Thursday, April 3
The phone book lay buried under a pile of notepaper, the kind her mom made by cutting up botched photocopies. Emma’s hand shook as she pulled it from the drawer. Her mom stood by the phone, an old-school model mounted on the wall with a twirly cord connecting it to the handset. She held it in front of her, its rectangular number pads glowing alien green in the darkness. “Give me the number,” her mom said.
Emma turned page after page, but her hot tears blurred all the tiny black type. “Mom, I can’t see.”
“Go back to the beginning.”
In the front of the book, white pages with blood-red borders marked the city’s official phone numbers. She looked at the numbers for poison control, the national runaway switchboard, and the suicide prevention line. There were also numbers listed for the FBI, the US Marshals, and the Secret Service. “I don’t know which one.”
Mattie sniffed. “W—what about 911?”
“No,” her mom said.
Emma flipped to the very first page. To the right of the obscenely large 911, she found a list of numbers labeled Non-Emergency Calls, including the police and county sheriff.
“Read it,” her mom said.
Emma put her finger on the paper to guide her and opened her mouth to speak.
The phone beeped out an alarm, one angry pulse after another.
“Goddamn it.” Her mom pressed the clear plastic button that reset the circuit. “Again.”
Emma chose the number for the police. She didn’t know what the sheriffs did, other than put signs on street corners to beg for re-election. “831-555-8714.”
The phone rang three times before a male voice answered with, “MVPD, how may I direct your call?”
Mattie choked on a sob and ran into the hallway.
“Matt, wait.” Emma gave chase as her sister stumbled toward the living room and knocked over a big ceramic vase sitting on the floor. Emma kicked the shards out of the way and opened her arms. Her sister fell into them, just like in a Polaroid they’d snapped when Emma was six and Mattie three. “It’s going to be okay. Don’t be scared.”
“I am,” Mattie sobbed. “I’m scared, Em.”
“We’ll fix it, whatever went wrong.”
“How? We’re just kids.”
“I’ll figure it out.”
In the kitchen, her mom hung up the phone and then followed them into the hallway. Black mascara trailed from both of her lower lash lines. She stepped over the shattered bits of vase and wrapped both of them in her arms. Emma smelled a faint floral perfume, underscored with sweat. She closed her eyes and imagined her dad there, too, surrounding all of them with his arms, a concentric circle of love that belonged only to them.
• • •
They fell asleep in the living room because it was closest to the door. Mattie and her mom slumped on the couch, while Emma curled into her dad’s recliner, face pressed against the headrest. Her mom clutched the portable phone as she dozed. The desk sergeant had said he’d call the local hospitals and radio all officers on patrol to ask about accidents, incidents, or crashes. That was before ten.
It was after three.
Emma fought the crescent of nausea rising from her belly. If her dad could come home, he would have. Sleep was impossible until she knew why.
In the corner of the room stood a giant faux palm. Its nylon leaves were shrouded in a skin of dust, cemented by months of temperature cycling. Emma imagined the tree gasping for air.
She got up and took one crinkled leaf between her fingers, gouging it with a fingernail the way she would a scratch-off lotto ticket. The part underneath her scratch was still bright, but now it looked diseased next to the uniform grey of the rest of the leaves.
She stumbled back to the recliner and pulled her thighs to her chest. Everything felt wrong, even the color of the light. It was orange, tinted once by the streetlight and once by her mom’s fabric window blinds—but a strange, computerized orange with a hint of blue behind it, as if orange had gone extinct thirty years ago and an artist was trying to render the color from memory. Her nose began to run and she sniffed quietly to keep from waking her mom and Mattie. But when she tilted her head onto the recliner’s headrest, she heard something.
Leaves.
Moving leaves.
But which ones? There were bushes under the living room’s front window, a mandarin tree in the corner of the front yard, and a pot of small pink roses next to the door. There were also lots of animals in the neighborhood: cats, birds, squirrels.
She held her breath.
The crackling sounded again, louder this time. Not a cat, she thought. Not a cat, not a cat, not a cat, not a cat, not a cat. “Mom, wake up.”
Her mom’s eyes flew open, fingers still clenching the phone. They pressed several of the buttons, making them glow a ghostly green. “What is it?”
“Something’s outside.”
Her mom hurled the phone to the floor and jumped up from the couch without a care for Mattie, asleep on her shoulder. Her hands shook as they fumbled with the stiff door lock, the one she kept asking Emma’s dad to grease.
She threw it open hard enough to dent the wall with the doorknob. A mushroom cloud of paint flakes and drywall exploded into the air.
“Roger!” she shrieked, flinging herself toward the bushes.
Emma pitched herself out of the recliner and crawled on hands and knees to the door. Mattie scrambled after her, peering over her shoulder when she stopped dead in the doorway.
Her father lay in the bushes. She didn’t recognize his face because it was hardly a face at all. His glasses were gone, his right eye swollen shut. Dozens of tiny red marks and lines speckled his cheeks. A dark clump of purpled skin and dried blood peaked where his nose should be. Blood trailed out of his mouth on both sides. Red handprints dotted his torn undershirt like a prehistoric cave painting. His button-down was gone.
“Mattie,” her mom ordered. “Get the First Aid kit and bring it upstairs. Run.” Her sister’s feet clapped down the tile entryway. “Emma, get under his right arm.”
Emma squatted beside him and reached for his arm gently. “Faster,” her mom snapped, flinging his left arm over her shoulder. His head lolled onto her shoulder, staining it red instantly. Emma didn’t look at his face; if she did, all the strength would leave her knees. “I love you, Daddy,” she whispered.
They swayed inside just as the neighbor’s porch light came on. Her mom kicked the door shut behind them. With one arm, she reached out and locked the doorknob and the deadbolt.
