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House of Glass
Sophie Littlefield
Bestselling author Sophie Littlefield delivers a riveting, ripped-from-the-headlines story about a family put to the ultimate testJen Glass has worked hard to achieve the ideal life: a successful career, a beautiful home in an affluent suburb of Minneapolis, a seemingly perfect family. But inside the Glass house, everything is spinning out of Jen's control. Her marriage to her husband, Ted, is on the brink of collapse; her fifteen-year-old daughter grows more distant each day; and her five-year-old son barely speaks a word. Jen is on the verge of breaking, but nothing could have prepared her for what is to come….On an evening that was supposed to be like any other, two men force their way into the Glasses’ home, but what begins as a common robbery takes an even more terrifying turn. Held hostage in the basement for more than forty-eight hours, Jen and Ted must put aside their differences if they are to have any hope of survival. They will stop at nothing to keep their family safe—even if it means risking their own lives.A taut and emotional tale of a family brought together by extraordinary forces, House of Glass is a harrowing exploration of both the lengths a mother will go to protect her children, and the power of tragedy to teach us what truly matters.


Bestselling author Sophie Littlefield delivers a riveting, ripped-from-the-headlines story about a family put to the ultimate test when two men take them hostage inside their home
Jen Glass has worked hard to achieve the ideal life: a successful career, a beautiful home in an affluent suburb of Minneapolis, a seemingly perfect family. But inside the Glass house, everything is spinning out of Jen’s control. Her marriage to her husband, Ted, is on the brink of collapse; her fifteen-year-old daughter grows more distant each day; and her five-year-old son barely speaks a word. Jen is on the verge of breaking, but nothing could have prepared her for what is to come.…
On an evening that was supposed to be like any other, two men force their way into the Glasses’ home, but what begins as a common robbery takes an even more terrifying turn. Held hostage in the basement for more than forty-eight hours, Jen and Ted must put aside their differences if they have any hope of survival. They will stop at nothing to keep their family safe—even if it means risking their own lives. A taut and emotional tale of a family brought together by extraordinary forces, House of Glass is a harrowing exploration of the lengths a mother will go to protect her children, and the power of tragedy to teach us what truly matters.
“Sophie Littlefield shows considerable skills for delving into the depths of her characters and complex plotting.”
—South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Praise for Sophie Littlefield and Garden of Stones
“Littlefield…makes her tale resonant and universal…gripping.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Suspense, mystery, and love drive the intricate plot in this moving drama of women in a Japanese American family over the course of three generations….The shocking revelation is unforgettable.”
—Booklist
“Mesmerizing…it possesses elements of mystery
that give way to shocking revelations and heartbreaking
yet inevitable conclusions. A story of unspeakable injustice
and bitter sacrifice, it will leave you shaken.”
—RT Book Reviews
“Garden of Stones is a remarkable work of fiction…that is quite engaging and unique. The book and writing are immediately engrossing and engage the reader’s sympathies deeply. Reading this dramatic, affecting account is an illuminating and insightful journey.”
—Bookreporter.com
Also available from Sophie Littlefield and Harlequin MIRA
GARDEN OF STONES
House of Glass
Sophie Littlefield

www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
For S.A.L. and K.W.
Contents
Chapter One (#u06ee0eac-5f3a-5ec0-a686-5d1a6ff737f6)
Chapter Two (#ue0c96eaa-fd22-5a5f-b3d7-1b498a8ab5a2)
Chapter Three (#u9dfcfde8-2e88-53ef-947c-78d95c786a10)
Chapter Four (#u0d4279ec-689e-5e8b-bb38-c30476d70ef2)
Chapter Five (#u241867bd-40ee-560c-af25-be57093c0b52)
Chapter Six (#uf770baf9-5d0c-5494-9686-889519ce8faa)
Chapter Seven (#ueced4361-90d0-5445-a52d-015a8e2f1f61)
Chapter Eight (#u0ab7c823-23ef-5d8b-b987-82f94396c34a)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Questions for Discussion (#litres_trial_promo)
A Conversation with Sophie Littlefield (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One
On Jen Glass’s Saturday to-do list, she scheduled an hour to visit the apartment her father died in, and another for the morgue. Only half an hour for the funeral home, since you could make just about anything go faster when you were willing to write a big check.
And Jen was willing. With every passing mile of frozen fields, every tinny song on the classic rock station, every time her sister snapped her gum, she was growing ever more willing.
The to-do list was written in her neat handwriting in the fabric-covered notebook in her purse. On the page before were the notes she’d taken at the parents’ association meeting. On the page before that, a list of tree services that had been recommended by friends. Both of those lists were written before she knew her father was dead. But according to the police, he had been dead for several days when the landlady found him. So it was entirely possible that while Jen wrote down ArborWorks (Margeurite) ask for Gerald, he had already taken his last breath. When she was sitting in the library at Teddy’s preschool, writing Teacher appreciation, Thursday, two dozen cupcakes (carrot? cream cheese frost?) his corpse could well have been beginning to smell.
Tanya always made fun of Jen’s list making, so she had kept this one hidden away. But what Tanya didn’t understand was that when you wrote a list, it forced you to organize your thoughts, so when the time came to act, you didn’t waste time on false starts and dead ends. A list could make an unpleasant task go more quickly. And this day, attending to the details of the passing of a man Jen hadn’t seen or talked to in almost three decades, couldn’t go quickly enough.
* * *
They reached Murdoch in the early afternoon, after a stop at a roadside Subway because Tanya had a coupon. She paid for lunch. Jen was paying for everything else, and that knowledge sat between them like a screen that muffled what they wanted to say. But it was an inescapable fact: being a Calumet housewife of a global management consultant—even a laid-off one—paid far better than being a single mom with a high school education and a call center job.
Jen exited the highway when the phone app told her to. There wasn’t much to look at. A couple hundred miles north of Minneapolis, the land was flat and gray. Murdoch had no visible means of support, no smokestacks or office parks or hospital complexes. A cluster of motels and fast-food restaurants gave way to a depressing little town that spilled out on either side of a straight-shot four-lane road littered with strip malls and auto shops. Jen estimated that a quarter of the businesses they passed were boarded up.
“Jeez, this place isn’t much,” Tanya said, yawning. “Guess Sid didn’t exactly move up in the world.”
The phone took them into a neighborhood of shabby bungalows. Sid’s apartment building was a run-down two-story sandwiched between a vacant lot and a squat little cinder block bar whose neon Budweiser sign struck a jarring note in the colorless afternoon. No one had bothered to shovel the sidewalk leading up to the apartment building’s entrance after the last storm, and the snow had melted unevenly, dirty banks of it giving way to icy patches. One of the units still had Christmas lights up around the window; the strand had come loose from the nails and dangled against the building.
Tanya dug the keys out of her purse. The management company had overnighted them to her. Monday, they were hauling away whatever was left in the apartment.
“Ready?” she said, opening the door.
Jen steeled herself to face the residents they might pass in the hall. She imagined men in threadbare wool coats, old ladies with cats for company and the TV on all day long. But inside the building it was empty and still, the carved wood moldings and newel posts in surprisingly good shape. Someone in the twin cities would pay a bundle for them, Jen couldn’t help thinking. Up here in the sticks, people didn’t know what they had.
“One-oh-one.” Tanya read the numerals on the doors. “One-oh-two. Where the hell is apartment one?”
“Can I see?” Jen took the keys from Tanya. The little round tag had a number one printed clearly on it.
Tanya glared at her as she took the keys back. She was older, by almost two years, and even though they were in their forties now, she still sometimes seemed to need to be in charge. “Satisfied? Maybe next time trust me to read a number? I bet it’s downstairs.”
A narrow staircase at the back of the hall led to the basement. It smelled of both mold and bleach. There was a washer and dryer up on blocks, splintery plywood cupboards with padlocks. The light from a naked bulb overhead and a few narrow windows near the ceiling wasn’t enough to cut the gloom. At the far end of the basement was a door set in unpainted Sheetrock that blocked off the rest of the basement.
“No way this is a legal apartment,” Tanya said. She tried the key, and the door opened.
Inside, the odor of bleach was stronger, but there was another faint smell underneath, ripe and awful and somehow sweet. So that’s the smell of death, Jen thought.
The apartment was a single room. A bank of cabinets and a sink anchored one wall; a tiny bathroom and closet were built into the other. A high, cobwebbed window looked out on a dead shrub. There was a bookcase, a table under the window covered with a patterned cloth, a soiled couch facing a television set on a pressboard console. A bed stripped down to the mattress, which looked none too clean.
“I bet he died in the bed,” Tanya said. “Otherwise the sheets and stuff would still be on there.”
“Um.” Jen felt faintly nauseous. “They didn’t say when they called?”
“They hardly said anything when they called. I think it was just some secretary or something. She was, like, when was the last time you saw your father? I wanted to tell her to shove the death certificate up her ass.”
“Tanya,” Jen said reprovingly. “She didn’t mean anything.”
“How do you know? You weren’t there.”
Jen let it go. They were both on edge today. Tanya just said whatever she was thinking, a trait that had always gotten her into trouble. Jen had learned a long time ago to think before speaking, to filter out the emotions first.
Tanya picked up a glass that had been sitting on top of the television and inspected the contents. “There’s nothing in here that’s worth anything. Look at this. The Salvation Army probably wouldn’t even take it.”
“Well, then I guess it’s good that we don’t have to deal with it.”
“I asked the management company if there was a security deposit,” Tanya said, putting her hand on the metal headboard and giving it an experimental shove. “They gave me the runaround.”
Why are we even here? Jen was thinking, but she knew the answer. For her, anyway. She had to see the room, the place where Sid had lived, to believe he was truly gone. She had to feel his absence, the emptiness that he left behind.
And there was the curiosity, too. That faint uneasiness—was it hope? Dread?—that there would be some clue to who he’d been, or more specifically, who they’d been to him. Some evidence that their lives had once been tangled together.
Tanya moved briskly through the room, opening cabinets, picking up papers and CDs from the shelves and examining the covers, flicking through the half dozen shirts hanging in the closet. Jen stood near the window, watching. A yellowing newspaper was stacked on one end of the couch. A chipped bowl holding loose change sat next to the TV.
“Found his cash,” Tanya said, holding up a plastic baking soda container. She shook out the bills and counted. “One-eighty.”
“There’s nothing else here you want to take back with us,” Jen said. “Is there?”
“I guess not.” Tanya looked around, frowning. “I guess I just wanted to know if he had pictures of us. Of Mom. Anything, from then.”
“Are you disappointed?”
Tanya shook her head. “Not really. I guess I’m almost relieved. But I just had to see it for myself. Like, if he’d secretly saved things from then, it would be like part of him was still alive. And not in a good way.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.”
