A/N: No thoughts on chapter 46, eh? Hmm, okay, hopefully its conclusion generates more interest! Trigger warning for some graphic images and references to sexual assault. Enjoy.
Chapter 47.
Tinderbox
. . .
"Get everything taken care of?" Amanda asked when they met up with her by the water fountain, where she stood in the alert, wide-legged stance of a secret service agent. She lifted the diaper bag off Olivia's shoulder and onto her own before any objections could be made. Then she scooped up Tilly, keeping her skirt tucked modestly around her lap, as if she sensed Olivia's heart skip a beat at the thought of it exposing anything underneath.
"Um, yeah. We did. I had to improvise with one of Sammie's swim diapers, though. It's not very secure." Olivia reached over to fuss with Tilly's skirt, smoothing it against her downy legs, trying to iron out the crinkled hem. Amanda's hand closed around hers, stilling the restless motion, and she forced a wan smile. Her nervous hands were starting to give her away again, as they had in the Mangler aftermath, when she practically had to sit on them to make them behave. It had taken so long to get past all that, and here she was again, fighting the same tics and urges, but magnified by about a hundred. "I should take her home and get her changed into something more appropriate."
"Oh, I don't think we need to go that far, do we? Long as she doesn't go hanging upside down like a little fruit bat, nothing'll show." Amanda spread her palm open on Tilly's belly and gave it a jiggle. "And we'll be right here to watch her. She should be fine."
"We were right here watching her when the boys assault— taunted her too. Didn't stop them. I'm not comfortable letting her play without some kind of pants or shorts or something."
"Maybe Bella's got some backups with her. I can ask. Save you having to schlep all the way back to the apartment. And there's no sense in taking the birthday girl away from her party, huh, Tillster? It's her party, she can cry if she wants to, cry if she wants to, cry if she wants to." Amanda crooned the old Lesley Gore tune in her cute, twangy voice, bopping along with Tilly on her hip, red curls dancing like a flame in the sunshine. She pressed her forehead to the little girl's and cocked her head back and forth, making them both go cross eyed to look at each other. "You would cry too, if it happened to you. Ba ba ba ba bum, da da da da."
It did happen to me too, Olivia wanted to say. All of it. Over and over and over. Just like that fucking song, crying crying crying forever when would it ever stop why couldn't they just leave her—
"I'm not putting someone else's underwear on my child," she said, several octaves higher than intended. Everything seemed to come out shrill and panicked now whenever she spoke with any sort of emotion. Yet another thing she had lost control of, and it only increased her frustration and anxiety each time it happened. "She needs her own underwear and her own pants, Amanda. She shouldn't be out there in a dress and swimmers that don't even fit. Not with so many people around."
Any one of them a pervert. They were everywhere and you couldn't stop them.
"Okay," Amanda said quickly, brow red from rubbing against Tilly's and furrowed in concern. She took some deep breaths and exhaled slowly, their shorthand signal that Olivia should do the same. Sure enough, when she checked her respiration, she found it rapid and shallow, her chest heaving as if she'd just finished doing wind sprints. "Okay. You're right. She should have something on under the dress. How 'bout you stay here with her on the blanket, and I run home to grab some more undies and shorts? What do you think, Tilly girl, wanna hang out in Mommy's lap for a bit?"
It was a reasonable solution, and Olivia knew she should agree to it—would have in the Before times—but irrationality had taken over, her daughter's need for appropriate clothing (and the importance of Olivia being the one to give it to her) almost as dire as a medical emergency. They didn't care if you were wearing a skirt or yoga pants, they would tear into your ass anyway, but that didn't mean you offered your child up to them in her little pink party dress.
Fingers wedged in her mouth, Tilly gazed between Amanda and Olivia with uncertainty. She had never been much of a thumb-sucker, and she wasn't very shy, beyond the average four-year-old's stage fright in new situations, but right then she looked nearly fretful. "Umm, I wanna get my clothes with Mommy. These ones are pinchy. You can come too, Mama."
