41

Liz returned to yoga. She felt so stiff and weak—far more so than when she had first started, years ago. “Take it easy,” Diane told her, but she pushed hard. She pushed against her burning hamstrings, against her tired arms and resistant hips. She pushed against having let yoga go for so long and against how difficult it was to return.

Next, she went back to the bench. She wrote up a schedule for herself, a habit from long ago—from junior high, in fact, when she and Sarabeth would plan their assaults on the boys they liked, down to Hi on Monday and Do you have a pen I can borrow? on Wednesday or Friday. Making the schedules was far more fun than talking to or even kissing the boys, though they hadn’t known that then. They spent hours at it, laughing over the question of which was a bigger step, asking a boy for the time or saying Hey, cool bike.

Over many days, she got the blue and yellow lines she’d painted in the fall to intersect in green, a slow process of taping and painting and waiting and taping and painting and waiting. At last, her plaid finished, she was ready for the final touch.

So many things could suggest a flower: a circle of dots, a dot surrounded by zigzags, a series of soft arcs to imply a rose. She used them all. She painted tiny red snapdragon-like flowers and tiny orange zinnia-like flowers and tiny daisies of yellow and white. The work was slow and painstaking. At first, she tried not to repeat herself, but she had too much space to cover for that. And who ever heard of a garden in which every flower was unique?

She finished late one Sunday afternoon, her legs and arms stiff and aching as she straightened up and dropped her brushes into the garage sink. Brody and Lauren were in the family room, Brody grubby from an afternoon spent in the yard. “I’m done,” she said, stepping up into the kitchen.

Brody looked up. “Done done?”

“I believe so.”

“Your hands,” Lauren exclaimed, coming over. “They’re like a Seurat.”

Liz turned her hands over, turned them back. They were dotted with color.

“Hang on a sec,” Lauren said, and she ran up the stairs and returned with a piece of paper. “Here, do a print.” She laid the paper on the counter and directed Liz to press her palms to it.

“Cool,” she said when Liz lifted her hands away. “Check it out.”

The paper bore two ghostly handprints, patterned with what looked like pastel camouflage.

“Now that,” Brody said, “is a fine collaboration.”

They followed her back to the garage, Lauren slipping past her and saying, “I can’t believe how many flowers you painted. That is so OCD.” She looked back at Liz. “But in a good way. It’s really cool.”

Liz leaned against the washing machine as they bent to look closer. She wondered if there would come a time when this bench would stop reminding her of the split in her life, when she would no longer think that the yellow and blue represented innocence while the rest was from After.

She’d planned nothing for dinner, and Brody suggested going out for pizza. She headed upstairs to tell Joe, passing by the bathroom that only he now used.

He was at his desk with a book. His room was immaculate, bedspread pulled tight, not so much as a single sock in sight.

“What are you doing?” she said, and he turned to look at her.

“Reading.”

“You OK?”

He gave her a puzzled look, as if to say: Of course I’m OK. Why wouldn’t I be OK?

No reason. Anxious expectation, that’s what she had. Her new companion. Mother’s little helper, but in reverse. Mother’s little hindrance.

“You know,” her own mother had said to her in the kitchen before Easter dinner, the two of them working together, arranging asparagus on a platter, tossing tiny boiled potatoes with butter, “you know, you kids really raised yourselves. I was just there in case things went wrong.” Which had made Liz want to take her mother by the shoulders and shake some sense into her, shake some memory into her. Hello? she’d wanted to say. Remember the day John was born? Remember the day Steve left for college? Don’t you remember being kind of busy for the twenty-five years in between?

“We’re going out for pizza,” she said to Joe. “Ten minutes.”

“Can we get pepperoni?”

This was because Lauren didn’t like pepperoni; Lauren preferred veggie or pesto chicken. His diffidence broke her heart. She went to him and kissed his head, smelled soap and a trace of unfresh scalp. She put her hand in his hair and ruffled it a bit. “Absolutely we can get pepperoni,” she said. “We’ll get whatever you want.”

         

Suddenly the end of the school year was in sight. It was still seven or eight weeks off, but Lauren believed in it now, knew it was a matter of actual days beginning and ending rather than a miraculous lift from here to there. This was partly due to the weather, partly due to a plan she and Myrna had to get Myrna’s dad to teach them to surf, and partly due to the fact—the fact—that she was feeling better.