“Oh, wait.” Tanya reached up on the closet shelf and took down a faded cardboard shoe box. She brought it over to the table and dumped out the contents. Papers, mostly. She flipped through them. “Central Valley Tool and Die...it’s just HR stuff. Benefits, employee handbook. These look really old. Wonder how long he even worked there?”
An envelope fell out, two words written in black ink on the outside. “The Girls.” Jen didn’t know until that second that she knew her father’s handwriting, that the memory of it had lodged fast and hidden all these years.
Tanya shook out three pictures. Two were their school pictures from the year before Sid moved away: shy grins, their hair curving out in Farrah Fawcett waves, sleeveless cotton shirts revealing thin suntanned arms. The third picture was of the whole family, much earlier: their mother in the middle, Jen no more than six or seven and wearing a sundress printed with anchors. Sid with a mustache, looking out of the frame, scowling with impatience, as though there was somewhere else he needed to be.
* * *
The afternoon held no more surprises. Forms to sign at the morgue, where it turned out that they were not required to view the body. A brief tug-of-war at the mortuary until Jen gave in to the pitch and bought their cheapest urn for the ashes she had no intention of ever claiming.
It was dark by the time they checked into the Double Tree. Their room had a view of the parking lot. The heater cycled on with a vengeance, something rattling deep within.
“Is it okay with you if we do room service?” Jen asked. “I really don’t want to go back outside in the cold.”
“I’ve got something better,” Tanya said, setting her overnight bag down on the nearest bed. She unzipped the bag and pulled out a bottle of wine, and then another. “I even remembered the corkscrew. And check it out. Snacks.”
Jen feigned enthusiasm. She knew Tanya was just trying to contribute, and she didn’t really need anything more than the canned nuts and snack mix. While Tanya was setting it all up on the nightstand between the two beds, laying out a hand towel for a tablecloth and pouring wine into the plastic cups, Jen called Ted, but there was no answer. She took off her makeup and changed into her pajamas.
“Wow, look at you,” Tanya said, when Jen came out of the bathroom. She was lounging against the pillows in her bed, watching television. She picked up the remote and shut it off. “Got big plans later?”
Jen looked down at her pajamas, a silky navy blue set that Ted had given her for Christmas. “These aren’t anything special,” she said, blushing.
“Seriously? I don’t dress like that unless I’m getting some action.” She grinned, her teeth pink from the wine. She was wearing a faded T-shirt over sweats. Her cup was almost empty.
Jen got into her bed, pulling the covers up over her legs and taking a sip of her wine. She was always embarrassed when Tanya talked about the men she was seeing. They never lasted long, and they were never anywhere near as good as Tanya made them sound when she first met them.
“I feel like we ought to drink a toast to the old bastard,” Tanya said, and it took a minute for Jen to realize that she was talking about their father. “Only, I can’t think of a single thing to toast him for.”
Jen raised her cup, reaching across the space between the two beds. She was going to say May he rest in peace, but something stopped her; she had never seen Sid at rest during her entire childhood. He was always on the move, fidgeting, pacing, coming and going.
Until Tanya called, Jen had barely thought about her father in years. Sid Bennett was often away from home when his daughters were young, disappearing for days at a time. Later he took pipeline work in Alaska and his absences stretched to months. When he was around, he wanted little to do with two solemn, skittish little girls, and spent his time antagonizing their mother instead until she finally told him not to bother to come back.
And then the summer that Jen was thirteen and Tanya a rebellious, sullen fifteen, their mother got sick. Sid started coming around again, looking for an opening, wooing her with smooth talk and cheap flowers when he needed a tank of gas or money to tide him over. She was unable to resist, the cancer rendering her silent and listless. He might have persisted right up to her death, but a bar fight landed him in the hospital for a long stay at the end of that dismal summer.
When he was released, he headed north, ending up here in Murdoch. They only found out where he was when the court tracked him down after their mother died, but by then Jen and Tanya were settled into their aunt’s basement, a solution everyone agreed was better than trying to extract any support out of Sid.
“He never got in touch with us, not once,” Jen said, after they both drank.
“That never seemed to bother you before.”
“It doesn’t. I mean, I don’t know what I would have done if he had. It’s just that now he’s dead, I’m realizing that it’s like he never aged, for me. I never saw him get old.”
“I guess it was too much to hope that he would have gotten remarried. Left someone else to deal with all his shit.” Tanya’s voice was bitter.
“At least it’s all done. After today we don’t ever have to think of him again.”
“So we just walk away.” Tanya sighed. “I guess at least we got a night away from the kids. Speaking of which—what’s Ted doing with his big night to himself?”
“Working on the bathroom, supposedly.”
“He’s still not done?”
Jen grimaced. Ted had been laid off for almost six months, and the renovation project was supposed to keep him busy while he looked for a new job, but lately he hadn’t done much job searching or renovating. In the past few weeks there had been several times when he went out “for supplies,” and came home empty-handed. “He swore he was going to get a lot done this weekend.”
“Good luck with that.” Tanya laughed. Jake’s father left when he was a baby, and she took a dim view of men in general, other than the brief infatuations at the start of her relationships. “With his wife and kids gone for the weekend? I bet he went out and painted the town.”
“I guess...” Jen said, more morosely than she meant to.
Tanya looked at her keenly. “Hey, I was kidding. Everything’s okay with you guys, isn’t it?”
“No, no, it’s fine. Just, you know, I wish he’d find something. It’s hard having him underfoot all the time.”
Tanya looked at her doubtfully, picking up the bottle. “Here, give me your glass.”
As Tanya topped off her wine, Jen couldn’t help thinking of the little slip of goldenrod notepaper Ted had tossed in the tray on his dresser along with his change. The feminine handwriting that wasn’t hers, the initials SEB in a curvy script at the top. On it, Sarah Elizabeth Baker had written Thx tons, Thursday 2pm Firehouse xoxoxo.
Sarah had been his assistant before he was laid off. She wasn’t gorgeous, but she had a knowing, sensual way about her that was hard to miss; she could make a Brooks Brothers blouse look like an invitation. At the Christmas party, when she’d had too much to drink, she’d kissed Ted on the mouth when she said goodbye.
None of which necessarily meant anything—except that Ted left Flores Martin months ago. And yes, for a while there was a weekly bundle of his mail, delivered with one of these little gold notes paper clipped on top.
But there hadn’t been mail from work in a long time.
Jen wondered if she could tell Tanya about Sarah. But Tanya would be too quick to turn on Ted, too quick to castigate him for crimes he might not have even committed.
So Jen drank her wine and changed the subject, and when the bottle was empty Tanya opened the second one, and they made a good dent in it before Jen finally turned the light out. They mumbled their good-nights just like all those years ago when they shared a bedroom and a bunk bed. Tanya was asleep in minutes, her breathing even and deep. Jen lay awake for a while despite the blurry wine buzz, thinking about Sarah and her glossy hair, the x’s and o’s at the bottom of her note.
When Jen finally slept, her nightmare had nothing to do with Sarah, or even Sid. She dreamed the red bird, its beak opening wider and wider, its screams ever louder, uncoiling and unfurling until there was nothing else.
Chapter Two
Livvy woke up shivering. Her shirt was wet against her back. Something cold had seeped into her sleeping bag, the room smelled like vomit and her head felt thick.
Faint light came from the hall at the top of the stairs, enough for her to make out the others, asleep in the basement rec room. Paige and Rachel and Collin. The girls were huddled in the sleeping bags Rachel got from the garage, and Collin was making do on the couch with a blanket from Rachel’s room. No one else was awake. Someone snored softly.
Livvy sat up groggily, peeling the damp sleeping bag from her skin. It smelled like stale beer—and there was the overturned plastic cup. Rachel must have set it down between them before she fell asleep. Livvy patted the floor; the spill hadn’t reached Rachel, only her. And soaked through the carpet. How were they going to clean it up before Rachel’s parents got back?
Not to mention where Collin had vomited, over by the TV. They’d gotten most of it up then, holding their breath and laughing. It had seemed funny last night. Livvy knew that he wasn’t the only one: Paige had thrown up behind the fraternity before they’d walked home from the party.
“Are you up?” It was Paige, whispering from her other side. They’d lined up on the floor, the three of them, just like they used to do in middle school when they fell asleep watching movies during sleepovers. “Let’s go upstairs.”
“Rachel spilled beer on my sleeping bag.”
“Eww. Leave it. Come on.”
They tiptoed upstairs to Rachel’s bedroom, sneaking through the house as if Mr. and Mrs. Crane were sleeping upstairs. But they weren’t even home; they had taken Rachel’s sister to some out-of-town tournament, leaving Rachel home by herself. She was supposed to be on the school ski trip—they all were. Instead they’d walked the half mile to the edge of campus, to Collin’s brother’s fraternity, where the party was still in full swing hours later when they left.
Paige flopped on Rachel’s bed. “Did you get it on you?”
“Just on my shirt.” Livvy pulled the shirt over her head. She got clean clothes out of the overnight bag she’d stowed in Rachel’s room last night. Her pajamas, yellow flannel with snowflakes, were still folded neatly at the bottom of the bag. She felt guilty as she pulled on her clothes; she could smell the fabric softener her mom used.
Paige yawned. “Did you end up talking to Sean?”
Livvy didn’t look at Paige. Even hearing his name, even that hurt. “A little,” she said, like she didn’t care. “They weren’t there long.”
“You looked so good last night. It must have killed him. Oh, my God, especially when that guy...remember?”
Paige laughed, still riding the giddy thrill of their lie. She’d told everyone they were freshman from Ann Arbor, visiting for the weekend. No one questioned it, not for a second. People flowed in and out of the fraternity, tracking snow in on their shoes, leaving the door open, standing around the keg on the back porch like it was summer. No one seemed cold. Rachel was gorgeous and Paige was fearless and Collin made them laugh, and Livvy kept to the center of them all, where no one seemed to expect her to talk. Just to dance, as the night wore on and she drank more and Paige convinced her to get up on the coffee table, and she’d shut her eyes and felt the music go through her and then when she opened them, there was Sean, standing in the doorway watching her with an expression she couldn’t read.
“Stay here. I’m going to go get us a couple Red Bulls,” Paige said, bounding off the bed.
“Okay.” Livvy crawled under the covers. Maybe she and Paige could sleep here a little longer. She wasn’t supposed to be home until after lunch. With any luck, when she got home she would go straight to her room and her parents would leave her alone for once. At dinner if they asked her about the skiing she’d just lie—no big deal.
