Eva
Should I take it as a snub that once again, I wasn’t invited to the neighborhood book club? That my own daughters didn’t think to ask if their mother could attend?
I suppose not. After all, I don’t read that much, never have. The girls both know that. Seems wasteful somehow, my hands too idle. I’d rather knit or play cards. And besides, if I started socializing as much as they did, who would babysit? Hannah had been included after being in the neighborhood only a week, so that boded well for her fitting in. I was happy for her.
I came at the appointed hour—six. Hillary and Hannah had agreed that the kids would stay at Hillary’s because she had the elaborate finished basement with video games, Ping-Pong, air hockey. Sometimes I wondered if they weren’t more for Ben and his poker buddies than Morgan. And of course there was the pool, but the evenings were getting too cool for that. And the kids were at an age when they still did kid things with their grandmother. They’d bake cookies; they’d play a few rounds of kings in the corner. They’d show me cat videos they found amusing. Adolescence hadn’t hit them full force yet, but it was coming, and my daughters weren’t ready.
Case in point. Miles was twelve years old and couldn’t stay at home for a few hours when his mother was down the street with the neighbors? When I was younger than he, I sold doll clothes door to door, babysat at night, and walked the two blocks home in the dark without a single thought. I know Hannah worries about boys on the bus—and she should, given what he’s been through—but I thought she was perhaps overreacting to the little girl’s disappearance. Yes, a small child had wandered off, but at the press conference on TV, the police insisted there was no evidence of foul play. No reason for panic or worry to spread throughout the neighborhood. Little ones can tumble down a hillside or drown in an inch of water after all. A tragedy, but singular to their size and vulnerability. So was this any reason to never let her nearly grown son out of her sight? There was a huge difference between the fear you felt for a boy of twelve and a little girl of six. Wasn’t she going to scare him more by overprotecting him? I know, I know, middle school is a tricky time. When some boys are still tender and soft, and some rise up out of their sneakers, vines grown into trees. And Miles, still in the muddy middle. Tall but reedy.
As soon as my girls had walked out the door, I went into Hillary’s large pantry and brought out flour, sugar, cinnamon, and butter and assembled a batch of snickerdoodles. Big ones, too, none of those little thumbprints. I baked them and called the kids to help sprinkle cinnamon sugar on top while they were still warm. And then I watched Miles sit at the island and eat six cookies. Six! Yes, I let him. I confess I wanted him to like me, to draw himself closer. I thought perhaps that would work better, bringing him to me rather than the other way around. He looked at me, straight in the eye, as he took his fourth cookie, and I gave him a small nod. I refilled his milk glass to offer even greater encouragement. Dunk away! Wash ’em down! The coded signals between us. The hint of a smile. Progress! Maybe we could be better friends after all this time. He was certainly a boy who could use a friend. Morgan had one cookie that took her as long to nibble as it did for Miles to gulp down three. She waited patiently while he ate cookies four, five, and six, dangling her feet, picking up sugar particles from her plate with one finger, then carrying the plates to the sink. Good girl, I said.
Afterward, the two of them went downstairs, and I picked up my knitting—a jaunty beret—and wondered how things were going over at the neighbors’ she shed. That’s where the book club was being held, in Susan Somebody or Other’s charming backyard structure that probably cost more than Hannah’s little spring house, a structure a rich woman erected out of protest against the above-garage man cave. Hillary had told me the story of their renovation one-upmanship a year or so ago, and I’d found it amusing. Susan and…oh, I can’t remember, Sam or Steve or something. He had his man cave, and now Susan had her she shed. Couldn’t she have just called it a bungalow and called it a day? Oh, everyone had an outbuilding now, didn’t they? Tree houses for the children, caves for the men, sheds for the women, cottages for the pool, or in the case of the Harrises, separate baths for the dog.
Dear God, whatever happened to a hammock?
Downstairs, the slide and thrust of a fast-paced air hockey game came up through the vents. Small shouts and groans to punctuate the clicks of the lunges and parries and requisite disappointments. Did Morgan even watch the Philadelphia Flyers, follow the team, care about this sport? I didn’t know. Her father seemed to like all sports, unable to choose. Mike had been the same way when he was living with Miles and Hannah. So many holidays spent with those two men sneaking off to the television, groaning over bad plays, and cheering so loudly over good ones they rattled the china in the cabinet.
Going all in on all sports seemed a bit reckless to me, like liking all animals or all men. Best to be specific, not to generalize.
I was grateful that air hockey sounded different from Ping-Pong or computer games. Once when I babysat, the two of them had played Ping-Pong all night, and the tap-tapping had lodged in my head, entered my dreams like an inane pop song. The next time I came over, I hid the balls in my pockets and professed ignorance when they asked where they were.
Anyway, I digress. They’d been outside earlier in the afternoon, running around doing who knows what, but they were downstairs, playing air hockey, when the commotion began outside. They ran to the top of the stairs, or Miles did, leading, and he was leaping up them, based on his thuds, two at a time. He’d heard something the rest of us did not, like a dog’s whistle.
Only as he headed for the door, his cousin in tow, did I hear it, too: sirens. Multiple. Rounding the corner. Were they coming this way? Did he know they were?
