Chương 10
“Jesus.”
Rachel’s voice was quiet.
“You kept handing her access.”
He turned.
“So did Melissa.”
The accusation came fast and ugly.
I recoiled.
Daniel saw it immediately.
He shut his eyes.
“No.”
He shook his head.
“That was cheap.”
“Yes,” Rachel said.
“I know.”
He looked at me.
“I’m sorry.”
I did not answer.
Some apologies were useful.
Some were reflexes.
I no longer knew which kind his were.
Marisol asked Daniel to step outside with her.
They talked on the porch for nearly twenty minutes.
Emma sat beside me and drew windows on the black shape she had made in her sketchbook.
When Daniel came back inside, his face looked different.
Not calmer.
Emptier.
He crouched several feet in front of Emma.
“Marisol says I need to agree to some things.”
Emma looked at him.
“I’m going to stay somewhere else for now.”
My chest tightened.
He continued.
“You and Mom can go home if Mom wants.”
I stared at him.
“What?”
He looked at me.
“I’m going to a hotel.”
Rachel stopped leaning against the wall.
Daniel turned back to Emma.
“Grandma will not come to the house.”
“Promise?”
“Yes.”
“What if she has a key?”
Daniel looked at me.
I had forgotten.
Patricia did have a key.
“For emergencies,” she had always said.
Daniel nodded slowly.
“I’ll change the locks.”
Emma studied him.
“Today?”
“Yes.”
I watched his face for irritation.
There was none.
Only exhaustion.
“And Grandma won’t pick me up from school?”
“No.”
“Or call school?”
“I’ll make sure she’s removed from the pickup list.”
Marisol stepped back inside.
“That will need to be done jointly with Melissa.”
Daniel nodded.
“Fine.”
Emma looked at him for another long moment.
Then she said, “Okay.”
He smiled faintly.
Not because anything was okay.
Because she had given him one word and he was grateful for it.
He stood.
“I should go.”
Emma did not ask him to stay.
At the door, Daniel turned toward me.
“Can we talk outside?”
I followed him onto the porch.
The afternoon had become bright and almost offensively pleasant.
A lawn service was trimming hedges three houses down.
Daniel put his hands in his pockets.
“I told Marisol about something else.”
My stomach tightened.
“What else?”
He looked toward the closed front door.
“When Emma was five, my mom locked her in the laundry room.”
I stared at him.
He kept speaking before I could.
“It wasn’t long.”
The old phrase.
The old instinct.
He heard himself and stopped.
Then he started again.
“It was long enough.”
My hands went cold.
“Why?”
“She spilled paint.”
“Why did you never tell me?”
“Because Mom told me Emma had been put there to calm down.”
“That is not an answer.”
Daniel looked at the driveway.
“I was there.”
The hedge trimmer down the street stopped.
The sudden quiet felt enormous.
“You were there when she locked her in?”
“Yes.”
“Did you let her out?”
His face folded in on itself.
“Not right away.”
I stared at him until the porch blurred around the edges.
“How long?”
Daniel rubbed both hands over his face.
“I don’t know exactly.”
“That means you know enough to have an estimate.”
“Ten minutes.”
I said nothing.
“Maybe fifteen.”
Behind the closed front door, someone moved through Rachel’s hallway.
A floorboard creaked.
Daniel lowered his voice.
“She was screaming at first.”
My stomach turned.
“And you left her there?”
“I was arguing with Mom.”
“Where?”
“In the kitchen.”
“So Emma could hear you.”
“Yes.”
“And you could hear her.”
Daniel looked at the porch boards.
“Yes.”
A car rolled slowly past, bass thudding through closed windows.
For one absurd second I noticed the driver eating french fries.
Then the car was gone.
“What happened after fifteen minutes?”
“I opened the door.”
“Why?”
“Because she stopped crying.”
I felt something cold settle through me.
“You waited until she stopped.”
Daniel’s mouth tightened.
“I know how that sounds.”
“No, you know what it was.”
He looked at me then.
There was no anger left in his face.
Only the exhausted expression of someone who had run out of places to hide inside his own explanations.
“She was sitting on the floor by the dryer.”
I folded my arms because otherwise I thought I might hit him.
“What did you tell me?”
“That she spilled paint and Mom cleaned it up.”
I remembered that day.
Emma had come home unusually quiet and asked to sleep with the hallway light on.
Daniel had told me she was overtired.
Patricia had complained that Emma had ruined a throw pillow.
I had apologized for the paint.
I had bought Patricia a replacement pillow.
The memory made me physically nauseous.
“I bought your mother a pillow.”
Daniel shut his eyes.
“I know.”
“You watched our daughter get locked in a laundry room and I bought Patricia a goddamn pillow.”
“I know.”
I stepped back from him.
“Stop saying that.”
His eyes opened.
“Then tell me what to say.”
“I don’t know.”
He gave a small, broken laugh.
“Yeah.”
I hated that sound because part of me still recognized it.
Part of me still knew how his shoulders looked when he was ashamed, how he pulled his wedding ring around his finger when he wanted to escape a conversation, how he would eventually make coffee too strong and leave half of it untouched.
Knowing someone intimately did not make them safe.
That seemed obvious now.
It had not seemed obvious three days ago.
“Why are you telling me this now?”
“Because Marisol asked if there were other incidents.”
“You could have lied.”
“I already did that for years.”
“You could have kept doing it.”
He looked toward the door.
“I don’t think I can anymore.”
The answer did not move me as much as he probably hoped.
“What changed?”
He swallowed.
May you like
“Emma looked at me in there like she was trying to figure out whether I was one of the people she had to protect herself from.”
I said nothing.
