“When your Daddy is away . . .” she’d sung, staring down at me with a haunting grin.
“The woman will play!” I’d finish for her, trying to sing along.
My stomach lurched with the memory—more painful this time. It doubled me over as a cold sheen of nauseating sweat covered my skin. I opened the car door, fell over onto my side, and vomited.
“Mom!” Michael cried, pawing at the back of my jacket, trying to lift me. “Should I call Da—who can I call?”
“I’m okay, baby,” I told him, clearing my throat. I spat at the ground, spat at my old home and the curse she had set upon me. “All good now.”
“Please, Mom. Please tell me what’s wrong.”
I shook my head, wondering how to explain something so impossible to a young boy. “I can’t, Michael. It’s just one of those sad things that happen between grown-ups.”
When I turned around to face the backseat, Snacks gave me a long, wary stare and then turned away. She never had reason to look away before. Not before today. I stretched my hand, cupping her tiny knee, squeezing it playfully to jog a giggle. She twisted her head and crossed her arms, her usual reaction when she didn’t get her way.
“Baby girl,” I pleaded. “I’m sorry that I raised my hand. It was a reaction, you know, like jumping when you see a bug.”
“I’m no bug!” she exclaimed.
“I know, honey. I know you’re not a bug,” I tried to reason. “It was a mistake and I’m sorry.”
“Don’t you like that game?”
“What game, baby?”
Snacks looked at me then, bringing her hand to her mouth: Shush. I squeezed my eyes shut, revolted by the sight.
Shaking my head, I said in a voice that shook, “No. No, I don’t like that game.”
“But Grandma says you played it all the time with her.”
“Well, I don’t play that game anymore.”
“Can we go home?” she asked, already losing interest in what was being said. She’d be fine and hopefully would bury the memory. I just wished I’d buried some of mine a little deeper.
THIRTY-EIGHT
I DIDN’T SEE my mother again until the day of Katie’s funeral. Without Steve to lean on, I walked from my car alone, having chosen to drive by myself. I preferred the company of one on this day when I had to bury my best friend. I braced myself when I stepped up onto the grass, expecting my heels to sink in, but the winter had seized hold of all life, laying it dormant until spring, hardening the ground like stone. Winter birds took flight along the evergreens lining the cemetery, and I realized Katie’s grave wasn’t far from John’s. I glanced around, searching for tented mounds of freshly dug grave sites, wondering if Todd or Sam Wilts might be buried nearby. Sam had died days after the shootout with my husband, and his son’s death was deemed a murder. But his murder hadn’t been connected to Katie; I wondered if it ever would be. I stopped to close my coat but instead decided to welcome the winter air, let it take hold until my teeth began to chatter. I wanted to feel cold. Deserved it. I was convinced that my heart was as stony as the ground Katie would be laid in soon. If she’d known who I really was or what I’d done . . .
The memories of when I’d swung from the leather belt were sporadic. Some were fleeting, while others stuck and wouldn’t go away—those were the ones that scared me. The few when the men fought back, escaping from my mother. I remembered one man who had lurched up when I tried to close the belt on his throat. He’d let out a horrendous noise and vaulted forward, sending my body crashing into the car door while my mother flew off him and into the windshield. That man could have turned around and killed me then, killed both of us, but having the strap around his neck spooked him. He took the noosed belt and hurled it at me, holding on to the buckle but whipping the strap over my head. I heard his hands fumbling with the door handle, jerking it until the door squealed open in a lurch. He escaped that night, running across the pavement, his cock still hard and glistening by the pale light of a streetlamp. My mother tried to send me to fetch the belt that had fallen from his hand when he tumbled, but I was afraid to leave the car, certain that he’d come back.
“Go or we’ll lose it,” she scolded. “You want to use it again, don’t you?”
I clutched my chest, remembering what I said. “Yes, Momma. Yes, I want to use it again.”
