Chapter 32 Hailey #2
But when they stepped inside, apart from all the weird things Mack collected—mugs and shot glasses and bobbleheads, dozens of Dr Pepper cans and Starbucks cups, a few wilted plants—there was nothing of interest, not even any cracks.
At least not that Hailey could see. But then Ben the Concrete Guy moved aside the box of Mack’s mother’s papers and a stack of old comic books to reveal another sizable crack in the floor.
“They’re just everywhere,” said Hailey. “There’s one in the kitchen wall too. I forgot. I’ll show you on the way back up.”
“The drywall cracks are nothing to worry about.” Something in his manner reminded Hailey of the girls’ pediatrician, capable and reassuring, but this only lasted for a second or two.
“These cracks in the concrete itself though, they’re pretty unusual,” he continued.
“We’d expect to see this if the ground under the house was unstable—like if it was silt or sand—but that’s not the case.
This is hard clay around here, solid. But look—” He measured the width of the crack in Mack’s concrete floor with his thumb and forefinger and held up the inch of empty space for Hailey to see.
“This here tells me the house is moving. The steel foundation beams are shifting in the ground, for some reason.”
Hailey stared at him. “What reason?”
He chuckled. “Like an earthquake would do it,” he said, and Hailey did not think this was at all funny. “Although it’s obviously not an earthquake.”
“Could it be erosion? From the lake?”
“Not this far back from the water. I’m going to take some samples away with me, but I’d also like to get down under there and get access to the S beams. Are you okay if I get someone in here to take up the floor?”
“The concrete floor?”
“Yeah, we’ll blast it, check everything out, and then repour it.”
“The whole floor?”
“Just the part near the beams to start with.”
“Oh my god,” said Hailey, reeling at the image of a construction crew with sledgehammers descending on her house. “I do not need this right now. I really don’t, I—wait, could this be dangerous? I mean, are we safe to stay here?”
“I think for now—”
“Oh God,” Hailey said again. “I just don’t believe this. How can this be happening? The house is brand-new!” She could hear the whining in her voice but had no way of stopping it.
“Ain’t that always the way,” Ben said. “But you’re in luck, timing-wise. I can get my boys in Monday, and we’ll get it over with quick as we can.”
“And Simeon pays for it?”
“I don’t handle that part,” he said, backing away from her. “You’ll have to work it out with him.”
“But generally speaking, is this something insurance should cover, either Simeon’s or ours?”
“I would guess so, but I couldn’t say for sure. Depends on the cause, really. Simeon said you’re a lawyer?”
“Did he?” Would that have been in passing conversation, or in the context of a lawsuit? Judging by the way this guy was watching her now, it had to be the latter. “Yes, I’m a divorce lawyer.”
“I see.” He headed for the stairs. “Well, Divorce Lawyer Girl, your kids will want to play somewhere else next week probably. There’s gonna be a lot of dust down here.”
Mack’s Audi was pulling in just as the Concrete Guy’s Lexus was pulling out.
Mack had been at Tech for a meeting, and he headed straight for the fridge and gulped down a beer.
From the other side of the counter, Hailey took in his sharp cheekbones and the way his pants drooped at the back and around his waist. He was disappearing in front of her; soon he would be nothing but black circles and ashen skin.
“They want me to come back,” he said when the beer must have been almost empty, and even though this is what Hailey had wanted, she didn’t see how this person in front of her could possibly cope with a job, even a cushy one like his.
“They basically want to forget that anything happened. The dean called it ‘this unfortunate incident.’ ” There was not a trace of life in Mack’s voice.
“We could sue them, you know.”
He did not acknowledge this, but Hailey kept trying, mostly to fill the silence: “For not protecting you better. We could sue them for not investigating before they hung you out to dry.”
Mack set the beer can down and leaned on the counter, cocked his head sideways, and began to bob his chin up and down, something between a tic and a nod. “What difference does it make?”
“What do you mean? Do you want to go back to work?”
“I don’t care really at all,” said Mack, with a flatness that scared Hailey deep in her bones.
She recognized at once the state he was in; she had been there herself a couple of times in her life.
