First grade started two weeks ago, and last night was Brian’s first sleepover. Shannon helped him pack, and Edward dropped him off. All night she worried he’d call, desperate for his Bunky, but he hadn’t. She has it now, threadbare yellow flannel trimmed in fraying satin, draped over her wrist. She’ll rest it in his car seat so he’ll have it before he asks. A reward for making it a night without.
When she boops her car unlocked, the click answers from farther away than she expects. She forgot she’d parked several houses down after work yesterday because trucks from the tree people the Lindens hired to remove two giant dead oaks from their front yard had lined both sides of the street, blocking her usual spot at the end of her own sidewalk.
She rubs Bunky’s hem between her fingers the way her son does. Something about its smoothness comforts her. Wouldn’t the world be nicer if full-grown people and children alike carried lovey items and drew them out in stressful times instead of flipping people off in traffic? Why do parents rush kids into leaving them behind?
Zipping Brian’s backpack before the party yesterday, she’d been proud of how she managed the issue, with soft wheedles of, “Let’s see what happens, hm?” and, “Just in case everyone else leaves theirs home too.” But in the cheerful light of morning, Shannon feels duped.
At her own slumber party when she was about Brian’s age, she’d slipped up to her bedroom for her favorite stuffed toy while the other girls were unrolling their sleeping bags in the basement. Her brother whipped it from her hands on her way back downstairs. “You’ll be the only baby,” he said, then he whined waaaah waaaah waaaah, churning his fists into his eyes until she started to cry, and their mother rushed up the steps. “Boys tease,” she said, in a hoarse whisper so the girls in the basement wouldn’t hear. “Don’t give them things to tease you about.”
With Brian, Shannon’s been pleased to discover that boys are capable of as much tenderness as anyone, and Brian’s idea of a good joke is rearranging books on the shelf, then bursting into laughter when no one notices. His friends probably brought their own lovey toys, just like her friends had, and his tattered, washed-out blanket wouldn’t have drawn a stitch of attention.
Closer to her car, a scattering of broken bits flashes in the sunlight. It’s funny how glass catches light only to throw it back, magically brighter, sparkling now like tiny brilliant stars strewn about the sidewalk.
Glass. Smashed glass. Powdering the square of sidewalk directly in front of her car. She’d been walking toward it without thinking, but now she realizes that all that remains of her rear window is a dangling spider-webbed collection of fissures with a tiny, off-centered hole.
A familiar feeling knocks into her. She crosses into the street for a look from the other side, one arm clutched around her belly. The rear passenger window’s shot through too. Sunlight shimmers in splinters of glass, spewed across the entire width of the backseat. She casts looks over each shoulder. Twice, three times, but sees no one.
It’s her ex-husband she expects to find, lurking behind the Murphys’ unkempt bank of privet, maybe, or peeking around the Chesneys’ rattletrap campervan three cars away. Sleep-mussed tufts of golden hair. An ironic snarl on his fresh-licked lips. The rest of the world always saw him as handsome. She did too at first, but over time something in his gaze shook loose, and she noticed that his muscles clenched even when he meant to seem at ease. His body loomed rather than leaned.
Last time she saw Ronnie was soon after she started dating Edward, almost nine years ago. By then she and Ronnie had been divorced four years, they’d married so young, but he materialized from time to time to rattle her. This night, she’d been returning to her car after a volunteer training for the local food bank, and he stepped out of a stairwell in the parking garage. She knew better than to show fear, so she braced her elbows, cradling herself, a tactic he hadn’t deciphered.
She and Ronnie hadn’t spoken in months by then, so how could he have known she’d even be there or what time she’d finish? Early on, she would have sworn he had ESP, but by the time she left she understood it was obsession and cunning.
He asked what she saw in Edward. Of course she’d never mentioned Edward to him—not what his name was, not that he existed, and she’d barely mentioned Ronnie to Edward either, so eager to sweep him into the deeper past. She considered ignoring his bait, but answering felt braver. “I’d stopped believing men could be kind until I met Edward.”
“Limp dick,” he said. “I hear you.”
“No, that was yours,” she said, giddy at finding the right words in the moment, at refusing to be afraid. Though she was afraid.
He strode from the shadows and faced off with her. He loved pressing himself too close. “I’ll never be gone,” he said.
Goddam him. How quickly that prickle of ice along her neck returns. The sense that every leaf on every tree has eyes, watching watching watching.
She pans the street one more time.
After the parking garage ambush, she’d meant to tell Edward Ronnie’s whole story, but not telling made her liberation feel more complete. She shared enough to satisfy Edward’s curiosity about her past, and he believed in the general phobia she’d invented to explain the panic attacks that wracked her their first years together.
She sways to catch different angles between trees in the neighbors’ yards, behind cars, down driveways. She hugs her arms so tightly into herself that her nails bite the flesh of her biceps. He could be anywhere.
