“It’s work, Darby. Someone’s expecting me.” He picks up Jack and gives him a perfunctory kiss on the cheek.
“Did you know that in France it’s illegal to contact an employee with work communication outside of work hours? People need distance and off-hours, that’s the point. People need to disconnect.”
“This isn’t France.” He pushes Jack back into her arms. She feels like a docking station for a Roomba, her children occasionally leaving her, but never for long, always called back home, and it makes her inexplicably sad that the most apt description of herself is in the form of a vacuum cleaner.
She can’t even imagine what she might accomplish with two free hands.
“I was talking about me.”
There he goes. She turns back, the Mortons now minus one, and when she does, she startles to find how close by Lola is standing. An arm’s length at most and staring, there, with the flat black-hole pupils and the flaring nostrils and the glistening lips that Darby felt times ten in the classroom today, and Mary Beth’s question from earlier that day returns to her: You don’t think they would have …
“Come on.” She rolls up her sleeve and prepares a new syringe, fresh cotton swabs, and all the other accoutrements. She thinks: How is anyone supposed to lose weight, go to the gynecologist, clean her closet, and parent gently? How does any mother do anything? “Tell me something else about the octopus,” she says.
Minutes later, Lola’s expression has cleared, leaving behind the precious daughter who gives clammy hugs and counts bouncing her knees as dancing. “After a girl octopus lays eggs,” Lola says, voice husky, “she quits eating and just lays there and gets real skinny until her babies hatch and then she dies.”
“That’s terrible,” Darby says, inching back against the sofa cushion. She cuddles her daughter. “Poor mommy octopus.”
TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW OF WITNESS, LINCOLN SAWYER
APPEARANCES:
Detective Wanda Bright
PROCEEDINGS
DET. BRIGHT: Lincoln, did you like Miss Ollie? Was she a nice teacher?
LINCOLN SAWYER: Most of the time.
DET. BRIGHT: Most of the time, okay. So sometimes you didn’t like Miss Ollie?
LINCOLN SAWYER: Yeah, because sometimes she was mean.
DET. BRIGHT: What did she do that was mean?
LINCOLN SAWYER: She took away my scissors privileges.
DET. BRIGHT: Ah. Your scissors privileges. Just yours? Or the whole class’s?
LINCOLN SAWYER: Mine and Tamar’s.
DET. BRIGHT: Why’d she do that?
LINCOLN SAWYER: Because I got in trouble for cutting Tamar’s clothes.
MRS. CHELSEA SAWYER: When was this?
LINCOLN SAWYER: Um. Yesterday or last year?
MRS. CHELSEA SAWYER: Why would you cut up Tamar’s clothes?
LINCOLN SAWYER: We were just trying to be werewolves!
MRS. CHELSEA SAWYER: Lincoln, you know—
DET. BRIGHT: Which one, Lincoln? Was it last year?
LINCOLN SAWYER: Tomorrow I think? But after Christmas.
DET. BRIGHT: I see. How did that make you feel, Lincoln, when Miss Ollie took away your scissors?
LINCOLN SAWYER: Mad. Real, real mad.
DET. BRIGHT: I’ll bet. And what do you do when you’re mad?
MRS. CHELSEA SAWYER: Now, wait a minute. What are you imply—
LINCOLN SAWYER: I growl. Like this. Rawwwrrrgrrrrr.
DET. BRIGHT: Oh, wow, that is scary. You do that a lot, Lincoln?
MRS. CHELSEA SAWYER: Like he said, he’s into werewolves. He howls at the moon before bed. That kind of thing. Kids go through these phases, you know—
DET. BRIGHT: Let’s try to let Lincoln answer, okay?
MRS. CHELSEA SAWYER: Not necessarily okay, no.
DET. BRIGHT: Did you want to hurt Miss Ollie, Lincoln?
LINCOLN SAWYER: No. I like Miss Ollie.
MRS. CHELSEA SAWYER: See! This is what I’m saying.
DET. BRIGHT: Lincoln, I’m going to ask you a question that you might know the answer to and if you do, you might think you need to keep it a secret, but I’m going to ask you to be honest with me, okay? Can you do that? Do you know who hurt Miss Ollie?
LINCOLN SAWYER: Yes.
DET. BRIGHT: You do? You know who hurt your teacher?
LINCOLN SAWYER: Wait, no. Sorry. I thought you said something else.
DET. BRIGHT: What did you think I said?
LINCOLN SAWYER: I thought you asked if I know who the Poop Bandit is. ’Cause that’s the secret I know the answer to.
EIGHTEEN
This is a bad idea.
Rhea’s concern over the merits of this particular idea comes way too late. The studio comprises two red chairs, angled slightly toward each other, stationed atop a raised platform. Box lights point down at her from the ceiling, making the T-zone of her face go shiny. Behind her, a flat-screen TV mounted to the flimsy temporary wall displays the orange-and-white logo for KNT News.
She pulls out a small tube of roll-on oil she’s stashed in the pocket of her skirt, glides it across her wrist, and inhales the healing scent of eucalyptus.
“Five minutes,” the producer warns, and still Rhea stays fixed to her seat.
Gabriella Becker joins her on the chair directly across from Rhea, pulling notes into her lap and leaning on one arm, all comfortable, like she lives there. “The interview,” she says, without looking up from those notes, “will go exactly as discussed, so no need to worry about a thing.”
“And you’ll mention Terrene? You’ll … give me a chance to talk about it, right?”
Gabriella’s big brown eyes flit up and Rhea holds them like, Yeah, I said it. “Exactly as discussed.”
The night before, Darby prepped her. Get in front of this story, control the narrative. Humanize their children.
Rhea almost told her then. She could have said: Darby, it’s not true, Bodhi isn’t a biter. She thought if anyone would take it in stride, surely it’d be Darby. But then she noticed the tissue-paper-thin skin below Darby’s eyes and how it had purpled. A little bruise seeped along the crook of her elbow, surrounding a pinprick. And Rhea changed her mind.
For the first time, she researched Renfield’s syndrome online, picking at the scab of the internet until it bled out the information she needed. A graveyard of adult sites, grown men and women doing little more than playing pretend, wishing there were such things as vampires and hobbits. There were pictures of pentagrams, a graphic image of a goat with its throat slit and a naked man posing with his tongue out next to it, and Rhea thought: Well, do it then, drink it already.
The children were different. Of course they were different. Without agenda. A benign but disturbing medical condition, one author wrote. An obscure Christian organization Rhea never heard of referred to one group of five-year-olds’ urge to drink blood as a biblical temptation, a precursor to masturbation and women’s menstrual cycles.
Rhea, who has never had a healthy fear of computer viruses, clicked through her search engine indiscriminately, unafraid to visit the hits on pages five and six and seven, which was where she found an abandoned Reddit thread, the last entry dated five years earlier.
Parents. Offering advice, tips, and tricks for raising children with pediatric Renfield’s as though this is the popular breastfeeding website KellyMom.
Rhea read about parents developing Pavlovian responses, wincing whenever they had to brush their child’s teeth or wipe their noses or feed them applesauce. She skimmed casual stories of otherwise precious, normal children with bloodstained teeth, picking scabs, foraging for maxi pads, and sneaking into mommies’ bedrooms for a late-night nip.