You Will Know Me(45)

The dropped ceiling so low, the strip fluorescents hurting her eyes, Katie had sat there, feeling like her insides had been scraped clean, like her mom once told her an abortion felt (Which is why, she’d added, I put you on the pill at fifteen).

The woman kept asking them questions.

Mr. Knox, was it common to have your daughter with you while you mowed the lawn?

Mr. Knox, were you aware of the safety mechanisms on your mower?

Eric, all of twenty-two years old, younger even than Ryan Beck, just stood there, grass blades still slashed up his calves. No belt—he’d torn it from its loops, tying it around Devon’s foot. He stood there, unable to say anything but No, no, I don’t know.

Your daughter may not even remember this later, the officer told them, walking them out. She may not even remember her foot ever being like it was before.

But Katie knew that was a lie. The moment her own knees slid onto the shorn lawn, slick with Devon’s blood, she knew her daughter would remember this forever.

How did I do that? Eric kept asking her, his voice strange and high, like she’d never heard before and hadn’t since. How did I do that?

The paramedics, and Mr. Watts from next door, trying to help. To distract Devon, mashed against the grass, face white as paper.

Honey, look at me. Listen to me. Mr. Watts, trying to get her to look at him and not the red tangle hanging from her ankle. Do you have a dog? Did you get an ice cream from the truck today?

But, glassy-eyed, Devon would look only at Katie, her red-specked chin.

Mommy, where did it go?

Her foot stretched out in front of her, the bright mass below her ankle like a tissue-paper flower.

Where did it go?



She wondered if Eric was thinking about any of this now.

Looking at him, she had no idea, and would never ask.

*



“We’ll be in touch,” Officer Crandall said. Then added, turning to Eric, “And we can talk more about that restraining order.”

Her bandaged hand resting on top of her other one, Devon walked toward them from the restroom. So tiny, half a foot shorter than Katie herself.

“Dee-Dee,” Eric said, which he hadn’t called her in a decade or more. “Dee-Dee, come with us.”



Back home, after everything settled a little, after a muted dinner of freezer-scorched pizza, Drew collapsed into his bed and Devon disappeared into the basement gym again. As Eric drank whiskey from a coffee cup, Katie stood over the sink, scraping all the rice stuck to the bottom of yesterday’s casserole dish, drinking beer from a can.

All she wanted was for everything to stay quiet. To be quiet.

And to keep Eric away from Devon. He still looked so on edge, a coiled thing.

“Can you go to the drugstore?” she asked him. “Some vitamin E oil for Devon’s wrist?”

He said he would. She hoped to talk to Devon alone, quietly, and make sure she was really okay.

But before she could, everything started again.



“Katie,” Teddy said, one foot on the doorstep.

Polo shirt untucked, neck rubbed red, eyes pouched, he stood before her, one hand tugging nervously at the fingers of the other. She was guessing he’d been up for a long time, days maybe.

Under the porch light, though, there was still that magnificent silver hair like drusy quartz. And his voice.

“Oh God, Katie.”



Hurrying him inside, she shut the door to the den behind them.

“You absolutely cannot be here, Teddy. Eric’s at the drugstore, but he’ll be back. You know how he can be and this—”

“I can’t explain what she did, Katie. I won’t even try,” he said. “But I need you to know, we’re taking care of it.”

He explained that he had checked Hailey into Gateways Behavioral Health, the only way to keep the hospital from putting her in the psych ward after she’d tried to climb out of her bathroom window.

“It’s this lying, bullshit eyewitness. It unwound her. And he can’t keep his story straight. First he says Altima, but cops show him pictures and he ID’s a Chevy Malibu. And he’s a trucker!”

“I don’t care, Teddy. I don’t care about this. What does it have to do with what she did to my daughter?”

Shaking his head. “All of this, it’s eating her alive. It’s made her do…shameful things. I just ask that you try to understand that that wasn’t our Hailey there today.”

Katie kept her eyes on the front window for Eric’s return from the drugstore.

“Katie, when she first came to us, Hailey was headed down a crooked road—boy trouble, lots of volatility. We got her to church, got her on the swim team. Didn’t give up on her,” he said, voice cracking with urgency, his fist pounding his knee. “By sixteen, she was a prom queen and junior-class president.”

“Teddy, I know this.”

“And I thought,” he said, “well, I thought: We sealed that up. That’s done.”

Teddy covered his face with both hands and was silent for a moment. But when he lifted his head again, his eyes were dry and filled with surprise.

“I mean, I thought this was what I was good at. Making girls feel loved.”

And, in spite of herself, Katie felt her throat tighten.

And there it was, Eric’s weather-beaten silver Ford, lights flashing up the window.