A few bundled people came and went, their heads swiveling toward the swing sets where Michael was pushing Alice. Michael wondered if he was talking too loud. He was often paralyzed by the thought of some future humiliation gathering just outside his awareness. True, he’d brought much of this on himself, on them—but he was scared of what might happen. Scared of the two men. He tried to remember exactly what he’d told Lucinda about the murders, but it seemed lost among their many quarrels, outrages, and reconciliations. The beginnings of panic fluttered in his chest. But after a while there was only Alice’s back-and-forth arc in the swing. “High, higher, higherest!” Alice yelled. He told her that this was just about as high higher higherest as things could get. She might fall out. And then what?
“Fuck it,” Alice said sharply. Michael glanced quickly around to see if anyone had heard her. A woman on a bench was laughing, hand to mouth. She had on sunglasses and a puffy hat that looked like an animal. Her little boy, several years older than Alice, was off climbing the playscape. The woman’s good skin and confidence made Michael uneasy. Michael laughed in case that was expected of him, too. Then he said, “Alice,” with fatherly disapproval in his voice. He glanced over at the woman. Her sunglasses hid her eyes, but he could feel her scrutiny. He couldn’t see Alice’s face, only the back of her wool-hatted head as she fell away on the swing and then rose again until she almost touched the low, bare branches hung with fire.
At bedtime, Michael read “Rapunzel” to Alice. His hands were shaking but he hid this by bouncing the book lightly on his thighs. Alice chewed her lower lip thoughtfully. She asked him how he could be sure which things in the story were real and which were made up. He said all of the things in these stories are made up. They couldn’t really happen. But how did he know? she asked. Well, he said, for instance, even though they might want to, most people don’t really hide their children up in towers until they grow up. “That’s called child abuse,” he said. “People go to jail for that.” He smiled. Her face fell a little. She stared off at the darkened window beside them, her own reflection. Alice seemed to consider what it would be like to live at such a height all alone. “In the tower,” she said, “you can think about who you’re going to be when you grow up and let your hair grow super long before they cut it.”
12
MOST OF THE evidence that the fire didn’t destroy, the water did. Then the short-staffed detectives in Forensics (half of whom were out of town at a conference) botched what was left. The DNA samples were inconclusive. Firefighters and police and EMS paraded through the unsecured crime scene, dragging through sooty water their hoses, klieg lights, and gurneys. Defiling Kate’s girls’ bodies again and again.
At night, the billboard with the girls’ faces—paid for anonymously, Kate discovers—burns bright over the interstate. Elizabeth shaping her mouth into a smile that’s a bit sullen, a bit prideful, it’s true. Zadie with the pixie cut from her sophomore year Kate had fought against. (Your beautiful hair is gone was all Kate could think of to say.) Meredith with her large eyes, her skin darker than Kate remembered.
WHO KILLED THESE GIRLS? the sign says. A reward offered. A tip line number listed.
On the first anniversary, Kate’s scheduled to do an interview with a woman reporter from the Chronicle but cancels at the last minute, then allows local TV news reporters to trot her out to make her plea. She mentions the hotline number, platitudes about justice and closure. On TV, she’s the martyred mother, her face slack with something, though she’s not sure yet if it’s grief. Watching one of the reports on the ten o’clock news, she is amazed to find she had applied eyeliner and then is angry with herself for caring enough to.
Strangers mail her—in care of the news stations—their children’s drawings of her girls in heaven. Heaven has horses. Heaven has tennis and bike riding and seashells by the seashore. In these heavens, there are always the three girls, though it strikes Kate there are times she has almost forgotten about Meredith. Strangers who have lost their children send her recordings—email attachments, CDs—with their survivor stories she’ll never listen to. They send their children’s school photos, favorite stuffed animals (some tattered, discolored with age), and occasionally even locks of their dead children’s hair. These, of course, are meant to bring her closer to the strangers, but they don’t.
By the third anniversary, the tip line has conjured eighty-seven confessions. The publicity has brought out all the crazies, Detective Robeson says. He knows only a small number of them hold any promise, so he updates her from time to time so she doesn’t go insane. It was me all along, they all say. I was the one. She asks the detective why they confess. Because, he says, most have nothing else left of value to give.