Now Rhea—and the world—knows why Miss Ollie put in her two weeks’ notice. No one had ever believed the Nierlings about what Ben and his family were capable of, and when Miss Ollie realized Ben Sarpezze was taking funds from his pet youth center project, Miss Ollie knew the odds of her winning against a family like that again were slim. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, as the saying goes. Rhea tries to imagine their final confrontation, what must have happened to spur Ben into resorting to murder. Cocooned in the supply room, it could have been that she was bleeding him dry. Maybe she told him she was leaving the school before she got caught, and he understood that without skin in the game, she would have everything she needed to destroy him. Or maybe it was the more personal revelation of her true identity, the sister of a friend he’d killed, and that if she hadn’t let it go after these years, she wasn’t likely to ever.
All along, Rhea’s been collecting her little pieces and, with Darby’s help, she thought they found them all. But Rhea thinks she was wrong. Mary Beth held pieces, too.
“Okay,” Mary Beth mumbles out.
“Okay?”
Mary Beth nods. This time it looks like she’s warmed up, like the motion’s easier to come by.
Rhea stares at her. Something about Mary Beth is changing. She looks better, less pale. Her eyes, unseeing, gaze determinedly back at Rhea. “Okay,” Mary Beth repeats.
Rhea crosses her arms. No. She doesn’t get it. How can it be okay? Rhea is accusing her of murder. And Mary Beth is fine with it?
Rhea pulls out the charm bracelet and coils it into Mary Beth’s hand, so that the A and the N are reunited. The last pieces should be clicking together.
“Why’d you do it?” That’s what Rhea has been wanting to know. Rhea couldn’t stand Erin Ollie. Darby might have thought Griff was having an affair. But Mary Beth?
Mary Beth’s shoulders rise by a hair. The suggestion of a shrug. A shrug. Rhea nearly wants to claw the woman’s eyes out, but the effort would seem redundant. And cruel. And then all at once it’s like the answer is written right there on Mary Beth’s face. Because the answer is a miniature of the mother lying before her.
“Noelle,” Rhea whispers.
Mary Beth’s throat tenses, the lines on her neck rising into cords. “No.”
“It was Noelle,” Rhea insists, feeling the truth of those words in her soul.
“It wasn’t.” Mary Beth is crying and the tears pool on her face, where she’s incapable of wiping them away.
Rhea feels sick. Was the public right? Were the children a danger? Were they bloodsucking monsters all along?
She looks at Mary Beth and the answer seems obvious. Yes. And Rhea went on national television and said it was natural, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was deadly.
“Mary Beth, is Noelle a threat to the other children? Is she a threat to Angeline?” What does Rhea think she’ll say to this? Does she really believe Mary Beth is a reliable judge in this case? But Rhea can’t help herself from wanting to know what’s going through Mary Beth’s head.
Mary Beth’s chest rises and falls and Rhea lets her collect her energy. “I thought she was … found her there … the blood. But … I don’t know.” The words peter out.
Oh god, so Mary Beth found her daughter like that. And now Rhea has a choice. A difficult choice, but still, one for her to make. For all she knows, Ben Sarpezze did attack Miss Ollie. After all, he admitted it. He left her for dead just like he left Mary Beth. He’s a bad man. And Noelle is a kid. If Mary Beth found her daughter near Miss Ollie’s body, she would have jumped to conclusions. But if Ben had already attacked her, it probably wasn’t anything to do with Noelle. Probably. She would have been drawn by the stench of the blood. She would have walked through it on her way to Miss Ollie. Mary Beth should have told the cops they were there. Just like Rhea should have. But they didn’t.
Darby would bring Mary Beth a tissue, would dab at Mary Beth’s sweet face, but Rhea isn’t that guy. Her heart loses altitude as Mary Beth reaches for her wrist and holds her there.
“Would you … not … do anything for—” She swallows down the spit that’s collecting in the corners of her mouth. “—your child?”
Would she? Relief hits her body like a tidal wave when she passes the threshold of the sliding glass doors of the hospital out into the baking sun. For the first time in years, she feels tears slide down her cheeks and she sits down next to a pack of medical technicians smoking beside a cement barrier. No one glances her way. This is where people come to cry and Rhea’s not crying, not truly. But something is leaking out of her body, some long-held source of tension oozing from her like a toxin.
She looks down at the folded paper she surreptitiously slid free from Mary Beth’s other belongings before she left the hospital room and rereads it with fresh eyes:
She has taken a special interest in subjugating her best friend, Lola …
She could have told Mary Beth she’d read the evaluation. That she had wondered briefly if it might be a motive. But tomorrow she will leave the evaluation in Darby’s mailbox and put the whole thing behind her.
Rhea wipes her cheeks with a bent wrist and stares out at the glare of sunshine bouncing off of car windshields, for once not particularly eager to be anywhere.
Is Mary Beth saying that when it comes to her children there is no line too far afield to cross, or even more, that there is no line at all? Rhea’s made her own choices, after all, ones sometimes even she can hardly understand. She once believed she had it down, but now she considers that maybe she never will be fully qualified for a career in motherhood. If she saw a job posting, she might not even understand the description or what, exactly, she was meant to accomplish within the company.
Does she give and parent and love to make herself happy? That can’t be, because so often the choices she makes for the sake of her child drive her away from her own joy.
Then is it to make her kid happy? That can’t be true either, for there’s no surer way of ruining a child than relentlessly guaranteeing his or her happiness.
The point of parenthood must then be that it is its own point and parents each get to choose every day from here on out to ensure it will be one worth making.
FORTY-FIVE
Mary Beth’s cane clicks along the tile floor as she sweeps it back and forth before each step. Click-clack-click.
“Come on, Mommy.” The sound of Noelle’s skipping feet nearby. She finds that just two months later, she can recognize them anywhere, along with the sound of her daughter’s breaths, the creases of her palms, the candied tang of her sweat, as clearly as she knew her face. In many ways, the picture of her daughter has become more complete, a three-dimensional portrait. And though she suspects Doug has not been clipping bows into her hair like she instructs him to do, she pretends not to care.
“I’m coming,” Mary Beth says gently. It’s slow going, but she’s getting out more. Last month, Darby gifted her with a collapsible ID cane in hot pink. It makes her feel like a visually impaired Elle Woods and she has heard the life stories of more Uber drivers than she ever thought possible, and yet she has this new idea that perhaps ministering to them is part of her life’s purpose. God works in mysterious ways and all, but, you know, transparency is nice sometimes, too, isn’t it, Lord? Asking for a friend!