schools. The First Baptists and the Central Methodists had already completed their summer programs, and the house was even more littered with paper fish and bread glued to paper plates, sheep made from cotton balls and Popsicle sticks, and lopsided drawings of fishermen pulling in nets filled with people. Shakespeare Combined Church (a fundamentalist coalition) and the joint Episcopalian/Catholic Bible schools were yet to come.
I entered with my own key to find Carol standing in the middle of the kitchen, trying to get the snarls out of Dawn’s long curls. The little girl was wailing. She had on a nightgown with Winnie the Pooh on the front. She was wearing toy plastic high heels and she’d gotten into her mother’s makeup.
I surveyed the kitchen and began to gather dishes. When I reentered the kitchen a minute later, laden with dirty glasses and two plates that had been on the floor in the den, Carol was still standing in the middle of the floor, a quizzical expression on her face.
“Good morning, Lily,” she said, in a pointed way.
“Hello, Carol.”
“Is something wrong?”
“No.” Why tell Carol? Would she be reassured about my well-being if I told her I’d tried to kill Jack the night before?
“You could say hello when you come in,” Carol said, that little smile still playing across her face. Dawn looked up at me with as much fascination as if I’d been a cobra. Her hair was still a mess. I could solve that with a pair of scissors and a brush in about five minutes, and I found the idea very tempting.
“I’m sorry, I was thinking of other things,” I told Carol politely. “Was there anything special you needed done today?”
Carol shook her head, that faint smile still on her face. “Just the usual magic,” she said wryly, and bent to Dawn’s head again. As she worked the brush through the little girl’s thick hair, the oldest boy dashed into the kitchen in his swimming trunks.
“Mom, can I go swimming?” Carol’s fair complexion and brown hair had been passed on to both the girls, but the boys favored, I supposed, their own mother: they were both freckle-faced and redheaded.
“Where?” Carol asked, using a yellow elastic band to pull Dawn’s hair up into a ponytail.
“Tommy Sutton’s. I was invited,” Cody assured her. “I can walk there by myself, remember?” Cody was ten and Carol had given him a range of streets he could take by himself.
“Okay. Be back in two hours.”
Tyler erupted into the kitchen roaring with rage. “That’s not fair! I want to go swimming!”
“Weren’t invited,” Cody sneered. “I was.”
“I know Tommy’s brother! I could go!”
As Carol laid down the law I loaded the dishwasher and cleaned the kitchen counters. Tyler retreated to his room with a lot of door slamming and fuming. Dawn trotted off to play with her Duplos, and Carol left the room in such a hurry I wondered if she was ill. Heather appeared at my elbow to watch my every move.
I am not much of a kid person. I don’t like, or dislike, all children. I take it on an individual basis, as I do with adults. I very nearly liked Heather Althaus. She would be old enough for kindergarten in the fall, she had short, easy-to-deal-with hair since a drastic self-barbering job that had driven Carol to tears, and she tried to take care of herself. Heather eyed me solemnly, said “Hey, Miss Lily,” and extricated a frozen waffle from the side-by-side. After popping it in the toaster, Heather got her own plate, fork, and knife and set them on the counter. Heather had on lime green shorts and a kingfisher blue shirt, not a happy combination, but she’d gotten dressed herself and I could respect that. In acknowledgment, I poured a glass of orange juice for her and set it on the table. Tyler and Dawn trotted through on their way out to the fenced-in backyard.
For a comfortable time, Heather and I shared the kitchen silently. As she ate her waffle, Heather raised her feet one at a time when I swept, and moved her own chair when I mopped.
When there was only a puddle of syrup on the plate, Heather said, “My mama’s gonna have a baby. She says God will give us a little brother or a sister. She says we don’t get to pick.”
I leaned on my mop for a moment and considered this news. It explained the unpleasant noises coming from the bathroom. I could not think of one single thing to say, so I nodded. Heather wriggled off the chair and ran to the switch to turn on the overhead fan to dry the floor quickly, as I always did.
“It’s true the baby won’t come for a long time?” the little girl asked me.
“That’s true,” I said.
“Tyler says Mama’s tummy will get real big like a watermelon.”
“That’s true, too.”
“Will they have to cut her open with a knife, like Daddy does the watermelon?”
“No.” I hoped I wasn’t lying. “She won’t pop, either,” I added, just to cover another anxiety.
“How will the baby get out?”
“Moms like to explain that in their own way,” I said, after I’d thought a little. I would rather have answered her matter-of-factly, but I didn’t want to usurp Carol’s role.
Through the sliding glass doors to the backyard (doors that were perpetually decorated with handprints) I could see that Dawn had carried her Duplos into the sandbox. They’d have to be washed off. Tyler was firing the soft projectiles of some Nerf weapon in the general direction of a discarded plastic soda bottle he’d filled with water. The two seemed to be fine, and I couldn’t see any danger actually lurking. I reminded myself to check again in five minutes, since Carol was definitely indisposed.
With Heather at my heels, I went to the room she shared with her sister and began to change the sheets. I figured that any second, Heather would exhaust her attention span and go find something else to do. But instead, Heather sat on a child-sized Fisher-Price chair and observed me with close attention.
“You don’t
I stopped pulling the flat sheet straight and glanced over my shoulder at the little girl.
“I’m not,” I said, my voice flat and final.
It would be hard to pin down exactly why this hurt me, but it did. What a senseless thing to waste emotion on, the repetition by a child of something she’d apparently heard adults say.
“So why do you walk by yourself at night? Isn’t that a scary thing to do? Only ghosts and monsters are out at night.”
My first response was that I myself was scarier than any ghost or monster. But that would hardly be reassuring to a little girl, and already other ideas were flickering through my head.
“I’m not afraid at night,” I said, which was close to the truth. I was not any more afraid at night than I was in the daytime, for sure.
“So you do it to show them you’re not afraid?” Heather asked.
The same wrenching pain filled me that I’d felt when I saw Jack’s bloody nose. I straightened, dirty sheets in a bundle in my arms, and looked down at the little girl for a long moment. “Yes,” I said. “That’s exactly why I do it.”
I knew then and there that I would be at the therapy session the next night. It was time.
For now, I taught Heather how to make hospital folds.
Chapter Two
I slid through the designated door the next night as though I’d come to steal some help, not to get it for free.
There were four cars in the parking lot, which was only partially visible from the street. I recognized two of them.
The side door we were to use was a heavy metal door. It slid shut behind me with a heavy thud, and I walked toward the only two rooms that were well lit. All the other doors up and down the corridor were shut, and I was willing to bet they were probably locked as well.
A woman appeared in the first open doorway and called, “Come on in! We’re ready to get started!” As I got closer I could see she was as dark as I was blond, she was as soft as I am hard, and I was to find she talked twice as much as I’d ever thought about doing. “I’m Tamsin Lynd,” she said, extending her hand.
