All Good People Here(40)

“I know,” Krissy said. “I don’t understand either. Here.” She extended her hand, and when he looked up, she nodded at the robe in front of him. “Give me that.”

Billy blinked, looked down. “This?” He grabbed the sleeve with soft fingers. “Why?”

“I’m gonna wash it. In case the police find it. It doesn’t mean anything, but”—she took a breath—“but what if they think it does?”

The moment the bathroom door clicked shut behind her, Krissy twisted the lock into place and turned the bathtub faucet on as hot as it would go. Then, with a little bar of soap she had to unwrap from plastic, she held the sleeve of her robe beneath the scalding water and began to scrub.

Just as she was getting the color faded into an unrecognizable stain, a loud knock sounded on the hotel door. She jumped, heart hammering.

“Kris,” came Billy’s voice through the bathroom door. “That’s Officer Jones with Jace. I’m changing. Could you—”

“Shit,” Krissy hissed, yanking the tap off. She hurried to wrap her robe in a towel, stuffed it into the corner of the bathroom, then tossed another on top, so it looked like nothing more than a used pile of towels. “Coming!”

Taking a deep breath, she walked out of the bathroom to their hotel room door and swung it open to reveal Officer Jones, standing side by side and holding hands with her son. Krissy knew she should have been grateful to have Jace safe here with her, away from the watchful eyes of the police, but she wasn’t. Instead, all she felt when she saw him was a deep resentment that he wasn’t his sister.



* * *



—

Jace was hard from the moment he entered the world. While January met all the milestones babies were expected to—smiling at two months, laughing shortly after—Jace only oscillated between solemn and furious. With no need to be changed or fed or burped, he could cry for hours on end. If Billy hadn’t been so helpless with the babies, perhaps Krissy could have coped better, but throughout the twins’ entire infancy, her husband never missed even an hour’s work at the farm or an hour’s sleep. This wasn’t due to malice, Krissy knew, so much as to a lack of imagination. In Billy’s mind, men worked and women mothered. So, for the first year of her children’s lives, she and her son were in a world of their own.

At night, while January slept peacefully in her crib, Krissy would walk through the darkened downstairs of the house, rocking a wailing Jace in her arms. I didn’t ask for this, he seemed to say with his incessant cries. I didn’t ask to be born. And Krissy, sleep-deprived and embittered, would think back, Neither did I.

Those early years passed by in a blur of loneliness. Most of Billy and Krissy’s friends had left for college, and even the ones who hadn’t largely disappeared from their lives. And how could Krissy blame them? They were in their early twenties, spending their nights driving to concerts in Indianapolis, drinking cheap booze, hooking up with each other in the backs of the boys’ pickups. Meanwhile, Billy and Krissy had a family. Dave was the one who hung on the longest. He’d job searched in all the nearby towns and eventually landed something in Elkhart, but it was a short twenty-minute drive from Wakarusa, so instead of moving towns, he’d moved homes, out of his parents’ place and into a rented two-bedroom house only a few blocks away. But even so, he didn’t fit into their new life, and eventually he faded from it as well.

In a blink, the twins were walking then talking. Living with January was like living with a bright star; she was shining and happy in everything she did. Jace, on the other hand, still seemed angry at the world. He was sullen and quiet one moment, then in fitful, indignant tears the next. When the twins turned three, Krissy signed them up for lessons—dance for January, football for Jace. In ballet, January thrived, making fast friends with the other little girls and coming home after every lesson to show her mom what she’d learned. Each time Krissy took Jace to football, though, he refused to even walk onto the field. After four identical tantrums in a row, she unenrolled him.

Krissy encouraged Billy to spend time with their son, to teach him to fish, to throw a ball, even just to let him sit in his lap as he drove the tractor, but Jace never wanted to do any of that either, and eventually Billy stopped trying. Which meant that every other afternoon, Krissy would drag Jace to January’s practice, where he’d sit soundless in the lobby, absorbed by nothing more than his colored pencils and a stack of paper.

But it was clear something inside Jace had been building, because on the night after January’s first recital, it all boiled over.

As Krissy helped get January ready for the show, fussing over her makeup and costume, Jace had watched, white-lipped and glaring, then he’d sat still and wordless throughout the entire recital and car ride home. To anyone else, he may have looked like a particularly well-behaved kid, but his silence unnerved Krissy.

The moment they walked back inside the house, January announced, “I wanna do my recital!”

Billy laughed indulgently, but Krissy said, “Sweetie, you just did your dance.”

“I wanna do it again!” January was bouncing on the balls of her little ballet-slippered feet.

“C’mon, Kris,” Billy said. “Let her do it again.” January squealed and ran to him, her stick arms wrapping tightly around his legs.