The Children's Secret

by Nina Monroe

  The rain starts up again. Thick, heavy drops. If it doesn’t ease up, the stream that runs through town will burst its banks.

  She drives past the old house that’s been for sale for over a year now. And then past Brook Middle School. The twins looked miserable when they came home this afternoon. She wishes she’d put her foot down about them staying in the same class as their friends.

  The rain falls harder. She increases the speed on the windscreen wipers.

  She keeps driving up the steep incline of the valley toward Woodwind Stables and, suddenly, a shadow darts across the road in front of the car.

  She slams on the brakes. The car skids off the road. Yasmin’s heart thuds.

  A deer ducks into the undergrowth, its white tail lit up by her headlights.

  A second later, two fawns skitter after their mother.

  Yasmin releases her breath.

  She sits there for a while, letting the adrenaline drain out of her body. She could have killed the deer—the mother. Or its baby. Ayaan’s right: she’s not able to manage a car as big as this.

  There’s a knock on the passenger seat window. She jumps.

  Ben Wright looks in through the glass. Rain drips off his baseball cap.

  She opens the window.

  “You okay?” he asks.

  She glances in the rearview mirror and sees Ben’s red truck, parked a little way off on the road behind her.

  “Yasmin? Are you okay?” he says again.

  She nods, blood still rushing in her ears.

  And then she finds her voice. “Why don’t you come in out of the rain?”

  She’s not sure where the invitation comes from. Except that she likes how he makes her feel—and that, right now, she wants him next to her.

  He looks at the empty passenger seat beside her. “Sure.”

  He runs around to the other side of the car and jumps in. His warm breath steams up the window. He’s drenched.

  They both look out through the windscreen at the night sky, at the rain.

  “It’s a shock, isn’t it?” he says.

  She looks at him. His face is soft and concerned.

  “How the deer just comes out of nowhere,” he adds.

  She nods and looks over at the clearing through which the deer and her fawns disappeared.

  “It was my fault. I wasn’t paying attention,” she says.

  That’s what Ayaan would have said. Sometimes his voice in her head is louder than her own.

  “You can pay all the attention you want, and they’ll still run out in front of you without any warning,” he says.

  He’s kind, she thinks. He finds excuses for people’s shortcomings.

  “They’re a pain in the backside but they sure are beautiful,” he says.

  “Yes,” she says. “They are.”

  She knows that Ben and True go hunting together. And yet he seems to have a love for these creatures. Is it possible, she wonders, to love something and then to destroy it?

  “I’ve noticed them in this area for the past few weeks,” he goes on. “I wish they’d stop crossing the road—that they’d learn it’s not safe.”

  She looks into Ben’s kind, open face. His strong jaw. His big smile. His neat, brown hair with its old-fashioned side parting. An all-American guy, that’s what she’d thought the first time she met him. The kind of American guy she remembers from the movies she watched back home in Lahore. The kind of guys she saw all around her at Columbia. She’d dated one of them for a while, before she met Ayaan: Tom Adams. He was on the football team.

  “You’re out late,” Ben says.

  “I couldn’t sleep.” She feels a rush of embarrassment about her clothes: pyjama pants and an old sweatshirt. No one in town has ever seen her in anything other than her salwar kameez.

  Ben tilts his head to one side and gives her a smile. “I do that too,” he says. “Take drives when I can’t sleep. It helps clear my head.”

  She likes how normal he makes her feel, as if maybe she’s one of them after all.

  And there’s a gentleness to him. An easiness. He accepts people the way they are. She supposes that’s why he and Ayaan have never really hit it off.

  She’s seen how Ben is with Kaitlin. How he holds her hand, like they’ve only just started dating. How they go on walks together around Middlebrook Pond. She’s seen him at the grocery store, taking time to talk to the older people who live in town. How he’ll stop and bend over to pet a dog or squat down to talk to a child.

  How he’ll stop and make sure that someone’s okay when they’ve been startled by a deer shooting across the road.

  Neglectful homicide, wasn’t that the charge everyone was throwing around? But they’re wrong: there’s nothing the least bit neglectful about Ben Wright.

  At times like this she almost wishes that she did believe in Allah—or any god—then she could at least pray to someone to make things right again.

  I’m sorry, she wants to tell him. I’m so, so sorry for what you’re going through.

  “Well, I’m glad you’re okay,” he says.

  “Thank you.”

  The way he looks at her, the warmth and kindness in his brown eyes, makes something come loose in her chest. Her eyes well up.

  He moves closer to her and puts a hand on her arm. She can feel the warmth coming off his skin.

  “You okay to get home?” he asks.

  She sniffs. “Yes. Of course. I’m sorry.”

  “You say that a lot,” he says gently.

  She looks at him, confused.

  “That you’re sorry,” he explains.

  “Oh—I’m sorry—”

  He laughs. She laughs too.

  “That’s better,” he says.

  “You’re kind,” she says, her tears thickening again.

  And then she forgets herself. She leans forward and collapses into his chest, the gearstick and the handbrake sitting awkwardly between them.

  “Oh …” he says. Then he puts his arms around her and pats her shoulder blades gently.

