The High Season(102)

Behind Lark, Doe could see Shari on the lawn, holding a suitcase, standing still, as though by not moving she could make it happen.

Or Doe could make it happen, maybe.

She carefully put her arms around Lark. She leaned in. She smelled…nothing. No lavender, no grapefruit, no essential oil of anything except Lark’s real scent, the scent she had come to know in the dark, in the places she’d been the most real with another person. Lark had not perfumed herself this morning. By the smell of her hair, she hadn’t even showered.

She felt Lark’s arms encircle her. She touched a sore place, and Doe tried not to wince.

“Did I ruin it?” Doe asked, whispering.

“Do I really fall for everything? Because it kind of devalues what I’m falling for, here. If you follow it to its logical concl—”

“Shut up,” Doe said, and kissed her.

“Okay, I think we need to reevaluate our next step,” Daniel said, and Shari clapped her hands in applause while Daniel winced, and so, a new dysfunctional family was born.





66


ON TUESDAY THE machinery of the world began to turn again. School bells rang, buses flatulated their way along the roads. Ruthie walked through the rooms of her own house.

There were tiny differences: a vase moved a few inches, a spatula in the wrong drawer. Some very nice French wine had been left in the laundry room. A new vinegar in the pantry. Crackers still in a wicker basket from Locavoracious. A puzzling abundance of tissue boxes. A tiny splat of blood on the wall in the guest room, perhaps a residue of a squashed mosquito. An echo of other lives. In no other year had Ruthie felt the imprint of summer tenants. This year she did.



* * *



—

RUTHIE WALKED THE Manhattan streets like a native, even though she knew she would be taken as a tourist. She looked like what she was, a suburban mom visiting the city for the day, searching for a restaurant picked by a more sophisticated friend.

Daydreaming, she got on the subway at Penn Station but forgot to get off at 42nd to transfer to the shuttle, so she decided she had time to exit at 59th and cut across the park to the East Side. She hadn’t reckoned on the heat slowing her steps. The sun still blazed in early September. A new skyscraper—a needle poking the sky—was under construction. She’d read about these new buildings in Midtown, how the penthouses would be ninety-plus stories up, looking down on clouds. How the buildings had to be calibrated to offset a human’s normal instinct for danger, the elevators at precise speeds to forestall unsettling g-forces, gigantic dampers that acted as shock absorbers so that the sway could be controlled. It wasn’t that the buildings were unsafe, it was that humans did not feel safe in them without unseen assurances settling their equilibrium.

    Life did not offer the same assurances. There were no cosmic engineers. Equilibrium was a matter of trust as well as balance.

She was going to be late, or sweaty. She had to choose one. She chose sweat. When she reached Madison every article of clothing was damp, from her underwear to her shoes. She couldn’t find the restaurant and placed a finger on her phone to unlock it, but her finger was too wet to register her identity.

She realized she was in fact standing in front of the restaurant. She pushed open the door, ready for anything—iced tea, salad, consequence, jail.

She spotted Carole along the wall, looking cool and polished. She bent to kiss her cheeks, one, other, back in for another.

They commiserated about the heat while they perused their menus.

“Isn’t this marvelous?” Carole said. “I want everything. I’m so dying for a real American meal. Can you believe I’ve gone a whole summer without a lobster roll? I’m tempted by the cheeseburger.”

After they ordered—Ruthie got the lobster roll, Carole ordered a salad—Carole leaned over the table. “So how are you, really? I heard about what happened at the Belfry. So distressing!”

“Yes,” Ruthie said. “Someone could have been killed.”

Carole shuddered. “Thank God. Can you imagine how awful? The publicity has been bad enough.”

    “How was Paris?” Ruthie asked.

“Glorious. Isn’t it always? And we went to the ?le de Ré in August. You must go someday. These French children have such beautiful manners in restaurants. You just want to start the whole parenting thing all over. Now Dash wants to go to the Lycée Fran?ais. I say, do you know how many hoops I had to go through to get you into Dalton? No bread, please,” she said sweetly to the server, who was hovering over them with tongs. “Oh, God, we’re off the track. I’m here to find out about you. How’s the job search?”

“Picking up. It was slow in the summer.”

“You know you have me as a reference. I’ll sing your praises. You were the best director the Belfry ever had.”

“So why did I lose my job, Carole?”

“Those people are so awful. I sat in those meetings, and I wanted to just run out of the room.”

“So why didn’t you, Carole?”

“Helen is so upset. Now she thinks Mindy is crazy. She canceled her end-of-year party, you know. The invitations had already gone out!”

“No, I didn’t know. I wasn’t invited. So why didn’t you stop her?”