13

Sarabeth opened her front door and stepped onto the porch. It was very cold, and she shivered and crossed her arms tightly over her chest, but she didn’t go back inside. She had wept and wept in there, moving from room to room, from couch to bed to floor. She had come out here to stop.

…slit her wrists, took most of a bottle of Tylenol…

Quickly, she crossed the porch and braced herself against the post. At the Heidts’, all the upstairs lights were on, and she focused on the bright windows, imagined Bonnie and Rick up there putting the children to bed. Chloe, Pilar, Isaac. Girl, girl, boy. At the Castleberrys’ it had been boy, girl, boy.

…slit her wrists……slit her wrists, took most of a bottle of…

She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes and wiped them on her pants. She took a deep breath. There was wood smoke somewhere, faint and far away.

What had happened to Lauren? She remembered Lauren abruptly leaving her bedroom when the two of them were talking last time. She remembered thinking Lauren was dressing differently, that Lauren was a little spacey. And what did she do? Recommended a book. Recommended a book that had ultimately caused Lauren trouble. Oh, and had a small tantrum over the condition of the cheese rolls she’d brought.

She put her face to the cold post. This isn’t about you, she said to herself again, but it was baritone deep this time: wobbly, distorted, vanishing. She was worthless. All day today she had told herself she would call, but she had not called. All day today she had thought she should drive over with food, but she had not driven. And again, now, still: she wasn’t driving. Liz had saved her, saved her a thousand times over—it was the central truth of her life. Had it been inevitable that she would one day fail Liz?

A blade across the tender, pale skin. She pulled back her sleeve, felt the tendons where they surfaced close to her hand. Taut chords, strings on a violin. She found a tendon just to the side of the base of her throat and turned her head so she could pinch it between her fingers.

Lauren couldn’t have meant it. Liz couldn’t bear that.

Liz couldn’t bear this.

She made her way down the steps to the little scrap of walkway that led to the Heidts’ driveway. She paused. To her left was their garage, to her right their driveway and their car. The wind shifted, and she thought she felt a drop of rain on her forehead. She backed up and sat on her bottom step.

She should have taken food.

On Cowper Street, the day after her mother died, so many people brought so much food she couldn’t get it all into the refrigerator. She remembered finally giving up and just randomly stowing it: in cabinets, drawers, the cold oven. Then when people finally left, even Liz and her parents gone home, she retrieved the improperly stored dishes and scraped into the garbage creamy chicken and noodles; broccoli and rice; thick, tomatoey rafts of lasagne. She left the empty dishes in the sink until, in bed at last, she thought better of it and went back downstairs to wash them, thinking that she didn’t want her father to come upon them in the morning when he sought the small solace of a cup of coffee.

All this time later, all these years later. She brought her feet up and wrapped her arms around her shins, then lowered her forehead to her knees. After a while, she felt a drop of rain on her scalp, and then, some time later, another. She looked up again. Invisibly, barely audibly, it was raining. She heard it on the leaves, slow, and on the Heidts’ driveway. It hadn’t rained since yesterday morning, when she’d woken to the sound of it and had for a moment forgotten Billy, forgotten the long hours she’d spent thinking about him Saturday evening, Saturday afternoon, Friday night.

She longed to tell him about Lauren. Why?

Because she knew him, that was why. She knew what he would do. He would hold her, stroke her hair, make it easy to cry. The very things she’d failed to do for Liz.