Leaving math on Wednesday, she scanned the courtyard for Myrna, eager to tell her about the crazy thing that had just happened, Aimee Berman getting busted for using her cell phone during class. Mr. Pavlovich had humiliated her, demanding that she come up to his desk, and then flourishing a yellow principal’s ticket at her as if the whole thing made him happy. Aimee’s phone would be confiscated and kept in the office for a week. Far worse, she’d be barred from attending the next—and as it happened final—school dance.

People were moving here and there across the courtyard, but Myrna was nowhere to be seen. Lauren figured she was already at her locker, and she headed in that direction, looking the other way when she passed Amanda and Noah on a bench outside the cafeteria. A year ago, she would never have believed that not having Amanda as her best friend might be OK, but somehow it was. They still sat together in the classes they had together, and they talked a bit, but the rest of the time it was as if they barely knew each other.

Lauren wondered what you did if you were Aimee Berman and in deep shit. Aimee Berman busted just didn’t compute.

Mr. Greenway walked by, nodding at her as their paths crossed. She nodded back. She received a strange kind of recognition from certain teachers, almost a sanction. It was like they were saying: Yes—yes, you. It bugged her, but seeing as she couldn’t stop it, she hoped it would help with her grades.

There was Myrna, coming out of the locker area, scanning the courtyard herself. Lauren raised her hand and waved, then quickly dropped it. She’d just seen Aimee. Aimee and Tyler and Jeff, standing near the science complex. Why hadn’t Aimee gone to the office? She was crying, and Tyler’s arms were around her, and Lauren thought, How pathetic, though she also felt kind of sorry for her. She made sure Myrna hadn’t seen her and stepped back into the shadows.

Jeff was just standing there, a few feet from Tyler and Aimee. Do something, Lauren thought. Leave. But he didn’t. His pack hung from his shoulder, and he moved the toe of his shoe back and forth over the asphalt.

Tyler put his hands on Aimee’s shoulders and bent to look at her. He would graduate in six weeks, and Lauren had heard he was going to the University of Oregon in the fall. What would happen then?

He took Aimee’s backpack from her and slung it over his free shoulder, and then, one of his arms around her, they began walking toward the office. Lauren tracked their progress, thinking, Dead Girl Walking, though it didn’t seem all that funny. She watched for a while and then looked back at Jeff, and to her surprise he was looking right at her. Immediately her heart raced, but she didn’t look away, and after a moment he kind of smiled and shrugged, then he turned and headed out of sight.

“Because he’s an artiste,” Myrna said a little later. “He has to suff-aire.”

They were at the Jamba Juice across from school, sipping smoothies and talking about a cousin of hers who lived in New York City, in an apartment the size of “your average bathroom,” as Myrna put it.

“I mean, you should see the cockroaches in that place—they’re like the size of mice.”

“OK, I take it back,” Lauren said. “I’m not jealous.”

“If it was Paris I’d let you be jealous.”

“If it was Paris I’d be on the next plane. I’d be all, Hi, Myrna’s cousin, I’m just going to unroll my sleeping bag here, OK? Don’t mind me, I won’t be any trouble.”

“Au revoir, Mom and Dad.”

“No kidding.” Lauren pried the lid off her cup and used the straw to stir her smoothie. “Dear Mom and Dad,” she’d write on a postcard of the Eiffel Tower. But then what would she say?

“He even had a real mouse once,” Myrna said.

“Who?”

“My cousin. And listen to this—instead of setting a trap he fed the fucker.”

“Gross,” Lauren said, but she’d begun thinking of Dr. Lewis, of something he’d told her last week. They were talking about Prozac again, about whether or not it did anything, and somehow they got onto the subject of how antidepressants were first tested, back when they were new. Drug testing always started with animals, he explained, and he described how the researchers would give one mouse the antidepressant drug and another nothing, and then they’d put them both into buckets of water and see which fought harder to stay afloat. They were measuring the drug’s effect on mouse despair.

Mouse despair. Something about that really got Lauren.

Myrna’s mom arrived a little later to pick them up. She drove a funky old Saab, and when she saw Lauren she said, “Hey, doll—how’re things?”

