Chapter 25
Singing along to Hamilton at the top of their lungs, they are badly out of key, which is the only way Rebecca can sing.
Since there were no chores to get home to, Rebecca brought Maddy to the mall after dinner to get frozen yogurt, and even got them matching heart necklaces, which they now wear as a celebratory punctuation to the evening.
Turning onto their street, Rebecca spots the flashing emergency lights, and her stomach drops through the bottom of her seat.
Fighting through shock, she notes the ambulance and cop cars are not at their house but next door.
“Mommy, what’s happening?”
“I don’t know. Looks like something’s wrong at Jackson’s house.”
“Did someone sue him into the ground?”
But she cannot answer. The strobing blues and reds bring her back to the last time an ambulance came to their block.
She remembers vividly being jangled around in the rear as they drove her off, the wand pressing through the cool ultrasound gel on her belly, the terrible sound of just one beating heart inside her.
She eases up to the curb in front of Jackson’s. EMTs are pacing around, on their radios, looking grave. The cops are in a loose semicircle, standing guard over something. Through the bodies and vehicles, she notices a toppled ladder but can’t make out anything else.
“Maddysaurus, wait in here, okay?”
The nickname slips out, but Maddy does not object.
Rebecca parks and unbuckles, sliding out. Neighbors are at their windows, making calls, filming on iPhones.
“Hello, hi?” Rebecca says, approaching. “Is everything okay?”
“Are you the wife?” a cop asks.
“Oh, thank God,” an EMT says. “We got his wife!”
“No, I’m not his—”
But already she is being ushered forward into the inner sanctum. At first she struggles to register what is lying on the ground. It isn’t shaped like a man, but a collection of wrong angles.
Jackson lies grotesquely contorted, limbs bent this way and that, his head at an unnatural tilt on his neck. But that isn’t the worst part.
The worst part is that he is staring straight up at her.
He blinks rapidly. A line of drool runs down the side of his cheek.
Her breath catches in her throat, and she has to try twice before she can unstick it.
“He’s in bad shape,” the EMT says. “Do you want to say anything to him?”
Rebecca finally locates her voice. “I’m not his wife. I’m just . . . just the neighbor.”
Jackson glares up at her. One cheek is mashed to the earth, the visible eye bloodshot and bulging. Spittle flecks his lips. His lower lip quivers. He is irreversibly shattered in so many ways, like a car-struck dog that must be put down.
Rebecca can hardly make out anything over the rush of white noise in her ears. Her heart thumps against her ribs, fluttering her sweater. She’s amazed everyone else doesn’t hear it too.
She is clutching herself across her stomach, one hand clawing at her neck. She feels a tug—the necklace giving way?—but she cannot move her gaze from Jackson. It’s like he is impaling her with that one eye.
And he looks angry. No, not angry. Accusatory.
He tries to speak, but all that comes out is a garbled mess. That continuous cord of drool keeps spilling from his lips.
“Help him,” she hears herself say. “Why aren’t you helping him?”
“We’ve stabilized him as best we can,” the EMT says. “But we need a full-blown paramedic here. No way we’re risking snapping that neck entirely.”
“He’s paralyzed for sure, man,” one of the young cops says too loudly. “For sure.”
Rebecca thinks, He can hear you.
But at the same time, Jackson seems gone already, less a man than the remnants of an accident. Given his state, she wonders what, if anything, he can take in. The scream of a siren splits the air, more help arriving, but still she cannot tear her gaze from that hideous eye.
It twitches in the socket, pinning her.
“Errug,” Jackson says. And then, an agonized roar. “Eeruuggh!”
Horrified, she stumbles back.
Tripping, falling onto the fresh-cut lawn, shoving up from hands and knees.
The colossal fire engine seems to fill the entire world, flying up to the curb behind her van.
Maddy is gone from the back seat and Rebecca’s panic revs higher into redline, but as she whips her gaze up the street, she sees Mr. Man ushering Maddy in through their front door, one smooth hand at the side of her head to block her view of the accident.
Paramedics and firemen spill out, storming past Rebecca as she staggers to her van. Her hands tremble so badly she almost cannot fit the key into the slot.
She drives crookedly into the driveway, banging across the curb, and manages to slot the van into the garage without crashing.
She takes a moment to gather herself before entering the house.
Maddy is at the table, the calming scent of Nervous Tummy Tea rising from the mug before her, permeating the kitchen. She is smiling and talking with Mr. Man.