Except the thing with her mom’s dad. Livvy squeezed her eyes shut and burrowed down deeper in Rachel’s bed. It was so weird, not to even know she had a grandfather, that he had been alive all this time. Then all of a sudden he was dead, and Mom was going up there with Aunt Tanya to get him cremated or something.
At least her mom would be distracted and maybe she wouldn’t ask her a million questions about the ski trip. But still. It was her mom’s dad. Her mom and Aunt Tanya had been really poor growing up and their mother died when they were in high school and they had to go live with relatives, and her mom never talked about it except to constantly say how grateful they should all be for their blessings. So her dad must have been a real dick, not even taking care of them when their mom died, but still, not to ever even mention him?
Paige came back with the drinks. She slid in next to Livvy, and they popped the tops and drank. “So, what did you say to Sean?”
Livvy shrugged. “I told him I heard Allie has herpes. Then he told me I didn’t know what I was missing, and I told him to go fuck himself.”
“You didn’t!” Paige cracked up. “You can do so much better, anyway. Did you give that guy your number last night?”
“Are you kidding? My parents would kill me.”
“So? They don’t know about last night, right? You got away with it once, you can do it again. We just have to be careful.”
But as Paige chatted on about the night before, Livvy could only think of the way Sean had looked at her over his shoulder as he left. She knew her parents hated him, and even her friends thought he was a loser since he got suspended again, but none of them knew what it was like when he looked at you as though you were the answer to every question he ever had.
Last fall, for a few months, Sean had made her his world. And even if Livvy pretended she hated him now, even if he was with that skank Allie, whose cousins supposedly were in a gang, even if he never thought about her anymore, she knew that being with him had changed her and she would never be the same.
She hadn’t told Paige the truth about what really happened. Sean and Allie came up to the keg together, holding hands, not seeing Livvy standing there until they already got their drinks. Sean looked like someone slapped him, and Allie said something, and Livvy tried to get past them but Allie blocked her way.
“I heard you have herpes,” she muttered so only Livvy could hear.
And Livvy couldn’t think of anything to say back, because she was drunk and about to cry, and so she shoved Allie hard and the full cup of beer went all down her front, splashing up into her face and soaking her hair. As Sean dragged Allie off, she was yelling that Livvy would be sorry.
Livvy was already sorry. But not about Allie.
Chapter Three
When they got back to Tanya’s apartment, Jen parked and turned off the car. “Let me help you take your stuff up.”
Tanya had fallen asleep on the drive, and there was a crease on her face from where it was pressed against the hood of her coat. “What stuff?” she said irritably. “All’s I’ve got is just the one bag. Plus I need to pick up Jake from next door.”
She already had her hand on the door handle, and Jen didn’t know how to tell her that she wasn’t ready to leave her, that she’d replayed that desperate little apartment over in her head the whole way back and her stomach felt like it had a giant hole in it. That there were things somebody needed to say and she didn’t know what they were or how to say them.
“Have lunch next week?” she asked.
Tanya was out of the car, and she ducked back down to peer in. “We never have lunch. There’s nothing around the office except that Arby’s.”
She looked both perplexed and irritated. It was true that they never met for lunch—Jen wasn’t sure she could even find the building where Tanya worked.
“Or just call me,” she settled for.
Tanya got her bag and shut the door. Jen watched her walk to the stairs of her building, but drove away before Tanya reached the landing.
* * *
Jen managed to compose herself before she picked up Teddy from the Sterns’. Cricket Stern was one of her best friends, not to mention the mother of Teddy’s best friend, Mark, but even so Jen hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell her the real reason she’d gone out of town. Spa weekend with her sister, she’d claimed, a late birthday gift to Tanya. It wasn’t like Cricket’s and Tanya’s paths would ever cross, so it was a safe lie, but Jen felt guilty, anyway. But if she hadn’t been able to talk about Sid before the trip, she was even less willing now, so when Cricket asked she just said that the spa treatments were relaxing, the restaurant very good.
Teddy fell asleep in his car seat on the way home. She carried him up to his room and put him to bed; a nap wouldn’t hurt, considering the boys had been up late the night before. Ted was taking a shower in the hall bathroom, and Livvy’s door was closed, which only deepened Jen’s dark mood as she went to unpack.
The door to their own bathroom, the one Ted was renovating, was closed. On the floor of their bedroom was a mound of clothes, a sweatshirt and jeans and socks that were still warm when Jen picked them up to toss them in the hamper. She had lifted the wicker lid and was about to drop the clothes in when she noticed something odd: in the bottom of the hamper was only a single pair of boxer shorts.
Jen stared at the boxer shorts, thinking. She had emptied the hamper Friday when she did the laundry. In her arms were the clothes Ted had worn today while he worked on the bathroom. The flannel pants and T-shirt he slept in were on the floor by the bed, where he left them every morning for Jen to fold and put under his pillow.
She dropped the clothes in and let the lid fall shut, and went looking for his gym bag. She found it on the floor of the closet, unzipped it and confirmed there was nothing in it but his MP3 player and a couple of water bottles. Nowhere was there another set of dirty clothes.
Ted hadn’t done laundry since Livvy was a baby, and he never wore the same clothes twice. Which meant he had hidden or disposed of yesterday’s clothes for some reason.
Or left them somewhere else. He could have left the house yesterday with a change of clothes in his gym bag, gone somewhere else where he showered and changed, leaving the clothes for someone else to wash. Sarah, for instance. Sarah, who probably had one of those stackable units in her condo, who was in training to take on the role that Jen played, learning how Ted liked his T-shirts folded and his socks rolled and—
“No,” Jen whispered. There had to be a good explanation. It was crazy to equate a note and some missing laundry with a full-blown affair.
Ted walked into the bedroom, a towel wrapped around his waist, a thin sliver of shaving cream under his chin. He looked exhausted. Jen toed the gym bag out of sight in the corner of the closet.
“Hey,” he said, giving her a tired smile. “Welcome back.”
She watched him get socks and underwear from the dresser, clean clothes from the closet. He dressed unhurriedly, tossing the damp towel across the hamper. If he was covering up a guilty conscience, he was putting on a hell of an act.
“How was the drive?” he asked. “Any snow on your way back?”
“A few flurries. Nothing that stuck.” She forced a smile. “So, I can’t wait to see what you’ve been up to all weekend.”
His expression slipped, and his eyes darted to the closed bathroom door. “Okay, look,” he said nervously. “Don’t lose it when you see the tub. I mean, where the tub was. It was a big job getting it out of there.”
“What do you mean? What happened?”
“Nothing happened. Look, Jen, that thing weighed a ton. It would have been a job no matter who took it out.” He opened the bathroom door, and light poured in from the window.
“I hit the wall trying to get it out of here,” Ted continued, talking fast, his face going slightly red. “And listen, there’s a little damage to the subfloor, too, but I was lucky, I lost my grip, and I’m telling you, if I’d dropped that thing there’d be a crater there and not just a dent.”
Jen pushed the door open the rest of the way, willing herself not to react. No matter how bad it was, it could be fixed, and—
“Oh, wow,” she said, putting her hand over her mouth. Where the old tub had been, she saw a gaping hole edged with ragged plasterboard, wallpaper hanging in strips. The wall tile was gone, leaving exposed lath and scarred plaster. The subfloor was filthy and gashed, and the whole thing looked like a bomb had gone off in it.
And nothing else appeared to have been done. Ted had promised to finish stripping the wallpaper and replace the light fixtures—not to mention replacing the bathtub—by the time she was back from Murdoch. Instead, he’d gotten the tub out and then...what?
“Like I said, I know it looks bad,” Ted said.
“It’s just...I don’t understand what you’ve been doing all weekend. With us gone and the house to yourself—” She stopped, because if she kept going he might actually tell her, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. “Never mind. Just never mind.”
“Don’t you think I’m trying?” Ted said. “Is this really about the job search? Is that what this is?”
“What? No, I know you’re trying. I know it’s a tough market out there, and—”
“No. You don’t know what it’s like to send out thirty résumés and get only four callbacks. You can’t know what it’s like when a guy you trained—a guy who got out of business school in two thousand five, for Chrissakes, gets hired instead of you.”
“Ted, please. The kids’ll hear.”
“Hear what? We’re just talking, and it’s long overdue. I guess you’ve been wanting to say this to me for a while, and—”
“I didn’t even say anything! You brought it up. I have never once criticized you for not looking harder, not trying hard enough.” Tears welled up in her eyes, and she swiped them away.
“Hey, hey,” Ted said, instantly abashed. “Jen. Jesus. I’m sorry. Don’t cry. God, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to go off on you like that.”
He reached for her, and after a moment she stepped into his arms. She pressed her face pressed against the soft cotton of his sweater, feeling his heart beat against her cheek. What was she doing? How could she really believe Ted would cheat, would risk everything they had built together?
“Jen, look...it’s my fault, too. I don’t—I know I’ve let you down. I’ve let the family down. It’s just, knowing that I’m not providing for you guys, it eats away at me.”
“Oh, Ted...” Jen closed her eyes and inhaled, his soapy shower scent tinged with the faint metallic sweet smell he had when he drank too much the night before.
A tiny leftover spike of suspicion flared inside her, but she fought it back down. He probably took a break to watch a game, have a beer...and just let the afternoon overtake him, that was all. She could hardly hold it against him, considering she’d had more than enough herself last night.
“We’re going to get through this,” she said as much for her own benefit as his. “They say the economy’s picking up, and even if it doesn’t, we’re fine—we have money put away for exactly this situation. We could go another year before we have to worry.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Ted said heavily. “I don’t think I could take that.”
“No, that’s not what I meant, honey. You’ll find something long before that. I just mean that there’s nothing to worry about.”
They held each other for a moment longer before Ted pulled gently away. There was something in his eyes, some troubled emotion. God, she hoped he found something soon.
“I’m going to do better,” he muttered. “I’m going to make things right.”
Chapter Four
In the hours before dawn on Wednesday, Jen dreamed the red bird again. It was bright as blood, coiled in a circle, its beak open and angry. In the dream, the bird slowly unfurled its wings, expanding until it filled her mind, its screams growing hungrier and its beak widening until it seemed that it meant to consume her from the inside out.
She’d first had this nightmare years ago, when she was fresh out of college and just starting to date Ted. The bird didn’t do anything but scream, its beak open wide, spinning and getting larger and larger until she woke up. It had been years since she had the dream, but now it had come twice in one week.
When it first happened, Jen had researched the meaning of birds in dreams and decided the bird was nothing more than a symbol of her struggle—to put herself through school, to get her first job, to pay back her loans, to survive the stress of trying to fit into the society she had worked so hard to join. She struggled to erase her past, to project the ease and confidence that her colleagues and friends seemed to come by naturally, to be the mother she hadn’t had, the wife her own mother hadn’t had a chance to be.