  She feels his flannel shirt under her cheek and breathes in. He smells of woodchips and hay and engine oil. She hears his heart, beating under his ribcage.

  She looks up at him and when he looks at her, she leans in and kisses him.

  He jerks his head away. His baseball cap falls onto his lap, nudged out of place by her kiss. He picks it up, pulls it back on his head and reaches for the door handle.

  “I’m sorry!” She flushes. “I’m so sorry. You were just being so kind. I didn’t mean to do that—”

  He looks at her, confused.

  “Please forgive me—I forgot myself,” she says.

  “It’s okay, Yasmin.”

  “No, it’s not okay. You’re married—I’m married. I got carried away. You were so kind. I didn’t mean anything by it. Really, I’m sorry.”

  “I know you didn’t mean any harm. It’s okay, really it is.”

  Her throat goes tight. She wishes he would hold her again. Because even now, when she’d done something so wrong, he doesn’t blame her.

  He pushes open the car door. “I’d better be getting back.”

  “Of course.”

  “See you around, then.” He steps into the rain.

  “Thank you. For stopping,” she says.

  He touches the brim of his baseball cap. Then he walks back to his truck and drives off.

  When he’s gone, Yasmin opens the window and, for a few minutes, she sits there, on the side of the dark, quiet road, the pines bowing overhead, and breathes in the night.

  * * *

  She should drive straight home. It’s late. Ayaan might wake up and worry, not seeing her in bed beside him.

  But she can’t, not yet.

  She needs to pull herself together.

  And she needs to find a way to appease her guilt at having felt more at home in Ben Wright’s arms than in her husband’s.

  So she drives out of town and along the interstate to the junct
ion that leads to the mosque.

  She hasn’t been up to the construction site in ages. Ayaan keeps telling her she should come and see the progress they’ve made. He’s so proud of it. He wants her to be proud of it too: this amazing building he’s created.

  But she kept finding excuses not to come.

  Because she can’t bear it. The sick feeling that settles in her stomach whenever she thinks of the mosque—and about how she’s been lying to Ayaan this whole time.

  About sharing his vision for the mosque. About sharing his faith.

  She steps out of the car and looks at the pool through the glass doors and then up at the minaret: the part of the mosque everyone’s been talking about. Behind it, the moon shines, full and white.

  Whatever she believes, Ayaan has created something beautiful. And he’s right: she should be proud of him.

  When she goes back home, she’ll tell him that she drove out here to see the work he’s done. Maybe it will help things between them. Maybe it will make him less angry at her for taking the twins to the party at the Carvers’.

  She walks closer to the mosque, her eyes adjusting to the moonlight.

  At first, she doesn’t see it. She sees the scaffolding on the walls. Cranes and trucks that are perched around holes in the ground. Piles of bricks and timber. Big drums of concrete.

  But then they leap toward her. The fresh paint sprayed across one of the white marble walls. Thick, jagged letters.

  It must have happened tonight; maybe she’s only just missed them.

  The world around her spins. She tries to read the words again but they swim in front of her.

  She rubs her eyes until they hurt and then looks again.

  But the words are still there, sprayed over the glass doors, the dark pool shining behind the jagged letters:

  TERRORISTS GO HOME.

  DAY FIVE

  Thursday, September 5

  CHAPTER

  30

  4.30 a.m.

  PRISCILLA RUBS HER eyes and glances up at the clock.

  She curses herself for having fallen asleep.

  Astrid is so pale she disappears into the white hospital sheets. Now that her sunburn has faded, there’s no color left in her skin at all. Priscilla takes her little girl’s hand and holds it to her cheek.

  “I’ll never leave you alone again.” Her eyes swim with tears. “You’re going to get sick of the sight of me, Astrid.”

  There’s a flicker behind Astrid’s eyelids; Priscilla wills herself to believe that she can hear her.

  “If you wake up, things will be different,” she whispers. “I promise.”

  Priscilla wonders how many people have done this in ICUs: prayed, not to God, but to their sick children, begging them—bargaining with them—to get better, as though they were just lying there, waiting for their parents to say the magic words, and they’d wake up.

  “And I’m going to make damn sure that whoever’s responsible for this doesn’t get away with it.”

  She hadn’t been certain that Wendy Warnes would show up at the meeting. Sure, they’d both been to Yale Law, but they’d been a year apart—nowhere close enough to consider each other friends. She’d be surprised if Wendy even remembered her. But Wendy must have seen the press coverage and worked out that getting involved on a local level could help her campaign. Priscilla didn’t care what Wendy’s motivation was, as long as she made some noise and got Lieutenant Mesenberg and her team to sit up and start taking this case seriously.

  Priscilla strokes Astrid’s pale arm. “What happened to you isn’t going to get swept under the carpet, Astrid, I promise.”

  People shouldn’t have firearms in their homes. Period. Priscilla was going to get that message out into the world once and for all. And this time, people would listen.

  She stands up, stretches and walks around the room. “God, I’m sorry it’s so horrible in here, Astrid.”

  Everything is beige and gray. The only splash of color is the peeling decal of a giraffe on the wall next the bed.

  Priscilla had thought that maybe someone would send flowers. A card. A balloon. A note from a friend or a teacher from her old school.

