“Tommy Sutton’s. I was invited,” Cody assured her. “I can walk there by myself, remember?” Cody was ten and Carol had given him a range of streets he could take by himself.
“Okay. Be back in two hours.”
Tyler erupted into the kitchen roaring with rage. “That’s not fair! I want to go swimming!”
“Weren’t invited,” Cody sneered. “I was.”
“I know Tommy’s brother! I could go!”
As Carol laid down the law I loaded the dishwasher and cleaned the kitchen counters. Tyler retreated to his room with a lot of door slamming and fuming. Dawn trotted off to play with her Duplos, and Carol left the room in such a hurry I wondered if she was ill. Heather appeared at my elbow to watch my every move.
I am not much of a kid person. I don’t like, or dislike, all children. I take it on an individual basis, as I do with adults. I very nearly liked Heather Althaus. She would be old enough for kindergarten in the fall, she had short, easy-to-deal-with hair since a drastic self-barbering job that had driven Carol to tears, and she tried to take care of herself. Heather eyed me solemnly, said “Hey, Miss Lily,” and extricated a frozen waffle from the side-by-side. After popping it in the toaster, Heather got her own plate, fork, and knife and set them on the counter. Heather had on lime green shorts and a kingfisher blue shirt, not a happy combination, but she’d gotten dressed herself and I could respect that. In acknowledgment, I poured a glass of orange juice for her and set it on the table. Tyler and Dawn trotted through on their way out to the fenced-in backyard.
For a comfortable time, Heather and I shared the kitchen silently. As she ate her waffle, Heather raised her feet one at a time when I swept, and moved her own chair when I mopped.
When there was only a puddle of syrup on the plate, Heather said, “My mama’s gonna have a baby. She says God will give us a little brother or a sister. She says we don’t get to pick.”
I leaned on my mop for a moment and considered this news. It explained the unpleasant noises coming from the bathroom. I could not think of one single thing to say, so I nodded. Heather wriggled off the chair and ran to the switch to turn on the overhead fan to dry the floor quickly, as I always did.
“It’s true the baby won’t come for a long time?” the little girl asked me.
“That’s true,” I said.
“Tyler says Mama’s tummy will get real big like a watermelon.”
“That’s true, too.”
“Will they have to cut her open with a knife, like Daddy does the watermelon?”
“No.” I hoped I wasn’t lying. “She won’t pop, either,” I added, just to cover another anxiety.
“How will the baby get out?”
“Moms like to explain that in their own way,” I said, after I’d thought a little. I would rather have answered her matter-of-factly, but I didn’t want to usurp Carol’s role.
Through the sliding glass doors to the backyard (doors that were perpetually decorated with handprints) I could see that Dawn had carried her Duplos into the sandbox. They’d have to be washed off. Tyler was firing the soft projectiles of some Nerf weapon in the general direction of a discarded plastic soda bottle he’d filled with water. The two seemed to be fine, and I couldn’t see any danger actually lurking. I reminded myself to check again in five minutes, since Carol was definitely indisposed.
With Heather at my heels, I went to the room she shared with her sister and began to change the sheets. I figured that any second, Heather would exhaust her attention span and go find something else to do. But instead, Heather sat on a child-sized Fisher-Price chair and observed me with close attention.
“You don’t look crazy,” she told me.
I stopped pulling the flat sheet straight and glanced over my shoulder at the little girl.
“I’m not,” I said, my voice flat and final.
It would be hard to pin down exactly why this hurt me, but it did. What a senseless thing to waste emotion on, the repetition by a child of something she’d apparently heard adults say.
“So why do you walk by yourself at night? Isn’t that a scary thing to do? Only ghosts and monsters are out at night.”
My first response was that I myself was scarier than any ghost or monster. But that would hardly be reassuring to a little girl, and already other ideas were flickering through my head.
“I’m not afraid at night,” I said, which was close to the truth. I was not any more afraid at night than I was in the daytime, for sure.
“So you do it to show them you’re not afraid?” Heather asked.
The same wrenching pain filled me that I’d felt when I saw Jack’s bloody nose. I straightened, dirty sheets in a bundle in my arms, and looked down at the little girl for a long moment. “Yes,” I said. “That’s exactly why I do it.”
I knew then and there that I would be at the therapy session the next night. It was time.
For now, I taught Heather how to make hospital folds.
Chapter Two
I slid through the designated door the next night as though I’d come to steal some help, not to get it for free.
There were four cars in the parking lot, which was only partially visible from the street. I recognized two of them.
The side door we were to use was a heavy metal door. It slid shut behind me with a heavy thud, and I walked toward the only two rooms that were well lit. All the other doors up and down the corridor were shut, and I was willing to bet they were probably locked as well.
A woman appeared in the first open doorway and called, “Come on in! We’re ready to get started!” As I got closer I could see she was as dark as I was blond, she was as soft as I am hard, and I was to find she talked twice as much as I’d ever thought about doing. “I’m Tamsin Lynd,” she said, extending her hand.
“Lily Bard,” I said, taking the hand and giving it a good shake.
She winced. “Lily?…”
“Bard,” I supplied, resigned to what was to come.
Her eyes got round behind their glasses, which were wire framed and small. Tamsin Lynd clearly recognized my name, which was a famous one if you read a lot of true crime.
“Before you go in the therapy room, Lily, let me tell you the rules.” She stepped back and gestured, and I went into what was clearly her office. The desk and its chair were arranged facing the door, and there were books and papers everywhere. The room was pretty small, and there wasn’t space for much after the desk and chair and two bookcases and a filing cabinet. The wall behind the desk was covered with what looked like carpeting, dark gray with pink flecks to match the carpet on the floor. I decided it had been designed for use as a bulletin board of sorts. Tamsin Lynd had fixed newspaper and magazine clippings to it with pushpins, and the effect was at least a little cheerful. The therapist didn’t invite me to sit, but stood right in front of me examining me closely. I wondered if she imagined herself a mind reader.
I waited. When she saw I wasn’t going to speak, Tamsin began, “Every woman in this group has been through a lot, and this therapy group is designed to help each and every one get used to being in social situations and work situations and alone situations, without being overwhelmed with fear. So what we say here is confidential, and we have to have your word that the stories you hear in this room stop in your head. That’s the most important rule. Do you agree to this?”
I nodded. I sometimes felt the whole world had heard my story. But if I’d had a chance to prevent it, not a soul would’ve known.
“I’ve never had a group like this here in Shakespeare, but I’ve run them before. Women start coming to this group when they can stand talking about what happened to them-or when they can’t stand their lives as they are. Women leave the group when they feel better about themselves. You can come as long as I run it, if you need to. Now, let’s go to the therapy room and you can meet the others.”