Blood in the Water(16)

“Come on,” Fanny said. “If we don’t hurry, we’ll miss the bus. I don’t want to have to drive you to school today.”

She went over to the television set and turned it off. It was the only way she could get them to listen.

“Come on now,” she said.

The children got up off the floor, slowly, rolling a little and looking back at the dead black screen as if it were about to burst back into animation.

Fanny held out the backpacks and they took them, making some halfhearted whining complaints in the process. The complaints were so halfhearted, Fanny couldn’t figure out if they were about school or each other.

“Let’s go,” she said again. Then she double-checked to make sure their jackets were buttoned.

They would look, today, like every other child at the bus stop. That’s what elementary school was all about. Everybody wore the same clothes, and ate the same food, and played the same games. Everybody had the same birthday parties, too, and gave the same presents.

Fanny stopped for a moment and considered the possibility that she was going insane. The odd thing was, she didn’t think so. Her days drifted past her, one after the other, and nothing happened in them, but that did not make her insane. It couldn’t be insane to wonder about Charlie, or to wonder if the children would start asking where he had gone.

Mindy was looking through her jacket pockets, pulling out bits and pieces of Kleenex and stubs of pencils. She was frowning.

“It was boring this morning,” she said. “The lady with the pink car didn’t come.”

“That’s Mrs. Heydreich,” Fanny said. “You can’t go calling her ‘the lady with the pink car.’ It’s rude.”

“Mrs. Heydreich. Usually she comes by in the morning in the car and goes up to the club house. I love the pink car. I want a pink car like that when I grow up.”

“I’m sure that will be very nice,” Fanny said. She could have said, “You’ll change your mind.” She was sure that was true. Children hated being told they wouldn’t want the things they wanted once they were all grown up.

Josh had started excavating his pockets, too. Fanny went over to him and took the bits and pieces of garbage out of his hand and threw them in the wastebasket.

“Come on,” she said, trying to sound stern and serious this time. “We really have to go.”

They went, this time, stumbling through the kitchen to the door to the garage, and then through the garage to the street. Fanny grabbed Josh’s hand and tried to ignore the fact that Mindy no longer wanted hers held. It hardly seemed possible that Mindy was eight.

There were no sidewalks on the streets at Waldorf Pines. There were no school busses, either. The school bus stop was just off the grounds through the back gate, as if school bus drivers were like old-time tradesmen and not allowed at the front door.

Fanny swung them through the curve that passed in front of the houses of at least four couples without any children at all, and then down the cement path to the back gate. Waldorf Pines looked differently from this side than it did from the golf course. Fanny had never really understood the point of the golf course anyway. For the first three years they lived here, she’d woken up in the middle of the night, dreaming about golf balls sailing through the windows.

The back gate was, as always, very carefully locked. Fanny got out her key and opened it up. She had to try twice to make it work. Surely there had to be some better way than this to get children to the bus stop in the morning. Fanny always felt like a character in a fairy tale, having to unlock the enchanted mansion to release the prince and princess from their dreams.

Fanny always felt like a character in a fairy tale. That was the thing. That was the problem. She ran around and did things. She fed and bathed the children and helped with their homework. She slept with Charlie and washed his socks and ironed his shirts. She went out to dinner. She took the children to McDonald’s. She bought books at Barnes & Noble. She watched television.

And none of it ever seemed as if it were real.

She shut the gate behind her after they went through. She heard the click that said it had relocked securely in place. She double-checked her pocket for her keys, even though she had just used them, because to forget her keys meant having to walk all the way around to be let in by the guard at the front.

There were other children waiting at the bus stop, and other mothers. The other mothers didn’t talk to Fanny, because they were not from Waldorf Pines.

“She went out last night,” Mindy said.

“What?” Fanny said.

“She went out last night,” Mindy said again. “The lady with the pink car. Mrs. Heydreich. She went out. I saw her. But she wasn’t in the car.”