She crept past the TV room, catching a glimpse of Liston in profile. There she was, in her armchair, angled toward the door so as to see her oldest son come home. She was tipped back in it, her tired feet in the air, her mouth open slightly, her face turned to the side.
The back door made the least noise—Ada had caught William coming in and out of it, late, at least twice—so she exited that way, onto the patio. It was here that, hidden among the trees at the base of the yard, she had seen Liston as she spoke on the phone to David. She remembered Gregory, moving through the lit upstairs of the house; she remembered William coming home, after curfew as usual, from wherever he had been. How little she had known of any of them. How little, then, she had known of David.
She paused for a moment in Liston’s backyard, listening, and then walked resolutely eastward toward the hill, through the backyards of her neighbors. Her classmates’ voices echoed back to her. Across the quiet neighborhood, they sounded ghostly and strange. Once or twice she thought she heard William’s voice, but she was not certain.
At the edge of the last backyard was a fence that shielded it from Grampian Way, the road that bordered the park, and she slipped around it, avoiding the streetlamps to the extent that she could. The lights of the tennis courts across from her had been turned off for the night, and teenagers slipped up the hill behind them like shades, toward the top of the rock.
Ada had been to its peak only once or twice, during daylight hours, with David, who liked the view of the Boston skyline. She mainly avoided it now, knowing that it was the territory of the teenagers who populated the neighborhood, afraid to intrude. She had not known any better when she was younger. She and David had been wrong, she realized, about so many things; and she experienced a retroactive embarrassment for them both. She walked quickly, with her head down, hoping that her dark hat and parka would adequately conceal her identity from the little groups across the street.
She found a point of entry into the Woods that deviated from the paths that most of the rest of them used. It was steep and rocky, and she had not realized how dark it would be under the cover of the trees. She could not see the branches before her. She held her hands ahead of her, pushing brush out of the way. Every now and then, through the foliage above her, she caught a glimpse of the moon, still and round and white.
At times she heard a shout or a peal of laughter, and she made her way toward these sounds, breathing more heavily now, stumbling once or twice. When the clearing at the top of the little hill came into view, she stayed behind a nearby tree, hugging it. She peered out from behind it.
A small fire had been lit, and teenagers stood around it with cans of beer and bottles of vodka or gin in their hands. Many of them held lit cigarettes. As they gestured, small red trails of light arced through the night air. Ada was far afield from them; she both did and did not wish to be a part of the little circles she beheld.
She looked at every face in turn until she spied first Janice, and then Melanie, and then William, who had his arms raised in a kind of victorious stance, the front of him lit up orange by the flames. He stood there for longer than she imagined he would, his face turned upward toward the sky, and Melanie reached her arms around him and hugged him sideways. He stumbled slightly, held the bottle in his hands to his mouth, tipped it up for several beats. There was something very beautiful about the tableau and something very feral: it occurred to Ada suddenly that this—this—had been happening for centuries, millennia, the fire and the wide-open sky and the liquid that dropped with a burn down the throat of William and his companions. It was so human, so alive; she was touched by it all in a way she could not explain. She had never been so close to this sort of wildness. It frightened her and drew her in all at once.
I know them, thought Ada. I could go to them.
But she was not like them, did not understand their hearts and minds, the compasses inside them that governed what they said and did.
She held her breath.
Footsteps marched across the dead dry leaves, and a senior boy came into sight, paused, stared at her for a moment.
She could not tell if he recognized her. Her hat and parka made her genderless and strange. She was facing away from the only source of light. She looked down at the ground.
“What are you doing?” he asked her. His name was Bob Conley. He was a good student. He played on the basketball team and dated a girl named Heather. He had a brother named Chuck and a sister named Patty. He was a friend of William’s; he had been at Liston’s house once or twice before. That she had learned all of these things about him, about all of these people, in less than two years—that they knew nothing about her—pained her suddenly. The amount of space this knowledge occupied in her brain. She missed the knowledge that David had given her: facts that were concrete, substantial, productive.
Ada looked back at Bob Conley, blinking. For a moment she hesitated, said nothing. And then she turned and ran.
At the base of the hill, she saw two police cars slinking quietly toward the Woods, up Grampian, their lights and sirens off. She paused, staying still, hoping that her dark clothing would disguise her. It worked. But soon, she knew, teenagers on top of the hill would come streaming downward as quickly as they had run to the top. Soon William Liston would come in from his long night out, tiptoeing, as Ada had done earlier, past his mother, and then falling into a long and heavy sleep, dreaming of Melanie, or of the fire at the top of the hill.
When Ada reached Liston’s house, she stopped outside it for a moment and then, impulsively, turned back and went to David’s house. She wanted to be inside her old bedroom, inside her old twin bed, just for an hour or two; she wanted to make it up with sheets that had belonged to David before she was born. She wanted to fall asleep fast and hard inside it.
It was the seventh of December, and all the houses on the block had Christmas lights strung up in great number. Liston’s looked nice that year: she had paid her boys five dollars each to decorate the porch. Only David’s house was devoid of lights, and because of this it looked desolate and unmerry. David would have been horrified, thought Ada.