in my stomach are frantic. I haven’t had sex in so long and the possibility of it makes me irrational. When sex was available, endlessly lingering in the corner like a pile of clean laundry waiting to be smoothed and folded, I took it for granted. Now that it’s gone, it’s like water.
Pathetic, Grace. He is pursuing you only because he is investigating your neighbor’s murder. He is only trying to use you for information. You are by no means beautiful, you are not particularly kind or warm, and you have done nothing to peg yourself as intelligent or accomplished.
Still.
I lock my front door and hustle upstairs. For the first time in years, I take a cold shower on purpose. This must be how it feels to be a sixteen-year-old boy. My skin is crawling. I want to pull my hair out. What’s wrong with me?
Which reminds me that there might be something actually wrong with me.
38
YOU BROKE MY NOSE
I wake to the irritating commotion of Wyatt and Chloe arguing. I pee as fast as I can, skip glasses or contacts, and jump in as a blind referee.
Yellow flag usually goes to Chloe because she’s unreasonable, fickle, unpredictable, and melodramatic, but this morning the foul goes to Wyatt. He is explaining to her the variety of punishments she will incur if she does not clean up her act. He mentions detention, suspension, juvie, and maximum security before I get my blurry-visioned body on the scene.
“She is three, Wyatt. Three. Her behavior will evolve so much before she even gets to kindergarten.”
“She needs to learn how to be a normal human.”
Chloe sobs louder.
I get in Wyatt’s face. “When you were three you broke my nose at the public swimming pool.” Remember, asshole?
Of course he doesn’t remember, but I’ve told him the story. He was so stubbornly independent, he kept telling me to go away, he could swim on his own. Dumb little fuckers, these children. I wouldn’t let go of his writhing, intent-on-drowning body, so he head-butted me in the nose. Broke it right at the top. Only when I run my finger down the slope can I perceive a tiny inconsistency.
He is typically patient with her, but he, like his mother, has a mean streak.
“You know not to punch now, Wyatt, but you punched when you were three. Now, go take a break in your room.” And get out of my sight.
I pick up Chloe, rub her wet cheek against my own. Through her tears, she says, “Why isn’t anyone want to be my friend?”
“Wyatt loves you, he’s just grumpy this morning. We all get grumpy and say grumpy things.”
“But nobody wants to play with me.”
“Wyatt likes to play with you.” As if to counter my statement, banging noises rise from Wyatt’s room. I have no idea what he’s up to, but it doesn’t sound like anything is breaking, so I let it go. “And I like to play with you too,” I say.
“Can we play Play-Doh right now?”
She pinned me in a corner. Already the con artist.
“Let Mommy get dressed, and then we can play Play-Doh as I make breakfast.”
As I make eggs and butter toast and pour orange juice, I make pit stops at the table to squeeze Play-Doh hair out of the little plastic guy’s perforated head. She cuts his hair with a plastic knife.
Trying to prop up the kids, make them feel peaceful, make them feel whole in this soulless world, it wears on me. Like doing the dishes. There’s always more because everyone eats all the fucking time.
I am glad for work this morning. As Wyatt walks out the door, I feel lighter. When I drop Chloe off, I feel energized.
During our combined music class with Miss Jenny, the energetic, barefoot music teacher, Liz pulls me aside. Her eyes wide and serious, she says, “How are you?”
“Same old.”
“Grace. Your neighbor,” she whispers, giving me a harsh parental look. “I saw on the local news this morning your neighbor was murdered. Murdered. Were you going to mention it?”
“No. It’s actually too overwhelming to think about. I can’t consider it and pay attention to the kids at the same time. I need to compartmentalize.”
Her eyes soften. “OK, I understand that. Later, though. We’ll talk later. Seriously. I mean, what did you—” she says, then stops herself. “Forget it, I won’t ask you about it now. Not now. How is your hearing, by the way?”
“What?”
She smiles and swats my arm flab.
“My hearing has been totally normal.” I don’t want to talk about my state of health. “How’s it going in your household?”
