“How would Berg know,” Will asks angrily, “if Alice was the suicide type?” It isn’t like Will to get angry. But this is his sister we’re talking about. His niece. His flesh and blood.
“I don’t trust Imogen,” I admit. “She scares me,” I say again.
“Listen to yourself, Sadie,” Will says. “First you accuse Imogen of taking our knife. Now you’re saying she killed Alice.” Will is too worked up to spell the words out, though he mouths them for Tate’s benefit. “You’re all over the place. I know she hasn’t exactly been welcoming, but she’s done nothing to lead me to believe she’s capable of murder,” he says, seemingly having already forgotten about the writing on my car window just the other day.Die.
“Are you really suggesting that this was a murder made to look like a suicide?” he asks, disbelieving.
Before I can reply, Tate again begs, “Please, Mommy, play with me.” My eyes drop to his, and they look so sad, my heart aches.
“All right, Tate,” I tell him, feeling guilty that Will and I are going on like this, ignoring him. “What do you want to play?” I ask him, voice softening though my insides are still in a tizzy. “Do you want to play charades, or a board game?”
He tugs hard on my hand and is chanting, “Statue game, statue game!”
The wrenching on my hand has begun to hurt. It’s wearing on my nerves, because not only is he pulling on my hand, hurting me, but he’s trying to turn my body, to make it go ways it doesn’t want to go. It’s subliminal, the way I yank my hand suddenly away, holding it above my head, out of reach of his. I don’t mean to do it. But there’s an immediacy to it. So much so that Tate flinches like he’s been slapped.
“Please, Mommy,” Tate begs, eyes suddenly sad as he stands before me and leaps for my hand. I try to be patient, I really do, but my mind is whirling in a dozen different directions and I don’t know what Tate means by this statue game. He’s begun to cry. Not a real cry but crocodile tears, which wear on me even more.
That’s when I catch sight of the doll I kicked aside over an hour ago. Her limp body is pressed against the wall. “Put your toys away and then we’ll play,” I tell him, and he asks, “What toys?”
“Your doll, Tate,” I say, losing patience. “Right there,” I tell him, motioning to the floppy doll with her frizzy hair and marble-like eyes. She lies on her side, dress torn along a seam, one shoe missing.
Tate’s look is leery. “It’s notmine,” he says, as if this is something I should know. But of course it’s his—it’s not like any of the rest of us still play with toys—and my first thought is that Tate is embarrassed for having been caught playing with a doll.
“Put it away,” I say, and Tate comes back with a quintessential childish reply.
“You putyourdoll away,” he says, hands on hips, tongue thrust out at me. It startles me. It’s not like Tate to act this way. Tate is my good boy, the kind and obedient one. I wonder what’s gotten into him.
But before I can answer, Will does so for me. “Tate,” he says, voice stern. “Do as your mother says and put your toy away. Right now,” he says, “or your mother won’t play with you.”
Having no choice, Tate picks the doll up by a single leg and carries her upside down to his bedroom. Through the floors, I hear the thump of her plastic head hitting the hardwood.
When he returns, Tate chants, “Statue game, statue game,” over and over again until I’m forced to admit that I don’t know what this statue game is. That I’ve never played it before, that I’ve never heard of it.
It’s then that he snaps and calls me a liar. “Mommy is a liar!”is what he screams, taking my breath away. He says, “Yes, you do!” as his crocodile tears turn to real tears. “You do know what it is, you liar.”
I should reprimand him, I know. But I’m speechless and stunned. For the next few seconds, I can’t find the words to speak as Tate scampers from the room, bare feet sliding on the wooden floors. Before I can catch my breath, he’s gone. In the next room, I hear his body drop to the ground. He’s thrown himself down somewhere, as limp as the doll. I do nothing.
Will steps closer, his hand brushing the hair from my eyes. I close my eyes and lean into his touch. “Maybe a warm bath would help you relax?” he suggests, and it’s only then that I remember I haven’t showered today. That instead I’m wet through from the run in the rain. My clothes, my hair have yet to completely dry. There’s a smell to me. It’s not a good one.
“Take your time,” Will tells me. “Tate and I will be fine. I’ll take care of this,” he says, and I feel grateful for that. That Will will clean up this mess I’ve made with Tate. By the time I return from my bath, everything will be as good as new.
On the way upstairs I call back to Tate that we’ll play something just as soon as I’m through. “Okay, buddy?” I ask, leaning over the banister where I see him, body thrown across the arm of the sofa, tears seeping into the marigold fabric. If he hears me, he makes no reply.
Beneath my feet, the steps creak. Upstairs in the hall, I find the sheets stripped from the beds, just where I left them. I’ll replace them later, put them back on the beds just as dirty as they were when I took them off.
The darkness of the outside world seeps into the home, making it hard to believe it’s not the middle of the night. I flip a light in the hallway on, but then just as quickly turn it off, on the off chance that someone is standing in the street, staring through the windows at Will, Tate and me.
MOUSE
Not long after they brought Bert the guinea pig home, he started getting fat. So fat that he could barely move. He spent his days laid out, flat on his big belly like a parachute. Her father and Fake Mom told Mouse she was feeding him too many carrots. That was why he was getting fat. But Mouse couldn’t help herself. Bert loved those carrots. He made a squealing sound every time Mouse brought him some. Even though she knew she shouldn’t, she kept on feeding him the carrots.
But then one day, Bert gave birth to babies. That was how Mouse knew that Bert wasn’t a boy after all, but that he was a girl, because she knew enough to know that boys don’t have babies. Those babies must have already been inside Bert when they got her from the pet store. Mouse wasn’t sure how to take care of guinea pig babies, but it didn’t matter because none of those babies survived. Not a single one.
Mouse cried. She didn’t like to see anything get hurt. She didn’t like to see anything die.
Mouse told her real mom what happened to Bert’s babies. She told her what those babies looked like when they were born and how hard it was for Bert to get those babies out of her insides. She asked her mother how those babies got inside of Bert, but Mouse’s real mom didn’t say. She asked her father, too. He told her he’d tell her another day, when she was older. But Mouse didn’t want to know another day. She wanted to know that day.
Fake Mom told her that it was probably Bert’s fault those babies died, because Bert didn’t take care of them like a good mom should. But Mouse’s father said to her in private that it wasn’t really Bert’s fault, because Bert probably just didn’t know any better because she had never been a mom before. And sometimes these things happen for no reason at all.
