Such a Quiet Place: A Novel(7)

Once I settled in a lounge chair beside Ruby, Margo returned her focus to the baby, gently humming. I handed Ruby the sunscreen, passed her the fruit, watched the gated entrance.

It was easy to fall into old habits—the purple insulated cup, hers; the blue one, mine. The chair closer to the umbrella would be for me, for the shade, because I was more likely to burn than she was, though I never noticed until it was too late.

It was so easy to pretend that everything was normal. We’ve always been great pretenders here.

When I looked over at Preston, he had his phone propped on his stomach, peering down like he was reading something on his screen. But then I thought, from the angle, that maybe he was taking pictures of us. Recording us. It was not the first time I’d thought he was taking photos of people at the pool.

He tilted his phone slightly, and he pressed his lips together, as if trying not to smile. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end, and I sat up straighter, staring straight back at him. His expression didn’t change, until I wondered whether I was being paranoid. Whether he was watching a video—he had earbuds in, after all—or reading an article, or texting his brother: Guess who’s sitting on the other side of the pool right now…

He grinned, then placed his phone facedown beside him, resting his head back once more.

No one said anything. Margo kept pulling the baby around the pool; Preston remained almost motionless, only his fingers giving him away, tapping out some beat on the side of the lounge chair.

I wished someone would break. Say what they were thinking. None of us were strangers here. We’d all known Ruby since she was just barely on the cusp of adulthood. And last fall, we’d all testified at her trial.

I’d first met Ruby when I was twenty-five, working in the admissions department, and she was a twenty-year-old student staying with her dad in the summer. That was when Aidan and I moved in, and she was a kid bringing her friends to the pool.

People complained, covertly, passive aggressively, on our message board: What’s the policy on guests at the pool? For example, how many underage college kids can be drinking before someone should say something?

Flirting, even then, with Mac, who was older than I was and wouldn’t give her the time of day, just a nod as he passed with a can of beer in his hand.

I’d always had a soft spot for her. She reminded me of the best parts of my brother. The fun and the joy and the excitement that teetered on recklessness—the parts I imagined must still exist in him, if you stripped all the rest away.

After Ruby graduated, she’d gone on to get her master’s, working part-time in our department, giving student tours, and I got to know another side of her. We started having lunches together. She talked about her future.

She got a job teaching English at the prep school right after she’d earned her master’s, still staying with her dad, to save. That was the same year Aidan finished his postdoc.

That was also when he left me, in a sudden, jarring blindside—so fast and unexpected that the anger first masked the heartbreak, and even now I wasn’t sure whether I was more upset about the loss of the relationship or the way it had happened.

He was leaving for a better opportunity, he said, and maybe it’s time we stopped pretending this was working. This could be an opportunity for both of us. And when I argued, tried to understand where this was coming from, he threw his arms out to the sides and said, My God, Harper, I just have to get out of here.

Like some switch had been flipped and he was seeing this place with fresh eyes—the four walls limiting him, the neighborhood roads circling back around, and me, always the thing he was coming back to.

As if I were something that required escaping.

There was nothing secret about our breakup—it was a casualty of the summer, and there was nothing better to do than watch the unraveling. There was a moving truck, because he took half the furniture. I demanded the cat in a moment of insanity. Aidan held a going-away party with the guys in the neighborhood—Javier Cora, Mac and Preston Seaver, Chase Colby—and they all pretended this was a normal thing to do. No one mentioned how I supported him through his education, and then the second he was done, he left me.

Even my dad was unsympathetic when I told him. He’d never been a fan of Aidan, had tallied his shortcomings on both hands when I told him we were moving here together; said it was in my nature to want to see only the potential in people—like it was some great character flaw.

Aidan and I had bought the house together, in theory. But it was only my name on the mortgage because Aidan had terrible credit and an unappealing debt-to-income ratio (one of the many warnings from my dad), so it was easier to qualify without him.

And then Ruby’s father sold their house and moved away. When Ruby asked if I could use a roommate, I was still recovering from Aidan’s blindside, still caught off guard at the end of each day by the silence here. The unsettling emptiness that seemed to have its own presence.

I gave her Aidan’s office, on the second floor, across the loft from the master suite. She piled her things in her car and drove it the two blocks to my place, and I scooped up her clothes from the backseat, laughing. I was twenty-eight, she was twenty-three, and I wasn’t sure which of us was doing the other a favor right then.

Now, at thirty and twenty-five, the gap between us felt smaller.

Eventually, Margo made a production of leaving the pool, saying to no one in particular that it sounded like nap time, as if she needed a polite excuse to make her exit. She swooped her gear into the stroller, the yellow floatie spilling over the seat, and hitched the baby onto her hip.