You Will Know Me(92)

Molly was nearly crying, holding Katie’s hands, swinging them.

“How did I do it?” Katie said. “What did I do?”

What did I do.



Around ten, Katie found Eric in the kitchen, talking on the phone, asking Drew about something he was watching on television, a show about a woman who’d died of yellow fever and whose body had turned into soap.

As he talked (“She was wearing kneesocks? For real, buddy?”), his face relaxed for the first time in months. It reminded her of some things, and erased other things.

Watching him, she knew she would let him back in their bed later that night. She knew she would press against his back, burying her face in his thick hair, listening to his heart beat.

What would he be thinking, though, when he slipped under the covers?

Would he be thinking of what his daughter had done? What he’d done to conceal it? Katie could think of little else.

Or might he be thinking of how she’d trapped him seventeen years ago, turned his youthful fling with a concessions girl into marriage, family, mortgage, second mortgage, days sardined with school, practice drop-off, dry cleaner, grocery store, practice pickup, homework, overturned fishbowl, torn cereal boxes oozing flakes and Os on the top of the refrigerator, booster e-mails, dinner, laundry, collapse?

Maybe he’d be thinking he’d found a way to happiness, even if he hadn’t expected it. The life they’d created, or built—from their wayward romance or from the bloody back lawn where Devon was, in some ways, born—was far greater than the both of them. It was a beautiful, an extraordinary thing.

But, deep down, Katie knew Eric wouldn’t be thinking any of this.

Instead, he’d be thinking, Please, for Devon, tomorrow and the next day, let her hit all her spots, let her keep that right leg high, let her stun with her double-twist Yurchenko, let her show them everything that she can do, everything that she is. Let her make it.

So Katie left the kitchen and took the passed joint and drank long tugs from the beers that became margaritas later, at Casa Pepi’s down the road, a marimba trio playing raucously, a song called “I Already Have a Husband,” and Molly jumping up, starting to dance.

The musicians applauded, one of them handing her his mallet, and Molly grabbed it.

Laughing, she started twirling it over her head, just as she had at the tiki party.

And they could all see it, or Katie could, watching all that joy.

As everyone cheered, Molly twirled like she’d twirled that silver-sprayed pipe stolen from her father’s tool bench twenty-five years ago or more. How it had looked like a pinwheel in the sun.

Remember that kind of wanting? she’d said that night of the tiki party. That kind that’s just for yourself? And you don’t even have to feel guilty about it? You wouldn’t know to.



And now it was all happening, up there on the creaking risers at qualifiers.

Amid the roaming judges, black blazers and appraising eyes, and the metallic leotards, hologram swirls, mesh, spandex foil, the girls like jewel bugs hopping, flipping.

Beside her, Drew, the fever long gone, skin peeled away revealing a face that was not the same face, was new.

Curling him close, she looked into his eyes, and they weren’t the same eyes. Suddenly, with great pain, she knew she couldn’t see into them as she once could.

She had no idea what he was thinking at all. Eyes blank, blinds drawn.

“Mom, Devon’s going to do it,” he promised, patting her hand. “She’s going to make it. I told her this morning. And she said she loved me.”

“We all love you, Drew,” she said, pulling him closer.

They had never talked about the role he’d played in any of this, and never again about what he’d seen in the garage. His father and his sister, their world flayed before them, both their hands covered in blood and gristle. His father and sister conspiring to form a lie to last forever. Fortress walls thirty feet thick. A surrounding moat a hundred yards deep.

Or maybe Eric had talked to him, taking him, of late, on long, meandering walks through the woods to look for sphinx moths as dusk fell.



The Knoxes—they were four, but they were one. Seated in the risers, backs arched in their matching BelStars tees, Katie, Eric, and Drew watched Devon, the matchless perfection with which she stormed through the compulsories on day one. The night in between, at the Best Western that smelled like carpet powder and pet hair, they shared both a watchful silence and the excitement of knowing that she would secure it on day two. And now here it was, the end of a triumphant day two, her last routine, her last vault run.

They had embarked on this epic journey long ago, centuries, it felt like, and it was unstoppable.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.

No one could stop it now. Not the police. Not Hailey Belfour, who’d followed her beloved uncle in lockstep. Not Gwen Weaver. Not a scattering of paint chips that never led anywhere. Another unsolved hit-and-run.

Not the envy of others, not all the people who’d misunderstood and judged them.

Not even the lobster claw at the end of Devon’s ankle could stop them now.

Least of all a boy, a beautiful, ephemeral young man who’d floated up from the road like a feather.

No one could.

Was one meant to pay forever for a fleeting mistake? A turn of the wheel, a bobble of a foot, a pause that lasted seconds too long?