In the house, Edward is rinsing coffee mugs and wiping crumbs from behind the toaster. His big Saturday plans are to weed the back garden and maybe get started on the crossword from the paper. He wears thick socks and poplin pajama bottoms, navy with thin white stripes. His white t-shirt hitches at the waistband. Something in that hitch, in the pure vulnerability of pajamas and stocking feet. Their life is quiet and lovely, and she doesn’t want to drag her violent ex into the middle of it. When she tells him about the car windows, she doesn’t mention Ronnie.
“That sucks.” Edward scoops his own keys from the dish on the counter, tosses them to her. “We’ll need a police report for the insurance. I’ll call and get that started while you’re picking up Brian.”
She hadn’t thought about police. The last time she called police there’d been broken glass too. And blood. In the car on the way home from the hospital, her mother had said, “What were you thinking, calling the police? It was an accident.” That’s how Ronnie had described it when he’d called her mother, covering his tracks for trying to talk Shannon out of going to the hospital. Moments before fainting, she’d dialed 9-1-1 herself. When she woke up in the back of an ambulance, the EMT said no one else had been in the house when they arrived.
What happened was that Ronnie tripped on her foot in the kitchen and dropped his glass, which pissed him off. Her foot being in his way, his own clumsiness, they were all one to him. Picking up the jagged shard from the floor and waving it at her, he claimed, was meant to tease, not threaten. “I was kidding around,” he said, a sick chuckle bubbling in his throat while she slumped at his feet on the kitchen floor. “I only meant to graze you. How was I supposed to know it was so sharp?” He seemed to blame her for bleeding.
If Shannon had had anyone else to call to pick her up from the hospital, she wouldn’t have called her mother. If she’d been there when it happened, her mother probably would’ve thought it was funny. She always thought Ronnie was funny. She and Ronnie would shake their heads at her when she got upset, and her mother would say, “She never could take a joke.”
The police didn’t think Ronnie was joking. Neither did the nurse practitioner who sewed her up. “He barely missed your femoral artery.” She was young and new at her job and had never seen anything like it. “You could have bled out.”
Someone in the ER connected her with a magistrate to file a restraining order. Her mother showed enough respect to keep her mouth shut about that at least. Afterward, it took a year before Shannon could sleep through the night without triple-checking that every door and window was locked, another year before she stopped changing her phone number every few months, plus one more year after that before she let a friend set her up on a date with Edward and learned that men could be different.
Easing into Edward’s front seat, she’s glad she didn’t put Ronnie’s name to the disaster. Edward lacks her hard-knocks cynicism, so he’s unlikely to think of Ronnie on his own. Not after nine years and knowing so little about him to begin with. Police will blame bored teenagers like they always do. If Ronnie’s waiting for her to come chasing, let him wait forever.
Edward’s Camry sits much lower than her CR-V, which makes her feel like she’s slithering across the pavement. Her sunglasses are still in her car, so the sun glares in her eyes, making her miss road signs. She takes two wrong turns on the way to Matthew’s house.
Twice at stop signs she grabs her cell phone to text Edward and at least warn him to be careful. If Ronnie got close enough to trash her windows, what would stop him from getting closer? Hurting Edward? Snatching Brian? She wishes she’d thought of that sooner.
But she doesn’t text.
If the police look for Ronnie, they’ll find him. She’ll have to see him. That sneering look on his face. Like she should’ve known better.
She takes another wrong turn. She’s sure she’ll be the last to arrive. It’s the beginning of the school year and the parents are still getting to know each other. She doesn’t want to be that parent. The one who’s always late. The one who’s so ditzy she can’t find the kid’s house even with the help of GPS. The one whose eyes dart around like she’s searching for a secret exit.
What if Matthew’s mother invites her in for coffee? How will she hide the tremor in her hands? She doesn’t want to explain anything.
During court proceedings, the advocate she’d been assigned kept telling her that everything Ronnie did was his fault. Only his. She re-played that message in her mind until she believed it. Or mostly believed it. But people judge. You can see it in their eyes, a calculation of how much trouble knowing you is worth.
Finally parked in front of Matthew’s house, Shannon hammers the steering wheel with the heels of her hands, a quick tattoo to drum her nerves into line. One of the other mothers wanders back down the walkway, nodding to her little boy. Shannon thinks that’s Alexander and his mother, Patty? Pam? She waves through the car window, makes a big show of unbuckling her seatbelt, in case Patty-Pam had caught her dawdling.
“Shrinky dinks!” Brian shouts as soon as she steps into Matthew’s front hall. He opens his hands to show off a collection of glassy disks. Turtles, sharks, dinosaurs. Matthew’s mother looks tired, still in her fuzzy robe and slippers, overseeing the entryway side table covered with crafts and red cellophane favor bags labeled with each boy’s name.
Shannon lifts one of the shrinky dinks from Brian’s hands and says, “I remember these from when I was a kid,” grateful her voice comes out without quaking.
Matthew’s mother turns to her with a big smile. “Me too! They seemed so low tech, I was afraid the boys would turn up their noses, but they loved them.”
