The Kindness of Strangers (14 page)

She moaned. She looked at the clock: 2:00
A.M
. She felt relieved that this horrible day was finally over.

Sarah crawled into bed, for once grateful to be alone. She didn’t think she could tolerate another body next to her right now. Lately she’d been lulling herself to sleep with thoughts of Roy curled against her, his knees behind her own, his lips on her neck. She’d remember how he’d run his warm hand down her side, across the curve of her hip, and over her belly. They’d sometimes fall asleep with his fingers twined in the downy black hair where her legs met.

Not tonight. She didn’t want to see those horrendous images of Jordan when she thought of Roy.

She spent most of the night awake, staring at the ceiling, counting questions instead of sheep: Even though Courtney and Jordan were not mentioned on the news, wouldn’t everyone know? How would they react? Where was Mark right now? God, what must he think of Sarah? That she was an idiot? Gullible? Naive? And Courtney. In jail. Sarah wondered if Courtney had a pillow. Tears welled in her eyes.
Courtney wasn’t in the photos.

Yet Sarah couldn’t help but think that nearly every good picture of her own children taken in the last two years had been taken by Courtney.

Chapter Seven
Nate

M
om woke Nate up early on Saturday morning as she always did, to tell him she was leaving. She went running every Saturday with Mrs. Kendrick. But wait . . . Nate woke up for real. Mrs. Kendrick was in jail. “Where are you going?” he asked.

“I need to go visit Jordan,” she said. “He’s been all by himself since I took him to the emergency room.”

Nate nodded. When he’d been in the hospital to get his tonsils taken out, either Mom or Dad stayed with him the whole entire time.

When she left, Nate wandered down to the kitchen. Even though there was no school, he’d started to hate Saturdays. He missed Dad the most on Saturdays. Dad had never worked on Saturdays. He always worked on Sundays but never Saturdays. Saturday nights were a really busy time for Mom’s work, so it had always been up to Dad to get dinner. They’d started this tradition of having cereal for dinner. Just because it was easy. And they liked it. Dad would joke how they weren’t supposed to do any work on Saturday anyway. It wasn’t always cereal—sometimes it was pancakes or omelettes—it didn’t matter, but it was always breakfast food for supper. Right down to the orange juice.

It was a bummer hanging out in the kitchen thinking of that, so Nate took a box of cereal back up to his room. He sat on his bed eating the cereal dry out of the box and looked up at the corner of his room where he’d seen the bat that one time.

Ever since he’d seen those photos of Jordan, he couldn’t get the bat out of his head.

Once, when he was in eighth grade, they’d had a bat in their house. When they told people the story, everyone said, “Oh, yeah, the house is old,” like every old house was full of bats—but they only had one once. Never before and never since. Everyone said, “There’s never just one bat. They’re like mice. They live in colonies.” And Mom would purse her lips and say, “Well, this one must’ve been a scout, then. He went back and said, ‘Don’t bother.’ ”

The bat had shown up in
Nate’s
room. He woke up and had this hair-stand-up-on-the-back-of-his-neck feeling that he was not alone. He lay really still, wondering if it was a bad dream, or had some sound woken him up? And he heard it: this
swish, swish
sound, almost like a girl in a prom dress—that rustling sound that shiny material makes, only fainter, softer. He was
really
awake then, hyperalert, hearing everything, smelling everything.

And he saw it. Even in the darkness, he saw that black spot against his white wall in the moonlight. And seeing it made him cold. He didn’t know what it was, didn’t register it as a bat, but it was
not supposed to be there
. It looked wrong. It made him feel wrong. And he didn’t really want to turn on the light to see what it was. He closed his eyes, hoping when he opened them, the spot would be gone. But then he panicked—if it was gone, then where the hell
was
it? So he opened his eyes, and it was still there. But it moved. Shit. Nate reached out to turn on the lamp, and his arms felt like they weighed a ton, like they weren’t really even his arms. He turned on the light.

It was a bat.

