Inside are three sheets of red construction paper. One has a circle cut out from the middle with a notch on one side, eerily in the shape of a cartoon bomb.
Chapter Three
Andi
For a few brief moments when I wake up, I have a flicker of relief truly believing it was all a bad dream. I was up most of the night, but exhaustion finally took over after Carson left at 4 a.m. and I drifted off for just a short while, and now I sit here, excruciatingly aware that it was not a dream. It all comes back in fractured, wine-blurred images as I stare numbly at the bedroom wall.
I ran. I saw her lying on the ground with blood down the side of her head and I almost threw up, but I swallowed it down, and as I felt my own blood rushing in my ears and the adrenaline and fear coursing through me, panic took hold and I ran. As fast as I could back to the deck—the hot tub still bubbling away, wineglasses half full on the table, ESPN playing on the outdoor TV—all of it still existing like nothing at all had happened. My head was spinning and I dropped to myknees, trying to hold in the vomit creeping up my esophagus when Carson came back out the sliding glass doors and stopped cold upon seeing me.
I started to say the words. I started to tell him what had happened. I shouted for him to call the police, I thought. But no. I didn’t do that. No words came out. I was paralyzed in fear. Carson rushed to my side, asking what was wrong, and then he saw my colorless face and assumed I was sick.
“God, I hope it’s not food poisoning,” he said and started to help me into the house, into bed, in such a foggy haze, I scarcely remember it at all—I don’t know if he carried me, if I walked, because everything was spinning. Then he brought me saltine crackers and made tea and placed it on the bedside table, and I looked at the ceiling and I said nothing. He kept asking if I was okay and I just nodded, and he said he’d let me rest awhile and went back to the porch, where I heard the cheers of patrons in a football stadium between the TV announcers’ commentary and I just... I couldn’t move. It must be what absolute shock feels like.
I stared at the peppermint tea and the sleeve of crackers on the nightstand, and I heard the rain that the forecast had promised start to tap at the windowpanes, and I thought of Tia’s body on the cold ground and then... what I had just done started to sink in.
Then sometime in the middle of the night, I realized this was all a drunken haze of a memory—a dream. This could not have happened in real life. It wasn’t possible. So I quietly forced myself off the bed and made careful, silent steps out of the bedroom and downstairs. I pulled on a parka from the front hall closet and pushed my feet into old sneakers and then I used my phone flashlight to walk all the way back out to thefence and prove to myself that this was all just one drink too many and not real life.
There was a moment I almost laughed at myself—my stupidity. I probably had one of Carson’s edibles and forgot and that’s why I was so delusional, but when I reached the spot where it happened, I had to suppress a bloodcurdling scream as I saw Tia lying there. Very real. Not a sick nightmare as I was praying she would turn out to be. Her skin was ghostly white, her pale hair rain soaked. My heart ached. “I’m so, so sorry. I’m so sorry,” is all I could mutter over and over.
I stood, paralyzed, a few moments. Then I numbly moved to the utility shed a few yards away. I pulled an old paint drop cloth from a shelf and went to cover her with it.
I stood over her in the black night air and I could barely breathe. The shock of it was still sending ripples through me, my thoughts reeling. I knew I needed to confess, to tell Carson, to call for help, but I didn’t move. I moved back to sit on the floor inside the shed and stared out into the darkness, the dim moonlight reflecting off the cloth covering her body, and it felt almost like my life was slowly playing out before my eyes. Every ruined life that would fall like dominoes in the wake of this when the news hit, my motherless children, a lifetime in prison, the hatred and accusation and press and threats... my kids, my kids, my fucking kids.
I stayed up all night playing the scenarios over and over again in my mind. It was an accident. How could I have known Tia was snooping around the house again? But nobody, not one person, including Carson, would believe this was an accident. He heard the shot I took after he left. He said I should have waited for him and thought I was afraid of guns. I thought he’d be thrilled I was taking an interest, but he madea big deal about it being unsafe. He seemed almost suspicious, or maybe I was reading into it. But he knew I fought with her. He knows she snoops around. He would say he believed me, probably. But would he, deep down? The palpable hatred we had for one another displayed for everyone to witness at each public event and social occasion. There’s no way I would ever, in ten thousand lifetimes, be believed. The fight on her front lawn just hours before with all the neighbors watching. Slutbag, home-wrecker, twat, fuckface, whore. Her name actually pops up on my phone screen as “cow” the rare times she has to call about something to do with the kids.
