Swing Me

THE PLAN WAS LOVELY IN ITS SIMPLICITY. AFTER WRITING NOTES to explain their sudden absences and concealing them in places where they were certain to be found, Sarah and Todd would slip out of their respective houses, rendezvous at the Rayburn School playground, and head north for a few days at the seashore, giving all the interested parties some time to absorb the shock of their departure and begin the difficult process of orienting themselves to a new alignment of the domestic planets.

For the fleeing lovers, of course, this adjustment period would also be a honeymoon—premature by one standard, overdue by another—a celebration of the miracle of their finding one another, a hard-earned opportunity to savor the fruits of their daring. For three whole days, at the very least, they’d have nothing to do but eat, sleep, and make love whenever they wanted to, free from the banal responsibilities of child care, the ceaseless petty time pressures of family life. The sweetness of the prospect was almost too much for Sarah to contemplate.

Todd had originally proposed Monday as the date for their getaway, but it wasn’t doable. Richard was returning that night from a weekend business trip to California, and wouldn’t be home until close to midnight under the best of circumstances. After that, though, the coast was clear: He would begin a two-week vacation upon his return, leaving him free to watch Lucy for as long as Sarah needed him to. So they pushed the plan back to Tuesday, despite their eagerness to get the messy part over with as quickly as possible.

Sarah endured an excruciating weekend alone with Lucy, her mind a million miles away from her daughter’s annoying questions (What you favorite color? Why they call it raisin?) and highly specific requests (Hang me upside downy. Now drop me on the couch). But there was never any way she could see of deflecting the questions or ignoring the requests, so she said, Blue, and I don’t know, that’s just what they call it, and carried Lucy into the living room by her ankles and dropped her on the couch, and then did the same thing five more times without a break, all the while thinking, In two days I’ll be in a motel room near the beach with the man I love. In two days I’ll be a different person. In two days I’ll finally be happy.

It was unbearable to be so close to something so momentous and have nothing to do but wait, and no one to talk to about it. She was besieged by worries—he’s going to change his mind, he’ll never be able to leave her—and in desperate need of reassurance, but Todd had made her promise not to call or e-mail him if she could possibly avoid it, as he had reason to believe that his communications were being monitored (it didn’t help that he shared a cell phone and an e-mail account with his wife). She had no contact with him until Monday afternoon, when they made cautious eye contact at the Town Pool, separated by a distance of about fifty feet. His mother-in-law was sitting right next to him, but she was momentarily distracted by a problem with one of her sandals.

We still on? she asked with a hopeful grimace.

You bet, he replied, the vehemence of his nod undercut by the slightly fearful grin that accompanied it. But why shouldn’t he be scared? She was scared, too. It was okay, though. Just a glimpse of him steadied her nerves, made her feel like she wasn’t about to explode into a million tiny pieces after all. For the first time in days, she remembered how to breathe.

I love you, she mouthed, but he must have misread her lips. His face contorted into an uncomprehending slack-jawed squint, like he was a kid who didn’t yet realize he needed glasses to see the blackboard.

Oh, forget it, she mouthed. I’ll see you tomorrow.

Richard had come to San Diego not for business as he’d told Sarah, but for Beachfest 2001, the summer meeting of the Slutty Kay Fan Club. It had not been an easy decision to make. He’d resisted the temptation for weeks, just as he’d done with the panties, telling himself that it was out of the question, not even worth thinking about: Grown men didn’t belong to fan clubs, and even if they did, they didn’t lie to their wives and plunk down a couple of grand to attend a meeting on the other side of the country. And what if his plane went down on the way? Would people read about his idiotic mission on the obituary page? Richard Pierce, 47, died last week when his plane crashed in the Nevada desert. Pierce, a successful branding consultant for Namecheck, Inc., was on his way to a gathering of the Slutty Kay Fan Club, a web-based group of perverts that he had recently joined. He leaves behind a wife and a three-year-old daughter, as well as two grown daughters from a previous marriage.

But it was no use trying to scare himself straight. As the big weekend approached it became painfully clear to him that nothing was going to deter him from making the pilgrimage—not the dishonesty, not the expense, not even the possibility of shameful public exposure. Partly it was jealousy that motivated him: He couldn’t stand the thought of other men—braver, less self-deluding men—cavorting with Kay while he sat home, stewing in the juices of his own cowardice masquerading as virtue. But there was something else, too: the desperate hope that doing something so extreme might somehow cure him. Maybe the way out of his obsession with Slutty Kay was through it. Maybe some contact with the flesh-and-blood person would release him from his bondage to the virtual woman.

It was worth a try. Partying on a beach in California with his fellow weirdos couldn’t be any more embarrassing than sneaking into the bathroom at work five times a day to sniff a pair of panties whose odor had grown so faint that he was no longer even sure if he was smelling anything at all beyond the fumes of his own sick imagination.

 

An oddly familiar-looking man—he was white-haired, with a big belly and a ruddy, incongruously youthful face—was waiting among the chauffeurs at the airport, holding up a sign on which the word Beachfest! had been scrawled in a notably shaky hand. When Richard did a double take, the guy stepped forward.

“Here for S.K.?” he asked in a soft, conspiratorial voice.

Richard cast a quick glance at the air travelers and professional drivers milling around him. No one seemed particularly interested in his business. He nodded discreetly. The red-faced man stuck out a meaty, slightly humid hand.

“Walter Young. I’m president of the fan club.”

“Richard Pierce. Jeez, it was nice of you to come all the way out here.”

“It’s not that far,” Walter said, balling up the sign and jamming it in his pants pocket. “Besides, I know what it’s like to show up in a strange city at night, no one to meet you. I spent a lot of years on the road, trade shows, sales conferences, client meetings, all that shit. I’m retired now, thank God. I go where I want, when I want.”

“Good for you,” said Richard. “I’ve still got a few years on the chain gang.”

“Counting the days, huh?”

“You know it.”

On the way to the baggage claim, Walter persuaded Richard to cancel his rent-a-car. He explained that the club had arranged for a van to shuttle everyone from the hotel to the beach and back.

“Saves a lot of trouble,” Walter said, wrenching the suitcase out of Richard’s hand as soon as he hefted it up off the conveyor belt.

“Don’t be silly,” said Richard. “You don’t need to carry my bag.”

“It’s not a problem,” said Walter, yanking up the pull-handle and dragging the bag along as he headed for the exit doors. “I’m sure you’re tired from your trip.”

“Thanks,” said Richard, hurrying to keep up.

“Yeah, like I said, we started doing the van last year. Carla got tired of all the headaches. People getting lost, showing up late in a pissy mood. Who needs it, right? Plus, this way you can have a few beers and not have to worry about the drive home, you know?”

Richard was happy to hear it. He had long ago reached the age where having to make his own way around an unfamiliar city had lost all its charm and had become a genuine source of anxiety.

“This is great,” he said, following his guide out into the balmy night. “You guys thought of everything.”

“That’s Carla for you. She insists on doing things first-class. That’s just the kind of lady she is.”

“I’m a little behind the curve. Who’s Carla?”

Walter glanced at him for a second, apparently to see if he was kidding.

“Kay,” he explained. “In person she’s Carla. Slutty Kay’s more like a stage name or something. You know, just for the web site.”

Walter clicked the remote and the trunk of his white Chrysler Concorde popped open.

“That’s weird,” said Richard. “She doesn’t really seem like a Carla.”

Walter heaved the suitcase into the trunk.

“That’s what her mama named her.”

“I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem right to me.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

The hotel was only a fifteen-minute drive from the airport, and Walter talked the whole way about recent club events, many of which Richard knew about from photos archived on sluttykay.com. They were just pulling into the parking lot of the Holiday Inn when he suddenly realized why his companion looked so familiar. In one of the “Hot Tub Encounter” photos that Richard knew so well, Walter was sitting naked on the edge of the tub with a beer in one hand and his other hand resting on the shoulder of a naked old guy with leathery skin and a sad little tuft of white hair on his chest. The two of them were leaning close together, engaged in a lively conversation, apparently oblivious to the fact that Kay was having sex with a bald man just a couple of feet away.

“You want to get a drink or something?” Walter asked as he pulled up in front of the office. “After you check in, I mean.”

“I don’t think so,” said Richard. “I’m kinda beat. Still on East Coast time.”

Walter nodded. “Yeah, that jet lag’s a bitch. Just be in the lobby tomorrow, eleven o’clock sharp. You snooze, you lose.”

“I’ll be there,” Richard promised, holding up his right 7hand. “Scout’s honor.”

Walter returned the salute.

“Scout’s honor,” he laughed. “I like that.”

Carol told him he needed to get to the hospital right away.

“Call a cab,” she said. “And tell them it’s an emergency.”

Ronnie hung up the phone, gripping the edge of the counter for support while he waited for the strength to return to his legs. This was it. He could sense it in his sister’s voice, in the very fact that she’d lowered herself to speak to him personally, which she had not done for years. For the past week, even with their mother in critical condition, Carol had somehow managed to arrange it that they were never at her bedside at the same time. If she needed to communicate with him, she used Bertha as an intermediary, adding insult to injury.

He looked around the kitchen in a fog of dread and disbelief, his mother’s unmistakable presence radiating from the avocado tea-kettle and toaster; the peeling wallpaper with illustrations of various herbs and spices, their names written helpfully below; the brown medicine containers lined up like good little soldiers on the windowsill, the prescription labels all facing out. It didn’t seem possible that she wouldn’t be coming home. Just the thought of it made him feel dizzy and imperiled, as if he were standing on a high balcony with no railing, looking straight down at an empty parking lot.

“Please,” he said, turning his gaze to the ceiling, in the direction of a God he considered his mother a fool for believing in. “Don’t you fucking let her die.”

The cab driver was a senior citizen who had something wrong with his nose, these multiple lumpy growths sprouting out of it, like a flesh-colored cauliflower had taken root in the middle of his face. Ronnie felt for the guy. It couldn’t have been easy going through your golden years like that.

“Where to?” he grunted.

“Presbyterian Hospital. My mother’s in the ICU.” The driver didn’t respond, didn’t say Too bad, or I’m sorry, or any of the crap people usually spouted when you told them something like this, but Ronnie kept talking anyway. “She had a stroke last week. Bad one. We don’t know if she’s gonna make it.”

