Little Deaths(97)

“I unlatched their door and went in. They were asleep, both of them, lying on their sides, facing each other. Cin was muttering and sighing, and Frankie had his mouth open. Little soft snores like a puppy.

“I opened the window, thinking I might get them out that way in case you came back. Took off the screen and dropped it on the ground. But then I realized it was too difficult. Decided to carry them out through the apartment after all.

“Frankie half-woke up but I just said we were going for a ride and when he realized it was his daddy, he fell back asleep, quick as winking.”

There’s a roaring in her ears. It’s her blood she can hear. Her own blood.

She stares at him, focusing on the dark bristles on his jaw that his razor missed. The wrinkle in his collar. The cracked tile above his head. Desperately reaching for the ordinary, the mundane.

“Cin never woke up at all. As I took them out, I relatched the bedroom door again. Figured if you checked, that’d prove you cared enough about them. That you deserved them. I would’ve brought them back then, told you it was just a joke, that we’d only been around the block.”

“But you never checked, did you? When you came back with the dog, you never checked. I sat in the car and watched you sitting on the steps with a drink and a smoke like you didn’t have a care in the world. So I knew you hadn’t bothered to check they were okay, and I had to take ’em.”

She realizes that her mouth is open and dry. Tries to swallow.

“As I took them out, I noticed a stroller near the next building. Just on the grass. And a box lying near it. So I put the box on the stroller and wheeled the whole thing under the window. Guess I thought it might look like they climbed out themselves. Maybe used the stroller to step down.”

She focuses on the detail of his words. As though this will make the horror easier to bear.

“You didn’t think people might wonder how they could’ve moved the stroller? How they could’ve taken the screen down? Two little kids couldn’t have managed that.”

She marvels at how calm her voice sounds. She could have sworn she was yelling. But her voice comes out tiny and level.

He shrugs. “I didn’t think that far. I just wanted to mix things up a little.”

In his story, they’re still alive and she wants him to write her a new ending. “What were you going to do? With . . . with the kids?”

He shrugs again. “I’d have brought ’em back in the morning, I guess. I don’t know, I didn’t have a plan. Maybe I’d have said I was in the neighborhood and I found ’em wandering outside. That I took ’em home.”

“But they’d say . . . they’d tell me. Frankie would have told me that wasn’t true.”

Even as she says it, she knows she’s wrong. Frankie adored his daddy, would have said whatever Frank had told him to. And maybe they wouldn’t even remember right, would think it was a dream—going to sleep in their own house, waking up at Frank’s place.

All those interviews. Those statements. The police, looking for a careful, clever plan. Herself wanting to believe in a careful, clever stranger, in someone watching them all for days.

And all the time: just Frank.

“After you put . . . them . . . in the car, what then?”

“I put the kids in the back and got out the same way I got in—took the handbrake off and pushed the car to the end of the street, then got in and just drove home. It was that easy. I carried ’em up to my room. Gave ’em some comics. Grape juice.”

And now she has to look away. She can’t look at his face and listen to the rest of it.

But he just says, “I never meant to hurt ’em.”

And then, “How did you guess?”

Here it is: the thing she puzzled over for so long, the question she prodded like a sore, refusing to let the wound heal. Now the poison is coming out. The filthy truth.

“Someone fed them after I did. It had to be someone who . . .” She can’t make herself say the word. “Someone fed them and took care of them. Why would anyone else feed them?”

He nods and his breath eases.

“It’s funny, nobody even noticed what I did with the stroller. But the food, I didn’t even think about it.”

“People never notice what you think they will. I told the cops that I was in bed by midnight and that I never woke up till you called me in the morning. But you told ’em about the call I made to you at three a.m. I realized I slipped up. I got scared. Worried they’d check the phone records. But you know, they never picked up on it. Or if they did, they didn’t care. They were so set on you being guilty, ’specially when you wouldn’t take the lie detector test.”

She blinks. Answers almost automatically, “You didn’t take it either.”

He nods. Says, “Yeah, but they never asked me. And after you walked out of the test, the cops hardly noticed me at all.”

Clears his throat.

“Anyway, I fed ’em. I went upstairs to get them some juice and when I came back, Frankie was awake again. He needed to pee, then he said he was hungry. I asked him what they had for dinner—know what he said? He said, ‘We haven’t had nothing, Daddy.’ ”

“I fed them. I fed them! I gave them veal. Veal and canned beans and milk. Just like I told the cops. Only . . . only they wouldn’t eat it. The meat was chewy and Frankie said he didn’t like it.”