Leo tosses off his Star Wars blanket without further prompting and climbs out of bed, his favorite stuffed Super Mario toy in hand, heading for the bathroom he shares with his sister, experience having taught him that he’d better get in there while he has the chance.
Maggie returns to her bedroom. She takes a quick shower in the small en suite bathroom, then throws on a T-shirt and a pair of shorts before fluffing out her chin-length, mousy brown hair, hair that used to be lush and shoulder-length.Used to be,she thinks, mindful of all the things she once was: employed, confident, married. “Don’t forget pretty,” she says out loud, staring at the defeated-looking stranger in the full-length mirror on the inside of her closet door. “Who are you?” she whispers. “What have you done with Maggie McKay?”
“Erin!” she calls as she heads down the stairs, eyes on the alert for anything that looks even vaguely out of place. “Time to get up.” She does a quick check of the downstairs rooms—the combined living-dining room to one side of the stairs, the kitchen, powder room, and den to the other—before turning off the burglar alarm to the right of the front door.
She knows she’s being silly—Craig would use the word “paranoid,”had,in fact, used it on more than one occasion—that there’s no need to check every room in the house, as she’s done every morning since they moved in eighteen months ago, that no one could circumvent the state-of-the-art alarm system she insisted they install despite its prohibitive cost, and that even if someone did, surely she would hear his footsteps on the stairs, stairs she’s deliberately left uncarpeted for that very reason.
She opens the front door, her eyes doing a quick pan of the small cul-de-sac as she bends down to retrieve the morning paper. Hers is the house at the street’s rounded tip, a location that gives her a clear view of the two houses on both sides. The yellow school bus is already parked in front of the house to her immediate right, waiting to transport Tyler and Ben Wilson to their tony private school in North Palm Beach. Maggie acknowledges the bus driver’s nod with an uneasy wave of her fingers and a sigh of relief. It’s the same man who’s been picking them up for the last four months. No reason to panic, as she did after the last driver retired and this much younger one appeared. She’d even called The Benjamin School for confirmation they’d hired someone new, then questioned his references.
“I’m sorry. Who areyou?” the school receptionist asked.
“You’re being paranoid,” Craig told her.
“Okay, so I’m paranoid,” Maggie mutters to herself now, retreating into the house. Better paranoid than dead.
She would have loved to send her children to a private school like the Wilsons, but the price tag was way too high. The Wilsons are high-earning professionals—he, a well-regarded oncologist and she, a dentist—but Maggie no longer has a job, and even though Craig makes good money selling luxury cars, it isn’t nearly enough to cover the cost of two tuitions, especially now that he has two residences to maintain. Whatever savings they once had went toward the move.
“There’s absolutely nothing the matter with public schools,” she reminds herself, needing the confirmation of hearing her words out loud. She used to teach in one after all.
Used to,she thinks, setting the kitchen table, a white plastic oval that occupies the center of the small space. She boils an egg for Leo and puts two pieces of raisin bread in the toaster, glancing at the day’s depressing headlines before turning to the puzzle page, the only reason she buys the paper anymore. “Erin!” she yells, and then again, “Erin! You better be up and out of bed.”
“I’m up!” Erin yells back. “Chill, for God’s sake!” Upstairs, the bathroom door slams shut.
I would if you’d let me,Maggie thinks, knowing she’s being unfair. It’s not the teenager’s fault their lives have been turned upside down. “This is on me,” she says.
“What’s on you?” Leo says, entering the kitchen.
Maggie jumps at the sound of her son’s voice. How did she not hear him come down? “Where are your shoes?”
Leo glances toward his bare feet. “Oh,” he says, indicating the backpack on the floor beside him. “I think I packed them.”
Maggie smiles.My little space cadet,she thinks, wondering if this is the reason he and Ben Wilson have never become more than casual acquaintances. She’d been so excited when she’d learned their new next-door neighbors had a son the same age as Leo, and hoped they’d soon become fast friends, but sadly, this has not proven to be the case. She suspects this has more to do with Dani Wilson than her son, the prevailing wisdom being that Dani Wilson considers herself too good for her surroundings, that she would prefer to live in a more upscale development, one with a prestigious address more fitting a family headed by two doctors. Perhaps she also resents the professional deference regularly showered on her husband by the residents of Carlyle Terrace, a deference that, as a mere dentist, she rarely gets to experience.
Or maybe she’s just a bitch.
“Is it a spider?” Leo asks.
“Is what a spider?”
“What’s on you,” he replies, turning the question he asked earlier into a statement, his eyes growing fearful.
I put that fear there,Maggie thinks. “Oh,” she says. “No. There’s no spider.”
“Then what?”
“Just some crumbs, I guess,” she improvises.
This seems to satisfy him. He sits down in one of the four white plastic chairs, removes his sneakers from his backpack, and pushes his feet into them, struggling with the laces.
“Here. Let me help you.” Maggie is already kneeling in front of him, hands outstretched.
“No, it’s okay. Dad says I need to start doing things by myself.”
“Your father…” Maggie bites her tongue to keep from saying something she’ll regret. She has too many regrets as it is. She’s running out of room. She hears the toaster pop out the two pieces of bread. “Do you want to butter your toast by yourself?” she asks. Surely he can’t hurt himself with a butter knife.
“No,” he says. “You can butter them.”
“Okay.” She fights the urge to thank him. “Erin!” she calls as Leo is taking his final few bites. “It’s after seven. School starts in less than half an hour. We’re going to be late.” Why schools have to start so damn early is something she’s never been able to figure out.