You Will Know Me(52)

The chime from his laptop.

The hiss of his phone.

She swore she could hear everything.

*



Devon had been gone less than two days, and the house felt haunted, the decaying manse of a family quarantined by fever.

Without car duty, practices, there was suddenly so much time, and Katie ended up spending far too long with Drew’s sickbed meals, fashioning a banana to look like a person with raisin eyes. Cutting his sandwich into angel wings.

You really only learn your place, her mother once said, when you’re left in it.

She had talked to Devon on the phone four times, each time a minute or less, Devon off to special air floors and ballet barres and the thirty-foot inflatable tumbling strip in Gwen’s home gym.

Katie hadn’t talked to Eric at all.

“Are you going to be mad at me forever?” Eric asked, coming up behind her as she dressed in the morning. He put his hands on her hips and ducked his head down against the top of her hair, and she felt a unexpected shiver.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.” But then he added, leaving for work, “Katie, it’s the right thing. I swear.”



Something was wrong, wronger than it even seemed. She just wasn’t sure what it was.

“I’m better, Mom,” Drew said, seven a.m., leaning over his terrarium, peering in the resin cave the salamander liked to hide in.

“Okay,” she said, her hand on his forehead, no longer the little radiator of days before. “But better isn’t well.”

“Remember when we watched that show about cavefish?” he asked, tapping on the resin with one red finger.

“I think so.”

“They have scars where their eyes should be.”

“Right. Because of evolution. It’s always dark. They don’t need to see.”

“Mrs. Teazer said it’s not true,” Drew said, lifting his hand from the terrarium, a slurpy snail curled on his wrist. “They did this experiment where they mated the fish with other fish from different caves and then the baby fish could see. Their eyes were bigger and they could see everything.”

“Is that so?” she said. Sometimes she wondered how she’d gotten such a smart kid. And just how smart he might be.

“Mom, it was the cave’s fault. Not the fish.” His voice shook slightly and she knew he must still be sick, emotional. “The cave made them that way.”

“But it still doesn’t matter. They don’t need to see down there, baby,” she said, touching his forehead again. “There’s nothing to see.”

“It must have been weird the first time they saw their parents,” he said, peering closely at the snail on his wrist, his eyes glassed. “But their parents still couldn’t see them.”

“I think you still have a fever.”

“Mom, what was Dad doing in the backyard?” he asked, coaxing the snail up his speckled forearm.

She looked at him.

“Dad? He just left for work.”

“No, in the nighttime. Last night. Before the newspaper came.”

“What was he doing?”

He shrugged. “Talking on his phone. I saw the light on his cheek. He kept spinning around, talking. Who was he talking to?”



The hydraulic drill of the landline startled her.

“Katie? This is Helen Beck. Ryan’s mom.”

“Oh, Helen. Yes. Are you okay?”

“I’m so sorry. I heard about what happened. Between Hailey Belfour and your daughter.”

“Yes,” Katie said. “Thank you. Devon’s okay.”

“I’m at Ryan’s apartment. Taking care of things.” She let out a weighty sigh. “You should see how many T-shirts he has. They all smell like him.”

And then she said, “Katie, I think you should come here.”

“Pardon?”

“Well, it’s…I think you should come over. If you can. Do you think you can do that? It’s easier in person.”

There was a pause, Katie looking at Drew, who was drinking a tall glass of flat ginger ale with a leisurely grace.

“Oh, I remember this one.” Helen’s voice came soft. “The gray ringer. He used to wear this back in high school whenever he played baseball.”



“That’s three forty-six, Mom,” Drew croaked from the backseat, Post-it in his damp hand. “Is this where Ryan lived?”

She stopped at the box-shaped low-rise buildings on the right, just past the Quik Mart. Concrete walls, two sets of balconies, a banner across the facade: Affordable Rentals Call Today!

“Yes.”

She’d gotten in the car within ten minutes of Helen’s call, had not stopped to think. Or even to ponder the wisdom of taking Drew outside.



Helen met them at the door, the buzzer broken.

“He was working really hard, saving up,” Helen said as they walked inside, the hallway’s linoleum cluttered with circulars, tented takeout menus, a waterlogged stack of aging Yellow Pages. “He would’ve been out of here soon.”

“It looks fine,” Katie said.

“Hey, devil boy,” Helen said, winking down at Drew. She looked over at Katie. “Ryan used to get funny rashes like that all the time when he was little. They always told me it was my detergent, no matter which one I used. They never believed me.”