It rang off the side of the house. It rang off the fence and the Nakamuras' garage and the patio cover, and she heard it come back to her, thin and wild, and she didn't care, she screamed it again, with her hands spread over her belly as if she could cover the baby's ears from inside—"Explain? Kissing my mother? Explain that—explain that to me, Grant—"
Somebody behind her said, "Oh my God."
She turned. They had come around the corner of the house—not all of them, but enough. Priya, in front, already moving. Teresa with her hand over her mouth. Two of the second-grade teachers. Linda, Grant's mother, gripping the arm of a lawn chair she'd carried with her without noticing. And behind them, coming up from the garage with a bag of ice in each hand, her father.
Frank stopped. He looked at the glass. He looked at his daughter's bleeding ankles. He looked past her, at the lemon tree, at his wife with her back against the fence and her honey-colored hair mussed on one side, at his son-in-law with lipstick—Diane's shade, a brownish rose she'd worn since the eighties—smeared at the corner of his mouth.
He set the two bags of ice down on the gravel, gently, side by side, as if they were something that could break.
"Nora," he said. "Honey. Come here. Come here to me. Watch the glass."
She went to him. She walked straight through the glass in her sandals and she didn't feel it, and he caught her by both elbows and then pulled her against him, and she shook, and he held her. Over her head she heard him say, very quietly, in a voice she had never once heard in thirty-one years: "Get away from her, Grant."
"Frank—"
"Get away from her. Diane. Go inside. Go inside right now."
"Frank, please, this isn't—"
"Diane." Just her name. Nothing else. And after a second, Nora heard her mother's sandals on the grass, and the side door, and the house swallowing her.
* * *
What she remembered of the next hour came back to her in pieces, like a dream described by someone else.