Any triumph Olivia might have felt about Tilly siding with her was overshadowed by Amanda's defeated sigh and their daughters uneasiness at choosing between them. It was an awful spot to put either of them in, and she silently chastised herself all the way back to the blanket, wishing she had stuck to her initial plan to stay home. They would have been better off without her there to spoil all the fun. Her slice of cake was still where she had left it, another reminder of what a party pooper she was, what a failure. She barely heard the explanation Amanda gave Daphne and Jules, who had arrived moments after the playground brawl, about where they were off to.
"—something dry. You guys mind watching the other kids while I take them back to the apartment?"
"Can I go, Ma?" Noah interrupted. Someone had given him a party napkin for his split lip, creating the unfortunate impression that Peppa was bleeding like, what else, a stuck pig. It was partly wadded in his fist, a cake fork in the other. His battle wound had not affected his appetite in the least, the plate in front of him reduced to a faint dusting of crumbs. "That way you can stay here with Jesse and the baby? I'll watch out for them real good."
"I dunno, son. I think it's best if I go with them. You should probably stay here and recuperate until I can get back and have a talk with you about using your words instead of your fists." Amanda's expression may have been subdued, but Olivia saw a glimmer of pride in her vivid blue eyes. She fretted over the boy's sensitivity sometimes—would defend it with the ferocity of a lioness protecting her cub, if need be—and whether or not he could stand up for himself. Today he had taken on two bigger, meaner boys all on his own to defend his little sister's honor: yeah, he was going to be okay.
"I can talk to him about that on the drive," Olivia said, keeping her voice as low and smooth as possible. No need to make it obvious how eager she was to escape the park, how each childish shriek or shout went through her like a buzzsaw, how she vibrated inside her skin as if she were trapped in some invisible energy field. "It's better if one of us stays here for the girls, anyway. In case Jesse needs her Epi or Sammie starts to fuss. And yes, I am sure."
She regretted not letting Amanda ask, but if she heard the question one more time she was afraid she might scream. And it appeared to work; Amanda regarded her long and hard before finally granting a reluctant nod. "Okay. But if anything—and I mean anything—comes up, you call me immediately. And you take Gigi too. No arguments." Tongue curled behind her bottom teeth, she emitted a short, piercing whistle, top teeth set as if she were smiling, and brought the dogs wagging and clomping over.
"No arguments," Olivia agreed. She was so anxious to leave, she didn't even care that Amanda was issuing orders or treating her like she couldn't handle a simple trip back to their apartment on her own. Challenging her wife would just keep her there longer, and it was true—she was a basket case who probably didn't deserve to be in charge of two young children and a dog. But she couldn't be alone, either. Being alone was worse than having too many eyes on her, which she felt now from the group on the blanket, from her son, from her daughter. It would be less intrusive in the rearview mirror, their curiosity (What's wrong with Mommy? flashed through her mind like the sensationalized title on a schlocky noir poster: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?) contained to the backseat.
. . .
Or so she believed. Noah, her quietest, most pensive child, became a chatterbox on the way home. She suspected he was compensating for the scuffle, hoping to steer her away from the topic altogether, but the running commentary set her nerves on edge all the same. Why were they doing construction on this street again? Wouldn't it have been easier to walk back to the apartment? Or take a taxi? Or the subway? Could he have another piece of cake when they returned to the park? Were dogs allowed to have cake if it wasn't chocolate?
"I bet Gigi would take a big ol' bite out of Peppa Pig," he said in singsong, waggling his fingers ghoulishly across the backseat at his little sister. "That stupid pink snout. She'd be going around oinking like this." He made a muted snuffling noise through his nostrils that was about as accurate an impression of a snoutless pig as you would imagine.
"Nooo," squealed Tilly at a pitch too high to be artificial. She hadn't heard the good nature that was usually present in her brother's teasing, and frankly, neither had Olivia.
"Noah! Stop picking on your sister! And what have I told you about using that word?" Olivia spoke so sharply that both children's heads, and Gigi's, snapped to attention. She tried to soften her tone, but the damage was done. Matilda looked like she might cry again. "Tell her you were just kidding about Peppa. And no more screaming, Tilly, okay sweetie? Mommy's driving."
"Ma yells when she drives," said Noah.
"Yes, well." Olivia left it at that, shooting him a warning look in the mirror. "Apologize, please."
