Walcott and I sat side by side on top of a picnic table, our feet on the bench, watching Natty dig trenches in the sandbox about ten feet away. Downtown was dead this early, with only the diner open, but I hoped another sunrise kind of kid might show up for Natty to play with.
“Why don’t you go slide,” I called to him. Beyond the sandbox, the park had two cute wooden play forts. Kids climbed up a ladder and through a hole in the floor to get in the first one, then crossed to the other through a clear plastic tube. The second one had a slide for an exit.
“No, thank you,” Natty called back.
“Keep your head in the game, Pierce,” Walcott told me. He’d brought his iPad, and I was trying to help him solve the Rubik’s Cube app that had been making him so crazy.
“I could swing you,” I called to Natty.
“No, thank you,” he yelled.
I said to Walcott, “I hate sandboxes. Cats come and poop in them. You know they do. Why would you put a giant litter box in the middle of a kiddy park?”
Walcott took the iPad back and started messing with the cube himself. I’d managed to get one side to all be yellow, but in just a couple of moves, he thoroughly wrecked it. Walcott was an English major.
“Dammit,” he said mildly, and poked it again. Every time he touched it, he made it worse.
“Natty!” I called. “Go slide!”
Natty blew air out his mouth so loudly I heard it from the picnic table, but then he obediently got out of the sandbox and trotted to the first play fort, climbing up into it. We watched him cross through the tube and then come whizzing down the slide. He ran around to do it again, and I looked back to the screen.
“You’re terrible at this mathy kind of game,” I told him. “Get the new Angry Birds.”
He shook his head, sad. “Angry Birds is secretly geometry. Game apps are all math, one way or another.”
“So go to Facebook and make CeeCee play Words with Friends! This is torture,” I said, but it was addictive torture. Walcott and I both bent over the screen as Natty ran the ladder-tube-slide in an endless, churning circle that boded well for today’s nap. I couldn’t make more than one color line up, but I could intuit that there was a pattern. I fixed the yellow side, not sure exactly how I was doing it. The other five sides were still a mess. As I spun the cube with my finger, it occurred to me that Natty’s last circuit through the play fort had started a couple of minutes ago, and he hadn’t yet come down the slide.
I called his name, and waited, head cocked, but he didn’t answer. I got a little spine chill.
“He’s in the fort,” Walcott said.
But the chill didn’t pass. “Let me go look.”
I called out “Marco?” as I crossed the green. Natty might ignore his name, but when one of us said “Marco,” Natty always came back “Polo.” Not answering “Polo” was a cheat, Walcott had told him last year, after a fifteen-minute tearing search through all the house, when two-year-old Nat decided to play hide-and-seek and didn’t tell us. Natty was such an earnest little person. He would never cheat. If I said “Marco,” he came back “Polo,” always. But not this time.
“Marco?” I called again.
In the resulting silence, my heart learned the cramping beatless stutter that every mother comes to know, the one that happens when your kid drops out of sight at Dillard’s or the Kroger. Nine-hundred-ninety-nine times out of a thousand, he’s crawled under a clothes rack to see a neat bug or run ahead to the sugar cereal aisle. But that thousandth time. That thousandth kid. For five seconds, I was so scared I was the thousandth mother, the one who looks away from her child, just for a moment. When she looks back, she sees only dead air, empty and already cold. I was so scared to be her. I broke into a run as I passed the sandbox.
I climbed the ladder, stuck my head and shoulders through the hatch—and there he was. He squatted with his back pressed into a corner, arms hugged around his own knees. Exasperated relief washed through me. He was all I could see: Natty, safe and present, his forehead in an angry rumple and his mouth scrunched into a wad.
Then my eyes adjusted to the dimmer light, and I saw Hilde Fleming was up there with him. Dirt streaked her pale, flat face. Her lips parted as our eyes met, and the tip of her tongue poked thoughtfully out, very pink and pointy. She’d folded herself into the corner opposite, on her knees. She held her white-bandaged hand in close against her chest, like any creature with a wounded paw. In that small, dim space, she was close enough to Natty to be breathing in the air my son had just breathed out.
