Today they had a checklist. They started with the appliances in the kitchen and ended up in the guest bath.
The three of them stood in the small bathroom, staring at a trickle of water from the expensively tiled shower stall to the new checkerboard floor.
“You see?” Sarah Galloway pointed a shiny red talon at the tiny stream. “It leaks.”
Why are you taking showers in the guest bath anyway? she wanted to ask, but didn’t. Instead, she popped out her measuring tape and measured the curb of the shower stall, which, as she knew, was standard.
“Hmmm. It’s standard width.”
“But you SEE the LEAK.”
“Yes … I was wondering.…”
Sarah looked over at Janie with the puzzled-owl expression that Janie had come to understand was a Botoxed frown. “Wondering what?”
“I mean, is this a question of the shower stall or the amount of water? Because if there’s a lot of water it might be understandable.…” Janie paused and said it all in one quick breath. “Is this the first shower somebody’s taken here today or the second? Do you take particularly long showers?”
God, she hated this part of the job. She might as well have asked them if they’re having sex in there. And if so, she supposed they ought to have told her, so she could have customized the size.…
Frank Galloway cleared his throat. “I think our shower use is pretty, uh, normal—” he started to say, when Janie’s phone buzzed in her pocket.
“Just a sec.”
She glanced at her cell. Little Sprouts Day Care. Oh, for god’s sake. “Listen, I’m sorry, I’ve got to take this. It’ll just be a moment.” She stepped into the next room. What did the teachers want now? Probably to complain that Noah was smelly today. Which, okay, he was, but—
“This is Miriam Whittaker.” The gravelly voice of the preschool director scraped against her ear.
In a second, her breath caught, her knees jellied—is this the moment between before and after, the one everyone feared? The choking on the apple core, the tumble down the stairs? She leaned against the wall. “Is Noah all right?”
“He’s fine.”
“Oh, thank goodness. Listen, I’m in the middle of a meeting, can I call you back?”
“Miss Zimmerman. This is very serious.”
“Oh.” The tone was unnerving; she gripped the phone tightly against her ear. “What happened? Did Noah do something?”
The silence that followed bled slowly into her consciousness, telling her everything and nothing she needed to know. She could hear the woman breathing on the other end of the phone, Sarah Galloway clucking quietly but not that quietly to her husband in the bathroom. “Inattentive,” she thought she heard.
“Did he cry during naptime? Pull someone’s hair? What?”
“Actually, Miss Zimmerman.” There was a sharp intake of breath. “This is a conversation we need to have in person.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” Janie said briskly, but her voice wavered, the fear poking through the skin of her professionalism like bone.
*
The Little Sprouts director was a lion, a witch, and a wardrobe all in one. Built like a box, black clad from her hip-granny spectacles down to her pointy ankle-length boots, Miriam Whittaker wore her hair long, a silvery mane grazing those broad shoulders with unexpected eros, like a middle finger to the vagaries of time. She had been running the school-obsessed neighborhood’s premiere preschool for the last fifteen years, and thus had a somewhat outsized sense of her own importance relative to the universe’s grand scheme. Janie had always found Ms. Whittaker’s imperiousness with grown-ups amusing, sensing through its veil a kind of pathos and scattershot warmth.
Now, though, wedged across from Ms. Whittaker in a little plastic orange chair between the potted plant and the Bookworm poster, Janie saw in the older woman’s face something far more disturbing than her usual flashy authority: she saw anxiety. The woman was almost as nervous as she was.
“Thank you for coming in,” the other woman said, clearing her throat. “On such short notice.”
Janie kept her voice level. “So what’s this about?”
A pause ensued, in which Janie tried to keep her breathing as steady as possible, in which she heard every tick of the preschool’s beating heart, the sound of a faucet in the art room, a teacher singing clean-up, clean-up, everybody clean up, a child somewhere, not hers, screaming.
Ms. Whittaker lifted her head, focusing on a spot slightly to the left of Janie’s shoulder. “Noah has been talking to us about guns.”
So that’s what this was all about? Something Noah had said? But that was easy. She felt the tension in her body begin to relax. “Don’t all little boys do that?”
“He’s been saying he’s played with guns.”
“He was probably talking about a Nerf gun,” she said, and Ms. Whittaker glanced at her. There was something hard in her eyes.