“They are from Africa,” she is saying. “Rhodesia, which is now called Zimbobby.”
“Zimbabwe,” Mr. Man says, moving clean plates from dishwasher to cupboard.
“Zimbobby,” Maddy says again. “And they were bred to hunt lions. Raaar!” She makes raaar claws just as Rebecca did earlier, her pug nose scrunched up in a snarl. She notices Rebecca standing there. “You okay, Mommy?”
“Yeah, Maddysaurus. I’m okay. It’s just . . . Jackson had an accident.”
“A accident? He cut his finger?”
“No, honey,” Rebecca says. “He fell off his ladder.”
“Owie!”
“Yeah.” Rebecca is still trying to breathe normally. “Owie.”
“He gonna be awright, Mommy?”
The pause is quiet enough that she can hear Bao-Bao nibbling at his water nozzle.
“I hope so.”
“I’ll say a prayer for him.”
“That’d be nice, Maddysaurus.”
Maddy’s eyelids are heavy, her blinks long; she is crashing from the Froyo sugar high. Rebecca rests a hand on Maddy’s head, surprised as always by how warm it is. Maddy gets up, and Rebecca keeps her palm atop her sweaty hair, steering her down the hall to her bedroom.
They skip bath, and the rest of the nigh-night routine goes swiftly and smoothly until it is time for forehead kiss.
Maddy pokes a finger at the hollow of Rebecca’s throat. “Where’s your necklace, Mommy?”
Memory flash: Rebecca standing over Jackson’s buckled form, clawing at her neck, the give of the cheap filament chain.
“Oh,” she says. “I know where I left it.”
“Better go get it,” Maddy says, so sleepy the last words come out as one: geddit. “So we can be twinsies tomorrow.”
And she is asleep.
As Rebecca pads down the hall, she rubs her shoulder, which has abruptly knotted.
Mr. Man stands in the sparkling kitchen, sponge in hand, everything polished to a shine.
Not a crumb, not a smudge. Maddy’s lunch box has been retrieved from the minivan, cleaned, and left open face down to dry on a dish towel.
Rebecca smacks her forehead. “Groceries. I forgot to get groceries.”
“Are you hungry?” Mr. Man asks.
“No, no, we ate. Just need to make her lunch for tomorrow. Can you rustle something up? Something fresh and healthy?”
“Of course,” Mr. Man says.
“Okay. Be right back. I left something next door.”
As she exits the house and steps clear of the porch, the sudden quiet of the neighborhood cocoons her.
The fire engine is gone, as are the cop cars and ambulance.
A few bits of trash wag in the breeze on Jackson’s lawn—a square of gauze, a wrapper from some medical implement, scissored-off shreds of clothing. His house is dark.
The ladder remains there on its side, ominous in the moonlight. How little it takes for a life to be immutably altered. A visit to a developmental pediatrician, a placental abnormality, a toppled ladder.
As she cuts through the break in the hedge, she holds her gaze steady on the fallen ladder. Tentatively she approaches the spot where Jackson landed. Several spots in the dirt are soaked dark. It is hard to look away from them.
It feels odd to be standing here on Jackson’s side of the divide. Aside from this evening, she has never been over here.
A light rain starts up, spitting at her cheeks. She steps up onto his porch for cover and to get a better vantage, hoping to spot a sparkle of plated silver in the grass.
The soles of her shoes stick to the poured concrete. Jackson’s porch is gummed up with sap from her pine tree. It’s a lot.
In fact, it’s quite awful.
Leaning out from the eaves, she gazes up at the gutters. Their edges, too, are caked with sap, bristling with pine needles.
She feels like a total asshole. How different the perspective is. Here across the hedge, the pine tree isn’t a source of pride but a shedding mess.
The rain quickens, a snare drum rat-a-tat-tatting against the roof.
As she lowers her gaze, she catches a glimmer among the blades of grass. There it is, her cheap half-a-heart pendant. Gathering it up, she hurries home. The moon is almost full, the light nearly orange. She notes the fine patterns of needles on the ground.
She reaches the break in the hedge.
For a moment, she does not believe her eyes. The humming has returned, a bee swarm filling her head. Her nerves are tingling, all of them, all at once.
Pressed into the wet dirt of the gap in the hedge, a single barefoot print.
The toes slightly too proportional.
They are aimed in the direction of Jackson’s house.
Forgetting to breathe, she watches as the raindrops pick apart the faint impression, melting it back into the mud.