The Wrong Family(15)

Juno stepped into Winnie and Nigel’s bedroom. The rattan fan whirred soundlessly above the bed, stirring the smells of the room. She was tempted to turn it off, but she knew better. Instead, she walked on the balls of her feet toward the nightstand. She’d start there first. Juno slid the first drawer open. Everything was unbearably tidy: three squat jars of lotion stood in a neat line. Next to them was a woman’s devotional, a tube of Carmex, three unused notebooks with floral covers, and a tampon. But no nail clippers.

The next drawer had much of the same, the organized clutter of an uninteresting woman: a box of truffles, two expensive-looking pens, more floral notebooks, these with Winnie’s handwriting on the inside. Juno sat lightly on the edge of the bed and flipped open the cover of the first one. Was it a diary of some sort? She squinted down at Winnie’s spiky handwriting, trying to make out the words. They were...thoughts. Dated, and one per page. That it wasn’t necessarily a diary made Juno feel less guilty about reading it. Pacifying her conscience with that, she looked to the first one. It read: Day after day it eats me. I am tired, but not tired enough to kill myself.

Juno frowned. Had she read that right? Little Miss Perfect Winnie Crouch had days where she just didn’t want to live?

She turned the page, thinking she’d opened it to a bad day—even people like Winnie had those once in a while, she supposed, but the next entry was similar: I tore the pages out of my favorite book, one by one...

Juno was more than shocked. Winnie wasn’t a darkness and gloom girl; she had subscriptions to Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, Food & Family, and Marie Claire, the kind of person who considered herself an artist because of her beautifully curated Instagram account. Juno wasn’t making fun; it was just a fact—Winnie wasn’t drinking from a deep pool. Or at least Juno had thought so, until now. Abruptly she flipped the notebook closed and put it back where she found it. She really needed nail clippers.

She checked Nigel’s side of the bed and the bathroom drawers. She pushed junk around the junk drawer. The Crouches had an endless supply of matches; Juno pocketed several boxes and moved to a different drawer where she found an unopened package of LED tap lights. She held them for several minutes, considering. Winnie had probably forgotten they were there. She stuck the package in the waistband of her pants. Then she decided to check Sam’s room for the clippers.

She didn’t like snooping in Sam’s room, and she didn’t do it often, being that Sam was the person she liked the most in the house. Sometimes, when she had extra time, she’d wander up there to see what he was reading or what little project he was working on. Without turning on the light, her eyes scanned the silhouettes of furniture. She found everything tidy and put away. No pieces of metal lay scattered across his desk, either.

Generally, tiny remnants were strewn about his room as he built model airplanes or put together a tiny wooden T. rex with parts so small Juno could barely pick them up with her fingers. But today, something was off. Looking around, she noticed an absence of the usual stuffed animals that sat on his bed. The posters of superheroes were gone, too, fresh navy paint on his walls to replace the light blue wallpaper. Juno harrumphed. He’d gone and grown himself up overnight.

She remembered their conversations in the park, and suddenly the nail clippers were forgotten. She found herself nudging the mouse to his desktop, and the screen sprang to life. Having raised two sons, Juno knew the types of things boys got up to online; for that reason, she avoided his open internet browser and looked beyond that, at his desktop. He was working on something; it looked like the back end of a website. Sam-Side.

She slumped into his chair, not taking her eyes from the screen. Had he designed this? She’d hired people to do this for her when the internet became a thing, for the business. Kregger had reassured her when she was intimidated by all the buttons and screens—and then when all the buttons disappeared, and it was just screens. Her website had been amateur compared to this, and it had cost her a whopping twelve hundred dollars in the early 2000s. But here he was, a thirteen-year-old boy building his first website. They made them different nowadays, and she suspected he was tired of building toys—at least the ones they made for boys. She tried to understand what she was reading. It was a blog. She could see several blog titles in the box that said DRAFTS, all of them yet to be published.

“You’ve been busy,” she heard herself say out loud. Snooping was wrong, but what was the harm in taking a little peek—it wasn’t like she was some stranger off the street. Once upon a time, she’d been a bona fide psychologist, for God’s sake. She felt a wave of excitement that didn’t have anything to do with being a psychologist. It was a familiar feeling; she’d spent thirty years digging and plowing through people’s brains—learning their secrets and hearing the ugliest desires of their hearts. She may be retired, but her lust for knowledge had never gone away.

The first draft Juno clicked on was titled: Pretty Sure I’m Adopted.

Sam had said this to her in the park, too, and she’d responded lightly. In a clinical setting, Juno would brush this off, too; adolescents went through a period where they felt disconnected from everything, even the people who loved them most. Juno compared it to a young lion learning to roar, picking fights, feeling insecure but acting volatile.

But this particular blog entry had never made it past one sentence. Sam, new to adult words, had described his feelings in one staggering fritz of emotion: Wolves know when they’re being raised by bears.