The Family Across the Street by Nicole Trope

4

Katherine

If she could unlock her hands from theirs, she would like to grab the skin on her arm and twist it hard enough to leave a mark just so she could be sure she is actually here. That she is actually looking at someone she loves and who supposedly loves her, standing in front of her and these two small children, casually holding a way to end all their lives. But as their little hands grow sweaty in hers, she understands that she cannot let go because they are desperate for the reassurance she is trying to communicate through her fingers. Mama’s here. It’s okay. Mama’s here. But it’s not okay because how can it be? How on earth has the day become this nightmare from which she cannot wake? He loves me. I thought he loved me despite everything. How can he be doing this?

This is not someone she knows or understands anymore. Before today she would have described him one way and she might even have admitted to the tension between the two of them, but right now she wouldn’t know where to begin. Who are you? Who have you become? she wants to ask. She watches him rubbing his T-shirt over the barrel of the black metal gun and wonders when he became this kind of a person and how she managed to miss such a colossal change. How long has he been planning it? Days? Weeks? Months? How long?

‘Please,’ she says, ‘don’t do this.’

‘Give me your phone,’ he says.

‘No,’ she utters, ‘I need it. People will be calling me and if I don’t answer…’

He walks over to where they are sitting and rests the gun on George’s temple, pushing slightly so the little boy’s head angles. She feels her son freeze, his body against her body. She releases her tight hold of his hand and wraps her arms around his shoulders and Sophie’s shoulders, pulling them closer, feeling them mould into her body.

‘I said, give me your phone,’ he says, and she reluctantly pulls her arms from around her children’s shoulders to dig it out of her pocket and hand it to him. Her hands are trembling and he sees this and smiles. Where did all that love between us go? She has thousands of images stored in her brain of him laughing, smiling at her, of sunshine-filled days and star-filled nights – and yet here they are. And he looks nothing like those images anymore. She wonders if she’s ever really seen him at all or just the version of him that she wanted to see. Wrapped up with her terror is a twinge of humiliation at how foolish she has been. I thought I was smarter than this and now my children will have to pay for my mistake.

He looks at her phone, at the screen saver of her and George and Sophie at their last birthday party. In front of each child is a cake with five candles, the glow lighting up their faces. She is between them, crouched down to get into the picture. ‘Big smiles, everyone,’ said her husband, their father. Big smiles.

Anyone looking at the picture would see the resemblance in their faces, heart-shaped with slightly too pointed chins. Her eyes are brown and theirs are green, but they get that from their father. When they were babies, their hair was blonde but now it’s light brown, and Katherine knows that one day Sophie will colour it and change it, lamenting that it gets curly in the humidity like it has today. She hasn’t had time to brush it for her yet. There was no time.

She remembers the hours it took to make the cakes, cutting and shaping so that she could produce the number five for each of them. She had made her own icing, some in pink and some in blue, messing up the first batch because she added too much water. She’s not a good baker. She wants to be but it’s not a skill she has. Her mother used to produce cakes easily, light and fluffy, perfectly decorated. If she had lived until their fifth birthday, she would have made them each a birthday cake as she did when they turned one and two and three and four.

Katherine swallows hard and tightens her hold on her children. What would her mother say now if she could see this? How broken would her heart be?

‘Are you sure, my darling?’ she asked Katherine on the eve of her wedding to John. ‘Are you sure?’ she asked, as she had done before every life decision Katherine made, giving her daughter time to take a step back. But there was no time for that this morning.

The children are both pushing against her side, trying to get even closer, and she can feel George shaking. His hands are clenched into fists and she knows that he believes that he has to be braver and stronger than Sophie because he is her older brother, even though he is only older by three minutes. Five-year-old children should not have to think about being brave.

Today should have been an ordinary day. She had prepared for the heatwave by freezing the children’s water bottles so that they would melt over the day into ice-cold water to drink at lunchtime and playtime. They should be getting ready to go to school now. She was looking forward to walking them before the heat took hold, and then she had planned to get some exercise at the indoor pool at her gym before doing some shopping. She was going to stock up on ice cream.

‘Is that a real gun?’ her son whispers.

‘Shh,’ she says.

He smiles and nods. ‘It’s as real as it gets, Georgie boy.’

Yesterday George brought home a new marble from school, blue and filled with stars inside, which could be seen only if you put your eye right up against the glass surface.

‘It’s the best marble I’ve ever seen,’ she told him because it was, and he smiled, a wide generous smile that filled his whole face and lit up his green eyes. Sophie isn’t interested in marbles but is obsessed with Polly Pocket dolls, taking them everywhere and getting told off at school for having them.