In her good hand, she held a pair of sewing scissors. The sunlight came through the fort’s slatted roof in stripes, lighting up the silver blades. They went in a nasty curve like the beak of a small but wicked bird. In the other hand, she held a lock of hair. It was light brown and straight and very fine, as familiar to me as my own. I looked back at Natty and this time clocked the bristle of cropped hairs sticking up like a chicken tail at the very crown of his head. My whole skin blanched cold.
I came up another step and lurched the top half of my body toward my kid. He reached for me and I grabbed him, pulling him across the floor to me. He clipped his legs around my waist, arms wrapping tight around my neck. I could feel his small body shaking.
“She cut my hair!” he whispered fiercely, and I realized that he wasn’t shaking because he was scared. He was outraged.
I stood on the ladder with only the top half of my body poking up through the hatch, holding my kid close, and I bared my teeth at Hilde Fleming. My breath came out in a wordless hiss. It was an animal noise, rising up from the animal feeling that poured through me. I could have bit her open, in that moment, could have torn her face to bleeding ribbons with my hands.
The violence rising up inside my middle scared me; I had never felt this in myself before. I backed down the ladder, one-handed and very fast.
As soon as we touched ground, I set Natty on his feet. I knelt down, checking him over. As far as I could see, the only thing she’d cut with her wicked little scissors was the sprig of hair. But this was the girl who put a nail through her own hand. What if I’d been thirty seconds later? An awful picture came into my head: Hilde going after my son’s pretty eye with those curved blades, short and sharp. I shuddered, and I couldn’t get my heart to slow, not a tick. I could maybe keep myself from biting her, but I wasn’t done with Hilde Fleming yet. Not by half.
“You’re fine, bunny,” I said to Natty, and I made my voice be mild and cheery in spite of all the animal raging inside me. He blinked up at me, believing it.
“I don’t like that girl, though,” he told me.
“Me either!” I kept my tone light, as if we were discussing the spoiled kid who tried to boss everybody at his preschool. “I need a sec—run go see Walcott? You can have a turn on the iPad.”
He grinned and trotted instantly off toward the table. Last week Walcott had downloaded a preschool app called Dinosaurs!, and Natty was obsessed with it. I watched until I saw Walcott had eyes on him, and then I turned back to the ladder.
My blood galloped through me, red and hot. I’d seen Mimmy like this once, when Nat was barely four months old. She and I had turned to look at a dress displayed in a shop window. When we turned back, an oily-looking man, not a local, was bent over the stroller, hovering so close to the baby. I blinked, only surprised, but Mimmy was already moving, bulling in between them, physically shoving at this fellow who was twice her size. He skipped back, blanching. Her shoulders stayed braced and her neck was so tense that it looked made of cords. He’d apologized and I’d apologized and laughed it off, smoothing things over, but as he walked away, Mimmy stayed bristled up.
“He’s not right,” she said. “If you see that man again, you take Natty and you go the other way.” Staring holes in his retreating back, she had a look on her face that I had never seen before, her upper lip curled back to show her teeth, h
er eyes slitty and mean. I could feel the same look on my face now.
I hadn’t known I had it in me.
I went up the ladder, poking my top half back through the hole, legs braced on the ladder.
Hilde still knelt where I had left her. She’d put the scissors away into her big purse, trading them for the same purple notebook that she’d had at the blood drive. She was writing in it as I reared up over her, my head almost touching the ceiling. I leaned in, putting my face close to her face.
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
She looked back at me, thin bands of sunlight striping her face, and the shine caught in her glossy eyes, yellowing them. Her head tilted slightly to the side, regarding me like I was an odd species of beetle that had come along to interrupt her business. I hadn’t ever been so close to her. She gave off a faint electric lemon smell, like ozone gone a little sour.