The boy heaved a tragic sigh and leaned across Gigi to pat Matilda's arm on the armrest of her car seat. His hand slid down to her wrist and held it lightly, almost daintily. "Sorry, Tilly. I didn't mean it about Peppa Pig. Gigi would never bite her nose. I shouldn't have called it stupid."
"That's okay, bubba. Dogs don't eat tartoons anyway."
Tartoons. Olivia nearly burst into tears at the childish pronunciation of cartoons, though it was the innocence and the glimpse of her children's reflections, so solemn and sincere, that really got to her. She wanted to pull the vehicle over and reach around to gather them into a fierce hug, tell them how dear they were to her, how precious, but she kept it on the road and kept going. That was all she could do—stay the course, keep going, breathe.
"Feel like telling me what's going on, sweetheart?" she asked, catching Noah's eye in the mirror again.
A small pout settled on his features, which had always been girlishly pretty beneath all those curls. He was getting that lean boy look now, the soft edges becoming refined, hardened in a way that made her slightly uneasy—it was the shorter hair, it had to be—though she'd never admit to it. God, it was all happening so fast. Soon he would be decidedly male, with all the characteristics and connotations that entailed. Long ago she had given up worrying about the genes passed down by his biological father, but what about the millions of years of evolution that had honed men's DNA down to a brutal, deadly sharp point? She couldn't undo what was hardwired into him.
No one could.
When he didn't attempt an answer, Olivia continued: "It's not like you to start fights and pick on your sister. I know . . . I know things have been a little tough lately, with Mommy being injured and . . . and sad, and both your ma and I at home 24/7, but sweetie, you can't take it out on others. It's never okay to hurt people, no matter how upset you're feeling. You should have come to me or Mama when those boys were harassing Tilly. We would have straightened it out."
Amanda would have. Olivia was fairly certain she would have clammed up and let the boys go with a weak, ineffectual warning, had she gotten her lips to move at all. That older boy frightened her if she were to be perfectly honest. Something about his malicious tone and demeanor reminded her of The Kid. Liam Sandberg. Sandman Junior. The most enthusiastic of her rapists.
"What?" she asked, not because she had blanked out again, but because Noah had mumbled his answer.
"I said I wasn't upset." He drew out the pause that followed, his voice dropping back down to a barely audible volume. "I was mad. And scared. I thought they were going to hurt Tilly. I thought . . . "
Olivia strained to hear the rest, and when she did catch the tail end, it required every bit of self-control she possessed not to slam on her breaks in the middle of West Street and turn to gape in horror at him in the backseat.
"I thought they were going to rape her."
It was something very like a near-death experience, hearing those words come out of her child's mouth. Time slowed down, even as images flashed in front of her with dizzying speed—not images of her life, but of sexual assaults. The majority were hers, but her mother's rape was there, strung together in vivid detail by the recording she had listened to obsessively, the case notes, and her imagination (it must have been like looking up from your own grave, looking up at the city from a landing below street level while a stranger was on top of you); Amanda's assault by Charles Patton came into view too, and though she had tried desperately not to imagine it based on what she knew, she could still smell the whiskey, feel the throbbing in her head from where he bashed it against the headboard, see the hot blood on her fingertips; whether it was real or not, she saw Dana Lewis's rape, which had played over and over in her head while she investigated it and then sat through the woman's testimony.
dark sideburns no face Amanda you know I don't take no for an answer a velvet throat bet yours is real pretty just like your mouth (red velvet) please God don't let him climb on top of me again
She saw them all. Felt them creeping up her skin like the legs of poisonous insects—thousands of them—ready to overwhelm her, filling her eyes, nose, mouth, until she was no longer visible, just a dark squirming cloud of bugs.
Her boy knew about rape.
"Wha-what?" she asked, too shaky to collect her thoughts and put them into a coherent sentence. "Where did you— why would— who told you about . . . what that means? Rrr—" The word died on her tongue, sounding like a breathy cough: rape.
