She shook her head.
“Call them!”
“Junior,” she said. “James. Matthew. Can you come here?”
Three boys came out of the smoke. The youngest had a smiler’s dimples, even with his face pulled downward in concern and fear. The oldest came slowly, with his hands jammed into his pockets, looking at his feet. The middle child came most fearfully, tucking himself into his older brother’s shadow. His black-framed glasses slid down his nose, and he pushed them up and coughed, and then ducked his head, as if the cough were a guilty secret he wished he could deny.
“Your sister is dead.” The wet, clarifying stain was a baby’s body wrapped in a white towel. Blue lips pulled back from purple gums, blue irises gleaming under the half-shut eyelids. “How did this happen?”
The boys shuffled their feet, all but the oldest, who flashed a glance to the kneeling mother and shook his head.
“She did it.” There was a gun in the man’s hand and a sense that time had passed. The light in the porthole window had deepened to red. “She put the baby in the bath and then she—lay—down—for—a—nap. She’s guilty. Say it.”
“Guilty,” all three boys muttered, one after the other by age, youngest to oldest.
“But is she guilty alone? Because there’s such a thing in the law as a conspiracy. She killed the baby by her laziness, but she didn’t do it alone, boys.” The baby’s hair was dry, now, and one small hand was fisted against her left cheek. “No, you were here, too. And didn’t I tell you to help your mother, didn’t I tell you all?”
“Yes,” they said, oldest and youngest, but the middle boy’s answer was an exploding sob.
“Look what you did. All of you did it. All of you.”
He held the baby up in front of them. The towel fell off her bare body. In death, she had drawn herself inward, legs and arms folded into the chest, as if she still slept in her mother’s body. The wedge-shaped feet were crossed at the ankles. He held her up to show her to them, then he dropped her, threw her down the stairs. “No,” the mother said. She heard the three shots, one after the other, but she felt the fourth shot as a surge of white in her mind and body. She fell after the falling children. It was like flying.
Something caught her by her left elbow and shoulder. She cried out, struggled and kicked against it, but it pulled her back, and a panting voice in her ear called a name she did not know, “Lacey, Lacey, Lacey, listen to me!”
The pain pressed harder, a crushing and grinding intensity, and Lacey looked at her watch. Seven forty-eight, and if the first one started at 7:16, that meant, what? For the moment, she couldn’t remember how to subtract, she couldn’t remember anything. The pressure eased, and she said, “Thirty-two minutes.”
“Lacey, is it you?”
Lacey was leaning against her mother’s body on the top step. “Is what me?”
“Are you you? Because you and Jack said awful things— Jack! We’ve got to call an ambulance. If I let you go, are you going to throw yourself down the stairs?”
“Why would I do that?”
“Stay here and don’t move.” Ella Dane pulled Lacey backward down the hallway to the bedroom door. “I’m getting my cell phone.”
“Where’s Jack? What happened?” Lacey hadn’t felt this disoriented since coming out of anesthesia when her wisdom teeth were pulled. As then, she felt a sense of weird loss, something hollowed out that had been solid, some pain already present though not yet perceptible. She touched her belly, and the baby pushed her hand.
Ella Dane ran into her bedroom and came out with cell phone in hand. “Let me call 911 first. We need an ambulance! 571 Forrester Lane. My friend fell down the stairs.” She covered the phone with her hand and said to Lacey, “He started yelling at you. Saying things that didn’t make sense. You were both falling. I grabbed you.”
“Did I push him?” Lacey asked. “Did he push me?”
“Nobody pushed anybody,” Ella Dane said. She repeated it into the phone, as the dispatcher asked another question. “Nobody pushed anybody! It was an accident.”
“I’m having contractions,” Lacey said. “I might be in labor.” She lay against the wall and looked at the ceiling, the corner of the hallway above the bathroom. The shadows crawled over each other; the air whispered guilty, guilty, guilty.
“I don’t believe it,” she said. No mother would walk away from a baby in a bathtub to lie down for a nap. And the other vision, Dora kneeling by the bathtub to drown Dorothy. They couldn’t both be true. Maybe they weren’t either of them true.