Once, someone came close to expressing what Kareena herself was feeling. This was one of the poorer moms, one who could no longer afford their preschool—the rates had gone up again.
“Compared to my first, my second kid has a nasty temperament,” she’d said. Had that mom used the word “nasty”? That might be Kareena’s word. Probably the other mom had said something more innocuous and forgiving. Something more loving. Probably she’d laughed affectionately as she said it.
No one ever said what Kareena suspected. Not only was her second child different. She was somehow wrong.
SERA, AT FOUR YEARS
For her birthday, Sera wanted guns and soldiers and swords. She preferred the ones that looked real. Patrick wanted to indulge her, but Kareena did not. Instead, she bought her bright plush dolls with too-big eyes. Sera built forts with pillows, used her Barbie car as a tank, called in air strikes with her walkie-talkie, sent those dolls to war.
SERA, AT FOUR YEARS, TWO MONTHS
Her eyes never did turn brown. She never had any baby fat. She was always all angles and sharp places. So many differences. Hard where Callie had been soft. Fair—pale hair, pale eyes, pale skin—where Callie had been darker, richer, warmer.
Sera was fearless, but not in a good way.
There were things in this world to be afraid of, and Sera was afraid of none of them.
And then came the day that changed everything. The three of them—Kareena, Callie, and Sera—were walking home from the park. Winter was on the horizon. The days got dark earlier, and the mile-walk home longer and lonelier than in the summer.
Patrick was at work. He was always at work. To get to the park, they had to leave a very nice neighborhood and cross through a less nice one. Not that it was bad, but it had dead zones. Dead zones like the one they were approaching now.
The street ended in an abandoned parking lot on one side and a narrow, dark alley on the other. A few blocks beyond this dead space, the neighborhood once again became safe, inviolable. But for now there was the parking lot and the alley and two little girls who were too slow and a man who Kareena could swear she’d seen watching them at the park. Now he was half a block behind them and there was something about him, and that something was not good.
Kareena picked Sera up and told Callie to pedal faster on her bicycle. Callie frowned her little worry frown and, instead of pedaling, got off the bike. She held tight to Kareena with one small hand and pulled the bike along with the other.
“Get back on the bike, honey,” Kareena urged, trying not to look back at the man, but looking back all the same. He was closer.
Callie refused, but not because she was being bad, but because she was worried. Her little Callie understood danger, but not what to do about it, and Sera—well, who knew exactly what Sera understood?
Should they run? Was she just being paranoid? Kareena looked back again, and the man met her eyes and he was closer, and they both knew that he would catch her and her girls and do to them what he would.
Kareena adjusted Sera’s position on her hip so she only needed one hand to hold her. With her other hand, she grabbed Callie and pulled her away from the bike. They could always buy another one.
“Run with Mommy,” she said, and Callie obeyed.
They ran. They just had to make it to the other side. Had it always been this dark on this street at this time of year?
Sera wiggled in her arms. “Put me down,” she cried. “Put me down.”
Kareena was the kind of mother who tried not to yell. She was careful to explain her reasoning when denying something or the other. She never told her girls that they were bad, just that they had bad behavior. She almost never yelled. But she wanted to yell now. She wanted to slap their faces so they understood that she was serious.
What she wanted most of all was to put Sera down and pick Callie up and run.
Sera would be fine.
The thought flew away as quickly as it came, but the shame of it almost killed Kareena as she ran. Sera stilled in her arms, as if she’d heard her mother’s thought.
“Put me down, Mama,” Sera demanded. And Kareena did, but before she could capture her hand again, Sera twisted away and ran in the wrong direction.
Kareena screamed because now she could see that the man was definitely a bad man. Not just bad behavior. No. He, himself, at his core was a bad man. She screamed as Sera ran toward him and Callie screamed, and Kareena could not think what to do.
“Bang, bang,” Sera said loudly as her little legs brought her closer to the man.
He stopped moving.
“Bang, bang,” she said again as she stopped a foot away from him.
He pulled out a knife.
Sera lifted her small hands into the air and raised her little voice so that it strained around the edges. The knife was still in the man’s hands, and Sera was so close to him. Too close and her skin was pink, pinker than it had ever been, and even her hair seemed less pale. And the man held the knife and Kareena screamed and Callie screamed and Sera said “Bang, bang,” and the bad man plunged the knife right into his own heart, and then he twisted the blade.
In the weeks after, they all went to counseling. The counselor said they would learn to accept, adjust, and recover as a family. Patrick nodded—conciliatory and vaguely guilty—through these sessions.
Kareena wanted nothing to do with acceptance. She wanted to forget. She wanted Callie to forget how the blood had soaked the man’s blue shirt.
“Blue and red make purple,” Sera had said sometime later.
Kareena wanted to forget about the small spot of blood that had landed on Sera’s nose. Sera had smeared it across her face with her palm. She sucked at the palm before Kareena could get out a wipe. She looked less pale than she usually did.
SERA, AT FOUR YEARS, THREE MONTHS
“Are you sure you’re remembering correctly?” the woman FBI agent asked in every interview in the weeks to follow. “Your daughter said ‘bang, bang’?”
“Yes.”
“And then he stabbed himself?”
“Yes.”
“And twisted the knife?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
Yes. Yes. Yes.
The agent told her that they were lucky. They’d been trying to catch that man for a very long time. He killed girls and their mothers in brutal ways. It was good he was dead. Kareena agreed.
She wondered if she’d imagined Sera tasting the bad man’s blood.
SERA, AT FOUR YEARS, THREE MONTHS
Sera asked, “Do you have the light, Mama?”
Kareena said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
SERA, AT FOUR YEARS, SIX MONTHS
Kareena was shocked. All the parents were shocked when they learned that Mr. Jordan, everyone’s favorite kindergarten teacher, had been fired.
“He slapped a child?” This shrieked question was from one of the preschool moms.
The parents had been summoned to an all-hands community circle meeting.