A YEAR AFTER THE murders, Kate puts the house up for sale. Friends nod sympathetically, say they understand, all those memories. The girls. The marriage to Ray. A few mention different neighborhoods she might consider, a deal on a condo downtown. A new beginning, they say. But, of course, they don’t understand. How do you start over with the future gouged out? Margo Farbrother, her friend from the book group, had come by with food all that first week. Margo, with her dark skin like polished wood, high cheekbones. Unlike the others, she didn’t veer away from mentioning the girls, asking what the police knew, what they didn’t. One night, on the couch, Margo held Kate’s head in her lap and stroked her hair with her long fingers. Margo had her own problems. Her stepson, Michael, was in trouble. He’d dropped out of school, gotten arrested for several DWIs, was fucked up on drugs half the time. He and his father, Darnell, fighting constantly. On top of it all, Margo, with endometriosis, suddenly inexplicably pregnant for the first time. She will lose the baby within a month, though nobody knows that now.
On the couch, Kate shook as if she had a fever. Her teeth chattered. Margo seemed to know there was nothing to say. She bent over Kate like a bough, her cheek pressed to Kate’s ear. Kate could feel the rise of Margo’s belly against her back.
Some mornings Kate stands in front of the bathroom mirror and takes a measure of her body as if for the first time. Her areolas have grown darker with age and remind her of when she was pregnant with the girls. Faint stretch marks still pearl her hips and breasts. The pale fault line of a C-section scar just above her pubic bone, which divides her into before and after.
The Realtor, a squatty salt-and-pepper-haired woman from the suburbs—Kate’s consciously avoided the city ones friends recommend; she can’t stand the sympathetic stares—comes by the house and, among other things, wants Kate to remove the growing collage of framed photos of the girls from the living room wall. “Everyone wants to imagine their own brood up there,” the Realtor says, smiling in a disapproving, hands-on-hips way that reminds Kate of her mother. Kate still expects the Realtor to know their story—as if life didn’t go on elsewhere, as if people didn’t continue to show up for work, squabble with teenage children, slog through mediocre marriages. For a few seconds they stand in silence in front of the photos. Zadie and Elizabeth in their bikinis at the beach on Galveston Island; Zadie with her first boyfriend, Marcus, at the prom. An empty space next to it where a photo once hung of the girls and Ray, looking sheepish and gangly in his shorts, waving from the deck of his houseboat. Kate removed the photo after she’d found out the detectives had questioned him. He’d grown paler and paler in her mind until he’d become a space on the wall.
“A couple of head-turners,” the Realtor says, looking at the photos of the girls. “Who’d want to compete with that?” The Realtor smiles, fiddles with a wall dimmer switch. The Realtor looks out at the living room, says that Kate might want to remove the bead board paneling, go with a neutral color on the walls instead of the sea green, mentions a range of hours they might have showings, dates to host an open house. The ceiling fan makes a ticka ticka ticka sound.
Kate readjusts one of the larger studio portraits of the girls from the year before. Cheesy, they’d called it. Staged. Both their heads tilted awkwardly to one side as if listening to an invisible radio.
The detectives surprised Ray on his houseboat. This was three weeks after the murders, two weeks after Kate had told him to leave. Ray didn’t have a phone.