Her friends would have good advice, no doubt about it. But every time she felt herself winding up to begin talking, she suddenly became protective of their secret, as she’d come to think of it. Where would she even slip it in? After which sentence? They’d tune in closely. They wouldn’t interrupt. They’d tell her it would all be okay. She imagined herself saying it: He sleeps on the couch at least two nights a week. He went months without touching me. Siobhán would insist it was all normal, my goodness, only to be expected, but an alarm would ring in her expression. So Jess always pulled back, hard, like a sluice of water rushing up against a dam.
Also, they’d discuss it after, with each other. They’d do it out of concern, but she didn’t want concern; she wanted a concrete solution. She wanted a cure for grief and she wanted someone to tell her where to find it. Siobhán and Alice and every other woman in her life were sensitive to what she’d been through and never brought it up explicitly unless Jess did first, but even small talk, even the most careful arrangement of information, was a reminder of their bustling families. It was there in the cars they drove, always full of crumbs and shin guards and orphan socks. It was in the food they stocked in their refrigerators, particularly the drinks: juice boxes and lime green sport-aids and rows of water bottles with floral prints. It was in the way they had to keep a cell phone on the table when they went out to dinner, and had to keep looking at it in case a babysitter texted, in case a kid called from a sleepover to be picked up early.
Cobie wouldn’t understand, either, because she grew up in a family where they all said what they felt, and then had follow-up discussions to make sure problems were being addressed. Whenever anyone in her family visited New York, Cobie hugged them tight and said, “I’ve missed you so much.” Jess had witnessed these greetings and had barely known where to look. Cobie’s wife had conceived their twins through intrauterine insemination—“via turkey baster,” as she always put it—and it had all been very straightforward, as far as Jess could tell. Sometimes Cobie seemed to lose track of the reason it had not gone the same way for Jess.
Siobhán and Alice grew up more like Malcolm and Jess, but whenever Siobhán had a few drinks she let her guard down. Very recently, over glasses of wine on Jess’s patio—the first time Jess had invited friends over in a while, Malcolm at work—Siobhán made a crack that her kids were conceived nearly the exact moment it crossed their minds to try.
“Oh God,” she said immediately after, placing her wineglass down on the table. It was as if a cold wind had swept through. Every woman looked chastened, and that’s when Jess glimpsed the extent to which they must discuss her when she wasn’t around. “I’m so sorry. That was an incredibly dumb thing to say. What the heck is wrong with me?”
“What?” Jess asked, as she always did, the many, many times it happened in ways big and small. “Don’t worry about it.” Siobhán was better at protecting Jess from other people’s stories than she was from her own. Alice, too, had stories about the lengths she and her husband, Jack, went to have sex, always hiding from the kids, being quiet because of the kids, making sure no sounds were uttered, no bedsprings creaked, the time recently that Jack, usually so thrifty, drove her to a hotel fifteen minutes from their house and paid for the night even though they stayed for only three hours. “I would have spent the time watching TV in peace,” Alice joked, but her expression—if not smug, exactly—bordered on self-congratulatory.
One morning, Jess decided to surprise Malcolm in the shower, but when she opened the door and slid aside the curtain, he was just standing there with both hands flat against the tiled wall, his face taking the full brunt of the water, his eyes closed, not washing himself, not doing anything. He looked sad, and Malcolm rarely looked sad. Jess stepped backward out of the room, shut the door, tried to wipe the image from her mind. There was a time when he would have felt the slightest tickle of the draft on his skin and known she was standing there, would have pulled her in.
He was worried about the bar, she knew he was, even though he acted as if all her worries were built on a foundation of sand. But then he didn’t act like a person who was worried. She heard him humming under his breath when he dragged the garden hose around the yard, and his pleasantness, his general good mood, grated on her as if he’d been clanging symbols and yodeling. “Hey!” he said to anyone who shouted hello to him from a passing car, and pumped his fist. Sometimes he called out a specific name. “Johnny B! What you got?” and when she looked out, he’d still be talking through someone’s car window fifteen, twenty minutes later.
* * *
After everything happened, Jess tried to remember what things had been like at home on the morning of the barbeque where she first met Neil, as she and Malcolm were getting ready to head over to the Hills’ house. She tried to remember what they talked about. They arrived separately because Patrick texted Malcolm to pick up a few bags of ice, and Jess made a Buffalo chicken dip she wanted to bring over early in case Siobhán wanted to pretend she made it. They passed each other in the hallway in their haste, each hustling to their separate assignments, Malcolm in a new T-shirt that still had the size sticker on the sleeve. She put her hand on his chest and he looked at her with alarm, as if he had to brace himself every time she took a breath to speak. She saw everything he feared she would say pass through him, and he knew she saw it and neither of them said a word. She peeled the sticker off and held the little XL circle on her fingertip to show him. He stood there, his expression different now, full of relief, though he would have denied it. He looked at the top of her head for a moment before they both motored on. The day was already warm and the Hills’ yard wouldn’t be fully shaded until late afternoon.
An hour later, Malcolm was ripping open bags of ice and pouring them into coolers while Jess was helping set chairs on the lawn. The walk over had left her sweaty, and she was fanning herself with a package of napkins when Neil walked into the yard, his son in an infant carrier, only six months old, the two older girls in matching sundresses, sticking so close to their dad that Jess thought they might get tangled up in his legs. She saw him hesitate by the hedge, reach for his younger daughter’s hand. She thought she saw him take a breath, as if girding himself, even though it was just a backyard barbeque, just friends of his friend, and he was an accomplished guy, everyone was on his side, there was nothing to be nervous about. Jess noticed he changed his expression for his daughters, whose faces were tipped up to study his. Out of habit she watched the hedges a moment longer, as if a woman, a wife, the mother of these children, might stride in behind him, but then she remembered.
Siobhán had told her how young his kids were, but Jess didn’t really take it in until she saw them. “Hello.” She waved, about to introduce herself, but next thing Patrick was there, clapping Neil’s back, crouching to look at the baby, and she didn’t want to interrupt.
“He’s here,” Jess leaned into the kitchen to tell Siobhán, but instead of going out to greet him, Siobhán waved her over to the corner of the kitchen, where she was huddled with Toby’s wife, Amanda, and another woman named Laura, the mother of a friend of one of Siobhán’s kids, and who was always at the Hills’ parties now.
“She didn’t even try that hard to keep them,” Siobhán was saying. “Final straw was—and don’t ever repeat this—she had the kids in the car after having a few drinks. I forget some of the details, but the story I heard was that one of the girls was supposed to sleep over at a friend’s but started crying to come home, so next thing Christine—that’s his ex—heads out to pick her up, and rather than leave the other two alone she put them in the car with her.”
Siobhán paused so they could take that in. Jess didn’t like this side of her friend. Her true motive, Jess knew, was getting everyone on Neil’s side, getting them to welcome him and accept him as if he’d been there hanging out with them all along, but she just ended up seeming like a gossip.
“Those poor kids,” Amanda said.
“Ugh,” Laura said.