Cutting Teeth(33)
He greets her wearing a clean undershirt and jeans, ushering her in as he moves for his own chair across the way.
The seat beneath her is an old schoolhouse chair with metal legs and a curved wooden back, designed to be stacked. Her bottom feels slippery on it. “I wanted to talk to you about—about what happened to Miss Ollie,” she says.
He drops back into his chair, his intense green eyes fastened on her. “I’m listening.”
“I want to make sure you’re prepared to protect the children.” She tries not to sound overly dramatic, but it feels important. They’re a community, after all, they need to act like it. “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but a child’s footprints were found beside the body.” She can’t bring herself to mention Miss Ollie by name.
“A child’s footprints?”
She nods. “We have to think one of them might have … found the body and been too afraid to say anything.” A four-year-old witness. More than one person will be after these children. To say nothing of their … condition, which, in truth, only seems to be getting more pronounced.
She’s begun spotting the signs before Noelle has a craving. She gets this yucky collection of saliva at the corners of her mouth, a bit like a dog. Mary Beth is disgusted by it. She would never admit that to anyone, but every time she sees that pool of spit shining on either side of her daughter’s lips, she feels repulsed, revolted by her own child. She mentally quashes the image in order to continue without gagging.
“I was thinking it wouldn’t look good for the church, the class unsupervised, doesn’t feel safe. They’ll need an advocate,” she says. “Someone to make sure that nothing’s blown out of proportion by the press. Or the police. This syndrome that many of the kids are exhibiting. It’s harmless. Rare but there are other cases, not just ours.”
Harmless, so long as you don’t put too much stock in the bruising track marks that can now be seen running up the length of some of the parents’ arms. Innocuous so long as you don’t mind a few muscle cramps and a touch of lethargy, but honestly show her a parent who doesn’t experience both regularly.
Ben’s eyes are kind and his voice gentle. He’ll be a father someday. “I hate to think that this is affecting them. They’re so pure of heart at that age. I have a nephew. He turned one a couple weeks ago. I got to help him smash his cake.”
“With your work on the youth center and your commitment to children, knowing we have your support for our class would be incredibly meaningful.” A morale boost, really. She can share with the other parents. Maybe in an email blast. That feels very on brand for her. She likes it already. “You might even come to talk to the children. Help them to process their grief, spiritually, I mean. Heaven!” She exclaims too loudly, the idea just occurring to her.
Oh god, she sounds deranged. It seems that ever since that day, her moods have been swinging wildly this way and that. She can’t get a proper grip. Then again, that’s more or less what she’s doing here. Why she’s assembling the skills of Darby and the support of Ben and the cooperation of the other moms and dads. She’ll get a grip and then they’ll all move beyond this terrible, no good, very awful day, just like in that picture book Angeline loved so much at Noelle’s age.
“You could talk about heaven, I mean. And guardian angels. I think the kids would really like that. I think,” she says, the emotion building in her throat, “we all would.”
SIXTEEN
Rhea could have sworn she dropped Bodhi off at school two minutes ago when suddenly the alarm blares on her phone, signaling the time for pickup. She isn’t ready. She should have more to show for her free hours. And yet, they’ve come and gone.
They started with a call from Margot, phoning her back. No, there was nothing to do about the angel investor. Yes, they would think of something. Don’t worry, it would all work out. Rhea would see. But Margot was just saying shit, going through the motions. Rhea is one client on a roster of many.
After that defeating call, she sat amidst the detritus of packing boxes and customer service emails and new products and, not for the first time, couldn’t move, or didn’t want to. She felt mulish. Didn’t care that the wallet she was punishing would not be some big-dollar corporation, but her own puny time bank. Still, she didn’t want the moment she dropped off her son at school to feel like the starting gun of a sprint race, one she would be required to run, at that breakneck speed, for more than the length of a whole Iron Man competition.
So what did she do? Did she, at least, jog? Move in the general direction of the finish line? Surely, help would arrive somewhere along the way. No. She wasted entirely too much time staring at a financial statement that wasn’t even hers, that, in fact, had nothing to do with her.
It was like a Wikipedia rabbit hole, once she started she couldn’t stop clicking and clicking and clicking. Rhea isn’t one for rabbit holes. That’s more Darby’s domain. Darby, who listens to podcasts about serial killers and, occasionally, regales Rhea with stories of women (always “upper-middle class,” which just means plain old rich) who’ve gone missing and kids—always white—who’ve been kidnapped from their beds.
Were it not for the fact that she had been required to prepare and pore over the very same forms for Terrene to show to the angel investors, the documents she found open on Miss Ollie’s laptop computer might not have caught her eye. They would have seemed written in a foreign language. But now she translates the pluses and minuses, the dollars and cents, the transfers and deposits, and keeps coming to the same conclusion: Either she’s not reading it correctly or the columns don’t add up.