You Will Know Me(74)

“You say the word, and the minute you leave,” Teddy said, as if he hadn’t noticed. Could he really not notice? “Bang goes the starter pistol. We are back.”

Tina was on her feet now too, her hand on Katie’s shoulder, the hard pebble of her engagement ring pressed there, talking loudly into Katie’s ear, loudly over the thudding of a door over and over again upstairs.

“Practice at two forty-five sharp, as ever,” Tina said. “Devon back where she belongs.”

Upstairs, a brief lull came, before the ceiling itself seemed to shake from a fathoms-deep, from-the-bellows sobbing.

“And I promise you this,” Teddy intoned, moving closer to her, all their bodies nearly touching, as if in prayer. “I will devote every fiber of my being, every cell in this aging body, every drop of my heart’s blood to making Devon a Senior Elite in one month’s time. She will have it. I leave it in your hands.”

What could she say? What else could she possibly say?



This is how it is, Katie thought, sitting in the parked car, not ready to turn the key. Our shared effort, the things we all do to keep following that Sharpied arrow.

It made her think of something from months and months back. She’d come upon Eric and Teddy in the living room, watching footage from Devon’s failed bid for Junior Elite two years ago. Their faces lit by the screen, Eric’s hand on the remote, pausing on every frame of the vault. Hurtling down the runway, round-off, feet slapping board, rocketing backward, hands hitting table, body rising, left arm down, right elbow lifted, and then twisting, arms close to chest, spinning madly like a lathe.

Then landing, legs fused, on the mat.

Again and again, the frame palsied on that landing, that slightest of ankle rolls, the half step at most. A decade of work, an inch, two, of blue foam.

“That’s always been her Achilles’ heel,” Teddy had said. “That foot. It makes her work the other one too hard. It’s like she can’t bear how wrong that foot is.”

“The foot’s not wrong,” Eric had replied, eyes on the screen. “The foot’s everything.”



Still sitting her car, from the corner of her eye, she saw a blond blur speeding past the Belfours’ side deck, the one she’d stood on after Ryan’s funeral.

Pound, pound, pound across the deck, the sharp twang of the small dive board.

A swelling plunge, a splash from the chemical depths of the Belfour pool.

Exiting the car, Katie walked quickly up the lawn and through the arbor.

Just then, Hailey emerged from the water and climbed, shirt and jeans drenched, up the ladder.

“Hey!” Katie said. “I need to ask you something.”

Sweeping her hair back with her hands, the pectoral fins of a slender dolphin, she looked over at Katie, chin trembling. Katie could see the stippled spot on the scalp where the hair was gone, the purple under her eye where Devon’s teeth had been.

“They’ll see you,” Hailey hissed, eyes darting toward the house. “They see everything.”



Her pink shirt stuck to her brown skin, Hailey sat, dripping, in Katie’s passenger seat.

“Mrs. Knox, I can’t talk to you,” she said, the wetness like a presence, a third thing in the car. “I made promises. I made my promises and I’m taking the pills and I’m moving back home with them. I’m getting my act together. I made promises.”

“Maybe you’ve convinced them,” Katie said, “but I’m not convinced. How do I know you’re not going to wake up tomorrow and call those detectives or come after my daughter again?”

Hailey shook her head, water scattering across Katie’s arm. “I’m not saying a word. I’m never saying anything. What would it get me, Mrs. Knox?”

Katie said nothing for a second, watching Hailey, her eyes pinned, her hands tucked under her soaked jeans. She looked like a teenage girl gone wrong, caught and cowed.

“Mrs. Knox, I don’t know what happened to Ryan,” Hailey said, eyes flitting up the slope to her uncle’s house.

“I didn’t ask—”

“But I do know about Ryan and your daughter, and I’m not talking about it. Not ever. So can I leave now? Can I?”

“But why?” Katie knew she shouldn’t ask. She couldn’t stop herself. “Why would you do that?”

“They took care of me,” Hailey said. “Uncle Teddy and Aunt Tina. When I was Devon’s age, younger, I…You know how babies, when they first come out, you swaddle them? To keep them from scratching themselves, from scaring themselves? That’s what it was like.”

Katie felt her phone vibrating under her hand but didn’t dare look.

“Uncle Teddy, he never missed one of my volleyball games, never missed a swim meet. Put me through State. He believed in me. They both did.”

Katie couldn’t stop looking at the browning half-moon under Hailey’s eyes. Had Devon really bitten her?

“And they’re still here, looking after me, even after everything the last week.” Then a funny look passed over her face, a shadow, something. “I should’ve listened to Aunt Tina. She never trusted Ryan. A whistling girl and a crowing hen always come to some bad end, she said.”

She looked over at Katie, a smile lurking, rueful and sharp-toothed.