4. Tuesday, September 5, 2023 #2
He told them that there had been a head-on collision at an intersection, and that both cars had caught fire.
Alice held up her hand to stop him, shaking her head furiously, but he ignored her and carried on.
Explained that by the time emergency responders arrived on the scene, both drivers were deceased due to smoke inhalation and burns.
Alice yanked her hand from Geoff’s and jumped to her feet.
She would physically make the police officer stop talking if she had to.
Geoff caught her before she could get to him. She could feel his sobs against her back, the wet of his tears against her neck. She struggled for a while before finally collapsing inwardly, and together they slid down to the floor in a posture of anguish.
After a few minutes the doctor gently reminded them of Quinn outside in the hall and their other daughter recuperating from surgery.
That got them up off the floor. When they told Quinn about Lucy, he fought against it as hard as Alice had and Geoff held him until the fight finally left him.
For her part, Alice couldn’t stop thinking about Lucy’s basketball game in the morning. She’d never even missed a practice.
When Geoff and Alice were finally able to go in and see Polly, the sight of her body connected to beeping machines and dripping bags, her head and face completely covered by bandages, caused Alice to drop to her knees.
She reached up to find the only part of Polly that wasn’t covered—her hand.
Brought it to her lips and whispered against her cool skin: “I’m here now, Polly. I’m here now.”
For the next five days, Alice and Geoff took turns sitting at Polly’s bedside. Grieving the loss of one daughter; willing the other back to life.
Alice doesn’t talk about the way her mind keeps leading her back to that horrific night.
Her family doesn’t know that when she arrives home weary and angry, it’s not from a long day of work but from a car ride of reliving the worst night of her life.
She’s tried podcasts as distraction, favorite playlists, even singing out loud, but when her mind decides to go there, she has no choice but to follow.
Her family also doesn’t know that some days, Alice initiates conversations with total strangers—store clerks, people in line at coffee shops, patients waiting at doctors’ offices, lonely old men sitting by themselves at fast-food restaurants—just so that she can talk about Lucy.
Not dead Lucy. Lucy as if she were still alive.
Like how she’s gone off to college on a basketball scholarship but is coming home for Thanksgiving or Christmas.
Sometimes she makes up funny anecdotes that her daughter has told her about college life.
Or she talks about family vacations they’re going to take.
Whatever comes to mind in the moment, really.
The strangers pretend to be interested, but Alice knows they’re not.
It doesn’t matter. Talking about her daughter as though she’s still alive makes her chest open wide so that she can take deep breaths again.
It makes the ground under her feet feel level.
It quiets the voices that tell her it’s all her fault, all her failure.
For those ten to twenty minutes, thirty if she’s lucky, she’s just a proud mother, not a mother who has lost a child. The comedown is rough. Her brain doesn’t like the acrobatics of the charade and makes her pay for it later, but the brief reprieve is worth it.
Today, though, Alice comes home less weary, in a better mood than usual, and not once did she seek out a stranger to lie to about her dead daughter.
It was her first day back at work after moving to the new house.
Driving down the tree-lined driveway to what has come to feel like her secret forest refuge, Alice feels content for the first time in a long time.
The change was good. It was a risk, moving the entire family to a whole new town and landscape, but it feels like it’s starting to pay off.
Stepping through the front door, her sense of calm is quickly dispelled by the yelling.
Dropping her bag in the foyer she takes a deep breath before going into the kitchen, where she finds Polly with her arms crossed and her eyes laser-focused on Quinn.
Alice is assuming her daughter’s stance is due to the slur that Alice heard upon entering the room:
“—meddling, slut bitch!”
“Whoa, whoa,” Alice says, holding up one hand. “Quinn, watch yourself.”
“Oh yeah! Of course you walk in and immediately take her side,” he says, throwing his arms up. His cheeks are flushed and his eyes shine with tears. He’s still wearing his school uniform, and his knapsack sits on the floor.
“I’m not taking anybody’s side, but you’re the one calling Polly a slut,” Alice says calmly, her right temple suddenly throbbing.
Gone is the sense of contentment she arrived with, replaced by the adrenaline rush of refereeing sibling conflict.