“Well, Sonya is wetting the bed and it’s not cute because she’s nine, and Camden smells like weed when he comes home after school, but they are on their own too much, so what do you expect?”
Liz’s daughter, Tanya, is a single parent of two, and they live with Liz. Tanya has a patchwork of scars courtesy of both her ex and past drug abuse, and she’s barely holding onto her night job as a dispatcher.
Liz’s four other children seem to have their shit together. One of her kids is a high school teacher, one is a lawyer, two are military. Three of them are happily married with kids. Four out of five ain’t bad. Honestly, it’s damn impressive.
But that’s not how you look at it when they’re your offspring.
“I’m sorry, Liz. It’s not easy. For any of you. But kids go through phases. They will come out of this. Tanya loves them and you love them, so they will turn out just fine.” I don’t think I actually believe this, but it is something I would like to believe.
“True, true,” she says indifferently. She probably doesn’t believe this platitude either. “Hey, besides your hearing, you seem to be a little up and down. And you’ve lost weight.” Her eyebrows go up, her chin tilts down.
Miss Jenny is handing out maracas and singing a jazzy version of “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary”. When Wyatt was born, I googled all the nursery rhymes because I have a terrible ear for lyrics. Turns out, most nursery rhymes have a dark side. Silver bells and cockleshells all in a row are metaphors for the queen’s torture devices, or so they say. I can’t remember which queen.
Lucas and Ryan are getting wild with their maracas and paving a pathway to trouble for the rest of the students. I rush in with feigned calm and high-energy compliments and redirect them. They are back on track, blissfully unaware of my manipulation.
Note to self: If Detective Mahoney comes back snooping, I need to redirect his energy.
“I’ve had a bad stretch of shitty sleep, but I’m coming out of it now,” I say.
“OK, hon. If you need to talk, I’m here, and I’ve heard it all.” Not only does she have five kids, but she has six siblings.
“Yes, I believe you, which scares me.”
She laughs, deep and rich.
I’m about to let the conversation end there, keeping it light and glossy, but some part of me needs to dig deeper. “Liz, how did you ever manage five kids and not lose your head?”
She raises her eyebrows. “Who says I didn’t lose my head? When I struggled—let me rephrase that—when I wanted to strangle one of my own children, I told myself my mother had seven of us. Mostly on her own.” Liz’s dad died when she was little.
“I’ve tried the ‘other people have it harder’ thing; it doesn’t work for me.”
“Then break your day into dangling carrots,” she says. “Wake up looking forward to coffee. When you’ve had enough coffee, look forward to wine.”
“Good idea,” I say to end the conversation. There’s no point to it. Liz is a stronger person than I am.
As much as I adore my kids, as much as I live for them and would die for them in the blink of an eye, I was not built to be a mother. For me, mothering is like trying to loosen a stripped screw from a plastic toy.
39
LOSE A FEW TOES
&nb
sp; I need to talk to the Boones and I can’t wait.
After work, I park outside their house. Natalie’s car is in the driveway.
Today is her day off. I called her employer, faked that my teen needed a counselor, requested Natalie, and found out her schedule.
You are Point Bird. You will not let things drop. Go ring her bell.
I sit in my car. Two minutes tick by. Five minutes, that’s all you get. Five minutes, then you will ring her bell. Another minute ticks by.
The front door opens and Natalie Boone hobbles out of her house. Hobbles because her right foot is casted. She’s wearing a boot. What the hell happened to her?
And why is the Boone house so active? My fourth time here this week, and someone has always been coming or going. Because you come right after work. That’s Lila’s after-school activity time, Ethan’s get-home-from-work or take-out-the-garbage time, and Mason’s drug-dealing time. What will Natalie do?
It takes an extraordinary amount of effort for her to get in her car. I backwards-calculate how much time I have before I have to pick up Wyatt and Chloe. Forty-five, fifty minutes.
I follow Natalie like I followed her son, Mason.
She turns into the Walmart parking lot. Maybe Natalie and Mason are a mother and son drug-dealing duo.
