A little girl from across the road, the alpha girl, Jennifer Grant, bullies Margaret and makes her cry. She calls Margaret ugly and laughs at her because she doesn’t know any of the skipping rhymes.
Oliver knows that he can’t hit a girl, but he hits her anyway. Jennifer runs inside, and her older brother comes out of the house. He grabs Oliver by the throat and lifts him off the ground, shaking him and choking him at the same time. Oliver can’t breathe, can’t cry out. The older boy throws him to the asphalt, and Jennifer comes out of the house and crosses her arms and laughs, and so do some of the other kids. Even little Anthony, but you can’t blame him for siding with the majority.
It’s the kind of scene you’d see in an after-school special. It doesn’t feel real. But it is real. And it’s only a moment. Bored, the kids drift off to other diversions.
The twins slip back inside the house, hide in the garage, and wait for their father to get home.
He gets home late. He works in the FBI field office on Wilshire Boulevard, which is a hell of a commute.
At dinner that night, the twins don’t mention the incident, and Anthony has actually forgotten about it. Tom is full of chat. He talks about his new job and new opportunities. Cheryl reminds him that he wanted to tell the kids something. Tom grins and asks the kids if they want to go to Disneyland this very Saturday. They all say yes.
When Saturday comes, however, Tom has to work, but he tells them they’ll do it the following weekend.
“I bet we never end up going,” Margaret says prophetically to Oliver that night in their bedroom.
“I bet we don’t,” Oliver agrees.
“Does your neck still hurt?” Margaret asks.
“No,” Oliver says, but she can tell that he’s lying.
Margaret sits in bed reading one of the Baby-Sitters Club books. It’s the one where Mary Anne gets one of those chain letters, and it really upsets her. Her friends tell her to rip up the chain letter and nothing bad will happen.
Mary Anne rips up the letter. Nothing bad happens. That’s the problem with chain letters.
An idea occurs to Margaret.
The bad thing has to happen first.
The following Tuesday, Jennifer Grant’s rabbit escapes from its hutch and runs away.
The next day at school, Jennifer finds a note in her lunch box: Spill grape juice on yourself at lunchtime or your rabbit will die.
In the cafeteria, in front of everyone, Jennifer spills grape juice on herself.
The notes continue.
The demands escalate.
Jennifer stands up and says “Shit” in class. She asks to go to the bathroom five times in one lesson.
The most disturbing one orders Jennifer to go outside naked at six in the morning and stand in front of her house for ten seconds. If she does that, her rabbit will be returned.
Jennifer stands outside the house naked for ten seconds, and a note in her cubby that day tells her where to find her dead rabbit.
Margaret and Oliver put the Polaroid they took of Jennifer naked under the chest of drawers in their room. No doubt it will come in useful later.
Life rolls on as normal. Little Anthony is adjusting well to his new school and his new friends. The twins finally seem to be settling in.
Cheryl is lonely and bored. She calls her mother, and her mother tells her to suck it up. Plenty of people have it worse. Cheryl continues to self-medicate with diazepam, vodka tonics, and Cuba libres.
Two months into the LA gig, Tom comes home drunk. He has dinged the car and is furious about it. Cheryl and he get into a big argument. Tom smacks her and she goes down like a ton of bricks.
Little Anthony starts to wail but Oliver and Margaret watch with cool indifference.
49
The therapist is in Brookline in a new office building over a store that sells bespoke umbrellas. Très hipster.
Rachel waits in a plush reception area and skims nervously through copies of British Vogue.
Rain lashes the windows, and the minute hand on the refurbished antique clock moves slowly. She stares at a reproduction of Manet’s Devant la glace. A woman is looking in a mirror but you can’t see her face, which Rachel thinks is somehow appropriate considering her own looking-glass phobia. The music being piped in is from one of the later Miles Davis albums. You’re Under Arrest, she thinks, which is also some kind of ironic commentary on her situation.
Rachel wonders what Kylie is talking about. She’s told Kylie that she can’t mention The Chain or what happened to her, but she hopes that the therapist will give her strategies to cope with her suicidal thoughts, bed-wetting, and anxiety.
She and Kylie both know that it won’t work but they still have to try. What else can they do?
Fifty minutes later, the therapist comes out and gives Rachel a little encouraging nod. The therapist seems to be in her midtwenties. What does someone in her twenties know about the human heart or, indeed, anything? Rachel thinks and smiles back.
During the car ride home, Kylie doesn’t speak.
They drive over the PI bridge and along the turnpike and up the lane to the house. Rachel doesn’t want to press her daughter, but Kylie has given her nothing.
“Well?” Rachel says at last.
“She asked if I was being sexually abused. I said no. She asked if I was being bullied at school. I said no. She asked if I was having boyfriend trouble. I said no. She says that I’m exhibiting the signs of someone who has gone through a physical trauma.”
“Well, that’s true. They did actually hit you.”
“Yes. But I can’t tell her that, can I? I can’t tell anyone about that. I just had to sit there and lie about teenage problems and stress and worries about starting high school. I can’t tell her that a policeman got murdered in front of me or that people put a gun in my face and threatened to kill me and my mom. I can’t tell her that I had to lie on the floor with a little girl who had been kidnapped by my mom. And I can’t tell her that they still might come back for us if we ever breathe a word of this,” Kylie says and begins to cry.
Rachel reaches out to her as the rain hammers on the roof and pours down the windshield of the Volvo.
“We’re trapped, aren’t we, Mom? If we go to the police, you and Pete will go to prison for kidnapping. And they’ll still try to kill us, won’t they?”
There’s nothing Rachel can say.
When they go inside, the house is cold and Pete is trying to fix the woodstove. “How did it go?” he asks.
She shakes her head. Don’t bring it up, she mouths.
A silent dinner. Kylie moves the food around her plate. Rachel’s unable to eat. Pete’s worried sick about both of them.
When Pete and Kylie go to bed, Rachel logs on to her blog. There is a new notification in the comments section. From Anonymous. She scrolls down the screen and reads the comment.
It says, Delete blog now before they see it. Keep eye on personal column of Boston Globe.
She doesn’t need to be told twice. She logs in to Blogger and clicks Delete blog.
Are you sure you wish to erase this blog and all of its contents? Blogger asks her.
She clicks Yes and logs out.
50
Wednesday, 5:00 a.m. Rachel can’t sleep.
She gets up, puts on her comfy red sweater and her robe, and makes some coffee. She sits in the dark living room for a while looking at the lights of the houses on the far side of the tidal basin.