Instead of answering, she turned her notebook toward me, showing me the page she was working on. It was filled with numbers, symbols, too random to be true math. There were curls of hand-drawn smoke filling every bit of blank space, the paper so overworked it was almost black with ink. She’d cut out tiny bits of magazine pictures, too, collaging them into the bad math, like they were part of the equation: a candle with a human eye glued where the flame should be. A long, legless dog body with a baby’s face. A manicured model’s hand with a nail drawn in, jutting through the palm.
The numbers and symbols were written in a spiral, like a nautilus shell that had the only patch of clean white paper at the genesis. That patch was blank, but not empty. Sunlight gleamed there as the few strands of Natty’s hair she’d taped into the middle caught the light. “He solves it. Do you see?” Hilde whispered, so intense. “He’s the other half of me. You see?”
I saw she needed medication. I saw that she was so, so not okay. I skipped reason and told her straight, “Stay away from my kid.”
To my surprise, she nodded, solemn, and said, “We all will. After the miracle.”
I blinked. She was so matter-of-fact, for a crazy person. “What miracle?” I asked, but that was the wrong question. “Wait—who is ‘we’?”
“I couldn’t do it by myself. I’ve tried and tried. But I found him, and we’ll make the miracle happen together,” she said, like it was perfectly normal to creep up on a three-year-old in a play fort to make him change his juice box into wine. Then her lips tilted up in a prim, instructive smile and she added, “After we’re one, you must call us Emmanuel. The angels sing that it is so. I know you hear them, too.” Her voice was high-pitched and bright with conviction. My spine shuddered like a tuning fork that had just been struck. There was an odd compelling power in her stillness and the sheen of her round, wet eyes; last semester I’d had to read The Crucible, but until this second, I hadn’t understood how the Salem Witch Trials could have happened.
I said, “You keep your crazy bitch scissors away from my kid.”
As I spoke, her gaze twitched sideways, like she was looking at my ear tip or just past my shoulder. She said, almost sorrowfully, “You’re right. She’s not yet fit.” She wasn’t talking to me. Not at all. “We’ll have to help her see.” I was breathing hard, but it was like the air near her was dry of oxygen. Then she did speak to me again. “This is our secret, little Mary. You know what he is. I’m just like him.”
“He’s nothing like you,” I spat back in a pure reaction that had no thought behind it.
“Oh, no, we’re the same.” She leaned in closer to me. “I was born of a virgin, too,” she confided, and then added slyly, “My mother and father still don’t share a bedroom.”
So she’d definitely heard me at the hospital. She’d already decided that Natty was “special,” at the gym, and I had inadvertently confirmed it.
I realized then that she hadn’t put the nail through herself just because she was a nut bag. She’d had an agenda. She’d watched me run out of the gym with Natty as he seized and shook, and she’d wanted to go to the hospital, because where else would I be taking him? She’d caused her own injury so her mother would take her along. So she could follow us.
No, worse. Follow Natty. God, she must have done it immediately, seconds after Natty seized, to get there so soon after us.
There was nothing I could say to her now that wouldn’t make things worse. I slid down the ladder, jumping the last rungs to land on my shaking legs. My heart was pounding, but across the park, Walcott and Natty sat side by side on top of the picnic table, blessedly regular and whole and dear in the fresh morning sun. Walcott’s long, long legs folded like jackknives to rest on the bench. Beside him, Natty’s legs were so short that his feet swung free in their blue Keds. Walcott thumbed at his phone, probably texting with CeeCee, because Natty had of course taken over the iPad. Walcott looked up, smiling, as I hurried to them, but his face changed when he saw mine.
“What’s wrong?”
“We’re going,” I told him.
But now he was looking past me, over my shoulder. I turned and saw Hilde Fleming worming on her belly through the clear plastic tunnel that connected the forts.
“What the what is that?” Walcott said, as she disappeared into the second one. A few seconds later, she sailed slowly down the slide, her purse across her shoulder, legs together in front of her, primly holding her skirt down. She landed lightly and stood, brushing at herself. Then she waved at us, all cheery with the bandaged hand, the one I knew had a hole clean through it. She turned and trotted off the other way, toward the diner, and disappeared inside it.
