Rebecca peeled her eyes from the screen. Her daughter was a . . . YouTube personality? She perused the comments following the three videos she had watched. On each video there were many, many comments—dozens! Hundreds! One of the first comments on each video came from someone called jt76. Love how succinct this is! Also: Great explanation of balancing risk and reward. You’re so talented!
There were a lot of other comments too, most encouraging, some obnoxious. But the thing that stood out the most to Rebecca was the number of views: Alexa’s videos averaged in the tens of thousands! The highest viewed video Rebecca saw had been viewed thirty-seven thousand times!
A lot of people were watching Alexa Thornhill do her thing online.
Then there was this. Not a single one of the dresses Alexa was wearing in the videos looked familiar to Rebecca. Morgan was exactly right: they were more conservative than Alexa’s usual garb. They were very pretty! But where had they come from? Where did they live?
Granted, Alexa was almost preternaturally self-sufficient. She’d been doing her own laundry since the age of nine, and now that she could drive, Rebecca supposed it was possible that she had her own account at Anton’s dry cleaning. How much money was she making from this YouTube thing? And how far apart had she and Alexa grown, that Alexa could have this whole identity, this whole life, this whole wardrobe, that Rebecca knew nothing about? In the past this was something she would have taken immediately to Peter, of course, and failing that, to one of the Mom Squad members. Probably Gina! Before the sleeping bag incident, Gina would have been happy to lend an ear, and Rebecca would have trusted her. But now—now the earth had shifted beneath her feet in all kinds of unsettling ways, and now she had nobody. Well, not nobody.
She pulled up Daniel’s number on her phone and typed out a text.
Can you meet me tomorrow at Maudslay? I want to tell you something.
She held her breath, but the reply came almost immediately. I would love to.
After that, the three dots, then another text came in.
I miss you.
She didn’t even hesitate before texting back, I miss you too.
The next day they did their usual thing, which was to park on opposite ends of the parking lot and meet up once they’d gotten on their way. They usually walked down the road a bit before entering the park; Rebecca liked to go in by the Gates of Hell rather than via the more common entrance, by the rangers’ cottage at the beginning of the property.
“First things first,” said Rebecca. “Daniel, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry about that whole thing at the tall ships.” She took a deep breath and turned to face Daniel. “I’m sorry I told you that you need to live in a box.”
Bernice gave them a baleful look, as if to say, Are we walking, or are we spending all day apologizing?
“No, I’m sorry,” said Daniel. “I need to let you do things in your own time. I didn’t mean to pressure you, or rush you. I understand that our situations are different, I do. I can wait until you’re ready, Rebecca. It turns out that being in a box with you is way better than being outside the box without you.”
“It is? Are you sure?”
“Way better,” said Daniel. “Way, way better.”
Just like that, an enormous weight lifted itself from Rebecca’s shoulders and disappeared into the summer morning air. Just like that. Maybe everything didn’t have to be so hard after all.
The Gates of Hell were wrought-iron gates that used to lead to one of the mansions on the property, back when the mansions still stood. There was a rumor that the Gates were haunted, and that late at night you could see the heads of decapitated family members on the spikes, even though no murders had ever taken place on the estate to anyone’s knowledge. Nevertheless, Rebecca shivered and tried not to look at the gates.
“Are you worried about the decapitated heads again?” Daniel asked.
“Maybe a little,” she admitted.
Daniel glanced up. “If we saw the ghosts of murdered people, I would do everything in my power to protect you.” He stepped behind Rebecca and wrapped his arms around her waist and rested his chin on the top of her head. This was one of the things about dating someone new after years and years with the same person: you got to see how your body would fit with someone else’s, and sometimes there were unexpected surprises in that. Peter had been very tall, and would have had to stoop to rest his chin on Rebecca’s head. It was never worth the effort.
Immediately Rebecca felt disloyal for thinking that about Peter. He would have stooped for her all day long if she’d wanted him to.
They passed through the gates and began to walk along the dirt path.
Daniel tapped the side of his thigh for Bernice to catch up—she tended to lag, especially early in the morning. She was not a morning person. Obviously she wasn’t a person at all.
