by Sonja Yoerg
Soft air, more summer than spring, floated in through the open window. The moon was already high, casting blue shadows that made the familiar objects in the room take on wondrous qualities. She shouldn’t go out, she knew she shouldn’t, but she couldn’t stay. She would come back—at least she planned to—but tonight she had to break out into the moonlight.
She climbed out of bed and dressed in yesterday’s clothes. She removed her jackknife from the top drawer of her dresser and slipped out of her room and down the stairs, her sneakers in her hand. She bypassed the front door and went straight through the kitchen to the back door. It didn’t creak and was more private, plus Suzanne had hidden a key under a plant pot for when Iris slept in the hammock. Once outside, Iris put on her shoes and went through the side gate and onto the sidewalk, keeping to the shadows as much as she could.
The town slept. Iris knew vaguely where she was from being driven around, but her internal map was incomplete. It didn’t matter. She followed her senses, sniffing the air and judging the height of the trees and the shape of the land from the moon shadows. She moved away from the center of town, through the university—a very large school where Iris had overheard Suzanne tell Brynn she should never go late at night. Iris guessed that whatever dangers Suzanne meant weren’t ones that would bother Iris. She was just passing through and doubted anyone could catch her anyway.
She approached a large road and crouched behind a concrete barrier until the few cars had disappeared. She crossed the road and two smaller ones, the smell of trees, a great stand of trees ahead, pulling her along, reeling her in. Near the house, the streetlights had been close together. Now, wherever she was, there were hardly any. Iris broke into a run, letting her feet find their own rhythm. Running into the night, into the slipstream of the moon.
She climbed over a wooden rail fence and found herself in the woods. The moon struggled to reach the ground here, and she picked her way carefully.
“Ash? You here?”
She moved deeper into the woods. The trees knit a solid blanket above her. In her own woods, in her home, she’d be out on a warm, soft, moonlit night like this and just lie down and go to sleep. She wanted to do that so badly, she could feel the earth pulling at her, gravity times a thousand. She yawned.
“Ash,” she said, impatient now. “Why don’t you just come here? I’m tired.”
She listened, not with her ears, but with her heart, the way she always had. The leaf-thick ground and the rough trunks gave up nothing. These woods were strangely empty. At home she would’ve felt the company of animals curled in their lairs, birds hunched on their roosts with beaks tucked under their wings. She would’ve expected a pair of yellow eyes to appear: a raccoon or a skunk. Not here. She thought maybe she’d lost her knowledge, and the forest was hiding from her.
Even Ash. Where was he? She’d been away too long, she guessed. Her chest tightened.
“Ash! Stop fooling around!”
Her voice surprised her, too fierce for the night.
Iris walked slowly, touching her fingertips to the low bushes and the slick young saplings as she passed.
A sour smell, a bad smell, made her pause. In the dark, she swiveled to her right. Something was there. Not Ash, she was dead sure about that. Her pulse sped up and she told herself not to be a fool. Probably a deer, lying down. Maybe it was hurt and afraid. It was that sort of smell.
Iris tensed, ready to run. She reached into her pocket, pulled out the knife.
“Looking for someone, girlie?” A man’s voice, grating, like stone against stone, maybe thirty feet away. Rustling, then a soft sound, a blanket being thrown off. “Don’t know anyone named Ash, but I’ll bet I’m as good.”
Footfalls. He was coming toward her.
Iris sprang away, darting between the trees, a shadow in the shadows, twigs snapping under her feet. She reached the fence, vaulted over, and paused, willing the thunder of her heart to die down so she could hear.
Nothing. Only the hum of a car driving along the road a good distance behind her.
She turned and ran, out into the reassuring moonlight and into the darkness again.
She should not have come. Ash was lost to her.
Her heart sank, weakening her knees. She choked back her tears and kept on because she didn’t know what else to do.
She found her way to the university and to the right street, bathed in yellow light, and to the house. She stood before it, the windows dark upstairs and down. Here was home.
