“It’s not her,” one of the men in thick neoprene announced. “Go home.”
But Rhea wouldn’t be stopped. What else could it be? She charged through the Ponti men to get to the body, her family following, and unzipped the bag.
They could all see what was inside: a German shepherd. His long pelt was slick with sand oil. His paws were bloody, nails missing from trying to smash his way free. Most unnerving, the cocktail of chemicals and cold had kept him perfectly preserved. A fossil of exactly the thing he had been eleven days before, trapped in time.
Fritz Schroeder looked away. Ella Schroeder began to cry. It was unclear whether her tears were relief or exhaustion. Then, Rhea. It wasn’t simply the corpse that unnerved her. It was its perfect preservation. She imagined Shelly, discovered this way. Her raw body exposed for all to witness. Rhea staggered, hands flapping, unable, somehow, to understand what she was seeing: the wet fur, the pink tongue, the open, rolled-back eyes.
She faced the crowd, expression beseeching, and wailed, sonorous as an echo through a great canyon. It shuddered across the crescent and down the hole, too. Those who heard were unmoored by its upwind. Unsettled, not just in space, but in their very identities. They watched this woman, but did not come to her. There was so much space around her, unfilled.
Shelly Schroeder. Shelly Schroeder.
What happened to you?
Rhea’s mad, witless focus took root in just one person: Gertie Wilde. Still screaming, she staggered in Gertie’s direction. How apt this unity, they thought. The mother of the living child and the mother of the missing one, taking solace. What a perfect convergence from which healing could begin.
But instead of holding Rhea, Gertie flinched. “I’m so sorry,” Gertie muttered. “But at least…”
Slap!
Rhea open-handed Gertie across the face. The sound was final. Cathartic, rendering the terrible unknown of these last horrible eleven days into something concrete. （Shelly Schroeder! Shelly Schroeder!）
It took a second before the blood. Rhea’s large diamond, turned inward, had snagged a piece of Gertie’s perfect cheek.
“Jesus Christ! Get the fuck away from my wife!” Arlo barked.
Gertie braced his tattooed arm and held him back. “It’s okay,” she mewed, her voice small and childlike. Disturbingly reminiscent of baby talk.
Shaking with violent intent, Arlo took a beat to calm down. Too long.
Linda Ottomanelli came to Rhea’s side. She clutched Rhea’s hand. “You need to go,” she told Arlo and, by association, the entire Wilde brood.
The Wildes hunched, self-conscious and shamed. None came to their rescue. None could summon the correct words. And so, they slinked back to 116 with their children, shutting their door behind them.
Except for Peter Benchley, who rolled back home in disgust, the rest of the neighbors remained. Though they intended only to pay witness, their presence issued validation to Rhea’s slap. They chatted with the rescue crew and consoled the Schroeders and offered licorice to sick Bethany, who gagged at the sight of her dog being zipped and packed as evidence. They remained until their own disquiet calmed. Because it was Rhea they stayed with, and because they were empathetic people, it was Rhea’s side that they saw. What harm did a simple slap do Gertie, the woman whose children had survived?
Really, it was Arlo who’d scared them more. He’d seemed so angry. So quietly violent. Even Gertie had shrunk in fear beside him.
Shelly Schroeder.
What happened to you?
That night, the neighbors ruminated over the events of the day. They remembered that terrible wail, punctuated by a shocking slap, like an arrow pointing blame. They recalled the shortened, most repeatable version of what Gertie had said: I’m so sorry. They remembered Arlo, shaking with disproportionate rage.
SHELLY SCHROEDER! SHELLY SCHROEDER! SHELLY SCHROEDER!
In the dark, unsettled quiet, they would know that there was something deeper to this story, something as yet unrevealed: Sorry for what?
* * *
Directed against the wrong person, violence assumes a will of its own. It wants to continue to hurt that person, as if to right the wrong, as if, in some way, to provoke violence in kind, thereby coercing its own legitimacy.
After all the neighbors went home that night; after Fred Atlas put his sick wife, Bethany, to bed and headed to the Wildes to check in and say, What happened out there was absurd, but was told, Thanks anyway. Nobody’s much in the mood for a visit by Arlo, who’d felt betrayed that his only real friend on Maple Street had not spoken out; after the Ponti men, Sai Singh, and Dominick Ottomanelli conferenced about how they might better have handled the situation, and good thing it hadn’t been Shelly, but it was a dry run upon which they could improve; after Peter Benchley conducted his mirror therapy, then took an extra Oxy to calm his hurting, phantom legs; after Fritz Schroeder muttered something quick and polite about a new scent he was working on, then took the Mercedes out of Maple Street; after screens tuned to static because it was better than nothing were shut down, and every remaining family was tucked in its own fold; after the rescue crew at last gave up, covering the hole with new and thicker wood, hammered by wide and deep rivets, sealing it off for the first time since Shelly had fallen inside, and going home. Long after all these things, Rhea Schroeder’s murk bubbled up.