And now, as I stood at my friend’s grave, I wondered what my mother would have to say for herself. She stood opposite me, perched in black, a dark, lacy veil covering her eyes. She made the sign of the cross and then touched Katie’s casket before fixing me with a look of contentment. There was no mistaking what I was seeing. She looked happier than I had seen her in years, as if our past had happened just yesterday. I closed my eyes to focus on the ceremony, kept them closed with Katie on my mind. I was here for her. I wasn’t here for my mother, or myself. I was here for my best friend.
“I’ll miss you, Katie,” I whispered, placing my hand onto her casket. Katie’s body would be lowered into the ground soon. The thought of her being gone put a hole so deep inside me that I didn’t think it could ever be filled.
“Thank you for coming,” I heard Jerry say. I nodded in his direction. Katie’s boys stayed sitting by the grave, their eyes on the casket. Two large men were perched directly behind them. They looked like bodyguards and wore sunglasses, but I was certain they each held a badge inside their jackets. “Please tell Steve that I wish him well.”
“I will,” I answered as I offered my condolences—a formality, but in my gut I felt that this would probably be the last time I would ever talk to Jerry. As if to confirm what I was thinking, the taller bodyguard spoke into his wrist, whispering about the funeral ending. He tapped Jerry’s shoulder.
“Time to go, sir,” he said, his voice guttural and reserved.
“Just give me a minute, would you?” Jerry begged, raising his hands to show his palms. “I just want more time with my boys.”
“We have to go, sir,” the man said, raising his voice and drawing curious glances. Clouds of cold breath appeared as folks turned around, only to turn back to their cars.
“I’ve got them, Jerry,” Katie’s mother said, coming to their side and pulling them closer to her. The boys said little, just cried softly and reached for their father, who’d already moved to leave. “You take care, Jerry.”
I sensed my mother behind me before I heard her voice. “So sad,” she said and cautiously touched my arm. “So sad to see a family broken apart like that.”
“What is it, Mom?” I asked. I heard her shift around, shuffling as though trying to find something to say.
“Amy, I’m sorry. Really, I am. What happened all those years ago was my fault.”
I swung around, sickened and appalled. But more than that, I was afraid. “I was just a kid. This doesn’t go away with an ‘I’m sorry’!” I had heard enough. I stepped around her. My mother gripped my arm, jerking me back. “What are you doing?”
“Listen to me,” she pleaded. “This is important. You have to know who we are. This is who Snacks will be!”
“No. No, you’re wrong!” I shouted, looking at her like some monstrous vampire and not caring who heard me. By now the graveyard had thinned to only a few curious onlookers anyway. “You’re wrong about that!”
“I think she has a secret box too,” my mother said. I cupped my mouth as the air rushed into my lungs in a gasp. My knees went weak, causing me to stumble. My most intimate of secrets were known to someone else.
But how?
Her eyes widened, surprised. “Oh, you didn’t know? I’ve known about your little secret box since your earliest designs. You weren’t exactly quiet about it, Amy.”
“How . . . how?” I stuttered, but then realized a squeaky floorboard would easily draw a curious eye. “Snacks! What about my baby?”
“She told me that she had a secret too,” my mother explained. I clenched my fists and jaw, squeezing them in anguish at what I feared my mother was going to sa
y next. “And then she showed me.”
My mother handed me a rolled-up piece of construction paper. I unfurled it, and found myself looking at a small design that had been drawn in crayon. I shook my head as a burning took over my face and my body flushed with heat. It was a Killing Katie–type design. But Snacks was much younger than I had been when I started drawing mine. I tried to make out an innocent shape in my baby girl’s crayon scribbles—a rabbit or tree or anything else—but there was no mistaking that it depicted a sharp blade and knife handle and a pool of puddled blood, which she had filled with a waxy red. A twisting erupted inside me when I saw the poorly written name of my baby girl on the sheet. She was too young to write her whole name, but she knew a few letters. In the corner, she had scratched a big letter S with a short scribble after it. A pang of jealousy came then, but I wasn’t sure of what hurt me more—that Snacks had opened up to my mother or that my mother knew about my secret box.
