“It was called Mountain Day when I was at Smith,” Kristin was explaining to Melissa and Melissa’s friend Claudia as the three of them stood with the very last of the commuters on the platform of the Bronxville train station. Kristin was doing something now that she wished she had done four days ago, back on Monday morning: she was taking a personal day. She was taking a personal day with her daughter and one of her daughter’s friends. Something about Richard having to drive to Brooklyn to ID a body had pushed her over the edge and given her the idea. She and her daughter simply weren’t going to go to school today. That’s all there was to it. And they were going to bring Claudia with them when they played hooky. As Kristin had anticipated, Jesse was all in: she didn’t mind her daughter joining them for a day off in the slightest.
“One weekday in the autumn, we’d all wake up and hear bells,” Kristin went on. “The bells in College Hall and the quadrangle and the chapel would all ring like it was, I don’t know, 1918 and the end of a war, and that meant that all classes were canceled. We—the students and faculty—had the day off and we could do whatever we wanted. The college has been doing it for forever. And this, girls, is our own personal Mountain Day.”
“Why did they ring bells at the end of a war?” Claudia asked her.
“To let people know it was all over,” she answered.
“Why not just tell them on TV?”
“There was no TV in 1918.”
“But there were newspapers,” Claudia argued. “I think a newspaper would be a better way to tell people a war is over than ringing a bell. I mean, when the students at Smith College heard the bells, did they think it was the end of the war or they just had no school?”
“Claudia, don’t take everything literally,” Melissa said to her friend, rolling her eyes.
“What does that mean?”
“It means,” Melissa began, but then the thought stalled. She didn’t know quite what it meant. What she meant. She just knew that Claudia took everything…literally. It drove Melissa crazy sometimes. It drove everyone crazy sometimes.
“You’re right, Claudia—about the bells and the newspapers,” Kristin told her. “People knew the war was over because of the newspapers. And the newspapers had informed them that the bells would ring when there was an armistice. When there was peace. I just meant that we heard a lot of bells on Mountain Day at Smith.”
The three of them stared for a long moment in silence at the train tracks. It was chilly this morning, and the temperature wasn’t supposed to climb above forty-five degrees that day. When Kristin exhaled, she saw her breath. But it was sunny and the sky was cerulean. Her plan was to take the girls to the Museum of Natural History and then the Museum of Modern Art. She was going to see if her own mother would like to join the three of them for lunch, though she guessed this was a long shot: her mother’s social calendar filled up far in advance. Given how much the two girls enjoyed clothes shopping, she assumed they might also wander into some of the stores on Fifth Avenue or Rockefeller Center. They might visit Capezio for new leotards and dance tights.
She wished the girls were still in third grade. A year ago, she could have taken them to the American Girl store, and they would have been in heaven for hours. Now Melissa hardly ever played with her American Girl dolls. Kristin wasn’t sure she had picked up any of them since school had started in September. Soon they would be as much a memory as her plush pals from Sesame Street—Zoe and Abby and Elmo—or her Barbies.
She shuddered ever so slightly when her mind roamed to the Barbies, because that meant she saw once more the used condom on her daughter’s Tucker Tote. She wondered which of the two prostitutes had been in Melissa’s bedroom. Was it the one who later would bring her husband to the guest room? Or was it the one who would steal one of her kitchen knives and—according to the media, not her husband—nearly decapitate a Russian with a sequoia for a neck? (Richard had been more circumspect: he had said only that the girl had stabbed the fellow in the throat.) She had never liked emotional chaos, but she was feeling this morning that her composure—so frail since the bachelor party—was under siege. Hence the need for this Mountain Day. When she thought of the dead body in the morgue, she felt bad that she had any preference at all when she contemplated whether it was the one who had been with Richard or the one who had rained hellfire down on her bodyguard. Her captor. Whatever. But—and she could admit this only to herself—she did have a preference. Of course, she did. The truth was, she did not wish that either girl was dead. Had been murdered. But the inalterable (and unutterable) fact was this: Richard was now on his way to ID one of them, and somewhere deep inside her she hoped that the victim was the girl before whom her husband had stood naked. The girl who had led her husband upstairs, where the two of them…
Where the two of them either did nothing or something. Probably she’d never know for sure.
“Train’s coming,” Claudia was saying. “There’s a movie about a lady who throws herself under a train when it’s coming.”
“It was a book first,” Melissa corrected her.
“Doesn’t matter. Is that the worst way to kill yourself or what? What a total mess! You’re like…you’re like hamburger meat.”
“You should see our couch,” said Melissa, and she shook her head.