Unlike Mason, she tries for a spot as close as she can get to a set of doors. She doesn’t have a handicap placard, but she manages a good parking spot anyway, then wobbles into the store.
I hope this is only a quick run for milk and bananas and not her stock-up-the-garage-fridge, $300, once-a-week blowout. I don’t have that kind of time.
I only have to wait twenty minutes.
With that boot, she’s easy to spot. Natalie hobbles out with her cart quarter full. It was maybe a forty-dollar trip, a run to make tonight’s dinner plus a few extra items. She’s got three plastic bags in her cart and a rectangular box of canned sodas on the bottom rack. Someone in her house likes diet root beer.
I meet her as she approaches her car. I make it seem accidental.
“You look like you could use a hand.”
She’s surprised and worried, but when she sees I don’t have a salesperson’s slippery smile or a thief’s hard eyes, that I’m a middle-aged lady like herself, she relaxes.
“I’m OK, really,” she says.
“I’m the same way. I hate when people are trying to help. I’ll grab the soda. No need to tip me,” I joke.
“Oh, OK, thanks.”
I maneuver the case of soda from the bottom rack into her tidy, vacuumed trunk. Folded blanket and flashlight in there. How a trunk should look. Mine has toys, candy wrappers, half-empty crushed bottles of water, and bags of clothes the kids have outgrown that I still need to drop at the Salvation Army. “That looks like it was painful,” I say. “What happened?”
“I ran over my foot with the car. Can you believe it?” From the wonder in her cadence, she still can’t believe it. She’s loosening up. “I thought I put it in park, but I had it in reverse. Stepped out of my car in the driveway and the car rolled back and ran right over my gym shoe. Worse pain I’ve ever felt. They thought I would lose a few toes, but now it looks like I’ll keep them so there’s that. Stupidest thing you’ve ever heard, right?”
I imagine her pulling into her driveway, her mind somewhere far away, with Ava, and not paying attention to her dashboard. Her muscle memory, her years of training herself to shift the car into park, failed her when she needed it most. Poor woman.
I say, “I was at a stop light once when my older kid was two. He wouldn’t stop screaming about his seatbelt. I was so flustered, I stepped out of my car to help him and forgot I was still in drive. Hit the car in front of me. Everyone was fine. My car was only going a half-mile per hour, but I felt like a lunatic. The guy I hit couldn’t understand what happened. So embarrassing, but, so, no, not the stupidest thing I’ve heard.”
She half smiles and almost laughs, which comes out sounding like, “Hm.” She drops a bag into her trunk and sucks air through her teeth. Pain. She must have moved a toe or stretched the wrong way in that boot.
“Time for your pain meds, maybe.”
“Oh, no. I don’t take those.” Her reaction is exaggerated, her eyes horrified by the thought of pain meds. Maybe she’s a holistic gal. Tea tree oil and elderberry. Brewing her own tinctures with cheesecloth and mason jars. Or maybe she realizes she’s spent too much time talking to a stranger and she’s panicking.
“The way they talk about pain meds these days, it does seem like a good idea to avoid them,” I say. “They have their uses though. My father took loads of pain meds, Fentanyl patches and Oxy pills, when he was terminally ill and under hospice care at home.”
She wants to say something, but holds back. Bites her lip. Eyes watery, she decides to go ahead and says, “My sister works as a hospice nurse.”
That’s right. Sarah.
Natalie reaches into her cart for her last bag.
“I’ll get your cart for you,” I say.
“Oh. Thank you.” She tosses her last bag into the trunk, lets it drop, and there’s a crinkling sound. Something papery in there, maybe a bag of bakery bread. I say, “Seems like a tough job, hospice. She must be a gentle woman, your sister.”
Her smile bends naturally. “She’s a saint. Single mom. Two kids. Going to people’s houses in the middle of the night, comforting them. A damn saint. Bends over backwards for people.” Worry washes over her face as if she’s said too much. “Well, thanks again.” Walk away. Just walk away.
No. You have to tell her she can trust you. It’s your fault, after all. Your. Fault.
