Beneath Devil's Bridge(27)

We think we can keep them safe if we order them what to do, if we control them. We think that if we keep them busy with sports, they can’t get into trouble. But we’re wrong.

Pratima was right. I know firsthand. A mother can do everything in her power to make sure the lines of communication with her kids stay open. And it goes wrong anyway. I was a difficult kid myself. Pretty much right up until the time I fell pregnant with Maddy at twenty-two. That’s when I went back to my parents, hat in hand, to ask for help, because neither Jake nor I had a job or money, and we were in a tight spot. Jake had come west from Ontario to hike mountains, ski, and party. I fell hard for him and joined him as a ski bum. My dad, who was already police chief at the time, helped find Jake a job in construction with a friend of his. And my mom babysat Maddy while I started my police training. Jake and I grew up pretty fast from that point. I joined the Twin Falls PD, thanks to my dad, and Jake eventually started his own small construction business. Maddy, however, never settled emotionally, even after she married Darren Jankowski from her class. Or after they had their two girls. My grandbabies.

I turn into a street of suburban homes, all similar in design. It’s one of the newer developments above town, higher up the flanks of the mountain. At the end of the cul-de-sac lies Maddy and Darren’s pretty white double-story with green trim. Jake helped them build it.

As I spy the house, my neck goes tight. I feel my stomach brace.

I pull my truck into their driveway, kill the engine, and stare at the house with its quaint dormer windows. Next door a male neighbor is stringing Christmas lights around a fir tree that grows in his front yard. A toddler, all bundled up, watches from a stroller on the porch. Smoke curls from their chimney.

I get out. Wave. The neighbor’s gaze darts toward Maddy and Darren’s front door, and he hesitates before returning my wave. Is that how foreign I look? Like a stranger in my own kid’s yard? Or does he know full well who I am, and that I am not welcome in this green-trimmed house?

I knock on the front door.

Darren opens it. Shock chases across his face, but he quickly controls it and offers a smile. “Rachel? What . . . what’re you doing here?”

I slide my truck keys into my back pocket as I see little Daisy peeking around the corner.

“Heya, Daisy.” I crouch down. “How are you, kiddo? How’s your little sister?”

Daisy, four years old, smiles coyly, comes forward slightly, and holds on to her dad’s jeans as she leans into his legs.

“Say hi, Daize,” Darren says. “It’s your grandmother.”

“Hi,” she says shyly, twisting against her dad’s leg, cheeks blushing.

I feel a sharp pang of hurt. I am alien to my granddaughters, and Lord knows I’ve tried to change that, but Maddy puts up roadblocks any way she can.

“I brought you something.” I take a small Snickers bar from my pocket and hold it out to her.

“Maddy doesn’t want the girls to have candy.” Darren manages to look apologetic. “Especially if it has peanuts.”

I slide the candy back into my pocket. “Well, then, I’ll have to bring you something better next time, okay, Daize? Where’s Lily?”

“Thleeping.” Her lisp is adorable. It squeezes my heart, and emotion shoots to my eyes. I come erect.

“Is Maddy home?” I ask Darren. “I saw her van in the garage.”

He looks trapped. Her van is clearly there, the garage door open. He can hardly pull a Granger and pretend his wife is not home.

“Who is it?” I hear Maddy’s voice before she comes around the corner into the hallway.

She appears, sees me, and freezes, her hands tightening on the sides of her wheelchair. Her face changes.

“Hey, Mads,” I say.

“Who died?”

“I was passing by. I stopped to . . . I came to say hi to my grandchildren.”

“Right.”

“Can we have a word?”

“Whatever you want to say, you can say it here.” In the entrance hall. With the door right behind my back.

“I got a visit from a woman named Trinity Scott. She’s producing a podcast on the Leena Rai murder.”

Maddy stares at me. Time stretches. Abruptly she spins her chair around and heads out of the hallway, disappearing from sight.

Darren jerks his head and says softly, “Go on through.”

I find my daughter in her kitchen, washing dishes in the sink, her back to me. Above the sink is a window with a clear view of the north face of Chief Mountain. The rock face gleams with moisture and is streaked through with shades of gray. I see two specks of color in a crevice. Climbers. I feel sick. I can’t understand why my daughter wants to live in a house with such a prominent view of the granite mountain against which she used to hurl herself so hard and so often, tackling one climbing route more challenging than the last, as if defying the Chief to shrug her off. Almost as if wanting it to. And then the mountain did. Two years ago, not long after she’d given birth to Lily. The Chief finally shrugged a shoulder, as if vaguely irritated with the human flea attacking it, and a slab of stone separated with Maddy holding on to it. Everyone said it was a miracle she hadn’t been killed. A secret part of me believes my daughter really wanted to die, and I have not been able to fully understand why, or where it all started to go so wrong with my once-happy little girl. Or why most of her anger is focused on me. Yes, I had a brief fling. But her father did a lot worse. Yes, she is angry at her dad, too. But it’s me she seems to want to really punish.