"Nobody. I asked Aunt Daph about it a while ago, but she wouldn't tell me. She said you and Ma probably want to wait till I'm older to talk about it." Noah gazed earnestly into the mirror as he spoke, his eyes full of questions. If they were darker it might be easier to ignore, but there was no mistaking that inquisitive sparkle in his light blue eyes. "I know it's really bad and boys do it to hurt girls. I'm not sure how. But those guys were saying bad things and I thought they would do something bad like that to Tilly, too. The bigger one said he should put his pee-pee on her and see how she likes it."
Olivia gasped, the
(iron bar?)
steering wheel in a death grip in her white-knuckled fists. She could tell by the inflection and his use of the word "pee-pee," which he had never called the action or his genitals, even as a toddler, that he was paraphrasing, but the thought of another child saying something so sick in front of her children was appalling. She hoped to God the kid hadn't been referring to his penis (of course he had), although threatening to urinate on her four-year-old daughter wasn't much better.
"Jesus. Oh, lovies, I'm so sorry. No one should ever say things like that to you. That is totally inappropriate and completely unacceptable." Olivia had to take a moment to catch her breath; she was panting like the dogs after a run with Amanda. She almost missed her turn onto the street their building was on, and had to cut the wheel sharply to make it. A symphony of car horns heralded her impromptu exit, but her glance into the rearview was for Noah alone. "It's still not okay to resort to violence, unless you're defending yourself or someone else from a physical attack. Remember that. But I can understand now why you thought you had to protect your little sister. And I'm proud of you for that. You should always look out for her."
A small crooked smile inched up the corner of Noah's mouth, and he ducked his head shyly this time, instead of in shame. He nodded his agreement.
"Me too?" Tilly asked.
"You too, little love. You should always look out for your big bubby and sissy, and Sammie too. You guys are siblings and that's something really special. Not everyone has that. Try to always have each other's backs, okay?" Olivia was still rattled from the R-word—her hands were clammy, throat dry—and she wanted to know how and where her son had picked it up, but she couldn't have that discussion while driving. Not with Matilda listening in, wide-eyed and absorbing everything; not with cars on every side of her waiting to
(rape)
pass when she finally exited the turning lane. Besides, the mention of familial bonds was heartening. She had at least given her children one thing she never had.
"I've got your back too, Mom," Noah said, bolstered as well. His chest was puffed out the slightest bit. "I wish I could've protected you from the bad guys."
The wince started in her shoulders, an involuntary muscle spasm that hunched them forward, while her back arched in the opposite direction, like a stunt actor taking a fake bullet to the chest. She managed not to swerve into the turn as she angled her SUV toward the parking garage, but she was approaching the sharp dip that seamed the entrance and the road with some speed. It would be rough on the front tires—and the passengers—and she braced herself for the bronco-like jounce that every tenant in the building had issued complaints to the super and the city about.
But there was no bracing for Noah's next statement, uttered a moment before impact: "I wouldn't let them rape you, either. Did they—"
A solid crunch cut off the rest, and for one wild second she thought it was internal, that something had imploded inside of her so violently it could be heard on the outside. She tried to remember if brain aneurysms or ruptured organs caused such sensations, but all she could think of was the burnt toast smell that supposedly preceded a stroke. Although she didn't smell burnt toast, there was a scent of hot metal wafting through the air vents and she gazed past the windshield in dismay at her front driver's side bumper.
She had turned too fast and too sharp, colliding with the boom barrier that admitted tenants into the garage. The automated arm—"Why does it look like a candy cane?" Jesse once asked of the red and white striped bar—ascended jerkily toward the sky like a frightened hostage, hands up and quaking. In a daze she watched it rise and had the funny urge to salute. Then she remembered her precious cargo in the backseat, head whiplashing around so abruptly it awakened the mostly-healed injuries: her sore neck, fractured cheekbone, cracked tooth. (Something, she was privately convinced, had also been jarred loose inside her skull during her time in The Box, but she had no proof. Just the sense that pieces of her were no longer in the right place.)
(What if it was she who was no longer in the right place?)
"Oh my God, are you all right?" she asked her children, glancing back and forth between them. They were both strapped in securely and looked more confused than frightened, but her pulse was through the roof and she scanned them head-to-toe for injuries. Her heart clenched at the sight of Noah's split lip, until she remembered it was a souvenir from his first fistfight. Tilly's lightly scuffed knees were from play, and nothing more. "I'm so sorry, loves. Are you okay?"
