“Mom,” Devon said, hand out as if to calm her, “I need to go. Mrs. Weaver said the bacteria lives for up to eight days, maybe longer. She called a specialist.”
“Not with antibiotics,” Katie said, voice cresting. She knew Gwen could hear her, everyone could. “You are staying in this house with your parents and your sick brother. Have you even ducked your head in there? Have you even asked him how he is?”
“But Mom,” Devon said, her hands shaking slightly, her fingers wrapping around her wrists like just before a vault run. “Dad set it all up. It’s the right thing.”
Katie looked at Eric, who didn’t say a word.
Their bedroom door shut, Eric began talking quietly, fervently.
About how Gwen would escort Devon to and from practice with Lacey, and that not only was the Weaver house germ-free, it had a full workout room with a beam, a bar trainer, even a vault table. Devon could practice around the clock if she wanted—see? Gwen could take care of Devon, and they could take care of Drew.
“It’s not just about Devon,” he added, husky-voiced. “It could spread through the whole squad. All those girls who are counting on doing their best next month. And it’s only for a few days.”
“We need her here, Eric,” she said. “You didn’t see it. You didn’t see her on the floor of that locker room.”
“Gwen’s house has a security system. It’s wired for everything—fire, carbon monoxide. It can even tell if someone opens the medicine cabinet.”
“I don’t give a goddamn if it’s land-mine-tripped from basement to roof, Eric. She belongs with her family. She belongs with her mom and dad.”
Her voice sounded high and childlike. Once, in the grocery store, piling the cart with energy bars and string cheese and a tilting stack of frozen dinners, when the woman came inside and said, Whoever owns the blue Ford, you shouldn’t leave your child in the car like that, and she’d forgotten Drew, six months old and strapped in the car seat for close to a half hour and Katie crying the whole way home and so tired she snapped the wheel too hard on the final turn, hit a guardrail. What will Eric say, what will he say? But he’d said nothing.
And then the fear spinning inside: What would he have said if that had been Devon?
He would never say anything, though. He never did. But did he stow it away? Did they both have their little storage lockers of parental missteps and near catastrophes?
“Katie,” he said now, with a hollow look in his eyes that rattled her, “this is the best thing. If something happened to Devon, you’d never forgive yourself.”
It ended with the slamming of doors, and Katie shouting like she hadn’t since she was a teenager, a hoarse and howling thing.
Eric kept shaking his head, shaking his head, his face white, eyes like two pinholes.
“What makes you think you know better?” she finally asked, voice shredded. “You?”
And the word itself like a charge. A long-buried indictment.
But all he said was “Katie, I’m fixing things. I have to fix this.”
“You can stay in here, Mom,” Drew said, his bed heavy with books. “I don’t mind.”
So she sat with him while he read, stopping every few minutes to tell her things, until she warned him to rest his sweet voice.
“‘Boy, at sunrise it must be like diving into cotton candy!’” Drew read. “Mom, didn’t you sell cotton candy when you were young?”
“I did, yes. That’s how I met your dad.”
At the Kiwanis fair. She’d sold him fried clams on a paper plate and a twist-tie bag of cotton candy and they spent that summer careening through back roads with sixers of Keystone. He loved to kiss the round scar on her eyebrow, the one from the time her stepdad caught her with the Wiffle bat he carried when he was drinking. Eric loved to run his hand along the Fight Like a Grrrl tattoo ringing her left thigh. A thousand years ago.
The door open, she could hear the zipping and unzipping of duffel bags, the shushing of Velcro grips, Eric and Devon shuttling back and forth, grabbing wristbands, liquid-bandage spray, flip-flops, a jiggling pair of ankle braces, a tower of leotards. As if she were going to a major tournament rather than to Gwen’s pleasure palace a few blocks away.
Devon stealing nervous glances at her through the doorway.
From the upstairs window, she watched as Devon walked outside, bag swung over her shoulder. Gwen was leaning against the car door, saying something to Eric, as Devon slipped into the front passenger seat.
Lacey had already moved to the back.
That night felt lonely in a way she hadn’t known since childhood, the endless chain of evenings with the TV tray and waxy sleeve of crackers, peanut butter jar, her mom working late.
Drew asleep in his room, she and Eric passing each other silently. For most of the evening, he sat at his computer, working with headphones on.
She couldn’t tell if he felt guilty or righteous.