The first was when she—Hailey Byers, valedictorian of her high school class, summa cum laude graduate of Duke University, acer of the LSAT, and editor of the NYU Law Review—had (whisper it) failed the Ohio bar.
Not by one silly little point, nor by the many, many points that would have signified a missed section, a small stroke, or some other such disaster, but by a margin that plainly demonstrated that this girl didn’t know her stuff.
Hailey was not descended from lawyers, she did not look like a lawyer, she did not feel grown-up enough to be a lawyer, and here was the numerical proof: the universe had caught her playing dress-up and it had put her back in her place, which turned out to be mostly in bed, staring at the wall.
The Hailey Byers who never cracked under pressure had disintegrated in an instant, and no one around her had any idea what to do about it.
Not her parents, not her sister, not the partners at the prestigious Cleveland law firm that had already hired her.
No one except for Mack.
It wasn’t any grand gesture on his part.
He mostly let Hailey mope, stared at the wall with her, told her stories about his new job teaching poetry and creative writing to teenage scientists who just wanted to know what the right answer was!
He brought her Dr Peppers when she slept too long, played her Jimi Hendrix to put some fight back in her.
All he wanted, he said, was to be with her.
In any mental state she happened to be in that day.
And eventually it worked, as Mack had seemed sure it would, as he must’ve known from his own great disappointments, even though he never talked about them.
When the numbness was over, when Hailey had faced her demons, retaken the bar, and passed, Mack had even admitted that he loved her more for having failed, that doing so had made her infinitely more interesting than she had been before.
Hailey had briefly considered leaving him for that comment, but she decided to marry him instead.
The second time that Mack had saved her from oblivion wasn’t anything nearly as frivolous.
It had been when Mabel was born, which was also when Mabel had almost died.
Without having to be told, Mack had shifted his watch, and while Hailey’s body recovered, it was Mabel who got the poetry and the Hendrix, the student stories and the hole-by-hole commentary on the golf round that had won Mack his scholarship.
Even when the nurses urged Mack to lay off the Dr Pepper, to go home and get some rest, he had never left their tiny daughter’s side.
What’s more, whereas in those early days Hailey had been numb and mostly preoccupied by negotiations with God, Mack had been laser-focused on Mabel.
Whenever Hailey joined the two of them in the NICU after they’d been alone for a while, it was as if Mack had been building a human out of the tiniest of beings: She likes Salinger, he’d say.
Her teenage years are gonna be rough. Mabel’s limbs were long (even though they weren’t) and good for golf; her attitude toward the babies that cried too much and the resident who clicked his pen was poor at times.
She has musical sensibilities, Mack explained.
She doesn’t like all this discordant noise.
What Mack had really done was to lead by example: She’s our person, and it’s okay to start loving her. And so Hailey had, even though it was the most frightening thing she had ever done.
“I don’t seem to care about anything,” Mack was saying now. “I just sat there today in the dean’s office; you know? I couldn’t think of anything to say to the department head. And then I went to the hospital—”
“What? Why? Why would you do that?”
“I have to find out what happened to the kid, Hailey, I—”
“I told you, we’ll see something in the news if it is serious. I’ve been checking. Did you speak to anyone?”
“The Plain Dealer said they took him to Metro, so I thought maybe if I—”
“Did you speak to anyone there?” Hailey owed Mack, and she knew he needed her, but he sure wasn’t making this easy.
“No. I chickened out. I—” He didn’t seem to have enough breath left in him to get through his sentence. Hailey stood waiting until the silence was pierced by a scream from the basement, and then yelling:
“What did you do? Gigi, you stupid, stupid thing! I hate you!”
“Hey!” Mack jolted to life as if he’d been struck by lightning. “What’s going on down there?” He turned toward the stairs, but Mabel was already in the doorway, eyes shiny with tears.
“Gigi drop-ded the Polly in the crack! She did it on purpose! It’s Mommy’s and it’s lost and she always—”
“Okay, Mabs, don’t worry, I’m sure we can get Polly back.”
Mabel eyed Hailey warily; the marker had not washed out of her Christmas dress, and significant trust had been lost. Mabel put her thumb in her mouth and cried as Gigi appeared in the doorway, incandescent with rage.
