Lucy, Sunny Bang, and Claire were having ladies’ night cocktails at the Cutting Room. Lucy thought it was hilarious that Beekman had a bar named the Cutting Room—like they were filmmakers grabbing a drink after a long day in the editing suite instead of three stay-at-home moms who’d miraculously been allowed out of the house at seven thirty on a Tuesday night.
“It’s completely insane,” said Claire.
“It’s somewhere between romantic and insane,” said Lucy. “It’s somewhere in there.”
The news had just broken that Arlen Lowell was going to stay with her husband. Her now-wife. They were to be the two Mrs. Lowells.
“And it’s not just that they’re not splitting up,” said Sunny Bang. “They’re staying happily, committedly, romantically married.”
“I don’t get it,” said Claire. “Is Arlen becoming a lesbian?”
“I think we’ve entered the zone beyond labels, Claire,” said Sunny Bang.
“This is the weirdest part of this whole thing,” said Lucy. “I mean, can you imagine? What would you do if Jake came home and told you he wanted to become a woman?”
“It’s more likely that I’d tell him I wanted to become a man,” said Sunny Bang. “That’s the more probable scenario.”
“Yeah, okay, whatever, Sunny,” said Claire. Sunny Bang never missed an opportunity to shock. “What would Jake do if you told him you wanted to become a man?”
“Honestly?” said Sunny Bang. She looked up in the air and appeared to give the question some serious thought. “I think he’d have a pretty major problem with it.”
“Exactly.”
“But who knows what goes on between people. Love is a strange thing.”
*
Arlen and Eric Lowell’s house did not look out on the pond where Arlen’s sister’s body was found.
The pond in question was behind the house next door, a fact that had been more or less lost by the town gossips over the years. The pond was down in a little hollow, and it was impossible to see it from the Lowell property, especially now that the underbrush in the woods between the houses hadn’t been properly cut back in decades.
Arlen was seven years old when Rose disappeared. After a frantic search that brought out the entire township of Beekman, Rose was discovered in the murky pond behind their next-door neighbor’s house. She could have wandered into the pond, of course, although Rose was not known to wander off. Not known to wander off, Arlen could imagine the police writing in their little notebooks. There was a rock wall that separated the two properties, one of those ancient walls that was really nothing more than a row of loose stones heaped there by the farmers who had cleared the land sometime in the 1800s. How did she get over the wall? But there were two places where the stones had tumbled, two places where a three-year-old could conceivably have passed through, although she hadn’t left any traces. Not a trace near the rough rock wall, not a hair, not a scrape. Still, it was at least a possibility. Rose was only three, she couldn’t swim, and that particular pond had a way of sucking hard at one’s feet. And a person can drown in two inches of water. But still: It’s always the parents, right?
Both of Arlen’s parents lived under a cloud of suspicion for the rest of their lives, and yet they chose to remain in Beekman. Theories abounded—the crazy mother did it, the drunken father did it, they did it together, the father did it and the mother helped him cover it up, although this last theory was hardest to believe, because by the time Rose died, Arlen’s parents weren’t even attempting to hide their contempt for each other. In the end, nothing was proven, no evidence was found, and no charges were ever filed.
The result was that the good people of Beekman had been feeling sorry for Arlen her entire life. They bought her presents at Christmas, they remembered her birthday, they gave her hand-me-downs, they checked up on her. They were thrilled when her father died of cirrhosis at forty-seven and positively gleeful when her mother was institutionalized in the late 1970s, although she was let out later, back when releasing the crazies was the popular thing to do.
Arlen never went to college. It just wasn’t in the cards. She married Eric when she was twenty, and they had had two kids, a boy and a girl. Once her kids got to junior high, Arlen took a job at a shelter for women who were victims of domestic abuse. Over the years, she’d done just about everything at that place that you could imagine, from cleaning the toilets to hauling sheets to the Laundromat to offering unofficial life-coaching sessions to the women and scrounging up books and craft supplies for the kids. Man, the things she’d seen.
The things she’d seen! So much pain and suffering. Those beautiful women, heartbroken and lost and scared, often with nothing more than the clothes on their backs, afraid for themselves, terrified for their kids. And the little kids! They broke your heart. One time she walked in with a small stuffed owl she’d gotten for opening a checking account, and a little girl had looked up at her and said, “Is that for me?” Working at the shelter had, more than anything else, shaped the philosophy of Arlen’s adult life, which was, in a nutshell: If this is my biggest problem…
It was Christmas Eve two years earlier. Arlen’s mother had refused to come home for the holidays, nearly breaking the burly nursing-home attendant’s jaw when he tried to force her into Arlen’s car. The Lowells’ daughter couldn’t travel because she was on probation, and their son was going skiing with a girlfriend in Nevada, so Christmas was going to be just Arlen and Eric. Which was nice, really. Arlen liked to spend time alone with her husband, which was more than most women at her stage of life could say. She liked to sit across the kitchen table from him and tell him stories about the women in the shelter and pick his brain for advice. Arlen started a lot of conversations at the shelter with her trademark phrase “Now, I don’t mean to should on you, but I’m gonna go ahead and do it if you’ll let me,” and she got a lot of her best suggestions from Eric. “Where the mind goes, the behind follows” is what she said when she talked to a woman who seemed to be thinking too often or too fondly about her ex. Arlen liked a good folksy saying. She collected them like cats.
Arlen was doing the dishes, looking out the window to her backyard, reminding herself to fill the bird feeders and put out a Christmas bonus for the mailman. Eric had strung the lights on the juniper tree like he did every year, even though the tree kept getting taller, and Arlen knew the day would come when it wouldn’t be safe for him to string the lights on it anymore, and the thought made her suddenly sad. Enjoy the lights right now, she told herself. Don’t worry about somedays and might-happens.
Eric cleared his throat and said her name. Arlen turned around.