Seconds later it seemed, the alarm clock was blaring in Natalie’s ears—that cheap, tinny, big-box-store blare. She rolled over and smacked it off. Her eyes felt glued shut. Her head was throbbing. Her father had a name for this—a crime-scene hangover. Joey would’ve been proud.
She crawled out of bed and staggered into the bathroom, where she swallowed two Aleves with a glass of tap water and took the hottest shower in the world. She tried to squeeze all the grief and confusion out of her heart. She scrubbed herself vigorously with a soapy washcloth, rubbing out the stench of death until her skin was velvety pink.
She left the bathroom ventilation fan running and opened a window. The lacy trees were budding out. A gorgeous perfume filled the air. Her stomach clenched. Fresh from her shower, Natalie grew clammy all over. This was no ordinary day. Something ugly had happened last night. Daisy had lost her life—Grace’s best friend, Brandon’s pregnant wife, the students’ beloved Ms. Buckner. Something inside Natalie stirred—a fresh awareness that the world wasn’t as safe as it seemed. Forces greater than yourself could carry you into a realm where all color was sucked out of the landscape—a realm where butterflies became symbols of evil. How could that be?
Natalie skipped her morning run and went downstairs to start the coffeemaker, grab a Pop-Tart for breakfast, and load the dishwasher. She’d inherited this sunny, drafty hundred-year-old house from her parents. She let the sadness wash over her as she glanced around the old-fashioned living room. She’d taken a stab at renovating last year, sanding and repainting the walls, but the end result was a mixed bag of awful. She’d donated some of the ugly-ass furniture to the Goodwill and had moved the rest of her parents’ belongings up into the attic, big orchestrated piles of boxes and scarred sticks of furniture she couldn’t bear to part with. Now she could feel her mother’s resentment boring into her—That’s a perfectly good chair, why aren’t you using my hutch?
Deborah Lockhart had been a smart, well-educated woman stuck in a domestic role she both relished and resented. Raising three girls had been fun for a while—until it wasn’t. According to Deborah, she’d fallen in love with Joey at a friend’s graduation party. Joey had a cleft in his chin she was tempted to push the tip of her finger into. He wore a look of intense introspection, and his piercing blue eyes, elegant face, and wolfish ears made her heart skip a beat. She had a fleeting desire to lose herself in him, or at least to misplace herself for a little while.
“A little while” turned into a lifetime of housekeeping and motherhood. On her deathbed, Deborah told Natalie, “When you girls were growing up, the days just flew by. I was always doing laundry or shopping or housework, and three times a day, seven days a week, I had to figure out what to feed the hungry people who showed up at my door. You girls and your father. Four hungry mouths.” To make life simpler, Deborah had assigned each girl a color: Willow was pink, Grace was purple, and Natalie was as blue as her father’s uniform. They all had plastic dishware in their own color, socks and pajamas in their color, headbands and sweaters in their color. Even the walls of their bedrooms were painted pink, purple, and blue. Deborah encouraged her daughters to pursue a career in the fine arts, since her dream had been to become a dancer. Therefore, it was decided early on that Willow would be a ballerina, Grace a writer, and Natalie an artist (since she’d shown talent for it early on). Deborah believed all her girls were gifted, and it upset her deeply when Natalie chose Joey’s dangerous profession over her own preference.
Now Natalie chewed on her Pop-Tart and noticed the cardboard box in a corner of the living room, gathering dust. It was full of Zack’s stuff. She kept finding little things he’d left behind and tossing them in there—cutesy trinkets, an old sweatshirt that smelled just like him, a coffee mug that said SH*T HAPPENS, a disposable razor, stray socks. Eight months’ worth of crap.
Put a fork in us, we’re done.
Okay. She put down her Pop-Tart and carried the box outside, where she upended it into the trash. Her relationship with Zack Stadler hadn’t just happened—he’d hunted her down, if hipsters could hunt. More accurately, Natalie had let herself be captured. Big mistake. She was drawn to him initially because of his bookish levelheadedness. She thought it was cute how studious and argumentative he was. They met at a juice bar, and it was love at first sight. Zack was teaching art history at the local community college, and he used a lot of big words and was truly impressed by her gun. He detested her world, and yet he couldn’t stop asking her about it. Of course they argued. There were tears. Every couple had their meltdowns. But it was his tendency to behave like a petulant child instead of an adult that finally got to her, as if he’d been pushed halfway out of the nest by his parents but somehow managed to cling to the sides and never let go. She grew sick of his self-absorbed tirades over the years.
What was worse, Zack hated Burning Lake. He called it a “bucolic fucklet,” but Natalie loved this town, warts and all. Neither one of them was strong enough to endure the final stages of their relationship, and so it had collapsed like a poorly constructed building. All that was left was a smoking cloud of dry rot and regrets.
