We Are Not Like Them(43)

Matt gave him shit for it. “You’re off to see the Wizard,” he teased. That’s what the cops call shrinks—the Wizard. “Don’t get lost in Oz, Dorothy.”

But Kevin surprised us all by jumping at the offer. Naturally, he doesn’t tell me anything about it. I can only hope that he’s opening up to the doctor. He said he’d try to make it today, but I’m not holding my breath. No one else could come with me either. Annie’s on shift at the hospital, and I’d never dream of asking her to find someone to cover. Cookie is watching Archie because day care is closed for some reason, and Frank volunteers every Tuesday morning at the VA.

The regular receptionist is out. Her replacement is a youngish Black woman with long thick braids and a necklace made of giant stones. Normally I would compliment her jewelry, ask where she got it, tell her about this girl on Etsy who sells rings that look similar. But I don’t do any of that. I barely even look up as I hand over my insurance card and driver’s license. She takes it without smiling and squints as she scrutinizes my ID. I shift from foot to foot as I wait for her to recognize the name, hiss at me, call me the wife of a murderer. She just hands me back my card with a friendly look on her face.

“You don’t look much like your driver’s license picture anymore.”

“I chopped off my hair. And I gained some weight.” I point to my belly.

“Pregnancy suits you. The hair too.”

Her unexpected kindness makes me want to ask her to come into the exam room with me to hold my hand.

I find the most secluded seat possible, far in the corner. I pull my phone out of my bag so I don’t have to make eye contact with anyone else. I already have eleven missed calls. All from “Unknown” or unfamiliar numbers. Reporters… or worse. It’s escalated since the interview. In the last twenty-four hours alone, I’ve received multiple messages from crazy strangers saying that Kevin should burn in hell for what he did, or that our baby should be taken away from us. And then there was the woman who’d hissed, “Maybe you’d understand if your own baby was killed.” After that I vowed to never listen again. I delete anything that doesn’t come from a number I recognize.

My forefinger swipes the screen and presses down to pull up the video again. I don’t know why I do it—it’s like a car crash I keep rubbernecking. The counter at the corner says Riley’s interview with Tamara has been viewed 437,322 times since it aired Saturday night. I’m probably at least a dozen of those. Riley’s face, the size of my thumb, is close to the screen. I watch as she nods along when Tamara Dwyer demands that the officers who shot her son get sent to prison “for the rest of their lives.”

I drag my finger along the bottom of the screen, fast-forwarding a few seconds to another close-up of Riley, her glassy eyes, her tight grip on Tamara’s hand. If any other reporter did that, I’d think it was an act, turning it on for the camera, except this is Riley, and I can tell she means it, that’s what makes her so good. She truly cares. Riley looks so genuinely pained, I want to reach through the phone and comfort her, the grieving mother too. Then I remember: The man they’re talking about locking up for the rest of his life is my husband.

And maybe Riley is just doing her job, so why do I feel like I’ve been stabbed in the back every time I watch this video? Why does it feel like Riley is choosing sides?

We’re fine, Riley had written me yesterday, a full two days after I’d texted her that I didn’t want to be fighting, after I’d almost stopped expecting to hear back from her. It’s obviously not true, which is why I haven’t responded. Besides, after that interview, what could I even say? Nice job making the case that my husband is a monster.

As betrayed as I felt watching that one-sided interview, I’d still somehow found myself defending Riley to the Murphys when it aired. “She’s just doing her job,” I offered meekly as we watched it live in the sunken living room on the too-big TV. That I felt the need to stick up for Riley at all only made me more pissed off about the whole thing.

Matt’s voice had thundered through the room, rattling Cookie’s Precious Moments figurines. “Are you kidding me? That Black bitch knows exactly what she’s doing!”

“Do not call her that!” I spat back.

Kevin jumped to his feet, upsetting the empty beer cans on the coffee table. “She’s a traitor. She knows me, Jen. She knows me, and she does this?” He stormed out through the patio doors, into the freezing night. Matt joined him; the two of them paced and passed a vape back and forth for hours, long after I went to bed.

Does Riley know Kevin? Even I don’t know my husband right now. Before we were married, when we did our Pre-Cana at St. Matthew (at Cookie’s insistence), Father Mike, who’d christened Kevin as a baby, looked across his massive cherry desk and asked us to tell him about the hardest challenge we’d faced so far as a couple. He was dead serious, but it didn’t stop our nervous giggles. We were all of twenty-five. We’d only been dating for a year. Life was all sex in weird places and dirty texts.

It was hard to imagine a time when Kevin wouldn’t make me happy. I tried to force myself to think of scenarios that would break us and came up blank. Kevin would never cheat, never hit me, never leave me. He had a good job. He’d support our family. I guess everyone goes into their wedding day believing these things, but with Kevin, they were facts, not wishes. I was building a life on the bedrock of these truths.