She missed Devon, and the energy around Devon being there, which felt elemental to everything. As if Devon’s presence, quiet and focused, generated everything. In some way powered the house, the family.
She only realized it now, because everything else had stopped.
Nearly nine o’clock, and she was drinking vinegary wine she’d found buried in the back of the refrigerator behind a jug of bubbling kefir.
She tried to stop her mind from turning and overturning images of Gwen’s house. She had seen it at parties, a half dozen over the years.
All the sconces and gilt and high ceilings of the powder-blue plaster, the study’s lacquered walls, the curve-backed sofas, the fresh flowers fogging your mouth as you passed through. The marble-topped kitchen island where platters of food always sat, mounds of olives, impossibly green artichokes, dewy lemons, everything wet and ready, all the time.
In the backyard, there was even a secret garden enclosed by pear trees latticed flat, candelabra-style, into a trellis, trained with the same rigor as Gwen trained Lacey’s hair, planting her daughter between her legs in the stands as she flattened that white-blond hair into the tight Dutch braid, smoothing the feather wisps at her hairline hourly during meets.
Sometimes even Lacey seemed hand-manufactured, face cast in porcelain, that tiny nose that tilted up at the end as if Gwen herself had pinched it daintily, like a piecrust, right down the center.
*
When the phone rang and Devon’s name flashed there, Katie’s body shook to life.
“Mom,” Devon said, “I’m staying in one of the guest rooms. It’s bigger than our whole upstairs.”
“Well,” Katie said. “I’m glad.”
“The sheets smell funny, though,” she said. “Not like at home.”
There was a brief silence.
“Mom, it’s just a few days. I feel okay here. I do.”
A pause.
“Mom, are you there? Mom, I’m sorry.”
Chapter Thirteen
It’s in here. It’s in the bed with me. I see it.
Hair and teeth against her ankles, something gnashing, something furred and champing. The rasping of hooves and nails.
One of those night terrors she hadn’t had since she was six years old, sleeping on that pullout sofa with her mom.
It’s here, it’s here. Help me, please, someone.
Her mother always laughing at the someone, saying, How come you never ask for help from me?
Devon used to have them too, back in kindergarten. Clutching her sherbet-striped comforter, distraught, inconsolable.
Katie had nearly forgotten what they felt like until—
I see it in the bed!
—sheets torn away, her palms white and spread on the bare mattress.
“Katie! Katie! Wake up.”
It was Eric, leaning in the darkened doorway, beer bottle in hand, looking at her.
“Wake up.”
In the violet dark of two a.m., he remade the bed for her, yanking the sheets back across the rumpled mattress pad.
“I can’t sleep,” he said. Then he went downstairs again.
You were mysterious to him and he was mysterious to you.
She could hear him walking, floors creaking, the refrigerator opening and closing.
The chime from his laptop.
The hiss of his phone.
She swore she could hear everything.
*
Devon had been gone less than two days, and the house felt haunted, the decaying manse of a family quarantined by fever.
Without car duty, practices, there was suddenly so much time, and Katie ended up spending far too long with Drew’s sickbed meals, fashioning a banana to look like a person with raisin eyes. Cutting his sandwich into angel wings.
You really only learn your place, her mother once said, when you’re left in it.
She had talked to Devon on the phone four times, each time a minute or less, Devon off to special air floors and ballet barres and the thirty-foot inflatable tumbling strip in Gwen’s home gym.
Katie hadn’t talked to Eric at all.
“Are you going to be mad at me forever?” Eric asked, coming up behind her as she dressed in the morning. He put his hands on her hips and ducked his head down against the top of her hair, and she felt a unexpected shiver.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.” But then he added, leaving for work, “Katie, it’s the right thing. I swear.”
Something was wrong, wronger than it even seemed. She just wasn’t sure what it was.
“I’m better, Mom,” Drew said, seven a.m., leaning over his terrarium, peering in the resin cave the salamander liked to hide in.
“Okay,” she said, her hand on his forehead, no longer the little radiator of days before. “But better isn’t well.”
“Remember when we watched that show about cavefish?” he asked, tapping on the resin with one red finger.
“I think so.”
“They have scars where their eyes should be.”
“Right. Because of evolution. It’s always dark. They don’t need to see.”