Page 23 of Everyone Here Is Lying
“We need to talk to your son. Is he home?” Detective Bledsoe repeats.
“He’s in bed.”
“Can you get him up, please?”
She turns away from them and makes her way upstairs and opens the door to her son’s room, her mind all over the place. She’s thinking,Not again.She can’t face Ryan getting into trouble for drugs again. She flicks on the light. He doesn’t respond. She moves over to the bed and shakes him by the shoulder and says urgently, “Ryan, the police are here. They want to talk to you.”
He looks up at her groggily. “What? Why?”
“I don’t know.”
On the landing, Al appears at their bedroom door. “What’s going on?” he asks, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
Nora says, “The police are here. They want to talk to Ryan.” She sees the immediate concern on her husband’s face.
Her husband grabs a robe and the three of them go downstairs. Nora keeps her eyes on her son, in T-shirt and pajama bottoms, his hair sticking up at odd angles. But what she notes most is how worried he looks when he sees the detectives standing in the downstairs hall.
“Let’s go into the living room,” Nora suggests, functioning on automatic pilot, something awful in the pit of her stomach. None of this feels real. She can’t do this. Not again.
They all sit down and face one another.
Detective Bledsoe says, “Ryan, do you mind telling us where you were Tuesday afternoon?”
Nora’s simmering anxiety escalates to genuine fear.What is going on here?She glances at Al, who looks alarmed. Then she looks back at Ryan, who suddenly seems very young and overwhelmed.
“I, um, I have to think,” he says.
“Take your time,” Bledsoe says, as if humoring him. Nora immediately dislikes the detective.
“My shift at work was canceled yesterday,” Ryan says, stumbling over his words. “I usually work one to nine, but they’ve been cutting back lately.”
“So where were you?”
“I was here, at home for a while.” He turns to Nora. “I was here when you left, remember?”
She nods. “That’s right. He was home.”
“And what time did you leave, Mrs. Blanchard?”
“I went to run a few errands around two or two thirty,” she says, feeling the heat rise in her face with the lie. She’d gone to the motel to meet William. But they aren’t here about her and William, she realizes. This is much worse.
“And what did you do, Ryan?” the detective asks.
“I, uh, I hung out here for a while, then I went out in my car.”
“Alone?”
Ryan nods. “Yes.” His face is flushed. He’s not meeting the detective’s eyes.
“What time would that be?” Bledsoe asks.
“I don’t know exactly. Sometime around four thirty?”
Nora sees Bledsoe give the other detective a sharp glance.
“Where did you go?”
“I drove out of town, just killing time.”
