The meeting had been scheduled for that night long before Aurora hit—they never missed a first Thursday—and the four old friends had spent much of the day texting like teenagers, back and forth about whether, given the circumstances, they ought to cancel. No one had wanted to, though. First Thursday was First Thursday. Dorothy had texted that if it was her last night, getting dizzy with her friends sounded like the way to do it. Gail and Margaret had voted the same, and Blanche had, too, feeling a little guilty about leaving Warden Coates in the lurch but that she was well within her rights, having already gone way into overtime for which the state would not compensate her. Besides, Blanche wanted to talk about the book. Like Dorothy, she was amazed at the evil of the little girl Briony, and also, of the way that the evil child had matured into quite a different sort of adult.
Then, once they had settled in Dorothy’s living room, Margaret had produced the bottles of lorazepam. The bottles were a couple of years old. When her husband passed away, the doctor gave it to her “just to help you cope, Midge.” Margaret never took any; though she was sad to lose her husband, her nerves were fine, maybe better, actually, since once he was dead she no longer had to worry about him killing himself shoveling the driveway in the winters or climbing up on the ladder to cut tree branches that were awfully close to the power lines. But because her insurance covered the cost, she had filled the prescriptions anyway. You never knew what might come in handy, was her motto. Or when. Now it seemed that when had arrived.
“Better to do it together, was what I was thinking,” Margaret said. “Less scary that way.”
The other three had, with no significant objections, agreed that it was a good idea. Dorothy Harper was also a widow. Gail’s husband was in a nursing home and did not recognize even his children these days. And speaking of the children of the First Thursday gals, they were middle-aged adults who lived in places far from the hills of Appalachia, and no last minute reunion was feasible. Blanche, the only non-retiree among the group, had never married or had children at all, which was probably for the best, considering how things were turning out.
Now, the question Blanche had asked put the laughter to a stop.
“Maybe we’ll wake up as butterflies,” Gail said. “The cocoons I’ve seen on the news, they remind me a little of the cocoons that caterpillars make.”
“Spiders wrap up flies, too. I think the cocoons look more like that than like any sort of chrysalis,” Margaret said.
“I’m not counting on anything.” Blanche’s full glass had at some point in the last few minutes become an empty glass.
“I hope to see an angel,” Dorothy said.
The other three looked to her. She did not seem to be joking. Her wrinkled chin and mouth tightened into a tiny fist. “I’ve been pretty good, you know,” she added. “Tried to be kind. Good wife. Good mother. Good friend. Volunteered in retirement. Why, I drove all the way to Coughlin just on Monday for my committee meeting.”
“We know,” said Margaret, and extended a hand in the air toward Dorothy, who was the very definition of a good old soul. Gail echoed this, and so did Blanche.
They passed around the pill bottles and each woman took two tablets and swallowed them. Following this act of communion, the four friends sat and looked at each other.
“What should we do now?” Gail asked. “Just wait?”
“Cry,” Margaret said, and giggled as she pretended to rub at her eyes with her knuckles. “Cry, cry, cry!”
“Pass the cookies around,” Dorothy said. “I’m quitting my diet.”
“I want to get back to the book,” Blanche said. “I want to talk about how Briony changed. She was like a butterfly. I thought that was lovely. It reminded me of some of the women in the prison.”
Gail had retrieved the Pinot from the coffee table. She unwrapped the foil and stuck in the corkscrew.
While she went around pouring everyone a new glass, Blanche continued, “You know there’s a lot of recidivism—fallback, I mean—breaking parole, and getting back into bad habits and such—but some of them do change. Some of them start brand new lives. Like Briony. Isn’t that inspiring?”
“Yes,” Gail said. She raised her glass. “To emerging new lives.”
3
Frank and Elaine lingered in the doorway of Nana’s room. It was past nine. They’d laid her down on the bed, leaving aside the covers. There was a poster of a uniformed marching band on the wall and a bulletin board tacked with Nana’s best drawings of Manga characters. A wind chime of colored pipes and glass beads hung from the ceiling. Elaine insisted on neatness so there were no clothes or toys on the floor. The blinds were pulled shut. Around Nana’s head the growth was bulbous. The growths bunched around her hands were identical, only smaller. Mittens with no thumbs.
Though neither had said anything, after standing together in silence for more than a minute, Frank realized that they were both afraid to turn off the light.
“Let’s come back and check on her again in a little while.” Out of habit, Frank whispered this to Elaine, as on so many occasions when they were desperate to keep from waking Nana, instead of the opposite.
Elaine nodded. As one, they retreated from their daughter’s open door and went downstairs to the kitchen.
While Elaine sat at the table, Frank made a pot of coffee, filling the urn, sifting out the grounds. It was something he’d done a thousand times before, though never at so late an hour. The normality of the activity soothed him.
She was thinking along similar lines. “It’s like the old days, isn’t it? Sick baby upstairs, us down here, wondering if we’re doing the right things.”
Frank pressed the brew button. Elaine had her head on the table, tucked between her arms.
“You should sit up,” he said gently, and took the chair across from her.
She nodded and sat up straight. Her bangs were stuck to her forehead and she had the querulous, what’s-that-who-now? look of someone who had recently absorbed a blow to the skull. He didn’t suppose he looked any better.
“Anyway, I know what you mean,” said Frank. “I remember. Questioning how we ever could have tricked ourselves into thinking we could take care of another human being in the first place.”
This brought a bright smile to Elaine’s face. Whatever was happening to them now, they’d survived an infant together—no small achievement.
The coffee machine beeped. For a moment, it had seemed quiet, but Frank suddenly became aware of the noise outside. Someone was yelling. There were police sirens, a car alarm whooping. He instinctively tilted his ear toward the stairs, toward Nana.
He didn’t hear anything, of course he didn’t; she wasn’t a baby anymore, and these weren’t the old days, weren’t like any days ever before. The way Nana was sleeping tonight, it was impossible to imagine what kind of racket would rouse her, cause her to open her eyes beneath that layer of white fiber.
Elaine had her head canted the same way toward the stairs.
“What is this, Frank?”
“I don’t know.” He broke away from her gaze. “We shouldn’t have left the hospital.” Implying that Elaine had made them go, not sure he really believed it, but needing to share the blame, to kick a little of the dirt he felt on himself back onto her. That he knew he was doing this, knew it exactly, made him hate himself. He couldn’t stop, though. “We should have stayed. Nana needs a doctor.”
“They all do, Frank. Soon I’ll need a doctor, too.” She poured herself a cup of the coffee. Years passed while she stirred in milk and Equal. He thought that part of the discussion was over, but then she said, “You should be grateful that I made us leave.”
“What?”
“It saved you from doing whatever you might have done if we hadn’t.”