Being a nanny for a family on the East Side must have felt like progress. She was certainly good at it. But she was still on the outside. What would she have done to get inside?
Nothing worse than you did.
You should be dead. Not her.
I rub a shaking hand along Ester’s back as the road slopes steeply. If we’d had a snow or ice storm, no way I’d be able to brave the sidewalk. But the sun is shining, and I’m breaking a sweat when I’m only a few blocks from Blackstone Boulevard. Now I’m close to my end point and where the real money lives.
The streets are wider and the yards precisely landscaped; rarely is a hedge unshaped, a lawn not the perfect inch and a half. Slate roofs for the oversize English cottages and stucco turrets with leaded windows for the Tudors and thick columns lining the grand porches of Georgian Colonials.
They’ll see trash like you coming a mile away.
I unzip my coat but keep most of Ester protected from the cool breeze. Tipping my head back, I blink into the sun as I near my destination. The moment echoes in my mind, and I see Belina warming her face a dozen times.
I stand on the corner of Cole and Ogden, breathing fast, not sure what I should say to Alec. I can’t cross to his house. It’s too easy to see Belina hurrying out the door, pushing the stroller with Emmett. She’d wave my way with an extra coffee or smoothie she’d made for us. I often wondered if she needed these walks together as much as I did.
My reverie is interrupted by an older lady power walking past with three Chihuahuas. With a wicked curve of her wrist, she hurls a neon-blue plastic poop bag onto Alec’s lawn. Her bag is not alone. There are dozens of poop bags, all kinds, in fact, from white CVS to purple biodegradable, littering the unkempt landscape like malformed croquet balls.
“Oh my God,” I say, almost unable to believe what I can see. Unable to imagine why a neighbor strolling by would drop shit on his lawn.
The large wooden front door flies open, and Alec shuffles into the yard. He’s carrying a small wastebasket and starts picking up the bags.
Still shocked, I hurry across the street. “Hey, Alec.”
“Devon,” he says, stumbling at the fence. “You had the baby already?”
He’ll see what a terrible mother you are.
What an awful child you’ve had.
“Her name is Ester.” I glance down as my chest seizes at the prospect of Alec seeing her, judging us both for her crying or not being as big as normal newborns.
My fingers stroke up Ester’s covered back to the hat pulled down over her dark hair. My touch confirms she’s fully wrapped and protected from judgmental eyes. I relax slightly at how safe she is against me.
“You should have called,” Alec says without enough enthusiasm for me to believe him.
I’m not surprised Jack didn’t tell him. I only texted Alec to check in, hoping he’d share something about what was happening with Belina’s case. “Would have dropped off your Up-All-Night-Dorito-Nacho-Supreme?” I tease with a joke from our college days.
“Saved us from plenty of hangovers,” he says with a grin, letting out a pleased little sigh that quickly disappears. “I don’t think I’ve smiled since . . .”
I see some tears in his eyes. “How’s Emmett?” I quickly ask about his son.
“He’s okay,” Alec says as if that were the wrong question.
I nod toward the yard because I can’t not ask. “What on earth is with the shit bags?”
His gaze drops to the ground. I take a step back and really study him. He’s in a cinched bathrobe and looks like he hasn’t shaved in days. His face is gaunt and his eyes bloodshot with purple rings from sleeplessness. He steps toward me, trembling, an intensity radiating from wide eyes. “I didn’t do it.”
“What?” I shake my head. “What are you talking about?”
“Belina . . . they think . . .” Alec’s long fingers cover his face, and he begins to cry, something I’ve never seen. After a few sobs, he swears and wipes the tears on the sleeve of his robe.
“No,” I stammer. “You would never . . .”
Pulling me close, he releases a whisper-sob. “Everyone thinks I killed her.”
Chapter 4
I remember the feel of Belina’s skin the day she died. Her touch was delicate like the dogwood bloom, and the olive color of her fingers contrasted with my own, pale and freckled. Her last day on earth, I held her hand on a bench. We were as quiet and ominous as the tombstones around us in Swan Point Cemetery. The place I first met her and now the last place I’d ever see her. The place she was murdered.
It should have been you.
The way Alec cries into my shoulder, I wonder if he also knew Belina’s touch, shared the generosity of skin against skin. Alec and I have a friendship that goes back a decade, but still I can’t ask.
“Who said you killed her?” I ask, incredulous, glaring at the bags of poop. I know what it’s like to feel stares. To experience the heat of embarrassment every time you step outside your house and the feeling barely subsiding when you’re in.
Alec slowly rubs his forehead against my shoulder, something he hasn’t done since he was drunk at college. “You know I’d never hurt her . . . She is . . . was . . . so remarkable.”
I’ve seen Alec upset plenty, but he’s usually quick to rebound. Ready with a joke and an offer to buy a drink, which is important for someone who screws up a lot. But we’ve never been anywhere close to a situation like this.
Oh, but you have.
Blood on the pillow.
Knife in your hand.
How he screamed.
How you ran.
I met Alec before Jack, my first day at Georgetown University. He plopped down next to me in the back of a class full of girls with good highlights and Coach bags and guys who knew each other from lacrosse. All I could think was that everyone could see through me, smell the Kansas bumpkin who came from trash and who’d always be trash.
Nothing has changed.
Alec elbowed me, whispered for a pen and paper with an apathetic laugh. He never knew, but my hands were shaking under the desk. My nails dug so deep into one palm that I could feel the blood. I was about to stand up and leave and likely never return. But I stayed.
He asked me to go out with him and some friends that night, but I said thanks but no thanks.
“Come on, daddy-o,” he said. “Don’t be a—” He paused and made a square with his pointer fingers.
I laughed and asked what the hell he was doing.
He smacked his forehead with his hand. “You haven’t seen Pulp Fiction? Come on, Kansas. We’re watching it right now!”
And we did. We even danced like John Travolta and Uma Thurman after the fifth replay of their “Twist” contest scene. I’d never fallen so platonically in love with someone so quickly in my life.
Alec’s music and movie selections were epic. In my small town, the closest theater was almost an hour away, and I didn’t have a car. Even the movie rental place was three towns over. Alec wasn’t shy about helping me catch up with the real world. A place I’d never dared to imagine I’d really belong.
“You just have to know Radiohead,” he said. “How can you talk to anyone without an opinion on Pablo Honey versus Kid A?”