“Fine, thanks,” Lauren said as she got into the backseat. The car was messy and smelled of Myrna’s dog, but she was happy to be in it. She had only been to Myrna’s house once, but she was dying to go again. Everything about Myrna was interesting.

They left the shopping center and drove past the high school and then up the hill. Myrna’s mom glanced over her shoulder and said, “So Lauren, what are you two beauties up to these days? My daughter won’t tell me anything.”

“Mom,” Myrna said from the passenger seat. “Don’t call us beauties.”

Her mom shrugged. “Damn—busted on my first sentence.”

“You said ‘Hey, doll’ to Lauren when we first got in.”

“That’s true, I did.”

In the backseat, Lauren closed her eyes. She felt a smile pulling at her mouth, and she let it pull, let her lips come apart and her teeth feel the air.

At home she dropped her backpack at the foot of the stairs. “Picking up Joe,” said a note on the kitchen counter. She went up to her room, found a sketch pad, and flipped through it to a clean page. She thought of Jeff after school today, that little smile he’d given her—or had she imagined it? The little smile, the shrugged shoulders. He was going to Chico. Party school, everyone said.

She started to draw a mouse in a bucket. The problem was, she kept making it cute: Its little face peeking over the edge. Its big eyes and long, silly whiskers. She didn’t know how to get the despair in. It might work better if it were a view from above, but how to put despair in a mouse’s ears and tail? Desolation in its legs and terror in its lumpish little body.

Jeff, staring at the ground. What was he looking at? What was he thinking? She wondered if she was going to laugh about him someday, like Sarabeth with the guy Doug.

Puppy love, she thought.

Mouse despair.

Mouse-sized despair, as if it were small, what she’d felt: a junior version of something adults experienced, of something she might experience someday. On the Internet she’d learned that depression often came back. Did it come back bigger?

What are you doing? Dr. Lewis might say.

I don’t know—trying to scare myself? As a way of attacking myself?

I can see that. But I think there’s another possibility. Maybe you’re trying to prepare yourself for something that’s very scary. So you won’t be surprised if it happens. I could make an argument that you’re not attacking yourself, you’re trying to take care of yourself. Do you think?

Sure, Lauren said. She flipped the page and started to draw again. If you say so.

         

Brody had a busy week, including a quick trip to LA and a management meeting late Thursday afternoon. It was Russ and all the VPs, gearing up for the first-quarter board meeting. Last time around, Brody had been caught short—how he’d gotten anything done in December he didn’t know—and so he was actually ahead of the game. He sat and listened to the other guys—plus Joanne Ramirez, from HR—talk about how they were ready with their updated PowerPoints, knowing full well they’d spend their weekends here.

At home that evening, Liz asked him to help her move the bench to the entry hall. He got the old one out of the way first, then carried the new one in and stood with her while she appraised it.

She held her right arm across her stomach, tucked her left fist under her chin. He could tell she was disappointed, and he said, “I think it looks good.”

She shook her head. “No, it’s all wrong here. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

The entry hall had a serious look: grayish-green walls, some botanical prints he’d given her for Christmas early in their marriage. The old bench had fit better—a woven straw seat on dark wood legs.

“It kind of livens things up,” he said, but she grimaced, moved to drag the bench away from the wall, gave up and headed for the kitchen.

He followed after her. “Maybe it could go in here,” he said, glancing around the family room and knowing even as he spoke that she’d say no.

“That wouldn’t work, either. It doesn’t matter. When you get a chance can you just take it back to the garage?”

Lauren was sitting at the coffee table doing homework. She looked up and said, “What are you guys talking about?”

“The bench,” Liz said. “It doesn’t really go.”

“You’re kidding.” Lauren got to her feet and made for the living room. In a moment she was back.

“See what I mean?” Liz said.

“It totally doesn’t go.”

“I didn’t think it was so bad,” Brody said. “I thought it was kind of cheerful.”

“Dad, you’re high,” Lauren said. She went to the refrigerator and got an apple; Brody watched as she cut it into slices and arranged them in a pinwheel pattern on a plate. Back at the coffee table, she took up her pencil again and said, “You know who it reminds me of?”

