Smoke (15 page)

“Well,” she said, pulling back, “look at me. Someday this stuff isn’t going to bother me so much.”

“Why don’t you keep the dress? Save it for when Carrie has a girl.”

“Yes, maybe. But you should take some of this . . . Look at all of it. I can’t believe how much there is.”

I protested but ended up leaving with a bundle of onesies. I snuck them into the house feeling like they were contraband. As if I too was touched with the reverse magical thinking Mindy described. If I planned for the baby, the baby might never come. But when I hung the little outfits in the closet, they looked so very
right
there, like they were coming home. It wasn’t long before I found myself surfing Baby Gap on the Internet late at night and ordering sale items to my post office box.

I always thought the contents of that closet were my little secret.

“What are you doing?” I ask Ben now.

He turns his head to the side so I can see his profile.

“It didn’t seem right to leave these. Not the way the wind is blowing.”

I sit next to him on the hard floor, the pile of clothes between us, and start removing them from hangers, dividing them into his already started piles. He watches me for a moment, then joins in. We make short work of it.

There isn’t so much to it, after all.

When the last piece is folded, Ben snaps the plastic cover on the bin.

“All this stuff, it’s probably going to smell like smoke,” he says.

“We’ll wash it, then.”

“We should probably get the rest of our clothes. As much as we can.”

“Yes,” I say, but neither of us makes any attempt to move. Instead, I reach out my hand until it covers his. He flinches, briefly, but then his muscles relax and he turns his palm over so it’s flat against mine.

“How long have you known about this?” I ask.

“The clothes? Always?”

“Are you mad?”

“No, of course not.”

“Do you understand?”

“I do. I always did, you know.”

I bow my head like it might keep the tears from coming, but all it does is drop them onto my lap when they start.

“Hey, now, hush,” Ben says. “It’s okay.”

He wraps his arm around my shoulder and pulls me to him. I turn my head before it reaches his chest, and my lips come up against his chin.

I kiss it reflexively, and then Ben’s lips are on mine and we’re clinging to each other and his mouth is everywhere—my face, my neck, my breasts when we get my shirt off. Then the bin full of baby clothes is pushed aside and we are fused together on the floor, my legs tight against his back as he pushes as deeply inside me as he can, and for a few minutes, everything between us is forgotten.

We lie there, afterward, in the quiet room, filling it with the sounds of our breathing. The wind rattles the window in its frame, and I feel that same prickle of gooseflesh I did the last time we did this here.

I wonder which of us is going to speak first, what either of us is going to say. I don’t know how I feel about this or how he does or even, really, why it happened. Does it mean we regret our decision? Are we both trying to cling to the one thing that always remained good between us, no matter how vicious our words got? Is this just an excuse to feel something, anything, other than loss?

I don’t get a chance to find out, because right when I feel like one of us, maybe me, is going to speak, say something important even, my phone starts buzzing insistently in the pocket of the pants we flung aside in our haste. I let it go to voice mail, but then the buzzing starts again, and I haul myself up, feeling bruised by the floor, and slip Ben’s T-shirt over my head while I reach for the phone.

“Liz?” Rich says. “Where are you? All hell’s breaking loose here.”

“What? I—”

“What did I hire you for if this kind of shit was going to happen?”

I sense Ben standing next to me, climbing slowly back into his clothes. He must be able to hear Rich’s angry tone coming out of the phone.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. What’s going on? What’s happened?”

“I told you Phillips was responsible for this.”

“But I really don’t think he is. I saw him today, and he was able to tell me who the ringleader of that gang of kids is, and—”

“You’re not listening to me. He did it.”

“Why are you so sure all of a sudden?”

“Because his house was about to be repossessed.”

DAY THREE

CHAPTER 16

Take Cover

Mindy

When the roar of low-flying planes
started at three in the morning, Mindy was fully awake.

She’d been tossing and turning all night, never able to catch even a moment of sleep. She knew this because every time she finally closed her eyes and opened them again, sure it must be at least an hour later, less than five minutes had gone by. It was enough to drive anyone insane, especially since Mindy felt like she was halfway there already.

