She woke up, in the gray light of dawn, to the pulsing shriek of the burglar alarm. Her foot had fallen asleep. Numb and heavy, it slid heavily on the floor as she tried to stand up and shuffle to the closet control pad and turn off the alarm. The pulsing changed to a louder, faster, more urgent beep and then a shrieking wail. She made it to the closet just in time to avoid triggering a police visit.
Then the thought hit her like a sick punch: maybe she needed the police. She crept down the stairs. The front door was closed. The downstairs hallway, kitchen, and family room appeared tranquil and undisturbed. From the backyard came a faint rustle, a slap of something against the wood.
She spied a gray rounded shape on the damp redwood of her patio. Sticking out of the lump was a hand, pale and seemingly too small for the body attached, with two silver rings on the index finger. And rising from behind the lump, another, larger hand clutching a red rubber volleyball, followed by an arm and a spiky green head. Jared! The ball slipped from his hands and rolled toward the door, where it bounced off with a mild thump. Jared leaped for it, losing his balance and hitting his chin on the gas barbeque.
“What the hell?” Erica squeaked, shivering outside in her cotton leggings and a U2 concert shirt.
“Oh, Aunt Rikki, that’s not going to set the alarm off again, is it?’
“The alarm’s turned off,” said Erica. “You scared me half to death.” The pale ringed hand, now clearly attached to Ashley, rose, still clutching the gray woolen blanket that Erica last recalled seeing neatly folded at the base of Jared’s bed.
“I tossed the ball at the door, and the alarm went off,” Jared said. “I’m so sorry.”
“We added extra wiring to the windows last winter,” Erica said. “It’s real sensitive. Come on in. It’s freezing out here.”
They straggled in, Jared wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and a dirty pair of running shoes, Ashley still cocooned in the blanket.
“I’m sorry for the inconvenience, Mrs. Richards,” Ashley said.
Jared launched into a soliloquy. “I get home at 2:00 a.m., and Dad’s waiting up, all red-faced like he gets, and he’s having a cow because my weekday curfew is 10:00 p.m. He’s ranting and raving, about how could I do this to Mom, how I’m making her sick. I didn’t even used to have a specific curfew, but that’s one of the stupid rules we worked out in family therapy. So Dad’s ranting on about how even when we negotiate rules, I break them, and why was my trashy girlfriend out at that time of night, didn’t her parents care, and if I didn’t like the rules of the house, why didn’t I leave. So I left.”
“Want some coffee?” Erica asked.
“Yeah, sure, absolutely!” he said. “Mom never lets me have coffee. She claims it aggravates my DDD.”
Erica ground some glossy Costa Rican beans Ethan had special-ordered. This morning, Ashley was as quiet as Jared was voluble. She entwined her hand somewhere between Jared’s waistband and the small of his back. She looked congested and red-eyed. Erica fought back the urge to wipe her nose, to feel her forehead for fever.
She poured the strong coffee into three mugs. “Do your parents know where you are, Ashley?” she asked.
“My mother is in St. Thomas,” Ashley said. “Only the housekeeper is home, and she doesn’t care. Her name is Georgia. The last housekeeper we had was also named Georgia. Don’t you think that’s kinda weird? And she cooks jerk chicken every single night. It’s so fattening. She must dump a stick of butter on it.”
“You want to take a shower or something?” Erica gulped a long, satisfying draft of coffee. “You can borrow my clothes if you want, not that they’d fit.”
“No, thanks—we gotta get to school by 7:30,” Jared said. “I have to carry around a green attendance sheet that gets signed by all my teachers. It’s another negotiated psychologist rule.”
“I have to carry around one of those stupid sheets too,” Ashley said. “Not that anyone ever reads them.”
“We met in family therapy.” Jared stirred a heaping tablespoon of sugar into his coffee. “That’s the only good thing to come out of all this bizarreness.”
Erica popped a waffle in the toaster. “That sounds really dumb,” she agreed. “Green sheets.”
“I knew you’d understand,” said Jared.
“Do the sheets go on your permanent record?” Erica asked.
Ashley looked confused. “What’s a permanent record?”
“Maybe they don’t have them anymore,” Erica said. “When I was in school, teachers always used to threaten you about putting things in your permanent record. And you know what? When I was in high school, there was a court decision, and students got the right to examine their records. So I looked, and it was really boring. Just grades and test scores and a psychological evaluation from the school psychologist saying I was hyperactive and some other evaluation from a graduate student who observed my sixth-grade class and said I was a spirited child with advanced fine motor skills.”
“I got diagnosed as hyperactive too.” Ashley nodded sagely.
“Do you want to be my approved friend?” Jared asked. “We negotiated a list of approved friends in therapy. We could party.”
Were it not for her four children sleeping upstairs, soon to awaken, Erica thought they could have all been high school kids, chatting in the kitchen after a sleepover. “Yeah, sure,” she said. “But I think it would be best if I knew when you were coming over. Why don’t you tell your parents you’re lending me a CD? That can be our secret code.”
“Cool,” Jared said. “Thanks.”
From upstairs Erica heard coos from the crib and Dylan’s clock radio. She needed to try Stephan again but he would be on his way to work already. She could call him in the evening, but with Ethan gone, she probably couldn’t find any private phone time until all the kids were in bed, and suppose Stephan also went to bed early like Ethan, or went out to dinner, or movies, or late-night yoga? She still couldn’t see leaving messages on that phone machine.
When Ashley disappeared into the powder room to brush her hair, Erica asked Jared something she hadn’t planned on until it popped out of her mouth. “Jared, I do have a favor to ask you. Can you get me something?”
“You want more pot?”
“Well, yes, but also something else.”
“You want lots of CDs for real? My friend Rich works at Tower Records in Roosevelt Field, and he rips them off all the time.” Jared bounced a stray rubber ball against the refrigerator.
“Well, that would be nice too, but could you get me a gram of coke?” Erica said.
Jared dropped the rubber ball. “You do coke?” he asked. “This guy Colin in my therapy group went to rehab for that.”
“I thought I’d try it,” Erica said.
Jared rubbed a strand of greenish hair. “I don’t know. Let me ask around.” He rubbed his hair some more, bit his lip. “Wait a minute—I do know someone, this guy Nick Stromboli. I know him from the family clinic. It might be kind of expensive, though.”
“That’s no problem,” Erica said. “Thank you.”
“Where’s the toothpaste, Mom?” Dylan called from upstairs.
“Try the second shelf of the vanity,” Erica called up.
Ashley emerged from the powder room hairsprayed and mascaraed, but still shivering in her T-shirt.
“Here, borrow this,” Erica said, offering her a sweater from the front closet.
“Thanks so much, Mrs. Richards,” said Ashley, pulling on Erica’s pink Liz Claiborne, which hung on her narrow chest like a tent.