After her visit with Ted at the Middlesex County Jail, Jessica entered her house, again pushing that damn squeaky door, and picked up the mail from the floor, which she had ignored yesterday during the chaos following Ted’s arrest. At least no one from the news media was out there waiting for her, and it looked like Attorney Wray was right: eventually the press did go on to something else.
Good for them, she thought, and walked through the empty house, dropped her purse on the dining room table, and then threw the mail—a flyer from Hannaford’s, a plea from Boston Children’s Hospital, a checking account statement in her and Ted’s name from her own place of business—across the room, making the pieces fly and scatter like baby chicks being kicked out of the nest.
Jessica looked back at that damn squeaky door. Remembered all the times Ted had promised to fix it. She went to the door leading to the cellar, opened it, went downstairs, grabbed a tool kit, and went back to the front door. She took out a screwdriver and pliers and went to work. It was good to have tools in her hands, to get something done. Jessica remembered the times back in high school, taking computers apart and putting them back together, sometimes fixing small things around the house.
A while later she put the tools away and tried working the door.
The damn thing still rubbed and squeaked. All that work had been for nothing.
She put both hands up to her face, took a deep sigh, wondered and waited, and then put the tool kit away, washed her hands and face, and went upstairs.
The door to Craig’s room was closed. Big surprise.
The door to Emma’s was slightly open and she walked in.
A mess, but why not? Emma was fifteen years old, had her entire future ready for her, from running track to having her mom get access to that trust fund when she turned twenty-one, to getting the whole thing when she turned thirty. All Jessica had to do was take care of her little girl.
She stepped over to the bed, kicked off her shoes, plopped herself down, and stretched out on the blanket, taking Emma’s pillow and wrapping her arms around it, bringing it close to her chest. Taking in the scent of Emma brought back so many memories, just tumbling in, one right after another, including the night she had gotten the phone call from the Maine State Police that Bobby had died in York.
Long after the phone calls, the trip up to the Maine State Police barracks, coming home and relieving her neighbor—sweet old Mrs. Miller, a retiree from a tech firm out on Route 128—she had taken young Emma to bed with her, held her, whispered to her, brushed her hair. Emma had struggled and whined while in her mother’s insistent arms but had fallen asleep, not knowing then that her daddy was dead, and in the new darkness Jessica had said, “I will always protect you, my little girl. Tonight, tomorrow, and forever. And you will never know what I’ve done for you.”
Now, alone in her girl’s room, she wondered how Emma was doing tonight.
Emma Thornton was at her friend Kate Romer’s house and was enjoying her time until her phone tinged with an incoming text. Kate’s parents, Doris and John, were loud, talking, arguing, laughing, and hugging each other in the crowded kitchen and living room. Kate’s younger twin brothers, Paul and Peter, raced around, knocking things over, and Emma found the place fun and happy. Not like her own home, with Mom coming home from the bank, moaning about her sore feet, her stepdad Ted bitching about the soft real estate market, and Craig being Craig.
Which is why she swore when she saw the text she got on her iPhone:
need to see u RIGHT NOW
And she typed back
later
And in seconds,
NO!!! or I go to the cops NOW
She shook her head, let her fingers fly, and then went out to the kitchen, where Kate was drying the dinner dishes with her mom, laughing and flicking dishwater from her fingers, and Emma said, “Mrs. Romer? I need to go out for some fresh air.”
Kate’s mom, who was plump, florid-faced, wearing a flannel shirt and jeans, wiped her hands on a dish towel and touched Emma’s cheek.
“Everything okay, sweetheart?”
Emma said, “I just need some fresh air. That’s all.”
Kate said, “I’ll come along.”
“No, that’s okay,” Emma said. “I just want a few minutes by myself.”
Kate started to speak, but her mom gave her a soft glare, and that was that.
“Be safe, all right?”
Emma nodded.
Safe, sure.
Luckily the Romers lived near the Bormans, where Craig was hanging out with his equally weird pal Mark. Via text, he had agreed to meet her at the town common. The walk was quick enough. She walked with her head down and hair tucked up under a wool cap, hoping she wouldn’t be noticed. Not that she had anything to be nervous about, but the fewer eyes on her, the better.
She went across the marked crosswalk to the common and over to the Minuteman statue and the bandstand, right where it seemed about half the town had gathered the other night for the sobfest over Sam’s death.