But none of that had been a problem for years. So why was the dream returning now?
Jen was tired and irritable as she got Teddy fed and ready for preschool. Livvy refused to eat breakfast and dashed out the door so she didn’t miss the bus. Ted took his car to the dealership to have the oil changed and a dent fixed. He’d been complaining about the dent for weeks—someone had dinged him at the Target Center parking lot during a Timberwolves game.
After preschool, Cricket Stern brought the boys over for their standing playdate. “Listen, Jen, something happened today,” she said as Mark and Teddy shot past her into the house. “I thought you’d want to know.”
Instantly Jen was on alert. She had worked so hard to get the speech pathologist and Teddy’s teacher on the same page. A year ago, when he was three, Teddy stopped talking to strangers; when he stopped speaking to his babysitters and then to his friends and teachers, Jen and Ted became concerned enough to have him evaluated, and Teddy had been diagnosed with selective mutism.
For the past year, he hadn’t spoken to anyone outside his immediate family, but the speech pathologist said that Teddy was responding well to the self-modeling and desensitization exercises. She thought Teddy was very close to verbalizing one-on-one with a trusted adult.
“It’s nothing,” Cricket said hastily. “Just, the kids are starting to pick on him. Well, not all the kids. Mack and Jordan. Of course, right?”
“Oh. Shit.”
“I know.” Cricket grimaced. “Sometimes I just want to smack Tessa. It’s like she wants to raise a couple of delinquents, the way she lets them run wild.”
The twins had been a problem since the beginning of the year. Recently they pushed a kid out of the castle in the play yard and knocked out two of his teeth.
“What did they do?” Jen asked, steeling herself.
“They had him in the corner by the dress-up box, and they were trying to make him talk. Mack was making fun of him and calling him retarded. Or maybe it was Jordan—I can’t tell them apart.”
Jen’s anger was tempered with dismay. “What did Teddy do?”
“He managed to get past them. They’re big, but he’s fast, you know?”
“Well, it could have been worse. Did he look upset?”
“Not too bad. More like aggravated. I said something to Mrs. Bray, and she talked to the boys. I thought you could decide whether you want to have her talk to Tessa.”
“No, I feel like that’ll make it worse. You know, like he’s a tattletale. Damn it. He’s so close. He’s been talking to the speech therapist over Skype. She says any day now...” She felt her eyes tearing up.
“Oh, honey, it’s okay. I didn’t mean to upset you,” Cricket said, pulling a packet of tissues from her purse.
“No, it’s not even that,” Jen said, taking a tissue and dabbing at her eyes. “It’s...just, things are kind of a mess right now.”
“Is it Ted’s job search?” Cricket asked sympathetically.
Jen hesitated. She hadn’t told Cricket about Sid’s death, or about Sarah’s note. She didn’t like to make her problems public, even to her best friends. “Yes, I guess,” she said, settling for a partial truth.
Cricket nodded sympathetically. “When Brad was laid off a few years ago he was unbearable. I finally made him rent office space to get out of the house. We pretended he was ‘consulting.’” She smiled as she made air quotes. “Luckily it was only for a few months or we’d be divorced.”
“Oh, it’s not that bad.” Jen had heard rumors that Brad was seeing a woman he’d met on one of his accounts while he was supposed to be at that rented office. “Just a blip, that’s all.”
As Jen watched Cricket drive away, she had the strange sensation that she could be watching herself. Sometimes it felt like she and her friends were all the same, well-preserved Calumet housewives in expensive sunglasses and recent-model SUVs.
Jen closed the door and wondered how many other secrets they kept from each other.
* * *
Thursday afternoon, Jen decided to bundle Teddy into the car and pick Livvy up from school so she wouldn’t have to take the bus. Livvy had been hostile and distant all week, and the gesture was meant to be conciliatory, to let her daughter know she was trying.
As she inched forward in the car-pool line, she caught sight of Livvy with her cluster of friends. Standing a few feet away was a gangly boy with shaggy black hair and a threadbare backpack repaired with duct tape. Sean—Livvy’s first boyfriend, the one who had broken her heart over the Christmas holidays. He was talking to a girl in pink UGG boots and a pink knit cap, his hands jammed in his pockets, and Jen had a momentary urge to get out of the car and shake him, to demand to know who he thought he was to hurt her daughter’s feelings, an unspectacular boy with a dusting of acne on his forehead and gauge earrings he was surely going to regret in a few years.
Livvy got into the car without sparing Sean a glance. She said hi to Teddy and lapsed into sullen silence.
“How was your day?” Jen tried. “Anything interesting happen?”
“My day was like every other day of my life,” Livvy muttered. “So no, I would say that nothing interesting happened.”
“Well, mine was fascinating. After I worked at your school, I did your laundry and made you a dentist appointment and picked up your sweaters from the cleaners.”
“Good for you.”
Jen tightened her grip on the steering wheel and pressed her lips together. They rode the rest of the way in silence. When she turned onto Crabapple Court, she realized she’d been holding her breath. She exhaled with relief as the garage door glided up, and she saw Ted’s BMW parked in his side of the garage. So he’d come home from wherever he’d been all day.
Jen had barely turned off the car when Livvy opened her door and bolted into the house. Teddy started whimpering to get out of his car seat, shoving at the restraints, and Jen hurried out of the car to help him. But even as she worked at the tangled strap, his protestations turned to frustrated tears.
Even though Jen could swear she was doing everything right—even though she was trying just as hard as she knew how—the more she strove to connect with her family, the further she seemed to drive them away.
* * *
Jen set her purse on the hall table and headed for the kitchen. She could hear Livvy’s footsteps racing up the stairs, and she winced, waiting for the slam of her daughter’s bedroom door.
Jen filled a plastic cup with snack crackers and got Teddy settled in front of the TV, his tears forgotten. She felt guilty using Dinosaur Train as a babysitter, but she just needed a few minutes to change into yoga pants and put her hair in a ponytail before she started dinner.
Jen went upstairs to her bedroom, steeling herself for whatever Ted had done to the room now. There he was, on his knees by the wall under the windows. It wasn’t really all that bad. He had put a drop cloth on the bed and the nightstand, and the lengths of baseboard that he’d pried away from the wall were stacked neatly. But there were several gouges and scrapes in the plaster. And there was a long, thin scratch in the finish on the walnut-stained floor.
Jen pushed her hair behind her ears as she looked around the room. It’s fine, it’s fine.
Ted set down his pry bar and got to his feet. “Hey, hon,” he said, a note of guilt in his voice. “I had to go to the lumber store to order a few trim pieces. Thought I’d get these baseboards taken care of.”
“Uh-huh. Listen, I was wondering, maybe you could watch Teddy while I get changed and start dinner.”
“Jen...” Ted ran his hand through his hair. “All I’m doing is trying to get this thing finished. I know you’re tired of the mess. I got that message, loud and clear, and I’m just trying to get it put back together.”
Frustration mixed with fatigue in his voice, and Jen tried not to rise to the bait. “I appreciate that you’re trying to get some work done up here. I just wonder if you could have done it while Teddy was at preschool instead of going...wherever you went.”
“I just told you, I was at the lumberyard. And a couple of errands.” Ted’s face darkened with anger. “Look, I don’t think it’s the end of the world if our kid watches half an hour of PBS. I guess that makes me a crappy parent on top of everything else, but I wish you’d stop and think once in a while that maybe your way isn’t the only way to raise a kid.”
“Could you keep your voice down?”
“Why? A little disagreement’s normal, Jen. It’s not going to break us. It’s good for the kids to hear it once in a while, instead of growing up thinking everything has to be perfect all the time.”
Jen flinched. “If you really want to go there, I’m not going to have our daughter listening,” she said, hurrying to shut the bedroom door.
“Look,” Ted said carefully, waiting until she came back. “I’m sorry if that came out wrong. But there’s no need to get hysterical about every little thing.”
Hysterical, Jen repeated in her mind. Was that how her husband saw her? She was trying to think of how to respond without sounding defensive when there was a knock at the bedroom door.
She and Ted both froze. Ted wiped his hand across his forehead, muttering softly.
“I’ll get it,” Jen said.
As she crossed the room, she thought about how the smallest reminder of one’s children could make a person feel guilty even when there was no rational reason. The air, charged with tension seconds earlier, was now weighted with wistful failure.
Jen put her hand on the brass knob. Later, she would remember this detail, the warmth of the old brass to her touch, the way she had to tug to clear the slight jam.
Standing in the hall was her beautiful daughter, her face exquisitely frozen, her lips parted and her long-lashed eyes wide with terror.
On her left, a man Jen had never seen before held Teddy in his arms, her little boy flailing ineffectively against his grip.
On her right, a man who looked unnervingly like Orlando Bloom pressed a gun to Livvy’s head.
Chapter Five
“This is where you stay real quiet,” the younger man snapped, jabbing Livvy’s skin with the barrel of his gun, making her head jerk. He was wearing gloves, his hands pale and dead-looking through the thin latex.
“Mom,” she whimpered, and Jen didn’t think, she threw herself at her daughter, her fingertips brushing Livvy’s arm before she was struck from the side and went crashing to the floor. The other one had kicked her in the knees, still holding her son in his arms, and as Jen pushed herself up on her hands, she saw the rough work boots he was wearing and wondered if he had broken something in her leg.
Ted was yelling: no, stop, but he stayed rooted to the spot. Which was what she should have done, because she had endangered her daughter. The young one had Livvy’s hair in his fist, dragging her backward, out of the range of Jen’s flailing feet.
“That was stupid,” he snarled, and gave Livvy’s hair a hard yank, forcing her head back and exposing the long pale expanse of her throat. Her whimpering escalated to shrieking until he put his hand around her throat and squeezed. “Shut the fuck up now,” he yelled, and she did.
Jen scrambled backward on her hands and knees. Ted grabbed her arm and pulled her up, holding her around the waist against him. “What do you want?” he demanded.
The older one held Teddy tightly, absorbing the impact of Teddy’s silent kicking and flailing. He looked like he was in his fifties, but he was powerfully built, his forearms roped with muscle. He, too, was wearing latex gloves. “Tell this kid to calm the fuck down.”
“It’s all right, honey,” Jen gasped, thinking please please don’t hurt him. “Mommy’s here. It’s all right.”
But Teddy only struggled harder, trying to twist around in the older man’s arms so he could see her. Jen knew how strong a four-year-old could be—Teddy could grab your hand so hard you felt the bones squeeze together; he could hug you so tight it was hard to breathe.
“Goddamn it,” Ted said, pushing her roughly behind him, putting his body between her and the intruders. “What the hell is going on here?”
