And she wouldn’t mind having the house to herself for a change . . . especially tonight.
But of course, Keith has no idea of the date’s significance.
Happy birthday, Anna.
Stacey
After leaving Lennon in the park, Stacey was relieved that he didn’t chase her down to continue the argument, or worse yet, to apologize. She wasn’t ready to forgive him. Maybe she never will be.
Back home, the house was quiet. Kato was dozing, Dad and Piper were on their way to dinner, and Mom wasn’t yet back from the urban farm. Stacey closed herself into her room to have a good cry, but she was too angry for tears. After a while, the anger gave way to numbness and she fell asleep.
Now she awakens to a dark room and steady rain pattering on the roof. She turns on the lamp, finds her phone, and remembers she’d turned it off earlier to avoid the inevitable barrage of texts from Lennon. As it powers up, she braces herself for the onslaught.
But she finds only one message: Meet me on our bench.
He must have sent it earlier, before the weather turned.
But no, it came in a literal minute ago.
She starts typing a response, but thinks better of it. Does she really want to engage after successfully extracting herself? She needs more time to process what happened, and figure out what she wants to do about it.
She notices three dots wobbling in the message window. He’s typing on his end.
A single word appears.
Please.
She shakes her head. She’ll just ignore it. Maybe go back to sleep.
She leans back, thinking about how nice it had been to escape—and how strange it is that he’d texted her as soon as she woke up, almost as if he’d sensed that she’d stirred back to consciousness.
She opens the Stealth Soldier app. Maybe there’s something in the settings that alerted him when her phone powered back on.
But before she can check for that, she spies the blue pulsating heart that indicates Lennon’s whereabouts.
It can’t be right.
She returns to the text window.
Where are you? she types quickly, and presses Send.
A moment later, he responds, Bench.
“In the rain?” she mutters.
More dots. He’s typing something else.
It’s a heart emoji, followed by the words of mine.
She clicks back over to the tracking app.
The blue heart is located over a small rectangle that represents the shed behind the house next door.
She reaches over to turn off the lamp, plunging the room into darkness. Another text dings the phone in her hand as she walks toward the window on shaky legs.
It says, RU coming? Waiting 4 U.
Her own breathing roars in her ears as she lifts the edge of the shade and peers out into the night.
A hooded man stands on the shed roof.
Lennon.
Nora
Nora’s phone buzzes.
She’d turned on the alerts for Piper’s social media posts, figuring it was only a matter of time before something popped up.
Sure enough, she’s posted a selfie.
Intermission! Daddy and me! #Hamilton
They’re in their theater seats, turned so that the curtained stage is behind them. Piper is wearing far too much makeup even for the velvet dress she has on, probably with Nora’s most expensive and tallest pair of designer heels, conspicuously missing from her closet tonight.
They need to have a little talk about that, and other things. She suspects Piper’s growing up too fast, maybe experimenting with things she shouldn’t be. She needs more parental guidance than she’s been getting lately.
Keith is in a black blazer and white open-collar shirt, his smile revealing perfect white teeth.
So handsome, her husband. It’s one of the things that had drawn Nora to him when they met, though his looks weren’t the only reason. She’s not that shallow, despite the story she’d told Stacey about her old nose.
Yes, she’d had cosmetic rhinoplasty because every damned time she looked in the mirror, that nose anchored her not just to the injury she’d suffered, but to the person she used to be. Altering her physical appearance was her futile attempt at banishing the troubled young woman she’d once been.
Tonight, wearing a baggy old shirt of Keith’s, with her colored contacts removed and her hair still damp from the bath, darker than blond . . .
That woman, no longer young, meets Nora’s gaze in the bureau mirror.
“Forget-me-not,” she whispers, and Nora pivots away.
Keith and Piper won’t be home for at least a couple of hours. Stacey is here, but she was sound asleep when Nora peeked into her room.
She sits on the bed with the metal box from the shed, heart hammering in time with the rain on the roof. She’d turned up the thermostat earlier. The old cast-iron radiators are hot to the touch, and she’d sat in a hot bath so long her skin shriveled, yet she shivers as she opens the box.
On top is the thick gold watch that had been wrapped around Stanley Toska’s hairy wrist the first time she’d ever seen him. Gaudy, she’d thought. His eyes, though dutifully creased into a smile, were cruel.
She tosses the watch aside like a used tissue, takes out the photo album, and flips pages.
Two weeks; first Christmas; first tooth . . .
First birthday.
The photos, taken forty-four years ago today, have a reddish tint, like all photos from the 1970s. Frightened baby, gaping at a blazing candle on a cupcake. Gleeful baby drooling pink frosting in a high chair. Weary baby surrounded by crumpled wrapping paper.
In the background, a hi-fi console, a brown-and-orange afghan of crocheted granny squares, earth-toned kitchen appliances and vinyl wallpaper . . .
“Everyone had that kitchen,” Nora had said the night Keith mentioned that Jules and Heather’s retro décor reminded him of his childhood home.
Everyone.
She’d been caught off guard stepping into that room, nearly identical to the old one at 104 Glover Street. Same layout, same knotty pine cabinets, same black iron pulls, same Formica countertops. Everything the same, except for those monkey figurines.
All around the mulberry bush, the monkey chased the weasel . . .
A fragmented image darts into her mind and then back into the shadows. This time, it hovers tantalizingly close. She closes her eyes, straining to grasp it, straining, straining . . .
A shrill scream explodes in the night, and the memory splinters like glass.
Stacey
“Stacey! Are you all right?”
Backing into the hallway, clutching her phone, she turns to see her mother rushing out of the master bedroom.
“What happened? Why did you scream?”
“Because he’s . . . watching me.”
“What? Who—”
“Lennon.” She points to her window. “Out there. On the shed roof.”
Mom strides past her into the darkened bedroom, lifts the shade, and looks out.
“I don’t see anything.”
“He’s right . . .” Stacey joins her at the window, pressing her forehead close to the rain-spattered pane.
The rooftop is empty.
“He was right there!”
“Okay.” Mom’s tone is as opaque as her expression.
“You don’t believe me! I swear, he was just—”