by Monica Ali
ALSO BY MONICA ALI
Brick Lane
Alentejo Blue
In the Kitchen
SCRIBNER
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either
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Copyright © 2011 by Monica Ali
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-1-4516-3548-5
ISBN 978-1-4516-3551-5 (ebook)
For M.M.S.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Some stories are never meant to be told. Some can only be told as fairy tales.
Once upon a time three girlfriends threw a little party for a fourth who had yet to arrive by the time the first bottle of Pinot Grigio had been downed. Walk with me now across the backyard of the neat suburban house, in this street of widely spaced heartlands, past the kid’s bike and baseball bat staged just so on the satin green lawn, up to the sweet glow of the kitchen window, and take a look inside. Three women, one dark, one blonde, the third a redhead—all in their prime, those tenuous years when middle age is held carefully at bay. There they are, sitting at the table, innocent of their unreality, oblivious to the story, naively breathing in and out.
“Where is Lydia?” says Amber, the blonde. She is a neat little package. Delicate features, Peter Pan collar dress, French tip manicure. “Where the heck can she be?”
“We holding off on the sandwiches, right?” says Suzie, the dark-haired friend. She didn’t have time to get changed before she came out. There is a splash of Bolognese sauce on her T-shirt. She made it in a hurry and left it for the kids and babysitter to eat. “These reduced-calorie Ruffles? Forget it, not going there.” She pushes the bowl of chips away.
“Should I call her again?” says Amber. “I left three messages already.” She closed up her clothing store an hour early to be sure to get everything ready on time.
The redhead, Tevis, takes a small phallus-shaped crystal out of her pocket and sets it on the table. She says, “I had a premonition this morning.”
“You see a doctor about that?” Suzie, in her favorite khaki pants and stained T-shirt, sits like a man, right ankle on left knee. She gives Amber a wink.
“You guys can mock all you want,” says Tevis. She has come straight from work. In her pantsuit, with her hair in a tight bun, pursing her lips, she looks close to prim—the opposite of how she would want to be seen.
“We’re not mocking,” says Amber. “Was it about Lydia?”
“Not specifically,” says Tevis in a very Tevis way. She cups her hands above the stone.
“You carry that around with you?” says Suzie. Her hair is aubergine dark, a hint of purple, and has that freshly colored shine. She plucks a carrot out of the refrigerator and peels it directly onto the table that has been laid with the pretty crockery, hand-painted red and pink roses, fine bone china cups and saucers with handles so small they make you crook your little finger, just like a real English high tea. “Don’t worry, I’m clearing this up.”
“You better,” says Amber, but she reaches across and scoops up the peelings herself. If Lydia walks in that second everything has to look right. She feels guilty about packing Serena and Tyler off to friends’ houses when they’d wanted to stay and say happy birthday to Lydia. Wouldn’t Lydia have preferred to see the children rather than have everything arranged just so? Amber tucks her hair behind her ears and pulls a loose thread from her sleeve. “Please say it wasn’t about her.”
“Jeez Louise,” says Suzie. “She’ll be working late. You know how she loves those dogs.”
“Why isn’t she answering her phone?” says Amber.
“I didn’t wrap her present. Think she’ll mind?” Suzie snaps off the end of the carrot with her front teeth. The teeth are strong and white but irregular; they strike an attitude.
“I’m not trying to worry anyone,” says Tevis. She puts the crystal back in the pocket of her tailored jacket. She is a Realtor and has to look smart. It’s not who she is. It’s what she does. As she herself has pointed out many times. But this is a town full of skeptics, people who buy into all that bricks-and-mortar-and-white-goods fandango instead of having their chakras cleansed.
“Seriously,” says Suzie, “you’re not.” She loves Tevis. Tevis has no kids so you talked about other stuff. Suzie has four kids and once you’d talked about those and then talked about the other moms’ kids, it was time to head home and pack sports gear for the following day. Tevis being childless meant you felt a bit sorry for her, and a bit jealous. Probably the same way she felt about you. She could be dreamy, or she could be intense, or some strange combination of the two. And she was fun to tease.
“Remember what happened last time?” says Tevis.
“Last time what? You had a premonition? Is it about Lydia or not?” Amber, she is pretty sure, knows Lydia better than the others do. She got friendly with her first, nearly three years ago now.
“I don’t know,” says Tevis. “It’s just a bad feeling. I had it this morning, right after I got out of the shower.”