And yet she was lost.
CHAPTER 26
Suzanne retrieved two plates from the cupboard and placed them on the counter along with forks and knives. Behind her, Mia was unpacking the lunch she had brought for the two of them. Mia had called last night to announce she was coming over today. “I need to escape the office, plus I haven’t seen you in forever.” Suzanne hid her surprise; Mia rarely abandoned her law office for any reason short of catastrophe. Work was her escape. Suzanne could only surmise that Whit had said something to Malcolm, who had assigned Mia the task of finding out what the hell was wrong with Suzanne. Did her outburst at her parents’ house really warrant this?
Mia piled kale-and-radicchio salad onto the plates and balanced a rectangle of focaccia on each. She stepped back so Suzanne could see. “Enough for you?”
“Plenty, thanks.”
“Should I save some for Iris?”
“She ate already.”
“And you got rid of her how?”
Suzanne sighed. “It’s not hard these days. She retreats to her room whenever Brynn’s not around.”
Mia gave her a long look.
Suzanne wanted out from under it. “So where shall we sit?”
Mia first surveyed the kitchen counter, covered with papers, a laptop, and several botany texts and other books for Iris, then the breakfast table, where Suzanne had dumped the tower of mail she had brought in from the foyer but had not yet sorted through. Mia picked up the plates. “How about the dining room?”
Suzanne nodded and led the way. “As long as you don’t expect me to break out the crystal.” She pulled placemats and cloth napkins from the sideboard. See? I can still be civilized, even without advance notice.
Mia returned to the kitchen, filled two glasses with water, and sat across from Suzanne. “I’ll dispense with the small talk. Whit’s worried about you. And given what he told Malcolm, so am I.”
“You’re staging an intervention.”
Mia frowned. “I’m worried about my best friend, so I’m having lunch with her.”
A sarcasm-free statement from Mia was so rare, Suzanne began to worry, too. What had Whit said? That she’d overreacted to a playful stunt of Brynn’s? She became annoyed at the thought of the whispering behind her back, not that Whit hadn’t expressed his concerns directly as well. “Not the woman I married,” she recalled him saying that night. It had stung but she couldn’t argue. The woman he had married was dutiful to a fault, and docile. Whit and she had stated dating when Suzanne was living at home because she couldn’t hold down a job. Her anxiety was debilitating and she had trouble focusing. Antianxiety meds smoothed over the cracks, but the cracks were still there. Suzanne felt she might have a panic attack, collapse, at any moment. Whit calmed her, got her away from her parents, but now it occurred to her she might have simply traded one cage for another.
Mia began to eat. Between bites, she said, casually, “So what’s going on?”
Suzanne held her fork but didn’t touch her salad. Whit had asked her to account for her behavior. Tinsley had called to admonish her—and suggest yet again she return Iris, with the receipt and in the original packaging. Brynn had stopped talking to Suzanne, and Iris was taking all her cues from Brynn. And Reid? Suzanne would have expected him to understand her frustration and disillusionment, but the last few days he seemed to be avoiding her. No one had asked her the open question Mia had.
“I feel like I’ve failed Iris. She hasn’t even been here a month and I’
ve already lost her.”
“Lost her? How?”
“To Brynn.” She realized how petty and competitive that sounded. “I don’t have a problem with them being friends—obviously, that would be wonderful—but I question Brynn’s motives.”
Mia was unfazed. “We both know Brynn is a force to be reckoned with.” She took a bite of focaccia. “But what is the girl doing exactly?”
Suzanne shrugged. “That’s it. I don’t know. I don’t think I have for quite a while. It’s like she’s on the other side of a piece of glass, only it’s not actually transparent. Brynn controls what I see.”
“She’s fifteen. They all want to get away with murder—or at least mayhem.”
“I know. But somehow it feels more corrupt than it should.”
Mia stopped chewing. “Corrupt is a strong word.”
