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She thought of her son’s soft cheek hitting the floor, her daughter’s head against the brick. The little fingers that had to be forced and pried away. She choked on the memory, on her own snot and tears.
“They were scared, so scared!”
The sergeant’s face was level with hers now. He was on one knee like a football player in a huddle.
“I need you to focus,” he said softly. “I need to know exactly where your kids are.”
“My head,” she told him. “There’s something broken.”
“Just tell me what you can,” the sergeant said.
“He’s very, very big, the café manager. He said we were delicious. Said he would find us.”
“Okay, all right. That’s…helpful. Now, where are the children?”
“In the office. Bottom right panel. It opens up if you push the just right spot. A hidden door.”
“Tell ’em,” he said to the boyish policeman, who relayed this into a radio, crackling and beeping back and forth instructions.
Even kneeling the sergeant’s posture was precise. She wondered at how the edges of his stiffly pressed uniform stayed so rigid under his coat. His eyes were blue and blank, locked on hers until she closed her good eye and drifted.
The boyish policeman whispered something to the sergeant.
“Ma’am,” the sergeant said, shaking her lightly on the shoulder as if to wake her. “They’re not finding an opening. No hidden room. They’ve called out for the kids. Nothing. Where are they?”
Yes, they were brave children, good children. They were still hiding. Hiding from all those male voices calling out. “Don’t even come out for Mama, not even if you hear Mama screaming and murdered. Don’t come out unless there’s smoke, fire. Mama willcome to you! Mama will open the panel.” Wasn’t that what she’d said?
It has to be that, because otherwise…
She heaved, sick with panic.
What if? What if they can’t find them because he took them?
The sergeant gently dabbed her face with a towel. His voice was stiff as he asked quietly, “Ma’am, did you hurt them?”
Her thoughts thickened. She’d popped their little fingers away from her arms, her robe. Knocked her son into the dirt. Her daughter against the brick. Grit and crack.
How did he know? How’d he know that?
“I don’t—”
“Did you hurt them?”
The room was so hushed and the sergeant’s voice so low even the walls seemed to tilt toward them, listening.
She touched her swollen lip and her finger left a depression. She felt it slowly refill, like her face was made of sand and seawater.
Did this sergeant have children? The last time, the first time you met him, didn’t he say he had kids? Hadn’t he offered that up, hadn’t he said, “I’m so sorry, so sorry, I’m a father myself”?
If he was a father, he’d know how ridiculous this question was. Of course she’d hurt them. Not just tonight, enraged and frightened that they wouldn’t let her help them, no. She’d hurt them in a million accidental, stumbling, impatient ways.
You’re a horrible mother.
The time she’d left her daughter on the changing table and the baby had slipped off, gotten that cut on her head that left a scar just under the eyebrow. The time she’d stepped on her son’s pinkie toe and broken it, had to tape it to the one next to it to heal. The time she was cuddling her daughter and stood up, ripping out a clump oftoddler hair that had somehow gotten caught around her shirt button. She could still hear that scream.
A horrible, horrible mother.
Then there were the uncountable hurts they’d caused her. The baby fingernail that scratched her retina deep enough she’d seen blurry for months. The kick to her chin that slammed her tongue between her teeth so hard she’d lost a small chunk of it. Pregnancy, the months of vomiting, constipation, cramps. Childbirth, being split and sewn up and left with her muscles so torn apart she couldn’t control her bowels, so broken that her intestine peeked through her stomach, round and tender and needing to be cut open and shoved back in. The sleeplessness that made her say, “Now I understand why sleep deprivation is considered torture. Now I understand why people lose their minds.”