He directed these remarks not so much to the driver himself as to his hack license, which was affixed by rubber bands to the flipped-down sun visor on the passenger side. WENDELL DEGRAW, it said, next to an ID photo showing the poor guy’s face in a highly unflattering profile that looked like it could have been ripped out of a medical textbook.

Wendell himself was listening to talk radio, a familiar voice that Ronnie couldn’t quite identify, one of those professional know-it-alls with a smart-ass comeback for everything. Ronnie used to listen to a lot of that stuff before he went to prison, used to fantasize about going to broadcasting school, getting a radio show of his own. Smart Talk with Ron McGorvey. Two hours a day to speak his mind and humiliate the uninformed idiots who called in, barely able to form a grammatical sentence. Pardon my asking, Frank, but do you have shit for brains or what?

“They had to put her on a ventilator,” he continued. “She can’t talk or anything. Just lies there all day, staring up at the ceiling.”

Fuckface Wendell turned up the radio, as if purposely trying to drown out Ronnie’s voice. The talk-show guy was ranting about Gary Condit, how if he had a shred of decency he’d resign from Congress and tell everybody what he’d done with his girlfriend. Ronnie spoke up even louder.

“She’s a good woman. Raised two kids all by herself, not a mean bone in her body. You couldn’t find a nicer lady.”

The bastard didn’t even grunt. He cranked down his window, hawked up a loogie from deep in his throat, and spat it onto the pavement.

Nice, Wendell. Real classy.

“What about you?” Ronnie inquired, while they waited at an endless red light. “Your mother still alive?”

Wendell whirled around in the driver’s seat. Full on, he looked even more hideous than he did in profile.

“You think I don’t know who you are?” he demanded. “You’re lucky I don’t toss you out on your ass.”

“Sorry,” Ronnie muttered. “I was just making conversation. You don’t have to be so goddam sensitive.”

Wendell turned off the radio, and they rode in silence the rest of the way to the hospital. When they pulled up in front of the main entrance, Ronnie gave the guy a twenty for a fourteen-dollar fare.

“Keep the change,” he said. “Buy yourself a new nose, okay?”

Sarah should have known there would be a hitch. There was always a hitch. As soon as kids were involved, the simplest plan had a way of turning complicated on you. She hadn’t been home from the pool for fifteen minutes when she got the call from Richard. He made small talk about the California weather for a minute or two before abruptly shifting gears.

“So listen,” he said. “I don’t think I’m coming home.”

“Why? Is your flight delayed?”

“It’s not about the flight. It’s about us.”

He said he was going to spend the rest of his vacation in San Diego, give some thought to moving there permanently. He’d been thinking about making a change for a long time now, and had always wanted to give a California a shot.

“We never should have gotten married.” His voice was sad when he said this, and the sadness made her remember how much she’d liked him before everything turned awful. “You know that as well as I do.”

“Oh, shit,” she said suddenly. “Damn it.”

“Are you upset? I thought you’d be relieved.”

She was; she was more than relieved. On any other day she would have broken out the champagne and tap-danced on the kitchen table. But right then, all she could think about was her honeymoon on the beach, how the whole plan depended on his being home to take care of Lucy.

“I’m fine,” she said. “The timing’s just a little inconvenient.”

“There’s never a good time for something like this. But we’ve both been miserable for too long.”

“What am I supposed to do with Lucy?” she asked, thinking out loud.

“Please,” he told her. “Don’t worry about that. I’m going to take good care of her. Of both of you. You can keep the car and the house. All I want is a fresh start.”

“Okay,” she said. “Fine. Whatever. We don’t need to hash this out over the phone. I guess I’ll have to hire a lawyer or something.”

“Absolutely. Sure. That would be the smartest thing.” He hesitated. “Sarah?”

“Yeah?”

“I came out here to meet a woman. Someone I’ve been in touch with on the Internet. I just wanted you to know.”

She took a moment to absorb this information, wondering if she’d feel even the smallest flicker of jealousy or betrayal. But there was nothing. Nothing at all.

“Okay,” she said finally.

“Okay?” He seemed almost hurt. “Is that all you can say?”

Jesus, she thought. What does he want from me? Was she supposed to tell him the truth, that she felt sorry for the woman, who wouldn’t find out until it was too late that Richard was not as nice a guy as he seemed? And besides, who could tell with these things? Maybe a new woman would turn Richard into a new man.

“You do what you have to do,” she said.

Lucy entered the kitchen, still in her damp bathing suit, the toy stethoscope hanging around her neck, her hair sun-bleached and matted. She was watching her mother with ominous intensity, as if she’d been listening to the conversation on another line.

“Daddy?” she inquired.

Sarah nodded. “Your daughter’s here,” she informed Richard. “You want to say hi?”

“Not right now,” he said. “I gotta run. Just tell her I love her, okay? I’ll be home in a couple of weeks, and we can break the news to her then. You know, do it as a family.”

“Sure,” she murmured, her head buzzing with a swarm of conflicting emotions. Something wonderful had happened at the worst possible time. Everything was all messed up, but she was free. Richard was leaving. She could keep the house. “That’s a good idea. We’ll do it as a family.”

“Do what?” Lucy asked, after Sarah clicked off the phone. “What we do?”

“Nothing,” said Sarah, averting her gaze from her daughter’s watchful face. “Nothing you need to worry about, sweetheart.”

Richard hadn’t expected her to take the news so calmly. He had no doubt that they’d reach an accommodation over time, but he’d braced himself for a lot more anger and recrimination in the short run, the kind of abuse that comes with the territory when you take a hike on your wife and kid. At least that was how it worked with his first marriage; Peggy had made him suffer for years before she found it in her heart to forgive him. But Sarah belonged to a different generation. Women her age were more independent, less freaked-out by the idea of divorce or single parenthood. She’d reacted so agreeably, in fact, that he was almost sorry that he’d offered her the house and car without running it by his lawyer. He’d just blurted it out, no strategic thinking whatsoever, the kind of impulsive, self-defeating behavior he never would have permitted himself in a business situation.

Oh well, he thought, no sense getting all stressed out about it. He closed his cell phone and took a moment to savor the mellow touch of the Southern California sunshine on his skin, so much less antagonistic than the midday glare back home. It was a cliché, but it struck him with the force of transcendent truth: Things are easier out here. His lungs expanded as he drew in a deep breath of eucalyptus-tinged air. An exhilarating sense of lightness spread through his body, as if he’d just stepped out of a lead-lined suit. Maybe this is what life feels like for happy people, he thought, the obstacles falling down in front of you before you even get close enough to give them a push.

It was weird, but Ronnie actually liked going to the hospital. People were friendly there. They smiled at him in the elevators and corridors, and treated him as if he had as much right to be there as they did, an attitude he didn’t often encounter in public places.

He understood that they weren’t smiling because of the warm feelings they harbored in their hearts for Ronald James McGorvey, Registered Sex Offender. They were smiling because his right arm was encased in a fiberglass cast, suspended in a cloth sling. That was all they saw when they looked at him—a man with a broken bone, a medical problem that was obvious and eminently fixable. He wasn’t one of those mystery patients who looked fine on the outside but must have had some terrible disease gnawing at their innards. In the hospital, those were the scary ones, the ones who made you wonder what kind of time bomb was ticking away in your own apparently healthy body. Ronnie was dreading the day when the cast came off his arm, when he’d no longer have that one small claim on people’s sympathy. He was thinking about doing a little research, finding out if he couldn’t get some sort of fake cast he could wear to the supermarket or public library, maybe even a waterproof one for the Town Pool. If not, maybe he could just get that asshole to throw him down the steps again.

He walked more and more slowly as he approached the ICU, as if his legs were filling gradually with cement. The waiting room seemed quieter than usual; the extended Puerto Rican family who’d been camping out around the TV for the past week had disappeared. They’d been taking turns visiting this comatose guy in his midtwenties—supposedly he’d fallen off a scaffold at a construction site—standing around his bed in pairs and weeping so melodramatically Ronnie couldn’t help shooting them dirty looks when they started to get on his nerves. He sat down in an armchair and watched a couple of minutes of CNN, wondering if the Puerto Ricans had relocated their moaning and hair-tearing to a private room or a funeral home, then got up and announced himself over the intercom. One of the nurses told him to come in.

You’d think a moment like that would be unbearable, but it wasn’t as hard as he expected. You just do that thing, that thing where you kind of shut off your mind for a little while. You see what’s in front of you—your sister and her husband, the priest in black, the doctor in his white coat, Bertha, the nice Jamaican nurse, every last one of them ringing your dead mother’s bed, shaking their heads in unison, as if you’ve asked a question, when really you’re just standing there taking it all in with a blank expression, not feeling a thing.

Richard had to fight off a persistent sense of unreality as he and Carla made small talk while looking over their menus. It hardly seemed possible that this was actually happening, that he was having lunch with the woman who had presided over his fantasy life for more than a year, a woman whose thong he’d been carrying around in his briefcase for most of the summer. And yet here she was, sitting right across from him, cursing softly to herself as she tried to wipe a salsa stain off her silk blouse with a damp napkin.

“I’m such a slob,” she said. “I should wear one of those yellow rain slickers when I eat in public.”

“I’m the same way,” said Richard. “I find these spots on my ties sometimes, I don’t have a goddam clue how they got there.”

She gave up and tossed the napkin on the table.

“My dry cleaner’s gonna yell at me. He’s this old Chinese guy, always giving me a hard time when I bring him something with a stain on it. Why you do that? You not careful! Why you so messy? He’s worse than my mother.”

Richard felt a foolish smile spreading across his face.

“What?” she said, a bit defensively. “I got something in my teeth?”

He shook his head. “I can’t tell you how weird this is for me. Like I’m out with the queen of England.”

“I’ve seen pictures of the queen. I’m not sure if I should take that as a compliment.”

“You’re a lot prettier,” he assured her.

“I know, I know,” she said, as if she’d had this conversation a hundred times, “but she gives better head.”

Richard let out a guffaw that drew the attention of his fellow diners.

“You’re too much,” he told her.

Carla shrugged, her open hands held at shoulder level as if to say, I can’t help myself. But then her face turned serious, as if she’d suddenly remembered why they were here.

“So you have a business proposition for me?”

“I wouldn’t call it a proposition at this point,” he said. “I just want to brainstorm a little. About the mail-order panties.”

“Oh, wait,” she said. “Hold that thought. Before I forget.”

