Locust Lane(8)

“Just hung out.”

“At Hannah’s?”

“Yeah.” He finally made eye contact. “Is that a problem?”

More defiance. She decided not to get into it now. It was useless trying to reason with him when he was like this.

“We can talk about that later. You want breakfast?”

“I’ll grab something at school. Can I go now?”

She nodded and he fled upstairs. Celia wasn’t thrilled about the attitude, but she told herself he was only tired. After all, he’d just spent the night in bed with a girl for the first time. It would be strange if he didn’t look and act like he’d been put through the wringer.

She went back to the kitchen. The workers continued to wreak havoc. It had taken them just over an hour to turn the majestic old patio into six hundred square feet of rubble and churned earth. She surveyed the rest of the yard. The slate pool, the recently painted gazebo, the maze of rose trellises, the tastefully tarnished birdbath. The lawn itself, a tranquil sea of green from which periscope-like sprinklers emerged every evening. A place for games and barbecues and parties. Twenty-five years they’d been here, since just before Drew was born. She wondered what it would be like when it was just the two of them. She’d envisioned them on the new patio on a summer Sunday morning, their bare feet on cool slate, sipping coffee as they passed the sectioned Times back and forth. Or entertaining in the evening beneath bug-zapping devices that would spit-roast interloping mosquitoes. But would it really be like all that? Or would it just be two aging people rattling around a house far too grand for them?

Once again, she had to catch herself. Where on earth is all this gloom and doom coming from? They’d be fine. They’d have a blast. A few months in Italy, nights in the city, trips to Broadway or Jackson Hole or wherever they pleased. They’d be fine.

Jack thundered downstairs and vanished out the front door after a shouted goodbye. So much for that heart-to-heart. And then the jackhammer resumed its bone-rattling chatter. That’s when Celia decided to text Alice. They could discuss this sleepover business over lunch. Establish some guidelines; forge a united front. It had been a long time since she’d seen her crazy friend. Too long. She felt guilty about that, even though Alice had been the one making excuses the last few times she tried to get together. This time, however, Celia would insist.

And then there was nothing to do but try to escape the noise and not think about that look on her son’s face. Finally, just when it seemed like it was going to be too late, her phone lit up.

“Papillon?” Alice wrote.

“That would be lovely,” Celia replied.





ALICE


The Ambien-and-Chablis nightcap had not been a good choice. There was no reason to pretend otherwise. She’d had it sometime around midnight, after hearing Hannah get home. It had bought her four hours of dreamless, deathlike sleep. She checked her phone the moment she woke, although she knew full well that there was no way he was going to message her in the middle of the night. He wasn’t even doing it during the day, for God’s sake. She kicked free of the twisted covers and went downstairs to irrigate her sandblasted tongue. Light leaked from beneath Geoff’s office door. He’d been working later and later, fueled, no doubt, by nootropics he scored from his buddies, the buzz-feeders and focus-pullers that were too new to even have nicknames. His all-nighters had evolved from the exception to the rule. Which was okay by Alice. She was perfectly fine conducting her marriage in shifts. There was light edging through Hannah’s bedroom door as well, but she often slept with the lights on, darkness being high on the long list of things she feared.

Alice went to the kitchen and opened the fridge. She pondered another glass of Chablis. It wasn’t as if she had anywhere to be in the morning. Or the afternoon, for that matter, now that Michel had dropped off the face of the earth. But that would kill the bottle, and she’d then have to deal with her husband knowing she’d killed the bottle. Geoff could be a real substance snob. Ingest an oblong pill freshly minted in a Malaysian lab and you were a consciousness pioneer, kicking open the doors of perception; drink a couple of shots of stomped grape or fermented potato and you had a problem. She should just get a liter of Stoli and keep it in her underwear drawer, like her mother. It wasn’t as if Geoff was going to be getting into her panties anytime soon.

Although maybe it wasn’t time for her to turn into her mom quite yet.

She reached for one of the exquisitely packaged bottles on the top shelf. Glacier water. For God’s sake. It was like eating a polar bear burger. Ah well. If the world was going to melt, she might as well put it to good use.

“Hey,” a voice said behind her.

As she spun in surprise, her hand struck a glass jar in the fridge, propelling it to the floor, where it shattered emphatically, leaving a viscid, bright red substance smeared across the tile. A sharp smell now filled the air. Harissa. Not the thing you wanted to deal with on an iffy stomach.

“What the fuck!” she whisper-shouted.

It was her stepdaughter, as tentative and spectral as ever.

“God, Hannah, you scared the shit out of me.”

As she watched the girl’s expression collapse, Alice regretted her harsh tone.

“Sorry,” Hannah said, miserably.

“Is everything all right?”

“Yes.”