"I'm okay, Mom. What did we hit?"
"I'm okay too." Tilly craned her neck, trying to see over the back of Olivia's seat and the dash, but she lacked the necessary height.
Gigi whined, as if confirming her safety as well, though she sounded less convinced than her small humans. She shifted from paw to paw on the backseat, panting, a sign of agitation that usually accompanied one of Olivia's panic attacks or bad dreams. If they were in the apartment right now, she would be turning in circles and pushing her furry head into Olivia's lap. Right on cue, she hopped awkwardly into the footwell, which fit her about the same as a cat in a tissue box, and nuzzled into the crook of Olivia's elbow. Her eyes rolled upward, giving her a pleading sort of expression. Please calm down, Mom. You're scaring us.
"What did we hit?" Noah repeated.
"The gate thing," Olivia said, unable to pluck the appropriate term from her racing mind. She made a discouraging ah-ah sound at him when he started to unbuckle his seatbelt. "Leave that on. If someone hit us from behind, you could get hurt."
"Is someone going to hit us, Mommy?" Matilda asked, craning to look out the back window now. The poor little thing's head didn't even clear the top of the seat.
Cursing herself for her own stupidity—she had always been so careful not to create unwarranted fears and anxieties in her children, and now that seemed like all she was doing—Olivia closed her eyes tight for a moment and shook her head. She could picture clearly in her mind's eye any one of the cars that sped by on the main road, just inches from the rear bumper, clipping her SUV and spinning them into traffic, where they would be clobbered head-on by a garbage truck and die in a fiery crash. Amanda, blissfully unaware as she played Ogre Under the Bridge and chased the kids around the park, would return home to find half her family dead. Burned beyond recognition. Why was it so easy to imagine?
"No, baby. It's just not safe to be unbuckled or out of our seats yet, okay? Mommy needs to make sure we're not blocking the street at all. Once we're parked—"
"Mom, who's that?"
No sooner were the words out of Noah's mouth than a knock at Olivia's window made her cry out, eyes snapping open, and instantly recoil. A man she vaguely recognized stood on the other side of the glass. Smiling, he spread his hands in sheepish apology for the start. "Sorry, didn't mean to scare you. Looks like you're having some trouble," he said in a loud voice, nodding to the front of the vehicle where it kissed the boom barrier. "Anything I can do to— hey, you mind lowering this?"
He motioned for the window to come down, his hands still near the glass. Olivia watched them as if they were deadly snakes on exhibit, perhaps capable of striking through the walls of their enclosure. She knew what he wanted to do with those cobra-headed
(weapons)
hands he was waving at her. She could feel them on her body, fangs sunk deep, hot venom coursing through her veins. The tongue behind that devil's smile was forked too, she was sure of it.
"Step away from my vehicle," she said, her voice much too loud for the space she was in. Serena and high school drama class had taught her to project ("You can't get your point across if they can't hear you"), and years of yelling at perps on the streets of New York City had perfected the skill, but that was for the acoustics of lecture halls and skyscraper-lined boulevards. Her children never heard that voice; were never meant to. Gigi whined.
"Mom, what's going on?"
"I said step back." Olivia instinctively reached to her hip, but came away empty-handed. An entire month had passed since she'd carried a weapon, and it was still a natural reflex, that reach. Her mind went to the glovebox, where Amanda often stashed her holstered gun, but it looked incredibly far away. Olivia felt as if a spotlight was shining directly on her, and she was incapable of moving outside its ring of light. "Now."
"Mom?"
The man at the window gave her an odd look, lips and eyebrows slanted bemusedly. He shuffled his feet, as if to obey her request/order, but didn't budge more than half an inch. "Think you've got me confused with someone else," he said, his attempt at sounding good-natured belying a tinge of annoyance. "You're one of the cops in 6E, right? I'm the fitness trainer, 4B. We ride the elevator together, mornings. See your . . . wife running at the park sometimes. Haven't seen you in a while, though."
