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  ‘You cut this shit out now, you hear me?’

  And Daddy looks to her, his face a study in amusement, as if Donna and he are Park Avenue sophisticates who’ve been surprised by an uncouth emissary from the League of Decency. And Danny, whose eyes are glittering with anger, without moving the right hand, hits Daddy with a swinging left that nearly knocks him sideways, then hard in the belly with his right, and rounds it off with an uppercut to the face that lands him on his back. Danny follows through and stands over him and Daddy cringes and cowers, curled up in a ball, and Danny is going to say something but doesn’t. He turns and looks at Donna, his face contorted with adrenaline.

  ‘You should clean that make-up off your face,’ he says. ‘You look like a clown.’

  Of course, instead of being grateful (because it ended right there) she was furious (because it ended right there). It took her a long while to unravel it all. She knew at some level her father had crossed the line, but he had never paid her such attention before – nobody had – and she felt bereft without it. And she blamed Danny. Truth be told, some part of her, some reptile self unsusceptible to reason or society, or sanity, still does.

  Barbara is out now, and they’re all toweled dry and huddled beneath the hackberry trees, leaves turned a rusty red but still clinging on, and they’re drinking the steaming hot chocolate Donna brought in a flask and chattering happily about the TV show Glee, which Barbara adores as a harbinger of the unimaginably exotic teenage excitements the future will bring, and which Irene disdains on the grounds that the singers are all copy cats. At least, the girls are chattering and Donna is listening and wondering if that’s why she adores being in their company quite so much, if it’s a simple equation: her unhappy childhood for their happy ones. Maybe she should have had her own kids. Only there’s no way, if she had, that they would have turned out as untroubled as this pair.

  ‘What’s that?’ Irene says, the more observant of the two, looking up towards the house.

  ‘What’s what?’ Barbara says, her mouth stained with choco- late.

  ‘A rustling up near the house. Maybe it’s a pussy cat.’

  ‘I tawt I taw a putty cat. Maybe it’s a snake.’

  There’s silence then.

  ‘Maybe it was nothing,’ Irene says quietly, uneasy at the notion there might be snakes anywhere nearby.

  But Donna has heard it, or thinks she has, a rustle of leaves, or of wings, her nerves and senses doing double duty since Danny left, since the doorbell rang an hour later. It was Claire, of course, calling first and then driving over here, out of her mind with worry. Donna had wanted to let her in, but she felt she had to protect Danny, at least within an hour or so of his leaving. After that she was up five times, sleep broken by creaking floorboards or animal cries or wind through the trees, padding barefoot around the house, turning lights on and off, nothing to protect her but her trusty Glock 17, one of her souvenirs of eighteen months with the ‘president’ of the Milwaukee Outlaws Motorcycle Club (along with the tattoos, the gang rape, the 147 stitches and the nervous breakdown she told Danny she never had and the suicide attempts he doesn’t even know about). She didn’t need Danny to alert her to the potential dangers of living alone and in some isolation, even in a twinky little burgh like Cambridge, but Danny’s crisis, whatever the hell it is, has ramped up the anxiety level more than somewhat.

  ‘It’s likely a racoon or an opossum,’ Donna says, gathering the flask and the towels into her canvas tote and reaching for her glossy red clutch, where she keeps her essentials: make-up, house keys and gun.

  ‘Come on, let’s hit the shower, girls.’

  Irene usually runs ahead, and Barbara lags behind, but this morning, Irene is in no hurry to run into a snake, so Donna is free to take the lead back up through the sycamore and blue beech, bright October sun coaxing wisps of steam from the soft forest scrub. Which is as she wants it. Just the same, she doesn’t want to press so far in front that she loses them, or that they could be surprised from behind, so she stops every now and again and waits for them to catch up. As Donna waits for the second or third time, nothing stirring up at the house as far as she can tell, she clocks the red clutch in her hand, and flashes on how bizarre she must look, in the woods, in a wetsuit, with a glossy evening purse: all she needs is a pair of Laboutins and it could be some demented fashion shoot in a glossy magazine.

  The girls catch up and she presses on, simultaneously thinking she’s being ridiculous and yet all too acquainted with, and therefore prepared for, the worst. She doesn’t know what kind of trouble Danny has got himself into. She’s so used to assuming he walked the straight path, she the crooked, that she couldn’t conceive of any trouble he could be in. He was right: she lacked imagination. Like the more partisan of her gay friends, she filed Danny and Claire under ‘breeders’ and neglected to give them rounded characters. And now they appear to have gone off the deep end, or at least Danny has. God knows what he was talking about, gambling debts, or maybe drugs, if that slacker Jeff Torrance had anything to do it. And implying that their house was under threat, Jesus. Blackmail from somebody in his past? No, Donna hasn’t a clue. She can barely remember those halfwits he used to hang out with, Gene something, and Dave, and … Ralph … Jesus, was one of them actually called Ralph? What a bunch of whitebreads, jocks and demi-jocks, Donna thinks she might have had sex with one of them in the back of a car out by the lake, but she can’t be sure which one, or what kind of sex, or whether it was with one of Danny’s friends; she knows she had plenty of sex in cars out by the lake, too much, in fact, and most of it pretty disappointing in almost every way, thanks all the same. But Danny really didn’t register for her once she put the whole thing with her dad behind her, or thought she had. Sure, she was pretty much out of it a lot of the time from the age of fifteen, grass and ludes and wine, but mostly she just wasn’t interested in him. Oh, she loved him and so on, but she didn’t really see him as anything more than her straight, boring little brother. And now, after all this, he reveals a wild side?