And it freaked Nate out. He didn’t want to move. He didn’t know what to do. He’d studied bats. Mom had even read him some bedtime story about a bat when he was little. He knew bats were good, bats were cool—but that didn’t mean he wanted one in his fucking room! His mouth and throat went totally dry. Stripped dry. Like in nightmares where you want to yell, but you can’t make any sound.

Finally he slid out of his bed and ran out of the room. He shut his door, because he didn’t want it to follow him. And he went to get his mom and dad. He felt like a damn baby. He was in eighth grade, for Christ’s sake, and hadn’t run to Mom and Dad’s room for a long time.

He woke them up. It was funny, because Mom was the one who was fine. Dad acted all “I’ll take care of it, son, don’t you worry about a thing,” but when they opened the bedroom door and the bat was flying, Dad turned into a sissy. He ducked and he cussed and made little noises. Mom laughed. She just started giggling at him, and so did Nate. Dad got kind of mad, but not really; he was laughing, too. Dad thought he would toss a towel on the bat while it was flying, but every time the bat flew toward them, he would duck. Then he opened all the windows in Nate’s room and tried to chase it out with the towel. This was in January. It was freezing outside. Actually snowing.

They made so much noise that Danny woke up. Danny wouldn’t come into Nate’s room but kept shouting “Did you catch it yet?” from the hall. Potter started barking.

Nate remembered thinking their family would have to move. He couldn’t sleep in this room, and they couldn’t live in this house with this
thing
in it. If they couldn’t get rid of the bat, it was all over. They’d have to leave.

But Mom finally caught it. While Nate and Dad were ducking and throwing towels at the poor bat, she left the room. They didn’t notice, or if they did, Nate guessed they probably thought she was scared and was leaving it to them. But she came back with a cookie sheet and a soup pot. Dad looked at her like she was crazy.

“Don’t tell me,” Dad said. “You’re going to cook something with it.”

She laughed. “Just leave it alone for a second. Let it land.”

But they’d pissed it off by now, and it kept flying. Mom turned on the overhead light, and it landed. She frowned, looking at it up so high, just inches from the ceiling. Then she glanced around Nate’s room, and said, “Nate. Put your desk chair right under where it is.” Nate did, and Mom climbed up on the chair and, without even a second of hesitation, put the pot right over the bat, trapping it.

“Oooh,” she said, “I can feel its sonar vibes.” She wrinkled her nose and curled up her bare toes. “That feels so weird.” But then, holding the pot against the wall with one hand, she slid the cookie sheet between the wall and the pot. Then she stepped off the chair and flipped the pot right side up, the cookie sheet on top like a lid. And she nodded at the door. Nate opened it. And then she walked calmly down the stairs, Potter prancing around trying to see what was in the pot. Nate and Dad and Danny followed Mom and opened the kitchen door for her and turned on the porch light so she could see.

She walked down the steps, barefooted in the snow, then set the pot on the ground. She stood up, and only then did she look uncertain. She reached out a toe and nudged the cookie sheet off the pot.

They waited. Nothing. A whole minute passed, and Mom whispered, “Shit.” It was one of the first times Nate had heard his mother cuss. She kept shifting from one foot to the other, holding a foot out of the snow. Dad and Danny still stood up on the porch, barefooted, too, but not in the snow.

“Sarah,” Dad said, “you need to come in.”

She took her foot again and tipped the pot over. The bat slid out into the snow and simply lay there, not moving. The sun was just coming up. It was probably six or something. Nate walked out into the snow with Mom, and they both looked real close at it. Now that it was out of Nate’s room, it looked really cool—it had little-old-man hands. And a weird human face. Its wings looked like leather.

They all went inside, and Mom pulled out hand towels for their feet, but they kept looking out the back window, and that bat just lay there in the snow. “It’s going to freeze to death,” she said. “I feel sorry for it.”

Finally Mom couldn’t stand it, and she went out there with a broom and was going to nudge it. But Nate didn’t think the broom ever actually touched the bat. It was like the bat sensed the broom, snapped to life, and fluttered off. In the whole incident, that was the only time Mom looked startled and acted like a girl. She jumped back with a little shriek. The bat fluttered all feeble across the yard, touching the snow, the way a duck will take off from water, then finally took flight. It looked like it was flying out of their yard, but then it circled back and flew into a little nook in the eaves right above Nate’s bedroom window.