“Take him,” the man said, holding Teddy out like a sack of cement. The minute Ted grabbed Teddy, the man reached for a gun he’d jammed in the waistband of his pants. It seemed to take less than a second, the movement of his arm and the way he held it still and sure, pointed right at Jen’s face. She gave an involuntary gasp and felt her body slacken with fear, her bladder almost releasing. She imagined the bullet striking her full in the face, shattering the bones, liquefying her brains.
Teddy wrapped his arms tightly around his father’s neck and immediately calmed. Livvy was gurgling, her neck craned awkwardly backward, the young man not seeming to care that he was hurting her. A half grin on his face—as though this all amused him, as though he was deriving pleasure from their fear.
“Let me have her, let my daughter go,” she pleaded. “Please. We won’t do anything. We won’t go anywhere.”
The young man held Livvy in place for another moment and then shoved her toward Jen. Livvy’s neck snapped forward; she stumbled and went down on one knee. Her hair flew across her face, obscuring her terror for a fraction of a second. Jen rushed to help her, wrapping Livvy in her arms, tensed for the bullet, waiting for the gunshot, but it didn’t come.
“Mom, Mom,” Livvy wailed, holding her so tightly the air was crushed from her lungs. But Jen held on, dragging Livvy backward until they were standing next to Ted. Teddy’s shoe was wedged against her shoulder and they were all touching, jammed together in a family scrum, facing the strangers outside the bedroom door.
“What do you want?” Ted demanded for the second time. The question echoed through the room, which Ted had stripped of its carpets and drapes in preparation for painting.
“Downstairs. Now.” The older man motioned with the gun. There was a faint sheen of perspiration along his hairline, and broken capillaries marred his sallow, broad cheeks. A few flakes of dandruff rested on the shoulders of his shirt.
For a moment they didn’t move. Jen felt the warmth of Ted’s body through their clothes, his shoulder pressed against hers.
“Now!” the man bellowed, and she took a step forward, still holding Livvy tightly.
“The girl first,” the younger man said. He reached toward her with the gun, caressing Livvy’s arm with the barrel while she trembled. His eyes roved up and down her body, lingering on her small breasts. “Don’t be scared.”
He seemed relaxed, grinning faintly. He wore his hair buzzed short, and he had skipped a shave or two, but his beard grew in fine and strawberry blond—the beard of a boy rather than a man. There were tattooed spikes on his neck; the rest of the design was hidden under his collar and Jen couldn’t tell what it was supposed to be. As they passed, his gaze stayed fixed on Livvy, watching her walk.
Livvy reached the stairs first and went down with her hand on the rail, barely pausing on the landing. Jen followed close behind. At the bottom of the staircase was the front door, heavy and solid. Jen could slip past Livvy and yank the door open. She could push her daughter out into the night, to safety. It would only take a second. One of the men might shoot her, but unless he got lucky the wound probably wouldn’t kill her. As long as she made it out the door, someone was bound to see her and Livvy on the front porch. It was dinnertime on Crabapple Court, and fathers were arriving home from work and kids from sports and clubs and music lessons. Moms were returning from grocery runs and yoga classes. Jen would scream and help would come.
Except she couldn’t leave her little boy behind, not even for a second, unprotected and vulnerable. She couldn’t leave Ted. So she walked past the front door and into the family room, the others close behind her.
“Sit.” The older man’s voice was terse and impatient.
Jen pulled Livvy down with her in the corner of the sectional. On the television, Dora the Explorer hid behind a cartoon tree.
“You don’t have to do this,” Ted said. “Come on.”
“Oh, yeah?” The man turned on Ted. The two men glared at each other, something passing between them. Jen looked from one to the other, trying to figure it out. “Turn that shit off.”
“Have you seen him before?” she whispered as Ted reached for the remote on the coffee table and turned off the set.
“No, never,” he muttered, sitting down on the other side of Livvy with Teddy on his lap.
The two men stood in front of them, one on either side of the television armoire. The younger one slouched against it, his gun practically dangling from his hand. The older man stood ramrod straight.
“We’re here to do a job,” he said angrily as though the Glasses had inconvenienced him in some way. “You make it easy, cooperate, you’ll be okay. You get in our way, we hurt you.”
Next to him the other man coughed, only Jen was pretty sure the cough covered up a laugh.
“What do you want?” she asked. “Because you can have it, I don’t care—”
“You don’t talk,” the man snapped. “I talk. I’m Dan. This is Ryan. You only talk when we tell you. You got something to say?”
Was she supposed to talk now? Jen tried to ignore the pounding of her heart, “I’m sorry. I’m just scared. Please don’t hurt my family. How can we help you get what you want so you can go?”
“Hah,” Ryan said. “She wants to help us. You like that, Dan?”
Jen realized something deeply terrifying: they had made no effort to disguise themselves. No knitted caps or Nixon masks, which meant they didn’t care if the Glasses knew what they looked like.
They’re going to kill us, Jen thought, terror slicing through her.
Dan ignored the younger man. “All you need to know right now is don’t talk until I tell you to. Keep your hands to yourself. Do what you’re told and don’t make me ask twice.”
“Just tell us what you want,” Ted demanded. “Whatever it is, we can help you get it.”
“That right...Ted?” Dan drawled.
“How do you know his name?” Jen asked. Ryan swung the gun in her direction, instantly tense.
“Aren’t you paying attention? Shut up!”
“Please,” Jen whispered. “I’m sorry. Can I ask, just one question—”
“Go. Fast.” Dan watched her impatiently.
“Let the kids go,” Jen said quickly, pleadingly. “Please, just let the kids go. They can walk over to my sister’s. It’s less than a mile.”
Ryan laughed, lips pulling back from slightly crooked teeth. “Right! Great idea. Livvy here’s gonna take her bratty little brother over to her aunt’s house and forget to mention that her parents are being held hostage.”
Jen felt her daughter stiffen in her arms. They knew Livvy’s name. Ted’s name. Ryan spun his gun so the barrel was pointing down, reached out and caressed Livvy’s cheek with the grip. Livvy flinched and pulled away with a whimper, and Ryan laughed.
“Get up,” Dan said. “Time to go downstairs.”
Chapter Six
“Oh, God,” Livvy said, a split second after they heard the lock at the top of the stairs. She was standing apart from her parents, her arms hugging her body. Tears threatened to spill from her eyes. “It smells so bad down here!”
Ted reached for Livvy, and she fell against him. He wrapped his arms around her and hugged her close, and she sobbed against his chest. Jen picked Teddy up and rocked him gently, whispering that he shouldn’t worry about Livvy, that his sister would be just fine.
After a few moments Livvy’s sobs subsided and she pulled away from Ted. She went to stand near the shelf where all her trophies were lined up—Mini Marlins swim, eight years of soccer, a few for softball, one from the American Legion speech contest back in middle school. Jen could see her shoulders trembling.
“Honey, it’s going to be okay,” Jen said, handing Teddy to her husband and approaching Livvy cautiously. She had to keep her calm, had to make her believe she and Ted had things under control. “Once they get what they want, they’ll go.”
“But what do they even want?”
Jen put her hand on Livvy’s shoulder and gently turned her so she could look into her eyes. “Anything they can sell, I would guess. There’s the silver, my jewelry, the computers—any number of things. They’ll take it and they’ll go.”
She could see Livvy trying, wanting, to believe her. She tried to make herself believe it, so her face would convince Livvy.
“I need to talk to Daddy,” she said as calmly as she could. “Can you play with Teddy and keep him busy for a few minutes?”
Livvy nodded. She looked a little better, some of the panic gone from her eyes.
“His old toys are in here,” Jen said, getting a cardboard box down off the shelf. “I haven’t had a chance to get them over to St. Vincent De Paul’s yet. Go ahead and get them out. Whatever he wants.”
Livvy talked softly to her brother, kneeling down on the cold concrete floor next to him and peeling the tape off the box. Jen and Ted went to the far side of the basement where the old living room furniture was stored, the pieces that Ted kept meaning to put on Craigslist. Ted lifted the old lamp shades off the couch and brushed off the cushions. When they sat down, he took her hands in his.
“I don’t understand why they picked us,” Jen said in a low voice. “It’s not like we have the biggest house in the neighborhood. And we were home. Why wouldn’t they pick a place where nobody was home? I mean, all they had to do was keep knocking on doors until they found one that nobody answered. Then they could just go around the back and break in.”
“I don’t know, maybe they were worried about alarms. Everybody’s got those signs in their yard, those ADT warnings.”
“Not everyone,” Jen said. “Lots of people don’t.” They didn’t, for instance. They’d talked about a home alarm system, but they’d felt that Livvy was too young to be depended on to arm and disarm the system.
“I think we have to assume it’s just random,” Ted said. “Just bad luck.”
“But you’d think they’d at least watch the house for a few days. I mean, that’s what you always read in the papers—they watch the house to figure out when the owners come and go, right? But these guys came at exactly the wrong time. This is the time of day there’s most likely to be someone home. It doesn’t make any sense.”
I’m scared, she wanted to say. She wanted Ted to put his arms around her and tell her everything was fine. She wanted him to do for her what he had done for Livvy, to hide his own fear and promise her they would be safe. But she wasn’t Livvy. She and Ted were the adults, and they had to face the truth.
“I don’t know, Jen,” Ted said. His voice was oddly detached, and he was looking past her shoulder at the shelves behind her. “I’m guessing they’ll have one of us go up there and show them where everything is. Where your jewelry is, the safe, stuff like that.”
“Oh, God.” Jen felt a wave of nausea, and she doubled over her knees, letting go of Ted’s hands. “There’s nothing in the safe but papers. What if they’re expecting more? Like cash or something—what if they’re angry that there isn’t more to take?”
“Well, there’s the electronics, the silver—there’s lots of stuff,” Ted said, putting his hand on her back and rubbing absently. His offhand touch was the opposite of comfort; it made her flinch and shrink away.
If the men upstairs were disappointed with what they could take from the house, they might take it out on her family. She pictured them opening the safe, and—once they had seen that there was nothing but insurance policies, passports, copies of the will—becoming enraged. In her imagination, Dan swung his gun around, his eyes accusing, and pointed it at her face.
She whimpered.
“Oh, hon,” Ted said. He gathered her into his arms and held her tightly. “You can’t let yourself think the worst. Do you hear me? We’re just going to take this one step at a time. We have to stay calm and trust that—believe that things will be all right. These aren’t some hopped-up drug addicts up there—they’re professionals. Professional thieves. Believe me, they want things to go smoothly just as badly as we do.”
