The address that this particular troll has uncovered is a dead end; it can’t lead him to our door, or our new names. There are at least eight broken trails between where he points and where I now sit, but that doesn’t comfort me. I’ve gotten good at this out of sheer necessity, but I’m not them. I don’t have the same rancid drive. All I want to do is survive—and keep my kids as safe as I can.
I finish checking, shake the stress out of my arms and hands, drink the cold tea, and stand up to pace the office. I want to hold on to the gun as I do, but that’s a terrible idea. Unsafe and paranoid. I stare at the quiet gleam of it, the safety it promises, though I know that’s a lie, too, as much a lie as any Mel ever told me. Guns don’t keep anyone safe. They only equal the playing field.
“Mom?”
A voice from the doorway, and I turn too quickly, heart hammering, glad that I don’t have the gun now because surprising me is a bad idea, and it’s Connor standing there, book bag dragging at his right hand. He doesn’t seem to notice that he’s startled me, or he’s so used to it he doesn’t care.
“Is Lanny okay?” he asks me, and I force a smile and nod.
“Yes, sweetie, she’s fine. How was school?” I am only half listening, because I’m thinking that I didn’t hear him come in, didn’t hear the code, didn’t hear the reset. I’d been too deep in concentration. Dangerous. I should be more aware.
He doesn’t answer the question anyway. He gestures at the computer. “Did you finish the Sicko Patrol?”
It catches me by surprise. I say, “Where did you hear that?” But I answer my own question. “Lanny?”
He shrugs. “You’re looking for stalkers, right?”
“Right.”
“Everybody gets mean stuff on the Internet, Mom. You shouldn’t take it so seriously. Just ignore them. They’ll go away.”
That, I think, is a maddening thing to say on so many levels. As if the Internet is a fantasy world, inhabited by imaginary people. As if we’re ordinary people in the first place. And most of all, it’s such a young male thing to say, this automatic assumption of safety. Women, even girls of Lanny’s age, don’t think that way. Parents don’t. Older people don’t. It reveals a certain blind, entitled ignorance to how dangerous the world really is.
It occurs to me, a little sickly, that I’ve helped him form that attitude because of how I’ve insulated him. Protected him. But what else can I do? Constantly terrify him? That can’t help.
“Thanks for the opinion I didn’t ask for,” I tell him. “But I’m all right with doing this.” I sort the papers and file them. I’ve always kept both electronic and paper records; in my experience, the police are more comfortable with paper. It feels like proof to them in a way that data on a screen doesn’t. In an emergency, we might not be able to pull data in time, anyway.
“Sicko Patrol completed,” I say, then shut and lock the file drawer. I drop the key in my pocket. It’s attached to the alarm fob, and it’s never out of my possession. I don’t want Connor or Lanny to go through those files. Not ever. Lanny has a laptop of her own now, but I have strict parental controls enabled. Not only does it not give her the results, but I’ll be alerted—and have been—when she tries to search keywords about her father, the murders, or anything related to it.
I can’t risk giving Connor a computer quite yet, but the pressure to give him online access is growing at an impressive rate.
Lanny flings her door open and flits past the office, dodging Connor on her way down the hall. She’s still wearing her goth pants and Ramones T-shirt, black hair fluttering in the breeze. Heading to the kitchen, I guess, for her typical afternoon snack of rice cakes and energy drink. Connor stares after her. He doesn’t look surprised. Just resigned. “All the sisters in the world, and mine has to dress like somebody out of The Nightmare Before Christmas,” he says. “She’s trying to make herself not as pretty, you know.”
It’s a surprising insight from a kid his age. I blink, and it strikes me hard that beneath her oversize pants and shaggy hair and corpse makeup, Lanny is pretty. Growing into her bones, turning tall and hinting at curves. As a mom, I always think of her as beautiful, but now others will, too. The edgy style keeps people at a distance and changes the standards by which she will be judged.
That’s clever and heartbreaking at the same time.
Connor turns and heads off to his room.
“Wait! Connor! Did you reset the alarm?”
“Of course,” he calls back without stopping. His door closes with finality, but no force. Lanny returns with her rice cakes and energy drink and flops into the small chair in the corner of my office. She puts the energy drink down and gives me a mock salute.
“All present and correct, Master Sergeant,” she says. Then she slumps at an angle functionally impossible for anyone over twenty-five. “I’ve been thinking. I want to get a job.”
“No.”
“I can help with the money.”
“No. Your job is to be in school.” I have to bite my lip to keep from complaining that my daughter used to like school. Lily Royal had liked school. She’d been in drama class and a programming club. But Lanny couldn’t stand out. Couldn’t have interests that made her special. Couldn’t make friends and tell them anything approaching the truth. No surprise it made school hell for her.
“This girl you got into the fight with,” I say. “You understand it can’t happen? Why you can’t get into these things?”
“I didn’t get into it. She started it. What, you want me to lose? Get the shit beat out of me? I thought you were all about self-defense!”
“I want you to walk away.”
“Oh, sure, you would. That’s all you do, walk away. Oh, I’m sorry. I mean run.”
There’s nothing quite as scorching as a teenager’s contempt. It has a breathless sting, and it lingers for a very long time. I try not to let her see she’s scored points, but I don’t trust myself to speak. I pick up the teacup and head for the kitchen, the comfort of running water to rinse away the dregs. She follows, but not to hit at me again. I can tell by the way she’s hanging back that she regrets having said it and isn’t quite sure how to take it back. Or even if she wants to.
As I put the teacup and saucer in the dishwasher, she says, “I was thinking of going out for a run . . . ?”
“Not alone you don’t,” I say, which is automatic, and then I realize she was counting on it. A nonapology apology. I hate even giving up the control of letting them ride the school bus, but venturing out on their own around the lake? No. “We’ll go together. I’ll change.”
I change into leggings and a loose T-shirt over a sports bra, heavy socks, good running shoes. When I come out, Lanny is stretching lithely. She has on a red sports bra, no shirt, and black leggings with harlequin patterns down the sides. I just look at her until she sighs, grabs a T-shirt, and pulls it on.
“Nobody else runs in T-shirts,” she grumbles at me.
I say, “I’m going to want that Ramones shirt back. It’s a classic. And I’ll bet you can’t name a single song.”
“‘I Wanna Be Sedated,’” Lanny immediately shoots back. I don’t respond. Lily had been medicated a lot, that first half year after The Event. She hadn’t been able to sleep for days, and when she finally had fallen into a restless doze, she’d woken up screaming, crying for her mother. The mother who was in prison. “Unless you’d prefer ‘We’re a Happy Family’?”
I say nothing, because her song choices are completely on point. I turn off the alarm, open the door, and call for Connor to reset it. He grunts from somewhere down the hall, and I have to hope he means yes.