You Will Know Me (14 page)

“We'd need a warrant,” he said. “And we'd have to go through her provider since her phone was in about twenty-five pieces on the locker-room floor.”

Katie remembered the sound of splintering, the skittering of plastic on linoleum. Devon's foot landing on it like a tomahawk. Hailey's banshee howl.

“Why do we keep talking about texts?” Eric said, face florid in a way Katie didn't recognize. “This woman attacked my daughter.”

“And by the way, deleting texts from your phone doesn't get rid of them,” the officer told Katie calmly. “It just removes them from your phone.”

As he spoke, the officer watched Devon, who was still fixated on her wrist, stretching the grip muscles like Teddy always told her to.

“Officer, what do we do?” Katie asked. “We have no idea what Hailey's capable of.”

“We know exactly what she's capable of,” Eric said. “We saw it today. And I can't be the only one wondering what this has to do with Ryan Beck.”

A loud crack, and the battered water bottle in Eric's fist completely gave way this time, a sluice of water scattering across all of them.

Katie jumped back, but neither Crandall nor Devon moved. Devon's eyes blinking as if water had been caught there, her lashes sticky with it.

“Mr. Knox,” Crandall said, looking down at the water spatters on the desk, “let's just keep focused on what happened to Devon. Okay?”

“Then tell me this: How do we file a restraining order?” Eric said, picking up the splintered water bottle, nearly slamming it into the trash can.

“She's locked up now, right?” Katie asked the officer, placing her hand on Eric's arm, pressing hard.

“Miss Belfour is at St. Joe's now,” Crandall said. “But we'll be talking to her very soon.”

“She's at the hospital?” Katie asked.

“Her injuries were more substantial than your daughter's,” Crandall added.

“Oh.”

“A big hank of her hair got torn out,” he said. “Your daughter knows how to protect herself.”

Katie looked at Devon, whose eyes remained downcast.

“And her scalp opened up where she hit the floor,” Crandall continued. “But mostly they need to be extra careful whenever there's bite marks. Especially under the eye.” He paused a second before adding, “It was a mean fight.”

They found Drew half asleep in his chair, mouth still ringed white and a fresh red rash swarming up his face.

“Come on, honey,” Katie said, arms around him. “Devon's in the restroom and then we'll go.”

She felt Eric's hand on her arm.

“Did you know she was violent?” he said. “Did you know any of this?”

Katie stared at him, the way his hands bulbed into fists. He was looking at her like she had done something. Like she was the one.

“You knew as much as I did,” she said, trying to keep her voice calm. “You're the one who said practice is how Devon ‘works through feelings.' Right?”

He looked at her, then down at Drew, the back of his hand touching Drew's bloomy face.

“We shouldn't have let Devon out of our sight after that call,” he said. “That's all I meant. Sorry. Sorry.”

She nodded, and stared at the ladies' room door, waiting for Devon.

That's when it came to her, the last time she'd talked to a police detective, more than a dozen years ago. They were huddled in the hectic waiting room at Good Samaritan Hospital, Eric's forearms streaked with three-year-old Devon's browning blood, the same blood that spattered across his T-shirt like scatter art, and the officer assuring them it was only routine, after any severe injury of a child.

The dropped ceiling so low, the strip fluorescents hurting her eyes, Katie had sat there, feeling like her insides had been scraped clean, like her mom once told her an abortion felt (
Which is why
, she'd added,
I put you on the pill at fifteen
).

The woman kept asking them questions.

Mr. Knox, was it common to have your daughter with you while you mowed the lawn?

Mr. Knox, were you aware of the safety mechanisms on your mower?

Eric, all of twenty-two years old, younger even than Ryan Beck, just stood there, grass blades still slashed up his calves. No belt—he'd torn it from its loops, tying it around Devon's foot. He stood there, unable to say anything but
No, no, I don't know.

Your daughter may not even remember this later,
the officer told them, walking them out.
She may not even remember her foot ever being like it was before.

