She enjoyed a chance to knock him off-balance. Ben was too confident that he had everyone around him figured out—as if they were characters in one of his books, amalgams of traits and quirks whose actions and dialogue could be predicted by anyone who knew enough of them. The only thing Caroline hated more than feeling like a foregone conclusion was knowing when she was acting like one.
But it felt nice to be on a family outing. The air was warm and the sky was clear, and she felt good today. Charlie sat in the backseat with Bub and read to him from The Book of Secrets, and Caroline enjoyed listening. She was glad to have a respite from Hickory Heck. He read faster than his usual cadence, his little-boy voice driven forward like a wave lunging for the shore.
Next to her, Ben was saying something about the Revolutionary War and the owner of the diner who’d invited him to the Preservation Society meeting. From what Caroline could gather, the woman’s family had lived in the village for generations, and Ben believed that she knew all its secrets. Caroline had discovered over the years that Ben hunted mysteries in everything he saw. She might roll her eyes at him for these sojourns into fantasy, but this was a trait of his that she enjoyed. Because Ben didn’t seem able to face the fact that life was, by definition, mundane, being with him had lent the world a vibrance it otherwise lacked. Caroline knew his childhood had a lot to do with the way he liked to live in worlds other than his own.
She’d first seen Ben during college orientation when they’d passed each other on a footpath. He was handsome, but the campus was filled with good-looking boys. Later, she decided that she took such an immediate interest because of the girl he was with—over the semesters, Caroline noted that Ben was always with one girl or another. It hadn’t been the girl herself but the way Ben was with her. Completely absorbed. Breathing her in. He hadn’t even glanced in Caroline’s direction as she passed them. When Caroline tried to imagine the pure bliss of total engrossment, she’d come up empty.
Caroline liked the way Ben walked the university’s halls and paths with a slight smile, how he tended to wear a scarf but not a jacket when the season started to turn. They began dating during their junior year, and Caroline had understood at once that Ben was different from her other boyfriends. More thoughtful and understanding. He listened. A man and not a boy, she thought—finally. Boys had demanded much from her. They needed to be entertained, they needed to be impressed, they needed to think that she needed them. Being with Ben had never felt like work. He was someone with whom she could be quiet, and yet he also made her laugh. For twelve years they had laughed so much. Twelve years of that—and the boys. She hadn’t always thought it, but she’d known all along how lucky she was.
Bipolar had been her psychiatrist’s diagnosis. She was told that the disease sometimes lay dormant like bulbs of spring flowers in the cold earth, awaiting the right conditions to sprout. For Caroline, the hormones from her pregnancy with Bub combined with the stress of losing her job had been the soil in which her condition had blossomed.
Between the diagnosis and her unemployment, Caroline had found herself spending more time with Ben than she had in many years. They’d had such busy lives that it had seemed a new thing to idle together, and she began to notice the changes that had accrued over the years. Her husband was not the way she remembered him.
She’d never paid attention to how Ben looked when he wrote, but now she had little more to do than study him. The way his face would tighten and then slacken, the way he would silently mouth the words written by him but spoken by another. Sometimes he’d fire an expression at the screen that she’d never before seen on his face.
Dr. Hatcher told her that this was simple paranoia, something that she had to be vigilant for. Nevertheless, a sense mounted in her that whoever Ben conjured in his head sat there in his chair, mouthing dialogue to the computer screen. Sometimes, when the words were working for him, she could almost see his creation, with its alien posture and phantom outline.
She could not arrest the thought that he wore an actor’s smile when he played with the boys or held her close. As if another life—his real life—lay elsewhere.
“I thought this would be more popular,” she said when they arrived.
The Preservation Society meetings were held at the little church in the village, and its parking lot held only six cars.
“This is probably, like, a solid third of the village’s population,” Ben said.
They pulled alongside a battered hatchback with a license plate two generations older than the one currently in use.
“Can I play out here?” Charlie asked them.
“Here?” Caroline asked as she slipped Bub into the BabyBj?rn she’d fastened around herself. “What would you do out here?”
“I want to play in the park, then I can read for a while,” he said. Charlie didn’t fidget, but Caroline had the sense that he thrummed with energy. He’d been like this for days now. Fueled with enough food and sleep, little boys were like engines without off switches, but the way he’d been acting struck Caroline as manic—something she knew a few things about.
“What park?”
“He means that broken plaza with the old fountain,” Ben said. Caroline remembered it now. It was a broad space that once must have been the center of village life, but now it was overrun with trees and clogged with vegetation.
“You think it’s safe there for him?” she asked. They’d agreed to give Charlie a longer leash up here, but some habits were hard to break.
“As long as he stays out of the streets. It’s just on the other side of those trees,” Ben said. He pointed to an outcropping of scraggly evergreens that leaned against the back of church.
“Take my phone.” Caroline pressed it into Charlie’s hands. “Call Dad if you have any trouble, and if you see anyone, run back to the church.”
“Okay.”
“Stay out of the streets, and don’t leave the square, got it?”