“What’s going on?” I asked dumbly, as if they had a police scanner. As if they knew any more than I did. Even the internet isn’t that fast or accurate. You can’t know everything all the time, despite your desire to. No.
They opened the door, and I expected them to stand on the steps, to wait. But that was what an adult would do, not a child. They rushed down the steps, hurtling down the lawn, drawn by the lights and sound.
Who could blame them? I let them go, didn’t hold them back. The night was cool but pleasant, and I was struck as I looked at the yards and houses, the way the lights had just begun to dance off green bushes and brick archways, some nestled at the base of mature trees, that this was the only time of the year when homes are truly themselves. Not embellished and decorated for seasons or holidays. Not stripped bare and admonished by winter or swollen and colored by spring. No, these were the real homes. A rare moment, I thought, and I wondered if I had ever really noticed it before. Oh, the things you see when life slows down. The time you wasted all these years when you weren’t looking properly.
I sensed the children would stop at the street and watch, and that they did, at first. But whatever was happening just kept happening. A parade of multiple police cars, an ambulance, a fire truck. The whole township emergency force, it seemed, was on our street, headed up and over. But we were the only ones who stood outside.
A thought seized me suddenly—the book club. The lane above Hillary’s house, where the she shed overlooks the gully on the other side of the hill. And I swear, the moment it hit me was the moment it hit Miles. He started running. Morgan looked back at me, torn. And then I heard the screech of brakes and a thud. Not a loud one, more a glancing blow. But Miles, Miles was so thin.
We ran down together, Morgan and I, and were met with a police officer holding up his hand.
“We’ll need you to stay back, ma’am. There’s a fluid investigation going on.”
I despised the use of the word fluid this way, but there was no time to argue with him over vocabulary words.
“But I heard a crash, and my grandson—”
“Police car hit a deer coming down the hill, that’s all.”
“Are you sure it was a deer, bec—”
“Yes. One hundred percent.”
“Did you see a boy? Did you—”
“Ma’am, no. Go back to your homes. We’re cordoning off the area, but you’re safe.”
“But my grandson—”
“It was a deer, ma’am.”
In the shadows below us, I saw a figure crouching between the bushes of the neighbor’s house. As the candy lights flashed nearby, they briefly illuminated a lock of his hair, the set of his chin. Miles. Hiding from them? Or from me?
“You should tell us more about what’s happening. This is our neighborhood,” I said huffily. “These are our children.”
“Ma’am, I know you’re all on high alert because of the child missing, but there is simply a fire in a playhouse at the end of the street—that’s all I can say.”
“Are you sure it’s a playhouse? And not a shed?”
He didn’t answer me. He just gave me the kind of look you give a naughty child and turned away. I thought I saw him shaking his head, as if I had been making a joke and wasn’t perfectly, deadly serious.
“My daughters are in that she shed down the street,” I screamed. “Twenty women are there, in the she shed!”
“It’s a playhouse,” he called over his shoulder. “An empty playhouse.”
I told Morgan to go home and to text her mother’s cell phone and make sure she was all right. She said no, she wanted to stay with me. No, I insisted. I told her I’d be back in a minute.
The lawn was wet and uneven near the street, full of pocked, sloping indents, soupy, like it wanted to be a stream and a landscaper had refused to let it happen. I stepped slowly, grateful I had on sneakers. Surely, Miles heard me coming or knew I would be, but he waited until the cars were past us. Their lights took them elsewhere, past the book club house, all the way to the end of the street.
I was about to bend the bushes, to whisper his name, when he stood up.
He held something in his arms, bigger than a baby, smaller than a person. He started to walk the opposite way, toward the neighbors’ house, as if I wasn’t there.
“Miles!” I said it sharply, necessarily, I thought.
As he turned, I saw the shape of the fawn in his arms.
I felt my breath traveling the length of my throat, down my body.
“We can’t take it home,” I said.
“I know.”
“You have to leave it here,” I said.
“But it’s not dead yet.” His voice was cold and matter-of-fact, a mile from tender.
“The vet won’t take a wild animal, Miles. It could be sick. It could make you—”
I saw the arguments not adding up in front of him. His rejection, his lack of belief in everything I was saying. He lived in a different world from mine.
“It can’t die alone.”
My breath again. What did that mean? Was he planning to kill it? Put it out of its misery? Did he expect me to, like his father would, in a heartbeat? A sturdy rock, a glancing blow. A twist of the neck like Mike did with a bird in the field? His father would not hesitate. Had he taught him these skills? At his age, some young boys in Pennsylvania killed and gutted deer without blinking an eye. Others brought home the wounded to feed and tend and refused to eat meat. Which side was he on? Why couldn’t I tell?
“Miles,” I said evenly, “you have to leave it here, for its mother. The mother will come if you leave it.”
It was the best argument I could offer. But I did not want to witness his choice. I decided to trust him, because I had to. If he was going to kill it, if there was a knife in his pocket or a garrote up his sleeve, anything that justified the chill running up my spine, I didn’t see it. Before I turned, a plume of smoke rose in the air above our heads, darkening the sky. The first smell of something burning, comforting as camp. But then the next breaths came, singeing us with threats. I coughed and told him we needed to go back now.
I didn’t wait. I left it in his hands. But he did not come back to the house.