“I’ll look into it,” she promises Darby. “I’ll get to the bottom of it.”
“This is my fault.” Darby sounds miserable, like her nose might be drippy. “I could have picked Lola up early. I could have spent time with my child. Extra time. I mean, why not?” Mary Beth can’t answer that. “I will never forgive myself, Mary Beth. Never.”
“Darby—” she begins.
“People listen to you, Mary Beth. Just please don’t let everyone go poisoning the well before anything’s, like, official. That’s all I’m asking.” Darby sounds panicked and small, like a mouse with her tail caught in a trap.
Mary Beth spoons cookies-and-cream ice cream into her mouth straight from the carton. She feels a connective tissue with other mothers, something biological joining herself to them, and so of course she’s having an emotional reaction to the news that Darby’s family is going through this. Of course.
Her hand trembles and a drop of ice cream quickly melts on the countertop.
“She’s a child,” Darby says just before her time’s up.
After, she paces in front of the door to the backyard, looking out at her two girls bouncing together on the trampoline. Her spoon scrapes the cardboard bottom of the carton. “Darby’s in jail,” she tells Doug, who sits on the couch reading his phone. “Like actual jail.”
“Lord, why?” He looks at her over the top of the phone. He doesn’t remark on the fact that she’s eating ice cream standing up. She supposes it’s not actually that unusual for her.
“Lola.”
He frowns. “I always liked Lola. She always said, ‘I had so much fun, thank you for inviting me’ without her mother asking her to.”
“Lola Morton? The girl with the bangs?”
“Yes, Lola Morton. Noelle’s best friend.”
“They’re not really best anymore. I mean, don’t you think Lola’s kind of wild?” She watches Noelle rolled up in a ball on the trampoline while Angeline jumps around and tries to get her to break form.
“You’re around her more.”
She turns her attention back to her husband to see the thinning patch of hair at the top of his head as he bows to read his phone again. “She could have done this, don’t you think? Lola?”
Doug always wears socks in the house. His feet get cold easily, a point that tends to remind Mary Beth at moments like this that he’s fragile in ways she isn’t. “If that’s what the police are saying, then they probably have good reason.”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking. The police aren’t reckless. They wouldn’t just arrest anybody.” She chews a jagged piece of nail.
She waits for Doug to say more, but, then, he doesn’t know anything, really.
“Pastor Ben came on to me,” she says. Doug looks up. He sets his phone down beside him on the couch. “What are you doing?” she asks.
“Putting down my phone,” he tells her.
“Why? It’s not a big deal. I’m just relaying more information.” She takes a seat on the beige overstuffed armchair that looks exactly like the more expensive one in the Arhaus catalogue.
“Putting the phone down feels about right. Probably a little old for kicking people’s asses.”
“Plus, he’s in good shape,” she says.
Doug shrugs at his belly—why do men’s bellies get so hard with age? She should look it up. He plants his socked feet on the rug and rests an elbow on each knee. “Why are you telling me this?”
“I don’t know. It just felt like something I should tell you.” Amongst other things, maybe, but it’s a start. “He touched my calf.” He watches her until she feels silly. “I know you trust me.” She rolls her eyes.
“I don’t.” Doug’s jaw goes slack, eyes serious.
“You don’t—what—trust me? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I don’t trust you, not entirely.”
Is she supposed to be offended? Can he do that? They’ve already been married such a long time. Isn’t trust the foundational principle of a relationship? “I don’t take your fidelity for granted,” Doug continues. “I don’t think that if I sit on my butt and ignore you and scratch my own balls that you won’t make eyes at another man.”
Mary Beth touches her cheek to feel that it’s warm. She’s blushing. Physically blushing. Her husband made her do that. “Do you think I made eyes at another man?”
“I’m picking up my phone now,” he says.
* * *
That night, the girls have filed out of the bathroom to their respective rooms with wet, combed-through hair. Noelle accepts a half-full sippy cup of her mother’s blood from the refrigerator, saving them all a lot of trouble.
She asks Noelle, “Where is the dress with the apples on it that Grandma Raines and Grandpa G gave you? They want to get a picture of you in it.” This is a common problem in the Brandt household, the need to supply photographic evidence of their children in various gifts sent by relatives.
She’s been maintaining a low-grade level of alert for the missing dress, checking casually in all the usual places, some of which aren’t that usual—bottom of the hamper, game closet, underneath the girls’ beds—but now it’s officially starting to drive her crazy.
“You must have seen it somewhere.” The news of Darby’s arrest has left her with a brittle edge. She keeps looking around, waiting for someone else to notice. Like it’s all an outrageous joke that only she is getting. Here she is still performing her own motherhood. The calm. The mind-numbing tedium. The supposedly bottomless well of patience. Has anyone considered—has she considered even—that there might, in fact, be a bottom to it?
Noelle is busy soaking in her thirty allotted minutes of iPad time on the bed.
Mary Beth revisits Noelle’s closet. She scoots out the bookcase cubbies, examining the back. She finds a dead cockroach, but no dress. On the floor of the closet are discarded dust jackets from picture books that wind up ripped anyways. She moves the stuffed animals, which don’t even belong in the closet in the first place, when out of a giant plush cat pillow falls a bracelet that Mary Beth doesn’t recognize—a pretty little bracelet with a manatee dangling off it. She bends to pick it up. “Where’d you get this?” she asks Noelle, who shrugs.
And then a yo-yo falls out of the cat. Mary Beth turns the giant cat pillow over and sees that it has been ripped apart at the back seam, much of the stuffing removed. She sticks her hand in and out she shovels a deluge of trinkets—children’s sunglasses, a new water bottle with whales on it, a hair clip, a bow, a notepad, another bracelet, a keychain, hand sanitizer, a plastic octopus.
“Noelle, where did you get all these?”
Her daughter shrugs.
“Noelle?” Mary Beth snatches the iPad out of her hands and switches it off. There. Noelle tucks her chin into her shoulder and squirms. “Noelle, I asked you a question.”
“I took it,” she whines.
“Took it from whom?” Mary Beth feels around in the cat and comes out with a gel pen. The Brandts don’t own gel pens.