My Darling Husband(4)
I can’t help myself; I laugh. School starts in two weeks, and thanks to Miss Juliet’s nonnegotiable requirement for a minimum of three hours of daily practice, our schedules are already packed. With Beatrix’s ear, she could probably pick up a new instrument quickly, but still. “When on earth would you find time to practice the piano, too?”
“Not ‘too.’ I want to play the piano instead of the violin.”
I roll to a stop at the intersection, and my foot punches the brake a little too hard. I lurch against the seat belt and twist around on my seat. “Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t quit the violin.”
Beatrix hears the horror in my voice. We all do. Even Baxter stops tugging on his Goldfish wrapper and waits for his sister’s answer.
“Why not?”
“You know why.” It’s something we talk about often, how this spectacular gift comes hand in hand with a spectacular responsibility. “You can’t throw away all the work you’ve done. You just can’t.”
“Says who?”
“Says me. Says your father and Miss Juliet. You’re a violin prodigy.”
She frowns and drags her gaze to the window. “I hate that word. I wish people would stop saying it.”
I stare at my daughter’s profile, trying to puzzle out if there’s anything fueling this sudden change of heart, or if her announcement is for shock value only. Ever since that day in the toy aisle at Target, Beatrix’s musicality has felt equal parts exhilarating and consequential, an all-encompassing talent that means my daughter’s most important relationship is with an inanimate object. I’ve tried very hard to make sure she doesn’t miss out on friends and school and normal, nine-year-old life, fighting traffic to squeeze in playdates and birthday parties when really she should be practicing, but quit? Put down the violin and let all that talent and hard work go to waste?
Like hell. Not going to happen.
The car behind me honks, and I turn back to the road.
“Mommy, what happens when a kangaroo jumps on a trampoline?” Baxter says apropos of nothing, his voice light and carefree. The pureness of him melts my heart.
“I don’t know, baby. He jumps even higher, I guess.”
But Beatrix is still feeling combative. “No, he doesn’t.”
“Yes, he does.”
“No, he doesn’t. Mo-om.”
I’m still debating how to handle Beatrix’s little bombshell when I slow to a stop in front of the house, an ivy-covered brick-and-stone high atop a hill, to grab the mail. I keep pestering Cam to put a lock on the mailbox, something to stop strangers from digging through our post, but he hasn’t made the time.
Why bother? he said last I mentioned it. All the important things are digital these days.
I flip through the stack, junk mail and flyers folded around a lone bank statement. Not that there’s much in this one; it’s for the debit account, which we run down every month. But the point is, not everything is digital. If anyone wanted to know how much money we have in any of our accounts, all they’d have to do is rifle through our mail.
I drop the papers in my bag, steer the car up the driveway and press the button for the gate while behind me on the back seat, things are escalating. Baxter punches Beatrix. Beatrix pulls Baxter’s hair in retaliation. Both kids scream and cry.
I pull into the detached garage on the back side of the house, slam the car into Park and hit the remote for the garage door.
Later, this is the moment I will keep coming back to, in our windowless garage with only one flickering lightbulb on the mechanical box above my car, the darkness descending as the big door rumbled to a close. To the smell of dirt and oil and something foreign, something that didn’t quite belong but that I dismissed as carried in on the wind. To the chaos of holding my shit together while dragging two squirming children out of the car, of gathering up juice boxes and crackers and empty wrappers, of strapping backpacks and instrument cases to little shoulders because they’re big kids now and Mommy shouldn’t have to carry everything herself.
To how I was too busy, and far too distracted to see the body in the far corner.
How I didn’t hear his rubber soles hitting the concrete floor, or notice the dark smudge of the man stepping out of the shadows.
How I didn’t register any of it, not until it was too late.
J A D E
3:18 p.m.
I see the black figure in the shadows, and my first thought is of the kids, an immediate, full-throttle alarm that comes on like a freight train. This is parenthood in a nutshell: utter terror for your children’s welfare, always. It’s something Cam and I never thought about back when we were trying to get pregnant—the overwhelming insecurity when the doctor settled our babies into our arms, the unrelenting worry whenever they’re not near. I spot movement and I reach for them at the same time—instant and instinctual. My brain identifies a person, a male-sized form that does not belong here, and I shove their little bodies behind mine.
A man, looming in my garage. Breathing the same air.
I don’t move. I can’t. No fight. No flight. I just stand here, transfixed, dumbstruck, stock-still.
I think of my phone, buried under the mail and trash in my bag. I think of the panic button on the alarm pad in the house, on the other end of a breezeway and tucked safely behind a locked door. I think of my keys, next to my phone. Even if I managed to get us out of this garage, where would we go? I’d never make it inside the house, and the backyard is fenced, the gates either electronic or secured with a complicated, child-safe latch. There’s nowhere to escape.