It was the memory of her father’s easy company that delivered the sharpest pang now. Her humiliation at the way he’d called her out last weekend still burned; her fear that he thought less of her than he once had was almost more than she could bear.
“What do you think about out there?” Paul asked. “On your hikes, I mean. I don’t know how you spend so much time alone. I’m still getting used to it.” He coughed, and his cheeks colored. “That sounded insensitive. I didn’t mean—”
“It’s okay.” Izzy wasn’t offended. He was right. She did spend a lot of time alone. And then she wandered into the woods in search of more solitude to top it off.
Only now she was pining for those days when companionship—with her father, Josh, Penny—had been more or less a given. How audacious she’d been.
“To tell you the truth, I think a lot about the fact that I think too much.”
He burst out laughing, and she grinned sheepishly. Just as well. A normal person would have meant it as a joke.
“I wish I could be more like that,” he said.
“No, you don’t.” Her eyes were on the shadows quivering on the patches of water below, but she could feel him watching her and knew she shouldn’t have sounded so adamant.
“I do,” he said. “To tell you the truth, I don’t think enough about the fact that I don’t think enough.” She dared to look at him then. His eyes had turned serious, but a faint smile still played on his lips. He must have run a hand through his sweat-dampened hair to undo the helmet’s flattening job; it stuck out in all directions, putting her in mind of a child watching morning cartoons in his pajamas.
“I should try that,” she said. Of the two of them, by all rights Paul should have been the one having more trouble leaving his bur dens behind. The fact that he was not might have said something about him—but instead she had the feeling it laid bare her own flawed tendencies.
“Want to try it now?”
He moved a lock of her hair away from her face, and she didn’t have time to think. His kiss was gentle but not tentative. She took a step back, surprised, but his face never left hers, and she let him follow. When was the last time anyone had followed her anywhere? The brush of his hands against her arms made them buzz with near-electric current. It had been so long since anyone at all had touched her this way—or, more to the point, touched her any way at all.
But what were they doing? Where could this possibly go? What would anyone think—Clara or Rhoda or Randi, let alone the rest of the town?
Then again, did it matter? Where had caring so much about what other people thought gotten her, other than alone and unhappy?
With that final thought, she did try it. She let her mind go pleasantly blank and drank from the void.
When the kiss ended, there was no seismic shift beneath their feet.
“Ready to head back?” he asked softly. She nodded, and he smiled, and then it was almost as if it had never happened.
Almost.
Giving herself over to a moment was one thing. Avoiding deep thought in a more real sense would take some doing. And probably a lot of practice. And maybe, a nagging part of her brain was already whispering, rethinking—though that was contradictory to the point, obviously.
She was still telling herself not to think about what had happened with Paul as he steered them back toward town, racing against the rain as the cloud cover thickened without warning. She was still telling herself not to think about it as they approached the final turn, his house majestic on the corner, and she found herself imagining what might transpire or how she might feel or what Paul would do if Kristin were to materialize just now at the front door, her hands disapprovingly on her hips, her twins at her side. She was still telling herself not to think about it as she caught sight of Clara—sidewalk chalk in her hand, children and that flopsy new dog at her feet, jaw dropped slightly—watching Izzy dismount the bike. And she was beseeching her mind to revert to that moment of blissful blank as she handed Paul his helmet, gave him a shy wave and a smile, her face burning, and lifted the waving arm higher to include Clara, who only stood expressionless until she finally looked away.
28
You sound so innocent, the way you say your kids weren’t “happy” in their rear-facing car seats anymore, like that’s actually justification for facing them forward a full six months before the recommended age of two. You’re literally risking their lives just so they can be “happier”?
—Anonymous comment left on one of Kristin Kirkland’s posts to the school’s Circle of Parents blog, to which Clara anonymously replied, before Kristin had a chance, “Fuck off”
“Izzy?” Clara’s voice was drowned out by the rumble of Paul’s motorcycle maneuvering up his driveway. Thank God her head was back to normal now. Only the bruise remained, and at least the bruise didn’t mind the racket. Izzy was fumbling with her keys, about to disappear through her front door. Clara called out again, not a question this time. “Izzy!” Her voice sounded disproportionately frantic, and when Izzy turned, her keys clattering to the concrete stoop, she looked taken aback.
“Sorry!” Clara yelled good-naturedly, taking a few steps toward the curb. “Loud!” She gestured toward Paul’s house just as the engine went silent, and Izzy nodded.
“I just wondered if you wanted to come for dinner. Benny’s going to fire up the grill.”
Izzy looked up at the cold front whizzing by overhead, and Clara’s eyes followed hers. The thick clouds were moving with such determination they almost looked like time-lapsed freeze-frames of a sky. “Looks like rain,” Izzy called.
“Oh, Benny doesn’t mind,” Clara said easily. “Actually, he has no choice. He does this every fall, buying out Tom’s Market when he thinks it’s nice enough for one last barbecue. I won’t tell you how many ‘one last’ barbecues we had last year.”
“Well,” Izzy said, “if there’s one season worth being nostalgic for, summer’s it.”
It seemed to Clara that Izzy was capable of being nostalgic for just about anything, but she wouldn’t have said so. “That’s why you should come!”
Izzy glanced at Paul’s house, then away. Clara was banking on the fact that she didn’t have plans tonight, or any way in such close proximity to pretend that she did. Because when she’d caught sight of Izzy a moment before, on the back of Paul’s bike, her head turned into the cranny between his shoulder blades, what she’d felt wasn’t nagging worry or niggling concern.
It was fear. A jolt of fear that made her fingertips go numb.
And as she’d watched her friend wave halfheartedly, and watched Paul purposefully not look in her own direction, and watched Izzy turn and head up the walk, the frozen grip that held her under its siege had hissed into her ear, Don’t just stand there, do something.
She might have hurled a warning at the retreating form of Paul’s poseur leather jacket. She might have run across the street to seize Izzy by the wrists and ask, “What could you possibly be thinking?” But instead, she had opened her mouth, uncertain of what to say, and out had come a polite dinner invitation.
“Twist my arm,” Izzy said with a weak smile. “What time?”
*
Benny caught his wife’s elbow gently at the top of the stairs, steering her back into the dark hallway that ran the length of the old farmhouse’s second floor. She could hear the kids giggling from Thomas’s room, where they were awaiting one of Daddy’s famous stories—no book required. It wasn’t that Benny made them up; rather, he stole plotlines from movies they were too young to watch and adapted them to suit his audience. Clara always protested that the kids were going to grow up and realize their childhood had been full of spoilers without the alerts—that he’d ruined key scenes from Rudy, Star Wars, even Forrest Gump. Benny argued that kids would grow up to find out that all their youthful fairy tales were not what they’d once seemed.