Dr. Beggs murmurs her understanding.
“But I don’t know. I don’t feel like I can trust myself anymore. Maybe I’m not seeing her clearly. Poor choice of words, I know, but her teacher wrote—”
“She is your child,” Dr. Beggs cuts her off. “I don’t think you’re deluding yourself into believing she’s a good kid. Has she gone a little power mad? Yes, I think she probably has at school. Is that a problem? It can be. And there may even be a diagnosis to be had, but I have to tell you that my professional opinion, in which I am very confident, is that Noelle is experiencing a childhood phase that, with the proper guidance, she’ll outgrow in record time.”
“You’re … sure?”
“I’m sure. In fact, in a few years, you will look back at this stage of Noelle’s and laugh. It will feel like a blip on the radar. A small hurdle in the grand scheme of things.”
Mary Beth tries to picture herself a few years in the future. A few years back is, after all, a lifetime. Because a few years back, she wasn’t even a mother. She couldn’t picture her daughters’ faces. She didn’t know their names or the way they smelled or the dimples on their bottoms. And so, as she tries to imagine a world that exists a few years from now, she finds she can’t, that her imagination never has been or could be that vivid.
If it were, she would know that in a few years, the vampiric phase of the children at Little Academy will have been reduced to just another novelty case study in a textbook on children’s psychology and one poorly written true-crime account. All the affected children will have lost the urge to bite with the loss of their first baby tooth—there will be several parents who speed this process up with a trip to the dentist and no one, at least no one within the community, will offer opinions or judgments on the matter. In a few years, Mary Beth will have a three-year-old. Having managed to improve her sex life considerably through the truncated 30-Day Sexy Back Challenge （courtesy of the now-incarcerated Pastor Ben Sarpezze）， coupled with a break in her birth control regimen following a well-timed stroke, she will have gotten pregnant for a third time. Unexpectedly. Another girl. Therefore, in a few years, much to her chagrin, she will still be buying Pull-Ups and changing bedsheets. A never-ending stream of mushy food pouches and Legos on the stairs. She will be celebrating her eighteenth wedding anniversary, but at least that will still somehow feel closer to her fifth. She will never fully recover her eyesight, but she will get a retired guide dog named Bart and he will slobber and smell and she will feel God’s love beaming through him. Along the way, she will have lost touch with Rhea, their kids no longer going to the same school and their painful secret being easier kept when kept apart. She will take hand-me-downs from Darby, who, incidentally, will have opened a popular gym for middle-aged folks with a comically buff man called Cannon. She will still go to church, albeit a different one. She and Doug won’t save nearly enough for college because that problem feels too far away and thus, when Angeline gets into a good private, Christian college without a scholarship, they will suddenly wish they had viewed time and their money a little bit differently. She will be alarmed when her youngest goes through a biting phase, but it will pass, as will the worst of Noelle’s disruptive behavioral disorder, though she will later take medication for ADHD, about which Mary Beth will become an expert and an advocate. Over those years, the Brandt family will battle bouts of talking back and tantrums, ridiculously involved homework assignments, and when it comes to Noelle, Mary Beth will never cease being skeptical of her daughter when she is involved in a disagreement with a friend, not even when she’s an adult. The struggles and triumphs will ebb and flow with a feeling of both discovery and déjà vu, like they are pulled by the rhythms of the moon. Time and again as the years press on, she’ll be asked to give more and more and more of herself, serving up seconds and thirds and fourths and fifths, then regenerating entire pieces of her body and soul like the poor mommy octopi Lola Morton comes to study as a marine biologist off the Hawaiian island of Kaho‘olawe.
And like a good scientist, Mary Beth, too, will wonder about the mystery of it all, how in the process of raising new humans, you become a new one yourself. How love for a child can accomplish feats modern medicine and technology can still only dream of and it will do so in the blink of an eye. For that love will rewire your brain, alter your personality, modify your DNA, and explode your heart, all, somehow, without killing you. On the precipice of parenthood she once thought: What if I change? When the scarier question was: What if I don’t?
Because the person she used to be could never carry thirty-three pounds of toddler around a theme park for eight hours or decipher the meaning of a single cry or roam the earth as the mythical creature known as a “morning person”; she could never have done any of the wonderful and soul-crushing and inspiring and, yes, at times terrifying things she now finds to be second nature. But one thing she will not do, not once, not ever, is look back at the year Noelle was four years old in Miss Ollie’s class and laugh.
When she found them, Mary Beth’s head had been pounding pain like timpani between her ears. Her temples felt as if they’d burst any moment. At first there was a disconnect. A glitch in her Matrix. She couldn’t process the scene before her.
Miss Ollie was so still. Her lips pale. She looked like a waxen doll. Like a Disney princess. Noelle was frozen beside her, a tiny nightmare brought to life.
Bile coated Mary Beth’s teeth, but she managed to wrestle it back into her stomach just before it was too late.
If her child had done this, Noelle would live with it forever. She would be considered a danger, never free of this single moment in time. It would define her. But Mary Beth could fix this. She could hide it. In her mind, she was already fast-forwarding, skipping to the moment when she would sign Noelle out. She’d fudge the time, but not by much. She would throw Noelle’s shoes in the dumpster behind her favorite Target. She trained her mind on her children’s bright futures, which she’d already done so much to secure.
She reached for her daughter, carefully, as if they were on a ledge. One wrong move. And then Miss Ollie breathed, a great, audible, unmistakable breath. She blinked. Her eyes searched, and that’s what haunts Mary Beth the most, the way Miss Ollie’s eyes found her and believed, for a second, that help had arrived.
Mary Beth should have called for it then. There was still time. The course of history could still be altered, she should have sobbed with relief.
And yet. Her heart sank deep into the pit of her soul. If Miss Ollie survived … If Miss Ollie survived, there’d be no escape.
Like most mothers, when it came down to it, when it came to staying up for hours rocking a screaming child through her own exhaustion or breastfeeding through tears of pain, when it came to defending her child from attack or slicing herself open to share her blood, Mary Beth would give her daughters all she had, every last drop.
Stand outside and wait for Mommy.
The scissors had begun to slide out of Miss Ollie’s throat, slipping a bit further every time the teacher tried to swallow, every time her heart attempted to beat. As Mary Beth slipped her thumb and fingers through the scissors’ bows, she felt, strangely, like a little girl again. How she had adored her teachers, looked forward to being a line leader, a door holder, a class helper. Being someone’s child is so much simpler than being someone’s mother.