No One Can Know
Kate Alice Marshall
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This one is for my parents.
Which is kind of awkward, now that I think about it.
They’re really lovely people, I promise.
EMMA
Then
She looks at the body of her mother, sprawled in the hallway. If she turns her head, she will see her father, slumped in his chair by the fireplace in the next room, one fingertip still touching the side of a glass in which his whiskey, the ice long melted, still sits. She looks down at her hands to see if there is any spot or smear of blood, but they are clean.
She turns to her sisters. They stand apart from each other. She picks out details: the blood drying on the cuffs of the soft blue pajama bottoms, the wet hair hanging in stringy clumps, the hands rubbing together as if trying to get clean. She starts to speak, falters. She wets her lips and tries again.
“This is what we’re going to do,” she says, and when she tells them, they don’t argue. They don’t say anything. They simply obey.
Twenty-three minutes later, she picks up the phone from the kitchen counter and dials. When the emergency operator answers, she speaks in a level voice.
“My name is Emma Palmer. Our parents are dead. We need the police.”
She looks at the clock on the stove. It is 5:13 A.M.
She hangs up. They walk together to the porch and wait. When the cruiser pulls up in front, they are still standing there. The lights flash over them. Red, blue, red, blue. Hair dry. Faces each a study of numb shock. Dressed in clean clothes—there will be no blood found on them, no bloodied clothes found anywhere on the property. None of them look at the others. None of them reach out for comfort, for reassurance, or offer it in turn. They are each a world of their own.
Emma holds a hundred questions between her teeth, biting down until her jaw aches. She doesn’t ask. Will never ask.
It isn’t that she’s afraid of the answers.
She’s afraid she already knows them.
“Our parents are dead,” she says again, to no one in particular.
It’s the last true thing she says for a long time.
1
EMMA
Now
The edge of the picture nipped Emma’s finger as she reached into her purse for her keys. It was a flimsy thing, printed on glossy paper that felt plasticky under her fingertips. The image looked more like an off-brand gummy bear than a baby. She hadn’t asked for it, hadn’t really wanted it, but she hadn’t seen a way to refuse when the doctor pressed it into her hands.
She realized she was standing in front of the door, not moving, her hand still in her purse. With a muttered curse she hooked her finger through her key ring. She turned the key in the lock, but it was already open—which it shouldn’t have been, not in the middle of the day. The door swung open, and Emma stood frozen in the doorway. She breathed in. Testing, she knew and tried not to know, for the scent of blood, of sweet decay. Of everything happening again.
Then—“Emma?”
Nathan stepped out from the kitchen. He had a beer can in one hand. She stared at Nathan, at the beer, mind still on—about nine weeks along—the cheerfully sterile walls of the exam room. The slide of the ultrasound wand over her flat stomach.
“What are you doing home?” she managed at last.
An expression she couldn’t read flashed over his face—guilt, defeat, something in between. “Why don’t you come inside,” he said.
She closed the door behind her. She set her purse on the little table in the hall, and now she saw Nathan’s shoes discarded next to the shoe rack and his briefcase leaning against the couch in the living room. He was supposed to let her know if he was going to be home unexpectedly. She always had to know what she would find when she walked in the front door of her own home. She’d never told him why; he assumed it was just one of the quirks of her anxiety.
He was leaning against the kitchen doorway now, the beer can sweating in his hand. “We need to talk,” he said.
That’s my line, she thought.
Not a normal day off, then. She wiped her palms on her jeans. “Okay. What’s up?” she asked, her voice too bright. He didn’t seem to notice. He wasn’t very good at reading people. That was one of the things she liked about him. She was keenly aware at all times how other people perceived her—too aware that it was impossible, really, to get things just right. You were too emotional, not emotional enough. Putting on an act, not acting the way they expected, or so on point with expectations that it had to have been rehearsed.
Nathan took things at face value. She didn’t have to spend every conversation trying to ferret out what he really thought of her.
“Maybe you should have one of these first,” Nathan said with a crooked smile, holding out the beer. Emma’s stomach turned.
I shouldn’t drink.
I need a drink.
She’d waited too long again. Frozen up. He lowered his arm and sighed. “I got laid off,” he said, tossing a little shrug in at the end of the words.
She blinked at him, unsure what the proper facial expression to greet this news should be. How did one convey sympathy while also conveying we are truly, deeply screwed?
“Obviously it’s terrible timing,” he said.
“Nathan, we just had our offer accepted on the house,” Emma said, voice shaking. “We paid the earnest money.” More than ten thousand dollars. With multiple offers, their agent had told them it would help them compete.
“I’m aware of that,” he said, voice a bit clipped now.
Emma pressed her palms to her face. Her cheeks were hot, her hands cold. She could still feel the remnants of the ultrasound gel, dried to tackiness under the waistband of her jeans.
She walked past him, shoulder bumping against his. She crossed the kitchen to the countertop and planted her hands on the Formica surface, staring at the grease stain that had been there when they moved in three years ago.
She straightened up. “Have you called Justin yet?” Justin was the man handling their mortgage, who had suggested that given Emma’s spotty employment history and anemic income, Nathan should be the only one on the mortgage application. Emma had nodded along when he’d said to put the remaining medical bills, credit card bills, and car loan under her name to maximize Nathan’s borrowing power, so now here she was in the negative—on paper, only on paper, they were a team—while Nathan smiled his way into half a million dollars’ worth of house on credit. “The offer. There are—what are they—contingencies. We get our money back if the inspection doesn’t go through, that kind of thing. Is there—”
“I got laid off before we made the offer,” he said. She startled, her mouth dropping open. He made a dismissive gesture with one hand. “I had another job lined up. The house was perfect, and I was going to be able to start this week and it wouldn’t even matter, they were paying more, it was golden, and then.…”
“No job,” Emma said, voice strangled nearly to silence. “Nathan, why didn’t you say anything?”
“Because it was handled!” he said. “If I’d said anything, the loan could have fallen through. Better to have the new job sorted first. Then the project funding got canceled at the last minute. The position was eliminated.”