Liz looked over at her. “What?”

“The bench,” Lauren said. “Sarabeth.”

Liz looked as if she’d been punched. Brody didn’t understand what Lauren’s problem was. Why was she bringing up Sarabeth again? Surely she’d noticed the effect on Liz the last time.

He moved to the drainboard, where Liz was putting things away. He said, “Here, I’ve got that.” He took a platter from her and reached it to the high shelf where it was kept. He put away a colander, a mixing bowl.

She hadn’t spoken, and he said, “I think you should give it a day or two. Or you know what? It could go upstairs, on the landing. Wouldn’t it be nice to have something there?”

She was looking at Lauren, and he wondered if she’d even heard him. “But it’s plaid,” she said to Lauren. “With preppy colors.”

“I know,” Lauren said. “But it made me think of her.” She picked up an apple slice, then set it down again. “What’s going on with you guys?”

“Honey,” Brody said to her, “why don’t you go upstairs?”

“Don’t do that,” Liz said to him. She turned to Lauren and said, “I don’t mind your asking. It’s just that the situation is complicated.”

Lauren glanced at Brody and then looked down. “I’m sorry.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry about,” Liz said. “Really. And you know what? You know what’s going on. It’s no big secret. We’re out of touch.”

There were footsteps on the stairs, and Joe came in. He looked surprised to Brody, but just for a moment; he crossed the kitchen, opened the cookie cabinet, and helped himself to a handful of gingersnaps.

Liz went over to him. She said, “How many of those do you have, mister? At least drink some milk with them.”

Joe gave Brody a quick smile. “OK.”

She poured a glass of milk and slid it close to him. “I’ll take my tax now,” she said, holding out her hand for a cookie.

Lauren went back to her homework. Joe ate his cookies. Liz returned to the drainboard. Brody sat at the table and paged through the business section of the Times, feeling uneasy. Should he ask Liz about Sarabeth? Press her to tell him what happened? He had work to do, and in a while he headed upstairs, thinking he’d figure it out later. There was an e-mail from Russ, sent just twenty minutes ago to the product development team working with the Boston company; things had gotten off to a rocky start, and Brody had suggested a quick intervention now, before the situation got more complicated. “Let’s tread softly here, folks,” Russ had written. “Cook it like an egg, not a steak.” Amused, Brody composed a reply: “Well put, boss.” But he dumped it without sending it.

He stayed at his laptop for about an hour, then went back downstairs and carried the bench through the now-empty kitchen to the garage. He set it against a wall and stepped back for a better look. It was very flowery—maybe that had been Lauren’s point. Sarabeth’s house was full of flowery stuff. He’d always felt uncomfortable there, afraid he might break something.

Liz was asleep by the time he got to bed and up by the time he woke. At breakfast she seemed cheerful, chatting about plans for the weekend.

He was taking both kids to school, and when they were ready he kissed her goodbye and followed them out to the car. He unlocked the doors, then hesitated. “Hang on a sec,” he said, and he went back inside.

She was at the sink, a dishtowel tucked into the waist of her black yoga tights. “Forget something?” she said.

“No, I just—” He crossed the kitchen and touched her shoulder, then bent to kiss her again. “Just that. Are you OK? Last night?”

“I’m fine.”

“I didn’t mean to cut her off, I just—”

“You wanted to protect me.”

“I guess so.”

“You’d better get going,” she said, but he didn’t want to; he wanted her to talk to him. Didn’t she need someone to talk to at this point? With Sarabeth out of the picture? The dishes were right there, a stack of plates with silverware piled on top like kindling, and he pushed them away with the back of his forearm.

“How are you?” he said, and she gave him a puzzled look.

“Fine.”

“No, really. I want you to tell me everything—I want you to.”

“Brody.”

He looked across the kitchen table and into the family room. Over the years he’d missed hundreds of hours here: weekend hours taking the kids on outings; evening hours sitting up with Liz, listening for peeps and murmurs from upstairs. Nighttime hours, pillow to pillow.

“Hey, let’s plan a weekend,” he said. “Let’s go to Napa, just the two of us.”

She held her palm to his jaw. “That sounds very nice. But come on, you better go—look what time it is.”