Carla lifted a bulky tote bag onto the table, dirty white canvas with a blue PBS logo on the side. The sight of it surprised him.

“You give money to public television?”

She shook her head, an expression of distaste flickering across her face.

“It’s a freebie. My ex-husband used to work at the station. I must have a dozen of these things.”

“Your first husband?”

“My only.”

“But the web site says you’re married.”

“It’s easier that way. Keeps some of the weirdos away.” Carla smiled sadly. “Dave tried to be supportive when I started the business, but it got to him after a while. He didn’t want to share me.”

Richard nodded thoughtfully.

“You’d have to be a pretty evolved human being,” he said.

Carla seemed pleased by this insight. She withdrew a pale yellow folder from her bag and passed it across the table.

“This is for you. A little memento.”

The folder was made of stiff, high-quality paper. On the front cover, a decent amateur calligrapher had printed the words, Beachfest 2001: “Thanks” for the Memories. Richard opened it to find a five-by-seven print of the team picture taken on Saturday afternoon, along with the inscription, To Richard, One of my biggest fans. With love and kisses, Carla (aka., “Slutty Kay”).

In the picture, everyone was naked, but Richard thought that was a bit misleading. For most of the day, the Beachfest was just innocent fun, no more scandalous than your average company picnic. Carla and her seven fans wore bathing suits and T-shirts as they whiled away the afternoon drinking beer, playing beach volleyball, tossing a Frisbee, and even engaging in a hilarious round of three-legged races. Richard took some time to get acquainted with his colleagues, most of whom he recognized from photos on the web site. Aside from himself, the only newbie was Claude, a French-Canadian schoolteacher with a thick accent and a scar from open-heart surgery running down the center of his chest.

“They’re a nice bunch of guys,” Richard commented.

“I know,” said Carla. “I feel really lucky to know them.”

The other part of the festivities didn’t begin until much later in the day, after Walter fired up the grill for the evening barbecue. Carla went for a quick dip in the ocean—they were on a beautiful crescent of beach, a secluded cove north of La Jolla that Richard wouldn’t have been able to find on his own in a million years—and when she came back to shore she unsnapped her bikini top without fanfare and tossed it to Marcus, the twenty-eight-year-old software designer who was the youngest member of her entourage. As if that were the agreed-upon signal, the men of the Fan Club began pulling their shirts over their heads and stepping out of their swim trunks. Richard didn’t hesitate to join them. This was why he had come, after all. To be a part of this community, a tiny vanguard who had moved beyond shame and hypocrisy, at least for one day of the year.

For a long time after the clothes came off, nothing else happened. Walter kept watching the grill; Richard kept tossing the Frisbee in a triangular formation with Claude and Roberto, the only black man among them (he was a retired army master sergeant); and Marcus continued debating theology with Fred, a middle-aged Lutheran minister whose wife believed he was on some sort of spiritual retreat.

“And I am!” Fred had insisted, when reporting this fact to Richard. “Just not according to my wife’s cramped definition of the phrase.”

At some point, though, the Frisbee floated over Richard’s head, and when he turned to chase it he saw Carla kneeling by the grill, her head bobbing back and forth against Walter’s crotch. As if he’d been taken by surprise, Walter was still clutching the spatula, pressing the flat part of it against the top of Carla’s shoulder. Marcus was squatting nearby, recording the action with his high-resolution digital camera, the many impressive features of which he had explained to Richard in great detail earlier in the afternoon, almost like he was making a sales pitch.

“Don’t let the burgers burn!” shouted Earl—he was the old guy, a retired trucker from Nebraska—inspiring widespread laughter from the onlookers.

When Carla was finished with Walter, she took care of Claude, Earl, and Fred in short order. And then it was Richard’s turn. It felt like a dream as she knelt before him, the Pacific glinting a majestic purple and gold in front of him, the tantalizing smell of grilled meat mixing with the salty ocean air. It was almost as if he’d stepped inside his computer, into one of those images that had burned themselves into his brain, making him permanently unfit for normal life.

“Thank you,” he whispered, after she had planted a friendly kiss on his knee.

“No,” she said, looking up with the sweet, earnest expression he had memorized a long time ago. “Thank you.”

After they’d eaten, everyone lined up for the picture Richard was looking at now. Seven men in a row, of varying heights, weights, body types, ages, and skin colors, each of them grinning at the camera as if competing to see who could look the happiest. Claude, Marcus, Walter, Roberto, Richard, Earl, and Fred. In front of them, Carla on one knee, her arms spread wide, as if she were trying to embrace the world.

“Wow,” said Richard. “That was a great day.”

“It sure was,” said Carla. “Now tell me about the panties.”

Bertha’s jaw kept flapping all the way home from the hospital, telling Ronnie not to feel bad, that his mother had gone to a better place, that she no longer had to suffer the aches and pains of lonely old age in a town where everybody hated her.

“Nobody hated her,” he said, breaking his vow to just sit quietly the whole way home, not to utter a single word to the toxic old bitch. It was bad enough that he had to breathe the same air as her, that his own sister wouldn’t even offer him a ride home in her minivan on the day their mother died, like he was going to foul the seats just by touching his ass to them, like he’d leave an invisible slime of sex offender germs on the surfaces her kids had to touch on the way to school every day. Well, fuck her. One day she’d wake up and her precious fucking Mercury Villager would just be a smoking hulk in her driveway.

Oh, gee, Sis, sorry to hear it. Too bad you weren’t sleeping in it.

The thing that really pissed him off was that she hadn’t even hugged him good-bye. She thought about it for a second, he saw it, saw her move toward him and then suddenly draw back, as if realizing what she’d been about to do. She patted him on the shoulder instead, patted him the way you’d pat an ugly dog, standing as far away as you could, looking away so you wouldn’t have to smell its rotten breath.

“She was an old woman,” Bertha said, shooting him an accusatory sidelong glance. “She had no business fighting off intruders in the middle of the night. No business at all.”

“I have a broken arm,” Ronnie reminded her, shifting on the seat to show her his cast. “There was nothing I could do.”

Bertha shook her head, and Ronnie couldn’t help marveling at how pickled she looked, even after a day spent in the hospital. You could almost see the fumes rising off her skin, like she was a sponge soaked in cheap wine.

“She seemed so strong this morning.” Bertha dabbed a Kleenex at her eyes. “She was awake and alert, her vital signs were good. And then God called her.”

Ronnie shut his eyes and pretended his ears were clogged with melted wax. He reminded himself that he’d never have to spend another minute with Bertha in his life, never have to arrange his schedule around her daily visits.

Everything would turn out okay, he was pretty sure of it. His mother had set things up so that he could remain in the house for as long as he wanted. If he and Carol decided to sell it someday, they would split the proceeds, just like they would split the money in her bank account and the CDs and the annuities. The way he figured it, he’d have at least a year before he needed to worry about money, even if he went ahead and splurged on a new computer like he planned. A guy in prison had told him about some web sites he was interested in checking out.

“They’re from Amsterdam,” he’d said. “Those fucking Dutch people are sick, man.”

It was amazing to think about, a computer of his own and no one to bother him. He could just surf the web all day, look at whatever he wanted.

The cab pulled up in front of his house. He reached for his wallet, but Bertha told him his money was no good, not today.

“I’ll get it,” she said. “I promised your mother I’d keep an eye on you.”

Yeah, right, Ronnie thought, you and the Gallo Brothers.

“Oh wait,” she said. “I almost forgot.”

Bertha reached into her purse and handed him a folded sheet of paper that had been ripped from a spiral notebook.

“Your mother wrote it this morning. She wanted me to give it to you.”

“What do you mean, she wrote it?”

“She wrote it,” Bertha insisted. “I held the pen between her fingers and the nurse held the clipboard. But she did all the letters. She fell asleep right afterward. And then she had the hemorrhage.”

Ronnie stuck the paper into his shirt pocket and slipped out of the cab, glad not to have to look at Bertha’s nasty face for a second longer.

“See you at the wake,” she called out, as the cab pulled away from the curb.

Inside the house, Ronnie unfolded the note. The letters were big and sloppy but he could tell the handwriting from a single glance. His eyes filled with tears as he read the brief message, a mother’s final plea to her wayward son.

Please, she begged him. Please be a good boy.

As much as she hated to admit it, Mary Ann was rattled. Isabelle had gone to sleep according to plan, under the covers by seven, asleep by quarter after, but Troy had rebelled, pitching a kicking and screaming fit on the living room floor, the likes of which she’d never seen before.

“I’m not tired!” he shrieked. “Get that through your stupid head!”

She decided to ignore the insult for the moment.

“I don’t care if you’re tired or not. When it’s our bedtime, we go to bed.”

“Why?” he demanded. There was a wild look in his eyes, an expression Mary Ann might have called terror if it hadn’t sounded so ridiculous. “Why do I have to go to bed if I’m not tired?”

“Because I say so,” Mary Ann replied calmly. “And your father does, too.”

She cast a pointed glance at Lewis, who was sitting on the couch reading National Geographic, an activity she would have approved of under less pressing circumstances (she’d gotten him the subscription for Christmas, but he usually just let the magazines gather dust on the coffee table). He looked up with a carefully neutral expression, as if to say, You’re on your own, honey. He had never been as supportive about enforcing bedtimes as she would have liked.

Troy seemed emboldened by his father’s failure to intervene.

“None of the other kids go to bed at seven,” he declared, spreading his arms wide in a plaintive demand for an explanation.

“And you know what?” Mary Ann shot back. “None of the other kids are going to get accepted into Harvard, either. But you are. And do you know why? Because we do things differently around here, understand?”

She grabbed him roughly by the arm and marched him upstairs to his room, watching from the doorway as he crawled beneath the covers, muttering softly into his pillow. Mary Ann turned off the light.

“Good night, honey.”

Instead of answering, he rolled onto his side, face turned to the wall. She moved closer to the bed.

“Troy Jonathan, I just spoke to you.”

After a tense moment of defiance, he flopped onto his back.

“Mommy? Will you read me a story?”

“No,” she said. “I most definitely will not. Mommies don’t like it when little boys call them stupid.”