  There’s another rustle, and branches sway in the backyard, just above. Briskly now, to put some space between her and the girls, Donna climbs the last few yards, hot in her wetsuit, trying to keep her breathing hushed, and as she reaches the stacked railway sleepers that do fence duty, two things happen at once, sound and vision in a mixed-media spasm: her cell phone sings out its shrill refrain, and she sees that the source of the rustling is a wolf, a gray wolf prowling by the rear window of the house, then turning and staring in the direction of the ringtone. Donna goes rigid, meeting the animal’s silver gaze, its breath furling its great head in white steam. It’s afraid of you, she thinks, because she saw it in some documentary, along with what the fuck is a wolf doing this far south?

  The girls are approaching now, Barbara suddenly taking the lead and ticking Irene off for dawdling, and Irene giving it look-who’s-talking right back to her sister, and the wolf’s ears prick up at the sound and it does a kind of shuffle, like it’s stretching out its limbs before attacking, perhaps. Donna fiddles with the catch on her clutch, recalling that there has been at least one wolf sighting annually in Dane County for some years now, not that she really needs to reassure herself that this isn’t a fucking optical illusion as her hand closes around the Glock. No safety, she’ll shoot through the bag if she has to, and she’ll hit it, she’s kept her eye in, target shooting at the Oakland Conservation Club once a month.

  Irene shouts, ‘Aunt Donna, Aunt Donna!’

  And the wolf skitters around on the frosty ground like a young colt unsure of its hooves, and throws back its beautiful head and appears to howl, soundlessly, a white plume of sputum sprayed above it like a mane, and then careens unsteadily around the side of the house and darts out in the direction of the highway.

  ‘Aunt Donna!’ Irene says. ‘Tell Babs to stop being such a poo.’

  ‘Babs,’ Barbara says. ‘Puh-lease. Do not call me Babs. Anyway, she’s the poo. What are you looking for
in your bag, Aunt Donna?’

  ‘My cell phone,’ Donna says, truthfully, giggling a little in astonishment and nervous relief at the wolf, at its appearance and its departure.

  ‘I’m getting a cell phone when I’m twelve. I could have had one last birthday, but Mom said either that or a laptop and I chose a laptop,’ Barbara says.

  ‘You’re a lucky girl.’

  ‘Mmmm,’ says Barbara doubtfully. ‘Megan and Susie have both. And Megan has an iPad also.’

  ‘Megan is a snoot,’ Irene says. ‘But her brother Dougie is funny.’

  ‘Dougie is funny. Why do you think Megan is a snoot?’

  ‘She has a la-di-da accent.’

  ‘She can’t help that. Her mom is from England or Europe or somewhere.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So she sounds like her mom.’

  ‘Does her mom have a la-di-da accent too?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s so la-di-da.’

  ‘Law-dee-daw, law-dee-daw.’

  ‘Shut up, Irene, you’re being annoying.’

  ‘Dougie doesn’t have a law-dee-daw accent.’

  ‘Shut up shut up shut up!’

  ‘You’re not allowed say shut up!’

  And the girls walk on through the yard towards the house, bickering cheerfully, as if the wolf had never existed.

  Donna has found her phone. The missed call is yet another from Claire. No voicemail. She should phone her, let her know the kids are OK. She doesn’t want to mess with Danny’s plan though, however half-assed it might prove to be. What did he say? That he’d ‘left her a sign.’ And that if she called, to tell her the kids were OK, that they were with Danny. She doesn’t want to do that, doesn’t want to tell an outright lie, doesn’t actually want to talk to Claire at all. She’s a good mother, that’s clear from the girls, although actually it’s a little dubious, in Donna’s opinion, extrapolating from the children to the parents. What if your parents are idiots? Surely you have the chance to survive that, and to thrive, to become your own person, with no credit to the wretches who gave you life? Isn’t that after all what this country is founded on, the belief that you can triumph over your own circumstances? Yeah right, and in so many cases, isn’t that just the most unrealistic bullshit?

  Donna unlocks the glass door and slides it back, and the girls head upstairs to the shower, tossing their wet swimming things on the floor as they go, their little voices chattering. So does that suddenly make Claire a bad mother? And Donna a cranky aunt? She’s about to yell ‘dump them in the laundry,’ but she doesn’t. Who cares? She assumes their parents yell at them every now and again. They’d have to. She won’t. This is a house where they can come and never be yelled at, and that’s how they’ll remember it. As if the girls can somehow sense the wave of indulgence washing towards them, they stop at the top of the stairs and wave down at her. Sometimes, when she’s with them and they’re talking and laughing and goofing around, brewing up a head of noisy steam, they can seem older, seem close to grown. And then she spots them from afar, and they look so tiny again, so fragile, so vulnerable. She waves back, and finds she has to turn away. How did they get to be so beautiful?

