Fred got moving then, but Arlene slid away from him, too. She was laughing like an overexcited girl playing a spirited game of tag. She grabbed a Tupperware container full of Marshmallow Delite. She started to raise it, then dropped it between her feet. The laughter stopped. One hand cupped her large left breast. The other lay flat on her chest above it. She looked at her husband with wide eyes that were still swimming with tears.
Those eyes, Fred thought. Those are what I fell in love with.
‘Mom? Mom, what’s wrong?’
‘Nothing,’ she said, and then: ‘I think my heart.’ She bent to look at the chicken and the marshmallow dessert. Pasta fell from her hair. ‘Look what I did.’
She gave a long, whooping, rattling gasp. Fred grabbed her, but she was too heavy, and slithered through his arms. Before she went down on her side, Fred saw that the color was already fading from her cheeks.
Ollie screamed and dropped to his knees beside her. ‘Mom! Mom! Mom!’ He looked up at his father. ‘I don’t think she’s breathing!’
Fred pushed his son aside. ‘Call 911.’
Without looking to see if Ollie was doing it, Fred slipped a hand around his wife’s big neck, feeling for a pulse. He got one, but it was disorganized, chaotic: beatbeat, beatbeatbeat, beatbeatbeat. He straddled her, gripped his left wrist in his right hand, and began to push down in a steady rhythm. Was he doing it right? Was it even CPR? He didn’t know, but when her eyes opened, his own heart seemed to give an upward leap in his chest. There she was, she was back.
It wasn’t really a heart attack. She overexerted herself, that’s all. Fainted. I think they call that a syncope. But we’re getting you on a diet, my dear, and your birthday present is going to be one of those wristbands that measure your—
‘Made a mess,’ Arlene whispered. ‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t try to talk.’
Ollie was on their kitchen wall phone, talking fast and loud, almost shouting. Giving their address. Telling them to hurry.
‘You’ll have to clean up the living room again,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. Fred, I’m so, so sorry.’
Before Fred could tell her again to stop talking, to just lie still until she felt better, Arlene drew another of those great, rattling breaths. As she let it out, her eyes rolled up in her head. The bloodshot whites bulged, turning her into a horror-movie deathmask Fred would afterwards try to erase from his mind. He would fail.
‘Dad? They’re on their way. Is she all right?’
Fred didn’t reply. He was too busy applying more half-assed CPR and wishing he had taken a class – why had he never found time to do that? There were so many things he wished for. He would have traded his immortal soul to be able to turn the calendar back one lousy week.
Press and release. Press and release.
You’ll be all right, he told her. You have to be all right. Sorry cannot be your last word on this earth. I will not allow it.
Press and release. Press and release.
5
Marcy Maitland was glad to take Grace into bed with her when Grace asked, but when she asked Sarah if she wanted to join them, her older daughter shook her head.
‘All right,’ Marcy said, ‘but if you change your mind, I’ll be here.’
An hour passed, then another. The worst Saturday of her life became the worst Sunday. She thought of Terry, who should have been beside her now, fast asleep (perhaps dreaming about the upcoming City League championship, now that the Bears had been disposed of), and was instead in a jail cell. Was he also awake? Of course he was.
She knew there were going to be some hard days ahead, but Howie would put things right. Terry had once told her that his old Pop Warner co-coach was the best defense lawyer in the southwest, and might someday sit on the state’s supreme court. Given Terry’s cast-iron alibi, there was no way Howie could fail. But each time she drew almost enough comfort from this idea to drop off, she thought of Ralph Anderson, the Judas sonofabitch she’d thought of as a friend, and she came wide awake again. As soon as this was over, they would sue the Flint City PD for false arrest, defamation of character, anything else Howie Gold could think of, and when Howie began dropping his legal smart-bombs, she would make sure Ralph Anderson was standing on ground zero. Could they sue him personally? Strip him of everything he owned? She hoped so. She hoped they could send him, his wife, and the son with whom Terry had taken such pains, out into the street, barefoot and dressed in rags, with begging bowls in their hands. She guessed such things were not likely in this advanced and supposedly enlightened day and age, but she could see the three of them that way with utter clarity – mendicants in the streets of Flint City – and each time she did, the vision brought her wide awake again, vibrating with rage and satisfaction.
It was quarter past two by the clock on the nightstand when her older daughter appeared in the doorway, only her legs clearly visible below the oversized Okie City Thunder tee she wore as a nightshirt.
‘Mom? Are you awake?’
‘I am.’
‘Can I get in with you and Gracie?’
Marcy threw back the sheet and moved over. Sarah got in, and when Marcy hugged her and kissed the nape of her neck, Sarah began to cry.
‘Shh, you’ll wake your sister.’
‘I can’t help it. I keep thinking about the handcuffs. I’m sorry.’
‘Quietly, then. Quietly, hon.’
Marcy held her until Sarah had gotten it all out. When she was quiet for five minutes or so, Marcy thought the girl had gone to sleep, and felt that now, with both of her girls here, bookending her, she might be able to sleep herself. But then Sarah rolled over to look at her. Her wet eyes shone in the dark.
‘He won’t go to prison, will he, Mom?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘He didn’t do anything.’
‘But innocent people do go to prison. Sometimes for years, until someone finds out they were innocent after all. Then they get out, but they’re old.’
‘That isn’t going to happen to your father. He was in Cap City when the thing happened that they arrested him for—’
‘I know what they arrested him for,’ Sarah said. She wiped her eyes. ‘I’m not stupid.’
‘I know you’re not, honey.’
Sarah stirred restlessly. ‘They must have had a reason.’
‘They probably think so, but their reasons are wrong. Mr Gold will explain where he was, and they’ll have to let him go.’
‘All right.’ A long pause. ‘But I don’t want to go back to community camp until this is over, and I don’t think Gracie should, either.’
‘You won’t have to. And when fall comes around, all of this will just be a memory.’
‘A bad one,’ Sarah said, and sniffled.
‘Agreed. Now go to sleep.’
Sarah did. And with her girls to warm her, so did Marcy, although her dreams were bad ones in which Terry was marched away by those two policemen, while the crowd watched and Baibir Patel cried and Gavin Frick stared in disbelief.
6
Until midnight, the county jail sounded like a zoo at feeding time – drunks singing, drunks crying, drunks standing at the bars of their cells and holding shouted conversations. There was even what sounded like a fistfight, although since all the cells were singles, Terry didn’t see how that could be, unless there were two guys punching at each other through the bars. Somewhere, at the far end of the corridor, a guy was bellowing the first phrase of John 3:16 over and over at the top of his lungs: ‘For God so loved the world! For God so loved the world! For God so loved THE WHOLE FUCKIN WORLD!’ The stench was piss, shit, disinfectant, and whatever sauce-soaked pasta had been served for supper.