  But nothing came.

  She’d failed to see how lonely Astrid was. Failed to listen to her when she said she had no friends. Failed to acknowledge how much their lives had shrunk since Peter left.

  Maybe she should have let her go to the party. Maybe then Astrid wouldn’t have felt the need to sneak away without telling her. She and Priscilla could have gone together. And Priscilla could have kept her safe.

  A headache pulls across Priscilla’s forehead.

  No. Whatever the circumstances, Astrid should never have been on the Wrights’ property. No child should have been there that day. It wasn’t safe. And if those other parents had only listened to her advice, no one would have gotten hurt.

  Priscilla walks over to the window that looks out onto the parking lot of the hospital: only a tiny strip of gray sky is visible. It’s started raining again.

  She feels the hospital room pressing in around her.

  I have to do something, she tells herself.

  She goes back over to the bed and kisses Astrid’s forehead. “I’ll be back soon.”

  She gathers up her handbag and her raincoat and heads out into the hallway of the ICU.

  * * *

  Thirty minutes later, she’s standing at the checkout in the 24-hour Walmart, a trolley full of balloons and cards and flowers.

  “You’re up early,” says the checkout assistant. She has a peace tattoo on her forearm. “Planning a party?” she asks, scanning through the items.

  “Sort of. It’s for my daughter.”

  “She’s lucky,” the woman says. “You’re a good mom.”

  Priscilla’s heart pulls under her ribs. She gathers up the plastic bags, dumps them in the trolley and steers toward the exit.

  “Hope the party goes well!” the woman calls after her.

  * * *

  By 6.30 a.m., Priscilla is back at the hospital. She pushes through the doors of the ICU, dripping from the rain, plastic bags digging into her palms.

  When she gets to Astrid’s room, Peter’s there, sitting on the chair she spent the night on. He’s staring at his phone, his brow furrowed.

  He looks up. “Hey—where have you been?”

  “Just out.”

  He glances down at the phone again. “There’s been some vandalism at the mosque.” He shakes his head. “It’s awful.”

  Priscilla holds up her palm. “Not now, Peter.”

  She doesn’t have the headspace for any news.

  He switches his phone to silent and puts it in his pocket. Then he stands up and walks toward her. “You’re soaked. What are you doing with all those bags?”

  She feels foolish again. How could she think this would make a difference?

  “I couldn’t bear it any longer,” she says. “This terrible room. I didn’t want Astrid to wake up to this.” Her eyes scan the beige walls. “I didn’t want her to think that no one cares about her.”

  Peter takes another step toward her. She waits for him to tell her she’s crazy. Or to make fun of her. But instead, he takes the bags out of her hands and puts them down on the floor. Then he eases off her dripping raincoat and hangs it over the chair. And after that, he comes toward her again and puts his arms around her and draws her in close.

  He feels dry and clean and warm. He feels familiar, more familiar than anything else in her life right now. And, in those few moments, she lets her body collapse into his.

  www.GoodMorningBoston.com

  THE PLAYDATE SHOOTING: AN ACCIDENT OR AN ACT OF TERRORISM?

  Special report by Ellen Armstrong

  Graffiti on a new local mosque: a shocking act of vandalism or an insight into the background of the Middlebrook playdate shooting?

  Up until the playdate shooting on Sunday afternoon, the most interesting thing about Middlebrook, NH, a small town near the
Canadian border, was the fact that it was about to become the home of a new mosque.

  The building of the mosque has been uncontroversial which is surprising, considering the conservative nature of Northern New Hampshire. Locals have largely supported the project, guided by their minister, Reverend Avery Cotton, who has been vocal in proclaiming it as a place that will bring different faiths together. Only a month ago, she told one of our religious affairs reporters that “the mosque will be a symbol of tolerance, respect and neighborly understanding.”

  The mosque was designed by talented Columbia-educated architect from Lahore, Ayaan Sayeed, whose family lives in Middlebrook and whose children attend the local school. It seems that they, too, have until now been largely welcomed into the community.

  But then, on the afternoon of September 1, the eleven-year-old daughter of a local law professor was shot by a group of children playing in a stable. Among those children were the Sayed twins.

  At first, it was suspected that the shooter was Bryar Wright, whose party it was. He had access to his father’s gun safe and ammunition and it is widely known that there is animosity between his and the victim’s family. Evidence has also pointed to the involvement of a couple of foster children with a violent past, who moved from Roxbury to Middlebrook at the beginning of the summer. The girl, in particular, looked to be a likely suspect.

  Although those children are not off the hook, attention has now turned to the mild-mannered Muslim twins.

  The graffiti reveals a greater antipathy toward the building of the mosque than Middlebrook led us to believe. Antipathy that the Sayeds—and the Sayed twins—may well have become aware of.

  “They live in that big showy house on Main Street,” the resident added. “They don’t fit in here.”

  Not fitting in isn’t a crime, you might argue.

  But still. The shooting on Sunday. The graffiti discovered by police in the early hours of this morning. All of this points to a worrying unrest in the Middlebrook community, and might make us take a second look at what the motives were for the shooting—and who the shooter might have been.