“You’re wrong,” I insisted, deciding she had encouraged Snacks. “You did this! You drew this with her. This is not from my girl. This is your fucking sickness.”
“It’s ours,” she argued, squeezing my arm with a heavy pinch. “Just like it is going to be hers!”
I swung my arm, crashing my open hand against her cheek with a swift crack. My mother fell back, catching herself in a shuffle of clumsy footsteps. I was crying hard. I folded my arms around myself as if to guard against her vileness.
“Just stay away from us!” I said. “You’re not welcome in my house or in our lives.”
“Amy!” she cried out in a wail. Her voice shaking, pleading.
“Not my baby girl!” I heard myself screaming back to her. “Not my baby girl!”
THIRTY-NINE
WEEKS HAD PASSED since Katie’s death. Her children had moved in with her mother and father. At least they would be together. Jerry had been passed from federal agency to agency like a bone in a circle of dogs, trying to offer testimony in exchange for a reduction in his sentence. That is, less time in prison—though I thought it was still likely he would die in there. And my best friend? Her body, unmoving and cold, remained in the ground. It made me sad to think of her like that, to think of her beauty withering away into dusty nothingness.
For some reason, I’d gone out of my way to drive by Katie’s home during my trips to the hospital. Maybe I was punishing myself, wanting to witness the end of a family. Yellow police tape still hung from the porch columns, abandoned, tattered, the ends shredded and whipping in the breeze. The curtains Katie and I had picked out disappeared, leaving the windows dark and lifeless. And the brass porch lights we’d installed—thinking we didn’t need an electrician, just a pair of pliers and a bottle of wine—had been ripped out, leaving behind a tangle of wires like nerves from a severed limb.
Eventually, Katie’s home was emptied, gutted, and boarded up. But the ending came with a foreclosure sign, hung from a square post, stabbed into the ground with one wrenching blow as if to make sure the family was really dead. I teared up a few times at that, catching my breath in a shudder. I would have to drive away soon after. Seeing what had become of my best friend’s home was nearly as hard as seeing her body in the casket. A tornado had come, hit them head on, and sent the pieces of their lives in every direction. I couldn’t stand the idea of being the cause, of being the tornado. Jerry may have stirred things up, but it was Todd’s death that had moved Katie’s family into Sam’s path.
A month after being shot, Steve finally came home. And what a day it was. His mother joined me and the kids as we filled the foyer with a hundred balloons—all shapes and sizes and colors—the sound of them squeaking, a few of them popping, the sudden lift of our voices filling the house with shrieks. We added long, curly streamers to the colorful montage and hung a shiny Welcome Home banner across his office door. Michael had picked that one out, insisting on the electric blue and silvery colors.
Steve’s leg would never fully recover, we learned. I quickly sensed the sadness of what he’d be losing. My husband was alive. My husband was home. But my husband would never be the same person. That last fact stung, and I could only hope that what we had could survive it.
“Charlie isn’t going to Florida,” Steve said, stuffing his mouth with cake. I leaned against him, taking him in: his smell, his vibe, his presence. I realized how much I had missed having him home. I rubbed his leg, tenderly and softly, hoping that the massage would help ease the chronic pain.
“Nerve damage,” Doctor Lu had told us. “It’s the nerve damage that is causing the pain.”
He winced. I yanked my hand back, cringing.
“Easy,” he pleaded, sighing impatiently.
I shook my head, “I’m sorry. Would a heating pad feel better?” I asked, carefully feeling around the bandage on his thigh.
“I like what you’re doing. Just softer.”
“So Charlie is staying on?” I asked, unsure if I wanted to hear the answer.
Steve nodded. There was reluctance in the motion. Regret and disappointment too. “He’s going to stay on for another two years. It’s already a done deal.”
“How do you feel about that?” I asked and then wished I hadn’t. But I found that, more and more, I didn’t quite know what to say to him. The disappointment rolled off him like a wave.
