As they approached the porch, Hannah saw something that looked almost like a nest clinging at the opposite edge. She let go of Morgan’s hand. Hadn’t she just swept the porch?
“Hang on, Bug,” she said. Hannah walked across the planks to nudge it with her toe. Reddish brownish. Hair? Or fur?
“Miles!” Hannah yelled sharply as she lunged for the door. “Wake up!”
As if she didn’t know he was already up.
Miles had always loved his cousin. The pictures of Miles holding her as a newborn on his toddler lap were some of the sweetest photos ever taken in their family. The joy and blush on his face and the way Morgan seemed to be looking right at him. Their mother had it blown up to eleven by seventeen and framed it. People always asked her which studio had done the portrait. I took it, Eva would say with pride. Those are my grandbabies. They played together beautifully at family get-togethers, always happy to play cards or checkers or build a fort. Like siblings almost, and that was part of the reason Hannah wanted to live close to her sister. So the kids would have each other. So if they ended up only children, as it looked they might, they wouldn’t feel like only children.
But as Hannah headed toward her son’s room, shielding Morgan behind her, she felt full-on dread. Was she being paranoid or pragmatic? She loved her son, but having an adolescent boy, to someone who’d only had a sister, was like having an alien down the hall.
She was worried every time she saw an animal now, even on the damned wallpaper. She was worried when he offered to slice carrots for dinner and complained that the knife was dull. How the hell did he know the difference between a dull and a sharp knife?
She swallowed hard, then opened the door.
Miles was on his knees, putting shirts in drawers as he’d been told to the night before, and Morgan leapt onto his back, tickling him. “Surprise!” she cried, and he laughed, falling over.
“I got you good, admit it,” she said.
“Dude, you attacked me from behind like a coward!”
“Like a ninja, you mean!”
Hannah let the relief wash over her. Miles was so much bigger, yet he was delicate with Morgan, faux wrestling, swatting the air. All these years when he had let her win their thumb wars, their races for who got to go first. And he was patient, too, spending hours teaching her how to shuffle cards. And when she was better than him at something—cartwheels, dance moves, her effortless somersaults into her backyard pool—he seemed interested in learning even when Hannah knew he wasn’t. Usually, Ben would come and rescue him, proclaiming it was “man time!” just to drive Morgan crazy and make Miles happy. Mike didn’t do that; Ben did. She’d come into the room and think her husband didn’t even know his own son.
So she didn’t intervene, didn’t tell him to finish unpacking, didn’t say anything at all. She was needlessly worried, and she needed to get over herself. She left them alone, let them laugh themselves silly, while she went through the email chains with Sarah Harper from Boxt. Yes, there was a cancellation fee stated in the agreement letter, she was sure she’d negotiated that. She found Sarah’s profile had changed on LinkedIn, announcing her new job at a start-up in Boston. She sent her a carefully worded breezy message, containing her fury because, well, start-ups needed writers and had a lot of funding. And because guilt was a powerful motivator. Then she wrote a terse three-line email to the accounting department at Boxt, reminding them of her two-month cancellation fee, sharing the email trail.
They all walked back to Hillary’s house together and sat in the kitchen. Morgan told Miles what to expect the first day of school and which teachers were supposedly nice and which were supposedly mean and what the best day to eat in the cafeteria was (Tuesday, pizza pita day). Ben took his headphones off his neck, lending them to Miles to hear his favorite playlist on Spotify. It was Ben who’d gotten the kids into the Hamilton soundtrack, Ben who’d insisted John Legend was the Sinatra of their time. She was grateful Ben’s music was going into her son’s ears and not just Mike’s classic rock. Glad she would never have to get into Mike’s truck and hear Kid Rock blasting ever again.
It was only on the way home, bellies full, content, that she stopped just short of the porch and suddenly sniffed, alert, like a dog. There it was. The smell of death.
The memory of Hillary’s expensive coffee in her nose was suddenly gone. She turned to Miles; he looked away too quickly. His hair fell across his eyes like a veil, and instead of flicking his head like he usually did, he let it stay. Let it shield him. He was only half an inch shorter than Hannah now, but he hunched down next to her, folding his shoulders in as if trying to be invisible.
She remembered the half nest, the wisps of hair on the porch. Damn it, she should have listened harder to her intuition. Then she thought of the calls she’d have to make, to his father, his therapist. She thought of the punishment she’d have to mete out. She thought about how badly she didn’t want to do any of those things.
“Miles,” she said, “tell me what happened.”
The therapist had said she should be careful about asking questions, giving choices. With this issue, with boundaries and limits, statements were clearer.
He didn’t answer, and in that space, she wavered—could she be wrong? They lived in the woods now, near a creek, close to farmland. Things passed through; creatures lived and died. They were not in a village with sidewalks anymore. They were on the edge of suburbia, but it was more like the country than anywhere else they’d lived. They were part of the natural world. This made things better. Then she realized, just as sharply, that it could make them worse. There was more death around them, not less.
“I didn’t mean to.”
Wasn’t that the very definition of a compulsion? Wasn’t that the precise point that the psychiatrist she couldn’t afford had explained to her so carefully?
She took a deep breath. “Oh my God, the box cutter. Did you—”
“What? Mom, no. I swear, I—”
“Did you…leave it in the woods? Bury it? Where is it?”
The questions flew out of her mouth; she couldn’t help it. The statements were gone, evaporated.
She grabbed his arm—too hard, she’d think later—and spun him to face her. It took far more effort than she expected. Her arm ached with force and regret.
“Tell me where it is,” she declared.
“I hid it.”
“Get the shovel,” she said.
He glanced nervously up the hill toward Hillary’s.
“Can we wait till it’s dark?”
Of course that was the reasonable choice. He didn’t want to risk anyone seeing him, didn’t want his beloved cousin next door to know. And she, of course, the keeper of his secret, didn’t either. Doing it was one thing. Being bullied about it was another. But she didn’t know, couldn’t know, how much she’d regret saying yes. Yes, he could wait.