Beneath Her Skin

a restaurant owner would call milk and sugar ‘food,’ Mom.”
“That isn’t the point.”
“Yeah. I get it,” Katelyn said, feeling it unnecessary to point out that she’d been forced to have a food worker’s permit since she was nine and could recite safe temperatures for meat, poultry, milk and vegetables in her sleep.
The lights flickered and the breakers in the kitchen popped.
Another reason to hate this old house, even if it does have an extra upstairs bathroom.
Sandra started up the darkened stairs and made her way down the hallway. She could hear the sound of water running.
She called out to Katelyn and knocked on her bedroom door.
No answer.
Sandra twisted the knob and, at once, a wall of icy air blasted her face. Katelyn had left the window open. The lights were out too. Sandra flipped the switch up and down more times than she needed to, to prove the obvious. The room stayed dark.
Lights from the neighbor’s house next door spilled onto the wooden floor.
Sandra gripped the sill and pulled the window closed, shaking her head at her daughter’s escalating carelessness. It had to be forty degrees in that room. It would take all night to warm it up. She wondered how any teenager managed to survive to adulthood.
“Katelyn Melissa, you’re going to catch a cold!”
Sandra walked past the unmade bed—the one that looked good only on Sundays when she changed the sheets. Katelyn’s jeans and black Penney’s top—a Marc Jacobs knockoff—were heaped on the floor.
What a colossal mess.
The bathroom door was open a sliver and Sandra, still freezing, pushed it aside. Aromatherapy candles flickered.
“What are you thinking?” she asked, her tone harsh and demanding. Katelyn wasn’t thinking at all.
The fifteen-year-old was slumped over the edge of the old clawfoot tub, her eyes tiny shards of broken glass, her expression void of anything. Her long, wet hair dripped onto the floor.
Instinct took over and Sandra lunged in the direction of her daughter, slipping on the wet floor and falling. As she reached for the rim of the tub, she yelled, “I could have broken my neck! What’s going on with you?”
No answer, to a very stupid question.
Sandra, her heart racing and the rum now gnawing at the walls of her stomach, tried to steady herself in the candlelight. She tasted blood. Her own. She’d cut her lip when she’d fallen, and several red drops trickled to the floor. She felt tears, fear and panic as she looked at Katelyn in the faint candlelight. Her lifeless daughter. It was so very hard to see with the lights out. Katelyn’s dark-brown hair, highlighted by a home kit, hung limp, curling over the edge of the tub. One arm was askew, as if flailing at something unseen.
The other was hidden in the sudsy water.
“Katie. Katie. Katie!” With each repetition of her daughter’s name, Sandra’s voice grew louder. By the third utterance, it was a scream that probably could be heard all over Port Gamble.
Katelyn Melissa Berkley, just fifteen, was dead.
“It can’t be,” Sandra said, tears now streaming down her face. She was woozy. Sick. Scared. She wanted to call for Harper, but she knew he had gone. She was alone in the house where the unthinkable had occurred. She slipped again as she pulled at Katelyn’s shoulders, white where the cold air had cooled them, pinkish in the still-hot bathwater. Two-tone. Like a strawberry dipped in white chocolate.
Katelyn loved white chocolate. Even though Sandra insisted it wasn’t really chocolate at all.
“Baby, what happened?” Instinctively, Sandra turned off the slowly rising water. “Tell me you’re going to be all right!”
At first, Sandra only heard dead silence. Then the quiet drip, drip, drip of the tub’s leaky faucet. There was no answer to her question. There never could be. Never again.
Sandra shook her daughter violently, a reflex that she hadn’t had since Katelyn was a little girl and had lied about something so inconsequential that the terrified mother couldn’t retrieve the full memory of what had made her so angry.
As she spun around to go for a phone, Sandra Berkley noticed there was something else in the tub. It was hard to see. It was so dark in that bathroom. Through her thickening veil of tears, she leaned over and scooted the suds away.
The mini espresso machine.
Her eyes followed the electrical cord. Like a cobra that had recoiled, ready to strike, the plug sat upright, still firmly snug in the wall outlet at the side of the tub.
In small towns like Port Gamble, Washington, news travels fast. Within moments of the reverberating echoes of Sandra Berkley’s anguished screams, residents had begun to gather outside the tidy red house with white trim and pineapple shutters. Christmas lights of white, green and red sparkled in the icy night air. A passerby might have mistaken the gathering for a large group of carolers.
Port Gamble was that kind of place. At least, it tried to be.
An ambulance siren wailed down the highway from Kingston, growing louder with each second.
That the teenager had died was known by everyone. What exactly happened, no one was certain.
Someone in the crowd whispered that Katelyn had fallen in the tub and split her head open. Another suggested that the girl had “issues” of some sort and had taken her own life.
“Maybe she offed herself? Kids do that a lot these days. You know, one final grasp for attention.”
“I dunno. She didn’t seem the type.”
“Kids are hard to read.”
“True enough, but even so, I don’t think she was the kind of girl who would hurt herself.”
Scenes of sudden tragedy have their macabre pecking order when it comes to who stands where. Closest to the doorway were those who knew and loved the dead girl: her mother, father, a cousin or two. In the next wave were the friends, the church pastor and a police deputy, who was there to make sure that the scene stayed orderly. Beyond that were casual acquaintances, neighbors, even the occasional rubbernecker who was on the scene because it was better than