“Oh, you little shit,” Mom said. And she looked furious.

“You said you felt sorry for it,” Dad teased her.

“That was when it wasn’t in my house.” She stormed up to Nate’s room and examined every nook and cranny. No bat. She even took a flashlight and peered into the corners of his closet and down into the floor moldings, looking for how the bat might have come in. She was obsessed for days, snooping around the attic, calling an exterminator. Nothing. They never found another bat.

That was the year before Dad died. They didn’t even know Dad was sick yet—but it struck Nate that a year and a month from the bat visiting their house, Dad had died.

Nate would never forget that feeling when he saw the bat against the wall, looking so out of place. So dark. So wrong. And how he didn’t want to look at it closely. He just somehow knew that if he saw it clearly, it would be worse.

He’d felt that same sensation when Mom and Dad told him Dad had cancer. The word “inoperable” was like the bat.

And he felt it when he saw the pictures of Jordan. And when he thought about Mrs. Kendrick. Another dark spot Nate didn’t want to see. But there it was. And both of those times since the actual bat, Nate wanted someone to be able to fix it like Mom had, so calmly, so certainly. But she couldn’t. And Nate couldn’t. He didn’t know if anyone could.

Chapter Eight
Sarah

O
n her way to The Children’s Medical Center, Sarah made two stops. First she went to the post office and mailed a note of encouragement to Courtney, in care of the Montgomery County Jail. She hoped Courtney would be out by the time Monday’s mail arrived. Then she pulled in to the neighborhood market. She suddenly felt she must bring
something
with her to see Jordan. Or was she just stalling?

Before she’d left the house, Sarah had called Ali Darlen at Children’s. Ali used to be Roy’s resident at Miami Valley Hospital. Sarah and Ali still got together once or twice a year for lunch or drinks somewhere. Ali knew Courtney; they’d worked together. About a year ago, Ali had taken a job at Children’s. This morning Sarah had called her and asked to talk with her about Courtney. Ali had agreed to meet with Sarah. Sarah had woken feeling newly devoted to Courtney. The more she thought about it, the more she was certain Courtney simply couldn’t be involved in the pornography. She could not have known what was going on. Ali had worked with Courtney; she’d seen what a fabulous doctor Courtney was. No one with that amount of compassion or skill could be so hideously cruel.

Sarah had even dressed in an emerald green, cabled cashmere sweater Courtney had bought for her last birthday. When they shopped together, Courtney convinced Sarah to buy clothing she’d never select for herself. Most of the clothes Sarah received compliments for were items Courtney had encouraged her to buy. Courtney’s choices were more fun, more colorful. Courtney got Sarah to buy V-necks, surplice tops, and necklines that didn’t exactly plunge but dropped lower than Sarah normally wore—which was not low at all.

“You’ve got great cleavage, Sarah,” Courtney had chided, when Sarah hesitated.

“But I’m a mom.”

“And where’s the law that says a mom can’t be sexy?”

Sarah had put it back on the rack, but Courtney had later presented it to Sarah on her birthday. The sweater was now one of Sarah’s favorites.

Inside, the store buzzed with clusters of conversation, horrified voices, and the names “Mark,” “Courtney,” and “Kendrick”—the
k
’s clicking like insects, as if a horde of locusts had descended. “Absurd,” “not possible,” “witch-hunt,” were words that lifted themselves above the whir.

Sarah thought of the times she’d gossiped in this very market about horrible news, sometimes even with Courtney. Expressing outrage over moms who drowned their toddlers in bathtubs or locked them in cars and pushed them into lakes. Moms who burned their kids with scalding water or set entire houses on fire with their sleeping children inside. Moms who discarded the babies altogether—in toilets, in Dumpsters, in shallow garage-floor graves.

Only headlines. Not an actual person in her world. Not a neighbor, not her friend.