“Did you know she was violent?” he said. “Did you know any of this?”
Katie stared at him, the way his hands bulbed into fists. He was looking at her like she had done something. Like she was the one.
“You knew as much as I did,” she said, trying to keep her voice calm. “You’re the one who said practice is how Devon ‘works through feelings.’ Right?”
He looked at her, then down at Drew, the back of his hand touching Drew’s bloomy face.
“We shouldn’t have let Devon out of our sight after that call,” he said. “That’s all I meant. Sorry. Sorry.”
She nodded, and stared at the ladies’ room door, waiting for Devon.
That’s when it came to her, the last time she’d talked to a police detective, more than a dozen years ago. They were huddled in the hectic waiting room at Good Samaritan Hospital, Eric’s forearms streaked with three-year-old Devon’s browning blood, the same blood that spattered across his T-shirt like scatter art, and the officer assuring them it was only routine, after any severe injury of a child.
The dropped ceiling so low, the strip fluorescents hurting her eyes, Katie had sat there, feeling like her insides had been scraped clean, like her mom once told her an abortion felt (Which is why, she’d added, I put you on the pill at fifteen).
The woman kept asking them questions.
Mr. Knox, was it common to have your daughter with you while you mowed the lawn?
Mr. Knox, were you aware of the safety mechanisms on your mower?
Eric, all of twenty-two years old, younger even than Ryan Beck, just stood there, grass blades still slashed up his calves. No belt—he’d torn it from its loops, tying it around Devon’s foot. He stood there, unable to say anything but No, no, I don’t know.
Your daughter may not even remember this later, the officer told them, walking them out. She may not even remember her foot ever being like it was before.
But Katie knew that was a lie. The moment her own knees slid onto the shorn lawn, slick with Devon’s blood, she knew her daughter would remember this forever.
How did I do that? Eric kept asking her, his voice strange and high, like she’d never heard before and hadn’t since. How did I do that?
The paramedics, and Mr. Watts from next door, trying to help. To distract Devon, mashed against the grass, face white as paper.
Honey, look at me. Listen to me. Mr. Watts, trying to get her to look at him and not the red tangle hanging from her ankle. Do you have a dog? Did you get an ice cream from the truck today?
But, glassy-eyed, Devon would look only at Katie, her red-specked chin.
Mommy, where did it go?
Her foot stretched out in front of her, the bright mass below her ankle like a tissue-paper flower.
Where did it go?
She wondered if Eric was thinking about any of this now.
Looking at him, she had no idea, and would never ask.
*
“We’ll be in touch,” Officer Crandall said. Then added, turning to Eric, “And we can talk more about that restraining order.”
Her bandaged hand resting on top of her other one, Devon walked toward them from the restroom. So tiny, half a foot shorter than Katie herself.
“Dee-Dee,” Eric said, which he hadn’t called her in a decade or more. “Dee-Dee, come with us.”
Back home, after everything settled a little, after a muted dinner of freezer-scorched pizza, Drew collapsed into his bed and Devon disappeared into the basement gym again. As Eric drank whiskey from a coffee cup, Katie stood over the sink, scraping all the rice stuck to the bottom of yesterday’s casserole dish, drinking beer from a can.
All she wanted was for everything to stay quiet. To be quiet.
And to keep Eric away from Devon. He still looked so on edge, a coiled thing.
“Can you go to the drugstore?” she asked him. “Some vitamin E oil for Devon’s wrist?”
He said he would. She hoped to talk to Devon alone, quietly, and make sure she was really okay.
But before she could, everything started again.
“Katie,” Teddy said, one foot on the doorstep.
Polo shirt untucked, neck rubbed red, eyes pouched, he stood before her, one hand tugging nervously at the fingers of the other. She was guessing he’d been up for a long time, days maybe.
Under the porch light, though, there was still that magnificent silver hair like drusy quartz. And his voice.
“Oh God, Katie.”
Hurrying him inside, she shut the door to the den behind them.
“You absolutely cannot be here, Teddy. Eric’s at the drugstore, but he’ll be back. You know how he can be and this—”
“I can’t explain what she did, Katie. I won’t even try,” he said. “But I need you to know, we’re taking care of it.”