So what happened?
CM:
My mom. She came along and ruined what Charlie and I had. She ruins everything.
Cleo
THREE HOURS GONE
The first time I finally stood up to my mom I was ten. It was the summer before fifth grade, and we were at the beach at Jacob Riis Park. My mom was standing next to me at the water’s edge, the sand damp and cool under our feet, my dad back up at the umbrella with Annie and Janine, who’d tagged along with us as usual.
I could swim in a pool fine, but I’d been terrified of the ocean ever since I’d sprinted in headlong when I was little and gotten knocked out by a wave. A lifeguard had performed CPR on me. To this day, I remember it only in flashes—the burn of the water in my lungs, the pain of my skin being torn by shells and stones, the terror.
“How about we try that swim now?” my mom suggested, nudging me for thesecondtime that day. For years, she’d been harassing me about swimming in the ocean, basically every time we’d been to the beach since my accident. Of course, she was an annoyingly strong open-water swimmer, and the way she obsessed about the whole thing made me want to scream.
But that day I’d finally had it. “Can you shut the hell up, please, like for once? Shut up and think about what I want? Instead of trying to control everything!”
She looked like I’d slapped her. And I was glad.
“Cleo, that’s not—”
“You’re supposed to love me no matter what, you know.”
And then I stormed off, away from the waves, waiting for guilt that never came. The truth is, I still feel like I was right that day. My mom was always pushing me to be someone different. When all I wanted was for her to love me as I was.
For an hour we’ve been sitting in the living room, watching the police work. They’ve looked around, taken pictures, swabbed for DNA, lifted fingerprints—from the front door, from the unbroken glass on the kitchen island. The water in that glass is still cold, a wet ring underneath. No coaster. From the living room couch, I stare at the glass. Whoever left it there, it was definitelynotmy mom. She’d never leave a ring on that Carrara marble.
“We’ll run fingerprints and any DNA we’ve found, but I’m not optimistic,” says Detective Wilson, the one in charge. “Thank you for your samples. It will help with exclusion.”
She’s short and solidly built, neatly dressed in trim navy slacks and a blue button-down, the sleeves cuffed carefully. She’s pretty, too, with large, deep-set eyes, dark brown skin, a small tattoo on the inside of her right wrist, another on her left forearm, barely visible beneath her sleeve. She carries a fancy pen and a yellow-lined notebook, spiral-bound at the top, and her hair is in a high ponytail, which highlights a delicate jawline and great cheekbones. She’s no bullshit in the way you’d expect from a Brooklyn cop; not especially friendly, either. I like her immediately.
“Not optimistic?” my dad asks. “What does that mean?”
He gestures with his favorite mug. It saysScreams Internally,with a little cartoon of a howling Earth. My dad ordered a case of them last year to give out to random friends or funders or whoever if conversation turns to his environmental documentaries. Of course, manufacturing and shipping the mugs leaves a larger carbon footprint than gifting one could ever fill. I’ve neverpointed that out, though. My dad is big on heart, light on logic. But he means well.
“I’m sorry—I wasn’t referring to your wife’s well-being.” Wilson shakes her head. “I meant not optimistic with respect to the fingerprints on the door. There’s no doubt we’ll find dozens. Every delivery guy, service person, family friend who’s been here. But we’ll have no idea when any of the prints were left, so they’re next to useless. Now the glass is a different story …” She points at it. “That’s got temporal relevance. It was used around the time of whatever happened here. If your wife had a guest and he or she used that glass, that’s somebody we want to talk to … Of course, that person would also need to have prints or DNA in the system for an ID to be possible. Lots of bad people haven’t been caught.”