In the car the kids were quiet, Lauren beside him and Joe in the backseat. When they arrived at the high school, Lauren got out and said goodbye, but Joe stayed in back, the ride to his school too short for it to be worth his while to move.

“Cook it like an egg, not a steak.” That was a new one. Mike Patterson had a collection of corporate lingo, scrawled on Post-its stuck all over his office: “We’re not trying to boil the ocean here, folks.” “That’s like trying to roll Jell-O uphill.” Brody would forward Russ’s e-mail to him, soon as he got in.

“Joe?” he said, glancing at the rearview mirror.

“Yeah?”

He adjusted the mirror so he could see Joe’s face better.

“What?” Joe said.

Brody took in Joe’s patient expression, his willingness to listen to whatever his father wanted to tell him. “Nothing,” Brody said. “I just wanted to hear your voice.”

         

Not much later, a few blocks short of Yoga Life, Liz pulled to the curb and stopped. She was on a quiet street, commercial but far enough from the main shopping district that some of the storefronts were vacant. Four minutes till class, and she suddenly wasn’t sure she wanted to go.

But that was silly. Of course she’d go.

A row of flowering plum trees had been planted along the sidewalk; she’d always liked the deep burgundy of their leaves. She turned the radio on, then turned it off again. There was a car parked ahead of her, the only other stopped car on the block.

Napa with Brody. They’d gone a few times when the kids were younger, rented bikes one springtime, lazed around the pool at an insanely expensive hotel one summer. Gone wine tasting on both occasions. She didn’t think she had an appetite for wine anymore. She pictured herself in the passenger seat of Brody’s car, Brody standing on the sidewalk waiting for her to get out. Herself, not moving.

Two minutes. She hadn’t driven all the way down here to turn around, had she?

Don’t be late.

Don’t be lazy.

Don’t be weak.

I can’t help it, she thought, and she lowered her forehead to the steering wheel. She lifted her foot off the brake, felt the car roll forward, slammed the brake down again. Heart racing, she looked up, but the car in front of her was still a good five feet away.

One minute—she’d walk in breathless just as Diane was telling everyone to lie on their backs and take a minute to go inside. Her heart would be pounding as she pulled her knees to her chest and rocked back and forth.

She made a U-turn in the middle of the block and drove away. It was nine o’clock on a Friday morning, and she had no responsibilities for the next six hours. What did she ever used to do with herself?

She thought of the front yard at home, the greening hydrangeas and the leafy shrubs, and the bare spots where she usually planted annuals. There was actually a wonderful nursery in Napa; if she and Brody went up for a weekend they could stop in on the way home. She pictured zinnias, daisies, some color to fill in the garden while she waited for the perennials to bloom. Maybe they could even buy a tree; there was a spot in the backyard that needed some height.

But could they really go? The kids were too old for a babysitter but way too young to spend a weekend alone. She could ask her parents, but she hated to ask them for something they’d feel compelled to say yes about. They had their own lives now—though according to her mother at Easter dinner, they’d had their own lives for just about ever.

When she got home it was only 9:23. She’d been gone such a short time she could still smell coffee and even a trace of toast.

There’d been an e-mail plea last night from the middle-school vice-principal, saying parents were needed to organize the eighth-grade graduation dance, and she thought now was as good a time as any to write back. She’d worked on the dance Lauren’s year and had a file she could offer the committee—if she didn’t volunteer herself, which she ought to.

But first, to find the file. It was stuffy upstairs, and she opened the kids’ windows before going to the file cabinet in the TV room. There was a bulging Pendaflex labeled MIDDLE SCHOOL, and she pulled it out and took it over to the old plaid love seat, a relic from the house on Cowper Street. BOOK FAIR, PTA, HOT LUNCH: folder after soft-edged folder, papers jutting out of all of them.

And then there it was: GRAD DANCE.

Grad dance. She clasped the folder to her chest. There was something so innocent about that—“grad” instead of “graduation.” Her mouth felt dry. She looked again and saw the hurried scrawl, pictured herself just two years ago, quickly labeling this thing she’d need again very soon—in no time at all, in the blink of an eye. Before anything could possibly change.

Having no idea.