“It was not my fault! She, she—”
Mack looked as if he might just keel over; Hailey had to get them out of his face. “Tweezers,” she said. “I’ll bet we can save Polly with tweezers.”
But plastic Polly turned out to be too slippery for Hailey’s eyebrow tweezers to get hold of, and the crack was too deep and narrow to allow for maximum leverage.
Polly’s hair, which might have been easier to snare, was angled away from them, wedged down into the deepest part of the split in the floor.
“Mabs, we’ll figure something else out, okay?
But I really need to talk to Daddy for a minute first—”
Mabel stood, bottom lip quivering, as Hailey crouched, plucking at the basement floor. Gigi had slunk off at the first sign that Polly’s rescue would not be straightforward.
Mabel was inhaling the beginning of a fresh sob when Mack appeared with the vacuum cleaner in his hand.
“No, Daddy!”
But Hailey saw what he was doing: a quick suck with the hose of the Dyson, and Polly was safely inside its clear cylinder, and then she was back in Mabel’s palm, dusty but otherwise fine.
Mabel threw herself at Mack’s waist in gratitude, and for a second he looked like something more than a dead man walking.
Then he looked worse than he had before.
“Let’s put the Pollys away, okay, Mabs? You and I can play with them again soon, I promise. Where did Gigi run off to? She can help you clean up.”
As Mabel dutifully began to close up the plastic houses and shops, Gigi reappeared at the top of the stairs.
“We saved Polly,” Hailey told her, “in case you’re wondering.” But Gigi was engrossed in a tablet.
Hailey had had just about enough three-year-old for one day. “Where did you get that? You know you have to ask for screen time.”
Gigi ignored her.
“Gigi!”
Mack moved to take the tablet from her, but Gigi turned her back to him, still gorging on the screen.
“Genevieve Pamela Evans, now!”
“Something’s wrong with it, Mommy. Mabel changed it. Everything’s different. Everything’s wrong!”
Mack wrenched the tablet from her hands.
“Enough!” His tone snapped Gigi out of her stupor, but now Mabel too had grown concerned about their most prized (and fought over) possession.
She took the tablet from Mack, and they watched her tear-stained face twist into a scowl.
“What is this? What did you do, Gigi? Why is the picture—all the pictureses are different! You changed the games!”
Mack took the tablet back. “Enough of this! Please, girls. The tablet is fine—”
He glanced at it as he spoke, and then he frowned. Then he started scrolling.
“What’s wrong, Daddy?” Mabel tried to take the tablet back from him, but he held it above her reach, still scrolling.
“When did you have this last?” he said to her through clenched teeth. “Tell me right now!”
Mabel looked to Hailey for help. “Yesterday?”
Mack still did not look up. “Did you take it out somewhere? Out of the house?” He turned to Hailey. “Did we?” His voice got louder, and Gulliver came bounding down the steps and began to bark at Mack’s feet, but Mack kept scrolling, his face expressionless and terrifying.
“What’s wrong with Daddy?” Mabel asked Hailey, as if Mack wasn’t right there in front of them. Mack just wandered toward the stairs.
“Leave the Pollys, girls. Watch some TV for a minute. Daddy and I will be right back.”
Hailey turned on Peppa Pig, and then she went after Mack. He had stopped by the busted side door, his face still inches from the screen.
“What is the matter with you?” Hailey snatched the thing from his hands.
“You’re scaring the girls to death.” Right away she saw that the iPad’s home screen, which had previously been a close-up of Mabel’s and Gigi’s smiling faces, had somehow been changed.
Now it was a photograph of sunlight shining through a cloudy sky, and it only took another glance at Mack’s horrified face for the significance of the image to register.
Dotted over the top of this hellish skyscape were the icons for new apps, apps that there was no way Mabel or Gigi could have somehow installed.
“Did you—”
“No.” Mack read her mind. “I haven’t touched this thing in weeks.”
With a shaking finger, he reached out and clicked on the new Facebook icon. When it opened to an account in the name of Sunshine Enterprises, Hailey felt like she might combust with fear.