The most excruciating part had been removing Jenny’s things, because they were the closest things to Jenny. Each toy or doll or dress they threw into the cavernous packing box felt like throwing clumps of dirt onto her coffin—her final burial. Laurie had to take a break in the middle of it just in order to breathe. And there was all that unexpected stuff they stumbled across—a birthday card Jenny had drawn for her brother—Hapy birhdy Bne—three silver dollars and an Indian-head nickel she’d been given by her grandfather, a stable she’d constructed from Popsicle sticks and Elmer’s glue. Each item cracking open another door into memories they were dutifully trying to suppress, and each door opening inward, pressing painfully into what was left of her heart.
Once the room was empty, it was easier. Then they could pretend it was just a room: four walls, a floor, and a ceiling. They bought the desk where Ben would do his homework and Laurie would pay her bills, they mounted that big flat-screen TV to the wall and hooked it up to Ben’s Xbox. A home office, a game room—call it whatever you wanted, as long as you didn’t call it Jenny’s bedroom.
Of course, Laurie kept one toy from banishment to Goodwill, a golden horse belonging to a golden child, stashing it under a precarious tower of shoeboxes in her clothing closet—the one Jake never ventured into without a search warrant.
She’d pretty much forgotten about that toy—until she’d seen it today in one of the photos in the album. Four-year-old Jenny dancing Goldy across the floor of her bedroom, oblivious to the camera being held by a mother equally oblivious of what was to come. That unimaginable moment, when life would be separated into before and after.
Laurie pushed the door open.
For a moment, blackness. She had to wait a few seconds for her eyes to acclimate to the dark before she could see that the fold-out couch was actually folded out, and, yes, there was a person lying on top of it.
Laurie could hear her breathing, ragged and restless like a broken-down air conditioner. She wondered what she was dreaming about. Something horrible, probably, remembering what the female detective had told them.
Why did she wait so long to run away? Laurie had asked her.
They were her parents since she was six years old. They were monsters, sure—but they were her monsters.
And Laurie had thought there was something awful about relegating monster to a relative term. Even if it was true. There were all sorts of monsters let loose in this world, the detective was saying, and some of them belonged to you.
This is Jenny, she told herself.
Their friends the Shapiros had adopted twin daughters from Colombia, and as they were walking into the room where two complete strangers were going to be ushered into their arms, Amy Shapiro had whispered a kind of mantra to herself: These are my daughters, she’d told herself, Meghan and Molly Shapiro, these are my daughters.
That’s what Laurie was doing now.
This is my daughter, Jenny.
She didn’t look like Jenny—Jenny was six years old with dimpled knees. She didn’t act like Jenny—Jenny liked to gallivant around the house singing songs from Mulan. She didn’t talk like Jenny either, whose missing front tooth made her t’s whistle.
It didn’t matter.
This is my daughter, Jenny.
Who suddenly shifted and moaned, throwing an arm up as if to ward off a bad dream, her hand clenched into a tight fist. Her hair was a tangled mess and so was the blanket, as if she’d been wrestling with it before finally pinning it into a kind of submission.
Laurie let herself sink into the lumpy mattress the way you slowly lower yourself into a hot bath, then tentatively brushed away several strands of gold that were stuck to Jenny’s forehead. She stroked her hair and whispered, “Shhhhh.”
“Shhhhhh . . .”
Jenny’s eyes blinked open.
Jake had once set a trap for a possum that’d been mauling their backyard gardenias, but it’d been Laurie who’d first discovered it hissing and writhing in its makeshift prison. It was the possum’s eyes that still haunted her—twin beacons of panic.
That’s what Jenny’s eyes looked like now.
“Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away,” Laurie whispered, continuing to stroke her hair.
“So he said to his mother, ‘I am running away . . .’”
Jenny blinked.
“‘If you run away,’ said his mother, ‘I will run after you . . .’”
She blinked again, and Laurie could see a single tear slowly rolling down her cheek. The panic was leaving her, going back to that subterranean place where it caused sleeping hands to ball into angry fists.
“‘For you,’ said his mother, . . .”
Jenny curled herself into Laurie’s lap and shut her eyes.
“‘. . . are my little bunny . . .’”
SEVEN
Where am I?
It wasn’t the first time I’d asked myself that question. It should’ve been old hat by now.
Where the fuck am I . . . ?
I’d woken up in too many places not knowing where I was, and some of those places had turned out to be pretty awful.
I didn’t recognize anything.
A window of rippling silver.
A potted cactus with a dead flower half attached to it.
A desk with a blank computer sitting on it.
A miniature universe.
Focus.
The window was rippling because a heating vent was blowing the silvery shades up and down, up and down.
The universe was not a universe but a dusty diorama, slowly crystallizing into an actual and recognizable object.
It belonged to Ben. Ben’s diorama. Ben had stopped outside my door last night and gone, Ha . . .
But there’d been someone in this room last night.
I could swear it.
I’d been flitting in and out of half-remembered nightmares—that was old hat too—and when I managed to escape from a particularly terrifying one—I was chained to a tree at the bottom of a lake lit on fire—not exactly waking up, but not exactly sleeping either, someone was stroking my hair. And whispering to me.
Someone like Mom.
I stayed right there. In bed, which was really a couch, a couch bed, letting the sun creep through the shimmering blinds and up over my legs, like someone slowly pulling a warm woolen blanket up over me. I could hear waking-up sounds. They comforted me, those sounds: shuffling slippered feet, soft voices meant not to wake anyone, muted clanging from down in the kitchen.
What day was it?