“Yes, of course, but there are no other reasons,” Matthew said. Yet, his voice sounded weak to him and his heart was going so fast he felt like he might faint.
“Good to know,” the male officer said, sounding entirely unconvinced. The two cops stood.
“We’ll let ourselves out,” said the woman, and Matthew and Tara watched as they walked stiffly to the front door and shut it behind them.
Matthew popped out of his chair and went over to kneel in front of Tara and give her a hug. She started to cry and was shaking.
“What is happening, Tara? This can’t be real, can it?”
“What if they trace things? What then, Matthew, what then? Oh my God, I even googled ‘how to kill a coworker.’ Oh my God, no,” she sobbed. “What do we do?”
“I don’t know,” he replied, but the truth was Matthew could almost feel the blood on his hands.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Hope
There was blood on Faith’s hands, and on mine, for what happened to Charity. Not literal blood, of course. We didn’t hurt our little sister. Faith and I loved Charity. She was the sweetest little thing in her three years, chubby cheeked and with curly strawberry-blond hair. Mom sometimes called her “my little Shirley Temple.”
Faith and I might have been jealous of Charity, but she had another quality that we found endearing: Charity was slow to learn to talk, and we all tried to help her.
“Milk,” we would say, pointing at the container in the fridge.
“Gah,” she would reply.
“Cat,” we would say pointing at Bo, our cat.
“Bah,” she would reply.
“No, cat like aK,ka-ka-ka-cat,” we would reply.
“Fah” would be her answer.
Somehow her struggles with words made her more likable to us, more human, and although Mom fretted about it constantly, Faith and I enjoyed the fact that Charity, clearly the cutest of the three of us, was not perfect. And we liked being the teachers.We set up a “word school” and took turns being the instructor, with an easel and markers Mom had given us for Christmas. The reward for Charity if she got close to the correct pronunciation was a lollipop, grape being her favorite flavor.
“Today we’ll learn the letterM,” we would say. “Mama, moon, milk, money. Say ‘moon,’ Charity.”
And she might grunt out something like “Moo” if we were lucky. More often it would be completely different, like “Bubby,” and we’d crack up laughing.
Mom later told me she was considering whether to get Charity a speech therapist but never got the chance.
I was ten and Faith eight when Charity died, but I still remember every detail of that day. It was sunny but windy on the beach along Lake Michigan, an area known for big sand dunes. There was the popular part of the beach, with a boardwalk and tourists and ice cream shops, and then there was the quiet part, much farther up toward the trees and state park that bordered this stretch. Dad preferred the quieter spot, even though there was no lifeguard. Sometimes other people were up there, and sometimes it felt like our own little beach.
Faith, Charity, and I would spend hours building sandcastles, all of them with moats that we’d fill with water carried in buckets from the lake. But the sand would soak up the water so quickly we were constantly sending poor little Charity back down to the water’s edge for more buckets. She was our water runner. Faith and I were the architects of the elaborate castles we were creating, adding twigs and rocks for decorations. Lake Michigan had no true seashells, only tiny ones for snails and black ones for mussels. But there were plenty of smooth gray rocks, and if we ever found sea glass we thought we’d hit the jackpot.
I can still see little Charity, her swim diaper bulging under apurple one-piece, struggling with the weight of the red plastic bucket in her hand. She wanted to please her sisters, I could tell that even at my age, and we used it to our advantage, sending her back and forth so many times her tiny feet wore a rut into the sand.
Mom and Dad sat in lawn chairs back by our towels, Mom with a floppy sun hat and Dad with dark sunglasses. They even held hands at one point. I remember that clearly because it was so unusual. I never saw them have any kind of affection for each other before or after that, in public or in the privacy of our home. This was before the “disobey box” came to be, before Dad’s neat-freakiness soared to a manic level, before Faith brought home the rain gauge. This was when Dad was still not the happiest person, still going to the shooting range most weekends, still on us about our grades and about keeping the house clean, but before his rage hit new heights.
Thinking back, those few hours on the beach before the incident might have been the happiest we ever were as a family.
And then Faith and I had to ruin it. Well, one of us more than the other.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Olivia
June 3