“My feelings are running pretty strong. Isn’t that why you’re here?”
“I suppose that’s correct.”
Suzanne sipped her water. She still hadn’t touched her food. Her stomach was sour.
“Mia, don’t you sometimes wonder what it is we’re doing?”
“Meaning?”
Her mind was filled with myriad thoughts, charged with emotion that sent them spinning at unpredictable angles. She willed them into alignment. “Perhaps you don’t wonder what you’re doing because you’ve held on to your career with both hands. But for the rest of us, for all the mothers who spend every waking moment striving to perfect their children’s lives, don’t you wonder what it serves?”
Mia smiled. “The little darlings. It serves our darling children. And make no mistake, just because I outsource a lot of tasks, I’m doing the same thing, in practice.”
Suzanne nodded, although she wasn’t convinced it was, in fact, the same. Throwing money at a problem wasn’t equivalent to throwing your life at it. Funny how she had just called child rearing “a problem.” Suzanne pushed that thought aside and pressed on. “Of course it’s for the kids. But is it good for them? And I’m not sure I’m even allowed to pose this question, but what about us, the parents? Is it good for us?”
Her friend studied her. Suzanne had the full attention of an adult, and it felt like sunlight.
Mia said, “This is what you’ve been thinking about?”
“Yes.”
“It’s subversive, to be sure.”
“Don’t joke.”
“I am, but not really.” Mia paused, reflecting. Her lawyerly mind was working, running through theories, scenarios. “So first. I agree it’s crazy. All the stuff, all the attention, all the details that don’t make a damn bit of difference, like stressing over what shade of blue the high-tech team jersey ought to be. They can’t play in Fruit of the Loom T-shirts?”
Suzanne leaned toward her. “Right. It’s not exactly a revelation because everyone talks about it. Everyone is aware of it and complains about it, or at least most people do. But no one takes their own misgivings seriously. That’s what gets me. Everyone agrees that it’s crazy, but no one changes anything. They just laugh it off and get in line.”
“Because everyone we know lives and parents this way. It’s the water we swim in.”
“It’s the Kool-Aid we drink. Iris helped me see that.”
“Iris says this?”
“Not directly. But I’ve spent weeks explaining this world to her: why we buy things, why we need so many choices, why we try to get so much money, why we never sit still, why we throw so much away. I hear myself explain all this—or try to—and I can’t believe how ridiculous I sound.” Suzanne swallowed hard. She took a breath and spread her arms out wide. “I can’t believe this is me.”
Mia met her gaze. “Where is Whit in all this?”
“Nowhere.” Suzanne was surprised by how firm her tone was. “Whit is nowhere.”
A hush settled over the room, stretching across a long moment.
Mia spoke, her voice low. “After Zane disappeared from our lives, we thought we’d maxed out on the bad luck, if that’s what it was.”
Suzanne said, “You tried everything. You know you both did.”
“Sure. Twice. And Alex was proof. Great kid, everyone said so. Solid. Except it’s never that simple. Alex was the counterweight. He had to make up for Zane, and because Zane took all our attention and then Meryl started acting up, we never saw it. Poor kid.” Mia picked up her glass, setting off a tremor across the water’s surface. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “The pills Alex took? I told everyone we didn’t know where he’d gotten them. He didn’t say anything about it. No one pressed him. Why would they? Everyone was too glad he was alive. Besides, you can get pills anywhere, right? Xanax. Codeine. Ativan.”
Suzanne held her breath. A crack had opened in the veneer that separated her from her own most honest self. She blinked back tears and reached for Mia’s hand.
“Thing was, they were mine. They were all mine.”
Suzanne said, “Tell me.”
Mia straightened her shoulders and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “You know how I joke about my father.”
Suzanne nodded. “Cy the Cyborg.” She couldn’t help but smile a little at that.
“Exactly. I joke about him. I joke about everything.” Her face became grim. “My father’s not funny. I didn’t realize until Zane, but they are the same, Suzanne. The same.”
