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7:45 p.m.
It’s a mother’s lot in life to worry.
No one told Mary Ellen this when she was pregnant with Billy, so it came as a surprise when she first held his wailing, wriggling body in her arms and was filled not with love or tenderness but worry. A worry so deep she felt it in her soul.
What would she do, she thought, if something bad happened to him?
She knows now—just as she knew then, after that first, fraught thought had passed—that worry is a by-product of love. What she still doesn’t know is what to do with it. She thought it would pass with time, but it never did. Not even after Andy was born, though she’d been assured everything gets easier with your second child. Not in her experience. It just compounded her anxiety. Now she has two boys to worry about. And there’s so much cause for worry nowadays.
“This world gets crazier every day,” Trish Wallace said that very morning, and Mary Ellen has to agree. Everything outside of Hemlock Circle seems to be spiraling out of control, like the bus rigged with explosives in that movie she and Blake went to see last month. Mass slaughter in Rwanda. That pretty Nancy Kerrigan gettingwhacked in the knees. O. J. Simpson killing his wife, which Mary Ellen knows with every bone in her body is the truth. An innocent man doesn’t try to flee the way he did a few weeks ago. Like everyone else, she watched that white Ford Bronco driving on the freeway for hours. The whole time, a lump of worry sat in the pit of her gut, fearing that the chase would never end. That the Bronco would keep on driving. All the way across the country. All the way to Hemlock Circle, where no wife and mother would be safe.
That’s what keeps her up at night. The idea that nowhere is safe. Bad things can and do happen everywhere. Even here. Every time she sees Misty Chen, she wants to grip her arms and shake the truth out of her. Did she know her son was an addict? Did she do anything about it? Does she blame herself? Mary Ellen needs to know so she can keep it from happening to her boys.
Now Billy’s upstairs, getting ready before heading next door to the Marshes’. Mary Ellen told him he could still go, even though she remains concerned about that stranger spotted roaming the woods yesterday. The only reason she’s allowing it is because Billy seems…strange. Not quite upset, but not exactly happy. Muted. That’s the best word she can think of to describe him. Like something happened earlier today and Billy’s not sure how to feel about it.
He’s been hidden away in his room ever since slinking inside late this afternoon, probably paging through that horrible ghost book he thinks Mary Ellen doesn’t know about. She almost threw it out when she found it, but Blake stopped her.
“Let the boy have his book,” he said. “It’s harmless.”
Mary Ellen scoffed at that. “Harmless? Have you looked at it? It’s morbid. All those pictures of ghosts and ghouls.”
“Which is catnip to someone his age. Every boy goes through a spooky phase. He’ll outgrow it.”
But it doesn’t seem like a phase to Mary Ellen. Billy behaves likesomeone obsessed, talking about ghosts constantly. She was appalled when Blake helped him dress up as one for Halloween. She couldn’t understand why a boy as sweet as Billy would admire something so scary.
It worries her, the way he’s changing. She’d always thought of Andy as taking after her husband—smart, sly, even a little aloof and a bit of a loner. Until recently, she assumed that Billy took after her. Sensitive. So unlike the other boys in the neighborhood. So much like how she used to be. Well, how she still is. Over the years, she’s learned how to tamp down her eccentricities, act like all the other moms, pretend to be normal.
As a little girl, she had been the school oddball. Not a total outcast. Her classmates seemed to like her well enough. But there was always something off about her. Something that kept her from being fully embraced by her peers.
Mary Ellen’s mother told her, not unkindly, that she felt too much. That it ran in the family. “Our emotions run deep,” she said when Mary Ellen was about Andy’s age.
A perfect example is her porcelain doll, Stacy, which she received for Christmas when she was eight.
“Be very gentle with her,” Mary Ellen’s mother told her as she held Stacy for the first time. “She’s fragile.”
Mary Ellen didn’t know what that word meant, and when she asked, the answer disturbed her.
“That she can break very easily,” her mother said. “One wrong move and the whole doll will shatter and be lost forever.”
Despite this very dire warning, Mary Ellen loved Stacy. She kept the doll on a shelf opposite her bed so Stacy was the first thing she saw in the morning and the last thing she saw at night. When Mary Ellen took Stacy down from the shelf, it was only to gently cradle her for a few minutes. She knew it was too risky to do more than that, just asshe knew that, no matter how careful she was, there’d come a day when Stacy would break and be no more. In Mary Ellen’s mind, it wasn’t a matter of if but of when.
By high school, she’d learned to hide her constant fear enough to get by. She wasn’t exactly popular, but she had a few friends, she dated a few boys, and, most important, she blended in. But just because she hid the worry didn’t mean it had gone away. It was still there. A monster lurking in the dark, waiting to come out at the most unpredictable moments.
Tonight, for instance.
As Billy packs, Mary Ellen calls her husband, who’s away at a conference in Boston. Another source of concern. Boston’s so big and the drive difficult and the people, well, Mary Ellen feels bad stereotyping an entire city’s population, but she’s heard that they’re rude.
“Do you really think I should let Billy camp over at Ethan’s house?” she says.
Blake’s answer—“I don’t see why not”—doesn’t surprise Mary Ellen in the least. He’s always been more laid-back than her, a trait she finds both necessary and mystifying. Both of them can’t be strung tighter than a tennis racket. Yet she also can’t fathom how Blake manages to glide through life mostly worry-free.
“But there was a stranger roaming the neighborhood yesterday,” she says. “Maybe he’s still here, lurking.”
“It’s not like Billy’s camping alone in the woods,” Blake says. “He’ll be with Ethan in Fred and Joyce’s backyard. I’m sure they’ll keep an eye on things.”
When the call ends, Mary Ellen still hasn’t decided what to do. But then Billy comes downstairs, a rolled-up sleeping bag under his arm and his mood still unreadable.
“Are you sure you feel up to it tonight?” she says. “There’s always next Friday.”