“Is that the weird kid from the blood drive?” Walcott asked, his voice rising. “What the hell just happened?”
“Walcott said hell,” Natty reported, not looking up from his game.
I had no idea how to begin to answer. I’d been so relieved in the emergency room when Natty came back to himself that I’d forgotten her. I’d ignored the whole encounter, assuming we’d never see her again. Big mistake.
Natty didn’t need to worry about Hilde, though. He didn’t seem to be fretting about the encounter in the playhouse or fixating on the sprig of super-short hair chickening up at the back of his head. I wanted to keep it that way. I pulled Walcott up off the table and walked him a few feet away, out of earshot.
I spoke in a fast, low whisper. “She’s not right. She’s so not right. At the gym, remember, her mother was telling us that she’s some kind of genius? But I think it’s going wrong in there. In her head, it’s going very wrong. She has a thing about Natty, and I don’t think she’s safe. She thinks she’s magic or something, and she thinks my kid is like her. But he isn’t. He’s not like her. Natty is just regular.”
Natty looked up, though I knew he couldn’t have heard me.
“Done!” he said.
He turned the iPad to show us, and I saw he hadn’t been playing with Dinosaurs! It was the Rubik’s Cube app that had been tormenting Walcott for days. Natty’d had it less than ten minutes, but on the screen, fireworks were going off on the black background, and the cube itself spun in a beam of white light.
I shook my head no, because it wasn’t possible. He was three. No way was it possible. And yet he grinned at me so proudly, lofting the iPad where the cube spun, finished and whole, each side a smooth plane of a single color.
Chapter 4
Walcott and me, we did what we should have done the second Hilde Fleming got freaky with a nail at the blood drive: We went and told on her to all our mothers.
Mimmy first. I had Walcott keep Natty occupied with Legos in the den because my kid had a vivid imagination. He was plenty good at inventing his own closet bogeys and under-bed monsters without having to deal with a real one.
Mimmy was fresh out of the shower, getting ready for work. I barged into her bathroom and got her up to speed as she sat in her silky robe at her vanity, moisturizing. She remembered Hilde from the hospital. The ide
a that the girl had put that nail through her own palm to follow us deeply alarmed her, and by the time I got through the haircut up in the play fort, she looked as concerned as I was.
“I think I should talk to her mother,” Mimmy said. “This kid’s in trouble.”
It took me a sec to realize she meant Hilde. I didn’t think of Hilde that way. She was six years younger than me, sure, but she’d graduated high school. She was about to be a college girl, like me. In my mind, Natty was the kid in trouble. Hilde was something awful, looming over him with wicked, silver scissors, out to get a piece. And that rich, low-country mother, bragging about Elon University and early graduation when Hilde was maybe ninety pounds and sickly pale—she struck me as oblivious and smug. “If that woman was any kind of decent mother, don’t you think she’d notice Hilde going off the rails?”
Mimmy said, “I certainly would have. I hope. But the girl did make a big point of telling you that no one else could know. Maybe she’s tamping it down around her family?”
My head shook in an inadvertent, instant no; I couldn’t absolve Mrs. Fleming that easily. Even if Hilde’s crafty mind was protecting its own crazy by telling her to keep it secret, even if she wasn’t announcing to her mom that she was God’s particular, best daughter, I’d known Hilde was off the second I laid eyes on her. I’d seen it, and I didn’t even love her.
“Her mother should have noticed something. The notebook—No one could see those crazy, inked-up pages and not pause. The nail! Where in a high-school gym is she going to fall on a nail like that? If the mom’s this blind, talking to her could make things worse. We have to think about Natty.”
Mimmy pursed her lips, thinking. “I tell you what, I’ll call around first and find out who these Flemings are and where they’re staying. Maybe someone here in town knows the family and can help us figure out the best way to handle them.”
I gave her a grateful kiss and said, “Yes. Be sure you find out when their rental ends. That’s the main thing.”