Sarah unwrapped a Hershey bar and handed it to Lucy, whose eyelids were beginning to droop. The little girl accepted the treat without a word of comment, despite the fact that her mother normally enforced a strict no-chocolate-after-dinner policy. She took a tiny bite and chewed with unusual deliberation, keeping her vacant gaze glued to the TV screen like a pothead contemplating a lava lamp. Sarah couldn’t tell if she was mesmerized by the movie—Dick Van Dyke was leading his fellow chimney sweeps in their big broomstick number—or simply too tired to turn her head.

“Mommy’s going upstairs for a couple of minutes,” she said. “Whatever you do, don’t fall asleep. You keep those little eyes open, okay?”

“Okay, Mommy.”

Sarah got dressed with what she considered to be admirable efficiency given the circumstances, trying on only three outfits before settling on the stretchy black skirt and cropped white T-shirt (which she’d pretty much known she was going to wear all along). She brushed her teeth, put on a little makeup, and was back downstairs by eight-forty-five.

But she was too late. Lucy was conked out on the couch, the barely nibbled Hershey bar clutched to her chest like a stuffed animal, the chocolate already beginning to ooze between her fingers. She made sweet little puffing noises as she slept, as if she were reading a book consisting only of the letter “P.”

This was not good.

Sarah had gone to great lengths to avoid just this scenario, doing everything she could think of short of force-feeding her daughter a double espresso to keep her awake past the nine o’clock deadline, but it was all for naught. Lucy’s sleep schedule had gone haywire ever since she’d stopped napping with Aaron.

Sarah turned off the TV and considered her options. She could call Jean, ask her to come over and keep an eye on Lucy while she ran a quick errand, but the last thing she wanted was to bring Todd into the house on tonight of all nights and have to introduce him to her chatty next-door neighbor. It was theoretically possible to have him wait in the backyard or something, but Sarah knew Jean well enough to know that the payment she’d extract for a half hour of last-minute baby-sitting was an hour-long conversation about her husband’s shortcomings, how crabby and forgetful he’d become, and how difficult it was to buy him clothes now that he’d put on so much weight. It was trying enough to suffer through these monologues on a normal night; to know that every tiresome word out of Jean’s mouth was another second without Todd would be nothing short of torture.

Of course, none of this would have mattered if she’d been able to contact him and notify him of the change in their plans. It hardly seemed possible at this point in human history that you could try all day and not find a way to reach a person living less than a mile away to pass along the simplest bit of information—come to my house, not the playground—but that was precisely the position in which Sarah found herself.

He hadn’t come to the pool that afternoon, which eliminated the possibility of direct communication—a stolen conversation, a passed note, or, at the very least, the transmission of some sort of warning signal. Sarah called his house five times during the day from different pay phones—his home system was equipped with caller ID, supposedly to flush out solicitors—but each time the mother-in-law picked up, her voice growing harsher and more suspicious with each subsequent episode.

“Who’s there? Stop calling here. Leave us alone.”

Sarah considered breaking the cyber component of her promise as well, but that seemed even more dangerous. An e-mail in the wrong hands could have ruined everything. She believed she’d exercised heroic restraint in not exposing them to that risk, but it left her without any alternative beyond parking in front of Todd’s house and hoping to catch him if he left the house without his bodyguard. Unfortunately, it was an oppressively hot day, and all the shady spots were taken. Lucy’s complaints put an end to the stakeout after a mere twenty minutes.

For a fleeting second, Sarah thought about letting her daughter sleep. She wouldn’t need much more than fifteen or twenty minutes, would she? All she had to do was rush over to the playground, collect Todd, explain the circumstances, and bring him back here for the night (it wasn’t a seaside motel, but she was pretty sure he’d understand). Chances were, Lucy would sleep straight through till morning, and never even know her mother had been gone.

It was a tempting solution, but Sarah knew better. Every so often—a little more often than you’d expect—you’d hear these stories about tragic fires, very young children playing with matches, left alone in an apartment without adult supervision (the baby-sitter out looking for crack or whatever), or toddlers wandering across busy intersections with no shoes on their feet, their mothers subsequently arrested for neglect or endangerment (always the mothers, of course, hardly ever the fathers). And aside from these melodramatic risks, Sarah simply couldn’t stand the thought of Lucy waking up and spending even a couple of minutes trying to figure out where her mother had gone, why she’d been left all alone in an empty house.

Waking her up wasn’t such a great alternative, either. The last thing Sarah wanted on the way to what was supposed to have been the most romantic assignation of her life was a cranky and confused three-year-old whining in the backseat. Her only hope was to somehow transport Lucy out to the car, drive to the playground, pick up Todd, and carry her back inside without waking her. She was a deep sleeper; it could be done.

Sarah thought of everything. She opened the house and car doors beforehand, and removed a small plastic dog from the car seat. After prying the chocolate bar from Lucy’s grip and wiping her fingers clean with a wet paper towel, she slipped both hands under her daughter’s warm and compliant body and lifted her off the couch. Lucy stirred in her arms, uttering a drowsy syllable or two of protest, but she didn’t wake. Sarah carried her out the front door, pulling it shut behind her, and tiptoed down the stairs and across the lawn to the Volvo. As carefully as if she were transporting a ticking time bomb, she tilted her daughter’s body to avoid the door-frame and lowered her into her seat, pressing her head gently backward while she lowered the safety restraint and clicked the buckle into the slot. Lucy kicked her legs a couple of times, as if trying to free herself from tangled blankets, then let her head loll heavily to the right. Sarah released a deep sigh of relief and satisfaction.

Yes.

Everything would be all right now, she just knew it. She would get to the playground on time—well, maybe a couple of minutes late—and Todd would be waiting. They’d come home, put Lucy to bed, and go right to bed themselves, celebrating the beginning of a whole new phase in their lives. She couldn’t help it, she touched herself between her legs as she drove, just letting her hand rest there lightly, nothing too distracting. “Hey,” came a tiny, unhappy voice from the backseat. “Where my chocket?”

With a groan of disbelief, Sarah checked the rearview mirror. Lucy’s eyes were wide-open, as if it were the middle of the day, as if sleep were the furthest thing from her mind.

“It’s home,” Sarah said. “You can eat the rest of it tomorrow.”

“I want it now!”

“I don’t have it,” Sarah explained.

Lucy squeezed out an angry face for the mirror. Sarah braced herself for the inevitable tantrum, but somehow it passed. The little scowl softened; it looked more curious than angry.

“Where we going?” Lucy asked.

“To the playground,” Sarah told her. “But not to play.”

After all those years of being watched, first by the prison guards, and then by your mother, you would have thought it would be nice to be alone for once, nobody looking over your shoulder, making sure you were keeping out of trouble, but it was actually kind of weird and even a little scary. All these thoughts racing around your head, these impulses you no longer had to control.

It wasn’t that Ronnie didn’t want to be a good boy; he would have liked nothing better than to make his mother proud, to live a normal healthy life, be a solid citizen with a car, a good job, and a loving family. He could coach Little League, take his players out for ice cream after the games…

Yeah, like that was gonna happen.

He just wished he had the computer already. Then maybe he could look at a few pictures, keep himself occupied that way, maybe figure out how to navigate through those chat rooms you heard so much about. But right now he was in limbo. He tried to stick to the usual routine, dinner at six, the news, Wheel of Fortune, but it wasn’t the same without his mother sitting next to him on the couch, muttering about Dan Rather’s jowls or Vanna’s crazy getups, studying the puzzles like they would reveal the mystery of life rather than a stupid proverb or the name of a celebrity no one had thought about for decades.

“Abe Vigoda!” she’d shout in triumph. “The heart is a lonely hunter!”

It was the phone he kept staring at, as if it held some sort of magnetic attraction. He wished there was somebody he could call, a friend or a relative, somebody who’d want to hear his sad news, somebody he could invite over for a cup of coffee, a little company. But there was only one number in his head, a number he hadn’t used in years.

Don’t do it, he told himself, but his finger was already pressing the buttons. Don’t be stupid.

It rang three times, his heart going absolutely bonkers in his chest, the way it always did.

“Hello?” He could tell right away it was the mother, Diane Colapinto. He remembered seeing her on TV after the girl had disappeared, those black rings of grief encircling her dark eyes. “Hello?”

She sounded good, actually—cheerful, almost, like she’d given up crying over spilled milk and had finally gotten on with her life. He could hear laughter in the background, and realized that Holly’s two younger siblings weren’t so young anymore. The sister would be eleven, the brother ten, older than Holly was the day she got into his car.

“Hello?” Diane said again, this time more tentatively. “Who’s calling?”

It would have been easy to do it, to whisper what he used to whisper after sneaking out to a pay phone in the middle of the night, when he’d startle her out of a deep sleep, enjoying the confusion of terror and hope in her voice. I know where she is, he’d taunt. But I’m never going to tell you.

Not tonight, though. Out of respect for his own dead mother, if for nothing else.

“Sorry,” he said. “Wrong number.”

He hung up, feeling sweaty and light-headed. There was one more person he could call, come to think of it. He had the number in his wallet, scribbled on a sticky note. She wasn’t home, though—probably out on another blind date, boring some guy silly. All he got was her spacy voice on the answering machine. This is Sheila, please leave me a message. Ronnie waited for the beep, which took way longer than it should have.

“You are one loony bitch,” he told her. “Why don’t you put that in your personal ad?”

After that he was at a loss. It wasn’t even nine o’clock, and he didn’t have a fucking clue what to do with himself. He couldn’t just sit around the house all night, making prank phone calls, could he? It would have been easier if he was a drinker. Then he could at least go out and get plastered, then come staggering home to sleep it off. If that had been his problem, everything would have been so goddam simple.

“Hey, Ma,” he said, as if she were standing right there beside him, “I think I’m gonna go out for a while.”

Lewis didn’t even look up when she returned to the living room, taking a seat on the other end of the couch and picking up the copy of Family Circle that had just arrived in the mail.

“What are you reading about?” she asked after a moment or two, unable to tolerate the silence.

“Las Vegas.”

“In National Geographic?”

“It’s a history of the city. How it’s evolved since the fifties.”

“That’s not right,” she said. “You’d think National Geographic would have better things to report on. The rain forest or something.”

“It’s actually very interesting.”

At eight-thirty, she put down her magazine and told him she was going upstairs to get ready. He grunted, still absorbed in his article.

