The child nodded thoughtfully, and for a long time they both gazed up into the cathedral of suspended lives. After a while Josefina said, “So many.”
Cub was cutting firewood at Bear and Hester’s and called to say he was staying for supper, but Dellarobia declined to bring the kids over and join them. Hester’s confession in the woods had left her with a new and strange detachment ringing in her ears. Not exactly unwelcome, but unbound; there was a difference. She felt invisible and light. It was Friday night. She would fix something she and the kids favored like soup and fish sticks, and they’d watch some program from beginning to end. Assuming they arrived in one piece. Dovey was picking them up from Lupe’s and coming over too. The phone beeped on the table, and it was that bad girl, texting: GOT EM, ON OUR WAY.
Dellarobia shot back: TXT WHILE DRIVING IF . . .
:) was the prompt reply.
Dovey wasn’t the fish-stick type but would eat gravel to get away from her duplex, where her landlord brother was tearing out tile for no apparent reason. Dovey was seriously moving out, she said, like the boy who cried wolf, his cries ignored by all. She would stay put as long as Dellarobia’s place served her so well as a halfway house. Just as Cordie and Preston provided her the option of halfway motherhood.
Dellarobia was surprised to hear them pull up in the driveway so soon. Roy went to the front door and signaled an alert: ears up, tail down. Dellarobia went to look out the little upper windows in the door and was startled to see the white News Nine Jeep in her driveway. Tina Ultner in a belted white coat was out of the car, head down, the corn-silk hair pulsing with each fast step as she came up the walk. Dellarobia dropped to the floor to sit face to face with Roy, her back pressed against the doorjamb. There was not time to run and hide in the bedroom. She heard the hollow tick of a woman’s heels on the porch steps, and felt the shift of light as Tina moved in close to the door’s glass panes. Roy looked at Dellarobia and cocked his head to one side, the collie question mark. She held up a finger and Roy stood fast. The house took on the feel of a bomb shelter.
Rap rap, came the little knock. Rap rap, again. Then silence.
Roy glanced from the door to Dellarobia. He licked his lips and yawned, dog signs of nervousness. The tidy knock revived.
Dellarobia remembered she’d pocketed her phone after Dovey’s text, praise be. She put it on vibrate before keying carefully: DON’T COME TO THE HOUSE.
The reply from Dovey was immediate: ???
GO AWAY. XPLAIN LATER
WE R HERE. BEHIND JEEP. WTF?
Tina rang the doorbell. Roy yawned again, but didn’t move.
I M HIDING. GO!
A minute passed. Roy did an anxious little skitter, stepping back and forward, dancing at the edge of self-restraint. Dellarobia stared at the screen until the reply appeared. PRESTON HAS TO P. ME TOO. CORDIE ALREADY DID.
DO U HAVE DIAPERS?
FOR ALL US???
Dellarobia’s mind went blank. The knocking had stopped. Another text came from Dovey. OMG. SHE SEES US.
Then, ten seconds later: DON’T WORRY I’LL HANDLE. COMING IN.
Dellarobia knew not to bet the farm on Dovey’s don’t-worry-I’ll-handle plans. This one failed faster than most. She heard Dovey explaining with fair conviction that Dellarobia wasn’t home while Preston opened the door, plunging Dellarobia and Roy unexpectedly into the scene, at eye level with a pair of gorgeous gray suede boots. Dellarobia took them in, then turned her eyes upward into the nostrils of Tina Ultner.
“Dellarobia, hi,” Tina said, waiting for Dellarobia to find her feet before extending the cool little hand. The whole effect of Tina rushed her like a hit of some numbing drug. The pale eyebrows and huge, direct eyes, the otherworldly complexion. Her coat was winter white, the color she’d frowned on when Dellarobia wore it that first time. Both kids rushed into the house, followed by Dovey, then Roy, leaving Dellarobia on the porch with Tina.
“I’m not doing this,” she said. “Not again.”
“Listen,” Tina said, “this is a really special thing we do. Hear me out. It’s called our ‘in-depth’ segment. Very few stories get this kind of coverage, just the absolute viewer favorites. When there’s a ton of interest, what we’ll do is we go back and follow up on a story six weeks later, to see how things turned out.”
“Six weeks?” Dellarobia said, thinking several questions at once. Did Tina even have a clue how her camera trickery had upended Dellarobia’s life? Had it been six weeks, and had anything turned out? This was in-depth? She remembered Ovid’s complaint about the media’s short attention span. The living room blinds waggled sideways and Dovey stepped into view in the front window, behind Tina’s back. Dovey held up crossed index fingers as if to ward off a vampire.
“Is that Ron in the car?” Dellarobia asked. The figure in the Jeep looked slighter and blonder than Ron, with more hair.
“It’s not Ron,” Tina said, with some diffidence. “That’s Everett.”
“Okay, get Everett. Get whatever you need and come with me.” Dellarobia strode down the steps and around to the back of the house, leaving it to Tina to get her game on. She did not want to knock on the metal door of the camper, which felt too intimate, so was relieved to see lights on in the lab. She led Tina through the mucky barn, in those boots. If Tina was horrified by her surroundings she was good at pretending otherwise, looking around with the calculating eye Dellarobia remembered, as if storing away all these sights for later. They paused outside the lab door to wait for Everett, and Dellarobia threw down some background info on Dr. Ovid Byron. She spelled the name so Tina could type it into her phone device. Tina stood frowning at the little screen, intermittently tapping it in frenzied bursts with her manicured fingertips. “You’re kidding me,” she finally said. “You’ve got this man here? In a barn?”
The diminutive cameraman Everett arrived in haste, organizing and shoving black cables into his coat pockets as he came, disheveled in every aspect except for his hair, which looked shellacked. He gratified Dellarobia with a grimace of frank horror at the barn floor. Dellarobia rapped on the plastic-covered door, and they entered as a group to find Ovid sitting down, writing notes. To accommodate his reading glasses, he had pushed up his safety goggles on his forehead like a skin diver briefly out of water. His look of vulnerable surprise demoralized Dellarobia utterly. He stood up to meet Tina’s forthright handshake and quickly shed the goggles and glasses, revealing a small, surprising vanity that fueled Dellarobia’s anguish. Astonished, she watched Tina drop her former mom-to-mom allegiance as if it had never been, aiming the force of her charm in a brand-new direction. This lab was so great, unbelievable, she’d wanted to be a science major in college but the math, oh man! After the introductions Tina said they had to go up on the mountain to repeat the shot with the butterflies flying in the background. That was customary for these spots, to help key in the viewer visually to the earlier story. Ovid told her the follow-up in this case was that most of the butterflies were dead. Also it was too cold for them to be flying, and too late in the day. Tina clicked her tongue. They’d planned to get here earlier, but she’d had a breaking spot on a homicide.