It had started with the e-mails. Well, one e-mail, to be precise, her own. She and Kate had written it together, but Kate had insisted Mindy be the one to send it because it was “her idea, after all.”

Her idea.

She was starting to feel as if it had been a bad one.

Take how the organizing committee had reacted to the news.

“Will everybody calm down and let Mindy speak!” Kate had said to them in a stagey voice. She’d studied theater in college, and the voice-projection training came in handy sometimes.

They were gathered in one of the meeting rooms at the Nelson Arts Center. Tablecloths, votives, and long strings of fake fall-colored maple leaves were scattered around the tables waiting at the edges. Twenty irate-looking women sat in the kinds of plastic chairs the elementary school used, too low to the ground and too narrow for a grown-up backside. Mindy was up front with Kate, and she’d just finished dropping the news that they were going to shift the focus of the event.

“I mean it,” Kate said. “Shut it. All of you.”

She looked around the room sternly, and Mindy had that sense again that she was glad Kate was her friend. So what if she was catty and domineering and sometimes made Mindy feel like she was a twelve-year-old girl? When it came down to it, Kate did the right thing.

“I just don’t get it,” one of the women said. “Why does it have to be now? Why does it have to be him?”

“I’ll let Mindy answer that,” Kate said. “She’s taken a shine to Fire Guy.”

Mindy looked down at her feet as if the tops of her sensible shoes might somehow hold the words she needed to say. All she saw were blank floor tiles, so she raised her head and looked out at the women. They really did seem vulnerable sitting in those tiny chairs. But not as vulnerable as John Phillips, shivering under his blanket.

“I’m guessing that none of you have ever met John Phillips,” she said with a cracking voice. “I hadn’t either. But then I went to see him this morning. Right now, this man has nothing. Those chairs you’re sitting in? He has one of those next to his bed. Only his bed is not a bed, it’s a cot. He’s got a pair of hospital scrubs, and someone gave him a book from the school library. A Harry Potter book, which he told me he found mighty interesting, all things considered. His wife died two years ago. He has no kids. No insurance. Like I said, he has nothing. Can you imagine that? Well, I can’t. So you asked why we should do this, Susan. Why him? Seems pretty obvious to me.”

Mindy sat down with her legs shaking and misjudged the distance to the minuscule seat beneath her. She almost teetered off and onto the floor, but Kate’s strong hand caught her at the last moment and righted her.

“Anybody else have questions?” Kate asked, still holding Mindy firmly in her grip. “No? Then let’s get to work.”

After the meeting, Mindy and Kate took their time writing the e-mail that would be sent to the Fall Fling mailing list to advise them of the change in plan. After the reaction from the committee, they knew they had to set the tone just right or there’d be no end to the complaining. And on some level, Mindy could understand why people might be upset. The tickets were all prepurchased, and they’d been sold on the promise the money would go to the hockey team. Only the thing was, even if the fire and John Phillips hadn’t happened, the money wasn’t really going to the hockey team. That was something only she, Kate, and Bit knew about.

The hockey team was overfunded. That’s what Kate explained to her yesterday afternoon while they were sitting at Kate’s kitchen banquette, as she called it, enunciating the
tt
’s strangely.

Mindy always felt as if she’d made bad life choices in Kate’s ultramodern and pristine house. It wasn’t that it was somewhere she wanted to live—it didn’t feel like a home to her—or because of how much it cost. She wasn’t a materialistic person so long as her kids were taken care of. No, it was how clean it was. Not that Mindy’s home was dirty, it was just, well, a house with kids and busy people living in it and no help but her to pick up after them all. On the rare occasions when Mindy and Pete had people over for dinner, Mindy spent half the afternoon trying to figure out where to hide the kids’ sports equipment and the winter coats that never seemed to get put away, even when winter was long over.

But, yes, Kate had said nonchalantly. The hockey team hadn’t really needed any money for years. And because of this, Kate was secretly funneling the money they raised every year into a fund to renovate the town library, which was barely able to stay open. Kate had three hundred thousand saved, and this fall she was going to get the rest of what they needed by having a library renovation fund put on the special projects initiatives list that got voted on once a year.