She took a long bubble bath, closing her eyes and breathing deeply, trying to clear the clutter from her mind and will herself into a sexy mood. She’d recently come across an article (Five Zesty Ways to Spice Up Your Marriage!) that recommended fantasizing about partners other than your husband, and decided to give it a whirl. Bruce Willis didn’t work, for some reason, and neither did Brad Pitt, but that was probably because he was in dire need of a haircut and a shave, and, quite possibly, a hot shower. But then, out of nowhere, she found herself thinking about Tony Soprano, a man she found completely repulsive, with his big hairy belly and gutter mouth, the way he bent that girl over a table with his pants around his ankles, a cigar clenched between his teeth as he pounded away.

Disgusting.

She yanked the drain plug, forcing the image out of her mind, wishing Lewis had never convinced her to get HBO. After she brushed her teeth and dabbed some perfume on her neck, she slipped into a pink satin slip with a lacy bodice, ran a brush through her hair, and stepped into the bedroom, pausing to let herself be admired.

Her husband should have been sitting on the bed in his glasses and boxer shorts, nodding in fervent approval, but he wasn’t there. A queasy, almost desolate feeling came over her as she contemplated the undisturbed bed, the clock on the end table reading 9:02. She headed straight downstairs to see what was keeping him.

“Honey?” she said. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

“You know what?” he said. “Why don’t we give it a rest?”

“But it’s Tuesday. It’s our date night.”

He stared at her for what felt like a long time. There was the oddest look on his face, like he pitied her for something.

“I really don’t feel like it.”

Mary Ann gulped. It took an enormous effort to remain composed, to keep the tremor out of her voice.

“You don’t love me anymore.”

Lewis didn’t answer right away. He seemed to be giving her statement some serious consideration, as if he hadn’t thought about it in a while.

“Our son is four years old,” he said. “You have to stop talking to him about Harvard.”

Hands clammy and heart pounding, Sarah pulled into the Rayburn School parking lot at seven minutes after nine, not nearly as late as she’d feared. She kept her headlights on, their dusty beams shining on the deserted playground—the seesaw and slide, the play structure with its swaying bridge and festive little gazebo, the fateful swing set—waiting in an ecstasy of suspense for Todd to step out of the shadows, the sight of him always so startling to her after even the briefest of separations, the way he had of seeming so matter-of-factly present and so utterly fantastical at the same time.

At eleven after nine she shut off her headlights. It’s all right, she told herself, he’s only ten minutes late. She had to make a conscious effort to ignore the flutter of panic in her belly, the little voice reminding her that he’d never been late before. It was something they’d joked about at the Town Pool, the invariable pattern of their relationship—the boys always early, the girls always late.

But maybe it was a good thing, this little break in protocol. This way Todd would owe her an apology, and he’d be that much less likely to hold it against her that they weren’t going to the beach after all, that they’d be stuck in her house with Lucy, still trapped within the suffocating borders of Bellington and parenthood.

“What we doing?” Lucy inquired.

“Waiting for Todd,” she replied. “He should be here any minute. He’s going to sleep over at our house tonight.”

Lucy didn’t seem unduly troubled by this answer. Sarah had never really been able to figure out just how much she understood—even in her limited three-year-old capacity—about her relationship with Todd. All through the summer, she had just accepted whatever happened as if it were well within the natural order of things. When they were hanging out with Todd and Aaron every day, that was fine with her. When they stopped, she asked about it once, and seemed to find her mother’s explanation—Aaron’s grandma wants them all to herself—completely satisfactory. Sarah couldn’t help hoping that Lucy would show the same flexibility toward the much larger changes that were about to shake up her life, but she couldn’t quite suppress the suspicion that she was being a bit too passive as a parent, not doing enough to prepare her daughter for the immediate future.

“Honey,” she said. “Do you like Aaron?”

“Sometimes.”

“He’s a nice boy, isn’t he? You play so well together.”

“He likes cars,” Lucy said, a trace of contempt in her voice.

“Would you like him to be your brother?”

Lucy giggled nervously. She seemed to think Sarah was playing some sort of game with her.

“Him not my brother.”

“He might be.” Sarah turned in her seat and looked her daughter straight in the eyes, hoping by this to make her understand that they were having a very serious discussion. “Someday. Not your real brother, but your stepbrother. That means we would all live together in the same house, at least some of the time.”

“I don’t like that.” Lucy sounded angry.

“Sure you will. It’ll just take a little time to get used to it.”

Lucy shook her head in ferocious denial.

“Not get used to it.”

Sarah decided not to push it. You just had to take these things one step at a time. Given enough time and love, kids would adapt to anything. And Sarah couldn’t help thinking that, however Lucy felt about it right now, she’d be better off in the long run with Todd as the father figure in her life than she would be with Richard.

“Mommy?” Lucy asked a couple of moments later. Her voice was soft and tentative, as if she’d been thinking things over.

“Yes, honey?”

“Can you swing me?”

“Sure,” Sarah said, before she’d even realized what she was agreeing to. “But just for a little while, okay?”

Todd had left his house at nine o’clock sharp, but he got sidetracked at the library. The skateboarders were out, and he stopped for a minute to see how they were doing. To his surprise, they greeted him like an old friend as he assumed his once-familiar post by the mailbox.

“Dude,” this gruff-voiced kid called out. “Where the fuck you been?”

“We missed you,” another one added, somehow managing to sound sarcastic and sincere at the same time. “We thought you didn’t love us anymore.”

“Yeah,” said G., the skinny leader of the pack. “Thought maybe we were boring you.”

“Not at all,” he explained, oddly flattered by the attention. “I’ve just been going through some weird shit.”

He hadn’t watched them for weeks, not since before the bar exam, and was amazed at how much they’d improved in the interim, as if they’d all gone to skateboard camp or something. Kids who’d looked like beginners in June were whipping around like experts. The ones who were good then had blossomed into virtuosos, though G. remained in a league of his own.

As always, there was something hypnotic about the spectacle of the boys on their boards, the steady flow of riders gliding past him, each following the one before in almost metronomic regularity, the insistent hum of wheels on pavement. They were improvising these overlapping figures in the street, six of them weaving in and out of each other’s paths, crouching and standing like human pistons, shifting directions on a dime with these abrupt pivots and trick spins, performing nimble, almost monkeylike, maneuvers with their feet, flipping their boards into the air, then landing gracefully on top when they reconnected with the ground.

He knew Sarah was waiting, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to leave. Every time he did a gut check, it always felt like he needed another minute or two to clear his head, to gather up his courage for the big and terrible step they had agreed to take together.

He’d meant it on Thursday when he told her that they should run away together, meant it like he’d never meant anything in his life. In that sublime moment, the two of them lying on their backs on the fifty yard line, gazing up at the star-studded emptiness of space, the words had emerged from his mouth with a conviction that startled both of them. He remembered the thrill that had passed from his fingers into hers, then back again, an electrical current filling him with the conviction that a life with Sarah—a life rearranged and made whole—was not only possible but absolutely necessary.

Four days had passed since then, four strange and painful days during which this conviction had been tested in a hundred different ways. It started first thing on Friday, when Kathy shook him awake at eight o’clock in the morning and told him that they were going away for the weekend, just the two of them, to the same inn in the Berkshires where they’d spent their honeymoon.

“I’m taking the day off,” she said, running her hand over his forehead as if checking for a temperature. “We need a little time alone.”

He could have said no, of course, could have told her right then that he’d made other plans for his life, but he was still in too much of a daze to put up a struggle.

“Yeah, sure,” he said, raising himself up on his elbows and blinking away the harsh morning light. “Whatever.”

“Don’t get so excited,” she told him. “It’s not good for your heart.”

By the time they left, shortly after noon, he had decided that maybe the little trip wasn’t such a bad idea. One way or another, he was going to have to get through the next few days, and at least this way he’d be able to spend a couple of them without his mother-in-law breathing down his neck. Not to mention the fact that he was finding it extremely difficult that morning to look Aaron in the eye. It was almost a relief to leave him standing on the porch in his bathing suit and jester’s cap, waving good-bye along with his grandmother.

“What a cutie,” Kathy said, looking wistfully over her shoulder as they pulled away. “I kinda wish he was coming with us.”

They had been driving for about an hour in companionable silence—they’d always traveled well together, just as long as Kathy wasn’t driving—when she suddenly reached forward and turned down the stereo. He could feel her eyes on him, the tension gathering.

“Just tell me one thing,” she said. “Do you love her?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

She laughed, sounding a little more amused than he might have expected.

“Let me know when you decide, okay?”

“It’s not funny,” he muttered.

“Oh, that’s right. I almost forgot.”

They hiked and swam after checking in, then ate a sunset dinner on a terrace overlooking the lake. It was all so pleasant—so much like their idea of a good day—that Todd had to keep reminding himself that he was leaving her, that their marriage was over. He only drank one glass of wine at dinner and refused a bite of her chocolate mousse cake, as if he no longer had a right to it. Before bed, she asked him if he’d like her to try on some new lingerie she’d bought for the occasion, but he said no, he’d prefer it if she didn’t.

“Are you sure? It seems like a waste to drive all the way out here and not even make love.”

“I’m kinda tired,” he explained.

“Fine,” she said, pretending not to care. “Suit yourself.”

He caved on Saturday morning, when she woke him with a long sloppy kiss and guided his hand between her legs. Before he even had a chance to remember why it wasn’t such a good idea, he was hard, and she was straddling his prone body, smiling down at him with an expression that mingled triumph and apology.

“This isn’t so bad, is it?” she whispered.

“It’s okay,” he conceded.

Actually, it was way better than okay, a greatest hits medley of their entire relationship, Kathy reprising every mind-blowing bedroom move she’d ever performed for him, vividly illustrating the cornucopia of pleasures he was on the verge of giving up. It was an amazing performance, marred only by the slightest trace of smugness on her face, a cool erotic confidence that he couldn’t help resenting on behalf of Sarah, whose undeniable enthusiasm for sex was often accompanied by a strange, almost adolescent clumsiness, as if she were acting on the basis of vague schoolyard rumors and half-remembered passages from dirty books, rather than years of hard-won adult experience.

A heavy silence descended upon the room when they were finished, Todd staring up at the ceiling with a profound sense of melancholy, trying to process the realization that this was it for them, that he and Kathy would probably never make love again. As if reading his mind, she rolled over and punched him in the arm as hard as she could.

“You shithead,” she said.

“What?” he replied, trying to look casual as he massaged his tricep.

