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.
From her seat on the floor, she stretches her back. She could ask Marcus. He’d know the answer straightaway. But if she tells anyone where she got the forms and when, there will be questions no one but her could answer and she’s afraid she’s not ready to.
* * *
The moment she steps back on campus, she feels it again: an intense wave of déjà vu.
Her vision swims. She’s overcome with the bizarre impression that she’s a former version of herself. The version that sat trembly-handed behind her car steering wheel, shaken from what she’d just done. It’s all there, shimmering at the edges of the pristine campus underneath the same baby-blue sky that portended disaster just over a week earlier.
The other mothers mill about in front of the entrance and she thinks: Not today. Please. She doesn’t want to parent by committee ever, but definitely not today. They might like to cluck and fuss and flap their mama-bird wings, but that’s not Rhea’s bag, sorry not sorry.
“Rhea.” Darby lifts onto her tippy-toes, pushing her head into Rhea’s line of sight. “Did you hear me? Are you even listening?”
Rhea blinks, unsure of how long Darby has been trotting beside her.
“I said, did you see Lena’s shoulder?”
“Why would I have seen Lena’s shoulder?”
“You have to see it. You just have to. Lena, come here.” Darby raises her hand and beckons her over. Lena is quick to oblige.
“Rhea, oh my god, Rhea, do you want to see something?” Lena’s got those crunchy curls from too much supermarket gel and it smells like expired nail polish when she leans over and peels a bandage from her shoulder, all before Rhea can answer yes or no. She would have answered no, for the record.
“Lena!” Rhea exclaims on impulse.
The skin on her shoulder is so swollen, shiny, and red that it looks like her arm’s made of plastic. There are six puncture wounds, four of which are a deep purple-black and a yellow pus-like mound curves around one of the other wounds. The sight makes Rhea’s teeth ache. “That’s infected. You need to do something about that. Pronto.”
How she let it get to that point in the first place, Rhea has not one clue. These mothers are out here caring about the strangest things like matching bows and monograms and middle school wait lists when they’re still serving their kids up full doses of animal growth hormones in their sippy cups. It doesn’t make sense and, when Rhea has pointed this out—she’s entitled to express her own opinion—they either lie and say they don’t or act like they’re too busy to worry about every little thing.