“How do you know that?” Jen drew back and looked deeply into his eyes, trying to find the source of his certainty. “How can you be sure?”
“I’m not sure—how could I be?” His gaze skittered away, avoiding hers. “But what choice do we have but to believe it?”
“I just feel like there’s some connection, that if we thought about it we could figure it out. You’re sure you’ve never seen these guys anywhere?” Jen’s mind raced through her routines, the small world she inhabited: the kids’ schools and the grocery store and the yoga studio and the restaurants and coffee shops downtown. She was sure she’d never seen these men anywhere she went on a regular basis.
She thought of something. “Remember when your wallet was stolen from the locker room?”
“That was almost a year ago. Even if someone had kept it all this time, why would they wait so long to come here?”
“But they knew your name.” She remembered the faint smirk on Dan’s face, as he looked down on her in her own family room.
“Jen, they could have found out our names on a two-second Google search of the address. Hell, they could have gotten our names on their way up the sidewalk by just looking on their phones. That doesn’t mean anything.”
Jen was silent a minute, thinking through her family’s routines. Teddy was always with her unless he was at school or the Sterns’ house. Livvy went to school and soccer and out with her friends, less often since she’d been grounded last fall—
“What about Sean?” she said. “He had trouble with the police. Remember?”
“Sean’s sixteen years old, Jen,” Ted said incredulously. “He’s a child.”
“But he was arrested.”
“You mean that vandalism thing? That was just a stupid prank. He wasn’t even the instigator.”
It had happened after a football game, shortly after Livvy had started dating him. One of Sean’s friends had a key to the equipment shed, and they’d broken in and dragged the lacrosse goals into the parking lot and shot smashed beer cans into them. When the police came, Sean and one of the others were drunk enough that they fought ineffectively back and got assault charges tagged on, which were later dropped. The school got involved and suspended the boys for a week.
“I’m just saying he might know the young one. Ryan.” Jen tried to sort it out. “He could be friends with him. He could have told him to come here. Sean was in our house half a dozen times. He could have a grudge against Livvy from the breakup...or maybe all he did was tell them about the house, our stuff....”
“He broke up with her, Jen. Why would Sean have a grudge against her? It doesn’t make any sense.”
Jen’s mind raced with possibilities. “Or what about Renaldo?”
Ted stared at her, his eyebrows knit together. “Seriously? Our yard guy?”
“He has access. I mean, I know anyone could come through the gate, but he’s been in our yard so many times.” She felt ashamed of the betrayal even before she stopped speaking. Renaldo was a nice guy, respectful and dependable, and he never forgot to blow the bits of grass off the patio after the first time she had to remind him.
“Jen. How would Renaldo know those guys? And even if he did, why would he send them here—why wouldn’t he just come when he knew we were out of town? You always call to let him know when we’ll be away.”
Jen tried to corral the swirling thoughts in her head. She looked at her children, sitting on the carpet remnant Ted had laid out in the middle of the concrete floor. Livvy was talking softly, moving a plastic car along an imaginary track, a row of Playmobil people looking on. Teddy’s bubbling laughter was punctuated by growling engine noises and honking horns. Livvy was so good with him; she’d managed to banish the fear from his mind, somehow tamping down her own terror for his sake.
Because that’s what you do, Jen thought. When you love someone, you make yourself stronger for their sake. As strong as you can, as strong as you must—stronger than you ever believed you could be. Your love makes the other person all that matters, and how can you let your fear rule you when you have something so much more important to protect? Livvy had been shaking with fear when they came down the stairs, but now she was sitting cross-legged with a smile on her face, a smile she had conjured from nothing for her little brother.
And now she had to do the same for Livvy. For both of her children, and for Ted, too, because she was the center of their family. She was the axis on which the rest of them turned, and if she’d occasionally resented it, if sometimes it seemed thankless and even pointless, she had also spent the past fifteen years of her life building a core of strength that could support all of them even now. She would take over for Livvy and let her daughter be a child, and she would do her job.
“I’m sorry,” she said, running her hands through her hair. “You’re right. About Renaldo, and Sean—I was just trying to figure it out, but like you say, it’s probably just random. Just bad luck. Listen, can you see if you can talk to Livvy? Who knows what’s going through her head right now—just tell her what you told me, that everything’s going to be all right. And I’ll take over with Teddy.”
Jen knelt on the floor with her children. “Wow, I haven’t seen these old toys in a long time,” she said.
“Shepherd,” Teddy said, holding up an androgynous plastic figure with a yellow bowl haircut and a crook in its hand.
“That’s right, shepherd! Where are the sheep, do you think? I wonder if they’re in the box?”
While she upended the box of toys on the carpet, Ted took Livvy by the arm and led her to the couch. He sat with his arm around her and Livvy pressed her face to his shirt, shaking with silent sobs. She was trying to stay quiet for Teddy’s sake—and Ted enfolded her in his strong arms, comforting her like he always did after the worst disappointments. When her soccer team lost in the semifinals. When Sean had broken up with her. Ted was the one Livvy wanted when her world was falling apart.
Teddy’s eyes went wide at the pile of toys on the carpet. A few round pieces from the K’Nex set rolled across the floor. The poor kid was never allowed to make a mess like this; Jen was forever cleaning up around him, sorting his toys into their various bins and baskets. Well. If—when—they got out of this, she would try to loosen up a little.
She plowed her hand through the center of the pile, the figurines and building toys and vehicles clattering against each other. She dug out a Star Wars figurine. She didn’t know its name—it was from the new movie, some sort of soldier with a head scarf obscuring his face.
Teddy took it from her solemnly. “Bad mans,” he whispered. He stared at the inscrutable painted eyes, the plastic rifle nearly as tall as the figurine itself.
Jen took a deep breath. “You mean the men upstairs? They were a little scary, weren’t they?”
Teddy nodded, his lips quivering. He gripped the toy tightly. “He didn’t put me down. I wanted him to put me down but he didn’t.”
“Oh, I see. I can understand why that was upsetting.”
“They had guns.”
What the hell was she supposed to say now? In all the women’s magazines Jen had read over the years, the ones that promised solutions to everything from dry skin to marital disharmony to kids’ behavioral issues, there had never been a single piece of advice for what to do when your child is threatened at gunpoint. Jen flashed through the possibilities and decided to lie. If it was the wrong decision, she’d do her penance later.
“Oh, those were just pretend. Those guns? Toys, like these, only bigger.”
Jen took the toy back from Teddy and bent the rifle’s stock. She waggled it back and forth.
“Don’t break it, Mommy!”
“Oh, sorry. Here you go.” She handed the little soldier back to Teddy. “They were playing a game, kind of like when you and Rand and Mark play in the backyard. Remember? With the Super Soakers? Those were pretend guns.”
“I shot Rand,” Teddy said. “Rand shot me and Mark.”
“That’s right!” Jen said, warming to her lie. “And remember when Mark was crying because he didn’t understand that it was just a game? And I had to take the Super Soakers away and you guys all had quiet time? Well, upstairs it was kind of like that. Daddy and I didn’t understand it was just a game at first and so we were kind of upset. And now we’re having some quiet time down here so everyone can calm down.”
Teddy regarded her skeptically. Jen’s smile felt frozen in place. “They have to leave now,” he said. “I’m hungry.”
“Oh, yes, it is almost dinnertime, isn’t it?” Jen said, faking surprise. “But I’m just having a nice time down here with you guys. Let’s play for a while longer, okay?”
“Tell Livvy,” Teddy said.
“Tell her what?”
“That it’s a game because she was scared.” Before Jen could react, he reached into the pile of toys and pulled out a chubby little sheep. “I found him!”
Jen helped him find the other sheep, the lambs, the pieces of fence and the plastic bushes. Livvy joined them on the rug, helping Teddy assemble the imaginary pen. Jen looked at the windows and saw that it had grown pitch-dark outside. What did that make it, seven? The lights worked down here, thank God, even if it was just a few naked bulbs in the ceiling.
Ted was sorting through the shelves, pulling bottles of water from the emergency supplies. Jen went to help him.
“You got Teddy calmed down,” Ted said quietly.
“How’s Livvy?”
“Okay, I think. I think I convinced her that they weren’t here to hurt anyone.”
“I just wish I knew if they were coming back. I mean, maybe they just took what they wanted and left already.”
“No, they would have had to bring a car to load it all, and gone through the garage, unless they were really stupid. We would have heard the garage door. Besides, I hear them moving around up there.”
“Oh.” Jen tried to keep the disappointment from her voice. Why were they still in her home? “Maybe they’re just waiting until everyone’s in for the night, so they don’t call attention to themselves.”
“Maybe. Though pulling up a car late at night has its own risks, if someone sees them. They’d be more likely to notice a strange car at three in the morning.”
“Who’s up at three in the morning?” Jen demanded, and then wished she hadn’t, because the look Ted gave her conveyed what they both knew: that she was up at that hour as often as not. Lately, sleeping through the night had been nearly impossible for her; her doctor said it might be from perimenopause.
“I think we need to prepare for the possibility that we might be stuck here overnight,” Ted said.
“Oh, my God—there’s no way. They can’t just leave us down here—”
Ted reached for her, gently pushing the hair from her eyes, tilting up her face to look at him. “I know, sweetheart, I know.” His voice was heavy with emotion. “But maybe the kids can get some rest, if we just try to make it seem as normal as possible.”
“There’s nothing normal about this!” Jen felt the panic nipping at her. She wasn’t sure she could keep acting like nothing was wrong—pretending even for a few minutes with Teddy had exhausted her.
“We can do this,” Ted said as though sensing what she was feeling. “Together. We’ll stay busy and keep our minds off it, okay? And you’re right—they could leave at any time. And meanwhile we can move stuff around to make it comfortable down here for the kids. We can set it up kind of like it used to be upstairs.”
Jen looked around her at the crowded shelves, the furniture stacked up near the wall. When they’d bought the new living room furniture a couple years ago, Ted decided to sell the old stuff on Craigslist and dragged it all down to the basement, where it sat gathering dust. It had been one of their first arguments after he was laid off: Jen asked if he couldn’t finally get rid of all that junk now that he had time on his hands.
“Okay,” she whispered, because she couldn’t think of anything better to do, especially since Livvy and Teddy were occupied with the play set, and she didn’t want to interrupt and risk upsetting them.
First they took down the old dining room chairs, fussy dark walnut things with uncomfortable thin red damask cushions, and lined them up along the basement wall. The love seat was heavy and narrowly missed crushing Jen’s toe as it slid to the floor. They lifted the old coffee table down and set it next to the kids on the carpet.
Ted searched the shelves for the nonperishable food he thought he’d stored during his emergency preparedness phase, and Jen dug out the old quilts her grandmother had made. She found them packed in a box on a high shelf, and laid them out on the sofa. Livvy looked up from the floor.
