You Will Know Me (20 page)

Or was he thinking of Devon and Ryan? Was he thinking of them constantly since he'd found out?

I thought she'd want me to pick her up by now
, he'd said, watching Katie mop the briny water from the counter, the kitchen floor, the dining-room table, even the back of Drew's neck.

They have to sit for three days, Mom,
Drew had said.
To see how many die.

She told him to put the hatchery in the basement or the garage, or it'd get knocked over and she'd be cleaning up salt water for days.

Then she began gathering laundry, handwashing Devon's competition leotard in the sink. The TV was on downstairs, somewhere.

But where was Eric? The TV on, everyone's computer humming. The blip of cell phones. Everyone in a different corner. He must have put Drew to bed. She didn't remember that.

There was a whole pocket of the evening she couldn't be sure Eric had been there at all.

The next time she looked at her watch it was nearly eleven, and she ran down the basement stairs to throw a clot of crusted dishrags in the washer, the final load.

And she'd finally heard the door from the garage slam, heard Devon pounding up the stairs, the shower turn on. She'd knocked on her bedroom door at one point. Said good night.

Night, Mom. Night.

She and Eric often didn't go to bed at the same time. They almost never did.

Then, the part she remembered, two a.m., a tunnel of sleep and Eric reaching over, pressing against the small of her back, his fingers digging into the base of her spine, then climbing under her T-shirt, urgent and insistent.

Her demon lover.

What had he just done?

She felt her stomach turn.

I promise im ok. Really, mom.

Katie sat on the edge of her bed, phone in hand. It wasn't yet nine o'clock in the morning and she was already so tired she couldn't imagine standing, or putting on clothes.

I'll get you after last period. DO NOT leave with anyone else.

Ok.

“This is Mrs. Knox. I'm calling to make a special request. Devon's father—he's on medication. Back pain.” It was so easy to lie. “He's not supposed to be driving, but he's very stubborn.”

“Sounds like my husband,” the school secretary said with a sigh.

“If he shows up, I don't want him to leave with Devon.”

“Mr. Knox? Really?”

“He just doesn't seem to be able to take it easy,” Katie said, forcing a wry tone. “It's strong stuff he's on. And he just can't be trusted right now.”

“Of course, Mrs. Knox.”

“He's not himself.”

She didn't hear the car pull up the driveway.

She was on her hands and knees in the garage, looking for more paint chips, for glass.

All she could see was the long trail of rock salt from Drew's first, failed science project.

The garage door was open only a foot when she spotted the cuffs of a man's suit pants. A pair of scuffed wingtips.

The shoes paused a second, then kept walking.

A second later, the doorbell rang.

Katie looked down at herself, the T-shirt she'd slept in, her bare legs, knees covered in garage-floor grime. Dirt- and dust-flecked.

Through the frosted panel on one side of the front door, she saw the car in the driveway. A black Dodge.

Moving to the other panel, she spotted the two men on the porch, both in suits. One had a phone clipped to his belt.

Had they heard her in the garage, seen her feet?

The buzzer became a knock.

She could hear the crackle of a two-way radio through the door.

“Ma'am” a voice came. “Ma'am, I'm Detective Renton. This is Detective Furey. Can we speak to you?”

Three minutes later, after throwing on a pair of Devon's workout capris swiped from the laundry basket, streaking a dish towel up and down her arms, across her face even, she opened the door.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “My son is very sick.”

“We're sorry to bother you at home, Mrs. Knox,” said the younger one, Detective Fury, or Furey—had that really been his name?

The detectives settled into the slow-sinking sofa across from Katie in the wing chair, which still seemed to bear the scent of Gwen from days before, tuberose and musk.

The chair she and Eric had once copulated on. That's the word that came into her soiled brain.
Copulated
. Animals.

But she needed to focus. She needed to—

“Is Mr. Knox here?” Detective Renton asked.

And there it was.

“He's at work.”

The way they were watching her, she wondered how tight the capris were, how her face looked. Her hands went to her forehead, the slick of sweat there. Had she even brushed her teeth?

“What I can help you with?” she said. “What is it you want?”

“Mrs. Knox, are you okay?”

“Yes,” she said. Breathing from the center, like Coach T. always told Devon to do.
Breathe, focus, let go. Breathe, believe, and battle.
“But my son has scarlet fever. You probably shouldn't be here.”

“I'm sorry about your son, Mrs. Knox,” Renton said. “But don't worry about us. We're strong like bulls.” He tried to smile, or do something with his face.

“This won't take long,” said the young one, Furey, with the freshly shaved neck, pink and angry. But his voice was gentle. “We just have a few follow-up questions.”

“Questions?”

“How's your daughter doing?”

