PART 1
“She’s completely out again.”
And then a second voice came through that car’s speakers.
And it was my husband’s.
“Good. Bring her over. Vonda’s already there.”
I was sitting on the floor of my own bedroom with the door locked and the laptop on my knees.
Listening to eight hours of audio off a recorder I had sewn into the lining of my seven-year-old’s backpack at twenty past six that morning.
My name is Nadia Varga. We live in Belmere, about forty minutes out of the city, on a street with eleven houses on it.
My husband Emeric does corporate finance. Everybody calls him Rick. I do three days a week at a title company in Belmere and the rest at home, and I have done since Mira started kindergarten.
My daughter is seven years old. Her name is Mira.
She is the easiest child anybody in either of our families has ever had, and both of her grandmothers used to say so out loud at the same table.
Rick’s younger brother Lazlo started doing the school pickups in September.
He is thirty-one. He was at my wedding in a rented suit.
He has been at every single birthday that child has ever had, including the one in the hospital cafeteria when she was two and had the chest thing.
He offered. I did not ask him and I want that in here.
He said he was working from home Tuesdays and Thursdays anyway, and that the school was four minutes out of his way, and that it was no trouble at all.
And I was grateful. Properly grateful.
That is what you are when somebody offers. That is the only thing it is possible to be. I told my sister about it on the phone and said how lucky we were with his family.
The first time he carried her in, I was standing at the door.
“She crashed in the car. I didn’t want to wake her.”
I took her off him in the doorway and said her name right into her face.
And she did not react to it. Not a flicker. Not a hand moving. Nothing.
I am that child’s mother. She has come awake for my voice since she was four days old in a hospital room.
I carried her up and put her on her bed with her shoes still on and sat on the end of it for fifty minutes with my hand on her back, counting.
