The Queen of Hearts(29)

“I didn’t know she was outside.” After every few words, she sucked in her breath with a sickening audible creak. “The surgeon—Dr. Colley; do you know Dr. Colley?—says they don’t think she has a head injury, but she’s in the OR for, uh, abdominal injuries.” She caught her breath again. “They don’t know how bad it is yet.”

“Listen, Betsy,” I said. “I know Emma Colley—you couldn’t have a better surgeon. I’ll take Will to Ryder’s house right now.” I glanced in the rearview mirror at the blissfully oblivious occupants of the backseat, roiling like an octopus convention as they crowed and guffawed and invaded one another’s personal space.

“Sometimes, at night, I actually used to think about them getting hurt in a car wreck,” Betsy said, and then she gave in to the urge to cry—helpless, frightened sobbing that rang in my ears. My chest heaved in commiseration. There but for the grace of God . . . Betsy had just run smack up against one of those fallacious universal parenting beliefs: the idea that if you envision some terrible thing happening to your child, then it would not, in fact, actually happen. We make these implicit bargains with fate all the time, lulling ourselves into a false comfort, thinking we can ward off the worst just by acknowledging that it exists. A close corollary to this belief is the notion that if something ghastly happens to the child of someone you know, then your child is somehow mysteriously protected from that same thing.

But my job exposed me far too often to the truth; unspeakable fears do lunge out of our imaginations into reality, and it doesn’t matter who has gone down before you. Childhood cancers happen. Abuse from trusted adults happens.

And trauma happens.

—

Five o’clock p.m. Absolute worst hour of the day. Still reeling from the news of Eleanor Packard’s accident, I checked my phone for the thousandth time, hoping for an update. Nothing.

The children, post-school, post-tennis, were tired and cranky and had just expended the last of their brainpower on homework. I could not bring myself to tell them about Eleanor. Delaney, who’d been carted around in the car seat all afternoon, had finally fallen asleep just before we pulled into the driveway and had undergone a terrible transformation from her normal perky self to wordless screeching demon. One side of her face shone bright red from where she’d been lying on it, and she howled to be held. I had made the horrific mistake of waking her before bringing in all the grocery stuff, so I was forced to carry her to and from the car multiple times as I brought in all the bags.

Now, attempting to cook dinner, I staggered around the kitchen with the wailing Delaney clamped to my leg, while everyone pleaded for junk food. With the tip of my outstretched left pinkie finger, I managed to hit the home screen button on my phone in case Emma had tried to reach me. I’d been dying to tell her about Nick’s dog’s name, but now all I wanted to do was hear about Eleanor’s prognosis.

No missed texts.

“Rowan!” I snapped. “Get over here and assist me with your sister.”

“I can’t, Mom,” said Rowan coolly. “I have to text Isabelle.” Rowan seemed to be developing into the sort of girl whose presence caused other girls to go into paroxysms of insecurity. She was confident and cheeky, with a finely wrought face dominated by huge sea glass eyes and a great swathe of inky hair.

“You most certainly do not have to text Isabelle. What you have to do is get your sister off my leg. Now.”

“I’m sorry, but this is urgent.”

“It is not urgent. What is urgent is responding to your mother before she flies off the handle,” I yelled.

The whimpering coming from my ankle suddenly stopped. I looked down. Delaney was staring at me, mouth wide open. “Mom,” she said, awestruck. “You can fly?”

There was a pause, and then Rowan and I both started to laugh. I turned off my induction cooktop and leaned over to pick up Delaney, who smiled faintly, unsure of what she’d done to break the tension but pleased that she had gained undivided attention.

“Lainie,” I said. I stroked her corn silk curls and breathed in her baby fragrance, guiltily availing myself of the comfort of her perfect, unbroken body. “I can’t fly. I meant that I was getting mad. I’m going to finish this cooking and Sissy will read to you for a few minutes, and then we can cuddle on the couch.”

“Mom!” Rowan fumed. “I do not have time to read baby books! Why can’t the boys do it? In my opinion—”

“Your opinion is immaterial,” I interrupted. “Only my opinion matters here.”

“Well, that’s offensive.”

“Rowan, do it.”

Rowan grumbled, but she moved over to the comfortable couch in the sitting area off the kitchen and grabbed a book—our much-loved copy of Bink and Gollie—off the bookshelf. Delaney followed her and climbed up into Rowan’s lap, settling with her head resting sleepily on her big sister’s shoulder. Rowan tucked an arm around her and began to read.

The evening slogged along. No call from Emma, no call from Betsy. These sun-filled late-summer days tended to go forever, making it especially hard to convince the children that it was bedtime. They fought the good fight, complaining loudly of thirst, hunger, feeling unloved and lonely, hearing strange noises, and my personal favorite, suffering from “itchy teeth.” In response, I had begun barking, “Stall! Stall! Stall!” every time a small head poked out of its room, which made me sound like a plane going down. It was effective, though: it so annoyed the children that eventually they surrendered. I was a noodle by this point: droopy limbs, half-mast eyes, and garbled thoughts swirling around in my tired head. But the quiet peace of the house was way too precious to waste on sleep. I poured myself a glass of wine and ran a bath. I put in a few drops of rosemary-infused massage oil, which turned the water into warm liquid silk while giving the bathroom a seductive clean smell. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. My hair, which has a tendency to go haywire by the end of the day, sprang out from my head in uncontrolled coils so that I resembled a demented lion. I gathered it up into a hasty topknot.