The Perfect Wife

After Tim drops you back at the house, you use the burner phone to do an online search for graduated electronic decelerator. The links take you to a news story about a mother who sued Meadowbank for assaulting her eighteen-year-old son. There’s footage of him strapped to a board, being shocked thirty-one times. It’s disturbing to watch him scream “No!” over and over, jerking in pain as the electricity hits his body.

That film was made five and a half years ago, you notice. Only a short time before Abbie’s disappearance.

Did the footage spark a disagreement between her and Tim? Had she only then realized exactly what sending Danny to Meadowbank would entail? Could that have been another factor in what happened?

* * *

—

You find yourself thinking about the period of Danny’s diagnosis. Your memories of that time are hazy—almost as if they happened to someone else. Which of course they did, in a sense. They happened to her, to Abbie, and like all her most personal memories left little trace on social media for Tim’s algorithms to reconstruct.

Even so, the terror of that time is embedded deep in your brain.

You realized quite quickly something was wrong, of course. You just didn’t know what.

“Danny?” you called one day. “Lunchtime.”

Normally that would have been enough to bring him running to the table. But not that day. You knew he was in the playroom, playing with a dinosaur he’d been given for his birthday. When he still didn’t come after you called a second time, you put your head around the door.

“Danny!”

He didn’t look up. The dinosaur was on the floor, and he was staring at it. Just staring.

“Lunch,” you repeated. Still he didn’t look up.

You took a step forward, concerned. Then suddenly he turned to look at you, and his familiar toothy smile lit up his face.

* * *

—

“I think Danny might have glue ear,” you told Tim that evening. “He seems to find it hard to hear me sometimes.”

Tim frowned. “Danny?” he called.

At the sound of his father’s voice, Danny looked up. “Yef?”

“Seems all right to me.” Tim turned back to his BlackBerry.

“It varies,” you said defensively. “Anyway, I booked an appointment with the audiologist.”

“My grandpa used to have a saying,” Tim said mildly. “There’s none so deaf as them who don’t want to hear.”

“I’m so sad I never met Grandpa Scott. He always sounds so much fun.”

“He was a miserable old bastard,” Tim agreed.

You pointed silently at Danny.

“Sorry—miserable old person,” Tim said. “My point is, what was the consequence of Danny not paying attention to you? Did his lunch go in the trash?”

“Of course not.”

“Hmm.” Which was shorthand for a whole debate you and Tim had on a regular basis. For him, parenting was a subdivision of engineering, a collection of design processes that merely had to be applied with total consistency in order to produce a well-mannered, efficient outcome. For you, it was a relationship, and half the fun was seeing what happened when you threw the rule book out the window.

You’d never have admitted it to Tim, but you secretly encouraged Danny to climb into bed with you at first light every morning. Feeling your son’s warm, perfect body wriggling alongside yours was the best part of the day. Even his rare outbreaks of naughtiness seemed like cause for celebration, proof he was going to be an independent thinker, his own man, a creative not a suit. Sometimes, when he got angry or defiant with you, it was all you could do not to cheer him on.

When, later that week, the very expensive audiologist diagnosed glue ear and told you it would most likely clear up over time, you felt quietly vindicated.

* * *

—

You’d managed to place Danny in the local Montessori. It was a compromise between Tim and you: You’d rather Danny stayed home, Tim wanted a “proper” preschool.

“Research shows that children who start school earlier do better,” he told you more than once.

“Better at what, exactly?”

“Better at school.”

“But do we really care if he’s academic?” you wondered aloud. “I can teach him to paint better than any classroom assistant.”

“Better socially and academically,” Tim said patiently.

In the end it was the fact that the preschool was just a few blocks away that persuaded you. Plus, if you were honest, you were seduced by the sheer beauty of the Montessori teaching materials—handcrafted from pale Scandinavian oak, not a plastic toy among them.

As you picked Danny up one afternoon, the teacher came over. “I’m a little concerned about Danny’s language, Mrs. Cullen-Scott. He seems to use a lot of nouns. Very few verbs.”

You looked at her, surprised. You hadn’t known the ratio of nouns to verbs was even a thing. “Do you want us to work on it?”

“Oh no,” she said breezily. “I’m sure it’ll sort itself out.”

Needless to say, you spent the rest of the day randomly tossing verbs at him—“Look, Danny, dancing! Look, Danny, jumping! Danny, waving!” He seemed puzzled, but bore it with his customary good humor.

A few days later the same teacher said, “I’m a little concerned about Danny’s hearing. He doesn’t always seem very…present.”

“Well, it’s not glue ear,” you said. “He had that, but the audiologist says it’s cleared up.”

“Have you had him tested for a language processing disorder?”

“For a what?” you said, instantly concerned. You never knew parenthood was going to be such a minefield of disorders. It felt like every day there was a new one you should be worrying about.

“Sometimes it’s like he’s…tuned out for a few moments. I mean, it’s probably nothing, but…”

“No,” you said. “No, I’ve seen the exact same thing.” Because there had been four or five instances of this at home now, this switching-off as you’d come to think of it. You hadn’t wanted to mention it to Tim. You knew he’d ask what the consequences were, and raise his eyebrows when you told him the only consequence was that you got completely terrified.

You made an appointment with a pediatric neurologist. His assistant told you that, for elective scans, there was a waiting time of about seven weeks. Her tone made it clear that elective meant unnecessary.

You went ahead and booked a full set anyway.

* * *

—

Having made the appointment, you felt better—you’d done something, after all. It was probably nothing, but it was going to be checked out.

The next day was a Saturday. Tim went to the office, as usual—he liked it when there were fewer people around, he claimed, though from what you knew of Tim’s employees, they mostly spent weekends at the office, too.

In the night you’d been woken by laughter coming from Danny’s bedroom; a strange, eerie cackling. Not wanting to wake Tim, you’d crept to take a look. Danny’s eyes were open, and he was staring at the ceiling. His eyelids were fluttering.

According to a site you found on the internet, twitching eyelids could be a sign of abnormal brain activity.

Or, admittedly, it could just be a sign he was dreaming with his eyes open.

Tim, of course, was scathing about people who used the Web to make diagnoses. But this looked like a proper site, run by doctors.

You had to get groceries, so you and Danny went to Whole Foods. In the car he was unusually quiet. You kept twisting around to look at him, until you nearly caused an accident.

“They’re bad animals,” he said in a quiet, slurred voice. You pulled over then.

“They’re bad animals,” he repeated. He was looking at the other cars. “Bad animals! Bad animals! Kill them!” He was agitated now, wriggling in his booster seat, trying to bend his tiny body out of it. “Take it off,” he screamed at you. “Take it off! It hurts!”

He was pointing at his own head.

“What is it, Danny? What’s wrong?”

Then, as fast as it had come, the agitation stopped. He slumped back in his seat.

“Danny, what happened?”

“I saw a red one,” he said faintly. “Red ones are the baddest.”

* * *

—

At the store he trotted around next to you as usual, one hand on the shopping cart. When you got to the checkout, there was a line. An old lady was paying with coins, very slowly, counting them out and chatting to the cashier.

You always tried not to mind things like that—if the lady needed to take more time, she should. It was just unfortunate she was there today, when you really wanted to get Danny home.

That’s when you heard a low growling sound coming from his throat. He was staring at the people in front of you.

“It always takes longer at weekends,” you said, to distract him.

And then he started screaming.