“Fine. Yes. She asked me on a date. Or at least I think she did.”
“That’s really great, Maeve.” Behind his voice, a siren wailed. So close that we couldn’t speak for a moment. When it faded, he said goodbye. “Give my love to everyone. Kiss Claire’s belly for me. Love you guys. That’s so great about the girl. I’ll give you money. You can treat. Where are you going?”
“Continental.”
“You drink coffee?”
“Only if it has whipped cream.” Now I was the one who wanted to get off the phone. “Anyway, you need to go, right?”
“Right. Love you. Kisses for everybody, got it? The belly baby too.”
“Love you too.”
“Bye.”
—
Salix was still playing, but it was a different song now. Nothing that I recognized. I wanted to go back across the street and take her hand and walk to the beach and sit on a log and count the seagulls, or the dogs running up and down along the shore, or the children building sand castles. I didn’t want to go into the restaurant and sit there with the others and tell them everything, or parts of everything, or nothing at all.
I wanted to tell them that Salix wasn’t just some girl. I wanted to tell them that she was the one from the bus station and the ferry terminal and how that meant something, it really did. And the phone call with Dad. Would I tell them that he said hello and he loves us all? Or would I tell them that he was in the wrong place, and he was a jerk, and I didn’t believe for one minute that he was at work at all? I could see the twins and Grandma and Claire at a table by the window, laughing as Corbin stuck raspberries on the tips of his fingers of his broken arm.
I texted Mom.
I met a girl. Her name is Salix. She asked me out. I think. Also, Corbin broke his arm.
And Dad is acting weird.
For the first time since I’d left, she texted back almost right away.
A date! Email me the details. I want to know everything. Sign Corbin’s cast for me, will you? Hot here. Very hot.
And then a second text.
Raymond says hi.
I doubted that, but okay.
Salix was playing something classical now. Something that sounded like it could be happy or it could be sad. Like the composer wasn’t quite sure. I peeked around the shrubs. Salix had moved into a slice of shade at the edge of the forest beside the store. The music, the trees, the blue sky, the girl who looked like she could be a boy apprentice to a composer a hundred years ago, or a hundred years from now. It felt good watching her, but when I turned toward the restaurant, my stomach flipped with worry. Dad was messing up again.
When we got back to the city and unpacked, the boys went straight out to Gnomenville to return the troops and see how the rest of the Wrens and the Percivals had managed while they were gone. I put in a load of laundry, and when I came back upstairs, I noticed a box beside the couch that hadn’t been there before. It was open, a stack of disposable bed pads resting on the top, and a small brown bag with a label on it: LABOR TEA. And an illustration of a goddess pushing out a baby, her legs spread, stars raining down, smiling blissfully.
“Birth supplies.” Claire sat on the couch with a book. Birthing from Within. “They came while we were gone.”
The pads would be for the mess. When her water broke. The blood and mucus and shit.
I will not be at this birth.
I will not be at this birth.
I will not be at this birth.
“I’m going over to Mrs. Patel’s,” I said. “I owe her a game of rummy.”
“Sure.” Claire pointed to the counter. “Can you take that plate back to her?”
—
I knocked on Mrs. Patel’s door, but there was no answer. I could hear the television from inside, so loud that I could tell it was a soap opera. Someone was breaking up with someone else. Crying, dramatic music, then a commercial. I knocked again. No answer.
The door was unlocked, so I stepped inside. Just like I had a thousand times before.
“Mrs. Patel?” I slipped off my flip-flops and parked them beside Mrs. Patel’s sensible old-lady shoes. She liked footwear to be neatly lined up. “It’s Maeve.”
When there was still no answer, I put my hand on the banister and leaned up the stairs.
“Hello?”
It made sense that she didn’t answer, because the TV was so loud. Mrs. Patel was pretty deaf. If she didn’t have her hearing aids in, she might not hear me at all. Even with them in, I had to holler sometimes. I climbed the stairs into the living room.
“Mrs. Patel?”
She was slumped on the floor in front of her butter-yellow recliner, a deck of playing cards scattered around her. Half sitting, half lying, her head resting on one shoulder, vomit streaking her hair and her pink cardigan—the one with the hole at the elbow and the missing button. The smell of piss and shit, and for a moment it all got confused in my head and I thought that maybe I was still next door looking at the disposable pads and thinking about Claire shitting herself and bellowing like a cow. But that wasn’t right. This wasn’t right.
“Mrs. Patel?” I dropped the plate. I glanced at it. I should pick it up. I thought, What a relief that it didn’t break. I thought, None of this makes sense at all.
And then all those first-aid classes came to mind, and I rushed to her side and dropped to my knees. I grabbed her arm and shook it hard.
“Mrs. Patel!”
Her head rolled forward, her chin resting on her chest, her lanky gray hair a curtain across her face. I groped for her wrist and pressed my fingers to where her pulse should be. I must be in the wrong spot. I walked my fingers in tiny steps around Mrs. Patel’s bony wrist. No heartbeat. No pulse. Just cold skin, and Mrs. Patel’s hand flopping, lifeless.
Lifeless.
Dead.
I scrambled backward, knocking over the TV table Mrs. Patel kept beside her chair, spilling her phone and her crossword magazine and an abandoned dinner of fries and samosas to the floor. The soap opera hollered at me. “He’s leaving you! And he’s never coming back! He never loved you. Never! Not ever!”
Time fell onto the floor too, and slithered away. I have no idea why I didn’t just run. I have no idea how long I sat there beside Mrs. Patel’s body. I have no idea how long it took me to call 911. But I must have picked up the phone and dialed. Just as I must have reached for the crocheted throw from the couch and covered Mrs. Patel with it.
Mrs. Patel died suddenly in her living room, where she was found by her sometime neighbor Maeve Glover, who was shocked and horrified. She is survived by—
I wondered about all of this after. Of course I did. After the paramedics came, and the cops, and it was only then that Claire showed up, summoned by the commotion.