Suzanne tried to picture Mia’s father, details about him. Nothing specific emerged, only a persistent feeling of unease in his presence, which she’d always ignored.
“Zane got it from me, through me. I should’ve seen. I should’ve known and not have been blindsided. And now Alex is suffering because I couldn’t figure out what to do. I’ve ruined both my sons.”
Mia’s distress was so vivid and unexpected, Suzanne faltered. “You haven’t.”
“Haven’t I?” Mia wiped her eyes with her napkin. “Isn’t this what you’ve been saying? We agonize over every decision, every damn detail, and we still get it wrong. We lose them, Suzanne. No matter what, we ruin them and we lose them.”
Suzanne went to her friend and held her. She knew she should make an effort to dissuade Mia, but she couldn’t think of what to say.
CHAPTER 27
Reid carried the last of the card tables to the storage room and hiked up the slope to the Birdwood Grill to meet his grandfather, as he had promised. He wasn’t looking forward to it. He had nothing in common with Anson Royce and had already wasted an entire day helping out with a golf fund-raiser. At least the cause was legit—an Alzheimer’s foundation. But he didn’t understand why all these people had to go to the trouble of organizing a golf scramble, chewing up the time of club personnel and volunteers, when they could have simply written a check. Like they couldn’t let go of their money without having an event to draw attention to how generous they were.
He rounded the clubhouse and made his way to the restaurant patio. His grandfather sat at a large table with several other members. Reid had helped draw up the teams and recognized two of the women as part of Anson’s foursome. Reid didn’t know the others, but why would he? He wasn’t exactly a regular at the club.
Anson spotted him and waved him over. “Have a seat. Everyone, this is my grandson, Reid.”
Reid dragged a chair over from another table, shook hands with the man nearest to him, and nodded to the others.
Anson handed Reid a menu and signaled to a waiter. “Take a look, but the burger’s what you want.”
Reid ordered French fries and a lemonade.
Soon after the food arrived, two men dressed in tennis gear approached the group. Reid recognized the older guy as his father’s new business partner, Robert Shipstead, who had been over to their house a couple of times. The younger guy had to be his son, given their identical Brooks Brothers, don’t-touch-my-hair look. They had tennis shoes on at the moment, but Reid would bet a limb they wore their Sperrys without socks.
Anson introduced Robert and his son (“Robby”—what else?) to
each person at the table, unlike the blanket introduction Reid had been honored with. Robert moved around the table for a prime spot next to Anson, but Robby, to Reid’s surprise, pulled up a seat next to him.
Robby eyed his plate. “Mind if I snag a few fries? I’m starved.”
Reid nudged his plate toward him. “Help yourself.”
“Thanks, bro.”
Bro? Reid had to stop himself from laughing out loud. Truth was, the rate at which Robby the Bro was wolfing down his fries wasn’t funny at all.
The waiter came over and asked Robby if he wanted anything.
“Nah.” He finished off the last of the fries and licked the salt off his fingers. “I’m good.”
Reid couldn’t wait to leave but needed a ride from his grandfather, or his dad, who was playing tennis. No choice but to hang here.
Robby leaned back in his chair and fished his phone out of his pocket. “Want to see something?”
Reid shrugged.
Robby’s thumbs worked the screen until he found what he was looking for. He tipped the phone so Reid could see.
“Check out this piece.”
A girl, naked except for a white bra and matching underwear, was sprawled on a bed. She had very long legs. Her face wasn’t visible, but some of her straight blonde hair was hanging over one shoulder.
Reid wasn’t sure how the bro expected him to respond. He went with the most innocuous thought that popped into his head.
“Is that your girlfriend?”
“Nah. Just a haul from Tinder. Hey, want to come to a party Saturday?” He tapped Reid on the shoulder with a loose fist. “You should totally come.”
“Where is it?” He had no interest in going but couldn’t see how to get out of talking with this guy.
