Part 4
From downstairs came Claire’s voice, sharper now, not speaking to Margaret. “No, you are not going out there.”
Drew answered too low to make out.
A chair scraped. Glass broke. The sound flashed through Margaret’s nerves.
“Tanya,” she said.
“I hear raised voices,” Tanya replied. “Stay where you are.”
There was nowhere else.
By the time the sirens came, faint at first and then swelling through the walls, Margaret had lost feeling in her toes. She had sung half of “You Are My Sunshine” and forgotten the second verse, which was fine because the second verse had always been cruel. She had counted Ava’s breaths in sets of ten. She had tried not to imagine Claire downstairs rearranging the story before anyone arrived.
The attic door shook when someone pounded from the hall.
“Westbridge Police,” a man called. “Open the door.”
Margaret closed her eyes. Relief did not feel like relief. It felt like a new danger changing uniforms.
Drew shouted something. Claire shouted over him. More pounding. A man ordered someone to step back. A woman’s voice said, “Ma’am, can you hear me inside?”
“Yes,” Margaret cried. “We’re here. The baby’s here.”
The lock rattled. It did not open.
An officer cursed softly. Not at her. At the hardware.
“Stand clear,” he called.
“I’m away,” Margaret said, though she could move only another foot.
The door burst inward on the third strike. It did not fly dramatically from its hinges. It cracked, sagged, then opened with a stubborn wooden groan, because real doors resisted even rescue. Light poured in. Margaret flinched from it.
A uniformed officer came down two steps, followed by a paramedic carrying a bag. Behind them, in the hall, Drew stood with both hands raised and his face gray. Claire was farther back near the bathroom door, one arm folded across her stomach, the other hand pressed to her mouth. She did not look like a villain then. She looked like a woman who had run out of places to put the thing inside her.
The paramedic knelt beside Margaret. “I’m Jenna. I’m going to check the baby. May I?”
Margaret hesitated. Her arms tightened before her mind consented. She saw Jenna notice.
“I’ll keep her right here,” Jenna said. “I just need to see her face and chest.”
Margaret loosened her grip.
Ava cried when the paramedic touched her. The sound, strong and furious, made Jenna’s shoulders drop a fraction.
“That’s a good mad,” Jenna said. “We like mad.”
Margaret nodded stupidly. “She was on the floor.”
“I’ve got her.”
“No. Listen. She was on the floor when I came in.”
Jenna looked up, not long, but enough.
The officer had reached the bottom of the stairs. He was younger than Drew, with acne scars on his jaw and snow melting on his shoulders. “Ma’am, are you injured?”
“My knee. Not important.”
“It may be.”
“It isn’t.”
He accepted this with the expression of a person trained to let people be wrong temporarily. “Who locked the door?”
Margaret turned her head toward Drew.
Drew’s hands were still raised in the hall, though nobody was pointing anything at him. “I didn’t mean for—”
Claire said, “She’s lying.”
Everyone heard her.
The baby cried. Jenna slid a small thermometer under Ava’s arm and asked another paramedic, who had appeared behind Margaret, for a thermal blanket. The attic, so cramped a moment before, now seemed full of knees, boots, equipment, radios, breath.
Margaret kept her eyes on Claire. “About which part?”
Claire stepped forward, then stopped because the officer near the hall told her to stay where she was.
“You took her,” Claire said.
Margaret blinked. “What?”
“You took her out of the bassinet and brought her up here. Drew found you.”
Drew looked at Claire.
Margaret saw it. The tiny fracture. The first visible crack in the story they had planned, or in the story Claire had planned and Drew had failed to refuse.
“That’s not true,” Margaret said.
Claire’s eyes flashed. “You’ve been strange for months.”
“Claire,” Drew said.
“No, she has. She forgets things. She leaves burners on. She called Ava by your sister’s name twice.”
Margaret felt the old grief move under her skin. Not hot. Old grief was cold; it had settled there years ago and learned the shape of her. “I called her Anna once.”
“Twice.”
“Once. And I corrected myself.”
Claire looked at the officer. “She’s not safe with the baby. We were trying to keep everybody calm.”
The officer did not write anything down, but Margaret had the sense every word was entering some invisible ledger.
Jenna wrapped Ava in the thermal blanket. “We need to transport her for evaluation.”
Margaret’s hand moved instinctively with the baby as Jenna lifted her.
“Can I go?” Margaret asked.
Jenna looked toward the officer, who looked toward the hall, where Drew’s face had changed again. Shame, fear, calculation. Margaret hated that she could still read him so easily.
“Immediate family can ride if there’s room,” Jenna said carefully.
“I’m her grandmother,” Margaret said.
Claire made the same humorless laugh as before. “No, you’re not.”
This time Drew did not close his eyes. He looked at the floor.
The attic went quiet except for Ava’s smaller, tired cries.
Margaret understood that the door had only been the first thing shut against her.
May you like
At Westbridge Medical Center, they put Ava behind a curtain in the emergency department and Margaret in a plastic chair outside it with a chemical heat pack for her knee and a paper cup of water she kept forgetting to drink. She was not allowed to hold the baby during the first examination. She was not allowed in the curtained space after Claire arrived. She was not asked to leave either. She existed in the hallway as a problem nobody had yet labeled.
Drew stood near the vending machines, speaking to an officer in a low voice. Claire sat three chairs away from Margaret, her hair loosened from whatever neat arrangement she had begun the day with, her hands clasped so tightly her knuckles went white. She had changed from rage to trembling outrage, a more socially useful form. Whenever a nurse passed, Claire’s face rearranged into something wounded.