But Katie knew that was a lie. The moment her own knees slid onto the shorn lawn, slick with Devon's blood, she knew her daughter would remember this forever.

How did I do that?
Eric kept asking her, his voice strange and high, like she'd never heard before and hadn't since.
How did I do that?

The paramedics, and Mr. Watts from next door, trying to help. To distract Devon, mashed against the grass, face white as paper.

Honey, look at me. Listen to me.
Mr. Watts, trying to get her to look at him and not the red tangle hanging from her ankle.
Do you have a dog? Did you get an ice cream from the truck today?

But, glassy-eyed, Devon would look only at Katie, her red-specked chin.

Mommy, where did it go?

Her foot stretched out in front of her, the bright mass below her ankle like a tissue-paper flower.

Where did it go?

She wondered if Eric was thinking about any of this now.

Looking at him, she had no idea, and would never ask.

“We'll be in touch,” Officer Crandall said. Then added, turning to Eric, “And we can talk more about that restraining order.”

Her bandaged hand resting on top of her other one, Devon walked toward them from the restroom. So tiny, half a foot shorter than Katie herself.

“Dee-Dee,” Eric said, which he hadn't called her in a decade or more. “Dee-Dee, come with us.”

Back home, after everything settled a little, after a muted dinner of freezer-scorched pizza, Drew collapsed into his bed and Devon disappeared into the basement gym again. As Eric drank whiskey from a coffee cup, Katie stood over the sink, scraping all the rice stuck to the bottom of yesterday's casserole dish, drinking beer from a can.

All she wanted was for everything to stay quiet. To be quiet.

And to keep Eric away from Devon. He still looked so on edge, a coiled thing.

“Can you go to the drugstore?” she asked him. “Some vitamin E oil for Devon's wrist?”

He said he would. She hoped to talk to Devon alone, quietly, and make sure she was really okay.

But before she could, everything started again.

“Katie,” Teddy said, one foot on the doorstep.

Polo shirt untucked, neck rubbed red, eyes pouched, he stood before her, one hand tugging nervously at the fingers of the other. She was guessing he'd been up for a long time, days maybe.

Under the porch light, though, there was still that magnificent silver hair like drusy quartz. And his voice.

“Oh God, Katie.”

Hurrying him inside, she shut the door to the den behind them.

“You absolutely cannot be here, Teddy. Eric's at the drugstore, but he'll be back. You know how he can be and this—”

“I can't explain what she did, Katie. I won't even try,” he said. “But I need you to know, we're taking care of it.”

He explained that he had checked Hailey into Gateways Behavioral Health, the only way to keep the hospital from putting her in the psych ward after she'd tried to climb out of her bathroom window.

“It's this lying, bullshit eyewitness. It unwound her. And he can't keep his story straight. First he says Altima, but cops show him pictures and he ID's a Chevy Malibu. And he's a trucker!”

“I don't care, Teddy. I don't care about this. What does it have to do with what she did to my daughter?”

Shaking his head. “All of this, it's eating her alive. It's made her do…shameful things. I just ask that you try to understand that that wasn't our Hailey there today.”

Katie kept her eyes on the front window for Eric's return from the drugstore.

“Katie, when she first came to us, Hailey was headed down a crooked road—boy trouble, lots of volatility. We got her to church, got her on the swim team. Didn't give up on her,” he said, voice cracking with urgency, his fist pounding his knee. “By sixteen, she was a prom queen and junior-class president.”

“Teddy, I know this.”

“And I thought,” he said, “well, I thought:
We sealed that up. That's done
.”

Teddy covered his face with both hands and was silent for a moment. But when he lifted his head again, his eyes were dry and filled with surprise.

“I mean, I thought
this
was what I was good at. Making girls feel loved.”

And, in spite of herself, Katie felt her throat tighten.

And there it was, Eric's weather-beaten silver Ford, lights flashing up the window.

“Teddy, you have to go. Now.”

