You Will Know Me(33)

“Thank you, honey.” She smiled, her eyes filling. “A little gent.”



First, Helen couldn’t find her rental car, then she wasn’t sure which way her hotel was.

“I thought you were staying with the Belfours.”

“I’m at the Days Inn now. I needed to get out of that house. It felt bad. All these whispered conversations. The police calling all the time.”

“The police?”

“And I haven’t been sleeping,” Helen said, shaking her head. “I came to pick up my meds before I head over to the station again. Your daughter’s Debbie, right?”

“Devon,” Katie said, looking toward the car, Drew now belted into the backseat, his face chalk white. She was eager to get him home, but Helen hooked her hand around Katie’s wrist. “The police station?”

“Yeah. You know, things finally seemed to be coming up roses for him,” she said, her face crumpling slightly in a way that made Katie ache. “Well, carnations at least.”

“I’m so sorry, Helen. I guess I already said that.”

“He would always find the lonely person in every room and go talk to them. Make them feel special.” She looked at Katie, smiling faintly. “I’m sure he did that for you.”

“Everybody liked Ryan,” Katie said.



Finally, Helen found her car but not her keys, so Katie offered to drive her to the police station a few blocks away.

As Drew waited in the car, Katie walked Helen to the entrance, the precinct building so old that green-tinted lanterns still stood sentinel on either side.

For a second, Helen just stood at the door. Then she took a deep breath.

“Thank you again, Katie.” Waving her phone, she added, “And thank your sweet boy for me.”

Behind her, a whey-faced man nearly stumbled to hold the door open for Helen.

“Ma’am,” he said, tipping his baseball cap as she walked past him. “At your service.”

“Did you see his hat?” Drew asked squeakily when she returned to the car.

He was watching the man stroll across the lot.

“No,” Katie said, taking a breath and then turning the ignition. “Don’t hurt your throat.”

“The orange cap he was wearing. It had two eyes on it. And one was droopy. It made his face look droopy.”

“That’s not very nice,” Katie said.

“Sorry, Mom.”

But she looked in the rearview mirror, watched the man amble toward a panel van. Something in the way he’d stood there holding the door—the way he’d rocked from foot to foot as Helen passed through—felt familiar. Like her uncle Don, who also rocked like that, back ruined by years of lifting drywall. He used to carry around sandwich bags filled with blue pills. One day he came to the house streaked with gray sweat and tore the TV out of the wall and stole the new rims off her mom’s car.

That was all a long time ago. Sometimes it was like none of it ever happened.



“I’m sorry he’s sick,” Devon said, dragging the spare air mattress into the basement. “But I can’t be around it, Mom. You know I can’t. Qualifiers are thirty-six days away.”

“He’s on antibiotics,” Katie assured her. “By tomorrow he won’t be contagious.”

But Devon refused to share a bathroom or even a hallway with her brother (Sometimes he licks his hands when he’s nervous, Mom).

Instead, she disappeared into the basement, the treadmill vibrating through the ceiling, and no one seemed interested in dinner, Eric on the phone with booster after booster, Drew tunneling into a narcotized sleep, his mouth open, his comforter and pillows massed on top of him in that cavelike way he liked, the humidifier purring beside him.

“Mom,” he said as he drifted off, “the shrimp are dying. Or dead already. The science fair…”

“That’s days away, honey.”



Lysol bottle in hand, Katie started by wiping down all the chair rails, the doorknobs and jambs. Her head humming with thoughts, so many none could take shape.

At Devon’s empty bedroom, she stood in the doorway, bleach stinging her fingers.

It was always so quiet, so clean and pin-neat, so contained.

Occasionally, Katie would see the bedrooms of the other girls. Pink-zebra-striped, sparkly G-Y-M-N-A-S-T-I-C-S! lettering across purple padded memo boards, mounds of leotards swirled onto mamasan chairs.

But Devon was different, once again.

It isn’t how I pictured it, Kirsten Siefert said once when Katie found her sneaking a peek during a booster meeting downstairs. I thought you must’ve covered the walls with gymnastics posters, inspirational quotes, seven-point creeds. She looked at Katie. I don’t know what I thought.

Parents always wanted to know what they’d fed Devon as a child, if they’d ever tried homeschooling, if she’d ever been given hormones and was she vaccinated. They always thought there was a code they could crack.

They never understood that it was all Devon, just like the room. Spare, almost puritanical.

All her awards were in the family room, the special shelf Eric built for all the trophies, wooden dowel pegs beneath to hang all the medals and ribbons. In here, everything was simple.

A small corkboard with a meticulously pinned printout, Elite Compulsory Program Rules, REV. A desk wiped clean with a feather duster every night. File boxes with labels. Everything labeled: Algebra. History I. Routine Music. Family Photos.