“You think I don’t want a summer boyfriend? You think I don’t want to spend my days at the pool, holding hands with some cute guy I just met yesterday? How come you get to do that, but I have to spend my time in a smelly VA Hospital, listening to old men explain how they lost their legs?”

“I thought you liked your job.”

“It doesn’t matter if I like it or not, does it? I’m gonna have to do it regardless, unless somebody else in this family has a better idea.”

Todd had nothing to say in response. He didn’t have a better idea. All he had was a debt to Kathy he’d never be able to repay. Especially now, when he was on the verge of declaring bankruptcy.

“She’s not a summer girlfriend,” he muttered, more to himself than to his wife.

Kathy laughed, as if she were enjoying this in spite of herself.

“And let me tell you something else,” she said. “Summer’s just about over, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

There was a sour taste in Larry’s mouth as he walked up to the front door of 44 Blueberry Court. The thought of what he was about to do sickened him. If he could have done otherwise and still figured out a way to live with himself, he would have been a very happy man.

But there was no choice for him. He had lived through something like this once before with the Antoine Harris shooting, and he had learned his lesson. Hard as it was for even his close friends to believe, Larry never really regretted pulling the trigger in the food court that awful afternoon. He had made a tragic mistake, of course, but he would go to his grave knowing it had been an honest one. In his own mind, he’d seen a man with a gun, not a kid with a toy, and he’d reacted accordingly, the way any cop would. No matter how many times he’d turned it over in his thoughts, he could never see his way out of firing that fatal shot, not unless he’d been an entirely different person.

But he could have apologized. He could have ignored his lawyer’s advice and presented himself to the family, told Rolonda Harris how heartsick and sorry he was for her unimaginable loss and for his own part in causing it. Maybe she wouldn’t have believed him. Maybe she would have slammed the door shut, or called him an evil racist, or even spat in his face, but so what? At least he would have tried, and trying would have been better than keeping silent, acting like the boy’s death meant nothing to him, like all he cared about was saving his own skin.

Still, apologizing to Rolonda Harris was one thing, and apologizing to Ronnie McGorvey another. Rolonda was an innocent woman whose worst nightmare had come true. Ronnie was Ronnie, a repulsive human being who dragged his mother into a mess she had nothing to do with. If it hadn’t been for him, Larry would have had no reason to be standing on the poor woman’s front lawn, shouting into a bullhorn at two in the morning.

You killed your mother, Larry could have argued. You did it, not me.

But he wasn’t going to go there, wasn’t going to let himself sink into that futile swamp of blame-shifting and self-justification. Ronnie would have to live with his own conscience, if he even had one, and Larry would have to do what he could to accept responsibility for his own undeniable role in May McGorvey’s death.

He rang the bell, steeling himself for the moment when Ronnie appeared in front of him. He wasn’t going to shake hands or make small talk. All he was going to do was look the pervert in the eyes and say, I’m sorry for your loss. Just that, not another word. And then he was going to turn around and drive home.

He rang a second time, but still no one answered, even though all the downstairs lights were on. If this had been any other house, any other errand, he would have given up right then. But it had cost him too much to get this far; he couldn’t bear the thought of having to do it all again tomorrow. He tried the knob, pushed the door open just enough to stick his head inside.

“Ronnie? It’s Larry Moon. I’m not here to hurt you.”

Maybe he was sleeping. Larry remembered how bone-tired he’d felt after his own father’s death. He’d collapsed right after the funeral, slept for almost twenty hours.

“Yo, Ronnie?”

He stepped cautiously into the hallway and peeked into the living room. The TV was going, the sound turned way down. Someone had left a dirty plate on the coffee table, a half-eaten chicken leg and some peas.

“Ronnie?” he called again, this time from the base of the stairs.

He thought about checking the second-floor bedrooms, but decided against it. A bad feeling had suddenly come over him, the kind of feeling a cop learns to ignore at his own risk. If there was something ugly to find in this house, Larry didn’t want to be the one to find it.

He circled through the kitchen on his way out. It was cleaner than he’d expected, a lot like his own mother’s before she’d gotten it renovated. An old gas stove, pictures of the grandkids on the fridge. Everything in order except for an open liter bottle of 7-Up on the table, alongside an ashtray full of cigarettes that had been smoked down to the filter.

And a note under the ashtray, a creased and crumpled piece of paper with frayed edges on one side. Two different people had written on it, almost like they were having a conversation. The first message was a plea, written in faint blue ink by someone with a shaky hand.

Please please be a good boy.

The response was in black, in jagged block letters that could have been scrawled by a child.

I’M SORRY, MOMMY, I DON’T THINK I CAN.

Sarah pushed Lucy on the annoyingly creaky swing, forcing herself not to check her watch again. She already knew it was close to nine-thirty, how close she didn’t want to know.

Please, she thought, glancing over her shoulder to see if he might be approaching from the athletic field instead of the parking area. Would you just get here already?

It had been a romantic flourish, this plan to meet at the playground, to revisit the scene of their first kiss, that impulsive transgression that had changed everything for both of them. Right now, though, the playground felt anything but romantic. Never having been here at night, Sarah hadn’t realized how creepy and isolated it would be, backed up against the school building and overhung by shade trees, separated from nearby streets by a parking lot on one side and a vast grassy field on the other. It wasn’t pitch-black out—there were a couple of floodlights shining on the parking lot—but the weak grayish glow barely made it to the swing set.

“I sleepy,” Lucy murmured. “We go home?”

“In a minute,” said Sarah. “As soon as Todd gets here.”

He’s coming, she insisted to herself. He just got held up. Maybe Kathy had to work late. Maybe she and her mother went out shopping or something.

Or maybe Todd had just chickened out.

She knew he was worried about money, about the financial responsibilities he assumed would fall on his shoulders if he and Sarah decided to make a go of it. If he had been here, though, she would have told him not to worry. She had come up with the perfect solution to their problem.

“I’m going to be a lawyer,” she told her daughter. “What do you think of that?”

Lucy didn’t answer, but Sarah kept talking anyway.

“I could go to law school. I used to think it would be too boring and too hard for me, but now I don’t feel that way anymore. All you really need is an organized mind, and I think I have an organized mind, don’t you, sweetie?”

The decision had crept up on her over the weekend, while she was sitting in bed, plowing through A Civil Action. She’d been reading a lot of books about the law and legal education over the past couple of weeks—One L, The Paper Chase, The Brethren—thinking they might help her muster some good arguments to convince Todd to take the bar exam one last time, to not let his education go to waste, the way she’d done with her master’s in English. And then it suddenly occurred to her: Why not me? Why can’t I be the lawyer in the family? Todd could stay home, ferry the kids back and forth to school and music lessons and soccer practice, take care of the cooking and the housework if that was what he preferred. I’ll get a job with a small public interest firm, do environmental or sexual harassment law, take on the big corporations on behalf of the little people. She cultivated an appealing vision of herself standing in front of the jury box in a tailored blue suit, all those heads nodding as she made her elegant closing argument, asking her fellow citizens not to let big money trample on simple fairness, on America’s noble promise of justice for all.

“I don’t see why the man always has to be the breadwinner,” she continued. “That’s not the only way to do it. That’s not—Oh, thank God.”

Her pleasure at the sound of his footsteps was so strong that it took her a second or two to process the surprising fact that he wasn’t approaching from either the parking lot or the grassy field, which were the two obvious ways to access the playground from the street. Instead, the footsteps were coming from her right, almost as if he’d been hiding in the bushes by the school.

“What are you—?” she began, turning just in time to see a man step into the light between the seesaw and the twisty slide, a man with a cast on one arm and a far too familiar face. For an odd moment, she felt no fear at all, only the most profound, crushing disappointment of her life.

“Wait a minute,” she said, as if he were trying to pull a fast one on her. “You’re not Todd.”

The boys were catching air, zooming down the handicap ramp and launching off a small wooden platform at the edge of the street. The best ones, like G. and the gruff-voiced kid, actually managed to spin around in the air and still stick the landing. Their less skillful comrades usually got separated from their boards soon after liftoff; only the lucky ones landed on their feet. Because they were so young, though, even the unfortunates who did swan dives and belly flops bounced right up from the pavement, laughing like it was all in the service of an excellent time.

A slow surge of panic crept from Todd’s feet up through his chest and shoulders. He understood quite clearly that time was running out; Sarah wouldn’t wait forever. And yet he couldn’t bring himself to move. It was the same inexplicable paralysis that used to root him to this very spot on nights when he was supposed to have been studying for the bar.

The past two days with Aaron had been way harder than his weekend away with Kathy. They’d stuck to their well-oiled routine on Monday—playground, lunch, pool, supermarket, Train Wreck—dogged as usual by Marjorie and Big Bear. The whole time, Todd was tormented by an urgent need to explain himself, to pull Aaron aside and give him some advance notice of the tidal wave that was about to crash into his life, but he didn’t know how to do it without placing the entire plan in jeopardy—vague hints and obscure warnings just weren’t going to cut it with a three-year-old. So instead of putting it into words, Todd found himself hugging and kissing his son all day long, behavior Aaron tolerated from his mother, but apparently found worrisome, and even a bit unseemly, coming from his father.

“Da-ad!” he’d say, fending off the embrace with a stiff-arm that would serve him well in Pop Warner in a few years. “Why you do that?”

On Tuesday Todd tried a different approach, taking Aaron and Marjorie on an impromptu trip to an amusement park just over the New Hampshire border. He bought Aaron a bracelet good for a day’s worth of unlimited rides and let him call the shots. If he wanted to ride the Chinese Dragon kiddie coaster six times straight, Todd had no objection, nor to the cotton candy, SnoCone, and corn dog Aaron downed in quick succession, while his grandmother looked on, silently scandalized.

“This is your day,” Todd kept telling him. “You’re the boss.”

Right before they left, Todd and Aaron took a spin on the Ferris wheel. After a couple of continuous revolutions, they suddenly found themselves stopped at the top, swaying gently over the treetops in their green metal cage, looking down on the festive chaos below. Todd turned toward his son, gazing into his lovely, trusting eyes.

“Aaron? Whatever happens, I just want you to know one thing.”

“Something happen?” Aaron asked suspiciously.

“No, nothing happened. I’m only speaking hypothetically.”

Aaron frowned; Todd couldn’t help laughing.

“Forget it,” he said. “I’m not even going to try to explain that. I just want you to know, no matter what happens, that I love you very much and wouldn’t do anything to hurt you. Do you understand that? And if anything does happen, it’s not your fault, okay? You didn’t do anything wrong. Not a single thing.”