“I had a bad feeling in the shower this morning,” says Suzie. “I felt like I was going to eat a whole box of Pop-Tarts for breakfast.”
“How late is she anyway? God, an hour and a half.” Amber looks wistfully at the silver cake forks fanned out near the center of the table. They were nearly black when she found them in the antiques store over on Fairfax, but have cleaned up beautifully.
“And guess what,” said Suzie. “I did. The whole freakin’ box.”
Tevis takes off her jacket. “The air always gets like this before a thunderstorm.�
��
“What?” says Suzie. “It’s a beautiful evening. You’re not in Chicago anymore.”
“I’m just saying,” says Tevis. She fixes Suzie a stare.
“Come on, Tevis, don’t try to creep us out.” The cucumber sandwiches are beginning to curl at the edges. It is kind of dumb, Amber knows it, to have English high tea at seven in the evening. More like eight thirty now.
“Yeah, let’s just hear it, girl, the last time you had a premonition . . .” Suzie begins at her usual rat-a-tat pace, but suddenly tails off.
“So you do remember,” says Tevis. She turns to Amber. “Please try not to be alarmed. But last time I had a premonition was the day Jolinda’s little boy ran out in the street and got hit by the school bus.”
“And you saw that? You saw that ahead of time?”
Tevis hesitates a moment, then scrupulously shakes her head. “No. It was more like a general premonition.”
“And that was—what?—two years ago? How many you had since then?” Amber, her anxiety rising, glances at the Dundee cake, enthroned on a glass stand as the table’s centerpiece. It is mud brown and weighs a ton. Lydia mentioned it one time, a childhood favorite, and Amber found a recipe on the Internet.
“None,” says Tevis, “until today.”
“You never get a bad feeling in the mornings?” says Suzie. “Man, I get them, like, every day.”
Amber gets up and starts washing the three dirty wineglasses. She has to do something and it’s all she can think of except, of course, calling Lydia again. But when Lydia strides through the door, that swing in her hips, that giggle in her voice, Amber doesn’t want to feel too foolish. “Damn it, I’m calling again,” she says, drying her hands.
“There’s no reason why it should be to do with Lydia,” says Tevis, but the more she says it, the more certain she feels that it is. Only a couple of days ago, Lydia came over and asked for the tarot cards, something she had always refused before. Tevis laid the cards out on the mermaid mosaic table but then Rufus wagged his tail and knocked two cards to the floor. Lydia picked them up and said, “Let’s not do this,” and shuffled all the cards back into the deck. Tevis explained that it wouldn’t matter, that to deal the cards again would not diminish their power. “I know,” Lydia said, “but I’ve changed my mind. Rufus changed it for me. He’s very wise, you know.” She laughed, and though her laugh contained, as usual, a peal of silver bells, it also struck another note. Lydia was intuitive, she knew things, she sensed them, and she had backed away from the cards.
“Absolutely no reason,” Tevis repeats, and Suzie says, “It’s probably nothing at all,” which sounds like words of comfort and makes the three of them uneasy that such comfort should be required.
Amber tosses her cell phone onto a plate. Lydia’s phone has gone to voice mail again and what’s the point in leaving yet another message? “Maybe she took Rufus on a long walk, lost track of time, forgot to take her phone.” She knows how lame it sounds.
“She could’ve got the days mixed,” says Suzie, without conviction.
“Suzie, it’s her birthday. How could she get the days mixed? Anyway she called this morning and said see you at seven. There’s no mix-up, she’s just . . . late.” Lydia had sounded distracted, it was true. But, thinks Amber, she has frequently seemed distracted lately.
“What the . . .” says Suzie.
“I told you,” says Tevis. “Hail.”
“What the . . .” says Suzie again, and the rest of her sentence is lost in the din.
“Come on,” shouts Amber, racing for the front door. “If she arrives right now we’ll never hear the bell.”
They stand outside on the front deck and watch the hail drum off Mrs. Gillolt’s roof, snare sideways off the hood of Amber’s Highlander, rattle in and out of the aluminum bucket by the garage. The sky has turned an inglorious dirty purple, and the hail falls with utter abandon, bouncing, colliding, rolling, compelling in its unseemliness. It falls and it falls. The hail is not large, only dense, pouring down like white rice from the torn seam above. “Oh my God,” screams Amber. “Look at it,” Suzie screams back. Tevis walks down the steps and plants herself on the lawn, arms held wide, head tilted back to the sky. “Is she saying a prayer?” yells Suzie, and Amber, despite the tension, or because of it, starts to laugh.
