“Who are all these damn women?” the father who had started it all exclaimed at the outset of the Curriculum Committee’s next gathering, because, one-and-all, they were women, and there were far more of them than of him. Margaret was saved. Judy Blume sent a thank-you note.
Lila stayed on the Curriculum Committee, but there had never been another Margaret-sized controversy. The members read new books that were being added to the syllabi and the libraries at high schools and middle schools around the Tri-Counties, and listened to lectures by local English teachers and librarians. It was more like a book club than a political assembly. Lila enjoyed it. And, like most book clubs, though a man or two occasionally showed up, it remained primarily an XX affair.
There had been a meeting on the previous Monday night. Afterward, on the way to her car in the high school parking lot, Lila fell into step with an elderly woman named Dorothy Harper, a member of something called the First Thursday Book Club, and one of the townsfolk Lila had originally drafted to help defend Margaret.
“You must be so proud of your niece Sheila!” Dorothy remarked, leaning on a cane, a flowered purse large enough to contain a baby looped over her shoulder. “People are saying she might go to a Division I school on a basketball scholarship. Isn’t that wonderful for her?” Then Dorothy added, “Of course, I suppose you don’t want to get too excited yet—I know she’s only a sophomore. But very few girls make headlines at fifteen.”
It was on the tip of Lila’s tongue to say that Dotty had made a mistake: Clint didn’t have a brother and Lila didn’t have a niece. But Dorothy Harper was at the age where names often got mixed up. She wished the old lady a nice day and drove home.
Lila was a police officer, though, and paid to be curious. During an idle moment at her desk at the sheriff’s station the next morning, she thought of Dorothy’s comment, and typed Sheila Norcross into Firefox. A sports article with the headline, COUGHLIN PHENOM LEADS TIGERS TO TOURNEY FINALS, was the top result, fifteen-year-old Sheila Norcross being said phenom. So Dorothy Harper had been right about the name, after all. There were other Norcrosses in the Tri-Counties—who knew? She certainly hadn’t. Down toward the bottom of the article there was a mention of Sheila’s proud mother, who bore a different surname, Parks. Shannon Parks.
That creaked a board in Lila’s memory. A couple of years earlier, when Jared had gone out for track, Clint had mentioned the name in passing—had said that a friend named Shannon Parks was the person who convinced him to go out for track at the same age. Given the context, Lila had assumed that Shannon Parks was a male saddled with a rather preppy name. She remembered because her husband hardly ever talked about his childhood and teenage years, and the rare occasions when he did made an impression on Lila.
He had grown up in foster care. Lila didn’t know many details… and hey, who was she kidding? She didn’t know any details. What she knew was that it had been difficult. You could feel Clint’s temperature spike when the subject arose. If Lila ever brought up a case that involved a child being removed from its parents’ custody and put into care, Clint went quiet. He claimed it didn’t make him uncomfortable. “Just ruminative.” Lila, acutely conscious of the necessity of not being a cop in her marriage, let it go.
Not that it had been easy, or that she had never felt tempted. Her resources as a police officer could have gained her access to all manner of court records. She resisted, though. If you loved a person, didn’t you have to allow them their quiet places? The rooms they didn’t want to visit? Also, she believed that Clint would tell her someday, all of it.
But.
Sheila Norcross.
In the room he did not want to visit and where Lila had blithely assumed that he would someday invite her, was a woman—not a man but a woman—named Shannon, and a photograph of a teenage girl whose smile, sly and curled at the right corner, resembled not just one person that Lila knew well, but two—her husband and her son.
The rest was a simple two-part investigation.
In part one, Lila broke the law for the first time not only in her career but in her entire life. She contacted the principal of Coughlin High School and, sans warrant, requested a copy of Sheila Norcross’s records. The Coughlin principal had long been grateful for her help in putting a pin in the brief Margaret hullabaloo, and Lila reassured him that it was actually nothing about Sheila Norcross, and had to do rather with an identity theft ring. The principal faxed her the records without hesitation, his trust in Lila such that he was happy to break the law, too.
According to the records, Sheila Norcross was smart, strong in English, even stronger in math and science. She carried a 3.8 grade average. Her teachers described her as a little arrogant, but appealing, a natural leader. Shannon Parks, her mother, was listed as her sole guardian. Clinton Norcross was listed as her father. She had been born in 2002, making her a little over a year younger than Jared.
Until the AAU game on Wednesday night, Lila told herself she wasn’t sure. Uncertainty made no sense, of course, the truth was right there on the enrollment papers, and plain as the Norcross nose on the girl’s face, but she had to get through the days somehow. She told herself that she had to see the girl, see Sheila Norcross, standout point guard, slightly arrogant but likable 3.8 student, to be sure.
Lila pretended that she was undercover, that it was her job to convince Clint that she was still the woman he was married to.
“You seem preoccupied,” Clint said to her on Tuesday night.
“I’m sorry. It’s probably because I’m having an affair with someone at work,” she said, which was just the sort of thing that Lila would have said, if she was still the Lila he was married to. “It’s very distracting.”
“Ah. I understand,” Clint said, “It’s Linny, isn’t it?” and he pulled her close for a kiss, and she even kissed him back.
Then, the second step of the investigation: the stakeout.
Lila found a seat high up in the bleachers of the gymnasium and watched the Tri-Counties AAU team go through their warm-ups. Sheila Norcross was immediately identifiable, number 34, darting in to flick a lay-up off the corner of the backboard, then reversing on her heels, laughing. Lila studied the girl with a detective’s eye. Maybe 34 didn’t have Clint’s jaw, and maybe the way she held herself was different, too, but so what? Kids had two parents.
In the second row near the home team’s bench, several adults were standing, clapping along with the pre-game music. The players’ parents. Was the slim one in the cableknit sweater Shannon? Or was the girl’s mother the dyed blonde in the hip newsboy cap? Or some other woman? Lila couldn’t tell. How could she? She was the stranger at the party, after all, the uninvited. People talked about how their marriages fell apart, and they said, “It didn’t feel real.” Lila thought the game felt real enough, though—the crowd sounds, the gymnasium smells. No, it was her. She was what felt unreal.
The horn sounded. It was game time.