The women were already circled around Harriet Nessel’s living room when Jen creaked open the screen door like it was a portal to one year before.
The nonregulars crowding the room, Janine’s frantic welcome speech, Harriet’s impatient glance down to her yellow legal pad, the empty space next to Annie Perley on the couch where Jen squeezed in.
Annie spoke first. How’s Abe?
Good. How’re Laurel and Hank? Jen made a point to keep her voice smooth and easy.
Fine, Annie said, her voice a pitch too high. Everyone’s good.
Jen was relieved. Book club was not the time or place to lay it all bare. The ritual of this—the superficial hum of conversation—was making her feel safer than she had in a while.
Maybe Annie felt the same, although her smile looked pasted on. Lena sat on the other side of Annie, and although she was leaned into a conversation with Priya, Jen could sense her listening to them, ready to swoop in if Jen said the wrong thing.
Lena had to know what Annie had done, right?
Did Mike?
Because Jen hadn’t told Paul—a burr between them, admittedly—but telling him would mean giving it oxygen, examining everything that had happened in a more thorough way.
Jen had allowed it all to happen; she’d made it happen.
Colin had seen her desperation. He’d used the weakest, worst parts of her—her Abe-blindness, her fatigue—as a way in. All year he’d been her yes man, agreeing with her complaints and soothing her worry.
Or maybe that part hadn’t been a lie; Jen didn’t know anymore. She could not tell fact from fiction.
Why didn’t you say something sooner, she’d asked Abe. Didn’t you know it was wrong?
Colin said I misunderstood, Abe said, and he threatened to take away points if I said anything. But I didn’t misunderstand, did I?
Colin had never even gone to the doctor’s appointment that Deb had set up for him, and there had probably been no ulcer either.
All of those nervous tics, the bleeding vulnerability?
He didn’t deserve the absolution, but wasn’t it likely that someone had once hurt Colin, too?
When Jen thought about how for a few hours she’d sided with Colin, doubted her own son, she became shaky with anger, understood in a flash what trespass against your child could incite.
It wasn’t the worst thing, Jen had concluded, to have Colin disappear. Maxine Das could reason that nature required it.
As the introductions traveled around Harriet’s living room (“most fun thing you did this summer”?—lordy, Janine), Jen swore she could feel, in the space between her shoulder and Annie’s, an electric charge able to sear through all of the ways they fooled themselves, the rules and layers and clubs and community traditions, their good intentions to raise good people and make the world a better place.
Once, two years later, when they were both slightly tipsy and waiting for Priya to drive them home after a particularly giddy book club, Jen came close to saying something to Annie, but by then, the space between them had become less charged and she allowed the moment to pass.
If she had asked, though, this is what she would have learned:
Even two years after that night, Annie was uncertain how, exactly, she survived it.
He must have slipped on the rock. It was the only thing that could explain how he loosened his grip for just long enough to allow Annie to scramble away. There was a scuffle, and for a split second, Annie had been stronger or at least better positioned.
She had pushed him right then. Hard.
He was there, and then gone. It seemed almost supernatural until she heard it, over the rush of water.
“Please.”
She felt herself walk to the edge. Just below her, Colin was suspended on the rocks. He grasped an exposed root on the cliffside and was trying to hoist himself back up.
“Mrs. Perley. Please.” He reached out a hand for a brief second. “Please?”
The effort and shock had caught up to her, and Annie’s body had begun to shake in jerky tremors. She managed her limbs into a crouch, gauged the distance between them. Five feet, maybe six.
He looked up at her with pleading eyes.
Had she found a branch, had she slipped off her caftan to use as a tether, she believed she might have reached him.
But she didn’t. She didn’t extend a hand or search for a branch. She didn’t do anything except wait for him to lose his grip, watch him fall down into the rocks below.
She had the clarity of mind to think that he had been right, it would probably look like an accident.
Two years later, she might have even admitted to Jen that she’d felt satisfied watching Colin fall, that she hadn’t felt one ounce of regret as it happened.
So maybe it’s for the best Jen didn’t ask.
When Paul’s company is sold a few years later, he retires with the security of vested stock options, and Jen, who has two books under her belt, gets the opportunity to resume teaching again on the West Coast.
Abe, done with the Kingdom School, moves with them.
It’s ten years after Laurel Perley’s graduation party that Jen will scroll idly through social media and see Laurel, grown and gorgeous, again a graduate, this time with a blue mortarboard cap on her head.
Jen has followed the other kids, too—knows that one of Priya’s sons plays major-league baseball and her daughter manages the family car dealerships, that Katie Neff, who does something political in Washington, D.C., writes strident lengthy posts about how the government wants to take all of our liberties that Janine always forwards with a “PLEASE SHARE A!”
In the graduation photo up on Jen’s screen, Laurel’s arms reach to loop around Hank (so tall now, pink bow tie, crisp white shirt) and Annie (hair gone white, two heads shorter than her children). To Annie’s left is Mike, beaming, crow’s feet deepened, and then Lena Meeker, her long caramel hair and smooth skin suspiciously unaged. (She’s definitely had work done, she must have, but it’s subtle and natural enough that Jen can’t pinpoint exactly what.)
Next to Lena is a woman who Jen assumes is Lena’s prodigal daughter Rachel, with thick curly hair cut short, gray at the temples, dimples similar to Laurel’s.
Peering closer, Jen thinks that they look more like siblings than Laurel and Hank do, or maybe it’s just how closely their faces are positioned together and their matching dimples and smiles.
Family! boasts the caption.
Jen, who is not in a book club now that she’s teaching, thinks that she ought to join one; a part of her misses the camaraderie. She comments on the photo, something generically supportive and enthusiastic and forgettable.
She can’t help but wonder about the real story behind the picture—is Laurel okay? Does she have daily ups and downs like Abe, who is about to start work as a programmer (fingers crossed it sticks), but with no plans or desire to ever date or leave home (a relief, Jen feels, as well as something to mourn).
Abe isn’t as volatile now—at least, Jen doesn’t think so—but he’s still Abe, and the three of them remain their own little island. She tries not to think about what happens when they die, because the worry leaves her breathless, and because that’s the rub of being a parent: there are some things you just can’t control.
Which doesn’t mean you don’t try.
Is Laurel’s off-track college graduation (two years late by Jen’s calculation) traceable to the way Jen ushered Colin into her life like a Trojan horse? Or has he managed to fade into the background?
When Paul asks what are you gawking at, Jen will show him the photo and he’ll shrug. Who’s that?
Really, Paul?
From Cottonwood? Remember Laurel’s awful party where we thought Abe might be the vandal and that terrible video game he made? The night that Colin …
Sweet Jesus, Paul will say. I blocked that out.
Jen will fervently wish that she were capable of doing the same.
She’d be so much more productive without all of this noise in her head, but she feels less alone when she imagines Annie tuned to the same frequency.
We’d do anything for our children, you and I, Jen imagines saying. She likes to think that Annie would tilt her white head in agreement.
Not that it’s anything to brag about.
Back to the fever of that September:
On the couch before the book club discussion started, Jen felt desperate to diffuse the electricity between herself and Annie. She gently nudged Annie’s shoulder and pointed to Harriet Nessel, pitched slightly forward in her big striped chair, watching them intensely.
Annie’s face relaxed for a minute.
“Are we in trouble, Harriet?” she said, a teasing smile in her voice.
Harriet frowned. With a click of her pen against the legal pad, she leaned back against her chair.
“Enough chitchat,” she said. “It’s time to discuss the book.”