The Chain(98)

Gradually she’s no longer a trending topic on Twitter or Instagram. Some other poor devil has come along to take her place. And then another one will come along after that. And then another. It’s all very familiar…

In Newburyport she’s still recognized—how could she not be?—but when she drives up to the malls in New Hampshire or into the Boston suburbs, she’s anonymous again and that’s the way she likes it.

A sunny morning in late March.

Rachel is in bed with her laptop. She deletes the twenty new requests from her e-mail inbox asking for interviews and closes the computer. Pete is next door in the shower. Singing. Badly.

She smiles. Pete is doing really great now on his methadone program and at his brand-new job as a security consultant for a high-tech firm in Cambridge. She walks barefoot into the kitchen, lights the stove, fills the kettle, and puts the water on to boil.

Upstairs, she can hear the occasional ping of Kylie’s iPad. Kylie’s awake and hunkered under the sheets, chatting with her friends. Kylie is also doing amazingly well. They always say that kids are resilient and can bounce back from trauma, but it’s still incredible to see how high she is bouncing back.

At eight o’clock, Stuart comes by and she gives him a hug and he sits there petting the cat, waiting patiently for Kylie to be ready. Stuart also is doing great, and out of all of them he seems to be the one digging the fame the most. Although Marty also appears to be enjoying all the attention. He has popped up on the TV several times to talk about his experiences. And with each telling, his own role in the rescue has become a little bit more extravagant. Marty is all right and his new, very young girlfriend, Julie, seems to believe that they are all in some kind of romcom together in which Rachel, the gloomy first wife, will eventually be won over by her effervescent charms.

Rachel sits down at the dining-room table and opens her laptop again. Her thoughts drift. She thumbs through Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café and is momentarily taken aback by a striking picture of Simone de Beauvoir wearing a brooch in the shape of a labyrinth.

She shuts the book and waves at Dr. Havercamp as he walks through the reeds to pump the bilge from his boat.

“Trying to start this lecture with a joke, Stuart. How does this sound? ‘My friend is opening a bookstore to sell German philosophy texts. I told him it wouldn’t work—it’s too much of a Nietzsche market,’” Rachel says with a look of triumph.

Stuart grimaces.

“Not good?” Rachel asks.

“I’m not really qualified to judge the, uh…”

“What he’s trying to say, Mother, is that your comedy stylings skew to an older demographic,” Kylie says, leaning over the balcony rail.

Pete comes out of the shower and shakes his head. “I hope your plan B isn’t a career in stand-up,” he says.

“To hell with all of you!” Rachel says and shuts the laptop.

When everyone’s ready they go out to the car, and since they’re early for school, they swing by Dunkin’ Donuts on Route 1.

Rachel looks at her daughter as she takes a bite of a bear claw. Kylie and Stuart are arguing about spoilers for season three of Stranger Things. This is nearly the old, carefree, bullshitty Kylie again. The splinter will always be there, of course. The darkness. They’ll never quite be able to get that out. It’s part of her now, part of all of them. But the bed-wetting has stopped and the bad dreams are fewer. And that’s something.

“OK, here’s one that’s a winner. How many hipsters does it take to change a light bulb?” she asks.

“Mom, don’t! Please. Don’t even!” Kylie pleads.

“How many?” Stuart asks.

“It’s a pretty obscure number, you’ve probably never heard of it,” Rachel says, and at least Pete grins.

She leaves the kids at school and she drops Pete at the commuter-rail stop in Newburyport. His new job requires him to wear a suit and he hates that. He is continually fussing with his tie.

“Leave it alone! You look fabulous,” she says and means it.

When his train comes, she walks back to the Volvo, drives into town, and goes straight to the Walgreens. She checks that Mary Anne, the cashier she knows, isn’t working, and she slinks down the aisles to the pregnancy-test-kit section.

There’s a baffling number of choices. She grabs a kit more or less at random and takes it to the counter.

The cashier is a high-school-age girl whose name tag claims that she’s Ripley. She’s reading Moby-Dick.

She doesn’t appear to be at the “devious-cruising Rachel” bit. Their eyes meet.

“What chapter are you on?” Rachel asks.

“Seventy-six.”

“A man once told me that all books should end at chapter seventy-seven.”

“God, I wish this one did. I have loads to go. Hey, um, you should probably get the Clearblue kit,” the girl says.

“The Clearblue?”

“You think you’re saving money by getting the FastResponse. But the FastResponse has a higher rate of false positives.” She lowers her voice. “I speak from experience.”

“I’ll get the Clearblue,” Rachel says.

She pays for the kit, gets another coffee from the Starbucks on State Street, and drives back to the island.

She goes to the bathroom, takes the kit out of the box, reads the instructions, urinates on the stick over the toilet bowl, and puts the stick back in the box.