Never Ask Me

Grant Pollitt stands in front of the tree on the greenbelt that leads down to the creek, beyond his backyard. When he was little, he used to hide his treasures in a small hollow near the tree’s roots, until his mother worried that same hole might harbor copperheads or water moccasins.

He stands there, trembling, a little scared, and not sure why.

It’s been a very weird morning.

First the email arrives, sent to him from a friend. The email contains a picture of his favorite football player, arms lifted in triumph after a win. The email reads trust me, Grant, you want to click on this. It makes him suspicious, because a virus could hide inside a picture or a link, right? But it has his name in the caption and the email wasn’t from some unknown person; it was his friend Drew’s address. He bites his lip. He has heard other pictures could be hidden inside digital photos. Maybe this is Drew’s way of sending him the kind of pictures your parents don’t like you to have. He feels guilty, but Drew would know if he doesn’t click it because he couldn’t fake his way out of not knowing. He clicks it.

His browser opens. A new picture appears. It’s a photograph of a woman caught whirling in the misty rain; behind her stands the Eiffel Tower. She’s wearing an expensive raincoat and laughing. People around her are clapping and watching in admiration. At the bottom of the photo are the words:

Some days lies fall like the rain. Go look in your tree.

That’s…incredibly odd, he thinks.

He texts Drew. Did you send me an email with a picture of JJ Watt?

The answer: Uh no why would I do that and I was asleep thanks for waking me up

Never mind, Grant texts back. This wasn’t the kind of joke that his buddies Drew or Landon or Connor typically pulled on another friend. He scans the computer for viruses. None.

Go look in your tree.

It can mean only one tree. Maybe it’s Julia, pulling a prank on him. Julia isn’t interested in computers, though, and hiding a picture inside a picture—she wouldn’t know how to do that. It wasn’t the kind of joke his parents played, either, trying to turn everything into a learning opportunity or a challenge he could write about on his college essays.

He goes downstairs and into the kitchen. Mom is making coffee, tapping her foot as if the coffee maker were delaying her.

“Good morning,” she says. She runs a hand through the mess of his bedhead hair. She’s always trying to fix his hair. He loves her, but he wishes she wouldn’t do that. Sometimes Mom looks at him as though surprised he’s there.

“Hey,” he says, giving her a quick hug and thinking: This is silly. I should tell her about this email. But then, it’s so odd, so strange, that it’s like having a special secret. So he doesn’t, and she says: “I think your sister went out playing that Creaturescape game with Ned.”

“Critterscape,” he says. He gets orange juice from the fridge, pours a large glass.

“Whatever. Do they just walk around the neighborhood?”

“It’s exercise,” he says, not looking at her.

“That’s what her dance class is for. Do you know what’s going on between them?” Mom asks.

It’s like she can’t help herself, Grant thinks. Like if Julia confides in him he will break that confidence just because Mom asks. “I don’t know,” he says.

Mom bites at her lip, unsatisfied.

“I have to go down into the greenbelt,” he says.

“Why?” Mom is always a little suspicious of the greenbelt. Kids go down there into the heavy growth of oaks and cedars and swim in the wide creek and walk the convoluted trails and sometimes smoke weed or drink. He hasn’t done the forbidden activities. But he knows other kids who have.

He realizes then he should have waited until she wasn’t around or had gone upstairs and then just gone to his tree. Now she is interested, in that Mom way.

“Biology class specimens,” he says. He’s a freshman and biology is the bane of his existence.

“In winter?”

“Yes, Mom, in winter, biology still goes on.”

Her phone buzzes with a specific ringtone that indicates Julia is calling. The ringtone’s melody is that of a song Mom wrote about Julia when she was very young and fighting cancer—a neuroblastoma—and Julia hates that it’s a ringtone but doesn’t want to hurt Mom’s feelings. Grant keeps meaning to tell Mom to change it. Mom picks up the phone, stares at the screen.

Her face goes pale. She makes an odd little noise, like a gasp or a cough interrupted.

“Mom?”

She keeps staring at the screen; it’s like he isn’t there. “Mom?” he repeats.

“Stay here. Stay here. Keep your phone close.”

“What is it? Is Julia all right?”

“Yeah. No. I’ve got to go to her. Stay here.”

