Cold Springs(3)

When the front door shut, Katherine felt herself deflating, the little knots in her joints coming loose.

She took Candyland down from the shelf. She joked with Mallory and smiled as they drew color cards, but inside she felt the black sadness that was always just underneath her fingernails and behind her eyes, ready to break through.

Katherine wanted a fix. She knew it would only make her depression worse—buoy her up for a little while, then make the blackness wider, the edges of the chasm harder to keep her feet on. Her therapist had warned her. Ann Zedman had warned her. Her father had warned her. They were all part of the educational team, all looking out for her best interests.

We're here to help you be successful again, Katherine.

Fuck that.

If there was anything worse than having a dad who was a teacher, it was having your dad at the same school as you. And not just for a couple of years. A K–12 school. A small K–12 school, so you had thirteen years of absolute hell, no breathing space, no room to be yourself. And if that wasn't bad enough, have your dad be best friends with the headmistress for a gajillion years—Ann Zedman always over at your house, peeking into your life.

That was why Katherine loved the East Bay. It was hers.

At least, it had been until last week—the stupid cops separating her out, scolding her, asking what the hell she was doing with those people. She remembered the ride home from the Oakland police station, her wrists raw from the handcuffs, her anger building as her father glanced in the rearview mirror, insisting that she not tell her mother what she'd been doing at the party because it would break her mother's heart. Katherine had snapped. She'd told her dad everything—to hurt him, to prove it was even worse than he thought. She did have a life of her own. Friends of her own.

Oh, Daddy.

She hated herself even more than she hated him. She'd told him. She'd ruined everything. Now he would send her away to goddamn Texas.

Mallory tugged at her sleeve. “Come on, Kaferine. You got a double red.”

Katherine looked across the game board.

Mallory had been her dress-up doll, her pretend child, her toy self she could slip into whenever real life sucked too bad. But now that Mallory had started kindergarten at Laurel Heights, Katherine felt sad every time she looked at her. She never wanted to see them ruin this little girl, the way they'd ruined her. She never wanted to see Mallory grow up.

She forced a smile, moved her double red.

Mallory drew Queen Frostine and squealed with delight.

It was an easy skip from Queen Frostine to King Kandy. Mallory won the game while Katherine was still back in the Molasses Swamp.

“What can we play now?” Mallory asked. “Horses?”

“I have a better idea.”

“No,” Mallory said immediately. “I don't like that.”

“Come on. It's our little secret.”

“It's scary.”

“Nah. For a brave kid like you?”

Katherine went to the secret panel in the wainscoting, the storage closet that her grandfather had constructed when the bottom level of the townhouse had been his shop. He was a clockmaker, her grandfather. He loved gears and springs, mechanical tricks.

The door was impossible to see from the outside. You had to press in just the right spot for the pressure latch to release. Inside, the space was big enough for a child to crawl into, or maybe an adult, if you scrunched. The back was still crammed with clock parts—copper coils, weights and chains, star-and-moon clock faces.

She remembered her grandfather telling her, “Never wind a clock backwards, Katie. Never.” He had always called her Katie, never Katherine. Her father said it was because he couldn't bear to think of his wife, whose smoker's lungs had shut down while she was waiting for her namesake to be born. “Winding backwards will ruin the clock. Always go forward. Even if you only want to go back an hour, always go forward eleven.”

She wondered if her dad had been made out of clock parts, like the latch on the cabinet. She wished she could wind him backwards one week, to see if something would break.

She reached into the closet, to the little rusty hook only she knew about, and pulled out a copy of her Toyota key.

Ground me, Daddy. Go ahead.

She turned to Mallory, who was balancing Equestrian Barbie's plastic pony on her knee.

Poor little Mallory—the headmistress's daughter. She would have an even worse school experience than Katherine did. So what if she liked kindergarten? It was only a matter of time before she felt the walls closing in on her, that chasm opening at her feet. It sliced into Katherine's heart whenever she passed the lower school windows, saw Mallory wave a sticky hello to her, fingers covered in primary-colored gloop.

No, Katherine never wanted to see her baby doll grow up.

She smiled to cover the blackness. “Come on, Peewee. Let's go for a ride.”

Laurel Heights School blazed with light. Luminarias lined the sidewalk. Arcs of paper lanterns glowed red and blue over the playground, transforming the basketball court into a dance floor nobody could use, thanks to the weather.

Inside, the two-story building was buttery warm with jazz music and candlelight, waiters bustling about with trays of champagne and canapés, parents laughing too loud, drinking too freely, enjoying their big night away from the children.

For an outside party brought inside at the last minute, Ann had to admit the staff and the caterers had done a great job. Cloths had been draped over the teachers' supply cabinets. Banquet tables had replaced school desks. A hundred tiny articles of lost-and-found clothing had been taken off the coat hooks and stashed in closets, broken crayons and Montessori rods swept off the floor. Fresh-cut flowers decorated the music teacher's piano. The kindergarten teacher's desk had been converted to a cash bar.