“The car. My car,” she wails in between her heaving sobs.
“It’s okay. It’s okay, honey. I know this is scary, but we’re okay. We’re just going to go back inside the store. Don’t worry.” She’s too upset to walk and keeps crumpling onto the asphalt. I grab her and yank her back up over and over again, trying to get her to move. Genevieve abandons the car and catches us quickly, keeping stride.
“Now where do you think you’re going, Casey? Your car’s back there.” She points behind us like I don’t know where I am or what I’m doing.
“Leave us alone!” I scream in her face in a way I’ve only yelled at my brother.
It sends Harper over the edge. She kicks my left shin as hard as she can, and I almost let her go but manage to hold on to her as she struggles against me. “Harper, honey, it’s okay, stop,” I plead, but it’s no use.
“OW! OW! OW! OW!” She tries to break free and run, but I grip her tightly. She writhes against me, kicking and screaming.
“Harper, stop. Just stop. It’s okay.” My words don’t matter. Once she’s crossed over into this place, it’s impossible to bring her back until after she’s spiraled through her reaction. She kicks at my shins and lands one so hard that I let out a yelp and instinctively release one of her arms. She whips around and bites my other arm.
“Let go, Mommy! You’re hurting me!” Harper howls at the top of her lungs.
But I can’t let her go. She’ll bolt if I do, and she’s too fast for me to catch. In one swift motion, I grab her arms and slip behind her, enveloping her body with mine and desperately trying to settle her. She flails and twists against me.
“Do you see what you’re doing? You’re upsetting her,” I growl at Genevieve. “Stop! Please. This isn’t her fault. She didn’t have anything to do with it.”
Genevieve gets in my face. Her nose inches from mine. Breath putrid. She stabs her finger in my chest while she talks. “Neither did mine.”
Harper is finally asleep. It took a bath, two episodes of Hero Elementary, and ten minutes rolling around in her sleeping bag, but she’s settled. I’ve never seen her that upset before. I don’t ever want to see it again. I step into the backyard to call Detective Layne. I’m glad it took so long to soothe her, because I needed the distraction to calm down after what happened too. He doesn’t answer but calls back just as I’m leaving a voice mail for him.
“What’s going on?” My fury ignites immediately at the sound of his voice.
“What are you talking about?” he asks like he has no idea why I’m upset.
“Genevieve completely lost it on me and my daughter tonight. I mean completely lost it. She cornered us in the parking lot at Walmart and went nuts. She kept screaming and asking how could I and telling my daughter that I tricked her. What is she talking about?” His plan hinges on me befriending Genevieve and getting her to trust me, so he might need to think about his plan B, because I’m not going anywhere near Genevieve for a while. Not after that.
“I’m sorry that happened to y’all, but she’s kind of on a rampage. She’s been down at the station carrying on too,” he says casually like it’s not a big deal, as if she didn’t just terrorize me and my daughter in a parking lot. “Guess her parents didn’t teach her not to throw temper tantrums when things don’t go her way.”
“You’re sorry it happened?” I can’t believe him. That was more than a temper tantrum. That was an all-out rage fit. “Care to fill me in on what’s going on?”
“I told you that we were going to have to look into the bruises on Mason’s arms . . . and so . . . we did.” I wait for him to explain further, but he doesn’t. A pregnant pause fills the space between us.
“You mean have a pediatrician examine him?” I ask after a few more beats pass and he still hasn’t spoken. I never stopped to consider the logistics of it when he said it. I didn’t know it was anything I needed to worry about.
“Yes, but we went about it in a bit of a nontraditional way,” he responds, and we’ve had enough conversations for me to recognize when he’s dodging the issue.
“What do you mean?” I wish he’d just get to the point.
“There was suspicious bruising on his arms, so I had to make a report to Tuscaloosa Family Services.”
“You made a report to family services? Like an official report?”
“I had to. I’m a mandated reporter.”
“So am I!” I shriek. “I wasn’t referring to child abuse when we were talking, and you know that. I never said anything about child abuse. It was all about whether or not he’d struggled with Annabelle or someone else down at the creek.” No wonder she said all those things. She must feel so betrayed. “I told you they might even be self-inflicted or unintentional.”
“We don’t know who put those bruises on Mason’s arms. That’s what we’ve got to find out.” I can hear the sound of a shrug in his voice.
“By filing a child abuse report?”
“You’re the one who said she might be training him to look like he was intellectually disabled on those tests and making him fake his autism. I don’t know about you, but that sounds pretty abusive to me.”
But that’s not why he did it, and he knows it. He’s trying to shake things up. Separate Mason from Genevieve.
“How could you not tell me you were doing that?” I ask, but I should be used to this by now. I’m just his pawn. I’m not a player in this game. Not a real one, anyway.
“That’s how it goes sometimes,” he says, dismissing me that quickly. “I met with my team after we went over Mason’s test results, and we all felt the same way. It was a unanimous decision. Family services will look into it and make a determination.”