Courtney #2
I flush the toilet, and then I stand at the bathroom sink, staring at my face in the mirror’s reflection.
I hardly recognize myself. I’m a wreck. My face is blotchy, my eyes and cheeks swollen and red.
I haven’t brushed my hair today and it’s knotty, though I don’t bother brushing it because I don’t care what I look like, and I don’t have the capacity to even drag a brush through my hair right now.
Emily and Nolan are dead. What difference does it make what my hair looks like?
I still have on the same clothes I’ve worn all day—my robe over my pajamas—though there is vomit on the collar and sleeve, and blood on the cuff.
I lean over and take a sip of water directly from the tap, swirl it around in my mouth and spit it out, seeing traces of vomit
in the sink.
I open the bathroom door and breeze past Elliott in the doorway, our elbows bumping. “Where are you going?” he asks, reaching
for me, though I steal my arm from his grasp, walking away.
“I just need to change my clothes. I’ll be out as soon as I can. Can you tell the detective please?” I ask, going into the
bedroom and closing the door without giving him a chance to reply. In the bedroom, I sit on the edge of the unmade bed, fighting
a headache, hating the detective for putting these small seeds of doubt in my mind, no matter how inadvertent.
So your husband may have left before five o’clock?
I think again to last night. I try to take myself back in time, to remember if Elliott was here at 3:00 a.m. after I climbed
up into the loft, turned the girls’ TV off and came back to bed. I close my eyes, imagining the feel of the soft mattress
sinking beneath me, trying to feel Elliott curl around me from behind, his warm hand slipping onto my hip, the heat from his
body or the sound of his shallow breathing as he slept. I can’t, but that doesn’t mean anything, I tell myself, because I
was half asleep and I don’t remember the absence of him either, I don’t remember coming back to a cold and empty bed alone.
Elliott was here. Of course he was here.
I change into a pair of jeans and a t-shirt. I take a breath, steeling myself for what comes next.
I step out of the bedroom to find Elliott upstairs now and not waiting in the hall for me as I imagined. He’s in the loft
with Cass, sitting with her so that the detective can speak to Wyatt, Mae and me alone.
In the living room, Wyatt slumps on a saggy chair, staring down at his phone.
He might have internet connection or he might not.
He might just be playing some game offline because cell service is fickle; it comes and goes as it wants.
The pillow lines have disappeared from his face, and I think of what he must have gone through this morning.
I picture him sound asleep in his bed, maybe lost in a peaceful dream before waking up to the sound of police clearing rooms. They wouldn’t have knocked on his bedroom door when they came to it; they would have let themselves in, and I envision that: the police violently throwing open the door so hard it ricocheted off the opposite wall, finding Wyatt in bed, drawing and aiming their guns at him, screaming for him to freeze as if he’s a suspect, as if he’s the one who killed them.
He must have been confused, scared out of his mind.
I wonder what happened next, if the police told him his parents were dead.
They must have, because they would have had to prepare him to leave the bedroom and to walk past Nolan’s body in the hall.
I wonder if Wyatt cried. If he was afraid. If the police comforted him.
Wyatt and Mae haven’t had a second to grieve. I wonder if they’ve begun to process the fact that their parents are dead, or
if they’re in denial, harboring false hope that this isn’t real, that Nolan and Emily might walk through the door any minute.
They’ve had nothing in their life to prepare them for death. They’ve never had a pet die. Emily’s father died, but he had
Alzheimer’s for years and so they were never close to him before his death. They didn’t mourn him, not like they will Emily
and Nolan.
I set a hand on Wyatt’s shoulder. He looks up, and when he does, I see so much of Nolan in him, it takes my breath away.
It isn’t so much in the hair or body shape—because Wyatt, though tall, has yet to fill out—but in the facial features like the dark brown eyes, the round face, full cheeks and ears that stick slightly out.
Wyatt has a scar just above his right eye.
He’s had it for years as a result of a baseball injury.
I remember when it happened, the night he took a hit to the eye, because Emily called from the emergency room to see if I could come pick up Reese and Mae.
The bleeding was profuse, both externally and inside the eye.
They were worried he might lose some of his vision, which he didn’t, thank God, but still, he had an impressive black eye for weeks and now the scar.
“Do you need anything?” I ask.
Wyatt shakes his head, his mop of dark, coarse hair falling in his eyes, hiding them.
