House Rules: A Novel Read online

  When we reached the car, she set me down. I did what I’d seen Jacob do a thousand times; I went boneless as spaghetti and collapsed on the pavement.

  All of a sudden, I heard something I’d never heard before. It was louder than both my yelling and Jacob’s combined, and it was coming out of my mother’s mouth.

  She screamed. She stamped her feet. Aaaaaauuuurrrrrgggh, she cried. She flopped her arms and kicked and tossed her head back and forth. People stared at her from all the way across the parking lot.

  I stopped right away. The only thing worse than having the whole world looking at me going crazy was having the whole world look at my mother going crazy. I closed my eyes, feverishly wishing that the ground would open up and just swallow me.

  Jacob, on the other hand, kept shrieking and throwing his fit.

  “Do you think I don’t want to lose it every now and then?” my mother shouted, and then she pulled herself together and buckled a squirming Jacob into his seat in the car. She dragged me up from the asphalt and did the same with me.

  But none of that is the reason I’m telling you this story. It’s because that day was the first day my mother cried in front of me, instead of bravely trying to hold it all inside.

  Emma

  From Auntie Em’s column:

  When did they stop putting toys in cereal boxes?

  When I was little, I remember wandering the cereal aisle (which surely is as American a phenomenon as fireworks on the Fourth of July) and picking my breakfast food based on what the reward was: a Frisbee with the Trix rabbit’s face emblazoned on the front. Holographic stickers with the Lucky Charms leprechaun. A mystery decoder wheel. I could suffer through raisin bran for a month if it meant I got a magic ring at the end.

  I cannot admit this out loud. In the first place, we are expected to be supermoms these days, instead of admitting that we have flaws. It is tempting to believe that all mothers wake up feeling fresh every morning, never raise their voices, only cook with organic food, and are equally at ease with the CEO and the PTA.

  Here’s a secret: Those mothers don’t exist. Most of us—even if we’d never confess—are suffering through the raisin bran in the hopes of a glimpse of that magic ring.

  I look very good on paper. I have a family, and I write a newspaper column. In real life, I have to pick superglue out of the carpet, rarely remember to defrost for dinner, and plan to have BECAUSE I SAID SO engraved on my tombstone.

  Real mothers wonder why experts who write for Parents and Good Housekeeping—and, dare I say it, the Burlington Free Press—seem to have their acts together all the time when they themselves can barely keep their heads above the stormy seas of parenthood.

  Real mothers don’t just listen with humble embarrassment to the elderly lady who offers unsolicited advice in the checkout line when a child is throwing a tantrum. We take the child, dump him in the lady’s cart, and say, “Great. Maybe you can do a better job.”

  Real mothers know that it’s okay to eat cold pizza for breakfast.

  Real mothers admit it is easier to fail at this job than to succeed.

  If parenting is the box of raisin bran, then real mothers know the ratio of flakes to fun is severely imbalanced. For every moment that your child confides in you, or tells you he loves you, or does something unprompted to protect his brother that you happen to witness, there are many more moments of chaos, error, and self-doubt.

  Real mothers may not speak the heresy, but they sometimes secretly wish they’d chosen something for breakfast other than this endless cereal.

  Real mothers worry that other mothers will find that magic ring, whereas they’ll be looking and looking for ages.

  Rest easy, real mothers. The very fact that you worry about being a good mom means that you already are one.

  During a short fit of writer’s block, I make myself a tuna sandwich and listen to the midday news. The local station is so awful that I like to watch it for the entertainment value. If I were still in college, I’d play a drinking game and take a swig of beer every time the anchors mispronounced a word or dropped their notes. My favorite recent mistake was when the anchor reported on a Vermont senator’s proposed overhaul of Medicaid. Instead of cutting to the video of his speech, they showed a clip of a polar bear plunge by a bunch of local octogenarians.

  Today’s top story, however, is not funny at all.

  “Early Monday morning,” the anchor reads, “the body of Jessica Ogilvy was found in the woods behind her residence. The twenty-three-year-old UVM student had gone missing last Tuesday.”

  The plate on my lap falls to the floor as I stand up, tears in my eyes. Although I’d known this was a possibility—a probability, really, as days went by and she wasn’t found—that doesn’t make her death any easier.

  I had often wondered what the world would have looked like if there were more people like Jess around, young men and women who could see someone like Jacob and not laugh at his quirks and flaws but instead celebrate the ways they made him interesting and worthy. I imagined the boys who would one day be in a class Jess taught and who would not have to struggle with the self-esteem and bullying issues that Jacob had struggled with in grade school. And now, none of that would happen.

  The story cuts to a reporter, whose segment has been filmed close to the spot where Jess’s body was found. “In this very sad turn of events,” she says soberly, “investigators responded to a 911 call placed from Ogilvy’s cell phone and traced the call here, to a culvert behind Ogilvy’s home.”

  This was taped near dawn; the sky is striped with pink. In the background are the crime scene investigators, setting up markers and taking measurements and photos. “Shortly afterward,” the reporter continues, “authorities took Ogilvy’s boyfriend, twenty-four-year-old Mark Maguire, into custody. An autopsy report is still pending …”

  If I had blinked, I probably would never have seen it. If the reporter had not shifted her feet, I would never have seen it. The image was that quick—the tiniest flash on the side of the screen before it was gone.

  A quilt with rainbow patchwork, ROYGBIV over and over.

  I freeze the frame—a newfangled feature of the satellite system we use—and run the clip backward before letting it play again. This time maybe I will see that it was only a trick of the eye, a flutter of the reporter’s scarf that I mistook for something else.

  It is still there, so I run the tape backward a second time.

  I once saw madness defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. My heart is pounding so fiercely now that I can feel it beating at the base of my throat. I race upstairs to Jacob’s closet, where I’d found Jess’s backpack a few days earlier, wrapped in the rainbow quilt.

  Which is missing.

  I sink down on his bed and smooth my hand over his pillow. Right now, at 12:45, Jacob is in physics class. He told me this morning that they are doing a lab on Archimedes’ principle, trying to determine the density of two unknown materials. What mass, when inserted into a medium, causes it to displace? What floats, and what sinks?

  I will go to the school and pick the boys up, making up an excuse—a dentist’s visit, a haircut appointment. But instead of coming home we will drive and drive until we cross the border into Canada. I will pack suitcases for them, and we will never come back here.

  Even as I am thinking this, I know it could never happen. Jacob would not understand the concept of never coming back home. And somewhere, in a police station, Jess’s boyfriend is being blamed when he might be innocent.

  Downstairs, with numb fingers, I pick through the stack of bills that I haven’t sorted. I know it’s in here somewhere … and then I find it, beneath the second notice from the phone company. Rich Matson’s business card, with his cell phone number scrawled on the back.

  Just in case, he had said.

  Just in case you happen to think that your son might be involved in a murder. Just in case you are confronted with the glaring evidence that y