Craig was leaning against the bandstand, hands in his coat pockets, knapsack on the grass before him. He was wearing a long denim coat that for some reason the geeks at high school had taken on as their uniform, not knowing that it made them better targets whenever they got in somebody’s way.
“Hey,” Emma said.
Craig said, “Don’t fucking ‘hey’ me, Emma.”
Emma said, “I’ll say anything I want.”
Craig stood there looking at his perfect stepsister, wondering why, with everything she had going for her—a free ticket to college, lots of friends, solid B-plus work at school, a trust fund her mother could tap when she turned twenty-one—she had to have this wicked crazy streak that nearly always got her into trouble. She was like one of those Hawaiian surfers you saw on ESPN, those hot-looking blondes in their red spandex two-pieces, riding on top of a wave so freakin’ high, pushing it and pushing it, always just a few seconds away from tumbling into disaster, a wild-ass crazy grin on their faces. Emma was just like that, except in her case, if she was going to tumble, she was going to take Craig and Dad along with her.
Not going to happen.
He said, “My dad’s in jail, and you’re bitching to me about what you can say?”
“Stop being so dramatic,” she said. “He’s just been arrested, that’s all.”
“That’s all!” he nearly yelled back at her. “You don’t think that’s enough?”
In a cool, controlled, and slightly contemptuous tone, she said, “He’s been arrested. Where’s the evidence?”
“The cops must know something.”
“They know shit. They got your dad’s shotgun, and they got evidence that his poor widdle son was being teased by the big bad wrestling team. That’s all. In a few days he’ll be out on bail, when his new lawyer gets him sprung.”
“You don’t know that.”
“It makes sense. You know it does.”
When Craig had first met Emma a few years back, when his dad had started dating Jessica, she had seemed impossibly beautiful and perfect, like one of those crystal-like dolls sold downtown at Warner Gifts and Collectibles. But now all he wanted to do was to punch that smug face, make her hurt like he was hurting.
“I don’t know what makes sense,” he finally said, blurting out the words he had been practicing to say for the last hour. “All I know is that I’m going to the cops tomorrow. Let them know what happened. I gotta protect my dad.”
Emma stared at her idiot stepbrother and said, “You can’t—and you won’t—do that.”
“Oh, yeah? Why not? You going to stop me?”
“You bet I am,” she said. “You go, and our deal—it’s done.”
He shook his head. “Some fucking deal. You were never going to keep your end of it, were you?”
The thing was, Craig was right. She was never going to go through with it, but this wasn’t the time or place to bring that up. Him going to the cops!
“Look, give it a day, okay?”
“What’s a day going to do?”
She took a step toward him. “I’m over at Kate’s, okay? And I heard her dad talking about a couple of cops coming into the hardware store. They were blabbing when they shouldn’t have been blabbing, and they said the detective is also looking into the house party at Sam’s last Saturday.”
Craig looked like he was going to start bawling. “Ah, shit, no.”
“Ah, shit, yes,” she said, “but don’t worry. It’s not about me, and it’s not about you. It’s about something else that happened there.”
“Like what?”
“Like somebody’s dad came up to the house, drunk, pissed off, and he wanted to go in and meet up with Sam, and he got the shit beat out of him.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“It’s a big house, big yard. I don’t remember that either.”
And in a flash the fuzzy details of what she remembered from last Saturday night made her stomach whirl. Enough, she thought, enough.
Emma said, “I guess a couple of Sam’s pals grabbed the guy before he could make a fuss, beat him up some, and dumped him in a drainage ditch.”
“So?”
Emma was getting more and more exasperated with her older stepbrother. “Don’t you see? That’s another suspect. A guy who came to the party telling everybody that he wanted to hurt Sam. The cops will start looking at him, and the case against your dad will go away.”
Craig kept his mouth shut.
Emma saw her opportunity. “One more day,” she said. “Maybe two. Don’t go to the cops, Craig. It’ll just . . . confuse things. Raise a lot of questions. Get you into trouble, me into trouble.”
Craig nodded. Then he suddenly knelt down, lifted up his knapsack, and showed Emma what was inside.
Jesus Christ!
“Craig, I told you! I told you to get rid of it!”
“So I don’t do everything you tell me,” he said, zipping the bag shut, slinging it over his right shoulder. “And I tell you this—my dad gets out tomorrow, one way or another, or I’m going to the cops. No matter what. Okay?”