Last night she stared at the ceiling for a few hours, unable to close her eyes, worrying about her daughter getting into trouble at five years old. She decided that she would make star charts for the twins, rewarding good behaviour. What concerned her was that her children, especially Sophie, were starting to sense the tension in the house. She’d thought, she’d hoped, they were managing to conceal things from the children, but she feared they were not.

Her mind turns to last night’s argument – although calling it an argument is probably an understatement.

It led to John sleeping downstairs on the sofa before rushing out this morning, still wrapped in his anger, screeching out of the driveway. She had felt glad he was gone for the day – but then she hadn’t known what was coming.

‘Where’s Daddy?’ Sophie asked when she crept into her bed as the sun rose. She’s been trying to get them to be quieter in the mornings. Gladys complains about too much noise and she feels bad for Lou, who needs his sleep. Mostly they forget, but this morning her children had both been so quiet, she hadn’t noticed them until they were already in the room.

‘He slept downstairs because his back was sore.’

‘His back is sore a lot,’ said George. ‘Maybe he should see a back doctor.’

‘Maybe,’ Katherine agreed, her heart breaking over the lie she was telling her children, over the need for the lie, but she couldn’t tell them the truth. Their world would be shattered and she wasn’t sure yet that they couldn’t find their way back.

But now… now it is too late. It is so much worse than too late. The knowledge that today can only end one way has settled around her, suffocating and thick. It is much worse than just too late.

Yesterday there was a new marble and worries over school and spaghetti for dinner and today there is a gun and the smell of fear beginning to fill up the room.

Last night there was an argument that felt like one argument too far and now they are here.

Nothing she can say will change the situation. The only hope she has is to save the children. She needs to keep them safe.

The words she spat float back to her. ‘I’ll leave you and take these children.’

‘You won’t be going anywhere, Katherine. Don’t be ridiculous.’

He was right about that, terrifyingly right.

‘Guns kill people,’ says George.

She nods her head without thinking and then regrets it. They don’t need to be any more frightened than they already are. She and John had agreed they wouldn’t let the children play with toy guns, not wanting them to think of weapons as something to pretend with, not wanting to encourage any violent ideas. Now there is a real gun in her house, in her home, pointed at her and her children. Even when she was single and working in the city as an administrative assistant to a gruff old man who called her Katie, living in a one-bedroom apartment in a dubious neighbourhood, she had never seen a gun. Until now.

‘It’s going to be okay,’ she says softly to them.

‘It’s going to be okay,’ he repeats, pointing the gun directly at her head, his voice high and whiny.

Is it a real gun? Could he be doing this with something that is not real? But she can see it has weight to it. It’s real.

‘Actually,’ he says, dropping to his knees in front of the sofa they are sitting on, ‘it’s not going to be okay at all. Not for you anyway.’ He laughs, small droplets of spit coming out of his mouth, and Katherine feels a streak of burning hatred rise up from her toes. What’s happened to him? How can he be doing this to them?

He looks at her phone again and then turns it off, slides it into his pocket. She feels a surge of panic as he traps her and the children in here with him, with no way to communicate with the outside world. She already tried this morning, when she answered the door.

The bell chiming had startled him, and for a moment he’d looked unsure. ‘You expecting someone?’ he asked quietly.

‘No.’

‘Then get rid of them, get rid of them quickly. Just talk through the peephole. Do not, under any circumstances, open the door.’

‘Can I take the kids with me?’

He gave his head a long, slow shake, a parent disappointed with a child, his gaze holding her as he allowed the corners of his mouth to raise just a little at her ridiculous request.

‘Apparently you think I’m stupid, Katherine? Do you think I’m stupid?’ He tapped his own head gently with the barrel of the gun.

‘No, no, I’ll go, I’ll get rid of them.’

‘I will be listening to everything you say. Every. Single. Word.’ As he said this, he moved the gun back and forth between her children’s heads. Katherine swallowed so she would not throw up.

She sensed that the delivery man was irritated with her. She couldn’t make him understand and he had left, taking her new computer with him. That had been part of her plan for the day. A swim, some shopping and setting up her new computer. A very ordinary day.

‘What do you want?’ she asks him now, her voice raspy with terror. How will she get the children out of here and away from him?

‘I want… I want you to listen to me. Not to talk over me, not to explain, not to justify. I just want you to listen to me.’

‘I’ll listen,’ she says, ‘and then what? What’s going to happen?’ She wishes she could keep the desperation from her voice, that she could control her body as a tear escapes and rolls down her cheek.

‘You’ll have to wait to see,’ he says and he sits down on the leather recliner, pushes the seat back and raises his feet, relaxed and calm. He has all the time in the world. Katherine knows that she and her children don’t. He doesn’t have a plan. What he has is rage and a weapon and she can sense, in the prickling of her skin, that this makes him more dangerous than if he did know what he was going to do. A lot more dangerous.