He nodded firmly, squeezed his bloodshot eyes, nodded again. But he didn't get up.

“But, Katie, I do need to tell you: At the hospital, Hailey wasn't making any sense. She was talking about how the fight started. She started saying some kinda…
raw
things about…I mean, you must be wondering too.”

“You bet we're wondering, Teddy. We've known Hailey for years. We—”

“I mean about Devon. She had some things to say about Devon. About Ryan. Some stuff that kinda rocked me back on my feet.”

“What?”

“Well,” he said, shifting uncomfortably, “you know how young women can be.”

Then the side door slammed and Katie jumped up.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

It was Eric, standing in the doorway, keys still in hand, eyes bleared.

“What did you say?” he demanded, and Teddy rose.

“Eric, he just—”

“Katie, don't you talk to him.”

Katie looked at Eric. Something in his eyes she had never seen before.

“Teddy, you need to leave. You just do.”

Briskly, she walked Teddy outside, afraid Eric might follow.

“Teddy, what did Hailey say?” she asked. “What did she tell you?”

“Listen, it doesn't matter,” he said. “Let's just wait. Let everything calm a little.”

“Then you better go.” They both stood a moment on the front lawn, jungly with ground ivy.

“Katie, listen, you know Hailey,” he began, voice trembling. “You know her heart. You always understood her—”

“I don't know her heart,” Katie said coolly. “She came after my daughter. What would that do to you?”

Teddy nodded, kicking the curb at the foot of the drive, just like a little boy might. “I'd be the same way. I'd be like Eric. I'd be worse. You know I love your daughter.”

Katie folded her arms, glancing back at the house, Eric's shadow in the front window.

“I'm tired and life is a son of a bitch,” Teddy said, looking off into the distance, the neon-banded lights from the corner drive-through, cars chugging into the lot all night. Thumping bass, the drunken chirrs of girls.

“We never know,” he said, “none of us, what love'll do to us.” He smiled a little. “Make us buy a swimming pool, just so a niece might keep coming by.”

Katie felt something inside herself open, her face red-rushed with shame over it. It felt like he had poked a hole in her.

“Or maybe we do know,” he said, walking backward down the front walkway, the deep slope of the unmowed lawn.

“What was he thinking, showing up here?” Eric kept saying, over and over and over, pacing in the living room.

“He shouldn't have come.”

“After what she did to our daughter.”

“I know.”

“And you,” he said, freshly outraged at the thought. “What she did to you.”

It was the first time Eric mentioned it. Katie looked down at the spindle scratch on her arm. Felt the pulse over her brow where, she guessed, Hailey's hard knuckle—or was it Devon's, accidentally?—had pushed.

“No one ever wants to believe bad things about their own family,” Katie said.

He was standing by the front doorway, and those car keys still in his hand, like he was going to leave. For a second, she wondered if he would.

“How did it happen?” he asked, as if to himself. “How did this happen?”

She wasn't even sure what he meant, but there was something in his face. She'd seen it before, years ago, during the pureed-pear-smeared chaos of new parenthood. This dangerous and endangered creature had landed like a bomb in their lives—his life—and he'd stand at the nursery door at the end of a long day and she couldn't get him to come inside, to join her at the rocker, or he'd stand over the crib rail. His face stiff and eyes distracted, he'd linger in the doorway,
I don't want to wake her
. But Devon was always awake, bantam arms swatting at Katie's chest.
Come on, Eric,
Katie would urge,
hold her, smell that sweet smell.
But it was as though he were frozen there, and he never moved at all.

But that was a long time ago, before everything.

That night, tucking Drew in, feeling his forehead, she tried to explain what had happened, that Hailey was upset and had been mean to Devon.

“Oh. I thought Devon did something wrong,” Drew said, his throat clacking wetly. “I thought she was in trouble.”

“No,” she said, worried about the rash, his skin mottled-looking. She was going to call the doctor in the morning. “Sleep snug, okay?”