Kate downed a half bottle of wine before Edward picked her up.
At the party, she saw her old neighbors. Christine Fountain, who’d helped her plant a garden the year after the girls died—the zucchini squash they’d planted had taken over half the yard. Christine, picking purple hull peas and bringing them into Kate’s kitchen to shell. Christine, with her deeply tanned arms, who rode her bike everywhere in the heat. Winnie Lipsy, a nurse in the neonatal wing at the hospital where the girls were born and whose reserve reminded Kate of her mother. Kind eyes, she thought. The Gilmores with their two sons, toddlers when she’d moved. Jennifer, their mom, had let herself go, she thought. Jowly. Saggy ass. Then Kate felt ashamed for thinking it. Jennifer’s boys raced through the long dining room, bumped into Kate, spilling some of her wine on Edward, then slid on the wood floor and tumbled noisily into the den. Jennifer apologized, wiped at the spot on Edward’s sweater. Edward smiled weakly, said no problem, that he’d be sure to clothesline the boys the next time through. Edward swung his arm out. “Whack,” he said. Kate laughed, said Edward had been raised by wolves. Jennifer looked at them both blankly. Edward was hard to read. His deadpan sense of humor. But she liked him for it. He was who he was. Who was she?
Many of the people at the party had called to check in on her at various points over the years. They were decent and kind. Why had she ever moved? she wondered. Kate had the disquieting feeling that of all the people in the room, she had changed the least. Edward poured her another glass of white wine in the kitchen and she pulled on her sweater and followed him out onto the deck. The moon hung just over the tree line beyond the fence. A knot of people, some of whom she recognized, had gathered on the deck to smoke. A tennis-playing friend of Ray’s said a shy hello. Claire, a woman she used to carpool with when the girls were in grade school, saw her and came over to talk. They kept it light, talked about all the changes to the neighborhood, the spike in property values. At the edge of the deck, a man with a crew cut was drinking a beer and talking with Brent Gilmore, who wore a hat with reindeer antlers. The man seemed familiar, even the way he stood, his feet splayed, a hand jammed in his jeans pocket. A much younger woman, a girl, really, with long braided hair joined him, grabbed his forearm. The young woman caught Kate staring and Kate looked away.
Wine hummed in her head. Her mouth was dry. She looked around for Edward for some kind of ballast.
A string of firecrackers went off in the distance. In the middle of the yard, a group of teenage boys was hunched over a large clear plastic bag. One of the boys held a lighter inside the bag and lit candles sticking from a block of Styrofoam. “Better water down your roofs!” one of the men shouted from the porch, and everyone laughed. The fire balloon threw shadows across the yard, made spindly human figures against the fence. After a few minutes, the balloon swelled with hot air, rose slowly above the yard. A kind of quiet fell over the crowd as they watched. For a moment, to Kate, their upturned faces seemed to betray fretful memories, all their regrets. She wondered what her own face looked like.
The fire balloon floated over the creek bed behind the house. Illuminated live oak branches and telephone wires, where tennis shoes hung by their laces. She could see Edward standing on the lower rungs of the fence, watching. A few people who’d just come out onto the porch whooped and hollered drunkenly. The teenage boys, sheepish and amazed, stood around in the yard with their hands in their pockets, with no plan for what came next.
Kate’s head detached from her body, drifted upward.
“Ms. Ulrich?” a man’s voice said, and Kate turned. The man with the crew cut stared back. The young woman stood behind him, smiling but appraising Kate all the same. The girl and the man had the same thick dark eyebrows, brown eyes. And it was only then that Kate remembered his halting interview with the TV news reporter and knew who he was.
25
ON HER COMMUTE, Rosa sometimes listens to old taped interviews she did for pieces she never wrote. Voices of ex-cops, witnesses, medical examiners, victims’ families, neighbors. Labeled and put away for some future use. Stories that have grown more inscrutable over time. More like intimations.