“We’re going to sleep down here?” she asked, and then before Jen could answer, “What’s Daddy doing?”
Jen followed her gaze. Ted was at the top of the stairs with a flashlight and a screwdriver. Little light carried up the stairs, and his face was shadowed as he poked around at the knob.
Fear constricted Jen’s throat. If Ted managed to get the door open, he could get himself shot—or even worse, he might enrage the men upstairs, and invite their wrath on all of them. Before she could react, the door crashed open, sending Ted scrambling. The flashlight and screwdriver clattered down the wooden steps, and Ted cursed, falling a few steps until he was able to right himself by grabbing the handrail.
The door banged against the wall and swung back. A man stood in the door frame, but Jen couldn’t tell if it was Dan or Ryan. Something glinted dully, but Jen didn’t realize it was a gun until it had gone off, the report echoing dully. The man disappeared back into the hall, slamming the door shut behind him.
Jen raced up the steps. She heard Livvy screaming and the sound of the key turning on the other side of the door. Ted was holding his shin, muttering. Blood trickled down his forearm.
“What happened? Are you hurt?” Jen heard the panic in her own voice and knew the kids could hear it, too. She forced herself to stay calm.
“I’m fine.”
“But the gun—he shot—”
“Didn’t hit me. This is just from running into the handrail. I think he was just aiming for the wall.” Ted grimaced, wiping at the blood with the tail of his shirt. In the poor light Jen couldn’t see how bad it was. “Trying to make a point, I guess.”
“Daddy, come down here!” Livvy wailed frantically, and behind her, Teddy started to cry.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Ted said, getting up painfully and holding on to the handrail. Jen did her best to help him down the steps, as he favored his bruised hip. In the light she could see that the gash on his forearm wasn’t bad.
Livvy seized her father’s good arm. “Daddy, you can’t go up there! They could have killed you!”
“No, that was just...laying out the rules,” Ted said, managing a tight smile. “They never meant to hurt me. They’re not killers.”
“How do you know that?” Livvy demanded as Jen went to Teddy, lifting him into her arms.
“They’re just not.” Jen knew Ted was trying to reassure Livvy, to convince her they were safe. But even if the men fired this time as a warning, how could he be sure that next time they wouldn’t shoot to kill? “I don’t know what they want, but if they were going to hurt us they would have done it already. They’re probably just trying to figure out what’s worth taking.”
Teddy whimpered against Jen’s neck, and she rocked him, trying to calm him, feeling guilty about the lie she’d told him.
“That was scary, wasn’t it?” she asked quietly. “I don’t think I like this game anymore, do you?”
Teddy shook his head against her neck. She felt the dampness of his tears against her skin. Looking around the room for something to distract him with, she had an idea.
“Let’s do the wash, okay?” she said. “Do you want to help?”
Teddy stopped snuffling and allowed her to put him down. “Laundry baseball,” he said, running for the basket of soiled towels.
Laundry baseball was a game Jen had invented to keep Teddy occupied. She tossed items from the dirty laundry pile to him, and he batted them with a hollow plastic bat, sorting them into dark and light piles. She always had to sort them again afterward, but the sound of his laughter more than made up for the extra effort.
Teddy found his bat under the folding table and swung it. Jen tossed the washcloths to him, and he batted them to the ground. She poured the detergent into the plastic cup and picked him up so he could empty it into the receptacle. They put the towels in together, and Jen held him so he could press the start button, and he watched as the water began to spray against the convex round window.
She backed away cautiously, making sure he was truly distracted. He’d often stay rapt through most of the cycle when she let him, watching the slap of the drenched towels, the sloshing of the suds and waves of water.
Ted and Livvy were picking the toys up off the floor and putting them back into the box, both looking dazed. Jen crouched next to Livvy and touched her shoulder, making her jump. “You’re doing fine, sweetheart,” she murmured. “You’re so good with Teddy. I’m so glad you’re here for him.”
Livvy picked up the toys one at a time and tossed them into the box, her lips moving slightly, as if she were talking to herself.
“Let’s let Livvy finish this up,” Jen said pointedly. Ted straightened up and they went back to the corner of the basement.
“What were you thinking?” Jen hissed, the moment she judged herself out of range of Livvy hearing. “That was a crazy chance to take, Ted. You could have—”
Ted held up his hands to stop her. “I know, I know, I’m sorry. It was...” He swallowed, looked away. “I thought maybe I could... I thought if something happened, I could at least hold them off long enough, and you and the kids—” He slammed his fist into the sleeping bags stored on the shelf, making the shelves shake.
“Ted, don’t!” But Livvy hadn’t looked up. She had slumped against the coffee table, and she was trying to untangle a length of string that was attached to a toy spacecraft. “Please. I need you to keep it together. All right. I understand, you wanted to do something—”
“To stop them. To protect my family.”
“And instead, now Livvy’s twice as scared.”
“I didn’t know they were going to shoot—”
“You didn’t know? Two guys come in our house with guns and you didn’t know it was a possibility? And then telling her that they’re not going to hurt us, practically guaranteeing it, how can she trust you? She’s not stupid, Ted, she has to know how bad this is, and lying to her isn’t going to help.”
“I wasn’t lying, Jen, I just really didn’t think—don’t think—they have any intention of hurting us. If they got caught, that would make the charges against them so much worse. They know that. They aren’t some out-of-control tweakers looking for their next fix. They’ve got to have a plan.”
“Maybe, or maybe it’s like you said—they saw the house and looked it up on the phone and came in here just to take whatever they could find. I don’t think we can assume they’ve got a plan at all.” There was something off about Ryan, a crazy burning intensity in his eyes. “They don’t seem...stable.”
Ted frowned and rubbed a hand over his face. He hadn’t shaved this morning, and the day’s growth shadowed his face, making him look older. “Look, what do you want me to say here? I’m trying to stay positive. For you, for the kids. It isn’t going to do anyone any good if we start going to worst-case scenarios.”
Jen knew he was right. Someone had to keep the kids’ spirits up; someone had to make sure Livvy didn’t get hysterical. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re right. It was just, the moment and the gun and then when you fell...”
Ted took her into his arms. “You’re shaking,” he murmured, his face against her hair. “Sweetheart. It’s going to be okay. Come on now.”
Jen closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on the feel of his hands against her back, holding her, supporting her. She hadn’t known she was trembling until he held her, but now she felt the zigzag racing of her heart, the throbbing of her pulse in her temples, the weakness in her limbs.
But she couldn’t give in, couldn’t let herself fall apart in his arms. For one thing, she knew that Livvy saw everything, even when she pretended not to. And for another, it wasn’t fair to Ted. It wasn’t fair to expect him to be the strong one, the only one to hold them all up.
“I’m okay,” she said, gently pushing him away. She took a breath and pushed her hair away from her face. “I’m good. Really. Look, let’s try again. There’s got to be some—some sort of clue we’ve missed. About what they want. I mean, why not just take what they want and go, now that we’re stuck down here? What are they doing up there?”
“Look at it the other way—now that we’re stuck down here, why hurry? Why not take their time and make sure they get what they came for?”
“But leaving us in the basement for so long, that’s a risk, isn’t it?”
“Not really. There’s only the one door and now we know they’re keeping an eye on it. And if they’re looking for big-ticket stuff, they might just be trying to break us down, make us less likely to resist when they come looking for it.”
“But they can just take whatever they want. We can’t stop them.”
“They don’t know where we keep things...so once they take the obvious stuff, the electronics and art, they’ll come down here and want to know what we have hidden away.”
“But what are we going to tell them?”
“Whatever they want to know. It’s all insured. We tell them where the silver is, your jewelry, everything. Hell, we’ll tell them where the suitcases are and they can pack it all up. We cooperate, that is the important thing. Make it easy for them to get the job done.”
“Okay,” Jen said, nodding reluctantly. “I just, I guess I’m worried it won’t be enough.”
“Honey,” Ted said, taking her hand. “I know it’s hard, but you need to just stay calm and assume these guys are pros. Hell, for all we know they’ve done this before. There might have been a whole string of robberies around here. I mean, think about it, it’s not bad for one night’s work, right?”
“What, you think they’ve been breaking into houses all over Calumet? We would have heard about it.”
“It wouldn’t have to be just Calumet,” Ted said. “They could go all over the Twin Cities.”
“But, Ted, it would be in all the papers. The news would be all over it!”
A sound behind her caught Jen short.
“Stop it,” Livvy whispered. She was standing a few feet away, her arms hugging herself; she’d approached so quietly that they hadn’t heard her. “Please. Stop talking about it.”
Jen pulled her into her arms, shushing her, smoothing her hair. “I’m sorry, sweetie. Daddy and I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“Just do what they want,” Livvy pleaded. “Don’t let Daddy try to fight with them.”
As Jen comforted her, she thought she heard voices up above and felt the vibrations of footsteps through the basement floor. It had to be her mind playing tricks on her. In the moments since she first saw the strangers standing in her bedroom door, it was as though the edges of her mind were disintegrating, like a tablet dissolving in water. The core was still there—her rational mind, her focus on her family—but how long could she sustain it?
And in a way, it hadn’t started upstairs, today, with the arrival of this threat. Sid’s death. Sarah’s note. Ted’s evasiveness. And even before that—his job loss, Livvy’s hostility...what had happened to her perfect family, the beautiful home she had created so carefully for all of them? What had she done to invite all these destructive forces in?
She was doing her best, trying to be strong, but she was beginning to imagine the walls cracking, the house bearing down on them, old sins from the past clamoring to come back.
Chapter Seven
Livvy fell asleep first. Jen figured it was her body’s way of shutting down in the face of her terror. Jen covered her with one of the quilts and turned her attention to Teddy, who had finally gotten bored with the laundry when the wash cycle ended.
It had to be past his bedtime. Jen tried to get him to lie down on the couch, but he kept sitting up and fussing with his covers. Jen stroked his soft, downy hair and sang to him, and eventually his hand fell against his chest and his breathing grew steady and slow. She covered him with a second quilt, butterflies appliqued onto its square blocks, the colors faded to the palest greens and oranges and pinks. She had a vague memory of the quilt from her childhood, a time when her mother had used it for her own bed, after Sid left.
Ted was sitting in one of the old dining room chairs holding a spool of copper wire. Jen remembered seeing the wire in one of the jumbled bins of hardware and tools on the shelves above the workbench. The wire had become loose and slipped off the spool in tangled coils, and Ted was methodically working out the knots, rewinding it carefully around the spool.
Jen watched him for a few moments, feeling her gut contract and her breath go shallow until finally she couldn’t stand it anymore. “What in heaven’s name are you doing?”