“Three hundred thousand dollars?” Mindy had asked incredulously. “Didn’t anybody notice it was missing?”

Kate shrugged as she pulled her ultrathin silver laptop from the drawer where it lived in the kitchen. Kate had a drawer or a cabinet for everything. “Even for condoms,” Bit had whispered to her once behind a cupped hand, flushed with her boldness.

“Clearly not,” Kate said.

“But how is that possible?”

“Oh, honey. You can hide anything in this town if you plan hard enough.”

Mindy had sent the e-mail around 4:30 p.m., then turned off the computer and got tied up in dinner preparations. Angus and Carrie arrived home just as she was starting to cut up vegetables for the stir-fry she was going to make, and she asked them to help with the prep.

For once, amazingly, Angus hadn’t protested. He’d picked a knife out of the chopping block, testing the blade’s sharpness as Peter had taught him to do, and asked what she wanted him to cut. She set him on the broccoli and cauliflower, and stood watching him for a minute like she was seeing a ghost. And maybe she was. The ghost of Angus past.

Cooking together had been their thing. Mindy loved trying new recipes or seeing if she could replicate a dish she’d enjoyed in a restaurant, and mostly, she was pretty good at it. Except for roasted chicken, of course. But that night she felt in her element. And it was so nice to be working with Angus and chatting about his day that she forgot about the e-mail altogether.

“How’s Willow doing?” she’d asked him from across the kitchen island, certain she’d get something snappy back in reply.

But instead, Angus had said, “She’s all right. Some of those guys . . . well, you know kids are mean, right, Mom?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

He stopped chopping and looked at her. Mindy wasn’t sure whether he was more surprised she could relate to what he was saying or that she remembered what it was like to be a teenager.

“Right,” he said after a moment. “Well, like, there’s these guys, and they’ve kind of decided Willow’s the problem, but she’s not the problem, you know?”

“I think so. Sometimes adults do that too.”

Angus cut the head of cauliflower in two with a big
thump
.

“Tucker’s the fracking problem.”

“Angus. Language.”

“What?”

He gave her his innocent face. Years ago, he’d been into
Battlestar Galactica
, and that’s how they swore on the show. Fracking this and fracking that. Mindy found it intensely annoying, but Angus had picked it up with gusto. The problem was, when he said the word in public, it sounded enough like the word it wasn’t to make people snap their heads around and mentally put her on their Bad Mother list. So he’d long been forbidden from using it, and then, of course, he naturally stopped using it when
Battlestar Galactica
became a “stupid kid thing and
never
tell
anyone
I watched it, okay, Mom?” about a year ago when he’d started hanging out with Tucker and company.

“Nothing,” Mindy said. “So, what’s going on? What is Willow supposed to be the cause of?”

“You wouldn’t get it.”

“Try me.”

“It’s just Tucker being Tucker. He always needs to have all the toys.”

Mindy almost laughed. That was a classic Peter line right there, and it was funny to hear it come out of Angus’s half-Peter voice. But she stopped herself because she sensed the fragile ground they were on and didn’t want to do anything to disturb it.

“Well, someone should’ve taught him to share,” she said.

Angus rolled his eyes, and Mindy knew their moment had skipped away.

He finished up the vegetables soon after and drifted back to the computer. Mindy watched him frowning at the screen, scrolling through his news feed. She wished, not for the first time, that she had some way of seeing directly into his mind, believing that if his thoughts could be projected on a wall, she might be able to understand and fix whatever had gone wrong.

So with dinner and Angus and cleaning up, she’d forgotten all about the e-mail and the impact it might have until an hour after dinner, when she’d gone to look something up on the Internet she and Peter were debating (something silly about how old an actress in the TV show they were watching was) and she’d seen her inbox.

Forty-seven new messages.

At first, she thought she’d been spammed or hacked or whatever it was called when you suddenly got a million “investment opportunity” e-mails at once. Then she noticed they all had the same subject line as her Fall Fling e-mail, and she clicked open the first one nervously. It ended up being pretty typical.