You Will Know Me(51)

And the word itself like a charge. A long-buried indictment.

But all he said was “Katie, I’m fixing things. I have to fix this.”



“You can stay in here, Mom,” Drew said, his bed heavy with books. “I don’t mind.”

So she sat with him while he read, stopping every few minutes to tell her things, until she warned him to rest his sweet voice.

“‘Boy, at sunrise it must be like diving into cotton candy!’” Drew read. “Mom, didn’t you sell cotton candy when you were young?”

“I did, yes. That’s how I met your dad.”

At the Kiwanis fair. She’d sold him fried clams on a paper plate and a twist-tie bag of cotton candy and they spent that summer careening through back roads with sixers of Keystone. He loved to kiss the round scar on her eyebrow, the one from the time her stepdad caught her with the Wiffle bat he carried when he was drinking. Eric loved to run his hand along the Fight Like a Grrrl tattoo ringing her left thigh. A thousand years ago.

The door open, she could hear the zipping and unzipping of duffel bags, the shushing of Velcro grips, Eric and Devon shuttling back and forth, grabbing wristbands, liquid-bandage spray, flip-flops, a jiggling pair of ankle braces, a tower of leotards. As if she were going to a major tournament rather than to Gwen’s pleasure palace a few blocks away.

Devon stealing nervous glances at her through the doorway.



From the upstairs window, she watched as Devon walked outside, bag swung over her shoulder. Gwen was leaning against the car door, saying something to Eric, as Devon slipped into the front passenger seat.

Lacey had already moved to the back.



That night felt lonely in a way she hadn’t known since childhood, the endless chain of evenings with the TV tray and waxy sleeve of crackers, peanut butter jar, her mom working late.

Drew asleep in his room, she and Eric passing each other silently. For most of the evening, he sat at his computer, working with headphones on.

She couldn’t tell if he felt guilty or righteous.

She missed Devon, and the energy around Devon being there, which felt elemental to everything. As if Devon’s presence, quiet and focused, generated everything. In some way powered the house, the family.

She only realized it now, because everything else had stopped.



Nearly nine o’clock, and she was drinking vinegary wine she’d found buried in the back of the refrigerator behind a jug of bubbling kefir.

She tried to stop her mind from turning and overturning images of Gwen’s house. She had seen it at parties, a half dozen over the years.

All the sconces and gilt and high ceilings of the powder-blue plaster, the study’s lacquered walls, the curve-backed sofas, the fresh flowers fogging your mouth as you passed through. The marble-topped kitchen island where platters of food always sat, mounds of olives, impossibly green artichokes, dewy lemons, everything wet and ready, all the time.

In the backyard, there was even a secret garden enclosed by pear trees latticed flat, candelabra-style, into a trellis, trained with the same rigor as Gwen trained Lacey’s hair, planting her daughter between her legs in the stands as she flattened that white-blond hair into the tight Dutch braid, smoothing the feather wisps at her hairline hourly during meets.

Sometimes even Lacey seemed hand-manufactured, face cast in porcelain, that tiny nose that tilted up at the end as if Gwen herself had pinched it daintily, like a piecrust, right down the center.

*



When the phone rang and Devon’s name flashed there, Katie’s body shook to life.

“Mom,” Devon said, “I’m staying in one of the guest rooms. It’s bigger than our whole upstairs.”

“Well,” Katie said. “I’m glad.”

“The sheets smell funny, though,” she said. “Not like at home.”

There was a brief silence.

“Mom, it’s just a few days. I feel okay here. I do.”

A pause.

“Mom, are you there? Mom, I’m sorry.”





Chapter Thirteen



It’s in here. It’s in the bed with me. I see it.

Hair and teeth against her ankles, something gnashing, something furred and champing. The rasping of hooves and nails.

One of those night terrors she hadn’t had since she was six years old, sleeping on that pullout sofa with her mom.

It’s here, it’s here. Help me, please, someone.

Her mother always laughing at the someone, saying, How come you never ask for help from me?

Devon used to have them too, back in kindergarten. Clutching her sherbet-striped comforter, distraught, inconsolable.

Katie had nearly forgotten what they felt like until—

I see it in the bed!

—sheets torn away, her palms white and spread on the bare mattress.

“Katie! Katie! Wake up.”

It was Eric, leaning in the darkened doorway, beer bottle in hand, looking at her.

“Wake up.”



In the violet dark of two a.m., he remade the bed for her, yanking the sheets back across the rumpled mattress pad.

“I can’t sleep,” he said. Then he went downstairs again.

You were mysterious to him and he was mysterious to you.

She could hear him walking, floors creaking, the refrigerator opening and closing.