The tall man reached into the bed of the truck and lifted out something heavy, and held it low at his side, and started back up the walk.
Chapter Three
The Brick
What the tall man carried up the walk was a brick.
It sat in his gloved hand with an ugly familiarity, the way a tool sits in the hand of a man who has already decided what the tool is for. It was an ordinary brick, red brown and rough, heavy as a small sin, and Nick understood it all at once and refused the understanding in the same instant, because the world he had built so carefully did not have a place in it for what his eyes were telling him.
"Put that down," he said. "Whatever you think this is, put it down and get off my property."
The man did not put it down.
Allison had come out onto the porch steps without deciding to. Later, she would not remember opening the screen door. She remembered the heat on her face and the weight of Logan shifting against her as she moved, the baby still asleep, one fist at her collar, and she remembered thinking with a strange, clear calm that these men were not police, were not officials, were not anything with a right to be standing where they stood.
"You can't just walk onto our property," she said. "We didn't authorize any inspection."
The heavy man finally looked at her. He looked at the baby. Something crossed his face then, some weather of his own, and he half turned toward his partner as if a word might be coming.
"Dave," he said.
The tall man turned. Not toward the voice. Toward the house.
He turned the way a pitcher turns, with the whole of his shoulder in it, and raised his arm, and threw.
Nick would remember the sound before the sight, because his body heard it as an engineer hears a failure, as a single wrong note in a machine. The crash of the living room window was enormous and ordinary at once, glass going all at once the way glass does, a bright shattering that seemed to come from everywhere in the room behind them. Allison felt the spray of it on her back and her arms as she twisted, too late to matter, curving her body around her son.
The brick came through the window and across the room in the time it takes to fail to breathe.
It struck Logan.
There was a sound. Allison heard it through the whole of her body rather than her ears, a dull and final thud, and afterward she would hear it again in kitchens and parking lots and the small hours of the night for a long time. The brick fell to the hardwood floor and lay there among the glass, and the bright afternoon stood in the broken window as if it had forced its way in to look.
Nick dropped the water bottle. It burst at his feet unheard. He was already reaching, his arms out, his hands open and shaking in the air, but there was a distance between the porch and his family that no man could cross in time, and he crossed it anyway, and it was too late anyway, and both of those things were true for the rest of his life.
Allison did not scream.
She went down. Her knees folded the way a chair folds, as if her legs had consulted each other and resigned, and she sank to the porch boards with Logan pressed to her chest and her whole body curved over him. His tiny hand had let go of her collar. His body was limp against her. There was blood on her sleeve, bright against the pale blue of the blanket, blooming where his small head rested.
Her mouth moved. Words formed there and made no sound at all, the prayers going up silent because her voice had gone somewhere her body could not follow.
Behind her, rubber shrieked on asphalt.
The two men were in the truck before the glass had finished settling on the floor. The engine roared up out of its idle, and the black pickup tore away from the curb and down Oakridge Drive, past the Abernathy house, past the chalk drawings, around the bend it had come from, gone in seconds with nothing on it to remember but block letters and black paint.
No plate. No number. Nothing to write down.
Nick was on his knees on the porch with his hands hovering over his wife and his son, afraid to touch, afraid worse not to, his mind running its inspections in a burning building. Alive. Check if he is alive. Check the baby first. Breathe. Help him breathe.
"Allison," he said. "Allison. Look at me. Is he breathing?"
And Allison Grace rocked once, twice, with her son against her heart, and found the place in herself where the sound had been waiting.
Chapter Four