Part 2: The Geometry of the Return
Part 2: The Geometry of the Return
The silver Buick sedan pulled into the gravel drive at 5:14 PM, its tires throwing up a spray of grey slush against the foundation stones of the porch.
Blake Vance turned the ignition off, the engine dying with a greasy, mechanical sigh that filled the interior with the smell of unburnt regular fuel and hot antifreeze. In the backseat, his mother, Diane, was already unzipping a large, glossy paper bag from the boutique, her freshly painted lips pulled back into a small smile of commercial triumph.
“The leather on the strap is genuine calfskin, Blake,” she said, her voice carrying that smooth, unhurried arrogance that had dominated every dinner table Nora had sat at for three years. “Your father was right. If we had waited for Nora’s little spell to pass, the boutique would have been cleared out by the afternoon rush. A girl from Ohio just doesn't understand how quickly the stock moves in this city.”
Blake didn't answer. He was staring at the front porch.
The yellow porch light was on, but it wasn't casting its usual neat triangle of amber light across the welcome mat. The light was illuminating a jagged, three-foot hole where the door frame had been ripped out of the brickwork. A mountain of white drywall dust had drifted down onto the steps like artificial snow, mixed with three or four blue nitrile gloves that had been cast aside into the weeds.
“What did she do?” Blake muttered, his keys rattling inside his jacket pocket as he stepped out into the cold November wind. “I told her not to move. I told her I’d be back by five.”
“She’s probably gone to her sister’s house to cause a scene,” his sister, Lauren, said, not looking up from her screen as she kicked open her door. “She always does this when she doesn't get the front seat.”
The father-in-law, Arthur Vance, was the last to climb out, his heavy boots making a slow, deliberate crunch-crunch against the gravel. “She didn't go to her sister’s. Her coat is still hanging in the hall window. Look at the glass.”
The front window of apartment four-B was dark, but there was a thick, brown smudge of dried iron on the lower pane where someone had pressed a blood-stained palm against the frame to find their balance.
Blake reached the top step first. He didn't have to use his key. The door was hanging from its upper hinge like a broken wing, the brass bolt still thrown, extending into nothing but empty air.
When he stepped across the threshold, his leather shoes slipped immediately on something wet.
The living room did not smell like the lavender baby soap Nora had bought at the cooperative market. It smelled of sulfur, copper, burning ozone from the portable medical suction units, and a deep, biological heat that made the hair on the back of Blake’s neck stand straight up.
The corduroy sofa had been pushed into the corner, its cushions torn off and piled against the radiator to form a makeshift barrier. In the center of the oak floorboards was a vast, geometric circle of white towels—all of them ruined, stained with thick, dark crimson trails that led toward the kitchen nook.
Sitting flat on the low wooden stool in the kitchen, her back straight against the refrigerator door, was Nora.
She was wearing a clean white hospital gown that the medics had left behind. Her hair had been shorn close to her skull with a pair of surgical shears to keep the sweat out of her eyes, and her face was pale, hard, and completely free of the terror she had carried since Tuesday morning.
In her arms, wrapped in two matching gray fleece blankets from the emergency trunk, she held two small, silent bundles.
“Nora?” Blake whispered, his shopping bags dropping onto the wet linoleum with a heavy plop. His knees began to tremble, his long fingers reaching out toward the counter for a support that wasn't there. “What... what is this? Where are the doctors?”
Nora did not look at him. She looked at the small, pink forehead of the boy in her left arm, her thumb tracing the line of his eyebrow with a mechanical neatness that didn't belong to a twenty-four-year-old mother.
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“The doctors are at the precinct on Eighteenth Street, Blake,” she said, her voice level, dry, and carrying the cold resonance of a court clerk reading a forfeiture notice. “They left fifteen minutes ago with the county sheriff. Your father’s name was on the medical waiver, Blake. They’re calling it reckless endangerment of a multiple birth under the state’s domestic hazard code.”
