not sure—how could I be?” His gaze skittered away, avoiding hers. “But what choice do we have but to believe it?”
“I just feel like there’s some connection, that if we thought about it we could figure it out. You’re sure you’ve never seen these guys anywhere?” Jen’s mind raced through her routines, the small world she inhabited: the kids’ schools and the grocery store and the yoga studio and the restaurants and coffee shops downtown. She was sure she’d never seen these men anywhere she went on a regular basis.
She thought of something. “Remember when your wallet was stolen from the locker room?”
“That was almost a year ago. Even if someone had kept it all this time, why would they wait so long to come here?”
“But they knew your name.” She remembered the faint smirk on Dan’s face, as he looked down on her in her own family room.
“Jen, they could have found out our names on a two-second Google search of the address. Hell, they could have gotten our names on their way up the sidewalk by just looking on their phones. That doesn’t mean anything.”
Jen was silent a minute, thinking through her family’s routines. Teddy was always with her unless he was at school or the Sterns’ house. Livvy went to school and soccer and out with her friends, less often since she’d been grounded last fall—
“What about Sean?” she said. “He had trouble with the police. Remember?”
“Sean’s sixteen years old, Jen,” Ted said incredulously. “He’s a child.”
“But he was arrested.”
“You mean that vandalism thing? That was just a stupid prank. He wasn’t even the instigator.”
It had happened after a football game, shortly after Livvy had started dating him. One of Sean’s friends had a key to the equipment shed, and they’d broken in and dragged the lacrosse goals into the parking lot and shot smashed beer cans into them. When the police came, Sean and one of the others were drunk enough that they fought ineffectively back and got assault charges tagged on, which were later dropped. The school got involved and suspended the boys for a week.
“I’m just saying he might know the young one. Ryan.” Jen tried to sort it out. “He could be friends with him. He could have told him to come here. Sean was in our house half a dozen times. He could have a grudge against Livvy from the breakup...or maybe all he did was tell them about the house, our stuff....”
“He broke up with her, Jen. Why would Sean have a grudge against her? It doesn’t make any sense.”
Jen’s mind raced with possibilities. “Or what about Renaldo?”
Ted stared at her, his eyebrows knit together. “Seriously? Our yard guy?”
“He has access. I mean, I know anyone could come through the gate, but he’s been in our yard so many times.” She felt ashamed of the betrayal even before she stopped speaking. Renaldo was a nice guy, respectful and dependable, and he never forgot to blow the bits of grass off the patio after the first time she had to remind him.
“Jen. How would Renaldo know those guys? And even if he did, why would he send them here—why wouldn’t he just come when he knew we were out of town? You always call to let him know when we’ll be away.”
Jen tried to corral the swirling thoughts in her head. She looked at her children, sitting on the carpet remnant Ted had laid out in the middle of the concrete floor. Livvy was talking softly, moving a plastic car along an imaginary track, a row of Playmobil people looking on. Teddy’s bubbling laughter was punctuated by growling engine noises and honking horns. Livvy was so good with him; she’d managed to banish the fear from his mind, somehow tamping down her own terror for his sake.
Because that’s what you do, Jen thought. When you love someone, you make yourself stronger for their sake. As strong as you can, as strong as you must—stronger than you ever believed you could be. Your love makes the other person all that matters, and how can you let your fear rule you when you have something so much more important to protect? Livvy had been shaking with fear when they came down the stairs, but now she was sitting cross-legged with a smile on her face, a smile she had conjured from nothing for her little brother.
And now she had to do the same for Livvy. For both of her children, and for Ted, too, because she was the center of their family. She was the axis on which the rest of them turned, and if she’d occasionally resented it, if sometimes it seemed thankless and even pointless, she had also spent the past fifteen years of her life building a core of strength that could support all of them even now. She would take over for Livvy and let her daughter be a child, and she would do her job.
“I’m sorry,” she said, running her hands through her hair. “You’re right. About Renaldo, and Sean—I was just trying to figure it out, but like you say, it’s probably just random. Just bad luck. Listen, can you see if you can talk to Livvy? Who knows what’s going through her head right now—just tell her what you told me, that everything’s going to be all right. And I’ll take over with Teddy.”
Jen knelt on the floor with her children. “Wow, I haven’t seen these old toys in a long time,” she said.
“Shepherd,” Teddy said, holding up an androgynous plastic figure with a yellow bowl haircut and a crook in its hand.
“That’s right, shepherd! Where are the sheep, do you think? I wonder if they’re in the box?”
While she upended the box of toys on the carpet, Ted took Livvy by the arm and led her to the couch. He sat with his arm around her and Livvy pressed her face to his shirt, shaking with silent sobs. She was trying to stay quiet for Teddy’s sake—and Ted enfolded her in his strong arms, comforting her like he always did after the worst disappointments. When her soccer team lost in the semifinals. When Sean had broken up with her. Ted was the one Livvy wanted when her world was falling apart.
Teddy’s eyes went wide at the pile of toys on the carpet. A few round pieces from the K’Nex set rolled across the floor. The poor kid was never allowed to make a mess like this; Jen was forever cleaning up around him, sorting his toys into their various bins and baskets. Well. If—when—they got out of this, she would try to loosen up a little.
She plowed her hand through the center of the pile, the figurines and building toys and vehicles clattering against each other. She dug out a Star Wars figurine. She didn’t know its name—it was from the new movie, some sort of soldier with a head scarf obscuring his face.
Teddy took it from her solemnly. “Bad mans,” he whispered. He stared at the inscrutable painted eyes, the plastic rifle nearly as tall as the figurine itself.
Jen took a deep breath. “You mean the men upstairs? They were a little scary, weren’t they?”
Teddy nodded, his lips quivering. He gripped the toy tightly. “He didn’t put me down. I wanted him to put me down but he didn’t.”
“Oh, I see. I can understand why that was upsetting.”
“They had guns.”
What the hell was she supposed to say now? In all the women’s magazines Jen had read over the years, the ones that promised solutions to everything from dry skin to marital disharmony to kids’ behavioral issues, there had never been a single piece
