“Ticktock,” Caro said, and he laughed, and said, “Okay, fine.”
His friend, whoever he was, had an office in a nearby medical complex. The doors were all unlocked, and she could hear a vacuum cleaner in another room. The paper bag felt completely normal in her hands. It could have had a peanut butter sandwich in it, except it was heavy, and it rattled faintly. She opened the door to the office Chris had directed her to go to; it looked like the average doctor’s office, with a high counter and computers and chairs to wait in. Down a hallway she found the backmost office, which was too full of a gleaming wood desk. The walls were plastered with framed diplomas. She dropped the bag onto the chair behind the desk, tried not to look at any of the diplomas so she wouldn’t know the doctor’s name, and left.
“Go okay?” Chris said out in the car.
“You need to take me home,” she said. “What’s her name at the front desk is going to call the police.”
After everything, after all of it, she was still home fifteen minutes earlier than she would have been if she’d walked. When he pulled up to the curb in front of the duplex, he said, “Well, thanks. Don’t forget your doughnuts.”
She smiled and picked up the box. “There’s only two of us. They’ll be stale before we finish them.”
“Stale doughnuts are still pretty good,” he said. She agreed they were, said good-bye, and got out of the car.
Inside the house, Caro saw Margot had left her den and was a huddled lump under the blankets on the couch. “Here, Margot,” Caro said. “Take a doughnut.”
Margot’s hand slipped out from under the blanket, took the doughnut, and receded out of sight. “I love doughnuts,” she said, and Caro heard a happy sigh. It had a false, tinny note to it. Like Margot vaguely remembered what a happy sigh sounded like and was doing her best to get there.
Caro took the doughnut box into the kitchen. She set the table and chairs back on their feet and hunted around in the crumbs and muck under the edge of the cabinets for the folded pad of newspaper they used to keep the table level. After she found it, she opened her backpack and brought out her algebra book again. She still had six problems to solve.
Two days later, the last of the doughnuts had turned to rock. “They aren’t safe anymore,” Margot had said but—as usual—had been unable to articulate why the doughnuts were dangerous or how they had gotten that way. Just like she had been unable to articulate why books were bad, or sunlight, or the sound of the garbage truck that came on Friday mornings. Caro didn’t know if Margot herself didn’t know or if she just couldn’t find the words, but she knew that her mother’s terror was real. That it consumed her, that it drove her into dark soft places and, sometimes, into flaming rages of fear. Sometimes when she thought of school ending and the long months and years that came after, Caro herself felt a panicking flutter of fear deep inside her, and the thought that the flutter might be something akin to what Margot felt—the beginnings of it, maybe—kept her awake at night.
Caro took a bite of the stale doughnut. Chris was wrong. Stale doughnuts were actually pretty depressing. She dropped the box in the garbage.
The white paper inside shuffled and shifted. She stopped and looked again.
There was something else in the box.
Something green.
It was December. The sugar cookies Eat’n Park sold were all shaped like Christmas trees instead of smiley faces. Her manager called her up to the front; when Caro got there, he was wearing a scowl. “Somebody to see you,” he said. “Outside. Make it quick.”
She went out. There was a bench there, for busy Sunday mornings after church when the breakfast crowd overflowed the lobby, but now there was only one woman sitting on it, huddled against the cold and smoking a cigarette. When she looked up at Caro, her face twisted into a sneer.
“Well,” the woman said, standing up, “at least you’re pretty.”
“I don’t know who you are,” Caro said.
“Oh, don’t you?” The woman’s voice was cold. “How convenient for you. I’m Lisa Mitchell is who I am. Chris’s wife. His wife.”
“Oh.” Caro took a step backward.
“I found your hair all over my husband’s car,” Lisa Mitchell said. “I found your goddamned lipstick under the seat. You know what I didn’t find?” She tossed her cigarette into a snowbank. There was an ashtray right next to her too. “I didn’t find him. I can’t seem to find him anywhere.”