Page 46 of I Will Ruin You

“Bet you thought I’d never finish my drink.”

Marta had spun around only halfway when something hit her across the side of the head. Everything went black and down she went.

“Thought something was off about you. And then that sad fucker next to me confirmed it. Don’t mess with us, darlin’.”

But the words were wasted on her. Marta was out cold.

Twenty

Richard

After any social engagement, Bonnie and I would typically start our debrief once we were in the car and driving away. Maybe it would be a comment about how neither of us could eat the undercooked fish, or the kid who was a monster, or how the husband always cut off his wife before she could finish a single sentence. Not to give you the impression that we were the nastiest, most backstabbing couple in history—we would just as often talk about how that was the best chocolate mousse we’d ever tasted, or how she was the funniest person we’d met in a long time, or that we really clicked and should have them over to our place as soon as possible.

But we didn’t do any of that because Rachel was in the car. It was Rachel, in fact, who was ready to start talking immediately once we were driving away from seeing Trent and Melanie.

“Can I get some bugs?” she asked.

“Say again?” I said, looking over my shoulder at her in the backseat.

“Bugs,” Rachel said again. “Amanda has all kinds of them. Dead ones and live ones. She’s going to be a lemontologist.”

“An entomologist,” Bonnie said.

“What?”

“You said lemontologist.”

“That would be someone who studies citrus fruits,” I offered.

Rachel carried on. “She used to have this glass thing full of dirt where ants lived but she had to get rid of it because of her dad. Can I get one of those?”

I glanced over at Bonnie, who was biting her bottom lip. I could guess what she was thinking. The last thing she’d want would be to discourage our daughter from pursuing a new interest, especially when she’d seemed at loose ends lately. And the second last thing Bonnie would want is a wide variety of insects, living and/or dead, taking up residence in our house.

“She has dead butterflies,” Rachel continued. “With their wings spread out and they were under glass, held there with pins.”

Bonnie asked, “How does Amanda’s mom like having all those icky bugs in the house?”

Rachel adopted a lecturing tone. “Mom, bugs are not icky. They are part of the envierment. The world would die without bugs. And her mom is fine with it. It’s her dad who hates them. That’s why they’re in the garage. Isn’t that sexist, Mom? Thinking girls are all scared of bugs and boys aren’t?”

The kid was on fire today. I had to admit that I was pleased and was betting Bonnie might be, too. This might be just what Rachel needed. A new focus.

Although, as Bonnie said after Rachel had bolted from the car when we got home, “Why couldn’t Amanda have had a big fucking dollhouse?”

So later, as we got ready for bed, we debriefed. At least, up to a point. I did not share the details of my conversation with Trent.

“She was pretty shaken up, maybe even more than Trent,” Bonnie said of Melanie. “She put on a good front for you guys, but when I was in the kitchen with her she was still having a hard time with it. She put dressing on the salad a second time, forgetting she’d already done it.”

“It was a little on the wet side,” I said.

“She’s terrified that something like what happened Monday could happen again. If not a bomber, then a shooter. It’s like a virus, a contagion, spreading through the country. Hardly a week goes by you don’t hear about another one.”

“Did she know Trent had a gun at school?”

“She not only knew about it, she’d encouraged it. And Melanie said some wonderful things about you. How if you hadn’t done what you did, it could have been a much bigger tragedy. I think it hit her hard because she knew Mark LeDrew.”

That was news to me, but it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. He’d been a student at her husband’s school. They lived in the same town.

“They hired him one summer to look after their place, the year she and Trent rented a house up in Maine for all of July and half of August.”