“Oh!” Rebecca said. “Here’s what I wanted to tell you. You’re not going to believe this. I just found out that Alexa has this entire YouTube channel called Silk Stockings. She dresses up in pretty, tasteful clothes, and she sits in this chair in her bedroom, and she explains things. Terms. Economic terms, things about the stock market.”
“Oh yeah?” said Daniel. He stopped and turned toward Rebecca. “Like what sorts of things?”
Rebecca named the topics she remembered: stop-loss orders, crypto currency investments. “Blockchain, maybe?” she said. “Is that a thing?”
“It’s a thing,” Daniel said. He was smiling to beat the band.
“What?” she said. “What are you so cheerful about over there?”
“Nothing. Just that I taught her a lot of those things.”
“You did?”
“Sure thing. Intro to the Stock Market. Remember I told you I had her in class?” He looked proud, spine straight, eyes eager and alert, like Bernice when she’d done something special and was waiting for a reward.
“Wow,” said Rebecca. “Well, I think you did a really good job. She seems like an actual expert. But—” She paused. “But don’t you think it’s terrible, that I didn’t know about it? It makes me feel like such a bad mother. I found out from Morgan, of all people. I used to be the one who told Morgan things that she didn’t know, and now Morgan is schooling me. My own daughter.” They continued along the path to where it curved toward the formal Italian and rose gardens, which were part of the original estate and were still kept up by the park service. In these gardens roses and other flowers grew willfully, abundantly.
“I don’t think it’s terrible at all,” said Daniel. “I think it’s the opposite of terrible. I think it’s fantastic. Really. Teenagers do all sorts of things without their parents’ knowledge. You know that.”
“I know,” said Rebecca morosely. “I was a teenager once too.”
“Much of it way, way worse than secretly learning about the stock market. Believe me. I’ve been teaching high school since the dawn of the Internet. And at the risk of sounding self-referential, I couldn’t be happier. I can’t wait to see some of these videos myself!”
Daniel’s unbridled enthusiasm put Rebecca at ease, and she reached down and unclipped Bernice’s leash from her collar, allowing her to indulge in some illegal off-leash walking. “I guess you’re right,” she said. “No, I don’t guess you’re right. You are right. You are. There’s no harm done, right? And it’s just for now. She probably won’t keep up with any of this once she leaves for college.”
“Exactly,” said Daniel. “I think that’s exactly right.”
“But what do I do? Do I confront her about it? Do I put some limits on her?”
She could tell Daniel was thinking long and hard about this because furrows appeared on his forehead. “You know what? I wouldn’t. I’d give it some time, a week or two, maybe more. Does she seem happy?”
Rebecca thought about seeing Alexa and Cam walking pleasantly down Pleasant Street; she thought about how Alexa was helping Sherri out whenever she needed it—sometimes, Sherri had told her, free of charge! “Happier than I’ve seen her in a long time,” she admitted.
“Then let it be, for now. Give yourself some time to figure out how you feel about it. When the time feels right, have a talk with Alexa. That’s what I would do. Wait here for a sec,” he said.
Daniel climbed the few small steps to the rose gardens, and Rebecca stayed behind with Bernice, who was sniffing around the small pet cemetery, where the estate owners had purportedly buried favorite horses and dogs. Rebecca at first imagined that Bernice was paying homage but then she saw that actually she was relieving herself.
Every time Rebecca was in Maudslay she thought about all of the lives spent on the grounds, where once people had lived grandly and where now there remained only a few scattered outlines of structures: parts of the stone foundation of one of the homes, a thicket-choked understructure of a swimming pool, a root cellar. These surroundings at once gave Rebecca a sense of peace and well-being and shot her through with a reminder of the smallness of her life in the vast historical landscape, where one day they would all be rubble and dust.
Wow, that was morbid. She looked up to see Daniel coming toward her with a rose plucked from one of the bushes.
“A rose for my rose,” he said.
“That’s illegal!” said Rebecca, delighted and horrified. She looked around to see if a ranger might be lurking. First her dog had desecrated the pet cemetery, and now this. “This is a state park! You’re going to get us arrested.”
He tucked the rose behind her ear and kissed her, in front of God and Bernice and everyone else. “I don’t care,” he said. “It’s worth it. I’ve missed you, Rebecca Coleman. I’m glad you’ve come back to me.” Then he said, “Are you free today? Maybe we can find a summer adventure.”