She remembered the day it was over—her birthday last year. The memory of her ex-boyfriend’s aloofness hit her with a soft impact—Zack in his Clark Kentish glasses, dressed in flannel like a throwback to the golden age of Seattle grunge. They celebrated her birthday in a restaurant that had the best shrimp pad thai in town. He leaned in for a kiss, and their lips bumped together. There was a stiff formality about the way he moved that disturbed her and put her on edge.
“Natalie?” He sat down opposite her in the booth, and she noticed his heavily lined forehead—evidence of sleepless nights. “Don’t say anything for a second. Let me talk. I’ve been thinking about us lately.…”
As he spoke, he kept glancing beyond her into the depths of the bar. He told her things that she’d been thinking about herself but had never said aloud. Basically, what it came down to was that Zack wanted to run away, from this place, from her, from the things he no longer felt—that initial excitement, that spark, that sizzle, the tingle that had once driven them both physically crazy. Lust. Desire. It’d gradually evaporated until all that was left was a bunch of excuses. I’m busy, I’m exhausted, it’s my job, I’m sorry. Plenty of sorries.
It all boiled down to the fact that they’d fallen out of love. That each of their habits had become so annoyingly familiar, there was nothing left to explore. “You could’ve been anything you wanted to be,” Zack told her one night. “You’re an exceptionally talented woman—those drawings you showed me from your childhood. You were so gifted. Why did you throw it all away?”
If you wanted to get psychological about it, Zack was too much like Natalie’s mother. Deborah was a snob, an elitist, who wanted the girls to follow a certain narrow path in life. An artist—that’s what Natalie’s mother wanted her to be, not the choice she’d ultimately made. But Natalie’s early passion for painting had been smothered by the actual study of art. So boring—color charts, perspective, acrylics, stretching your own canvases. She used to look at her drawings and wonder what on earth she would do with an art degree? Teach? Ugh. Please.
Joey used to leave Natalie little made-up mysteries to solve—notes at the breakfast table; a message on the answering machine at home. She loved solving puzzles. She could see patterns everywhere—patterns of behavior, patterns of ritual and habit. Soon she began to observe people on her own. She caught Grace hiding condoms in her backpack. She found out Deborah had wanted only one child, not three—and that Grace and Natalie were accidents. She found out about Willow’s relationship with Justin Fowler before anybody else. The art—sure, Natalie was good at it, but her passion lay elsewhere. Besides, her artwork sort of embarrassed her, it was so nakedly revealing of her innermost secrets. What good was that? Natalie had felt forced and pressured into taking art classes by her mother, and so naturally, as a wildly independent teenager, she’d rebelled against this manufactured “destiny” and decided to follow in her dad’s footsteps instead. Despite Deborah’s heavy-handed pushback.
Natalie’s relationship with Zack seemed to reflect a similar tension—whether to become a cop or an artist, two radically different things. Zack represented her mother—refined, intellectual, judgmental. But Natalie sided with her father—down-to-earth, loyal, funny, ironic, always wanting to help out. Not that she didn’t appreciate art, music, books, culture. She adored the Whitney Museum and the Metropolitan, and she’d inherited Joey’s love of music—jazz and classical, Motown and Mozart, Frank Sinatra and Chet Baker, 1970s punk and 1990s grunge. She still sketched sometimes—absently, while thinking about a case. But she hadn’t chosen art as her profession, and Deborah and Zack would never forgive her for it.
Now Natalie felt a strong sense of closure and relief as she clamped the garbage lid shut. Good riddance. She rubbed the morning chill off her arms and looked around the property. This modest plot of land was isolated, bordered on three sides by thick woods. Some mornings, a doe and her fawn would step out of the shadows to nibble at the crab apples on the edge of the lawn. The fruit fell off and rotted on the ground, attracting honeybees in the summer. The forsythia bushes were in desperate need of pruning. The Creeping Jenny had spread into her mother’s old garden. A plastic watering can hung upside-down on a branch Deborah had pushed into the lawn thirty years ago. Her mother’s old gardening gloves were around here someplace, buried under countless fallen leaves.
Natalie’s parents had had an old-fashioned, blond-wood relationship with clearly defined boundaries and a cemented sense of duty. Just like the furniture that wasn’t pretty but lasted forever. Her mother had names for all the houseplants, which infuriated Grace, because Grace thought Deborah should love her children a thousand times more than she loved her stupid plants. And Deborah couldn’t seem to get rid of the girls fast enough, always kicking them out of the house to go play so that she could have a little peace-and-quiet time—nothing wrong with that—listening to her favorite Broadway musical soundtracks and eating vanilla yogurt mixed with fresh blueberries. “As if us kids were a burden, and not a privilege,” Grace said petulantly at their mother’s funeral. “Willow was her angel, and since God lets children die, then the two of us weren’t worth the trouble of loving and possibly losing.”
Natalie’s parents weren’t exactly what you’d call happy, but they were settled and comfortable. They nested together. Happiness was for other, more frivolous people.
Now her phone buzzed. It was Luke.
“Hey,” he said, “I’m heading over to the high school now.”
“Okay.”
“Meet me in front of the bulletin board.” He hung up.
She went back inside and turned on the dishwasher.