“And we don’t condone name-calling in this house. Tell me what happened.”
He points at Polly, pure aggression radiating out of his tense finger.
“She went up to that kid Max at the Labor Day thing down the street and told him she’d fuck him if he’d be my friend.
All day I overheard kids talking about the new guy who lives in the murder house whose hot sister is gonna sleep with Max Sheffield in exchange for hanging out with him. ”
Alice’s head whips in Polly’s direction. “Please tell me that’s not true.”
Polly turns her death glare from Quinn to her mother.
“Are you fucking kidding me? You actually believe that? I asked the little shit to hang out with my brother and said that maybe I’d see him around if he did.
I was just trying to help him make friends.
It’s not my fault he’s a loser who can’t manage that on his own.
” Now Polly’s eyes shine with tears. “If Lucy had done the same thing, nobody would be yelling slut at her. Would they?” The last words come out with a sob before she spins around and storms out of the kitchen to her room.
There’s no point in going after Polly until she calms down, so Alice turns her focus to Quinn.
She wants to pull him in for a hug; instead, she reaches out a hand to his shoulder and squeezes.
“That sounds awful, Quinn. It really does, but I think what you heard about Polly was a misunderstanding. Sounds like that boy, Max, twisted her words around. Not someone you want to befriend anyway. Right?”
Quinn shifts away so that her hand falls from his shoulder.
“That’s easy for you to say. You weren’t forced to start a new school with no friends.
” He bends down to get his knapsack. “And you weren’t forced to move into the murder house.
You know that’s what the whole fucking town calls it, right?
” He stomps out of the room and slams his bedroom door, leaving Alice alone in the kitchen, her jaw clenching so tight her fillings vibrate.
The back door opens and Geoff floats into the room, a big smile on his face. “Hey,” he says, planting a lazy kiss on her cheek. “When did you get home?”
“About five minutes ago,” she says, anger at his obliviousness burning her sternum like indigestion.
Geoff doesn’t seem to notice and glances at the clock on the wall, which reads 5:05.
“Oh shit. It’s later than I thought. Totally got caught up in my writing.
” He goes over to the cupboard for a wineglass.
She scrutinizes him. Takes in how relaxed he looks, the lack of bags under his eyes, the satisfied grin he can’t seem to wipe from his face.
She wonders if he takes long naps during the day and that’s why he’s so refreshed when she arrives home so weary.
At the old house she caught him stretched out on the living-room couch with his eyes closed a few times but he claimed that he was “letting his mind wander to creative places for inspiration.”
“Did you speak to Quinn when he got home?” she asks, hoping he had to deal with the same bullshit she did.
Geoff goes to the fridge and takes out a half-empty bottle of white wine.
He shakes his head. “No, I haven’t seen either of the kids since this morning.
I made sure Quinn got on the bus all right.
Polly asked to borrow my car to do some job-hunting, so I gave her the keys and then went to my writing studio.
I’ve been there all day. Why? Everything all right?
” He pours himself a glass of wine and sits down with it at the kitchen island.
“Not really,” she says, working hard to hide her annoyance that Geoff didn’t even clock the kids getting home safely. “Sounds like Quinn had a rough day. Maybe you should talk to him later.”
“Yeah, of course,” he’s quick to say.
“Any thoughts on dinner?” she asks, knowing that his answer will be salt in her wound.
“No, not really,” he says, putting a hand on the back of his neck to massage it, as though his day was so taxing he hadn’t even had time to consider dinner. “Do you?”
“I think there’s a frozen lasagna in the freezer in the basement.” She’s annoyed at herself as soon as it’s out of her mouth. Why must she always have the answer? Just once she wants to say, I have no fucking clue, Geoff. Figure it out yourself. “Why don’t you go see? I have to check in on Polly.”
He abandons his wine and slides off the stool with a sigh. “Maybe you could make your world-famous Caesar salad to go with it?”
“Sure.” Whenever Geoff wants her to prepare something specific, he calls it her world-famous… It’s pure manipulation, but she’s never called him on it—she just keeps cooking. She only has herself to blame now, as her mother would say.