She is laughing still when a car pulls off the road; the headlights seem to sweep the hail, lift it in a thick white cloud above the black asphalt driveway, and spray it toward the house. Tevis lets her arms drop and runs toward the car, her Realtor’s cream silk blouse sticking to her skinny back. The others run down too. It must be Lydia, although the car is nothing but a dark shape behind the lights.
When Esther climbs out of the front seat, clutching a present to her chest, they embrace her in an awkward circle of compensation that does little to conceal their disappointment.
Back in the kitchen, Amber sets another place at the table. Esther brushes hail from her shoulders, unpins her bun, and shakes a few hailstones out of her long gray hair. “Forgot I was coming, didn’t you?” she says, her tone somewhere between sage and mischievous.
“No!” says Amber. “Well, yes.”
“That’s what happens to women,” says Esther. “We reach an age where we get forgotten about.” She doesn’t sound remotely aggrieved.
Amber, through her cloud of embarrassment and anxiety, experiences a pang for what lies ahead, fears, in fact, that it has already begun, at her age, a divorcée the rest of her life. She gathers herself to the moment. “The thing is, we’ve all been a bit worried about Lydia. Has she been working late? She’s not answering her phone.”
“Lydia took the day off,” says Esther. “You mean she’s not been here?”
Nobody answers, as Esther looks from one to the next.
“We should drive over to the house,” says Suzie.
“Wait until the hail stops,” says Tevis.
“We can’t just sit here,” says Amber.
They sit and look at each other, waiting for someone to take charge.
Chapter Two
One month earlier, March 2007
For a town of only eight thousand inhabitants, Kensington pretty much had everything: a hardware store, two grocery stores, a florist, a bakery, a pharmacy with a wider-than-usual selection of books, an antiques store, a Realtor’s, a funeral home. When there was a death in Abrams, Havering, Bloomfield, or Gains, or any of the other not-quite-towns that tumbled across the county, nobody would dream of calling a funeral home in the city. They would call J. C. Dryden and Sons, a business established in 1882, a mere four years after the founding of Kensington itself. If, as sometimes happened, demand was running so high that a funeral could not be accommodated in timely fashion, Mr. Dryden would call the bereaved to advise personally on alternatives. Kensington was thus sought after in death, and if it was not quite equally sought after in life, real estate prices were certainly on the high side. A couple of Kensington’s stores were located on Fairfax but the majority lined Albert Street or turned the corner into Victoria Street. From Albert, the town fanned away on a gentle incline to the north, to the south reached down within five miles of the interstate, handy for those with a city commute, to the east was bounded by a thirsty-looking river, and to the west by the sprinkler-saturated greens of the golf course that eventually gave way to a forest of tamaracks, sweet gums, and pines.
Lydia drove past the golf course on her way into town. Wednesdays she worked a half day at the Kensington Canine Sanctuary, a sprawling block of kennels and yards just outside of town that picked up mutts or had them delivered from “the area of darkness”; that was how Esther described the county, which had no other dog shelters at all. Four days a week Lydia worked until six in the evening, ordering supplies, cleaning kennels, training and handling, humping thirty-pound bags of Nature’s Variety dried dog food, eating Esther’s chicken rice salad out of Tupperware. But Wednesdays Lydia nudged Rufus awake with the toe of her sneaker at noon. He�
��d be sleeping in the office with his ears flapped over his eyes, and he’d stretch his butt up in the air, shiver his front paws, and shake his head as if he knew not what the world was coming to, then race ahead of her to leap in the back of the dusty blue Sport Trac.
Usually Lydia scooped him out of the cargo box and set him on the front passenger seat but today she let him ride in the box with the wind streaming back his ears, so when she said, “Do you think I should stop seeing Carson?” there was no quizzical face looking up at her, urging her to continue. She shrugged at the empty passenger seat and switched the radio on.
She drove up Fairfax, past the sports field, playground, elementary school, and bed-and-breakfast and turned into Albert, parking by the bakery where she bought two toasted pastrami and Swiss paninis and walked up to Amber’s store, Rufus padding so close to her ankles she had a job to avoid tripping over him.
The store didn’t close for lunch and Wednesdays Amber’s assistant went to hairdressing school in the city so Lydia always took sandwiches in.
“Hey,” said Amber, looking up from a magazine. She came around from behind the counter adjusting her skirt and her hair, touching her finger to the bow of her lip to make sure no lipstick had strayed.
