The lady cop talked on her radio for a few seconds. “Yeah. Bring them through the front door and find someplace where they can sit. Tell them their mom and dad are okay and someone’s going to be with them soon.” She slipped the radio back into the pouch on her belt and looked at everyone in turn. “Suppose we run through this from the beginning,” she said. “What exactly happened here?”
“She ripped my face open with a bottle!” Marc snarled.
“A vinegar bottle,” Liz added unnecessarily. The lady cop turned to Liz and gave her a hard, appraising look. Her badge read Brophy. A nice Irish name. She didn’t look Irish. She was blonde and wide-faced like a Viking, with flint-gray eyes. Maybe cops got Irish surnames along with their badges. Except for Lowenthal.
“Are you saying this is true, ma’am?” Officer Brophy asked. “You assaulted him with a bottle?”
“Yes,” Liz said.
“Okay, you want to tell me why?”
I can’t, Liz thought bleakly. I don’t even understand it myself.
“He was on top of me,” she said. “Choking me.” It was absolutely true. It was also irrelevant. That wasn’t why she’d done what she did; it was only when.
“Can anyone corroborate that?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Parvesh said. “We saw the whole thing. We live upstairs. We heard the noise through the floor and ran down. The kitchen door was open, so we let ourselves in, and we saw Lizzie on the floor with this man—” He nodded his head in Marc’s direction. “—on top of her. She’s Elizabeth Kendall and he’s her ex-husband, Marc. Marc with a c. He had his hands around her throat. We were so amazed that for a moment we couldn’t think of what to do. We just shouted at him to get off of her. But he didn’t stop. He didn’t even seem to hear us. Then Lizzie grabbed the bottle up off the floor and swung it, and that was when we stepped in. Am I missing anything, Pete?”
“That’s how it went down,” Pete agreed.
“Look at her neck,” Parvesh told Officer Brophy, “if you don’t believe us.”
“I didn’t touch her,” Marc yelled. “They’re lying. She just went for me!”
Officer Brophy ignored Marc while she took up Parvesh’s invitation. She walked across to Liz and leaned in close to look at her bare throat. “Could you tilt your chin up a little, ma’am?” she asked politely. “If it doesn’t hurt too much.”
Liz obeyed. Officer Lowenthal whistled, short and low. “Nasty,” he murmured.
“How’s the gentleman looking?” Brophy asked the paramedic. She shot Marc a very brief glance.
“He’ll need stitches,” the paramedic said. “They both will.”
“You just got the one ambulance?”
“Yeah. The other one is out in Wilkinsburg.”
“Okay, then you take him. Officer Lowenthal will accompany you, and I’ll follow on with Mrs. Kendall. Len, you ought to cuff him to a gurney in case he gets argumentative.”
“I’ll do that,” Lowenthal said.
“This is insane!” Marc raged. “Look at me! I’m the one who’s injured. I’m the one who was attacked.” He swatted away the paramedic’s hands and pulled the dressing pad away to display his wounds. The eye looked fine, if a little red. The semi-circular gouge made by the bottle ringed it quite neatly, but there was a strip of loose flesh hanging down from his cheek as though Liz had tried to peel him.
“That does look pretty bad,” Officer Lowenthal allowed. “You just hit him the once, ma’am?”
“Once,” Liz agreed. “Yes.” And hey, she thought but didn’t say, that’s a one in my column and a couple of hundred in his, so he’ll probably still win the match on points even if he doesn’t get a knockout.
She shook her head to clear it. It didn’t clear. “Please,” she tried again. “My children. I can’t leave them on their own. I haven’t even seen them yet. They don’t know what’s happening.”
The two cops got into a murmured conversation that Liz couldn’t catch.
“Well, you go on in and talk to them,” Brophy said eventually. “While we get your husband’s statement.” Ex-husband, Liz amended in her mind. Took the best part of two years to get that ex nailed on the front, and nobody ever uses it. “They can ride with you to the hospital, if you want. Or if you’ve got friends who can look after them …”
“We’d be happy to do that,” Parvesh said.
“… then they can stay here until you get back. Up to you. You go ahead and talk to them now while we finish up in here.”
“I’m making a lasagna,” Pete said to Liz, touching her arm as she went by. “If they haven’t had supper, they can eat with us.”
Liz gave him a weak smile, grateful but almost too far out of herself to show it. “Thanks, Pete.”
“I was attacked with a bottle!” Marc said again, holding fast to this elemental truth. “She shoved a bottle in my face!”
“You told us that,” Officer Lowenthal said. “But she missed the eye. You got lucky there.”
“I’m filing charges. For criminal assault!”
“Okay,” Brophy said. “We’re listening, sir. Tell us what happened.”
Liz got out of there. She didn’t want to hear a version of the story where she was the monster and Marc was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The trouble was, if she told the truth she had to admit that there had been a monster in that kitchen. She had no idea where it had come from, or where it had gone when it left her.
If.
If it had left her.
Zac and Molly were sitting on the sofa next to an impassive police officer with a Burt Reynolds moustache. They jumped up when Liz came into the room and ran to her, hugging her high and low at the same time. The cop gave her a nod of acknowledgment, or else he was giving them permission to embrace.
Zac’s arms reached around Liz’s shoulders, his head bending down to touch the top of hers. As soon as he hit puberty, Zac had started to grow like he’d drunk a magic potion, but he had yet to fill out horizontally even a little bit. Now, at age sixteen, he was a willow twig, where his father—shorter and broader and a whole lot harder—was more like the stump of an oak. He had his father’s red-blond hair, though, where Molly’s was jet-black and—just like her mom’s—had less tendency to curl than a steel bar.
Molly had been born tiny, her five-pounds-and-one-ounce birth weight landing her right on the third percentile line, and she had stayed resolutely tiny ever since. Some of that was probably medical: severe bronchiectasis had played hell with her ability to latch onto the breast and feed, leading to a lot of broken nights and baby hysterics and a short-term failure to thrive that left a long-term legacy. At Moll’s sixth birthday party, only a few weeks before, Liz had served up the cake on a set of bunting-draped kitchen steps instead of the dining room table so Molly wouldn’t need to stand on a chair to blow her candles out.
But Molly was tenacious, and she had a way of being where she needed to be. Right now, she squeezed her way past her big brother to get a better purchase on her mommy. Her stubby arms closed around Liz’s leg, where she held on like a limpet.