“Balloons,” Shannon says. “I always let kids loose into a room of balloons they can sit on and pop. Never fails.”
Brian burrows through a pile of shoes at the front door but keeps finding other people’s shoes. Matthew’s mother crouches to help, but Brian jerks his head up and says, “I forgot my sleeping bag,” then tears off toward the leftover boys tossing a beanbag in the other room.
“They have all the energy,” Matthew’s mother says.
Shannon can’t tell if she’s irritated or pleased. “Were they any trouble?” She musters her best making-conversation tone, hiding her distraction. What if Ronnie followed her here? I’ll never be gone. Why didn’t she mention his name to Edward? Like an unkillable horror movie villain. If she could stop being scared, she’d be furious. She thought she’d stopped being scared long ago, but look at her now, like no time has passed. Like nothing changed.
“They giggled until midnight or so,” Matthew’s mother says. “Then no peeps until around eight. I’d say it was pretty mellow, actually, for a house full of boys.”
Shannon grits her teeth. She hates when parents engender noise and ruckus. Being a boy isn’t what makes you loud. Or rude. Or dangerous. She used to think it was too, and believing that was normal nearly killed her.
“Hey, are you okay?”
“Just tired, I guess?” Shannon smooths a hand across her face, finger-picks the fringes of her hair, wonders if tired covers any of what Matthew’s mother glimpsed in her. She cranes another look for Brian but can’t see beyond the living room doorway. “I had a little surprise on my way here.”
She didn’t mean to say it out loud.
“What kind of surprise?”
“Somebody shot out my rear window with a bb gun or something. I had to drive my husband’s car.” She doesn’t say second husband. Besides her mother and Edward, no one who knows her now knows she was married before. She’d only been 19. Lucky for her, she hardly qualifies as an older parent these days, so no one questions the time between.
Matthew’s mother fiddles with the remaining favor bags, crinkling the cellophane. “That’s awful.”
“Happening all over town, I heard,” says a father crossing the threshold into the foyer behind her. Shannon scoots forward, making way. She hadn’t heard the screen door open for him. It’s far too easy for people to sneak up on you.
“Is it?” Matthew’s mother says. “What a shame.”
“Obnoxious,” the man says, then calls his son’s name. “Costs a fortune to get a new window, doesn’t it? And bbs wreak havoc on paint jobs.”
Shannon hadn’t considered practical issues. Costs and time spent on estimates or repairs. Hadn’t believed for a second in random bored kids, joyriding stupidly in the night.
“What’s so funny?” the man says.
“I don’t know, it seems silly, doesn’t it?” Shannon’s breath stutters, catching back up after her kneejerk rush of laughter. “It’s just a car. It took me by such surprise, I let myself forget. We’ll get it fixed, and it won’t happen again.”
“I hope not,” the man says. “Little vandal bastards.”
“Elvin, the boys,” Matthew’s mother fake-scolds, in a conspiratorial tone that reminds Shannon of her mother.
“Oh, they’re little men. They’ve heard it all before.”
Shannon stiffens. Brian’s still nowhere to be seen. “Brian hasn’t.”
Elvin snorts. “Women always think their little boys are different.”
“Is your little boy a vandal bastard then? Because mine’s not.” Matthew’s mother backward-steps away from her, scans toward the room where the last boys are gathering their things.
Elvin snorts again, not as much as looking at her. A little blond head bobs around the corner. “Five more minutes, Dad?”
“No, we’ve got to get a move on, son.”
“Pleeasse?”
“What have I told you about backtalk?”
The boy’s eyes turn bleary.
“Don’t be a wuss, James, just grab your shoes and get into the car.”
Shannon doesn’t mean for her disgusted scoff to be audible, but Elvin doesn’t know that. He rounds on her, face swollen with rage. Reflexes die hard, and Shannon cowers, throws up a hand to guard her face.
Elvin’s anger melts into bafflement. James stares at her, his father’s hand perched lightly on his shoulder. “Jesus,” Elvin whispers. “I wasn’t going to hit you.”
Brian emerges, favor bag clutched to his chest, his sleeping bag slithering behind him. Shannon stands straight again. “Some of us have already been hit,” she says, before Brian quite reaches her side, and quietly enough that she hopes only Elvin hears. If he hears, she hopes, but doesn’t believe, maybe it’ll mean something to him, about the way he talks to his boy, the way he exists in a room.
She takes Brian by his free hand, squeezes past Elvin and James to exit. Each step down the walk lightens the burden of the gazes she’s sure are following her to the car. Let them stare.
Brian clambers into his safety seat where Bunky lies waiting for him, curled in a ball. He doesn’t ask why she’s driving Edward’s car. Doesn’t know to think it strange.
Later she’ll have to explain about her car. About random acts of violence. One day, maybe even about Ronnie. For now, he clutches Bunky to his face and breathes in its scent, and that’s all he needs.