Ted didn’t answer her for a moment. He wrapped a few more coils around the spool, then set it carefully—gently, as though it were something precious—on the coffee table. He didn’t look at her, pulling at a loose thread in the seam of his pants and clearing his throat. “Jen, there’s something I need to tell you—”
The door opened at the top of the stairs. “Oh, God,” Jen whispered. She accidentally dragged the quilt halfway off Teddy as she scrambled off the couch. He mumbled in his sleep.
“Don’t move.” Dan descended the stairs, slowly, holding a garbage bag in one hand and his gun in the other. When he reached the base of the stairs, he looked around the room, then let the bag drop to the floor with a muffled thud. “Here’s food. And I threw a few of the kid’s toys in, too.”
“Wait,” Jen said. She searched Dan’s face. His beard grew in unevenly, with a few bare patches that looked like he’d taken an indifferent swipe with a razor before giving up, more pepper than salt. Her father had that look, when he first came back from Alaska. He never made much of an effort at grooming. “Couldn’t you just let the kids go? They won’t say anything, they’re—”
He held up a hand to stop her. “Not going to happen, okay, so let it fucking drop. Trust me, it’ll go easier.”
He backed slowly up the stairs, one hand on the rail, finding his footing a little clumsily, moving with the bearing of a middle-aged man who got too little exercise. Then he was gone, the door closing behind him.
Jen stood motionless for a moment before bending to pick up the trash bag. It was one of the black lawn bags, the good ones. She upended it carefully on the rug, and four water bottles rolled out. Jen set them on the coffee table and shook out the rest of the food. Juice boxes, half a dozen of the little ones Jen sent to preschool with Teddy. A box of Triscuits. Another, half-full of cheddar goldfish. A mesh bag of those little round wax-covered cheese wheels, still cold from the fridge. Bruised fruit—a couple of bananas and three pears.
Jen picked up a pear, remembering choosing it from the bin at Whole Foods—was it just yesterday? She’d chosen the Bosc because the other ones were so hard and green, like they’d never ripen, and she’d come home and arranged them in the white ceramic bowl on the counter.
“You hungry?” Ted picked up the Triscuits, tore open the box.
“Are you kidding?”
Ted paused and stared at her. “Look, Jen, I’m not the enemy here.”
“I get that. But how can you eat?” Her own stomach had growled in protest, and she hadn’t eaten since taking Teddy to Jamba Juice after preschool, an outing that seemed like it had taken place days ago, not just hours earlier. But the thought of food was impossible.
Ted looked down at the cracker in his hand. “I’m...I just thought we should eat something.”
He looked so lost, and Jen wished he’d lie to her again, like he had before. Anything to stop her mind from chasing itself in desperate circles. She should never have come down on him so hard when he was only trying to keep their spirits up.
But she’d questioned him then, and now she’d done it again, eroding his strength right in front of her eyes. It was all wrong. Her job was to bolster him, to help him be the strong one, to help him take care of them all.
But the poison was in her mind, in her imagination. She kept getting flashes of the dark schemes the men upstairs might have in mind. Especially the young one. He seemed unbalanced, like someone who could hurt others without feeling remorse. Like he might enjoy it.
The way he looked at Livvy, his gaze sharpening and his mouth going tight, and she didn’t even know what he was seeing. When he looked at her daughter, did he imagine tearing her clothes off her? Doing things to her, making her do things—
Jen let out a whimper of terror, unable to stop the terrifying parade of images. Ted dropped the cracker on the coffee table and reached for her. “Honey. Jen. What is it?”
“It’s Ryan. I just don’t trust him. With Livvy. I mean, didn’t you see him watching her? When he pulled her head back—when he touched her with his gun? Even if what you said about Dan is true, even if he just wants to take our things and leave, how’s he going to stop Ryan if he wants to...” She couldn’t bear to say it, to name her fear.
“Dan’s not going to let things get out of control. He’s in charge here. There’s no way he’d risk that. Anything goes wrong, it takes them both down.”
Jen seized on the hope he was offering her, willing it to be true. “I know it seems like he’s in charge. But what if Ryan tries something, anyway?”
“Dan won’t let that happen.” Ted shook his head. “Look, I know guys like Ryan. There’s one in every locker room. On every team at work. They’re the guys who are always looking for an opening, trying to see what they can get away with. They always end up digging their own hole and getting fired.”
“This isn’t an office—”
“No, but Dan’s not going to let Ryan get the upper hand. Guys like that are tricky, but they’re weak.”
Jen considered, dubious. It seemed like Ted’s theory was woven from the thinnest threads, but it was better than anything she had, and it had the advantage—the enormous advantage—of giving her hope.
“I thought of something else,” Ted said. “A reason why they’re waiting.”
“What?”
“The cars. If they want to take the cars, they can’t risk driving out of here and being seen by someone who knows us. They could change the plates while they’re still in the garage, drive out in the middle of the night when there’s no one on the street. They could—come to think of it—” he snapped his fingers “—they could have a truck nearby. Make a few trips in our cars, get everything out and none of the neighbors would ever notice because everyone’s asleep.”
“But then they’d need a third person, right? To drive the truck? Besides, how much could they possibly take? More than they could fit in two cars?”
“Well, maybe that’s why they came so early. So they could take their time looking around.”
“Or maybe they already knew what we have,” Jen said. “If there’s someone else involved, like we were talking about before. Like where the safe is, my jewelry, the art, your dad’s coins—all of it.”
“I still think that’s such a long shot. I mean, someone who knew us well enough to know where all of that is—I just don’t know who that would be.”
Or Livvy, Jen thought. Someone who knew Livvy. But she had promised herself to try to stay calm, to keep a grip on her fears.
They were silent for a moment, both of them listening, both deep in their own thoughts. But upstairs, all was quiet.
“Look—take the love seat,” Ted said after a while. “You might be able to get some sleep on it. I’ll take the floor.”
“Well...” She thought about letting him have the love seat, since one of them might as well be comfortable, and she was pretty sure she would be wide-awake all night, no matter what. But she had to try, for the kids’ sake if not her own. “If you’re sure you’ll be all right.”
“Yeah, the floor’s nice and firm, probably be good for my back.”
He tried to smile, and for a moment Jen watched him, really looking at him the way she hadn’t in a long time. Something was different—some flicker in the depths of his eyes, some extra lines around his mouth. Of course it was probably just fear and exhaustion, the sheer weight of worry, but as Ted busied himself with spreading out some quilts on the floor, she couldn’t help feeling there was something else.
She arranged her blanket on the love seat and curled up on her side, using a sofa cushion for a pillow. When Ted snapped off the light, the basement was completely dark, the kind of dark where you almost feel like you’re in another dimension, adrift, without even the glow of the moon through a window or a night-light down the hall to orient you.
After a few seconds Ted turned the light back on. “I don’t want the kids to be scared if they wake up,” he whispered. “Will this be okay for you?”
“It’s fine,” Jen whispered back, and rolled over so her face was pressed against the back of the love seat, finding her own total darkness.
As she closed her eyes and waited for sleep, she tried to force her thoughts away from this horrible day, back to when things were normal. Yesterday, she’d gotten out of bed, brushed her teeth, got the paper, made the coffee. Packed a snack for Teddy and ironed a shirt for Livvy. Planned the details of her day, the errands, the car pools, the dinner menu, never dreaming that thirty-six hours later her life would be yanked out from under her. She’d had an extra cup of coffee with Ted before he went...where had he gone yesterday? Some errand...then she remembered, Ted had spent the afternoon at the BMW dealer having the oil changed and the dent fixed.
Except when she came home tonight with Livvy, she could swear the dent had still been there.
* * *
She dreamed a dinner party, impossibly detailed, and even as she walked the rooms of her house she suspected that she wasn’t really there. It happened that way, sometimes, in dreams. She touched the stemware, the silky petals of roses in the pewter bowls. She walked among her guests, but she barely greeted them. She brushed past the hired bartender, through the butler’s pantry, a quick tour of her kitchen, where several of the women from her Zumba class were standing near the bay window, wearing those skimpy outfits they all bought at the new fitness store that had opened in the old Blockbuster space. Jen was annoyed that they hadn’t dressed for her party, but still she didn’t stop.
She was looking for something.
She made her way up the stairs, leaving the crowd behind. The kids’ doors were open; they were with friends for the evening. The hall bath was tidy. It smelled like disinfectant, which Jen found soothing.
She hesitated at the door of her bedroom. It had been milled to match the rest of the doors in the house, solid six-panel construction. It was standing slightly ajar, and Jen tapped it with a fingertip and it opened a few more inches. Did she really want to do this? She could turn around; she could go back downstairs; she could have a glass of wine, a second, a third, however many it took to dull this wanting to know, this need, the one she couldn’t bring herself to separate from, the way she knew was best, the way other women did. Choosing not to know—it was one of the most important tools in a wife’s arsenal.
Some defiant spark wouldn’t let her turn away. She pushed the door open, hard enough for it to bang against the wall, and there they were. In her bed. Sarah Elizabeth Baker sitting astride her husband with her head thrown back, all that luxurious hair tangled around her shoulders as if she’d ridden through a windstorm to come to him. Ted’s hands were on her hips, pressing her against him, grinding up into her, and they were so consumed by the moment that even as they twisted around to see her, they didn’t stop their rhythm and the sight of them thrusting together was like an ax in Jen’s heart.
Chapter Eight
“Jen. Jen.”
Ted was shaking her, his hand on her shoulder. Jen shuddered, trying to banish the nightmare, and then she remembered where she was.
The basement was lit by the single overhead bulb, casting its small, gloomy pool of light down on the four of them. The kids were fast asleep, Livvy burrowed so far under her quilt that only her hair was visible, Teddy tangled up in his covers. Ted was on his knees at the foot of the love seat, staring up at her. Jen blinked and put her hand over her mouth.
“You were having a nightmare,” he said. “You were thrashing around. Are you all right?”
The last bits of the dream dissolved and were replaced with guilt. Absurd though it was, Jen felt like she’d been caught in a moment of betrayal, walking in on the scene between her husband and his lover.
“I’m fine,” she said shortly.
“I couldn’t sleep. I thought I might try to eat again. I don’t think I’ve had a real meal since breakfast yesterday. You want something? We probably ought to.”
Jen didn’t answer, but she watched Ted open the crackers, peel the wax off a cheese round, then another. He split the cheese into four squishy quadrants and stacked each on a cracker, brushing the crumbs into a little pile in the center of the plate. When he picked up a cracker and handed it to her, Jen was surprised that her stomach rumbled in response, and she was able to take a bite.

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