HP pushed me away and stood. He strode out of the living room without even looking back.
I couldn’t fall asleep that night, so I wandered downstairs in the darkness. I’ve always liked the quiet in a house when everyone else is sleeping. Houses take on a life of their own in the early hours of the morning: the hum of the fridge increasing to fill the absence of voices; the fabric of furniture lush to the fingertips; floorboards primed to release sound. I moved around like a chess piece, stepping this way and that, my feet finding the parts of the floor I knew were noiseless. Through the living room window, the moon shone high over the smooth lake. The water rolled like mercury, thick and viscous.
One of Olive’s stuffed toys lay slumped on the windowsill, so after a while I went up to her room to return it. Dusky light striped the stairway through the window. How soft the steps were under my feet, the broad strokes of HP’s shoulders and hands having smoothed the wood. A children’s book lay on Olive’s bedroom floor, ready to read for tomorrow. Are You My Mother? the title read. I stepped around it to the side of the bed.
“Olive,” I whispered. A crescent of brown skin peeped out from where her pajama top had ridden up. Her belly button rose and fell. “Olive, move over.”
I lay my body along the warmth of her. She turned and threw a short arm around my neck. We lay like that for a minute. Then she opened her eyes, blinking and rubbing at her nose with a knuckled fist.
“Where’s Mommy?” she asked.
“Next door, sleeping. Can I lie in here with you for a bit?”
“You can have Chops.” She found a rag-doll lamb and placed him alongside my neck. “Mom says I’m a big girl and I need to sleep in my own bed.”
“She’s right. You are a big girl.”
“You are, too. But I won’t tell.”
We slept like that until dawn, when I slipped back to my own room.
A few days after Ezra’s disastrous dinner party, I walked in from work to find Saskia and Olive coloring princess castles at the dining room table. They both looked up when I entered, brushing blond hair from their brows in perfect synchronicity.
“Where’s HP?” I asked. I was hungry and opened the fridge.
“Baseball practice. Their team’s killing it. It’s so exciting.”
He played in a beer league, slow-pitch, on the same team as Ezra. They had a game every Saturday afternoon, a thinly veiled excuse to go to the bar every Saturday night from May to September.
When I took a can of soda pop from the fridge, Olive’s eyebrows shot up. “You want one?” I asked her.
“No, thank you!” Saskia chimed on Olive’s behalf. She didn’t look up from the coloring, moving her golden pen within the lines. I wandered over to their table and sat down. She clicked the lid of the pen back on and stood up, brushing her hands on the front of her frayed jean shorts.
“Let’s go for a walk! Come on, all of us. It’s beautiful outside.”
“What, now?” I’d just walked in the door.
“It’ll be fun. Olive, get your bike. You can ride the lakeside path, and Godmother Angie and I will walk.”
It was only a block to the beach, and the path around the lake was paved smooth enough that Olive could easily pedal on it, although she needed help getting going. Her bicycle helmet had pink bunny rabbits along its edges, and glittery plastic tassels hung from the handlebars, clacking in the wind as she rode.
I took my soda with me and drank it as we walked. As soon as Olive was up ahead of us, Saskia launched her question.
“How long do you think you’ll stay with us?” Her tone was light. “I know your mom is eager for you to go home . . .”
I scrunched my can and threw it in the recycle bin. “How do you know that?”
She threaded her arm through mine, throwing me off-stride. “Ange, can I ask you something?”
I unlinked my arm before I spoke. “Go ahead. I won’t bite.”
“Do you think you and I could be friends?” From there it was a flood, a torrent. “I mean, I know we get on and everything, but I’ve been thinking about it heaps lately, and I want to be close with you like Haym is—you know, the kind of friendship you can count on. I see how you feel about him.”
I looked at her carefully. Her eyes were wide, her palms open as she spoke. I said nothing.
“I mean you guys have a history—you’ve known each other much longer than I’ve—”
“Eleven years.”
“Gosh. I’m only at seven.” Saskia took a breath. “Okay, well, what I’m saying is I’d like that for us, too. For you and me.” She stopped walking and blinked at me with summer-sky eyes. She looked like a child at a magic show, watching the handkerchief, waiting for the pure white dove.
Up ahead, Olive wobbled to a stop. She pointed at a tree and yelled something that the wind whipped across the lake. Saskia waved and gave her a thumbs-up. When she turned to me, she seemed more confident.
“Sometimes I think we met on the same night because of fate. I mean, if you’d told me in that beer tent in Oxford that one day we’d all be living in the same house on a beautiful lake, walking on a cool evening with my daughter playing in front of us—well . . . It just proves things work out as they should.”
“Seems too good to be true.”
“It’s just a dream of mine to have a woman I can talk to, trust. I’ve always known the universe would look after me. I know we can be closer.”
Just then Olive got too tired to pedal and Saskia had to push the bike all the way home with her back half bent. There was no more conversation, no more girl talk. We walked home in the dusk and it was then that I knew how this story would turn out. On the lake, a dark wave gathered, stretching and flexing. Soon it would flood, slipping under the doorways of her house and seeping into every window, turning every wall from blue to black.
The universe was coming for her and nobody saw it but me.
chapter
* * *
18
“Is Saskia’s disappearance the ending you’re referring to, Angela?” Novak asks.
“Maybe it’s the real world teaching her a lesson.”
“That’s cold.”
“Perhaps.” I refuse to give more.
He sits back, disgusted. “We found your big glass jar, you know.”
It takes me a minute to figure out what he might be talking about, and immediately my mouth floods with bile. “What big glass jar?”
“The one in your closet, Angela, dusty and hidden up high behind yearbooks and grad memorabilia. Your ‘Manifestations Jar.’?” He makes air quotes around the phrase. “Did you think we wouldn’t find it?”
“That’s not mine. It can’t be. I threw it out years ago.” My goddamn mother. Why would she have pulled that from the trash? “Mom must have salvaged it,” I say.
“Interesting. So your mom rescued your manifest destiny.”
The catchphrase shocks me. Did my mother give him that? I shift in my seat, smooth a wrinkle out of my pant fabric. “The jar was her idea. It was a dumb teenage thing. Whatever’s in there isn’t mine anymore, Novak.”