My stomach curls in on itself just with the thought of tomorrow. The investigators have been tiptoeing around us until after the funeral in an unspoken understanding to honor the Mitchells’ loss, but they’ve taken their kid gloves off. They made that clear when they called Bryan this morning and told him about the gun.
How many times have we told the kids not to play with the gun?
“What was I supposed to do?” Bryan asked after I got upset that he hadn’t consulted me about Ted coming to the police station. “You would’ve said no even if I’d asked you. Don’t even try to pretend like you wouldn’t.” He sneered at me. “You care more about what your damn girlfriends think than you do your own family. The boys used our gun, Dani—our gun. And the police know it.”
The intensity of the grief surrounds us, filling the police department waiting room with thick, suffocating energy. Chairs line each wall in front of the door that I can’t take my eyes off because any minute someone is going to walk through it and start whatever grueling process we are about to go through. It’s different from any waiting room I’ve been in before. There are no cheap prints in frames on the walls. No tables with old magazines for us to read while we wait. Nothing to distract us.
Kendra and Paul sit huddled in the corner. Paul’s arms are wrapped tightly around Kendra, and her small frame is buried inside his. He had to hold her up when they came through the door. Her sweatpants dragged across the floor, and her baggy long-sleeved shirt was dotted with stains. I tried to make eye contact with her, but she kept her face down, her long blonde hair falling forward like a shield. I shot Lindsey a worried look, but she quickly turned away, clearly ignoring me because she’s still upset about the lawyer. I sent her a bunch of apologetic texts last night, begging her to talk, but she didn’t respond to any of them, and she never would’ve done that unless she was mad.
It feels like we’re sitting in the principal’s office, and I hate getting into trouble. Bryan grips my hand. His palms are sweaty. Ted still hasn’t arrived. We got here first and grabbed seats on the row of chairs lining the right wall. Lindsey and Andrew came next and sat beside us, leaving the other wall to Kendra and Paul, like there’s an imaginary line separating the parents who have lost their child from those of us who haven’t.
Except that line might not be so clear.
Tears fill my eyes. Caleb wet the bed last night, and he hasn’t done that since kindergarten. He was too wrecked to even be embarrassed about it. I cleaned his sheets, then lay in bed with him, holding him tightly and running my hands through his hair while he sobbed.
Neither of us fell back to sleep.
He’s been out of the psychiatric ward for four days, and each night follows the same routine. His nightmares interrupt his fitful sleep, sending bloodcurdling screams throughout the house and shooting panic through my veins while I race to his room and Bryan rushes into Luna’s. Caleb shakes in terror on his bed and clings to me like he’d climb inside me if he could. My pleas are the same every night while I hold him against me, doing my best to comfort him.
“Please, Caleb, just tell me what happened,” I whisper.
It’s been seventeen days, and he still hasn’t spoken. Not one word.
He didn’t even speak the night of the accident when Miss Thelma found him wandering down her block covered in blood. She recognized him immediately when she spotted him across the street. She’s been walking her poodle, Mitzi, in our tree-lined neighborhood for as long as he’s been playing in it with his friends. He has knocked on her door with every school fundraising flyer since kindergarten and practically ran her over on his bike more than once. She called out to him, but he kept walking like he didn’t hear her, so she hurried down the sidewalk to make sure he was okay. That was when she saw his face and called the police. Miss Thelma followed behind him without saying anything until the police arrived. She hasn’t walked Mitzi since. Her daughter comes every day to do it for her.
We still have no clue what happened that night. The reporters are calling it the worst tragedy since the Lindell fires. The newspapers and media outlets have taken to calling Caleb “the silent child,” and some of them have been so bold as to claim he’s faking his silence to keep himself out of trouble, but they didn’t see him that night at the hospital. He was transported to the psychiatric ward on the sixteenth floor in a wheelchair because he couldn’t hold himself up to walk. Andrew and I practically carried him into his locked room. His nurses allowed me to clean him up once the investigators had bagged all his clothes.
I laid him in the tub and bathed him like I haven’t done since he was an infant, running the washcloth over his body and face again and again. Every part of his body was limp. His arms dangled like a doll’s. He gazed up at the ceiling, eyes unfixed, unseeing, as I washed away the blood of his best friends since preschool.
The front door of the police station opens, interrupting my thoughts. All of us turn to look as Ted strides into the room. There’s no mistaking he’s a lawyer with his shiny briefcase and three-piece suit. He makes a beeline for Bryan.
“I’m so sorry I’m late, buddy,” he says, pulling out a handkerchief from his pocket and swiping it across the beads of sweat on his forehead before sliding it back into his pocket in one swift movement.
Paul lets go of Kendra and leaps to his feet. “You hired a lawyer? What’d you hire a lawyer for?”
Bryan takes a step toward him, holding his hands out in a peaceful gesture. “It’s not what you think, Paul. He’s just a friend. He’s—”
“A friend?” Paul narrows his eyes to slits. “All of us have friends that are lawyers.” He waves his hand around the room. “Do you see any other lawyers here besides yours?”
People don’t speak to Bryan like that, and his body stiffens in response. I chew on my lip, hoping he’ll keep his mouth shut this once. He expels a deep breath like he’s letting go of his anger, and I breathe a sigh of relief.
“We thought it might be a good idea,” he says.
That’s not what we rehearsed. He was supposed to say that Ted was a family friend and there to help all of us because we were too emotional to think clearly, too close to the situation, so we needed someone to think rationally for us. That was the explanation we’d planned.
“You thought it would be a good idea?” Paul’s anger radiates off him, his rage contorting his familiar features into a man I don’t recognize.
Lindsey nudges Andrew, and he stands to join them. “Come on, guys. Let’s remember why we’re here,” he says, reaching out and grabbing their arms to form a lopsided triangle in the middle of the room.
Images of the three of them huddled together like that flash through my mind in quick snippets—all the family vacations, school functions, baseball games, and playdates over the years. Kendra, Lindsey, and I have been so lucky. We’ve gotten to live the life we whispered about when we were little girls huddled underneath our blankets at sleepovers. We always talked about living in the town we grew up in, marrying amazing men, and raising our children together. We couldn’t believe it when our three oldest boys were as close as we were growing up. We knew how good we had it and how fortunate we were that our husbands got along so well.