The hover of relief in her throat made it hard to talk. The locker-room fight, of course. “She's fine,” Katie said, folding her hands, resting them on her thighs, the slippery spandex of Devon's capris a half a foot too short for her. “As fine as can be expected.”

“That's good news,” said Furey, very earnest. He was just a boy, really. The Adam's apple, the razor marks on his neck. Officer Furey, Boy Detective

“I'm sure you heard,” Detective Renton said. “Miss Belfour has been under twenty-four-hour psychiatric care since the incident.”

“Yes. We were very glad.”

“Well, it looks like she's going home today,” he said, and then paused.

“Really?” she said. They both seemed to be watching her so closely, even leaning forward. Scrutinizing. Were there paint chips under her fingernails, maybe a ribbon of half-shredded evidence stuck to her foot bottom, pink slivers of the repair receipt clinging to her ankles? You could never hide it all.

“So we'll be talking to Miss Belfour again about what happened,” Renton continued, watery eyes on her. “After the incident, she wasn't too coherent, and after her attorney arrived, well, she wasn't talking anymore.”

“Wait,” Katie said, her voice squeaking like the uneven bars, like Devon's hands gripping the fiberglass, body swinging, chalk spraying. “Wait. I don't understand. She's a criminal. She attacked my little girl. You're charging her, right?”

They both looked at her.

“There haven't been any charges yet,” Renton said, voice even. “Before we submit our report to the DA, we need to follow up on a few things we've learned.”

“What things?” Katie said. Why had they come here, anyway, instead of calling her to the station? And wasn't it odd that they'd just stopped by, unannounced? Renton with his gravelly voice and his worn skin like an old potato, right alongside Furey with his delicate boy face, and was one the good cop and one the bad?

The thought came to her. “What happened to Officer Crandall? He's the one we spoke to after my daughter was attacked. Wasn't this his case?”

The two men looked at her, Furey's forehead crinkling gently.

Then: the squawk of her phone upstairs, those stroking first beats of “Assassin's Tango.”

“Excuse me.” She leaped to her feet, moving quickly to the stairs.

“If that's your husband, Mrs. Knox,” Renton called out, “we'd like to speak to him too. He works out of that studio over on Merricat Road, right?”

“Gwen,” she whispered, shutting the upstairs bathroom door behind her, making sure no one could hear. “I can't talk now.”

She never would have answered if it weren't for the detectives, their starchy blue shirts and thick-soled shoes. The squinting of their eyes and the leaning closer. She needed some space, some time. To think.

“Katie,” Gwen was saying, already mid-harangue, “I'd like you to reconsider your position here. Even if you want Devon home that doesn't mean she can't continue her sessions at EmPower—”

“That's not going to happen. And I can't talk.”

“—because in a month, your daughter will step out onto that competition floor and have what could be her last chance at qualifying for Elite after the catastrophe of two years ago.”

“I'm not discussing this with you,” Katie said, her hands on the sink, sticky from something—soap, last night's noxious whiskey. “This has nothing to do with you.”

“Well, that's just false. I'm the treasurer of this entire operation. Devon's success or failure will have a major impact on the finances of this gym.”

“I don't care about the gym's goddamn finances.” Trying to keep her voice low. The silence from downstairs—those detectives, could they hear?

“The boosters have invested a great deal in Devon,” Gwen continued. “And her fate affects our daughters too. Do you see what I'm saying?”

Leaning against the peeling vanity, Katie turned on the water so they couldn't hear. The old mold-thick vents might just muffle the telltale heart. Those detectives down there, surely Hailey had told them about Devon and Ryan? And if she hadn't told before, what would stop her from telling now? And then they would talk to Eric. And want to see Eric's car. And—

“Katie, do you see? Are you there? I can hear your anxious little breaths.”

“I'm hanging up.”

“Katie, were you an athlete?”

“No,” she said, wanting to scream at Gwen and fearing the detectives could hear, imagining them both leaning forward, craning necks.
Who is she talking to? Is it her daughter? Her husband?

“Of course you weren't. I don't know what you wanted at Devon's age, Katie, but I'd bet my daughter's college fund you couldn't name it then or now. But Devon is different. She knows what she wants. She's not like the rest of us, Katie.”

“Who the hell do you think you are?” Katie whispered, her mouth pressed against the phone. “Slinking into our lives with your snakeskin shoes and your big checkbook and your—”

“You wanted that checkbook, didn't you?” she said icily.

Downstairs, Katie thought she heard footsteps. She thought about the door to the garage. About what else might be in there. Glass fragments, the microscopic residue of paint—flakes and chips too small for the eye to see. But they would see.

“This isn't about your maternal vanity,” Gwen was saying. “It's about your daughter.”

In her head, Katie was screaming.

The water running, she leaned down as close to the rush of it as she could and said through gritted teeth, “Go to hell. You go to hell.”

But nothing ever touched Gwen.

