Soon she’ll have to pack up. Before the story spreads. Before the clients cancel. Before the looks in the grocery store. She surveys the house with an eye that’s already grown nostalgic. Upstairs Milo is curled up in a tight ball, watching a toy commercial. Jennifer sits beside him, puts her arm around him, and pulls him close.
“Is everybody gone?” he asks, and she says yes. She can sense his agitation. He knows something has happened that hasn’t been fully explained. But he also seems to know better than to want the explanation. He starts telling her about the TV show. Many hours later, when it’s bedtime, she lets him fall asleep in her bed.
But then she is the one who can’t sleep. Around two in the morning she gets out of bed and puts her clothes back on. She scoops up Milo, gently, gently, and carries him stirring and murmuring out to the car. He doesn’t wake as she buckles him in. She drives to Margaret’s house, pulls slowly, slowly up the drive. There’s no way to be totally silent but the lights are all out and everyone seems to be asleep. Everyone—by which she means Margaret and Zoe. She knows Zoe is still here because of the truck in the driveway. Tommy’s truck.
She eases out of the car, closes the door so it doesn’t latch. Then in the dark she walks over to the truck. She puts her hands on it. It feels like metal feels. She looks into the cab. All she can make out in the dark is a new tear in the fabric of the ceiling. It doesn’t have a sense of Tommy about it. It doesn’t speak for him.
Lights come on, and she jumps back from the truck. Too late for a clean getaway—Margaret has those little streetlamps with which people line their walkways, and when Jennifer crosses to her car she’ll be clearly lit by them.
The creak of the screen door, and then the sound of a cane on knobbly pavement. It’s Margaret, then. Trust Margaret to come outside when she hears an intruder, instead of calling the police.
Jennifer steps into the light. “It’s me, Margaret. It’s Jennifer.”
Margaret stops where her face is still in shadow. “So it is,” she says.
“I don’t know why I’m here,” Jennifer says.
“She’s asleep.”
“I thought she would be.”
“You thought right.”
There’s a long silence. “Well,” Jennifer says.
“Did you kill him?” Margaret asks. Matter-of-fact, as if it’s an everyday question.
“Ask Zoe.”
Margaret waves a dismissive hand. “Zoe’s been acting out of hurt, can’t you see that? Hurt and grief and loneliness. Zoe doesn’t know what she thinks. I want to know if you killed him.”
“Why?”
“Why?” Margaret repeats.
“Why do you care? What does it matter?”
“It matters,” Margaret says.
“I loved him,” Jennifer says. She felt fierce before she spoke, but now there are tears in her eyes. She shouldn’t have said that out loud. “I couldn’t help it.” Her voice is shaky. Stop it, stop it! Just stop talking. Just run away.
“I know,” Margaret says.
“What do you mean you know? What could you possibly know?”
“Oh, Jennifer.” Margaret sounds so weary. “Please answer my question.”
“So you can tell Zoe?”
“No. I’d never do that.”
“Why then? I don’t understand.”
“You’d understand if you’d listened to me. Don’t you see what’s happening here? I’m letting you tell.”
“You’re letting me tell?”
“I think you might want to.”
Jennifer blinks. In the dark she can’t make out Margaret’s expression. She sees the gleam of her white hair, her white cane, her two pale hands. “Yes,” she says. “I killed him. Yes. I killed him. I did.”
Margaret says nothing. How dare she say nothing?
“I killed him,” Jennifer says.
“I know,” Margaret says. “I heard you.”
What was her tone? What is she thinking? Jennifer can’t tell, won’t ask, won’t wait around for more. “Goodbye,” she says, or thinks she says. She gets into her car, where her son is still sleeping, and leaves Margaret and all that Margaret knows behind.
Where should they go now? she asks herself, hands on the wheel. Somewhere beautiful. Somewhere far away. She went to Hawaii, once, with Tommy. They went to the island of Kauai, on a honeymoon funded by his mother. They rented a one-room cottage with a huge bed enclosed by a mosquito net whose purpose seemed romantic rather than protective. They woke with the sun to the sound of roosters crowing. They ate pineapples and lychee fruit. They hiked an eleven-mile trail along a breathtaking coastline and spent the night on a beach, with other hikers and an outpost of hippies who shared the milk from their goats. Jennifer was purely, truly happy on that island, and so was Tommy, and she could go back there now to live with her son and tell him stories about his father, whom she loved. His father, who slept beside her on a starry beach and was a wonderful man.
The Unsolvable
Zoe is gone. When she got back from Jennifer’s, she said, “I don’t think my mother loves me.”
“Oh, Zoe,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“She hates me.”
“Can a parent hate a child?”