“Just do the homework,” I said, getting up from the table. “Let’s just start by seeing how much you can do. I won’t look.” He ducked his head behind the book, and I went to the couch.
From there I studied him. He was all odd shapes and angles, elbows thrown out onto the table and knees sharp underneath sloppy blue jeans. He’d always been thin, too thin at times. When he finally started collecting girth, I’d been relieved. One less thing to worry about. But that relief was misplaced, I saw now. His new shape wasn’t the return of something he had lost, but a different flesh altogether, a new body that would serve some purpose. A new purpose. Wasn’t that what biology was? Kids grew into the next phase, and you wanted them to become adult, to take the form of their adult selves. Joshua was just reaching, biologically speaking, toward—
Sex.
My throat seized up, and I coughed to catch my breath.
Joshua turned his head. “What?”
“Nothing,” I croaked, fanning my hand in front of my watering eyes. I grabbed at a notepad I’d left on the table and waved it in front of my face. Joshua watched.
Through the floor: tap, tap.
Joshua whipped around in the chair. “I’m not doing anything.”
“No, I know. It might be a cry for help.” Although if Margaret’s broom could reach the ceiling, how much trouble could she be in? “Or maybe she hit the wall by mistake?”
We sat and listened.
Tap. Tap-tap.
I put down the notepad and slid into my shoes. “I’ll be quick.”
I paused on the stairs, in no mood to be neighborly: all my efforts to keep men from my life to the contrary, there was one living in my house.
In the hallway outside Margaret’s apartment, I could hear the broom handle punching at the ceiling. I knocked and waited, long enough that I began to think something was actually wrong.
“Margaret? Are you OK?”
The door swung open, the old woman leaning on her broom. “Why wouldn’t I be OK?”
“Are you sweeping your ceiling? You might use the bristle end.”
“What do you think of that deal with the kid?”
“Margaret,” I said. “Is anything on fire? Can you not reach something? What did you need?”
“What’s that ruckus up there?” the old woman said.
“You have fantastic hearing, Margaret, to detect Joshua sitting at the table, silently doing his homework.”
“I have a hearing aid,” she crowed. “Never mind that. What’s all that stomping up and down the stairs lately?”
“I don’t know what you mean. Do you want me to take out your trash or something?”
“You, lady. You’re running all over the damn place. I can’t get a lick of sleep.”
Margaret slept all day, except for the two hours her game shows played. The volume was loud, broom-worthy. “That’s awful. I’m so sorry you can’t sleep.”
“I heard you was a police.”
The Parks grapevine really was impressive to reach a woman who never left her apartment. “Not exactly. Just helping out where I can.”
“What do you think about it, then? That boy gone?”
“I’m not sure what to think,” I said.
“That boy,” Margaret said, shaking her head. “That poor boy.”
“They’ll find him. We have to keep hopeful.”
Margaret glared. “I mean that boy, Bo. He’s got enough to bear. And that wife ’a his.”
I felt strangely protective of Aidan’s mother, had developed a sort of secret crush on her, for running, for eluding them all even for a few days. I couldn’t think how she had outgunned a woman a foot taller and probably thirty pounds heavier and so I couldn’t help but assign that crime elsewhere. I kept my tone noncommittal. “What?”
“She’s a real handful,” Margaret said.
That was old-biddy code. I’d heard it before, names applied to my mother and then later to me. We were women who got ideas, who got a notion, who thought they were better.
“Who said that?” I asked.
“People just say,” she said. “It’s in the air.”
“That must be what I smelled,” I said. “I thought it was the fumes from somebody’s hog farm.”
“What?” She reached to turn the volume on her hearing aid higher.
“What about the babysitter? Charity Jordan?” I said. “What’s in the air about her?”
“Well,” Margaret said, frowning. “She died.”
We didn’t speak ill of the dead. I thought about that burned blue letter. “Did she have a boyfriend?”
“How should I know?”
“You seemed to be on the pulse of Parks society, Margaret,” I said. “Never mind. You didn’t need anything? If not, could you keep the broom off the ceiling?”
Margaret sniffed and brushed at the carpet with the broom. “Ride to the doctor,” she said.
“What—oh. You need a ride? When?” This was not the question I wanted to ask. Why? Why me? “What about the van that comes around?”
“That’s for church,” she said. “For the doctor, I usually take a taxi, but the doc won’t let me check myself out tomorrow. Says I’ll be woozy.”
“Oh.” I thought of excuses, rapid fire, but none of them stuck. The best was the truth: that I didn’t care enough, that I didn’t want to get involved. Of all the neighbors in the building, why me? Because the sound of a broom handle could travel to my apartment? Because I worked from home and, maybe from Margaret’s perspective, didn’t seem to work at all? “Tomorrow?”
On my way upstairs, the best excuse of all came to me. Tomorrow—who made plans that far in advance?
Chapter Nine
The next morning, with Joshua out the door, I turned to my computer. Projects were stacking up while I played cops and robbers, while I got dragged into the lives of my neighbors.
First, I had in my email a new project from Kent: a scribbled kidnapping threat against a CEO of a Fortune 500 company in Chicago. For a moment, I let myself think about the apartment we’d left there, the noisy invented games of the children next door, the smell of barbecue on a Sunday afternoon. We’d lasted several years there, and I’d never, not once, had to take a neighbor to the doctor.
And then the trip downtown one day, like tourists. Chicago pizza, a trip to stores we never went to, Joshua lining up for some famous caramel popcorn he had to try. Not as though I was the criminal. Not as though I hadn’t done everything I could think of to get on with my life. But then some northern Wisconsin grandma looks at me like she’s seen a ghost. She’d been wearing a Sweetheart Lake sweatshirt.
I had forgotten about chance, about coincidence. I’d allowed myself to forget that unlikely things did happen. Chalk it up to a god, call it fate or the planets aligning or a bad sun on Jupiter, whatever woo-woo you believed in. Unlikely things happened all the time.
I opened Kent’s file, blowing the scrap up on my screen and focusing on a few words: I’ll skin the fucking bastard.