“Because, Katie, there's nothing on God's green earth I wouldn't do for my child,” Gwen said, the bastioned fortress in the center of an impassable moat. “That is something Eric and I agree on. Don't you? What kind of mother wouldn't?”

What kind of mother
. To say that to Katie, who had given every waking hour and every sleeping hour to her daughter. Who sat in that gym every day, spent hundreds of hours in backless bleachers, elbows perpetually rubbed raw from all the bleacher leaning. Who drove as many as thirty hours a week, who spent hours hunting for lost grips or a favorite leotard, every leotard costing more than any item of clothing Katie had. Who hadn't had a professional haircut in four years, who'd never been on a trip alone with her husband at all, her only vacations consisting of free hours torn from tournament weekends, her shoulder bag filled with water bottles and ibuprofen and gluey hair gel and sharp bobby pins and lucky grips and the right kind of energy bars you could only get online and the right kind of athletic tape and the lucky socks and the lucky hairbrush and Devon's inhaler and her backup inhaler, her hands resting on Devon's weary shoulders as they tromped through the museum, the science center, the amusement park in the forty-five minutes they had before prac—

“I refuse to deprive my daughter of the opportunity to achieve her dreams,” Gwen continued, unrelenting. “I will not give up on her. Will you give up on Devon?”

“You're lucky I didn't call the goddamned police,” Katie said instead, jaw grinding. “You took my daughter.”

“The police?” There was a brief pause, then Gwen's voice returned, grim and precise. “You don't want to call the police.”

Something in her tone. Something with portent. Whatever it meant, Katie could not hear it now.

“I'll do whatever I need to do to protect my daughter,” Katie said, and hung up.

Walking down the stairs, she dragged down the hems of the capris, smoothed her hair.

“I'm sorry,” she said, returning to the living room, blood high and with new purpose, “but it's not a good time.”

The detectives looked up at her, half rising, then sitting again.

“We get that a lot,” Renton said, trying for a smile.

Instead of sitting, Katie rested her hands on the back of the wing chair, hiding her shaking legs behind it.

“We already told Officer Crandall everything we know. And we're a sick house.”

We're a sick house
. Her words sounded funny to her, but they seemed to have weight, impact. That big way of talking, she'd never tried it before.
Nothing on God's green earth I wouldn't do for my child.

“Mrs. Knox,” Furey said, his neck less pink now, expression oddly tender, “we do understand. We're here to help you.”

She felt very tall, the detectives slunk so low on the ancient Sears sofa. She straightened her back. She would be ready this time.

“We reviewed security-camera footage of the gym lobby,” Renton said. “And you can clearly see Miss Belfour following your daughter into the locker room.”

“She was hunting her,” Katie said, “like my daughter was some kind of animal.”

“But you should know Miss Belfour's injuries far outweighed your daughter's,” Renton added.

“My daughter's strong. She knows how to defend herself. Thank God.”

Her spine tight and taut, nothing they said touched her. It was like the rival gym parents at the meets, the way they would talk, trying to diminish Devon's achievements, cast doubt. Noting the extra time Coach T. gave her, the special privileges. You had to be above all of that. Or trample it under your feet.

“And you,” Furey said, lifting his pen in the air, pointing it in her direction. “You too, Mrs. Knox. You defended yourself. Are those from Miss Belfour too?”

She followed his pen to her forearm, bare. The brown serrations etching that fish-hook scratch, elbow to wrist. Conscious of the gaping armholes of Eric's shirt, air hitting skin, their eyes on her. Her marks.

“Of course they are. You see what Hailey's capable of, then,” she said, discreetly displaying her forearm. Furey looked at it, noted it.

“Mrs. Knox,” Renton said, “have your daughter and Miss Belfour been involved in any back-and-forth? A kind of feud? There was talk of texts exchanged. Girls can—”

“No. Absolutely not. And, by the way, Hailey's not a girl. She's the adult who attacked my child. A minor. That's what we're talking about, right?”

“Right.”

“And she's the adult whose car was seen at the site of her boyfriend's deadly accident, correct?”

“That's a separate investigation, Mrs. Knox.”

“And as for talking to my husband, he wasn't there when my daughter was assaulted. I was. And I will tell you again what you already know. What a dozen people saw.”

She felt something stirring powerfully in her, and the words just came, her finger poking at them like Coach on the floor,
To stick it, you gotta grind those baby-girl heels of yours
, hand on the vault punching every word.
When it hurts you know you've landed it right
.

“That twenty-three-year-old woman, half a foot taller with at least thirty pounds on my child, a woman with a history of instabilities and juvenile delinquency, tackled her, pounded her head into the floor. Wrapped her hands around my baby's throat. That's what matters. And that is why you're here, isn't it? Because we don't live in a place where adults are allowed to beat on children.”