Later that day, for the third time in twenty-four hours, I set out on the same long drive.
For once, I didn’t listen to a book.
Instead, I opened the book of the past.
When we were kids, even the stoners and stumblers and art hags and assholes adored Felicity, because she was as noticing and kind to them as she was to the alphas. Was she concealing her meretricious character, handing out smiles, favors, advice, homework help like flowers from a basket? Why would she bother? Life for her would have been easy enough in any case. She hardly needed all that extra goodwill.
So, the corollary question was why Felicity, with so many gifts, didn’t have one truly intimate friend? I had other friends, among them girls like bold Chassy Reingold, sweet Cassandra Sullivan, and the gorgeous and ultimately loathsome bitch Molly Boone, who were, if not first-tier females, then definite contenders. Felicity did not. Anointed by proximity, I was what passed for a boon companion. It gave me status. It gave me pause.
Not so very long ago, Felicity and I did things like going ice skating on the pond in Bachelor’s Woods in the soul-shriveling cold of a purple evening in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, bratwurst capital of the world. One summer day, sweating, swearing, crawling on my stomach over sharp grass quivering with black flies, I helped Felicity drag her camera equipment as we edged closer to the water at Horicon Marsh so she could photograph a majestic sandhill crane and her awkward brown chicks for her senior project in biology and art. I did her updo for the prom. I ate meatloaf at her house, and she ate macaroni-and-cheese casserole at mine. She taught me how to swing dance.
She would never tell a lie, not even the small social kind that could be banished by the five-year test (which is, will this even matter in five years?).
One morning in our junior year, just before the organic chem midterm, she gave Marty Mazzoli her meticulous notes. A good student, Marty was on the verge of failing, mostly because he had to work weeknights unloading trucks since his dad was not only a deadbeat but a mean drunk.
When Mr. Styles caught her out, Felicity immediately confessed. Styles was so moved by her charity and honesty that he allowed Marty to do a project to replace the final in the knowledge that Felicity would tutor him through it. They started on a Sunday afternoon. It took them all night. Next morning, when I met Marty coming out of the Wilds’ mansion-house “rectory,” I heard him say, “That was the nicest thing anybody ever did for me.” And he went in to kiss Felicity on the cheek, but she stiff-armed him, patting his shoulder. Marty was embarrassed; he was a cute guy and probably unaccustomed to girls resisting his moves, especially moves as mild and sweet as this one was.
He said, “I didn’t mean...”
And Felicity replied, “I know. It’s okay. I didn’t either.”
Something about that moment framed it as the first time I ever witnessed anything that made me wonder if Felicity liked boys at all. But it was far from the first time I witnessed Felicity in benefactor mode.
Another occasion had always stayed with me, possibly because of the appalling viciousness of most high school girls. It was at the homecoming dance, where every other girl affected nonchalance in Stella McCartney knockoff slip-sheaths, but Felicity rocked a voluminous tulle princess dress, petal pink, like a birthday cake in the shape of a doll. She wore long black gloves and a cameo on a black ribbon at her throat, all things she’d found at little resale shops in rich burbs like Kohler and Mequon. About anhour after she was crowned the queen, I saw her throw on a long black opera cape, clearly another thrift-shop find.
I called to her, “Felicity! Where are you off to?” Some too-sweet party, I thought, with college kids.
“Home,” she said.
“It’s nine thirty!” I pointed out. “You’re the homecoming queen!”
“My work here is done,” she said, twirling that cape in a sort of jokey-regal way, then cutting her eyes at her date, soccer jock Ben Landry. Ben was dancing with Laura Dell-Mason, who’d been in love with him since sixth grade. A bright, kind girl, she was pretty but so painfully shy that no one really noticed her—except, unfortunately, to call her Laura Dalmatian.
On the day Felicity got nabbed for helping Marty Mazzoli, we stopped for coffee on the way home from school. It was stupidly cold, and I again thanked the universe for my coat and my grandmother. I would have that coat all my life. Suddenly, Felicity said, “Reenie, you look like Freya. You look like Freya, if she had freckles.”
“Who’s that?”
“The Norse goddess of the dead. She was beautiful, with this snow-white skin and a coat made from hawk feathers, driving her chariot pulled by cats.”
“Must have been a lot of cats,” I said.
“She would lend her magic coat to other gods to protect them in battle. She was really kind, but still, she was the goddess of the dead. So if you had a dream about her, it would be, uh-oh, somebody’s done for.”
“Somebody’s done for,” Felicity had said. She’d said that more than once.
It was she who was the fair one, draping her magical coat over those in need—but still the goddess of the dead.
Five
Northern Cardinal
Cardinalis cardinalis.Medium-sized red songbirds, cardinals are named after Roman Catholic bishops because the color of the robes those priests wear is very like the bird’s plumage. Males are intensely territorial, whistling from a high perch to warn others off their patch. A male cardinal may even mistake his own image on a shiny surface for an invading male and relentlessly fight that reflection. Admired backyard birds, cardinals go bald in late summer to make way for new feathers. Their lifespan is variable, from three to fifteen years. In Native American traditional images and lore, cardinals often symbolize monogamy.
A couple of days later, I stared at the list of names of Felicity’s purported clients given to me by my friend Ross, starting with the third name only because he lived in Crystal Creek, just south of Sheboygan, and he was a professor, still on winter break, so I might catch him at home.
There was no way that any of these men would happily agree to talk to me. A few times, I’d spent weeks campaigning to snare a few tense minutes with neurotic designers. I sent them fruit and flowers and antique laces, everything except a camel, cajoling them to permit the attention they actually craved but must pretend to despise. Felicity’s amours had no incentive at all togive me time. They would not be swayed by books or blooms. So I decided on a direct frontal assault.
On a clear but frigid morning, I located the home of Finn and Briony Vogel, parents to Louis, Levi, and Lars. Theirs was one of those mid-twentieth-century raised ranchers made over into craftsman houses with the addition of a covered porch and a gable, houses my dad hated not because they were bad houses but because they were good houses with good bones. As the lady once wrote, they had stood for seventy years and might stand for seventy more, for about a third of the cost of one of the baby mansions his company put up. The facade was a creamy beige with dark green shutters and a dark red door. I watched as the garage door peeled up and Briony left with tots in tow. Fifteen minutes later, time I used to listen to Finn Vogel’s remarks during a radio interview about why scientific knowledge was not always the best guide for public health policy, I knocked on that red door for about five minutes, and I was just turning away when that door swung open and a man stood there. Like Roman, he was intimidatingly good-looking, surfer-boy handsome, his hair shower wet, his toned arms in a crisp white shirt with the cuffs rolled to the elbows.
