Siobhán insisted Jess could have talked to her all along, and Jess knew it was probably true. She wouldn’t have stood in a circle at a party and told anyone what Jess was feeling. Siobhán loved Malcolm but she loved Jess, too. She might have helped steer her away from the mess she was currently in. Even talking for ten minutes or so, she could feel her friend soften, feel her listening closely. “What do you say when he returns home with the kids,” she asked Siobhán, “knowing they’re listening? Knowing what they’ve been through and that it’s quite possible their mother would prefer being anywhere else than with them. Knowing none of this is their fault?
“So what I said was ‘That’s great, I’m so happy they’re here, I’d rather hang out with them anyway.’ And I could sense their minds grow easy.” Morning until night, the house was full of their voices.
To which Siobhán said, after a long pause, “Oh, honey. What an absolute mess.”
* * *
“I still can’t believe it,” Jess said to Malcolm in the quiet of his car. “I could feel a baby in my arms. I’m not trying to be dramatic. I’m just telling you the truth. All that time, I thought I was seeing a future. So what was I seeing? It was so vivid. I would have been a good mother. I would have been really, really great.”
Malcolm wished he were better at putting words on his thoughts, but they came to him as feelings outside of language—static electricity that ran down his arms, tightening in his chest. She had to make her mind change the subject, like he had. She had to take what was dark and fill it with different light. Or maybe that was what she tried to do, maybe that’s what she was still trying for with Neil Bratton and his kids. It was the most astonishing thing, when he looked back. To think that when they first said they loved each other, when they got married, when they bought the house and filled it with furniture and plates and bowls and lamps and all the clutter of domestic life, that all of that was aimed at a future they had no guarantee of reaching. It had occurred to him since she left that each day, each hour, was a place he’d never been, that he’d have to find his way through. It was too obvious an observation to say aloud, and yet it had left him shaken.
“What are we going to do?” she asked after a moment.
“You’re asking me?”
“Well, yeah. We have a serious problem.”
“More than one,” he said.
“More than one,” she agreed. “Speaking of which—” She took his phone off the dash and punched in his password as if they’d never spent a day apart.
“The snow is supposed to start tomorrow midday.”
“I know.”
“The power is still out on Seneca, right? That whole section of town?”
“Yeah.” And then he noticed the lights inside Bratton’s house. He looked down the block and there were lighted windows dotting the fronts of every house.
“I have an idea. It came to me yesterday. That’s why I stopped by the house.”
“What?”
“First I want you to listen. We can talk about all this”—she indicated the house before them, the people inside—“and we have to, obviously. But we have a more pressing issue.”
He looked at her. “More pressing than this?”
“He was here. That skeevy guy. What’s-his-name.”
Malcolm was a total blank, and then he gaped at her.
“Hugh’s guy? Billy?”
“Yeah. Scared the hell out of me. I think he was outside our house when I went by, and then he followed me. Anyway, he just parked, and looked. And made sure I saw him looking. Don’t get mad, just listen.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, so I have an idea.”
“You said that.”
“And it’s so obvious I don’t know how I didn’t think of it before.”
“Okay,” Malcolm said, waiting.
“But before I tell you, I think you should go home and think about the bar. Think about yourself, about Hugh, about Gillam, the whole situation.”
“Huh? You’re sending me home to think? What’s this about, Jess?”
“Along with the bar,” Jess continued, “think about me and you, all that’s happened. You know what I read on one of the fertility sites recently? This woman commented that someone else was the luckiest person in the world to have had a healthy child, and a hundred people piped up and agreed. But then this one woman way down in the comments said the luckiest thing, actually, was that each of us got born in the first place, that we should all remember that. Because what were the chances? I’ve been thinking about that. I’m mourning the babies I didn’t have, but to get you, to get me, for our mothers to have conceived us—us specifically, you and I, and not the gazillion other possible combinations that could have gotten mixed up in there. It means something. And then to have been delivered safely, to have been raised safely, too. Whether we stay together or stay apart, it means something. I’m just trying to figure out what. We’re messing up. We’re wasting time. We have one life, and it’s a miracle when you think about it. I want to stop messing it up.”
“But how? We can’t exactly start over.”
“Look, Malcolm.” She turned fully in her seat and stared at him straight on. She wanted to put her hands on his beautiful face. She wanted to climb onto his lap. As if reading her thoughts, he took hold of her wrist and held her hand against his cheek.
“That’s what I’m asking,” she said. “That’s what I’m working up to. Are you sure about that?”
nine
Was he sure about that? He asked himself that question as he drove, once again, by the Half Moon. He didn’t bother going inside. He told Jess he’d meet her over there in the morning, before the snow, so she could explain her idea. He stayed in Bratton’s driveway long enough to watch her pull her navy coat tight around her body and walk back inside. Once she closed the door, he took his coffee from the cup holder—long gone cold—lowered his window, and flung it at the back of Bratton’s car. It exploded against the rear windshield, the cup skittering in one direction, the lid in another. He waited a few seconds to see if anyone—if Bratton—would come running out the door, but the world was as still as it had been before. As he drove away, the announcer from the local radio station was asking people to look in on each other, especially the elderly. There were warming centers set up in various parts of the county, but the problem was getting people there. He suggested those with fireplaces and generators take neighbors in. It was not advisable to drive, but a car with gas could be turned on for heat. The announcer warned that running cars should be in well-ventilated areas, that tailpipes should be checked for ice or packed snow.
Malcolm drove by his mother’s house again because he forgot to check how much wood she had stacked on the porch, but she didn’t answer, so he stomped around the house to the slider, which was always unlocked.
“Ma?” he called. The wood-burning stove felt warm to the touch, and the place smelled strongly of smoke. He walked quickly through the house, not caring about the snow he was tracking, expecting to find her slumped somewhere. Would it be better to drive to the hospital himself or call an ambulance? But the house was empty. Her car was parked in the driveway.
He drove over to Mr. Sheridan’s house and knocked.
“Oh, hi, Malcolm,” Mr. Sheridan said when he opened the door. “Your mom is here. Were you worried? I’m sorry. She just—” He stepped out and pulled the door shut behind him. He spoke in a low voice. “She just seemed a little confused. I figured, why not set her up here? If she’s here with me, then I won’t have to worry about her.”
“Oh,” Malcolm said. Mr. Sheridan worried about her? Malcolm said he appreciated it. Then Mr. Sheridan opened the door wide and used a loud voice. “Hey, Gail, Malcolm found you. You were afraid he wouldn’t.”
“Is that you, Malcolm?” his mother called.
“Hi, Mom,” he said, following Mr. Sheridan into the living room. He tried to remember when Mr. Sheridan’s wife died, if it was before or after his dad. He felt a little confused, too, like he was slow on the uptake, but they were just friends, surely, they’d been friends for years. His mother was seventy-two and Mr. Sheridan was probably older. He wanted to call Jess immediately, tell her to forget their troubles for two seconds so he could get her take on this. There was his mother, sitting on the couch with her knees tucked up on the cushion like a kid. She was clutching a mug of tea, and Mr. Sheridan’s German shepherd dog was at her feet. The fire was roaring.
“I went by the house.”