Craig wondered if he had gone too far, and then Emma sighed, pulled her blond hair free from the dark-pink wool cap, and let it fall over her shoulders.
“Craig . . . you’re upset. I’m sorry,” she said softly, stepping so close he could smell her fresh-soap scent, whatever it was that girls of her age wore on their skin or in the hair. “It’s been so rough, and you’ve been a real man about it. And I know I owe you big-time. What I promised, to make it right for you, to help you? I intend to do it. In fact, I was just talking about you to Kate. She . . . she told me she would love to go out with you. She’s just kinda shy.”
Then her hands were on his jeans belt, and Craig’s legs started trembling. He knew he was a geek, a nerd, someone to be teased at school, but my God, this was the first time a girl had ever taken hold of his belt. And started undoing it.
“You were very brave, getting me into that house party when everybody else on the track team was invited and I wasn’t,” she said, her voice just above a whisper. “I couldn’t let that happen. Those bitches . . . they would eventually vote me out as team captain if they saw I was weak. And then, when . . . when . . .”
Craig saw her eyes seem to well up and heard her voice choke. “And when they roofied me and Sam was taking advantage of me, you manned up and came to rescue me.”
The shaking in Craig’s legs increased. How did any guy with a steady girlfriend get through the day, through school, knowing that at any time his girl could—and would!—touch him like this!
His belt was undone. Her soft hands were unzipping his jeans. The sound of the zipper being pulled down by a girl was the most wonderful thing he had ever heard in his life.
Emma’s voice lowered some more. “And more brave . . . when Sam threatened to blackmail me with that video, you said you would help me. No matter how dangerous, you said you wouldn’t let Sam hurt me. You said that . . . and I said I would reward you. Remember? Make it right after they hurt you. I told you I’d set you up with Kate. And Kate—you put a beer into her, Craig, and she’ll do anything you like. Hear me? Anything you like.”
Craig was humiliated and wanted to say something, but all he could do was let out a soft sigh. In this part of the bandstand they were hidden by a rectangular stone monument honoring Warner veterans, and by bushes and saplings.
Hidden. They were hidden.
Her hands were soft on his belly, and her hands moved down, down, down—
And Emma suddenly pulled up his T-shirt and said, “And if you screw this up, Craig, this”—and she slapped his belly where the humiliating FAG marking still was, no matter how many times he had scrubbed and scrubbed—“will be put on flyers and dropped all over the school. And Kate Romer will never go out with you. Got it?”
She stood up, wiped her hands on her jacket as if they were soiled, and strode away. Craig, sobbing, quickly zipped up his pants and fastened his belt with shaking hands.
Jessica slowly woke up, the bed shaking underneath her. She wondered where she was, and it was the scent that keyed her off that she was in Emma’s room. She felt embarrassed, wondering what would happen if Emma came in, seeing that disappointed look on her face. She hated that look.
The shaking increased, and at first she wondered, An earthquake? But now there was the faint whistle of a freight train moving through Warner, and it was the old clapboards and beams of the house that were quivering from the passing train. Nothing more.
She lay awake in Emma’s bed. Thought about earthquakes. It was strange, she knew, but there were times she wished she and Emma lived in California. There was something appealing to her about living in a place where natural events struck without warning. Landslides. Wildfires. Earthquakes. Here in Massachusetts, the danger came at you with plenty of warning. Hurricanes. Sleet storms. Heavy snow.
The shaking of the bed eased off.
But sometimes the warning provided opportunities.
School had been canceled the day of a wet, heavy snowstorm that downed lots of trees in their Haverhill neighborhood. Mom worked for the tax assessor’s office at City Hall, and Dad was a salesman for Hewlett-Packard out of Andover, and some months he made lots of sales, but lately the sales were starting to dry up. Once she had heard Dad, getting drunk and mean one night, tell Mom, “It’s starting to fall apart. I don’t know why, but HP’s in trouble. Those fancy TV commercials and newspaper ads, they’re all shit. We’re gonna miss our projections and it’s gonna be announced this month.”
And there was more drinking, and some arguing, and some smacks she could hear in her bedroom, and in the morning, as always, Mom left with heavy foundation makeup on her swollen cheeks to try to hide the marks.
On that day Jessica Brown stayed home and hid in her bedroom while Mom went to work at City Hall and Dad called in to Andover and said he would work some leads from home. Which was all crap. On those days that Dad stayed home to “work leads,” he worked on his thirst instead. He started in the morning with screwdrivers, then switched to shots of bourbon once the clock chimed noon, and he’d stretch out on the couch and watch movies on TV and doze, wake up, and drink some more.