It’s the depression, I told myself. I’d read an encyclopedia’s worth of material online about recovery’s challenges, hoping to be the best wife I could be for him.
Steve chomped on another bite of his cake, choosing not to answer. Too soon, I supposed. I didn’t push it. He offered the fork, brushing my lips with the chocolate. Teasing. I licked at the icing playfully until the grim look on his face disappeared.
“I’ll be riding the desk for a long time. A very long time—but with an occasional distraction like that, I think I can deal with it.”
We were alone in his office. I shut the door, hoping to have him to myself for at least an hour. I bit at his fork, licking it again and said in a breathy voice, “Been a while. Do you feel up to it?”
His furrowed brow lifted and he leaned in, kissing me. I moaned, hungry for more than cake. I slipped my tongue into his mouth as I unbuttoned his pants. We made love that afternoon—for the first time in what felt like forever—taking our time, rediscovering, easing back into a familiar rhythm. And in my mind, I kept my thoughts on my husband and pushed away the wreckage of my actions. Sure, I still wanted my peanut butter and chocolate, but I wanted my husband more.
The first winter snows came with the whiskers of Steve’s unkempt beard. I begged him to cut the scraggly mess, insisted he shave it. But he decided to keep it, calling it his “recovery beard.” He spent months in and out of physical therapy. When he began to drive again, he came home after one of his sessions and sat me down. I pulled a chair out from the table, my heartbeat aching in my chest as the chair legs scratched against the floor. I expected him to tell me that he knew everything, that he knew what I had done and that he blamed me for getting shot. I held my breath. He pinched at the straggle of whiskers—brown whiskers, peppered with a bristle of untamed gray—his hand disappeared into his coat, fumbling for a moment before revealing law school pamphlets. He dropped them on the table, slid them in front of me, and looked proud for following through. I tucked my finger beneath the first, lifting it open. I didn’t know what to say, and I think he was at a loss for words too. His lips peeked through his heavy beard, smiling broadly. He nodded as if to say that he’d made up his mind, that he was going to go back to school.
“We just need to figure out how to pay for it,” he said. “But I found one. I found a school that would work out perfectly for us.”
“Thank you!” I answered, planting kisses all over his face, even the itchy parts that I didn’t care for very much.
Steve eventually rode the desk job, just as he said he would, going back to work once the doctors gave their okays. He took on new cases, investigating in ways that he’d never thought of before
. A small cyber crime division had opened up under Charlie, and Steve jumped at the chance to try something new. I had my reservations, though, knowing how good Nerd was and how much better others were than Steve when it came to swimming in the deep end of the Web. I thought of the red and yellow links, and what the click of a mouse button really meant. I wondered if Steve could ever unknowingly bump into Nerd. But the new position let Steve keep his detective’s shield, and it kept him safe. And what was even better, the homeless man’s case remained his—albeit unsolved. My buttons were safely hidden away in an evidence room that only Steve knew about.
Early one afternoon, I found myself on the bridge over Neshaminy Creek again. I decided to get out of the car. With the world at work, the kids in school, and the bridge empty, I had the creek to myself. Springtime was in the air, buds had started to show on the thinnest branches, and the tall piles of plowed snow had grown dark and begun to shrink. Soon they would be a memory, forgotten until the first snow of the coming year.
Gripping the rail, following the sound of passing water, I looked to where my bloody handprint had been stamped the day Katie was killed. Instinctively, I searched around me, making sure I was alone before picking up a pack of loose ice to clean the blood that was no longer there. I thought of Katie then, as the ice melted in the heat of my palm. A drop of water caught the sunlight, the shine skipping into my eyes.
I missed talking to my friend. But there was something else I missed. It took me a minute to understand what else it was—my mother. We hadn’t talked since the day of Katie’s funeral. She had listened to my demand that she stay away from my home and my family. Steve was suspicious of our falling out, and pried me with questions, but I talked around them and then fixed him just the right look, telling him to back off.
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