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.
Grief was not an emotion Rhea cared to entertain. It was a cockroach that waited until she turned out the lights, scampered in the dark.
In the light, she was all about blame.
Shelly’s fall had been an accident, but accidents have causes. The flimsy slab over a mammoth hole was negligent. She could sue the police department. The sinkhole by rights ought to have been filled long ago. She could sue the town. And why had the children been out there to begin with? Whose bad judgment had they followed? She still remembered the expression on Shelly’s face as she’d run from the crowd of chasing adults. She’d seemed so spooked.
Was it possible she’d been running from someone? Might her house contain a clue?
She searched the basement first. She passed the pile of bricks in the laundry room, which had once made up the front walk. She opened the closet full of empty wine bottles, added two more. Fruit flies buzzed, laying eggs in the wet slurry at the glassy bottoms.
Nothing.
She stalked the kitchen, slammed dirty plates into the sink where they broke like sand dollars. She tore down the toile drapes because they were ugly. Tacky. Twenty years old. Up the stairs, to her bedroom that she hated, which she shared with a man she only then realized she couldn’t stand. A man who wasn’t home. Because when important things happened, Fritz Schroeder was never there.
“Stay in your rooms!” she shouted along the hall. Doors shut quietly, no hands visible, as if dispossessed of authors.
She opened cabinets and closets in Shelly’s room, flinging out all that belonged to her bright, sensitive daughter. The pretty red winter coat; the homemade snow globe with a Sculpey snowman inside; the black knoll of shed braids sawed away with dull safety scissors; the horsehair brush, the goddamned brush.
She stripped the sheets so they floated, pregnant with old ghosts of the child who’d once slept beneath them. She turned the mattress. She shook every book, unleashing ticket stubs and class notes passed between schoolgirls, emblazoned with hearts, and even one from a boy—Dave Harrison—asking if she’d sneak out to meet him at midnight at 7-Eleven.