THE mother half of my working mother identity took precedence the next day. Isaac had come home the day before with a note pinned to his backpack. In flowery script, complete with smiley faces and misspellings, his preschool teacher informed me that I was delinquent in my volunteer duties, and thus was expected in class the next morning. The note had the tone of a cheerful jury summons, and I experienced the same trepidation as I had in junior high school when being called into the principal’s office. The summons further instructed me to be prepared to officiate at a lice check, but since I refused to believe this could be anything but a typo (Rice check? Mice check?), I was utterly unprepared when Ms. Morgenstern handed me a comb and a pair of latex gloves.
“You can usually find the nits in the hair over the ears or at the nape of the neck,” she said with a cheerfully condescending smile.
I stared first at the picture of the terrified louse stenciled on the comb and then up at her face. “Nits?” I could hear the quaver in my own voice.
“Little baby lice,” she said. “Look for eggs, or the little critters themselves. I’d start with Madison if I were you. And Colby. The two of them have been scratching all week.”
Since when had lice become a routine part of the academic experience? When I was a kid, nobody had lice. Or at least kids growing up in the New Jersey suburbs certainly didn’t. Maybe those New York children had heads full of creepy crawlies; those same children who were gnawed on by rats while they slept. But not us; not the kids who rode their Big Wheels down wide sidewalks past manicured lawns. And now, here I was, picking through the fragrant, shampooed locks of a class full of Travises, Hunters, Jacksons, Sadies, and Maxes, looking for insects. I couldn’t help but wonder if Ms. Morgenstern drafted me specifically because she knew I spent my working hours searching out the human equivalent.
The return of my morning sickness at the very thought of vermin infesting the scalp of my cosseted little boy and his passel of overly indulged friends caused me to be more thorough than I might have been otherwise. I ran the comb through the kids’ hair and diligently lifted up each and every strand, terrified I would actually see a louse laying its eggs and wriggling its little legs. I was undoing Fiona’s braids when my cell phone rang.
“How close are you to a newsstand?” Al said as soon as I’d answered the phone.
“Oh no.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“How bad?”
“Bad.”
“Read me the headline.”
He cleared his throat. “LIKE BROTHER LIKE SISTER—” he began.
“Okay, I get it,” I said. “I’ll call you back.” I was still holding on to Fiona’s head. I let her go and walked over to Ms. Morgenstern. “I’m sorry,” I told her, and handed her the combs. “I’ve got to go.”
She opened her mouth in protest, but I shook my head. “It’s an emergency.”
She pursed her lips and then widened them into her ubiquitous smile. “We’ll expect you back next month.”
I nodded and found Isaac. He was in the playhouse, wearing a pair of purple high heels. And a set of Viking horns. I kissed him goodbye.
My cell phone rang again while I was standing in line at the Quikmart, paying for the tall stack of Daily Enquirers I’d pulled off the rack. It was Lilly. And she was hysterical.
“Did you see it?” she screamed. “They know everything. Everything!”
“I know,” I murmured into the phone. I looked down at the cover photograph. It must have been taken right after Lilly had first shaved her head for her recent film, and her fragile skull filled almost the entire front page. They’d caught her without her usual wide and friendly grin; her mouth was twisted in an unfamiliar scowl. The newspaper had done its homework. The article contained a detailed description of Trudy-Ann’s death, and Lilly’s role in it. Everything was there—her mother’s relationship with Polaris, their life at the Topanga commune and in Mexico. There was a photograph of Dr. Blackmore with his hand to his face, refusing to be interviewed, and a sidebar detailing his theory of recovered memory of childhood trauma. They’d even included descriptions of papers he’d published in which he analyzed the case of a patient he referred to as “Little Girl Q.” Little Girl Q had accidentally caused the death of her mother and then repressed all memory of the event. Through intensive work with Dr. Blackmore, she had recovered her memories, and as a result become an emotionally whole individual who did not need the assistance of narcotics to handle her emotional pain. The newspaper left it up to the reader to assume who Little Girl Q really was.
There was also a full rehashing of the Chloe Jones murder, although the paper stopped just short of accusing Lilly of being involved. Nothing in the article was libelous as far as I could tell, but it certainly left the impression that Lilly’s violent past and Chloe’s violent end were not likely to be merely coincidental.
The descriptions of Lilly’s history, life, and troubles were intimate and detailed—how could they not be? Archer had told the newspaper everything he knew.
“I’m going to kill him!” Lilly screamed.
“Please don’t say that out loud, Lilly,” I said. I tossed some money on the counter and ran out of the store. I got in my car and locked the doors. Once I was safely away from prying ears, I tried to hush her tears. “It’s going to be okay.”
“How? How is it going to be okay?” She was no longer shouting—her sobs strangled all the volume out of her voice.
“Remember what Beverly said,” I murmured. “It will be hard, but you’ll end up okay. You’ll pull through. I promise.”
Lilly just cried harder. I leafed through the rest of the magazine. It was liberally sprinkled with photographs of Archer looking handsome, concerned, put upon. The long-suffering husband of a violent, irrational woman. Near the back was a small photograph of Beverly, standing in front of the state house. I skimmed the paragraph under her picture while murmuring words of comfort to a sobbing Lilly. Beverly and Raymond had survived the debacle relatively unscathed. They were, according to the paper, supportive and nurturing parents who had taken in a damaged and aggressive child and done their best with her. At some point, I knew Lilly was going to be grateful that they had been spared.
“Do you want me to come over?” I asked.
Lilly hiccupped. “No. I want you to go talk to Archer. Find out how much they paid him for this. I want to know what selling me out was worth to that son of a bitch.”
“Does that really matter?” I asked as gently as I could.
Her voice turned cold. “Yes. It matters. It matters to me. Can you do this one thing for me, Juliet? Can you?”
I tamped down my hurt feelings. Lilly was devastated, and enraged at Archer, at the newspaper, at the world. She didn’t mean to lash out at me.
“Yes, of course I can,” I said.