On Friday night, Scott and I celebrated 10 Years of Wedded Bliss™ with a steak dinner and a hotel night. I tell you this partly to set the scene, and partly because it is no small accomplishment that after the last six months we are still married. (Unrelated, or possibly totally related, a friend of mine told me about an infamous house in Bucktown that, after a snafu involving the roof, had to be torn down and rebuilt on the dime of an unlucky contractor. The couple who owned it divorced not long after the project was completed. “I don’t know if it’s related,” my friend said. “Believe me,” I answered. “It is.”)
Anyway, Saturday morning, I slept until 9:42, which was more luxurious than diamonds or furs could ever be, and the latest I have slept since the kids were born. When we got up, Scott and I laid around watched several hours’ worth of some kind of redneck cooking show involving barbeque served in Styrofoam boxes, which made me gain ten pounds just through some kind of televised osmosis. It was bliss.
But then we went home. It was not because we wanted to, but because the babysitting money ran out.
The sitter who stayed with the kids is a girl all of us just love. She never bats an eye at an overnight or weekend, she is always genuinely happy to see Kai and Ryan. She does art projects with the them and takes them on nature walks. This is more than Scott and I do with them, to be sure. Nonetheless, they were happy to see us when we walked in the door, and, briefly, we them.
I say “briefly” because the sitter was gone for 10 minutes before I heard my name called from upstairs.
“Megan! Come look at this!”
:::
I can’t tell you how much I’ve come to loathe those five words.
They mean one of two things: either the house has revealed yet another hideous defect, or Kai has caused yet more damage.
Both occurrences seem to happen with horrible, psychosis-inducing frequency. Just yesterday, I tried to open the garage door with my key and I couldn’t get it into the lock. I don’t even know how that happens, you guys. It’s the right key, it just won’t go in the lock. Also yesterday, I walked by the kids’ bathroom to find the water running unattended. I have no idea how long it had been that way. I found Kai to ask if he’d turned it on. He was downstairs watching TV. “Oh, yes,” he replied, all nonchalant and casual-like, as though we hadn’t had a million conversations about water, as though he hadn’t flooded the house doing the exact same thing. At least this time, he hadn’t plugged the sink.
Anyway, I found Scott in the bedroom, and saw what caused him to call me up there.
Our lampshades were, well, shredded. On the floor. It was like some kind of murder on SVU, only with lampshades instead of prostitutes.
“Kai!” We both shouted it at once.
:::
“It was Ryan,” Kai said immediately.
“Don’t make it worse by lying,” Scott said.
“I don’t do that,” he insisted.
But who else would it be?
I got down on the floor next to him.
“Honey,” I said, “I’m not even mad, I just want to know why you did this.”
“I didn’t do it,” he said.
But there’s no one else it could be. He destroys everything lately. He finds thread loose on a placemat and the next thing you know it’s in ribbons.
I sighed. “Clean it up,” I said.
:::
And then I got this text from his beloved aid, Eva on Monday:
This gave me pause.
I began to wonder if maybe he wasn’t telling the truth? I mean, I understand lying to your father to CYA. Who hasn’t done that? (Not me, Dad, I swear.) And I understand Kai lying to me to avoid my motherly disappointment. But why keep up the charade at school? What does Eva care?
I tried to see the situation from several different scenarios. I will lay them out for you.
Alternative Suspect 1: Ryan
Could Ryan have done this, as Kai said? I don’t know. She’s smart enough, I suppose, to unscrew the lampshades. She’s definitely smart enough to set Kai up, though she’s usually less sophisticated. She’ll get him to shove her then start to cry, for example. Plus, Ryan doesn’t have the same kind of history that Kai does with destroying things. Unless they belong to Kai, that is.
Likelihood: 30% chance.
Alternative Suspect 2: The Dog
If we are going to include all of the carbon-based life forms in the house, Elliott has to be on the list. Could the dog have done it? He’s got arthritis in his hips and can barely stand on the wood floor without his legs sliding pathetically out from under him. Likelihood: 0%
Alternative Suspect 3: The babysitter
Could the babysitter, in some kind of Manson-family-style trance, have killed the lampshades to, say, protest capitalism or start a race riot? Likelihood: 2% chance, only because she could actually, physically perform the task. But there’s no motive there. I mean, if she was going to destroy something of mine, she could have murdered things that were more expensive or that I cared about much, much, much more.
Alternative Suspect 4: The poltergeist
This is not the first time I’ve asked if there could there be some kind of poltergeist. And frankly, this is not outside the realm of possibility. This is just this kind of low-level mischief that poltergeists do. They unsettle you enough to make you doubt yourself, but not enough to make you run screaming before they can suck you into the hellmouth in your daughter’s closet. Likelihood: 25% chance.
Actual suspect: Kai
Was it Kai? Previous history of destroying things? Check. Lacking in impulse control? Check. Acting weird lately? You’d best believe that’s a check. Likelihood: 99% chance.
Still. I hate to think that I blamed him for something he didn’t do, that I didn’t believe him and that it tore him up inside, to think I’d lost faith in him.
:::
Scott is the first person to defend a husband every time a wife gets murdered and the guy is immediately convicted by the media. Scott Peterson certainly looks guilty, he might say, but all the evidence was circumstantial. Just because you get a ridiculous dye job and a massage-parlor mistress doesn't mean you killed your wife.
Even Scott thinks Kai's guilty as hell.
Because the thing is that where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
Or, to put it in a more relevant way, where there’s ADHD, there’s shredded lampshades.
Or maybe it was a poltergeist.
At this point, a poltergeist might be a relief.
I wonder if that’s covered under our warranty?
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