Just Between Us

“You’re yelling? Why are you and Daddy yelling?”

“It’s okay, Matt,” Michael said. “Your mom and I weren’t yelling, not really. We’re just talking a bit loud. You know how you talk like that with Lucy sometimes?”

“Like the time she took my soccer ball when I said no you can’t borrow it?” he said, looking from me to Michael and back again.

“Something like that,” Michael said. “It’s okay, bud. Sometimes Mom and I squabble about things just like you and Lucy squabble, but it’s okay.”

“Mrs. Arnold says people shouldn’t throw hard things when they’re angry,” Matthew said. “Mrs. Arnold says people should only throw soft things, like pillows.”

“Mrs. Arnold is a wise woman,” I said, a genuine smile slipping out. “Why don’t you go up and start getting ready for bed—Dad and I’ll be up in a bit to read you a story.”

Michael put an arm around Matthew and walked him down the hall to the stairs, while I grabbed a sponge and took out my leftover aggression on the countertops. He came back into the kitchen, but I kept swiping at the stone, not making eye contact.

“I’m worried about you,” he said. “You’re short-tempered with me and the kids, and you’re so tense that you jump at the slightest sound.”

“I’m just tired.”

“You’ve been crying out in your sleep, Ali.” That surprised me; it was something that I used to do a lifetime ago. I knew I’d been sleeping fitfully, but not to this extent. Seeing the look on my face, Michael reached out to comfort me and I flinched from his touch. An old reflex; it startled us both.

Michael sighed. “Things have been this way since you got that letter.”

My hands froze on the counter, a pool of soapy water gathering around the sponge. “What letter?”

“I saw it.”

“You did?” My thoughts raced, while everything else seemed to slow. Where had he found it? I’d had it in my coat pocket, before sticking it in a drawer in my desk. He never went in my desk—I should have hidden it better. I looked up from my hands, pressed so hard against the counter that they were a blotchy red and white. “Where? I mean, how did you find it—”

“Sean told me about it.”

“Sean?” I frowned, confused.

Michael must have thought I was angry because he said, “Don’t blame him, I asked.”

And then all at once I realized that he wasn’t talking about the blackmail letter at all, but about the letter I’d received back in the fall, the one Sean wanted to discuss, the one I wanted so much to forget. Relief swept through me—he didn’t know about the blackmail letter! I started to laugh, totally inappropriate and hysterical giggling that I couldn’t contain.

He must have thought this was the beginning of a nervous collapse, because he looked dismayed, coming to rescue me with his arms outstretched. “It’s okay,” he said, pulling me into an embrace. “It’s going to be okay.”

Who was he trying to convince? I tried to explain that I was fine, but when I started to speak, the words turned into a sob and suddenly I was clutching him hard and crying.

*

At Michael’s insistence, I called our GP and got a prescription for a sleep aid. The little white pills helped me fall asleep and sleep more deeply, but I felt sluggish and drowsy in the morning and I was plagued by nightmares in which the past and present merged.

I am Lucy’s age and hiding in a small dark room, a sharp blade of light under a door, pounding footfalls coming closer and closer. “Come out of there!” Scrambling back, trying to find another way out, but slamming against something hard and slick. I try to climb over it, my hands slipping against plastic, pulling sheeting off a green car. Viktor sitting up, bloody and grinning. “You can’t hide from me!”

I woke up from my own screaming, my mouth wide open and a puddle of drool on the pillow, covers twisted like a snake around me. The space next to me was empty, and hard daylight streamed through a gap in the curtains.

“You were sleeping so peacefully I didn’t want to wake you,” Michael said when I found him downstairs packing the kids’ lunches. “You look like you’re still tired—I can take them to school if you want to keep sleeping.”

“No,” I said at once, a bark that made little worry lines appear on Michael’s face. Lucy and Matthew were eating breakfast, Cheerios scattered across the kitchen table, a milk carton sitting out and open. A cartoon played loudly on the TV, but the kids were watching us. Matthew tapped his spoon nervously while he looked from me to his father, while Lucy shoveled spoonfuls of cereal in her mouth with grim determination.

“No,” I repeated in a quieter voice. “I’ve got it. You go ahead.”

“You sure?” He gave me a penetrating look, but he was already uncuffing the sleeves of his dress shirt and fastening the buttons. I nodded, stretching my lips into a smile in accordance with the positive-thinking tapes a therapist had once recommended: “Fake it till you make it!”

Michael had recommended that I go back to therapy. “If you won’t talk to me, you’ve got to talk to someone.”

“I talk to my friends,” I’d protested, regretting it when I saw the hurt look on his face. He wanted to be the one I turned to, he shared the good man’s fantasy of being his family’s savior and protector.

“You’ve told them about what happened?” he’d asked, sounding both surprised and a little sulky at the idea that I’d share my past with anyone else but him.

“Some of it.” Which meant next to none of it.

“They’re not professionals,” he’d argued. “You need to talk to someone you can tell everything to.”

“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t have time right now—I’m too behind with work.”

These half-truths we tell were something I might have talked about once with my friends. At times I passed by Crazy Mocha and felt a wave of longing for the mornings we’d sat there gossiping about other people’s lives, before our own became so complicated.

“Have you had any more visitors?” Julie asked every day at the bus stop, the only place where we could talk for a few minutes without concern that it would attract attention. Her way of referring to the police, something that she’d been asking since the detective questioned me. She and Sarah had been waiting for their visit ever since, but it hadn’t happened. At least not yet. I knew it wasn’t over and the police hadn’t moved on. The sound of the doorbell, or even just the noise of a car passing on my street, would send me flying to the window, convinced I’d see a squad car outside, roof lights spinning.

Of course, when I finally did see the police again, I wasn’t expecting it at all.

It was a Wednesday afternoon, almost a month after the funeral, a sunny day after a streak of gray ones. I’d driven up to Sewickley Heights because Heather had sent me a text earlier in the afternoon asking if I’d mind picking up Daniel after school. She was running late at the doctor and wouldn’t be home in time to meet his bus.

I was happy to do it. I hadn’t seen her in well over a week and was eager to see how she was doing. The after-school pickup was fine; she’d called the school and they released Daniel to me without any hassle, my kids running to me while Daniel followed slowly behind them.

“Benjamin Bunny is having a baby!” Matthew announced excitedly as the kids clambered into the backseat of my Subaru.

“Oh, so Benjamin isn’t a boy after all?” I asked with a laugh, helping him fasten the straps in his car seat. “What did your teacher say about that?”

“Mrs. Arnold said, ‘Wow, now that’s a surprise!’” Matthew said, doing a pretty credible imitation of her deep voice.

“You have to give him a new name,” Lucy told him.

“I like Benjamin.”

“Benjamin is a boy’s name and boys don’t have babies.”

“I know that,” Matthew said in a withering voice.

“So you can’t call him Benjamin anymore—you have to pick a girl’s name.”

“No we don’t.”

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