The Night Swim(46)

Mom didn’t stand up or reach out to shake the woman’s hand. It wasn’t because she was being rude. It took every last drop of her energy for her to sit up straight in the armchair and pretend that everything was fine.

“Hannah, it’s time to play outside,” Mom ordered when I brought them a pitcher of water.

I deliberately left the door open while I played with a tea set on the back patio. I tried my hardest to listen to what they were saying. It was difficult. Their voices were hushed.

I stayed there until the woman rose from the sofa. I thought she was leaving. Instead, she walked through the house with a clipboard and pen, pausing occasionally to write something down. Mom sat in the armchair, watching the woman helplessly as she opened our refrigerator door and examined the contents.

“Not much food in your fridge,” the woman said.

“That’s because we’re going shopping later,” I snapped, shocked at her rudeness. It was a lie. We’d run out of money for groceries and couldn’t get more until Mom’s welfare check arrived later that week.

That awful Mrs. Mason walked through the rest of the house with her lips pursed. When she opened Mom’s bedroom door, I was relieved it was aired out, with clean sheets on the bed. She walked down the hall. Without asking, she pushed open our bedroom door. It was dark with the drapes drawn. She turned on the lights. Jenny, who’d been sleeping, sat up in bed confused at the intrusion.

“My sister has a cold,” I told her. “She’s very infectious.”

The woman quickly turned off the lights and closed the door. When she was done poking around our house like a busybody, she and Mom had a quiet chat. I was once again banished to the backyard. Mom asked me to pick lemons from our tree. I think she wanted to give them to that Mason woman. By the time I came back, that woman had already gone. I stood by the window and watched her little car rattle down the dirt driveway. “Good riddance,” I murmured under my breath.

Mom’s eyes were closed with relief as we heard the last splutter of Mrs. Mason’s car engine.

“Who is she?” I asked.

“She works for the city. She was checking to make sure we’re managing,” Mom said.

And then as if she suddenly remembered, she asked, “Where’s Jenny?”

“She’s sick.”

“In summer?”

“She has a cold,” I answered evasively. “She didn’t want you to catch it.”

“She hasn’t been having enough fruit,” said Mom. She went to the kitchen and sliced in half the lemons that I’d picked. Beads of sweat formed on her forehead as she squeezed those lemons by hand and poured the juice into a glass jug. She added ice cubes, water, and sugar. When it was ready she stirred it with a long metal spoon and poured three glasses of lemonade.

“Give this to Jenny. Tell her to drink every drop. It’s full of vitamins.”

Jenny sat up in bed and drank the whole glass in a single go.

“It tastes like Mom’s lemonade.”

“It is Mom’s lemonade. She’s feeling better today.”

“Can I have more?” Jenny said when her glass was empty.

I brought her my own glass of lemonade from the kitchen. She drank that as well.

The next morning, for the first time in days, Jenny rose from bed. She spent the day lying on a picnic blanket in the backyard as laundry flapped on the washing line against a pristine sky. I lay near her, content, as I tried to replicate the exact shade of the cloudless cerulean sky with my dollar-store paint set.





27



Rachel


Scott Blair’s former roommate, Dwaine Richards, was a squat nineteen-year-old with a thick neck, wide shoulders, and a buzz cut. He was a college wrestler and he looked the part. He wore a square-cut light gray suit two sizes too big that Rachel suspected belonged to his father, who was watching sourly from the front row of the public gallery.

“We came back to our apartment with some girls after a party,” Dwaine Richards was saying, sitting on the edge of his seat as if looking for an escape route as Alkins fired questions at him. “When they left in the morning, me and Scott joked about how many times we’d each scored that night. One thing led to another and Scott bet a thousand dollars that he could sleep with more girls than me in a month. I thought it was a joke, but then Scott put up a chart on our fridge to keep track. He was mad as hell when he came back from a weekend swim-team training camp and saw that I was ahead of him.”

Alkins moved on to the night of Lexi’s party: “The defendant called you from a party. Can you tell the jury what he said?”

“Scott said that he was crashing a high school party in his hometown and he expected ‘to bag at least one girl,’” said Dwaine. “He warned me that he’d catch up to me, and that he planned to win.”

“Did you hear from the defendant again that night?” Alkins asked.

“Yup, I did,” he said. “Scott woke me up in the middle of the night. Said he’d banged a high school girl just like he’d said. He told me to ‘add her to the list.’”

“What did Scott mean by ‘add her to the list’?”

“He meant that I should add her name to the list of girls we’d slept with that month on the whiteboard on our refrigerator. We had two columns. One for me and one for him. I was ahead by three girls. Once I added her to Scott’s list, I was winning by two.”