Heather(50)

She almost calls her mother out—Diana said you did it last night—but then she realizes what she has. Iris is lying. She wouldn’t normally think much of it, but since finding those things in her mother’s closet last week she’s got a question fizzling in her mind. The note in a stranger’s writing lit up in her head like a neon sign. It feels absurd to think it, yet she can’t help it: Is Iris having an affair?

Following Iris is easy enough. They each have location sharing enabled on their phones. They did it last year when they went to Disney World as a family so they could find one another easily in the parks. Blair hardly ever thinks about it, because she knows Iris doesn’t use it. Unlike some of her friends’ parents, who track their kids’ every step home from school, Iris seems to forget that she can find Blair whenever she wants to.

Blair watches the little dot that represents her mother move down their block, turn left on Oak, then right on Elm, the way she would if she were heading to school. Blair feels both disappointed and relieved, until her mother makes a left on Lafayette Drive. If she were on the way to the high school Iris would have stayed straight for another two miles. She watches the dot progress toward the outer limits of town.

What’s out there? Blair wonders. She pulls up street view but all she can see are trees. But then she remembers. The new housing development going in. How it was a source of endless debate. Luxury condos that meant tearing down so many trees close to the creek so the owners could have good views. All these town meetings, her mother involved in some of them. She liked to walk along the dirt paths out that way, was always saying how sad it was that they would build there. It was so peaceful. But if she were going for a walk, why not just say so?

The dot is still for a long time, her mother parked. Blair feels a bolt of panic, dials Iris’s phone, but Iris doesn’t pick up.

Blair gets in her car, still in her pajamas, and drives there. It only takes ten minutes. If her mother catches her she can make up some excuse. You didn’t answer. I was worried. The carbon monoxide detector went off.

She parks just behind Iris’s crossover and sets off on the trail she knows her mother favors. She is surprised to see how many construction vehicles line the road, at how loudly the machinery booms as they take down trees, lines of orange caution tape marking the perimeter of the site.

The path slopes downward, and Blair takes the hill, looking out for her mother’s pink sweater between the trees. She’s lost in thought until she hears a snap of a branch. She slides behind a trunk and peers downhill. Her mother is alone, carrying something. Blair squints. Iris has three big stones in her hands. She’s bringing them from the direction of the construction site, walking downstream. There’s an old stone wall that runs through the woods, remnants from the town’s Revolutionary War days, and Iris steps over the wall and disappears from Blair’s view.

When Iris steps over the wall again she’s empty-handed. She walks back in the direction she came from, returns in a few minutes with another armful of stones. A third time, Iris disappears, then comes back, this time the stones smaller, and she has to cradle them close to her body to keep from dropping any. She looks blank but determined, and Blair can’t help but wonder if she’s watching her mother have some sort of psychotic break. The small stones seem to be the last, and across the distance Blair can hear the clink of them together, her mother hidden but busy underneath the boughs of the tree, arranging the rocks. Then it’s quiet for a long time.

She waits for five minutes, ten, fifteen, but her mother doesn’t come back up the path. There are shouts from the construction site, the sounds of saws and stump grinders working away at the woods. Blair waits another five minutes before she tiptoes her way back up the path to her car. On the way home she wonders if she should call her father, call Aunt Margot, call someone who can help her understand, or even just marvel at, the insanity she’s just seen. Her mother saving a bunch of rocks from demolition? It doesn’t make any sense.



* * *



At the carnival Iris looks tidy as ever. Not even a crumb of dirt on her pink sweater. A bright smile for each person she sells a ticket to. The other mothers on the PTA compliment her on a job well done.

“How’d it go with the balloons?” Blair asks her.

“Oh, easy with the helium tank.”

Blair stares at her, in wonder and awe. How easy it is for Iris to lie to her. As the carnival winds down, Iris tells Blair to order takeout at home—she’ll have to stay here and help clean up, but Blair should go enjoy her Saturday with her friends. Normally Blair would relish the time alone, but she’s uneasy. She doesn’t leave until she watches Iris absorbed in the task of collecting paper plates, boxing up extra food which she’ll donate to the homeless shelter.

Instead of heading home, Blair drives back to the construction site. It’s dark now and she only has her phone as a flashlight, but she makes her way down the path, this time descending all the way to the creek, to where the stone wall bisects the woods.

She pushes the pine bough aside to see the place where her mother had been hidden from her earlier that day. She stands before the two tidy piles of rocks, nearly identical in size, the largest ones arranged at the base, the smaller ones piled on top.

Cairns, she remembers, a word from her history class. Monuments. Memorials. Used across cultures, an ancient practice. Her teacher, Mr. Corrigan, sweeping his arms to indicate the vastness of distance and time.