Still, Nell had been dreading their goodbye to each other today. She knew how she’d hurt Mo. She would apologize, she decided. All that trite bullshit about how life is too short to not apologize came into sharp, painful focus. It was the most awful way to realize your mistakes.
She heard the wail then, outside the tiny hospital window. She could hardly bring herself to turn and see it: a mother on her knees and the ugly gasps of a weeping man. Fiona stood, as if in a trance, and walked out of the hospital doors, which automatically opened for her. As if approaching a stranger, she put one stiff arm on her mother’s shoulder.
But her mother pulled Fiona onto the ground. She would not weep there alone. The men stood beside them, and Jack put an uneasy arm around the father. They looked like accessories to the tragedy, still able to stand on their feet.
14
It was evening by the time Rachel and Denise arrived, and they parked behind the long line of cars leading up to the house. Denise carried a container of pasta salad they had picked up at a grocery store in Larchmont, and Rachel held a bouquet of half a dozen white roses—one of the few flower arrangements that had been left in the grocery store, many of the petals already browning.
A woman with a round face and highlighted blond hair answered the door; she turned out to be one of the Larkins’ neighbors, and she led them inside, where they found about a dozen more women who looked like her, plus Liam, shuttling between the kitchen and the dining room, carrying aluminum pans with potholders and placing them on the table among several pots and bowls and dishes of food. Denise made room for the store-bought pasta salad between a Pyrex pan of some untouched orange casserole and a crockpot full of meatballs. Liam saw Rachel, placed the Dutch oven that he was holding onto the table, and opened his arms, the hands still inside potholders.
“Rachel,” he said, and took her into a hug.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Denise said. “Is there anything we can do? You should rest. We can help in the kitchen.”
He shook his head. “You two should have something to eat,” he said without looking them in the eyes. “Rachel, Fiona is upstairs.” He turned away from them abruptly and went back through the swinging doors to the kitchen.
Denise made herself useful in the kitchen anyway, and Rachel walked up the carpeted steps to the second floor of the house. At the top of the stairway, she looked down the darkened hallway in both directions; all the doors were closed: the doors to the master bedroom and each child’s bedroom as well.
She approached Fiona’s door, with the ornamental, cursive F hanging from the doorknob, and knocked.
There was no answer. Rachel waited a few moments for some sort of a response. She put her ear to the door; there was silence. She knocked again.
“Fiona? It’s me.”
After a few beats, Fiona told her to come in.
Fiona was sitting on top of her bed, her back leaning on the wall that the side of her bed rested against. She was holding a worn paperback novel in her lap. She looked oddly, suspiciously normal.
“Hey,” Rachel said. She sat on the bed and took her friend into a long embrace. Fiona melted into it, leaning her weight into Rachel, an action that seemed to contain as much relief as if Fiona were letting out a long-held breath. “I’m so sorry,” Rachel said into Fiona’s neck.
When they released each other, Fiona said “Hey” back.
“It feels dumb to ask you how you’re doing.”
Fiona shrugged.
“So, how are you doing?” Rachel said sadly, self-aware.
“I’m fine,” Fiona said, not returning any glimpse of emotion. She had an unreadable, stoic expression on her face.
Rachel stroked Fiona’s hair, combing each finger through the strands. She had thought it would be clearer what she had to do; she’d thought that Fiona would be so distraught that Rachel would need only to sit there and hold her while she cried. Rachel had not been expecting this sort of opaque quietness. She did not know if it was appropriate to ask questions or to talk about Helen or if she should instead pretend they were there for any other reason but the actual one.
“Are your Larchmont friends here?” Rachel managed to ask.
She nodded. “Cooking, I think. They keep coming up to bring me tea.” She gestured to an untouched mug on her bedside table. “I told them I wanted to be alone.”
They sat for a few more moments in silence.
“Do you want to be alone?” Rachel finally asked.
Fiona thought for a moment. “Yeah,” she said.
“Okay,” Rachel said, nodding too much. “I totally understand.” She took Fiona’s hands in her own. “Call me whenever you need me, any hour; it doesn’t matter. Okay?”
“Yeah,” Fiona said, but for some reason, Rachel knew that she wouldn’t.
“I’ll see you Wednesday,” Rachel said. Wednesday was the funeral.
Things had not been good between them. After Rachel left camp, Fiona had called her several times, left desperate voicemails, sent emails from the computer lab, but Rachel hadn’t responded to any of them. She felt incapable of it; she was too angry. Angry that Fiona was still at camp, as if she was somehow betraying her through the sheer act of staying, even though Fiona was unaware of what had happened. In the days that followed, Rachel didn’t leave her apartment, numbing out to bad TV and eating junk food in order to not have to piece together the events of that night, to not have to think about her father, about Micah, about this disastrously terrible summer. She was being punished for something, she was sure. But for what? She kept saying to Denise, “I don’t want to talk about it,” and she counted the days until she could go back to school. Eventually Denise turned off the TV and sat on the coffee table in front of the couch and made Rachel sit up and took Rachel’s face into her hands and had to physically shake her in order to get her to talk.
Drunk as she had been at the time, she knew she never would have wanted to sleep with Chad. He was her friend, and she had begun to find safety in that, having a male friend who didn’t seem to want anything more from her than loyalty or trust or comfort. In the past few weeks, she had started to rethink her behavior around him, replay their summer together as if she could find a place where things had turned, where things went wrong. Maybe it was something that she could have stopped. She had been affectionate with him, as she was affectionate with all her friends, though now she wondered if he’d confused her affection with flirtation or a genuine romantic interest. The thought made her deeply upset, and angry with herself, that something terrible could have been avoided had she only smiled less, kissed his cheek less.