I can’t change what’s happened.The words repeated over and over in my head. What would become of me if I told? More importantly, what would happen to my kids? Their lives would be torn apart.
Not just because they’ll have a murderer for a mother, whom they will spend their weekends visiting in prison, but their shattered futures, the way they’ll be treated by everyone for the rest of their lives, the irreversible damage it will cause to the two precious babies that it’s my job to protect—my only job.
My husband and my own mother—would they ever really believe me? Would eventheythink, somewhere in the back of their minds, that this might not have been an accident, no matter how much I implore them to understand that it was? As my mother struggles with a third resurgence of breast cancer, she’ll have to wonder if her daughter is a killer—she’ll have to go to her grave with this question in her consciousness, even if she says she believes me. And after beating cancer twice, would learning about this, going through a trial and police questioning, all the inevitable press coverage—would itput her over the edge with no chance of recovery? Goddammit. What have I done to my family?
These thoughts looped through my head as I sat still in the darkness all night, the rise and fall of Carson’s breathing next to me. The whipping wind picked up, howling through the trees, and as the thoughts and all the scenarios played through, I came to my senses. I resolved to tell Carson and call the police. Yes. Of course I had to. But then the flashes started over again: my kids losing their childhood and being the children of a murderer; my mother in hospice; Ray hating me even more than he does now and poisoning the kids against me—the whole world forever thinking that I’m a killer. All of it crumbling, one destroyed life, then another, then another. No.
It’s private property. We have a legal right to shoot cans within our acreage. I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I can tell them that, right? Maybe they would believe it. These conflicting thoughts just keep fighting one another—keep looping and looping, and tugging back and forth, until hours have gone by and now it’s dawn and the sun is barely visible above the tree line as the rain falls in torrents.
And now it’s too late, isn’t it? Even if I wanted to tell, I have waited so long that now I am guilty no matter what. They’ll know when she died. I watch TV; I get what forensics is capable of. They’ll know how long it took me to call and since they already would certainly not have believed my story, now... waiting has hammered the last nail in my coffin.
I can’t change what has happened. But I can change what happens next, so that’s it. What other choice am I left with? No one can ever know.
There’s a knock on the front door that jolts me out of my thoughts so hard, I leap to my feet and suppress a scream. Ihold my racing heart as I quickly take inventory of how I must look. Guilty. Of something, I’m sure. What if it’s the police? What if they know? My eyes are swollen and my face is ghostly pale. I’m hungover on top of it all... and just then, before I can do anything at all, I hear the front door dead bolt click open.
I race to the front door just in time for Dez to fly past me with a bag of McDonald’s in his hand.
“Hi, Mom!” he says, and then I hear him take the stairs two at a time up to his room. The door slams. I look at Ray standing in the door frame.
“I’ve been calling you all goddamn morning,” he says. His eyes are bloodshot and his face is crumpled and distorted. He looks me up and down.
“Well, you look like shit. I guess that explains it. You must have tied one on last night. Great. Of course you did. Right when you’re needed, you’re useless,” he says, and in all the years and arguments and extremely one-sided and tumultuous divorce, he’s never talked to me like that.
“What?” is all I manage.
“I need you to keep the kids this week. Tia is... I don’t know. She didn’t come home last night. She’s missing. Like actually fucking missing,” he says, and his voice breaks. He runs his hands through his hair and takes a deep breath.
“I texted you a dozen times,” he said.
“I...” I stumble over my words. I have to be careful, because I am very aware of how I look right now and that what I say in this moment matters.
“My phone was on ‘do not disturb.’ I forgot to switch it back,” I say, and Ray glances past me to the glass doors leading out to the deck, where the wine bottles still sit and the coveris off the hot tub. He blushes. Even in a moment like this and even though he’s the one who cheated, any slight suggestion of me and Carson being intimate still somehow gives him a reaction after all this time. His chest gets red and blotchy and he changes the subject.