Her dad’s breathing was shallow and snagged, like a net on a harbor buoy. “Go,” her mom said. “Hurry.”
They lumbered toward the stairs like contestants in a three-legged race. Twined together, they moved one step at a time to the landing, then the hallway, then her parents’ bedroom, where Mattie stood clutching a white box with a red cross. Something wet trailed down Emma’s left arm. The sour smell of sweat and blood made her throat convulse and she clamped her lips shut.
“Go toward the bed,” her mom said. Instantly, Mattie reached to pull back the bedspread. “Leave it. Em, put your arm behind his shoulders. Hold him up.”
For a moment, Emma bore all his weight as her mom reached for his feet. Once she had them, they lifted him onto the bed as gently as they could. His dangling hand painted a poppy-red smear across the spread. Emma picked it up and held it, squeezing it until she felt the beat of his pulse.
“The First Aid kit,” Mattie said.
“Set it next to me.” Her mom lifted one of his feet and untied his shoe. “In the bathroom, Em, get tweezers and my contact lens solution. The saline, not the cleaner.”
Emma blinked. “Mom, the police—”
“Emma, please.”
“They need to see this, don’t they?”
Her mom looked up, the muscles of her jawbone quivering. Her hands gripped her dad’s bare ankles, the vertical lines of his socks still imprinted on his skin. “I asked you to do something.”
“You’re hurting him.”
Her mom’s deep golden eyes never blinked. “So are you.”
Emma let go of his hand. She would get the saline and then call the police and there wasn’t anything her mom could do about it. “Don’t worry,” she whispered in Mattie’s ear as she handed off the saline bottle. “I know what to do.”
• • •
The squad car arrived forty minutes later. Mattie had followed her downstairs, unable to watch their mother tweeze dirt and broken glass out of their father’s face. Emma stood in the doorway, fingers choking the brass handle, as two officers stepped up to the porch.
“It’s my dad,” she said, wiping away a tear and waving them inside. She locked the door behind them and laced her cold fingers with Mattie’s. Together, they led the way, squeezing each other’s hands as hard as they dared. The policemen jingled as they walked, the click and clatter of their gear echoing against the tile entryway.
For the first time, Emma noticed the smears and stains of blood on the walls and carpet. It was on her hands, too, in her nails and in the crevices of her fingerprints. “Don’t step in the blood,” she said, blinking as more tears flooded the corners of her eyes. “My mom will get mad.”
The officers didn’t respond.
At the top of the stairs, she pointed at the double doors of her parents’ bedroom. One of the officers crooked a knuckle and rapped. “Mr. and Mrs.—” He paused, reaching into his pocket.
“West,” Emma said. “Our name is West.”
“Mr. and Mrs. West?”
The second policeman leaned over the bannister, following the trail of blood with his eyes. “Jesus,” he said. Silent tears fell from Mattie’s eyes to her bare feet.
Her mom slipped out from behind the double doors. Beneath the skylight, her skin looked dull and dead, smeared with blood and stretched thin over cheekbones and chin. She waved the policemen inside and they obeyed, handcuffs slapping against their hips as they moved. “Girls, to your rooms.”
Emma stepped forward. “Mom, I want to—”
“No.”
“Don’t they need to talk to us?”
“Just do your chores and go to bed.”
“Mom, I can’t.”
“Please.” There were streaks in her hair, dark ones, in the shape of blood-stained fingers. “Emma, please.”
“We have to go, Em,” Mattie said, pulling on her arm.
All the words jumbled up inside her, in the wrong order, wrong tense, wrong case. They wouldn’t form a cyclone, like they normally did, so it was too hard to sort them out. She let Mattie pull her the rest of the way down the hall.
“Thank you,” her mom said softly.
Emma ignored her. She turned into the bathroom and stuck her hands under the faucet, watching her father’s blood swirl down the drain. The water ran for minutes until it was clear. When she finally turned it off, she dried her hands and cracked the bathroom door. As expected, she couldn’t hear much from her parents’ bedroom. Her mom had shut the door, and the muted mutterings she detected were no help at all.
She crept out of the bathroom, lining up her footsteps with the right side of the hall. The squeaky floorboard was smack in the middle. As long as she avoided it, her mom would never hear her. She scuttled sideways past Mattie’s door to the spare bedroom.
Once inside, she grasped the sliding closet door in both hands, easing it half a foot down the center of its track. A whiff of potpourri from inside the closet overwhelmed her, something fruity and warm, like berries on a picnic table. She held her breath and slid the door closed behind her. If she closed her eyes and concentrated, with her ear to the closet’s back wall, she could make out most of what the policemen were saying. Some of it was about the attack, and some of it was about the theft of her dad’s pickup truck.
She forced everything but the words themselves out of her mind—no connotations, only denotations. To cement them in her memory, she pretended to write them out, holding her imaginary pencil in a death grip. The officers talked fast, but so did Mr. Parker. She had a lot of practice using abbreviations to get everything down in time.
When her parents’ door opened, Emma held her breath. Would her mom notice the smell of potpourri . . . what if it had drifted from the office into the hallway? But her mom didn’t seem to notice anything as she walked the officers downstairs. She closed and locked the front door behind them, then sank against it and began to cry. Emma heard one fist strike the door, rattling the locking mechanism in the handle.
She pressed one hand to her mouth and reached out into the darkness with the other, as if she could comfort her mother. She put her head on her knees and bit her lip hard enough to keep her own sobs from becoming audible. Blood dripped from her lip onto her knees, staining her legs with what she’d just washed off her hands. When she heard her mom’s bedroom door close one more time, she padded back to her room and slid into bed, letting her red knees stain the covers.