Cutting Teeth(75)

“Have you tried asking Lola any more about that day—the day Erin was found?” Bright’s eyes flick to Lola. “Since she’s been home?”

“What exactly have you wanted us to ask her?”

“We wondered if she might have volunteered anything.” Princep shifts his feet, hip-width apart. “After we spoke. It might have triggered something, a memory.”

“Mom. Mom. Mommy!”

“Again: Like what?” Her temper is getting shorter. “She didn’t see anything. She doesn’t know any—” A blast of searing pain shoots out of Darby’s left buttock. “Jesus Christ, are you kidding me?” Darby feels herself bare her teeth, squinting her eyes shut tight. She latches on to Lola’s ponytail and yanks her daughter hard.

Griff, a man of action, few words, springs into it and she thinks, in a full body throb of love that feels as if it must be centered somewhere around the open wound on her ass, how perhaps all really is forgiven, or at least eventually will be, because she could not possibly be more attracted to him than she is in this very moment when he swoops, tucking Lola under his arm, absorbing the blows from her kicks silently, stoically, and carries her down the hall to their bedroom.

Darby is reasonably certain that only she—and not the two cops present—noticed the red outline of blood freshly wet around her daughter’s lips. In the meantime, Darby has been working to refashion her face into a look other than one of surprised agony, and in record time.

“Did she bite you?” Princep stares at the spot where Darby was indeed bitten, which is her ass, and so she stares back with fierce white-lady judgment.

“Barely a nip. Didn’t even break the skin.”

She presses her hand over the small tear in her gym shorts. Already she can feel it wet and leaking. Oh god. She feels like she’s oozing everywhere.

“I don’t think we have anything else to add,” she says stiffly. “At this moment. But we will definitely be sure to call if Lola thinks of anything useful.”



* * *



The Mortons pile into Griff’s SUV and Griff drives her to urgent care, where five stitches are sewn into the not-particularly-firm meat of her rear end.

On the way home, they stop at Walgreens for Neosporin and her prescribed wound care ointment. The cashier behind the counter is an older, gray-haired lady who peers over at Darby and her husband and children with a gleam in her eye, as if she’s in on a secret. “How precious.” She grins, showing her yellowed teeth. “They look just like you,” the woman says. “I have two grandchildren, both in middle school now. Gosh, I miss that stage. Enjoy it. It goes by so fast.”

Does it? Darby takes the bag of supplies. A marathon is over in roughly four hours. Four hours probably does seem like a pretty short amount of time to anyone who is not the marathon runner.

That night she stands with Griff over the sleeping lump of their daughter in bed.

“I don’t understand. She looks so innocent,” Griff whispers, and Darby hears the implication and knows that he’s worrying about the flip side of that word: guilty.

A jolly seahorse night-light glows in the corner of the room, casting shadows. Darby uses her toe to pick at a dried spot of toothpaste on the carpet.

“You don’t think—?” Darby has tipped her head onto his shoulder and together they stand fused, Lola’s parents.

“No.” He shakes his head. “I mean, of course not. She’s just a little kid.”

Below them, Lola breathes heavily through her nose, her little body somehow at a forty-five-degree angle on the mattress, legs twisted in the covers.

“She gets so mad,” Darby says.

“Yeah, but.”

“You think she’s a freak.”

“I think we’ve both thought that,” he murmurs into her hair.

“She’s scared of the pink elephants in Dumbo,” adds Darby. “She couldn’t—”

“Not without telling us, right?”

“I don’t know.” She exhales. “She didn’t tell us when she wrote on our leather chair with her fingernail. She didn’t break even when we confronted her with the letters that had been written there: LM.”

Griff’s skin is warm against her ear. She listens to his voice hum through as a vibration. “She was very strong in the face of damning evidence.”

“But she’s a good kid.”

“She loves us,” he agrees. They’re arguing the same stance. Convincing each other of the same point. Preaching to the choir. “She loves Jack. You see her with him.”

“She would never bite Jack,” says Darby.

“I mean,” he murmurs. “Would she?”

Tears prick her eyes. She swipes them away before Griff notices them dampen his shirt. She remembers staring for hours at Lola as an infant, how she and Griff talked out loud about how beautiful she was, how much more symmetrical her face was than other babies, about her eyes, her length, all so obviously superior to the rest of the dumb babies. Now when she looks back at pictures of those early days, she sees Lola for who she was, a misshapen, quivering bundle with baby acne, and still she thinks now Lola is truly beautiful, now her face is so symmetrical, now her hair is gorgeous, now she is so much prettier than Darby ever was and Darby is so much happier for it. And yet, what if her eyes are playing tricks on her all over again? How can she ever know for sure?