Mom grabs her coat from the mudroom and hurries out to the garage. He hears her car start and then silence for several seconds, as if she’s forgotten how to drive, and then the garage door powering up. He stands at the kitchen window, sees her Mercedes SUV jerk down the driveway, going way too fast. Julia’s done something stupid, he supposes, and she’s gotten into trouble. Last year she was Little Miss Perfect; now she’s in some vague rebellion that makes no sense to him. He wishes she would make up her mind.

He wonders where Dad is. He goes to his parents’ room. His father is lying under the covers, snoring softly. Another late night working, Grant figures. He closes the door softly.

Go look in your tree.

He goes out the patio door, crosses the backyard, and opens the gate. The greenbelt is just beyond. It’s fed by Winding Creek, a middling tributary of Barton Creek in West Austin, which runs across a slice of Lakehaven. There’s a hiking path by the creek. He walks off the trail, listening to the hiss of water as he heads down toward the creek, and his old tree is to the left.

A rock covers the cleft near the tree’s roots. The cleft was his hiding place: small, cozy. Grant would put pretend treasure maps there, or Legos, or hide little objects he had stolen from his parents—a penknife, coins, his father’s car keys once when Kyle had an endless succession of overseas business trips. He wasn’t even sure why he took small, worthless things and hid them away: he always brought them back home, put them in plain sight, and sometimes smiled to himself when Dad or Mom would find the missing item and say, How did I miss seeing that?

Now inside the cleft, where he hasn’t looked in years, is a plain brown envelope. His breath catches in his chest.

He pulls it free. It’s thick, with GRANT written across it in block letters with black ink. He opens the envelope.

Inside is money. Cash. Crisp twenties. Bound, organized, like it just came from a bank. He counts it, stunned.

It’s a thousand dollars.

Left for him in a tree.

He looks into the envelope again and sees there’s a note inside. He unfolds it and reads it.

Grant: You have been told a huge lie. I will only tell you the truth. Keep this money hidden and please tell no one about it. It’s a gift from me to you.

Grant stands up. This is insane. Someone spoofing an email address to lead him to money hidden behind his house. He’s never seen this much cash in his life. And it’s his now. It makes no sense. Why?

Grant feels like someone is watching him. He stands. He scans the dense growth of oaks and cedar along the creek, the hiking trail. Sees no one, listens to the quiet of the wind in the trees.

He clutches the envelope close to his chest, feels the weight of the cash.

Then, on the morning air, he hears the approaching scream of police sirens.

Iris Pollitt sits in her car, in her closed garage, hands on the wheel, thinking: Danielle is dead. Really dead.

And then she thinks: Good.

It’s the worst thought she’s ever had, a horror, unworthy, and she shoves the thought away. She wants to cry; she wants to vomit. Instead she takes several deep breaths and starts the car. Music plays, the nineties channel on satellite radio, or the “Mom Channel” as Julia calls it. Britney Spears is singing “…Baby One More Time,” and Iris turns the volume down into silence.

Now she hears only the sound of her own ragged, gasping breath.

Go. Go there. Your kid needs you. Mom mode. Now.

She’s in such shock she’s forgotten to open the garage door, and she jabs the button, thinking herself lucky she didn’t rocket into the closed door. She waits for the door to power up and reverses up the driveway, fast. Going past the kitchen window, she sees Grant staring out in surprise, in curiosity.

What do you say when you get there? What do you do?

She should have woken Kyle, made him come with her. She didn’t even think of that. She is moving through this morning as if she is in a dream and she needs to be awake.

Iris floors the Mercedes GLS. She doesn’t think about Danielle being dead—she can’t. She keeps that terrible thought at bay and instead retreats to thinking about her to-do list, which now won’t get done today: organizing the final fundraiser for the Lakehaven High Music Festival (featuring band, orchestra, and choir); dropping off donated supplies at the fundraiser for a less fortunate school on the other side of Austin (a project of Julia’s, both to do good and to bolster Julia’s résumé for college applications); then a meeting with the choir parents board tomorrow, where she’ll outline the spending for the school musical and the end-of-year senior chorister trip to Houston, where the kids will see a touring Broadway show and have a private session with the show’s understudies to learn about musical theater. It’s a lot; it’s a job where she doesn’t get paid, except that then her kids have better programs and her husband thinks she’s doing something worthwhile and not pining about her vanished career all day.

Thinking about her day as if it could still be normal doesn’t keep the horror at bay. Tears now in her eyes. Oh, Danielle. Why?