  All right, she has it. She goes to the Settings section of her iPhone, disables her Caller ID and composes the following:

  You must be worried, but whatever you do, don’t worry about the girls: they’re fine.

  She sends the text, thinking there’s a fair chance that Claire will deduce it’s her anyway, that this is a reply to her call, and that she’ll be on the doorstep within the hour. And maybe, whatever Danny thinks he’s doing, and despite the fact she’d like to keep the girls indefinitely, maybe that would be for the best.

  Travellin’ All Alone

  When Claire makes up her mind to go, she can go pretty fast, and here she is already, back in Chicago less than twenty-four hours after she left, at the bar of the Twin Anchors restaurant on Sedgwick Street, waiting for Paul Casey to show up. He’s late, which has always been his way, and not surprising, but much less endearing than it used to be, even last week. Last week. It’s not simply that it feels like such a long time ago, it feels like it happened in an entirely parallel reality, an alternative Claire in an alternative life. And yes, that was the point, she realizes, that was the entire point of the exercise: to be the Claire she hadn’t been, had failed to be, to try it on and see how it felt and … well, there wasn’t much thought beyond that. Wasn’t much reality to it at all. Even as she was walking up the drive of the house last night, before she discovered what had happened, it was click-clacking into her brain, in quickstep with her hangover: it’s very nice to go traveling, but it’s so much nicer to come home. Except when it isn’t.

  She orders a Diet Coke – she’s tempted by the idea of a bracer, a Greyhound would be her preference, vodka and grapefruit juice, breakfast of those at their wits’ end, but she doesn’t think she has the stomach for it – and looks at the text message again.

  You must be worried, but whatever you do, don’t worry about the girls: they’re fine.

  It arrived just after the cops left. They had stayed another half-hour, asking her about the knife, which she said she didn’t recognize, which was true insofar as it was kind of generic and she never used it, but they quickly found the matching set of knives in a block in the kitchen, and asked her again, and she just repeated what she had told them. They knew she wasn’t telling them everything, and Detective Fox in particular began to lay a trip on her about the children and how Claire had to be sure, even for her own peace of mind, that she was doing absolutely everything; in cases like these, the merest minutes, that was the phrase she had used, the merest minutes could be vital. And then they wanted photographs, and she’d managed to find a shot of Gene Peterson she’d kept.

  And then they left and, stricken with guilt, she phoned Donna again. The phone went to message and she hung up, but pretty sharply afterwards, she received this text message.

  You must be worried, but whatever you do, don’t worry about the girls: they’re fine.

  Was it from Donna? The message showed up as Blocked, and she had gotten texts from Donna before that had displayed her ID. She called her sister-in-law again two or three times, but the phone went to voicemail as before. Another mother would have called the cops. Maybe every other mother would have called the cops, showed them the message. Don’t they have some way of figuring out the caller ID even if it is blocked? They go to the phone provider and get the subscriber details. Wouldn’t any mother have done that for her children?

  It might have been Donna. It might have just been a coincidence. It might have been Danny. It most likely was Danny, she thought, and that’s why she wanted the cops out of the picture: because she wants to get to him first.

  ‘Have you considered the possibility that your husband might himself be in danger? Or worse?’ Detective Fox had said to her, as a parting shot. Of course she had, and if he was, it could well be because of what had happened in Chicago back in the day. It could well be her fault. But why would anyone who wanted to harm – or who had, God forbid, already harmed – the children have sent her that message? Don’t worry. The girls are fine. Believe in it, and behave as if it is true. Behave as if – the actor’s credo. Get to Chicago and figure it out.

  After that, it was all pretty brisk: a shower, the last of her clean clothes, the bag she brought with her yesterday. The crime scene team were still all over the yard, photographing and forensicing and whatever else it is they do. She called Dee, and then a cab; when it arrived, and she went outside to meet it, Officer Colby, the uniformed cop who’d found the knife, was waiting at the gate.

  ‘Ms Taylor. You mind telling me where you’re going?’

  ‘I’m going to visit my friend Dee.’

  ‘And can I ask you the purpose of your trip?’

  ‘The purpose of my trip? The purpose of my trip is food, and furniture, that type of thing. Clothes, for that matter. Shampoo. Soap. None of which I have here
. That’s the purpose of my trip.’

  Claire gave Officer Colby Dee’s address and got in the cab.

  Dee lives downtown in a seventh-floor apartment on East Wilson that overlooks Lake Monona. Claire spent the cab ride trying to figure out how to block her own caller ID, having suddenly succumbed to another fit of the jitters over the girls. She decided that if she couldn’t figure out a way to talk to Donna on the phone (and she feared Donna wouldn’t take her calls, since apart from anything else, she didn’t like her) she would have to drive out there again, not such a long trip but a ways out of her way. Finally, she located Show My Caller ID in the Phone section of Settings and turned it off. Standing on the sidewalk outside Dee’s building, Claire called Donna – and this time, Donna picked up.