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She left the bathroom and tossed the pin in the trash. She slipped noiselessly down the front stairs in her bare feet. Jules and Chris were in the kitchen, glugging water from the Brita. Her only thought was of getting away, as if she were carrying a live grenade from inside the house, so that when it exploded, it would destroy just herself.
The sky was electric blue above the trees, but the yard felt dark. Stephanie went to the edge of the lawn and sat, her forehead on her knees.
The grass and soil were still warm from the day. She wanted to cry but she couldn’t. The feeling was too deep.
She lay down, curled on her side in the grass, as if she were shielding the damaged part of herself, or trying to contain the pain that issued from it. Every turn of her thoughts increased her sense of horror, her belief that she couldn’t recover, had no more resources to draw on. Why was this worse than the other times? But it was.
She heard Bennie’s voice from the kitchen: “Steph?”
She got up and staggered into the shrubbery. She and Bennie had planted it together: gladiolis, hosta, black-eyed Susans. She heard stems crunching under her feet, but she didn’t look down. She went all the way to the fence and knelt in the dirt.
“Mom?” Chris’s voice, from upstairs. Stephanie covered her ears.
Then came another voice, so close to Stephanie that she heard it even her hands. It spoke in a whisper: “Hello there.”
It took her a moment to separate this new, nearby voice from the ones inside the house. She felt no fear, only a kind of numb curiosity. “Who’s that?”
“It’s me.”
Stephanie realized her eyes were shut. She opened them now and
looked through the slats of fence. Amid the shadows she made out Noreen’s white face peeking through from the other side. She’d taken off her sunglasses; Stephanie vaguely noted a pair of skittish eyes. “Hi Noreen,” she said.
“I like to sit in this spot,” Noreen said.
“I know.”
Stephanie wanted to move away, but she couldn’t seem to move. She closed her eyes again. Noreen didn’t speak, and as the minutes passed she seemed to fade into the rummaging breeze and chatter of insects, as if the night itself were alive. Stephanie hunched in the dirt for a long time, or what felt like a long time— maybe it was only a minute. She knelt until the calling started up again— Jules too, his panicked voice careening through the dark. At last she tottered to her feet. In unfolding herself, she felt the painful thing settle deep inside her. Her knees shook from its new,awkward weight.
“Good night, Noreen,” she said as she began picking her way back through the flowers and bushes toward the house.
“Good night,” she faintly heard.
