Skip forward three months.
A neighborhood get-together at the Barrens’。 I got the impression David hosted them because it kept the image of his perfect suburban family freeze-framed in the community’s collective mind. Mr. and Mrs. Barren, loving couple, handsome sons, successful business owners, church board members, pristine lawn.
I’d been clearing plates from the tables in the backyard near the tail end of the party. Dad and my sister Keli sat off to one side in the shade, sipping from paper cups. The house was wide open, doors and windows ajar, kids running in and out. I sidestepped my nieces as they raced after Rachel’s two boys, calling out the obligatory warning for them to slow down. Rachel was upstairs in the kitchen crying into her hands.
I hadn’t known what to do. No one else seemed to be in the house. There were the outside sounds of people talking faintly, the hum of a lawn mower somewhere else in the Loop, and her soft sobs hitting me right in the chest.
When she heard me step into the kitchen, she turned, tears trailing mascara down her cheeks. She saw me and huffed a laugh that turned into another sob, and then I was near enough to put a hand on her shoulder and ask what was wrong. She looked at my hand there on her shoulder, then so did I.
I pulled it away, saying, “Sorry, sorry, sorry.” She shook her head, sniffling and grabbing a paper towel off the counter to dry her eyes. We stood there for a second, all the confines of suburban life muted outside the little bubble we were in, and I just watched her, waiting for her to talk. She didn’t, only shook her head again before giving me the saddest smile I’ve ever seen.
In one of my books, my main character would’ve said something comforting, something profound to get the other person to open up. But I had nothing except a sense I’d invaded a very private moment with no idea how to extricate myself.
Rachel went to move past me, and I backed up out of her way until my hip touched the countertop. I was about to issue another apology when suddenly she was inches away, her face brushing mine.
She kissed me.
It was wonderful, and so fleeting. There and gone in a half second that seared itself into me. To a casual observer it could have just been Rachel reaching past me for an item on the counter or leaning close to say something discreet. But it had been a kiss. A secret.
Then she was gone. Out of the kitchen and down the hall to the bathroom. The faint clicking of a door being shut.
I turned, bracing myself against the counter, and looked out the window into the side yard just in time to see someone disappearing around the corner of the house.
3
I didn’t sleep. Dawn came and backlit the mountains in hues of gray, then pink.
More coffee, bordering on the point of jitters. I tried to write but gave up after putting down a few dozen sentences, then deleting the last page I’d written. Not writer’s block, writer’s distraction. Writer’s scatterbrain. Writer’s world upending.
I used binoculars to look up the street as soon as it was light enough to see if there was a twin of my note poking from the Barrens’ storm door. I felt dirty, like the bird lady next door. Mrs. Tross. Pushing eighty with a husband dead nearly ten years, probably killed by the point of his wife’s sharp tongue. We called her the bird lady because at any point in the day, she could be seen at one of her windows, Swarovski binoculars glued to her face, looking like some kind of alien insect, gathering intel on the Loop, while claiming she was only watching the local avian species.
I couldn’t see a note, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. I had to trust our observer wasn’t going to be too overt. I hoped they were cautious. The chances of someone stumbling upon my note, especially in the middle of the night, were low. But I could see one of Rachel’s kids, maybe Joey, opening up the door and finding her note. Not sure of all the words, he brings it to his dad to read. Christ on a bike.
That was, of course, if David himself hadn’t written it.
No, if Rachel’s husband had caught wind of us, I would’ve known right away. Probably in the form of catching one of his fists with my face. David was a lot of things, but he wasn’t subtle.
Besides, the note itself felt like a warning, not a threat. Whoever wrote it wanted us to stop discreetly—otherwise they would’ve shouted it from a rooftop. Being the possessor of neighborhood gossip was tough to resist. My stomach turned, and something Rachel had said came rushing back. My mother told me if I ever made a mistake again like I did that time with Joey, she and my dad would take David’s side if he sought custody.