Heather(49)

It’s a lighter. Not the long, thin kind that she’s seen her mother use to light taper candles on the dining table when they’ve had guests over for dinner or that her father uses to start the firepit in the yard. This is heavy, metal, a lighter designed to slip into a pocket, to be concealed. She turns it over in her palm. On one side, an S scratched into the surface, rough and crude.

Oh my god, she thinks. Does my mom smoke pot? The thought can’t help but make her laugh out loud, picturing her tidy, order-obsessed mother sparking a joint or bending over a bong. But the sound of her own laughter in the quiet house, holding this unexplainable object in her hand, soon leaves her feeling unsettled.

She runs her hand along the seams of the inside of the suitcase and uncovers a small film canister, black, that rattles when she shakes it. There’s another, smaller envelope underneath of that, the size someone would use for a letter. Inside there are two sheets of waxed paper, and when she peels them apart she finds a single pressed flower that might have been bright yellow once but has aged into a brownish-gold hue. There’s a scrap of paper folded in half also stuck in the envelope, and when she handles it, it feels worn to softness, like fabric. On it, a note in unfamiliar handwriting.

I love you. Forgive me.

She stares at the words until the sound of a car door slamming startles her. Her mother already back with her two brothers, Kyle thumping a basketball up the drive, Jake asking if he has time to play a video game before they eat. She takes another second to weigh the heft of the lighter in her hand before putting it back in the pocket of the bag, drawing the blanket over it again, closing the door, tiptoeing her way out of the room.



* * *



Over dinner she tries to tell herself it is nothing to worry about. The bag. This lighter. The note. So what if her mother allows herself one secret cigarette a month? So what if she occasionally lights up a spliff when everyone is asleep? But she doesn’t think that’s the story. Blair doesn’t like it, this side of her mother that she senses but can’t see. Like the dark side of the moon.

Throughout the meal Blair finds herself staring at her mother the second she’s not looking—when she rises to get more meatballs for the boys, or to fetch another stack of napkins because Kyle keeps getting sauce on the ends of his sleeves. And maybe because Blair has Henry, has her own secrets now, she can see it. Not the secret itself, but the halo of something untold.

“So, looks like they’re moving the construction date up for the condos,” Blair’s father says, making his voice gentle. He and Blair watch Iris. The condos are a difficult subject in their house. Iris had attended zoning meetings, written letters to the local paper on the value of protecting the woods alongside the river.

“Moving the date up?” Iris asks. “When?”

“They break ground next week. They want to be able to lease to people by the start of the school year next year. I’m sorry, sweetheart. I thought you might have heard already.”

“Oh,” Iris says, turning to look out the bay window at the end of their dining table. Blair looks at Iris’s reflection, the pale oval of her face, her mother’s features blurry and indistinct.





BLAIR


She goes over to Henry’s house on Tuesday after soccer practice. His mom is on the PTA with Iris, and the parents are getting together to decorate the gym for tomorrow’s homecoming carnival fundraiser. Blair’s brothers and dad are home, while Henry is an only child whose father is in San Francisco for work.

In Henry’s bedroom they kiss and kiss, until he asks if he can unbutton her jeans. She is nervous and excited and afraid, and she says yes. He asks if he can touch her, and she says yes to that too, and guides his hands in the way she’s learned she likes when she’s experimented, alone in her room, when everyone else has gone to bed, or sometimes in the bath, the rush of the water into the tub filling her ears, the pressure building and building in her body until there’s a catch sprung somewhere within her, then the helpless, glorious release. At first it’s strange, dreamlike, having someone else touch her in places only her own fingers have known. After a little while, he seems to understand what she likes, the pressure, the direction, and she lets her hand fall to the bed, lets her eyes close and her head fall back, lets herself feel everything until she gets hot all over, and the sensation spreads throughout her body, and she has no choice but to let go.

She rides her bike home in the chill of the autumn air, tender against the seat, little aftershocks traveling up her spine as she shifts and pedals, the feeling alternating between pleasant and nearly unbearable. There’s a smell of the first fires in the air, woody and sweet. She had felt so self-conscious saying goodbye to Henry’s mom in the driveway, her cheeks flushed and hair mussed. She had hoped to leave before Diana was back, but she and Henry couldn’t stop kissing goodbye. So there she was, in the driveway, sticky and slick between her legs, Henry’s mom telling her how she had just been with Iris, how they had filled all the balloons for the fall homecoming carnival together and how beautifully Iris had planned everything.



* * *



The day after she spends the afternoon with Henry, Blair is eating breakfast when Iris asks her if she wouldn’t mind driving separately to the carnival. Her dad is with her brothers at a soccer tournament two towns over. “I’ve got to go early. We need to blow up all those balloons.”