“It’s terrible,” Ines chimes in, her tone suggesting that it isn’t terrible so much as titillating. Ines was a studio exec before she had twin boys, now in kindergarten. Followed by another boy, Javier, when they tried for a girl.If they’d come to me,Gabe says every time we see her wrangling three rambunctious boys,I would have made sure it was a girl.Ines was thirty-eight when she had the twins, so Gabe assumes she must have gone to someone. His clinic, Longevity Fertility, specializes in women of advanced maternal age and has the highest successful birth rate on the West Coast. There are some thirty-eight-year-old women who can conceive on their own, I often remind him. When all you see is couplesstruggling with fertility, particularlyolderwomen, you forget that the human species has existed this long because it’s capable of reproducing on its own.
“Terrible,” Erin chimes in. Erin’s the youngest of us mothers, though still over thirty. How she and her musician husband afford the canals remains a mystery. I’m not sure she ever worked, even before she had her daughter, Freddie.
“I saw the medical examiner collecting evidence from her body,” Erin continues, glancing over at Freddie, who’s strapped into the baby swing beside Summer’s. “I’m pretty sure that means something.”
Her?I thought it was a man, although I have no idea why. Maybe it felt better to assume a person drunk or high enough to stumble into the canals was a man.
“You think she was murdered?” Ines asks loudly, then clamps her hand over her mouth.
Murdered? Reflexively, I search for Jasper. He’s too far away to hear us. He’s on a loop: toddle up the stairs, down the slide, up the stairs again. My head spins in the way I’ve come to identify as low blood pressure. Although pregnancy typically raises your blood pressure, mine is naturally low, and the drop now makes me dizzy.
“They always send a medical examiner when someone dies.” Claire walks over to the swings to give Summer and Freddie a push. When she returns to our huddle, Claire nudges Erin. “You watch too muchCSI.”
Claire’s words do little to reassure me. Could someone—a woman—really have been murdered right outside my home? I lean against the fence, steadying my breath.
“T., you okay?” Claire asks. I’m bent over, doing yogic breaths. The mothers swivel in unison.
“Are you having contractions?” The uptick in Ines’s voice betrays her excitement. First a murder, now a labor at the playground? It’s turning out to be an exciting Wednesday.
I rub the straining ligaments beneath my belly, the sharp cramps not entirely unlike contractions. “Just low blood pressure.”
“Come. Sit.” Claire guides me to the curb beneath the ficus tree. It wasn’t until I was pregnant and needed a seat that I realized the park doesn’t have a bench. Nothing on the canals is designed for families, not even the playground.
I remain seated after my blood pressure has stabilized, distancing myself from my friends’ conversation, which they manage to sustain despite having no concrete information, just conjectures about who she was, who was after her, how she might have been killed. Claire occasionally tells them to settle down, clearly more amused than troubled by their wild speculations. This woman, whoever she was, isn’t real to them. She isn’t real to me either. She can’t be. If I begin to think of her as a daughter or a mother or both, I’ll grow breathless and dizzy again. It’s too much. Maybe it’s too much for the other mothers too. Maybe their gossip isn’t insensitive. Maybe it’s self-protective.
We stay at the playground until Jasper starts rubbing his eyes, involuntarily admitting that he’s ready for his morning nap. Surely the police are gone by now. Surely it’s safe to go home.Safe.My choice of word startles me.
Although the park is only two blocks from our house, it’s long enough for Jasper to fall asleep and ruin his nap. I push him quickly, prompting shooting twinges along my left side, and quiz him on the colors of the clouds, the flowers, the houses. Anything to keep him awake. The walkways are as empty as usual on a gray Wednesday morning in early June. I don’t have to play chicken with anyone.
Up ahead, two cops guide traffic along the bridge. The crowd has vanished. A single officer guards the police tape along the saltbushes, the empty canal below.
I walk up to the officer and ask him what happened. He sees my stomach, then glances quickly at Jasper, trying to gauge my level of interest.
“We live here.” I point to our home. This gets his attention.
“Has my partner spoken to you?” His name tag readsS. Gonzales, and his badge lists him as an LAPD officer but not a detective. Thatmust be a good sign, right? He’d be a detective if it was a murder. For the first time, I wish I watched more cop shows.
“About what?”
“Just a routine investigation. We’re determining whether anyone in the area saw anything.”
Jasper points at the officer’s badge. “Shine. Shine.”
The cop nods to my son before he reaches into his pocket for a notepad. “Can you tell me your name and address?”
“Sure. It’s Tessa Irons. We live here at 225 Linnie Canal.”
Officer Gonzales asks me about the last twenty-four hours, if we saw or heard anything unusual. As I repeat my day back to him, I can hear how incredibly dull my life sounds. When it’s clear to him we don’t know anything, he asks if we have cameras on our property.
“Just a Ring on the front door.” I point toward the alley on the opposite side of our house. While our mailing address is along the canal, the front door faces the alley, Court D. Amazon drivers get confused all the time. Half the reason we know our neighbors is because we’re constantly trading packages.
“What about there?” He points to the camera above our French doors.
“It isn’t connected.”
During the pandemic, many of the houses along the canals were empty as people retreated to their second homes. The tourists were few, and break-ins were at an all-time high. In an anxious moment, I bought a camera for our patio. Gabe got as far as putting it up but never linked it to the internet. Then, as the break-ins declined and the tourists returned, it never became a priority. The presence of the camera seemed deterrent enough.
“We’ll need a copy of the footage from your Ring camera. You can email it to me.” He reaches into his pocket, then hands me his card.