But today was different. He was his usual angry self and looked out at their small, fenced-in backyard and said, “Jesus effin’ Christ, look at what the Sinclairs’ trees did to our yard.”
Jessica thought it was funny that Dad would blame something not human like the trees, but she had long ago learned not to tease him. Out in the yard was a covered gas grill, a small stone patio, and a picnic table. At the very rear was the Sinclairs’ house, with three large pine trees stretched above the stockade fence. The heavy snow overnight had broken off four large branches that were heavily draped over the picnic table.
“Fuck,” Dad said, heading to get his boots and coat. “Guess I’m gonna clean up that mess, and you know what I’m gonna do?”
“What’s that, Dad?” she asked, hoping he wouldn’t ask her to go outside. It was warm and safe inside her bedroom, with a new Harry Potter book, and she dreaded the thought of having to go out in the cold, hauling branches with sticky sap, getting snow down her back and down her boots.
He laughed, but she had never liked her dad’s laugh. It was fun on the surface, but underneath there was a lot of anger and hate.
“I’m gonna take those branches and toss ’em over the fence, dump ’em in his yard. Let him take care of it.”
Dad went outside without asking for her help. She went up to her bedroom, sat on the bed, and dove into Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and soon got lost into the details of a Triwizard Tournament being hosted by Hogwarts Academy.
Pages flipped by. Chapters. Big chunks flew by.
She looked at the digital clock and was stunned at how much time had passed. Where was Dad?
She put the book down on her bed, carefully crept downstairs. If Dad was back in the house, maybe he was snoring on the couch. If so, good; let him be. She could make herself lunch and go back up to her bedroom, not disturb him. It was never a good thing to disturb him.
The living room was empty. So was the kitchen. The bathroom. And with her parents’ bedroom across from her own, she knew he wasn’t there.
Jessica stood up on her tiptoes and looked out the kitchen window at the backyard. There was a shape in the snow, covered by a tree branch.
It was as cold as she had feared, and she slogged through the knee-deep snow to the rear of the yard. Dad was on his back, with a thick pine branch over his chest. His blue down coat was open, and his jeans were soaked through from the snow. One of his boots had slipped off. His bare foot was white and wrinkled.
Dad’s eyes were wide with pain and his face was as gray as an old sock. He was breathing hard.
“Jess . . . Jess . . .”
“Dad.”
He groaned, a deep sound she had never heard from him before. “I . . . my chest is hurting something awful. I think . . . I think . . . it might be my heart.” Another deep groan. “Run back to the house, okay?” He bit his lower lip, his eyes filling with tears. “Call 911. I need an ambulance. Hurry!”
She turned and slogged through the snow back to the house.
Even as cold as it was, the sun was high up and the sky was clear, a very fresh blue.
Inside she kicked off her boots, tossed off her jacket, and went into the kitchen. The phone was on the near wall, next to the calendar and a little bulletin board that held thumbtacked doctor and dentist appointment cards along with that week’s grocery list. A pencil dangled from a string tacked to the board.
She walked further into the kitchen. Looked out the window.
Dad was still.
Jessica made herself a peanut butter sandwich, poured a glass of milk, and sliced up a Granny Smith apple. Back upstairs in her bedroom, she read two more chapters, ate her lunch, and then went back downstairs and carefully washed her dishes and put them away.
What now?
She got dressed again and, very slowly and carefully, went out to where Dad was lying on his back, calling out, “Dad? Dad?”
No answer. His eyes were closed. His chest wasn’t moving up and down. His face was a deeper shade of gray.
“Dad?”
Jessica turned and went back to the house, making sure her boots slid into the prints from before, and when she got into the house, she undressed in a mad scramble, tossing boots and coat aside, and then ran to the phone and dialed 911. By the time the Haverhill police operator answered, she had worked up a good head of tears and anguish.
“Please, I need an ambulance! I think my daddy is dead!”
Jessica finally got up from Emma’s bed and went downstairs to grab something to eat, take a shower. As she puttered around in the kitchen, her biggest memory of her dad’s funeral was of being hugged by Mom as her three aunts gathered around her, and Mom whispering into her ear. “Now,” she said, “now we can have a safe life together. I think God helped us.”
And Jessica just thought back then, as ever: You will never know, Mom.
You will never know.