Danielle is dead.

And my daughter found her.

Suddenly, in her mind, an old and precious memory: Danielle surprising her at the front door, with a smile: I got the email. They’ve matched a baby for you. A boy.

And Iris screaming in joy, and Danielle embracing her.

She blasts down Winding Creek Trail. Past one neighbor walking a pair of dogs, past a jogger. The houses are morning-quiet. All that quiet, that sense of security, is about to go away for a long time. She feels the world shift. She has to be ready for her family.

Iris skids to a stop inside the park entrance. Ned kneels by the bench, sobbing, Julia embracing him from behind, still holding her phone. Two men she doesn’t recognize, but both dressed for jogging, are standing near them, watching. One has a phone pressed to his ear, speaking quietly. The other, a tall redhead, just stares, pale and unsure.

The enormity of it all slaps her in the chest, the stomach.

Iris stumbles out of her SUV, her hand at her mouth in horror, and runs toward them. “Julia!” she screams.

“Mom!” Julia looks like she’s seen the end of the world. “We found her…we found her on the bench.” Julia doesn’t let go of Ned, her face twisted, tears on her cheeks. “She was sitting here… She’s cold.”

“Don’t look. Kids, don’t look.” It’s too late for that, but she doesn’t know what else to say. She tries to pull them both away, but only Julia goes. Ned lets out this keening cry and lies down on the ground, his hand clenching his mom’s leg. It breaks Iris’s heart. She kneels, puts her hand on the small of his back because she doesn’t know what else to do.

“I tried to get him to move,” one of the joggers says quietly. “He won’t go.”

Iris forces herself to look at Danielle Roberts. The dead woman wears a dark wool coat, jeans, loafers, a dark-gray sweater. Expensive ring on her finger. A massive bruise discolors her throat; blood cakes her mouth, her chin.

“Iris?” the jogger on the phone calls to her. He knows who she is, of course; she isn’t sure of his name in the charge of emotions. She forces herself to flip through her mental catalog of contacts and remembers him. He’s Rachel Sifowicz’s husband. Matt. They have two kids, a senior in high school who plays football and an eighth-grade girl in band. Rachel had to cut back on volunteering when Matt was briefly unemployed after being laid off. Odd rambling thoughts fighting for footing in the slippery slope of her overwhelmed mind.

“Matt,” she says. “Call the police.”

“I did. They’re on their way. I’m on the phone with the emergency operator. They said don’t touch anything.”

“Did you find her?”

“The kids did,” he says. “We heard them screaming and ran here. Is she…for sure?”

Ned found his own mother. Dead. Iris feels faint. She swallows down a tickle of bile. She forces herself to check Danielle’s wrist; she can’t bear to touch that discolored throat. No pulse.

“Yes,” she says. Mom mode. She has to get into mom mode. For both of them.

She looks at the other jogger, a brawny redhead. She doesn’t know his name. “Help me with him,” she says, and he nods.

“Ned,” she whispers. She puts her fingertips on his chin and turns his face toward hers. She has known this boy since he was a toddler. His face is gaunt, his mouth quivering, brown eyes hollow with grief. His breath smells like mouthwash. His dark hair is under a cap. He looks at her like he no longer understands the world.

“Ned, come away.” She can hear the police sirens approaching; he hears them, too, and he shakes his head. Everything is about to change. He can’t let it, she sees; he cannot accept this new world.

“Ned,” she repeats. “Ned.”

He whispers, “Mom can’t be dead. She can’t be.”

“I know, I know. The police are here. Let them help her.”

“Why would anyone hurt her?”

“I don’t know, sweetie. I don’t know. Come with me. Come with us.”

She sees a shadow start to pass over his face, as if he is asking himself the question and considering the answers, and then he presses his face into Iris’s shoulder. She begins to stand, and he resists, but then the redheaded jogger gently raises the boy to his feet, and Iris guides Ned toward the police car that has just pulled up. The weight of him against her shoulder is the weight of this new, awful reality.

She hears words being spoken—Matt, remaining calm; the officer, taking command of the scene; Julia brokenly starting to tell them what happened—but she focuses on Ned, on steering him away from the horror, on holding him up, on comforting him. Another police car arrives.

Ned shudders under her arm.

Iris looks back at Danielle, an empty shell on a cold bench.

She can never tell now.

Iris hugs the grieving boy closer to her.