Aaron thought this over for a while as the operator released the brake and the wheel lurched forward and down.

“You mad at me?” he asked.

“No,” said Todd. “Not at all.”

“I thought you were mad.”

Todd reached for his son’s hand. Aaron let him take it.

“I’m not mad. I just love you so much.”

“Okay.” Aaron nodded thoughtfully, as if to say, Fair enough.

They held hands the rest of the ride, neither one looking at the other or saying a word. Even then, though, Todd’s resolve hadn’t weakened. He sang along with Raffi the whole way back to Bellington, never doubting for a second that he would be leaving with Sarah later that night, heading for the seashore and a new version of his life.

After putting Aaron down for his nap, Todd locked himself in his bedroom and wrote a long letter to Kathy, explaining what he was about to do and why he was doing it. The letter ended with a long postscript to Aaron that he asked Kathy to please read aloud to him in the morning. He sealed the note in an envelope, folded it, and slipped it into his back pocket.

A little before nine that night, Todd went upstairs and sat on Aaron’s bed for a few minutes, watching him sleep, trying to convince himself of what a luxury it would be to wake up tomorrow morning in a motel room far from here, no responsibilities, no fights about breakfast or getting dressed or turning off the TV, but he couldn’t quite pull it off. He liked dressing Aaron, as much as he complained about the relentless dailiness of it, and the extreme challenge posed by the socks. It was sad to think of him being dressed in the morning by someone else, especially in a house full of gloom and confusion.

Still, he pressed forward. He rose from Aaron’s bed with a weary sigh and ducked into his own room to hide the letter on Kathy’s pillow, a place where she’d be certain to find it, but not until after he and Sarah had ample time to make their getaway. He peeled back the bedspread just far enough to expose the pillow, and then froze.

That was when his courage faltered. Not completely, but just enough that the letter was still tucked into his back pocket when he bent down to pick up the errant skateboard that had banged into the curb by his feet, dislodging him from his reverie. It must have belonged to the kid who was sitting in the middle of the street, laughing and whimpering as he rubbed his knee.

“You okay?” Todd asked, walking toward him.

The kid nodded and stood up, but he shook his head when Todd tried to return the skateboard.

“Keep it,” he said. “I think I’m done for tonight.”

“Keep it?” said Todd. “What do you mean?”

“Take a run,” the kid told him. “It’s pretty fucking cool.”

“Yeah,” the gruff-voiced kid called out from the opposite curb, as his comrades nodded and muttered their agreement. “Give it a shot, dude.”

“You guys are crazy,” Todd said, trying to sound amused rather than intrigued. “I don’t know how to ride a skateboard.”

“Sure you do,” said G. “You been watching us all summer.”

Mary Ann stood beneath the streetlight at the edge of the soccer field, her hand shaking as she tried to light the cigarette. It was the first one she’d smoked since she was fourteen, the summer when she and two of her fellow counselors-in-training at Camp Mesquantum used to sneak down to the lake after lights-out, trading puffs on a single Marlboro and concocting clever plans for seducing older boys. It should have been a pleasant memory, but it wasn’t; Mary Ann hadn’t liked the other girls very much and was terrified of getting caught breaking two camp rules at the same time. Not to mention that she had absolutely no interest in seducing anyone at that point in her life, especially an older boy.

The cigarette wasn’t hers. It came from a pack of Camel Lights that had accidentally spilled out of Theresa’s purse at the playground a couple of weeks ago, when she was looking for a Band-Aid. Mary Ann had snatched it up from the picnic table before any of the kids had a chance to notice.

“I thought you quit,” she said, surprised by the anger in her voice.

“I’ve been backsliding,” Theresa admitted.

“I’m keeping them,” Mary Ann had told her. “For your own good.”

Ignoring Theresa’s feeble protests, she dropped the cigarettes into her own purse. And there they’d sat since the beginning of August, as if waiting for this very moment, when sneaking one would suddenly seem like an inspired idea, the perfect accessory for her mood of reckless desperation. Luckily, she’d confiscated a lighter, too, a yellow Bic some irresponsible parent had left lying on the edge of the sandbox.

It took her three tries just to get the thing lit. The first puff seared her lungs, triggering an extended coughing fit that brought tears to her eyes. Reminding herself not to inhale, she set off across the soccer field in the direction of the playground.

It was more force of habit than conscious intention that had led her to the Rayburn School after she’d barged out of the house, telling Lewis she needed a little fresh air. But it was the right place, she realized right away, a secluded spot where she could sit for a while without worrying about anyone she knew seeing her with a cigarette in her hand. She just needed a little time to think things over, to absorb the significance of what had just happened and what it might mean for her future.

Her marriage was floundering—there was no use denying it—but the truth was, it hadn’t been that great to begin with. She had never loved her husband, not even on the day when he raised her veil and kissed her in front of two hundred applauding people. She had married him in a fit of impatience that bordered on panic, after being dumped by the man she considered her soul mate. Sure, her career had been going well—she had just been named VP of Employee Relations—but what good was that? She vowed not to let herself get stranded, not to turn into one of those pathetic middle-aged spinsters she sometimes talked to at work, the ones who were always going on in these weirdly insistent voices about how much they loved their cats.

Lewis was a decent man, quiet and solid, a certified financial planner. Even when they met, when he was still in his early thirties, she’d wished that he had a little more hair and a flatter stomach, but what was the alternative? The last train’s leaving, she told herself. Better get on board.

She’d been reasonably satisfied with the trade-offs in her life until this past spring, when the Prom King started showing up at the playground. He reminded her so much of her beloved ex-boyfriend, Brian, the only man she’d ever loved—same height, same broad shoulders, same easy smile. Brian, the man she’d lived with for two years and fully expected to marry, and who’d left her, he said, because she didn’t know how to have any fun. Show me, she’d begged him, I want to know, but he said it was impossible, you either knew how to have fun or you didn’t.

Every day she sat at the picnic table with her friends and watched that ridiculously handsome man playing with that beautiful child in his jester’s cap, and it was like they were taunting her with an image of what might have been, the life that had been snatched away from her and replaced by something decidedly inferior. And then for that awful Sarah—Sarah, of all people—to become his girlfriend, it was just a little too much. She couldn’t help but take it out on Lewis. Poor schlubby Lewis. The good provider. Mr. 401(K). Talk about a person who didn’t know how to have any fun. It got to the point where she could barely look at him, let alone touch him. They wouldn’t have made love at all if it hadn’t been for the custom of the unbreakable Tuesday night date. And now he’d gone and broken it. Him, she thought bitterly. Him rejecting me. It was almost funny.

There are times when you know you’re awake, but can’t shake the feeling that you must be dreaming, because the world is suddenly showing you something that makes no sense whatsoever. That was how Mary Ann felt as she approached the playground, angrily puffing on Theresa’s cigarette and reflecting on her hopeless marriage. There was something peculiar happening by the swing set—it was hard to make out at first, but growing clearer with each step—something so disgusting and inexplicable it could only have emerged from her feverish and vengeful brain, rather than any possible version of objective reality.

This was so not the man Sarah wanted to be embracing right now. She tried to disengage, but he held on tightly with his one good arm, his ungainly body heaving against hers in great hiccupy sobs. It smelled like he hadn’t showered in a couple of days.

“Take it easy,” she whispered, turning her head to avoid contact with his wiry hair, her heart still pumping like crazy. “It’s gonna be okay.”

“No,” he replied, snorting and sniffling the way Lucy did when she was trying to regain control of herself after a tantrum. “It’s not…gonna…be…okay.”

He dropped his head onto her shoulder, his mouth alarmingly close to her breast. Patting him awkwardly on the shoulder blade, she tried to block out the unpleasant sensation of warm moisture seeping through the fabric of her shirt.

She took a couple of deep breaths, trying to calm down a little. Distasteful as it was to be hugging a hygienically challenged child molester, it was way better than the other possibilities that had flashed through her mind when he’d materialized so swiftly and unexpectedly out of the darkness. She’d been momentarily paralyzed by the sight of him—more out of bewilderment than fear, she thought—but then her maternal instincts had kicked in. Rushing around to the front of the swing, she grabbed her daughter under the arms and tried to yank her out of the rubber seat, but Lucy had fallen asleep, and her dangling foot got caught in the opening. Sarah was frantically trying to extract it when she felt an oddly gentle hand on her shoulder.

“Please,” Ronald James McGorvey had said, in this tremulous, almost beseeching voice that made no sense to her, as if she were the one calling the shots. “Don’t run away from me.”

She let go of Lucy and turned slowly, preparing herself to scream like she’d never screamed before, only to discover that her assailant was in a pitiful state. He was rocking back and forth on his heels with a dazed expression on his face, broken arm pressed across his chest like he was about to recite the pledge of allegiance.

“Do you need help?” she asked him.

“I just wanna talk to someone,” he said, his bottom lip quivering.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m listening.”

“I lost my mother!” he wailed, stepping forward and throwing his arm around her neck. “Just this afternoon!”

 

She tried a second time to step away from him, but he had a handful of her shirt and wasn’t letting go. Her whole shoulder felt wet, almost like he was drooling on her.

“It’s hard,” she said, squinting in the direction of the empty parking lot, her impatience with Todd suddenly metastasizing into anger. “It’s really hard.”

McGorvey lifted his head to look at her, his eyes swollen with grief behind his thick glasses. She had to make a conscious effort not to avert her gaze.

“I didn’t even say good-bye.” His voice was calmer now, only cracking on the last word. “She was dead when I got there.”

“It’s okay,” Sarah said, glancing over her shoulder to check on Lucy. She was still sleeping in the motionless swing, thank God, oblivious to the world. “I’m sure she knew how you felt about her.”

“I don’t know what I’m gonna do,” he said. “I just don’t know.”

Sarah didn’t answer, distracted by the sight of a silver minivan pulling into the parking lot, its headlights sweeping across the playground. At almost the same moment, she heard a siren in the distance and footsteps approaching from the soccer field. She turned quickly, hope surging through her body with such force that it almost knocked her down. But instead of Todd it was Mary Ann who emerged from the darkness. She stopped at the edge of the playground, where the wood chips met the grass, and stood there for a moment with a lit cigarette in her hand and the strangest look on her face.