“Okay,” I say. “Let me know if you do.”
I take a seat on the sofa. Mae shuffles over and sits beside me, pressing a leg close to mine, her face vacant, her eyes red.
I wrap an arm around her shoulder, feeling her collapse against me as Detective Evans lowers himself to a chair across from
us, and I watch him, taking in his height, his athletic build, his red hair, his freckles. I went to high school with a redhead
who was ruthlessly teased because kids can be mean. Detective Evans, on the other hand, seems to embrace his redheadedness.
He sits confident on the chair, his legs spread wide, taking up space, and I doubt that he’s ever been teased or had an issue
with getting girls to like him.
“What are you doing to find my niece?” I ask, worried that the police aren’t doing anything and that they don’t see Reese
as a victim but as a suspect.
“We are looking for her, Mrs. Gray,” Detective Evans says. “We’ve issued an AMBER Alert and have entered her into the NCIC
Missing Person File. We’ve set up roadblocks to try to apprehend her or anyone who may have her. We’re doing everything we
can.” He looks to Wyatt then, who’s on his phone. “How about you put that away for a little bit,” he says.
But Wyatt doesn’t put his phone away. Instead, he hesitates, looking from the detective to me, wondering, I think, if he has to.
“What if I don’t want to?” he finally asks, testing Detective Evans’s patience, looking him right in the face.
Detective Evans doesn’t balk, though I’m sure he’s not used to being told no, least of all not by someone Wyatt’s age.
My tone is soft, pleading. I feel afraid, for Wyatt’s sake, wondering how Detective Evans will react if he continues to say
no. “Put it away, Wyatt. Please. Just for a little bit.”
But Wyatt still doesn’t, and I’m not sure if he’s trying to be defiant or if it’s the grief speaking, being rebellious so
that he doesn’t break down and let us see him cry. Still, I worry about what Detective Evans is going to do, about what he’s
going to say. He watches Wyatt for a long time (Wyatt’s own eyes dropping to his phone), his face deadpan.
“You remind me of myself when I was your age,” Detective Evans finally says, his voice controlled, and Wyatt looks up, imagining,
as I do, Detective Evans at fourteen.
“Yeah?” Wyatt asks, doubting. “How’s that?”
“I didn’t like people telling me what to do. I hated authority figures as a result. Teachers, parents, coaches, you name it.”
Something he says registers. Wyatt doesn’t say as much, but he shifts, slumping further in his seat, still staring at his
phone.
“I’m going to ask one more time,” Detective Evans says. He nods at the phone. “Do you think you can put that away for a while
and answer a few questions of mine so we can find your sister and figure out who hurt your parents? You do want to find her,
don’t you?” he asks. This time, Wyatt reluctantly puts the phone away, mumbling something under his breath about the stupid internet not working anyway, turning it face down on the arm of the chair.
Detective Evans leans back. He asks, “Did you hear anything in your cottage last night?” Wyatt shrugs. “Is that a yes or a
no?”
Wyatt says nothing. He sits in his chair, silent, staring down at his hands.
“Wyatt? Did you hear the detective’s question?” I ask, and then, when he still doesn’t respond: “Wyatt? Did you hear me?”
“I already told you,” he says, his eyes darting up.
“You already told us what?” I ask, taken aback by the anger in his eyes.
Wyatt says nothing.
“Listen. Wyatt. I know this is hard,” Detective Evans says, the unexpected softness in his voice momentarily endearing him
to me. “I want to find the person who did this to your parents and to find your sister. I think you can help me do that. The
thing is, the sooner we start looking, the more likely we are to find them. But we can’t do that unless you talk to us. You
are the last person who saw the three of them, which means you might be the only one who can help. Try to think back to last
night, in your cottage. Did you hear anything unusual? Did anything out of the ordinary happen?”
Wyatt shifts in his seat. “I dunno. I don’t think so,” he says this time.
“You don’t think so?”
“No.”
“Okay,” Detective Evans says. “Take me through last night. Your aunt and uncle came for dinner, is that right?” Wyatt nods,
sitting slouched in his chair. “What time did they leave?”
Wyatt looks to me and asks, “What time did you leave?”
“Maybe eight or eight thirty,” I say, going through it again in my mind, playing cards and sharing a bottle of wine and a
couple beers with Emily and Nolan before that argument between Emily and Reese happened, and we left.