“Griff?” she calls as she pads into the family area to investigate. She’s always being called to referee things between the kids. “Griff—oh.” She hesitates, trying to process the scene as she comes across it in her living room. “I’m sorry.” She steps back, sinking toward the door to her master bedroom. “I’ll just be—”
“Stay. Please, Mrs. Morton.”
Darby’s eyes flick to the two bulky pairs of tactical zip boots digging dirt into her rug.
“Is everything okay?” She directs the question not to the two police officers—one male, one female—but to Griff, whose hand rests firmly on Lola’s shoulder. The TV is off, happy little faces no more. Lola loops a strand of hair between her teeth and chews while Jack scoots toy cars around the foyer on his knees.
The first officer—Princep, according to the name tag—isn’t more handsome than her Griff, but he’s up there. “We just had a few follow-up questions for your daughter related to the incident at school.”
“She—she already went in to answer—answer questions,” Griff stammers, looking to the woman—middle-aged, Black, natural hair, and nice, shapely eyebrows.
Darby nods in solidarity and her hair drips heavy droplets onto her bare toes. She looks at Griff, knowing instantly what this means: She has to call a stalemate. Whatever misgivings she may have about her feelings surrounding Griff, they end here. Whatever he did, whatever he said, whatever she saw, they will stand together.
“A few more,” says the female officer, whose tag reads simply: Det. Bright. She has a line of piercings up the cartilage of her left ear and yet she’s still got that “in charge” aura.
“That seems … excessive for a child.” Darby doesn’t even offer them a seat.
“We’re simply following up based on new information and subsequent interviews.” Princep flashes his dimples like all this is a good thing. Lucky them, they’ve been selected out of a hundred participants for a grand prize.
“I’m sorry, what are you trying to say?” She looks to Griff, who has clammed up; she knows that look. The hunched shoulders, the nervous rub of his lower lip. Hello, where is his new outgoing attitude now? It would be lovely if someone, anyone, could swoop in and tell them what to do in this perplexing situation. Where are the grown-ups? she finds herself thinking. Or rather, when did they become them?
One time, the house alarm sounded in the middle of the night in error and when she and Griff woke up, they both just sat in bed for about thirty seconds, waiting for their own respective parents to swoop in and take care of the problem. What a rude awakening it was to discover the parents were them.
“When we investigate a murder—” Detective Bright is a hand talker, something Darby usually likes in a person because it’s often an indication that this person can carry a conversation, but this is one conversation Darby would much prefer to be over. “—we’re primarily looking for two things: motive and opportunity. When we last spoke your husband confirmed that Lola is one of the children afflicted with this—this Renfield’s syndrome, I think you’re calling it.”
Darby glances sidelong at her husband, who has now apparently developed an itchy nose.
“A very mild case. We have clear boundaries. It’s—you know—it’s not a big deal,” Darby says, her voice tipping up. “Actually, I think Lola is one of the first kids to be outgrowing it. I’m not even feeding her anymore.” Darby embellishes, but it could be true.
Princep has withdrawn a flimsy notebook and is jotting down what she’s said, creating a record—an official record! “I understand that when parents don’t offer a blood supply on demand, you know, that the kids can get, er, agitated?” He gives her the smoldering look of a movie star cop. Where does he believe the cameras are? “Is that the kind of boundary you’re referring to?”
“Are you implying that I’m falling down on the job as a mother somehow?” Better question: Is this because of Rhea’s interview? All of that “joyously available” nonsense, the body knows what it needs. Because Darby would like a word, please. A small addendum. Last she checked, intensive parenting was a relatively new trend, but now it’s—what?—the norm, the expectation, the baseline standard? Baby-enrichment classes, oven-baked sweet potatoes, and patient, positive, lobotomized directives to sit in a child’s feelings with the—it takes a lot of time and money. Has anyone checked the temperature of the water recently? Have the princesses from the storybooks they all diligently read aloud to their kids swooped in and somehow turned the parents into sad, boiling frogs?
Beside her, she feels her husband’s full body cringe even before he says the word. “Darby.”
“Has Lola exhibited any behavioral issues recently?” asks Princep, clearly trying to lower the temperature on the conversation by trading on those soulful blue eyes, but no thanks, hard pass. “Ones that maybe you witnessed, but your husband hasn’t?”
“Who told you that?”
“We will, of course, be confirming and corroborating any answers you give us here.” That’s the female detective. Who is the good cop and who’s the bad one here? Darby’s getting turned around.
“She’s four,” Darby says. “Do you know a four-year-old without behavioral issues? They’re like—I don’t know—tiny little dictators at this age. But all of them, even the bad ones, not that Lola is one of the bad ones, are almost definitely going to turn out fine and not be serial killers or whatever.”
“Okay.” Detective Bright nods neutrally. “I agree with you there. But we still have to ask the questions. Speaking of, we’ve already had the chance to ask your husband this, but where were you in the hour before school pickup that day? Do you remember?”
Darby freezes. She purposefully doesn’t look at Griff. Where did he say he’d been?
“Waiting in my car,” she answers.
Detective Bright tilts her head. “You didn’t go into the school early?”
“Why would I?” Darby asks.
The image of herself as she pursued Griff through the campus, never catching him, always too many steps behind.
“Because there was a calendar meeting on Erin’s schedule. I think you were supposed to have a conference with her, weren’t you?”
When Darby arrived back at the class that afternoon for the meeting that no longer seemed likely to happen even without Mary Beth, she could have chosen to collect Lola then, signed her out on the sheet, and brought her home safely. Instead, she couldn’t bring herself to give up even one of those last few delicious minutes of alone time.
There it is. Her great, mortal sin. Why can’t she be a good mom for once? Does she really prefer her phone to her living, breathing children? And now she can’t even bring herself to consider what those extra minutes might have cost her daughter, what might have happened as a direct result.
“Not just me,” Darby clarifies quickly. “Mary Beth was supposed to come and she had to cancel.”
“Did you consider going anyway?” Detective Bright lifts her nice eyebrows.