“What’s that?”
“Did you hear that scream at the Russells’?” I repeat. I heard him return just now, barely thirty minutes after Jane appeared on the stoop. In the meantime my Nikon has veered from window to window at the Russell house, like a dog snouting out foxholes.
“No, I left about a half hour ago,” David says. “Went down to the coffee shop for a sandwich.” He lifts his shirt to his face, mops up the sweat. His stomach is corrugated. “You heard a scream?”
“Two of them. Loud and clear. Around six o’clock?”
He eyes his watch. “I might’ve been there, only I didn’t hear much,” he says, pointing to the earbud; the other swings against his thigh. “Except for Springsteen.”
It’s practically the first personal preference he’s ever expressed, but the timing is off. I steam ahead. “Mr. Russell didn’t say you were there. He said it was just him and his son.”
“Then I’d probably left.”
“I called you.” It sounds like a plea.
He frowns, takes his phone from his pocket, looks at it, frowns deeper, as though the phone has let him down. “Oh. You need something?”
“So you didn’t hear anyone scream.”
“I didn’t hear anyone scream.”
I turn. “You need something?” he says again, but I’m already moving toward the window, camera in hand.
I see him as he sets out. The door opens, and when it closes, there he is. He trips quickly down the steps, turns left, marches along the sidewalk. Toward my house.
When the bell rings a moment later, I’m already waiting by the buzzer. I press it, hear him enter the hall, hear the front door crack shut behind him. I open the hall door to find him standing there in the dark, eyes red and raw, the blood vessels frayed within them.
“I’m sorry,” Ethan says, hovering on the threshold.
“Don’t be. Come in.”
He moves like a kite, feinting first toward the sofa, then to the kitchen. “Do you want something to eat?” I ask him.
“No, I can’t stay.” Shaking his head, tears skittering down his face. Twice this child has set foot in my house, and twice he’s cried.
Of course, I’m accustomed to children in distress: weeping, shouting, pummeling dolls, flaying books. It used to be that Olivia was the only one I could hug. Now I open my arms to Ethan, spread them wide like wings, and he walks into them awkwardly, as though bumping into me.
For an instant, and then for a moment, I’m holding my daughter again—holding her before her first day of school, holding her in the swimming pool on our vacation in Barbados, clutching her amid the silent snowfall. Her heart beating against my own, a beat apart, a continuous drumline, blood surging through us both.
He mutters something indistinct against my shoulder. “What’s that?”
“I said I’m really sorry,” he repeats, prying himself free, skidding his sleeve beneath his nose. “I’m really sorry.”
“It’s fine. Stop saying that. It’s fine.” I brush a lock of hair from my eye, do the same for him. “What’s going on?”
“My dad . . .” He stops, glances through the window at his house. In the dark it glowers like a skull. “My dad was yelling, and I needed to get out of the house.”
“Where’s your mom?”
He sniffles, swipes at his nose again. “I don’t know.” A couple of deep breaths and he looks me in the eye. “Sorry. I don’t know where she is. She’s fine, though.”
“Is she?”
He sneezes, looks down. Punch has slipped between his feet, grating his body against Ethan’s shins. Ethan sneezes again.
“Sorry.” Another sniffle. “Cat.” He looks around, as if surprised to find himself in my kitchen. “I should go back. My dad’ll be angry.”
“Sounds as though he’s already angry.” I tug a chair back from the table, gesture to it.
He considers the chair, then darts his eyes back to the window. “I’ve gotta go. I shouldn’t have come over. I just . . .”
“You needed to get out of the house,” I finish. “I understand. But is it safe to go back?”
To my surprise, he laughs, short and spiky. “He talks big. That’s all. I’m not afraid of him.”
“But your mom is.”
He says nothing.
As far as I can see, Ethan doesn’t display any of the more obvious hallmarks of child abuse: His face and forearms are unmarked, his demeanor bright and outgoing (although he has cried twice, let’s not forget that), his hygiene satisfactory. But this is just an impression, just a glance. And he is, after all, standing here in my kitchen, slinging nervous looks at his home across the park.
I push the chair back into place. “I want you to have my cell number,” I tell him.
He nods—grudgingly, I think, but it’ll do. “Could you write it down for me?” he asks.
“You don’t have a phone?”
A shake of the head. “He—my dad won’t let me.” He sniffles. “I don’t have email, either.”
Not surprising. I fetch an old receipt from a kitchen drawer, scribble on it. Four digits in, I realize I’m writing out my old work number, the emergency line I reserved for my patients. “1-800-ANNA-NOW,” Ed used to joke.
“Sorry. Wrong number.” I slash a line through it, then jot down the correct one. When I look up again, he’s standing by the kitchen door, looking across the park at his house.
“You don’t have to go back there,” I say.
He turns. Hesitates. Shakes his head. “I’ve gotta head home.”
I nod, offer him the paper. He pockets it.
“You can call me anytime,” I say. “And share that number with your mom too, please.”
“Okay.” He’s moving toward the door, shoulders back, back straight. Bracing for battle, I think.
“Ethan?”
He turns, one hand on the doorknob.
“I mean it. Anytime.”
He nods. Then he opens the door and walks out.
I return to the window, watch him walk past the park, climb the steps, push his key into the lock. He pauses, draws a breath. Then he disappears inside.
26
Two hours later, I sluice the last of the wine down my throat, stand the bottle on the coffee table. I prop myself up, slowly, then tip to the other side, like the second hand of a clock.
No. Haul yourself to your bedroom. To your bathroom.
With the shower gushing, the last few days flood my brain, filling the fissures there, welling up in the hollows: Ethan, crying on the couch; Dr. Fielding and his high-voltage glasses; Bina, her leg braced against my spine; that whirlpool of a night when Jane visited. Ed’s voice in my ear. David with the knife. Alistair—a good man, a good father. Those screams.
I squeeze a slug of shampoo into one hand, smear it absently into my hair. The tide rises at my feet.
And the pills—God, the pills. “These are powerful psychotropics, Anna,” Dr. Fielding advised me at the very beginning, back when I was woolly on painkillers. “Use them responsibly.”
I press my palms against the wall, hang my head beneath the faucet, my face lurking within a dark cave of hair. Something’s happening to me, through me, something dangerous and new. It’s taken root, a poison tree; it’s grown, fanning out, vines winding round my gut, my lungs, my heart. “The pills,” I say, my voice soft and low amid the roar, like I’m speaking underwater.
My hand sketches hieroglyphs on the glass. I clear my eyes and read them. Over and over, across the door, I’ve written Jane Russell’s name.
Thursday, November 4
27
He lies on his back. I run a finger along the fence of dark hair that partitions his torso from navel to chest. “I like your body,” I tell him.
He sighs and smiles. “Don’t,” he says; and then, with my hand idling in the shallows of his neck, he catalogues his every flaw: the dry skin that makes terrazzo of his back; the single mole between his shoulder blades, like an Eskimo marooned on an expanse of flaggy ice; his warped thumbnail; his knobbed wrists; the tiny white scar that hyphenates his nostrils.
I finger the wound. My pinkie dips into his nose; he snorts. “How did it happen?” I ask.
He twists my hair around his thumb. “My cousin.”