She remembered Aileen at the Hungarian Pastry Shop that day, smug. Aileen with her perfect future and her perfect family from Connecticut and her fancy Tory Burch cashmere sweaters. Aileen, catching Rhea out as broken in ways Rhea herself had never guessed. The way she’d look at her, so smug, Rhea wondered if the murk around her was visible. If people who looked closely, who hated her enough, could see it.
She’d wanted to travel again. Expunge herself. But it had been so long that she didn’t remember how. With a woman as special as Rhea, the murk built up, a force all its own.
She remembered going blank after entering that bathroom. When she woke, she’d been sitting on the floor with a sprained knee, across from a bleeding young girl.
She remembered sitting with Gertie, confessing so much. Her words, every one, a gasp for breath from a drowning woman. And then Gertie’d seen her for what she was. She’d seen the dirty murk monster inside her. She’d pushed Rhea back down into it. Tried to drown her. Rhea’d had no other option but to fight back.
She remembered the way Shelly had always watched her, as if seeing what she could not. What she would never see. The holes. The missing things that made her incomplete, and the murky things that made her disgusting. The wrong things in a house of wrong. She remembered a brush, a thrumping into the quiet, to contain those revelations. To hold them still.
She remembered smashing her daughter’s Pain Box against the wrong person’s head.
These memories came at her like gunshots and she saw clearly, what she was and what she had done. She saw herself as something knotted and too large. A raging thing. She and the murk were the same. It was time to unburden. If she could not do it the one way, through time, she would do it the other way. She must confess.
She considered doing this. Today. She imagined Bianchi in his midpriced suit, hiding his grin. She imagined Gertie, at last given permission to retaliate, screaming at Rhea, the veins in her graceful neck taut as a barking dog’s. She pictured all of Maple Street, pointing and whispering. Her house would be like a prison. She’d sit center, the object of all that opprobrium.
Your fault, they would say.
But it wasn’t true. It wasn’t her fault. Someone else had done this.
A wave of terror bathed her. This was too much. She preferred the nothing. The murk unfurled then, heavy and glistening. It swallowed her.
She blinked, wet-eyed, over the papers and photos before her. Did not recognize them, or remember having brought them out. Put them away and stood. Left her office and turned out the light.
116 Maple Street
Monday, August 2
Gertie woke to a strange, empty room. She oriented quickly. Found the note on the nightstand. It read:
Gone to get Shelly.
She put on her shoes, brushed her hair, put it in a ponytail, and washed her face. Invented these ablutions as a means of keeping calm. Of taking a breath and staving off panic. She didn’t want to collapse again.
She got her keys and her wallet. Her phone. She called Detective Bianchi even though the sun had only started to rise. “Julia sneaked out. She’s at the hole looking for Shelly, I think. I’m going there now.”
Then she got on the road, back to Maple Street.
Sterling Park
Monday, August 2
Those with lights shined Julia’s path. It reminded her of those movies they showed in woodshop class—archaeological digs in faraway places, exposed to modern air for the first time in thousands of years. The smell thickened with acid sweetness. The walls were vast, stretching far wider than the hole’s mouth, and honey-combed by the wear of composite metals. To prevent collapse, hydraulic steel barriers shored the hole’s wide sides. These appeared sturdy, mechanical, and clean, even though bitumen seeped over the steel and red-painted pistons that ran the length between them and held them in place. The ladder ran down along the middle.
She was wearing her dad’s Hawaiian shirt again. It felt like a kind of synchronicity. Like going back in time. Her Toms sneakers went squish-squish. She got to the bottom where the ladder ended on a ledge, made room. The rest came down. They shined their phones. The water was ice cold and ankle deep.
Just a single path led downslope and they followed it, leaving the dawn behind. They went deeper, beyond the safety of the hydraulic barriers that prevented cave-in. Like bats, they could feel the hollow up ahead before they saw it: an absence. Their lights shined the path—a black, scaffolded shoring tunnel, made just for people to walk single file. They knew intuitively that it wasn’t big enough to prevent cave-in, but if the walls gave way, it might protect them long enough until someone found and rescued them. The tunnel was about two feet deep with springwater because the dredge they’d used to keep it clear was gone, the hole slated for fill later today. Straight ahead through the tunnel was the only direction to go.