She leaned back into the love seat, held the folder close again. How nice it would be to think that in the end it would merge, life before and life after: into life itself—just life. She longed to believe this, but she thought something permanent had come into being at the exact moment Lauren touched the blade to her skin.

         

Liz dreamed that night that she was trying to reach a red Frisbee that had lodged on someone’s roof. She had a mop stick screwed onto the extension handle, and she was leaning out Joe’s window, except that it wasn’t Joe’s window, it was the window of a huge loft place, and she was reaching and reaching for the Frisbee, and missing and missing it.

Brody dreamed of his father, sitting behind the wheel of the Cutlass he’d bought in ’71, tan with a dark brown roof. He was smiling. He was in the middle of a vast, sunny field, no road in sight: just sitting behind the wheel, windows open, smiling. In the dream, as in life, Brody thought the Cutlass was the coolest car his dad could have bought and still been his dad.

Lauren dreamed she couldn’t find her little pillow. She needed her exact pillows, a big one under her head, a small one over it. Myrna had confessed one day that she still slept with a stuffie, so Lauren’s extra pillow was nothing. She woke and found it, and when she slept again she dreamed about Ada, sitting in the canoe.

Joe wasn’t dreaming. He wasn’t sleeping, and he wasn’t at home. Fridays were turning out to be poker nights, and he was at Trent’s, lying in a sleeping bag in the family room, wide awake though it was almost one-thirty. Nearby, Trent snored, and Anthony whacked the floor every now and then as he tossed in his bag. They’d played till midnight, till Trent’s dad pulled the plug on them. Conor and Elliot had gone home, and Joe had thought at the last minute about getting a ride from Conor’s dad, but he’d decided to stay. It would’ve been hard to explain to Trent why he was leaving, harder still to explain to his parents why he’d come home. They’d’ve been in bed, and he’d’ve had to use his key to get in, and he didn’t like the look of that in his brain, tiptoeing into his own house, uncertain whether or not his parents were still awake. Not wanting to bother them.

Rosie, Trent’s golden, twitched in her sleep, then whimpered a little. She was on the couch, in her usual spot; Rosie in that spot on Trent’s couch was as old as anything.

He’d won. They only played for pennies, so it was just a few bucks, but still, he’d cleaned up. “Lucky,” Trent kept muttering, but Joe wasn’t lucky, he was good. He knew something the other guys didn’t: the cards didn’t really matter. What mattered was how you played. What mattered was your face.

The ice maker in the freezer clicked on, water filling the reservoir. Joe moved onto his other side. He didn’t mind being awake here, at Trent’s house. He could pretend he was anywhere.

An hour later he was still awake. Still not tired. The clock on the DVD player said 2:43. He pulled his legs from his sleeping bag and got to his feet. He knew Trent’s house almost as well as his own, and he walked slowly and quietly to the family room door.

Out in the hall, he had to be even quieter. Trent’s parents’ room was directly above the back door. He twisted the knob slowly and pulled, but nothing happened. He let go of the knob, quietly unlocked the dead bolt, then twisted again. Outside, he pulled the door after him to within an inch of the jamb.

It was colder than he’d expected, and he crossed his arms over his chest. He could see a fair number of stars—nothing like what he’d see at camp this summer, but not bad for here.

He couldn’t wait for camp.

Trent had two little brothers, and the backyard was full of sports equipment: bats and balls, a pitchback, two different-height basketball hoops on stands. There was some really old little-kid stuff, too, and he waited till he could see, then picked his way across the grass to an ancient plastic seesaw. He could barely get his butt between the handholds, but he wedged himself in anyway. He and his sister had had a seesaw exactly like this. And a little green sandbox in the shape of a turtle.

His sister had scars, two on her right wrist and four on her left. She touched the ones on her left wrist a lot. One, two, three, four: he imagined her counting. They were at home, the three of them—his father, mother, sister. He was here. One, two, three, four. When she was doing something else, he sometimes looked at them. The third was the longest, the fourth the darkest—the slowest to heal. A day would come when they would be close to invisible, and he wondered: Would she touch them still?

He looked at the sky again. In less than two months he’d be at camp, in the mountains, and the sky would swarm with stars—all that pinprick, enormous light. He thought of the impossible truth that they were finished despite their brightness. They looked motionless, but they were on their way away—they were going, they were already gone.