“I’m so sorry,” I say, shaking my head, irritated with myself. “I should have told you who I was. Who I am. My neighbor is Leland Ernest.”
“Who?” She’s only vaguely interested.
“Leland Ernest.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, smiling, feeling self-conscious, “I’m bad with names. Am I supposed to know who that is?”
She is telling the truth. Or she is a brilliant liar.
“He was a suspect in your daughter’s case.”
As if I slapped her face, she wobbles backward and catches herself on the car beside hers. A Caribbean-blue Prius. Flustered, she searches her purse, grabs her keys, then drops them on the ground. Mumbles something that sounds like pretty pickles.
I pick up her keys before she can, but don’t offer them. It’s cruel, especially considering her temporary handicap, but she needs to listen. “I found some things in Leland’s house. A little girl’s sock. A Shopkin. A little plastic shovel.” As each of my words land, her eyes widen further. She covers her mouth with her hand. “Yellow,” I say. “The shovel was yellow. I told your husband yesterday, and now today Leland is dead.”
She shudders at “dead”.
I find it hard to believe she doesn’t know Leland is dead. I find it hard to believe the detectives haven’t contacted the Boones yet. I would think Ethan and Natalie were the primary suspects in his murder. Also, it seems Ethan didn’t tell her about me. But that makes sense. Why would he want to upset her?
I hold her keys tight in my sweaty fist and try to force a connection with my eyes. “I wanted to make sure you know: I didn’t tell the detectives about your husband. I won’t tell them anything.”
“What? My husband?” Her eyes are wide with fear. “Give me my keys. Please.” I feel terrible, like I’ve assaulted her, but I need her to know we are on the same side. Same team.
Quietly, I say, “I’m relieved Leland’s dead. I’m so glad he’s dead. I won’t tell the detectives anything. I won’t even tell them I talked to you or your husband. You have my word.”
She furtively glances at people passing, considering if she should ask for help. It’s getting close to dinnertime, and the parking lot is busy. Dozens of people have walked by in the past few minutes; she could easily flag one down. Deciding to keep it between us, she pleads, her voice a whisper, “Please give me
my keys.”
“I’ll protect your family. Your husband.”
“My husband doesn’t need protecting,” she says, her voice cracking in panic. “Leave my family alone or I will call the police.”
“Don’t you need to know if it’s Ava’s Shopkin?” I say frantically, accusation in my voice. “What if Leland had your daughter? What if she’s alive?”
She takes a step toward me, leans into my space. Her mushy fear hardens and her face is like a stone wall. “It has been five months. Exactly one hundred forty-eight days. Do you have any idea, any idea, how long that is? Do you?” Her growl softens to a mere whisper. “My daughter is gone.” Her cheeks shine with fast-falling tears. “Give me my fucking keys.”
I offer her keys in my open palm. She grabs for them so frantically, her ragged, unpolished nails scratch my hand. She recoils as if I were sewage and struggles to get in her car. I pull her cart away so she doesn’t bang into it and send it rolling.
Holding the cart, I stand beside her car and wait. In case she wants to say something. In case she wants to ask about the Shopkin.
She backs up recklessly, nearly running over my toes.
40
PLAY, PAUSE, REWIND, PLAY
Twenty minutes later I am driving Chloe and Wyatt home, but my mind is still with Natalie Boone in the parking lot. Her reactions, her lack of reactions, bother me like a single strand of hair caught in my mouth, woven through a bolus of food while I’m chewing.
There’s something I need to check at home. We are only a few minutes away, but I need to be there now. I’m drumming my fingers against the steering wheel to the beat of my throbbing headache.
Chloe is strapped into her car seat, playing puzzles on my phone, when a call comes through. She doesn’t bother asking me, she answers it.
“I can’t hear you, Daddy.”
I glance at her in my rearview while I’m waiting to make a left. “Chloe, you have to press the speaker button. Do you see all those curved lines? Wyatt, can you reach over and help her press the speaker button?”
She Lies Close Page 17