Page 15 of The Wrong Family

“They do not. You’re not weird.” Winnie frowned at her son. She’d have to text Subomi’s mother and get to the bottom of this.

“You are weird,” Nigel said. Where had he come from? He was standing in the doorway, scratching the back of his head. Why was he saying this?

“I’d beat you up. Possibly shove your head in the urinal till—”

Samuel was cracking up, his face broken of its usually stony boredom, spread into a rare, crooked laughter. Winnie took a moment to appreciate it.

“Dude, weird is better than boring. Every time, man, every time.”

Samuel shrugged but Winnie could tell he was pleased.

“I guess so,” he said. “But I think they’re weird. Just to get that straight.”

“My man,” Nigel said, walking over to fist-bump their son. He strolled back out of the room and she blinked after him. The smell of his cologne on the air was overpowering; she cleared her throat once, twice.

“Did you need something, Mom?” Samuel was no longer smiling but staring at her like her presence was an intrusion.

Her mother’s heart wilted. “Nope. No—just checking on you…and I guess I wanted to talk to you about last night and Uncle Dakota…”

“Dad and I already had a talk. I get it.”

“Oh,” Winnie said. She bit back the rest of her questions, not wanting Samuel to know she was clueless.Thanks, Nigel.

“Well, if you need to talk about anything.”

“Thanks.”

She wanted to hug him—that’s what they always did after they resolved a conflict together—but as Winnie leaned toward her son, he’d already gone back to his book. And nothing had been resolved. Not that included her anyway. Winnie had never had fewer friends in her own home.

And then, as she left the room, a thought seized her so aggressively she took a little step back, away from them.What if Nigel told Samuel? What if he told him what I did?Winnie felt light-headed. There was nothing to steady herself on, so she just swayed on the spot, one hand reaching for a wall that wasn’t there. If Nigel had told Samuel, she’d lose her son forever.

Sometimes Winnie wondered if she’d taken the job at Illuminations Mental Health to prove something to Nigel. Once, when they were dating, he’d made a joke about her not being athletic; within a week she’d registered for indoor soccer and got a gym membership. It didn’t end there, no—Winnie actually became what she wanted. She began to like soccer, enjoy playing it.Can’t say I’m not athletic anymore, can you?

No, he really couldn’t. And since he’d called her spoiled within the first year of their marriage, she’d gotten to work, hadn’t she? He’d laughed at her when she spoke about the occasional dollar she passed to the homeless, had mocked her in one of his crueler moments. “You don’t care about homeless people,” he’d said. “You just have upper-middle-class shame you feel compelled to atone for!”

It was as if he’d issued some silent challenge to his wife. And so Winnie found herself working at Illuminations for two years. Two years of dedication to people less fortunate than she both in spirit and in bank. Two solid years. Before the incident.

He would have believed in her commitment to the cause, too, had she not done what she’d done. “The incident” was the name Nigel gave to it, but it was a weak word for what happened that night. It wasn’t an incident; it was a crime. One Winnie had committed.

10

JUNO

The autumn rain tapped incessantly against the windows in Winnie’s book nook. Juno settled into a chair with the book she’d started the day she fell. She’d bent the spine, and she regretted that; she had a deep respect for books. That entire day was a bit hazy in her memory. She hadn’t fallen since, but she knew that all it would take was falling the wrong way and her bones would snap like peanut brittle. She settled herself more firmly in her seat. No! There would be none of that. Juno was sick, sick as hell, and if she were careful, she could finish out her days without breaking a hip, or a leg, or whatever old people broke when they fell. As if on cue, Juno’s hip began to ache.

She was trying not to think about what she’d heard the night before as she lay in her own bed.You misheard, she’d told herself a hundred times since that morning. But she hadn’t misheard, and now those words were repeating themselves in her head like a goddamn two-year-old whining in a toy store. She rubbed little circles at her temples and tried to read the words on the page. But she wasn’t thinking about the story; it wasn’t fiction in which she wanted to immerse herself. It was the truth.

Juno got up from the chair with some difficulty and walked over to the family computer. The screen was dark, but she knew that if she gave the mouse a little nudge it would spring to life, revealing the family vacation screen saver. She hadn’t touched a computer in years—well, except when she’d nudged Sam’s mouse much the same way the other day—but her life before had held all of those things: computers and jobs and credit cards. She didn’t miss it. She had very little and having very little yielded fewer complications. It had taken Juno time to adjust to a life without—stuff—but once she had, she found that she preferred it.

She sat down in the chair facing the computer, flexing her fingers. It was no big deal; Juno knew how to work a damn computer. She wasn’t one of those timed-out old people who poked at an iPhone screen with a shaking index finger. She just didn’t want to be part of that world anymore. She almost got up right then and there, but Nigel’s words played again in her head. Call it human curiosity.

There they are!Juno thought as the photo of the Crouches appeared on the beach. She tried not to look at them as she pulled up the internet browser, but she could see them out of the corner of her eye, staring at her with their sunburned faces. Her fingers found the keys easily.Slipping right back into it, she thought, sitting up a little straighter. Not bad for a sixty-seven-year-old, not bad at all. She typedmissing children Seattle Washington, and then, as an afterthought, added the year into the search box. Sam was thirteen years old. That would have made him an infant in 2008.

The Center for Missing and Exploited Children was the first site to appear, and Juno clicked on it. She was given the option to search for a missing child by name, but since Juno didn’t know what Sam’s real name was, she scrolled past that and saw there was a section where she could search by the city and state from which a child had gone missing. She typed inSeattle Washingtonand entered the year 2008 into the missing date option. Then Juno hit the return key and waited.

There weren’t many. She scanned through the single page of results in less than five seconds. There were no infants reported missing in Washington in 2008, but that didn’t mean anything. If the Crouches had kidnapped Sam, they could have taken him from anywhere. And maybe he wasn’t aninfantinfant; Nigel could have used that word “infant” and meant it broadly. She widened the search to all fifty states, which yielded a considerable number of results.

She leaned back in the chair—think, Juno. She knew that of the nearly 800,000 children under age eighteen who went missing each year, more than 58,000 were nonfamily abductions and only about 115 were stranger kidnappings. That was almost two stranger-danger kidnappings to a state every year. That calmed Juno’s nerves. Her previous thoughts sounded kooky, even to herself. A kidnapper’s emotional motive was desperation, and Winnie and Nigel were hardly desperate—selfish, mostly, with a side of entitlement.

---