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?
TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW OF WITNESS, MAGGIE CHAPARRO
APPEARANCES:
Detective Wanda Bright
PROCEEDINGS
DET. BRIGHT: Do you like your school, Maggie?
MAGGIE CHAPARRO: My mom said school, well, she said it’s really been going downhill for a while.
DET. BRIGHT: I see.
MRS. ROXY CHAPARRO: I didn’t say—I’m sorry, I was just sending an email—Maggie, that’s not—
DET. BRIGHT: It’s fine. We want to encourage honesty and I don’t want you to feel like you’re being questioned here, Mrs. Chaparro. Earlier, though, you were saying something about the school photographer, Maggie?
MAGGIE CHAPARRO: Mr. Smiley was sick so I didn’t know him. Mommy said he looked like a pedal.
DET. BRIGHT: A pedal. Can you translate?
MRS. ROXY CHAPARRO: Kids. They hear everything. I just said to Miss Ollie, in passing, that he looked like—that he looked like a pedophile. I was being—
DET. BRIGHT: What made him look like a pedophile?
MRS. ROXY CHAPARRO: I don’t know. Some people just do, you know? Like doughy. Pale. Puffy lips and out-of-date glasses.
DET. BRIGHT: What time did you have pictures taken?
MAGGIE CHAPARRO: After Zeke got in trouble for potty talk and Bodhi told everyone he was going to marry Miss Ollie.
MRS. ROXY CHAPARRO: Let’s see. It was around 2:30, I think.
DET. BRIGHT: It sounds like you were there.
MRS. ROXY CHAPARRO: Just for a second. I forgot Maggie’s bow and I don’t like her looking like a ragamuffin. It reflects badly on me and it bothers my husband when we get the photographs back. Plus, she does better with a bit of coaching.
DET. BRIGHT: Mrs. Chaparro, why didn’t you mention you were on campus?
THIRTY-TWO
Rhea has stopped looking both ways before entering the Chick-fil-A drive-through. For breakfast, she orders her usual chicken biscuit and hash browns and then the same, but with milk, for Bodhi, to his delight. She reminds him not to get used to it and the two of them devour their meals while listening to a “Songs to Sing in the Shower” playlist on Spotify. Bodhi’s put on two and a half pounds in the last week and a half while Rhea has lost six on fast food and root beer. Only a matter of time before the other moms at school start sniffing around asking what is her secret.
By Rhea’s calculations this will last another two weeks, three tops, and then she’ll be through the worst of it. Six investors have signed their letters of intent following her interview. And with that money, she can rent space in a warehouse. She can get an assistant. She can give herself a raise. She can get a cat. She can get a life. And she’ll look back on this time and be like, Who? What? Oh, that was me?
Yesterday, they’d called Bodhi in for questioning and he’d surprised them all when he insisted Rhea was in the classroom the day of Miss Ollie’s murder. But no, she assured the detective, he was remembering that wrong. She was in the classroom the day Bodhi was bitten, not the day of the murder, ask anyone, ask Mary Beth, ask Darby even. This is the problem with kids. Unreliable witnesses.
Well, he didn’t mean any harm. As soon as she pointed out that she was there on the day Zeke attacked him, he was able to correct his memory. Of course mama was right. Mama’s always right.
She smiles at her son through the rearview mirror. “So, Mr. Bodhi. What are our positive affirmations today?” He swings his legs, the rest of his body pinned in by the three-point harness of the car seat.
He chews his food slowly and with his lips shut tight—it’s the little things—and then swallows. “I’m brave,” he says. “And I’m true. I’m quick. I’m strong. I’m kind. I got good hair.”
“Oh yeah, you do.”
Of all the tinctures Rhea concocts, the thing she most wishes she could bottle up is Bodhi. His essence. His comedic timing. His curiosity. His inherent politeness. None of which she can take responsibility for. Bodhi at four years old is a magic of her own making but none of her design.
So what if he doesn’t have the syndrome? Details. The point remains. She’s a conscientious mother, which is more than she can say for many of the other parents.
She stares at him for too long until he says, “Mom, why’re you staring at me like that?” He giggles and lifts his chin, exposing that little-boy neck she nuzzled when he was seven pounds eight ounces.
Through her windshield, there are all the makings of a weekday morning going on. Cars stuck behind school buses. Moms rapping behind steering wheels after drop-off like windows aren’t see-through, and that Starbucks line’s still maddeningly long.