“Sarah?” She sounded more puzzled than angry. “Why are you doing that?”

Before she could reply, McGorvey stepped out of her arms and turned toward the parking lot. A man—he was too stocky to be Todd—was running toward them at a furious clip, like he had an important message to deliver.

“Oh great,” said McGorvey. “Now he’s gonna break my other arm.”

Just for a second, Todd thought he must be at a football game. He was lying on his back on the hard ground, and DeWayne was staring down at him with a concerned expression.

“Todd?” he said. “Can you hear me?”

It couldn’t have been a football game, though. DeWayne was wearing his police uniform, hat and all, and some kids were standing a bit behind him, wearing unbuckled helmets.

Oh shit, he thought. The skateboard.

He tried to sit up, but DeWayne restrained him, pressing gently on his shoulder.

“Don’t move. The ambulance is on its way.”

“It’s okay. I’m fine.”

“You sure? Can you move your fingers and toes?”

Todd tested his digits.

“Everything’s okay,” he said. “Everything except my head.”

DeWayne shook his head. “Least it’s nothing important.”

It was a little more difficult than Todd expected to shift into a sitting position. When the dizzy spell passed, he reached up to rub his sore jaw, and was startled to find blood on his hand.

“Jesus,” he said. “What happened to me?”

“You had an intimate encounter with the street,” DeWayne informed him. “These kids say you’ve been out cold for the past five minutes.”

“You caught some monster air,” G. chimed in, with real admiration in his voice.

“Dude, you were fucking awesome,” echoed the gruff-voiced kid. “Like that ski jumper on TV.”

DeWayne shooed the kids away, telling them to give the man some breathing room, or better yet, get on home to their parents.

“No more skateboarding tonight,” he said. “Why don’t you clear out of here.”

The kids grumbled a little, but began to disperse, leaving Todd and DeWayne alone in the street. It was coming back to him now, the amazing sensation of rolling down the wheelchair ramp, gathering speed, his feet rooted to the board, as if this were the way he’d been meant to travel through the world. The launch platform wasn’t much higher than a curb, but it was steeply pitched, and he must have hit it with more momentum than he’d realized. Even through the thrumming pain in his head, he held on to a vivid memory of finding himself suddenly aloft, his arms spread wide, his body suspended above the street. And then pitching sideways, rolling over until he was staring straight up at the sky, floating on a cushion of air. The only thing he didn’t remember was hitting the ground.

“How you feeling?” DeWayne asked.

“Okay,” said Todd. “A little woozy.”

Fingering a tender bump on his skull, he flashed on Sarah, wondering if she’d left the playground. He hated to think of her still standing there in the dark, wondering what the hell had happened to him.

“They’re probably gonna take you to the hospital. Don’t like to take no chances with head injuries.”

Todd nodded. It was painful to admit it, but the main thing he felt right now was an overwhelming sense of relief to be here in the street with DeWayne, instead of in the car with Sarah, rushing down the highway into the next big mistake of his adult life. Sure, he felt guilty for disappointing her, for making her wait around for nothing, for promising something he couldn’t deliver. But what he suddenly understood—it seemed so obvious now, as if the truth had been jarred loose when his body hit the pavement—was that he’d never actually wanted to start a new life with her in the first place. What he loved most about Sarah was how beautifully she fit into his old one, distracting him from his imperfect marriage and the tedious obligations of child care, supercharging the dull summer days with a sweet illicit thrill. Outside of that context, he couldn’t imagine them ever being as happy with each other as they’d been this summer.

“Hey, DeWayne,” he said. “You think I’d make a good cop?”

DeWayne studied him for a moment, apparently trying to decide if it was a serious question.

“Yeah, sure,” he said, raising his voice to compete with the bloopy siren of the approaching ambulance. “You could patrol the town on your skateboard.”

Sarah felt like a fool. When she saw Larry Moon sprinting toward the playground, she’d let herself believe that Todd had sent him, that he was coming to deliver a message to her. But he went straight for McGorvey, grabbing him roughly by the collar.

“You sonofabitch!” he said, his voice trembling with rage. “Didn’t I tell you to stay away from playgrounds? Didn’t I?”

McGorvey nodded politely, as if responding to a civil question.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

The apology just seemed to make Moon angrier.

“Sorry?” He cuffed McGorvey hard on the side of his head. “You’re a sorry piece of shit is what you are.”

McGorvey just continued nodding, as if he were in complete agreement with this assessment of his character. Moon raised his hand again, but Sarah stepped in front of him before he could strike another blow.

“Would you just leave him alone?” she said. “He wasn’t hurting anybody.”

Mary Ann chose that moment to step beneath the crossbar of the swing set and join the group. She smiled cheerfully, taking an awkward puff on her cigarette and blowing out a mouthful of smoke right away, as if she hadn’t yet mastered the art of inhaling.

“They were sharing a tender moment,” she explained to Moon. “Until we so rudely interrupted.”

You bitch from hell, Sarah thought.

“His mother just died, okay? He’s upset.”

As if to confirm this report, McGorvey sniffled and rubbed a hand across a cheek.

“Oh, you’re upset, are you?” Moon taunted McGorvey. “Well, now you know how they felt. Except a million times worse.”

“How who felt?” said Mary Ann.

“The parents of that little girl. The one he killed. I bet they were pretty upset.”

McGorvey hung his head. Sarah wanted to tell Moon to stop hounding the man, to just leave him in peace for one single day, but McGorvey spoke up before she had a chance.

“I didn’t want to hurt her,” he muttered, still staring at the ground. “She made me.”

“What?” Moon cupped a hand around his ear as if he wasn’t sure he’d heard right. “What did you just say?”

McGorvey looked up. He held his good arm out like an actor, the way he had at the Town Pool on the day of the electrical storm.

“I didn’t want to,” he repeated in a wounded tone. “She said she was gonna tell on me.”

“She was gonna tell on you?” Moon repeated incredulously. “You killed a little girl because she was gonna tell on you?”

McGorvey lowered his arm. A strange whimper escaped from his throat. He shifted his gaze from Moon to Mary Ann to Sarah, as if searching for a more sympathetic listener.

“I didn’t want to get in trouble.” McGorvey’s voice trailed off as he said this, as if he suddenly realized how ridiculous it sounded.

“Did you hear that?” Moon asked Sarah and Mary Ann in an excited voice. “Did you hear what he just said? You two are witnesses.”

“I heard it,” said Mary Ann.

Sarah nodded. She wasn’t sure a hearsay confession would hold up in court, but she didn’t say so. She just watched silently as Moon clapped McGorvey on the back, almost like he was offering his congratulations.

“Oh-ho, man. You are so fucked.”

McGorvey shook his head.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’m fucked any way you look at it.”

A stunned silence descended upon the playground, a hush so sudden and profound that Sarah was momentarily startled by the sound of her own breathing. She stared at McGorvey with an open-mouthed expression of bewilderment that would have seemed unthinkably rude under any other circumstances, trying to comprehend the fact that this harmless-looking man—this man she’d just hugged—was a murderer.

Of a child.

More out of embarrassment than anything else, Sarah turned away from him to check on her daughter, who was still dozing peacefully in the swing, her head slumped to one side, her lips parted as if she were about to speak.

Poor girl, Sarah thought, reaching out to brush a strand of hair away from Lucy’s clammy cheek. I’m all you have.

She knew she’d been a bad mother, that she’d signed on for a job that demanded more of her than she knew how to give. If she’d been alone, she might have gotten down on her knees to beg her daughter’s forgiveness.

I’ll do better, she promised the sleeping child. I have to.

Sarah smelled chocolate on Lucy’s breath as she leaned forward to plant a soft kiss on the tip of her cute little nose. A vision came to her as her lips touched Lucy’s skin, a sudden vivid awareness of the life they’d lead together from here on out, the hothouse intimacy of a single mother and her only child, the two of them sharing everything, breathing the same air, inflicting their moods on each other, best friends and bitter rivals, competing for attention, relying on each other for companionship and emotional support, forming the intense, convoluted, and probably unhealthy bond that for better and worse would become the center of both of their identities, fodder for years of therapy, if they could ever figure out a way to pay for it. It wasn’t going to be an easy future, Sarah understood that, but it felt real to her—so palpable and close at hand, so in keeping with what she knew of her own life—that it almost seemed inevitable, the place they’d been heading all along. It was enough to make her wonder how she’d ever managed to believe in the alternate version, the one where the Prom King came and made everything better.

She smoothed Lucy’s hair again, then turned back around, rejoining the circle of adults, none of whom had spoken for some time. What was there to say, really, after someone had confessed to a murder? Another endless minute ticked by before McGorvey finally addressed Mary Ann.

“Mind if I bum a cigarette?”

With a certain reluctance, Mary Ann reached into her purse and withdrew a pack of Camel Lights.

“Since when do you smoke?” Sarah asked her.

“I don’t,” said Mary Ann, taking another amateurish drag. “This is just a one-time thing.”

“Got an extra?” Sarah asked.

Mary Ann extended the pack first to her, and then, out of politeness, to Moon. He waved her off, but then suddenly reconsidered.

“Ah, what the hell,” he said.

The four of them stood in a circle on the playground, smoking and exchanging furtive glances. Every couple of puffs, Sarah reached back and gave Lucy’s swing a gentle push.

“Hey, Ronnie,” Moon said, after a long interval of silence.

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry for your loss.” He sounded sincere. “I wish it hadn’t happened like that.”

“Thank you,” said McGorvey. “She was a good woman. Took good care of me.”

Mary Ann dropped her cigarette on the ground and stepped on it with unnecessary vigor. McGorvey turned to Sarah.

“Can I ask you something?” he said. “I mean, I wouldn’t want you to take this wrong, but it’s not such a great idea to be out here with your kid after dark.”

“Yeah,” said Moon. “I was kinda wondering about that myself.”

“You want to know what I’m doing here?” Sarah said, as if she hadn’t understood the question.

Moon and McGorvey nodded, while Mary Ann looked on with an oddly sympathetic expression. Sarah started to speak, but instead of words, only a small, embarrassed giggle escaped from her mouth. How could she explain? She was here because she’d kissed a man in this very spot, and tasted happiness for the first time in her adult life. She was here because he said he’d run away with her, and she believed him—believed, for a few brief, intensely sweet moments, that she was something special, one of the lucky ones, a character in a love story with a happy ending.