God, he was good. Even phrased the mention of Amanda as a question rather than a threat, but Olivia wasn't fooled. He knew their schedules, which apartment they lived in, their professions, and where Amanda liked to run. The longer she regarded him, the more convinced she became that she did recognize him—not as a neighbor but from a much darker, more sinister place than the elevator in her building. Had he been in The Box? One of her "gentlemen callers," so to speak? She thought all of the rapists' faces were burned into her brain like cattle
(prods)
brands, but maybe she'd forgotten one. She hadn't been completely lucid for all of it. Suppose other men had snuck in and used her while she was delirious with fear, dehydration, hypothermia, infection?
Suppose he was another trafficker, come to collect the merchandise promised to his buyer? She had told herself Amanda killed them all, but they were like cockroaches: you could never get rid of every last one.
Or maybe he really was just a neighbor, and now a fan, after seeing her live performance on the web. Maybe he wanted an autograph or a turn.
"I SAID MOVE," she bellowed, and threw the SUV into reverse.
"Hey, what the—!"
The gearshift was within her ring of light, of safety; so was the rearview mirror, although she forgot to check it before prying the front bumper away from the boom and narrowly missing a taxi that swerved to avoid collision, its horn shrieking in defiance. Tilly began to cry in high, hysterical wails that were unlike anything Olivia had ever heard from her before, even when the child was a teething infant. Noah kept asking Mommy, what's wrong, his distress slicing through her like a knife that sheared down to bone.
"Mommy, what's wrong?" she had always asked her mother when Serena behaved erratically behind the wheel, at the park, or during bedtime stories.
As she got older, it graduated to, "You're drunk," accusation and embarrassment outweighing concern.
Then finally "I hate you," screamed during the worst of their fights, when she could imagine no other escape but death—Serena's or her own.
. . .
"I think that guy was telling the truth," Noah said quietly. They had been parked—albeit a crooked, half-ass attempt, as Amanda would call it if she came across the SUV in a parking lot—for nearly five minutes in total silence. Almost. Tilly's occasional sniffles and Olivia's blasts of deep inhalation through her nostrils broke up the uneasy, suffocating quiet. "I think he just wanted to help."
No! she screamed inside her head. He wanted to rape me! He wanted to bend me over an old broken-down desk and make me beg for his big yummy cock. He wanted to call me kitty cat and ram me from behind until I choked on it. He wanted to shove a cattle prod inside of me and turn it on until everything below the waist was cooked, until smoke came out of my throat, scalding hot milk from my nipples. He wanted to hold his open mouth under me like a fountain and drink every last drop.
Her tongue couldn't articulate any of it. "I told him to back off," was what it eventually produced. "He should have listened to me. Men never . . . "
Noah and Matilda were rapt in the backseat, waiting to hear what men never did. She remembered hanging on every word of her mother's comments about men like that, too. Tearing her gaze away from the rearview, she checked her side mirrors for any sign of the so-called fitness trainer from 4B, but all she saw was an ominous stretch of dim garage, empty cars lining each side like participants in a gauntlet. You had to run in between and hope to God you survived each attack.
How Hell did imitate life. How life did become the hell you always feared it to be.
"We should call Ma," said her son, stalling as he helped Tilly out of her car seat at Olivia's request. "She said to, if something happened. She can come get us and—"
"No. We're not calling her. Everything is fine." Olivia's inflection brightened to mask the fearful catch in her throat, the tightness—she kept eyeing the mirrors, expecting 4B to skulk out from some hidden corner—but only near the end. "Grab Gigi's leash and hold onto her tight, can you do that for me? I'll get your sister out on this side. Try to keep up, okay? Noah, I mean it. No playing around."
. . .
"Why are we running?" he asked, trotting along beside her, his Vans slapping heavily on the cement as he tried to match her pace. "Mom, I'm kinda scared."
Olivia wanted to scoop him up too, hold his head against her other shoulder, hand at the back so it didn't bounce, same as she did with Tilly. But she could barely sustain her daughter's weight, let alone add Noah's sixty-odd pounds to it. He was safer on the ground where Gigi would fend off any attacker who dared get near her boy. On a cliffside in the Catskills, Olivia had witnessed the dog's extraordinary courage and willingness to fight to the death for her family. She trusted Gigi to protect the kids more than she trusted herself at the moment.
