“Uh …” My dad rubs a hand across his forehead.
Janine intervenes. “No, no, no. No one needs to look at that shoe again except the police.”
“But Mom’s okay, right?”
“Of course she is.” He sounds calm and confident now. And I really want to believe him.
“I was late, you know?” My voice breaks as the guilt fills my throat. I haven’t talked to my mom in months. I’ve been so angry at her. For good reason, but right now that feels beside the point. “Maybe if I’d been there—”
“Cleo, no.” Janine reaches forward to hug me. “Whatever happened doesn’t have anything to do with your being late. Your mom wouldnotwant you blaming yourself. And the last thing she would want is for you to have been in harm’s way, too. Not that we know that anything bad happened to her, either, obviously.” She pulls back to look me in the eye, gripping my upper arms. “I’m sure she’s just fine.”
But we all know that’s not true. There’s blood—on my mom’s shoe, in a puddle on the floor. Something has happened to her. Something terrible.
November 1, 1992
Okay, so the writing club was actually kind of cool, even if the whole thing is only Daitch trying to pretend this place isn’t a hellhole for the next state inspection.
I’d never written anything “creative” in my whole life. And it was nice not to be me for a little while. The tutor guy was right. Being a character is an escape. We were supposed to write a paragraph inspired by the view out the window, which sounded so dumb to me, until I started. Then I got totally sucked in.
“And I search always for the edges of the sky,” that was my last line. The tutor told me on the way out that my paragraph was really good. And then he repeated that line back to me—from memory.
Anyway, it was nice to have a distraction. A whole hour not to think about Silas, who for some reason has gotten fixated on me this week. He searched my room because he said someone reported that I had drugs on me. Took all my underwear out and spread it across the bed. Shaking each pair out while he stared at me with his gross mouth hanging open.
The worst part is that I’m not even mad. All I really feel is scared. And small.
Katrina
SIX DAYS BEFORE
I was fifteen minutes early to meet Doug. Force of habit, the punctuality. Yet another thing about me that started irritating Cleo no end by the time she entered middle school. As if bringing her someplace a few minutes early was something I was doingtoher. It wasn’t cool to be early. Of course, for her entire childhood before that, God forbid we were three seconds late.
When things between us first started going south and I blamed myself, it was my best friend, Lauren, who insisted that Cleo’s resenting me was normal, healthy even. It was her way of individuating, and a sign that I had built a safe-enough place for her to do so.
But I had also done things wrong, hadn’t I? Things I regretted. And not only with the Kyle situation. My mistakes as a mother had been accruing over time, as Cleo grew from little girl to teen and, increasingly, needed me simply to love her, and not to try and fix everything. But instead, I panicked. Because I was excellent at doing. I wasn’t so good at feeling. And I was absolute shit at uncertainty.
I think that’s why I made such an issue about the clothes, and the terrible black makeup, and, God, all the piercings: They were one thing I could still control, at least in theory. And, boy, did I try. Aidan was right about that.
But the worst was when Cleo came to me about losing her virginity. It was as if I was following instructions from aWhat Not to Do as a Momtextbook. I said all the wrong things. Actually, I said awful things. The kind a mother should never say to her daughter. It broke something between us—I’d seen it in Cleo’s eyes.
“Can I get you another?” the bartender asked, pointing toward my empty wineglass.
She was a very pretty brunette with a nose ring, her left forearm covered in vibrant tattoos. She didn’t look much older than Cleo but seemed so much more at ease in her own skin—probably because she had a mom who made her feel loved no matter what she wore or how she chose to express herself.
“Sure, another drink would be great,” I said, checking my phone again.
“This one’s on the house,” the bartender said, winking before putting down the full glass.
My face felt warm. She’d assumed I’d been stood up. At my age, I probably looked like a person that happened to. But Doug had been nothing if not dependable until now, always sending a text if he was running even a few minutes late, calling hours ahead the one time he’d had to cancel.
“Kat?” came a surprised high-pitched female voice behind me.
When I turned, there was Janine, Annie’s mom—chic as always in an emerald green jumpsuit, hair piled elegantly on her head, and absurdly tall heels that she wore like flip-flops. Janine was a stay-at-home mom who managed to be fashionable but also approachable and earthy. She was host of the best Park Slope holiday party and had the chicest Halloween décor. Her equally attractive—but, okay, chilly—husband, Liam, was a dashing British architect who, like Aidan, traveled constantly. Annie and Cleo were born only weeks apart, and so Janine and I, already neighbors, had become fast friends in those bleary-eyed baby months.
But with my maternity leave limited to four months, our friendship always felt like it had an expiration date. I’d also always beenkeenly aware that Janine was much better at being a mother than I was. She handled even those early weeks the way she’d handled everything since—with calm confidence, Pilates abs, and flawless red lipstick. She didn’t seem the least bit bothered that Liam wasn’t there, maybe because she was a full-time mom. Still, I’d felt intimidated by her ease in those days when neither of us was working. Janine wasn’t overwhelmed by taking care of Annie alone. In fact, she seemed … delighted. Meanwhile, I’d been an unqualified mess, precisely as I’d anticipated, which was why I’d never planned to have children in the first place.
It was hard to believe in your maternal instincts when you’d never had a mother.
My parents had disappeared when I was four and a half. After that, I’d bounced from foster home to foster home until I was nine. An “unlucky sequence of events,” according to one social worker, explaining to yet another prospective family why I still had not been adopted by the age of ten. But no one wanted a tween no matter how innocent the explanation, certainly not one who’d been in the system for years.