"We're not running," she said, shortening her stride but not her speed. She hadn't moved so briskly in a month or more, and she was already feeling winded. Not only that, she was lying directly to her son's face, gaslighting him as Serena had always done to her. Mommy didn't hit you. Why must you exaggerate everything, Olivia? You know that's not what happened, young lady. "I just don't want us to miss the elevator. I can't make it up the stairs yet."
That much was true. The empty elevator stood open to them a few yards ahead, its weird amber-lighting and limited capacity somehow reminding her of a nativity scene—close and inviting—minus the livestock and the virgin birth. She was determined to be on it before the doors closed, the feeling that otherwise she was doomed too overpowering to ignore. "Why don't you hurry and catch it for me?"
"Is that man following us? We should call—"
"Noah, just get in the damn elevator," she said too harshly. Matilda had lifted her head to look around for 4B, her heart giving a kick beneath the hand Olivia kept pressed to her slender back. Her little Tilly was learning the fear of men right before her very eyes, under the guidance of her own two hands. Serena's lessons passed down through the generations. Welcome to four years old, baby girl. "Sorry, sweetie, I'm not mad, I promise. Can you push the button for me? Hurry. Good boy."
Only when the four of them were enclosed safely within the elevator did she remember to breathe. If anything was said during the ride up, she either didn't hear it or didn't respond. When she finally did become aware of her surroundings again, they were inside the apartment, the door barricaded behind her (a dining chair she didn't recall putting there was wedged under the doorknob), her children and Gigi staring at her like she was certifiably insane. Or drunk.
"We're not going back to the park, are we?" Noah asked, after several moments passed in excruciating silence. He didn't sound angry or disappointed; instead, he was matter-of-fact, as if he had been expecting this breakdown for quite some time. Did he remember the others? After Sheila? The hostage situation in the townhouse? The Mangler? Orion?
How many times must her eight-year-old son have seen her like this, for him to know she would eventually fall apart?
"I . . . I don't think I can." Olivia stood awkwardly, tennis shoe hooked behind the heel of her other foot, fingers twisting into each other, as if she were the child speaking to a volatile adult. She recognized the shame from her school days, when teachers would ask why she fell asleep in class; why she was wearing last year's saddle shoes, which were so tight she developed a limp; why she didn't eat lunch in the cafeteria with everyone else. Why why why. "But I'll call Mama and ask her to come get you two."
Noah gazed past her at the chair tilted on its hind legs, the wavy crest rail cradling the doorknob. "Nah, the park is kinda boring anyway. It's mostly for babies. No offense, Tilly. You can go back if you want. I'll stay here with you, Mom."
Tilly's fingers were in her mouth again, and they came away shiny with saliva when she uncorked them from her china doll lips. "I want to stay here too, Mommy. I want new unnerwear and pants 'cause you said, and I need them."
Even Gigi seemed to be in agreement with the children, taking her weight off Olivia's legs where she had been leaning and settling onto her belly, chin on her paws. She was staying too, and the relief Olivia felt was so immense it almost made up for the guilt of taking the kids away from the fun—Tilly from her own birthday party—and locking them up in the apartment with her, turning them into prisoners of her own fears as well. But she couldn't force them to return to the park, nor could she be the one to take them there.
He knew their apartment number.
With a shudder, she pushed the thought away and ushered the kids to their rooms. Noah looked a little hurt when he tried to follow along into his sisters' bedroom and had to be sent across the hall to his own, but he needed to learn about boundaries, even a four-year-old's. He still wanted to shadow Olivia when she got Tilly into fresh clothes (a pair of tiny terry cloth shorts with white piping that reminded Olivia of high school gym class, a t-shirt with yet another unicorn on the front, and most importantly, underwear), but she encouraged him to teach Tilly his new dance routine in the living room while she journaled for a bit in her room.
She made it as far as I can't go on like this, I feel like I'm losing my mind before she laid the pen down, went to the kitchen, and poured herself a glass of red wine. The words flowed easily after that, her anxiety floating away, and by the time Amanda returned home, she had filled ten pages, front to back, and the empty Merlot bottle was tucked into the wastebasket by the bed, under a mass of tissues, maxi pad wrappers, a guest list for the birthday party, and an old pair of socks worn through at the heels.
. . .
