She has half an hour before her mother will be home with her two brothers after pickup over at the middle school. Half an hour could be enough to strip down, arrange herself. She doesn’t have any satin-trimmed underwear like Hailey, but she does have a black cotton thong that could do. Maybe her mother has something she could borrow. Not lingerie, not anything weird, but something to make it more grown-up. High heels. A necklace that will disappear into her cleavage.
Her mother’s closetis a study in contrasts: the stiff, bright scrubs she keeps around from when she worked as a home health aide, way back before Blair was born. And the things she wears for the PTA lunches, the date nights with Blair’s father. Silky camisoles and soft, thin knits. She examines a pair of black pumps but they seem so brisk, businesslike, the heel too low to be sexy. Her mother favors them for library fundraisers, the holiday party for her father’s work. She opens another shoebox to find a pair of brown suede loafers, scoffs, and puts the lid back onto the box. She knows it is a paradox—that she derides her mother’s ordinariness, and yet, how she would hate it even more if her mother were unordinary. If Blair had opened the box to find a pair of stilettos studded with rhinestones, or boots that went over the knee.
She’s about to give up when something else catches her eye. A duffel bag in the corner that had been hidden underneath an old blanket, the hint of weathered brown leather peeking out from beneath orange-and-white crochet squares. Though she has no reason to, Blair pushes the blanket aside and tugs on the zipper pull.
Inside she finds three pairs of black cotton underwear, one nude bra. A pair of jeans and a pair of sweatpants. A white T-shirt and a pale-blue button down. A small cloth toiletry bag containing a travel toothbrush, travel toothpaste, dental floss, a comb. In one of the side pockets there are three small envelopes, her initials and her brothers’ in her mother’s handwriting. Inside the one markedBERshe finds a single curl of her baby hair and the tiny, hollow pebbles of her first lost teeth. Flat against the bottom of the bag is a manilla envelope containing three black-and-white snapshots of Blair and her brothers, Blair’s front tooth missing and the boys’ cheeks padded with baby fat, that her mother took with the first DSLR camera her father bought her when Blair was small.
There’s another side pocket, a smaller one, but now she’s curious, wonders what pieces of herself she might find. Her fingers graze something cool and smooth and hard.
It’s a lighter. Not the long, thin kind that she’s seen her mother use to light taper candles on the dining table when they’ve had guestsover for dinner or that her father uses to start the firepit in the yard. This is heavy, metal, a lighter designed to slip into a pocket, to be concealed. She turns it over in her palm. On one side, an S scratched into the surface, rough and crude.
Oh my god, she thinks.Does my mom smoke pot?The thought can’t help but make her laugh out loud, picturing her tidy, order-obsessed mother sparking a joint or bending over a bong. But the sound of her own laughter in the quiet house, holding this unexplainable object in her hand, soon leaves her feeling unsettled.
She runs her hand along the seams of the inside of the suitcase and uncovers a small film canister, black, that rattles when she shakes it. There’s another, smaller envelope underneath of that, the size someone would use for a letter. Inside there are two sheets of waxed paper, and when she peels them apart she finds a single pressed flower that might have been bright yellow once but has aged into a brownish-gold hue. There’s a scrap of paper folded in half also stuck in the envelope, and when she handles it, it feels worn to softness, like fabric. On it, a note in unfamiliar handwriting.
I love you. Forgive me.
She stares at the words until the sound of a car door slamming startles her. Her mother already back with her two brothers, Kyle thumping a basketball up the drive, Jake asking if he has time to play a video game before they eat. She takes another second to weigh the heft of the lighter in her hand before putting it back in the pocket of the bag, drawing the blanket over it again, closing the door, tiptoeing her way out of the room.
Over dinner shetries to tell herself it is nothing to worry about. The bag. This lighter. The note. So what if her mother allows herself one secret cigarette a month? So what if she occasionally lights up a spliff when everyone is asleep? But she doesn’t think that’s the story. Blair doesn’t like it, this side of her mother that she senses but can’t see. Like the dark side of the moon.
Throughout the meal Blair finds herself staring at her mother thesecond she’s not looking—when she rises to get more meatballs for the boys, or to fetch another stack of napkins because Kyle keeps getting sauce on the ends of his sleeves. And maybe because Blair has Henry, has her own secrets now, she can see it. Not the secret itself, but the halo of something untold.
“So, looks like they’re moving the construction date up for the condos,” Blair’s father says, making his voice gentle. He and Blair watch Iris. The condos are a difficult subject in their house. Iris had attended zoning meetings, written letters to the local paper on the value of protecting the woods alongside the river.
“Moving the date up?” Iris asks. “When?”
“They break ground next week. They want to be able to lease to people by the start of the school year next year. I’m sorry, sweetheart. I thought you might have heard already.”
“Oh,” Iris says, turning to look out the bay window at the end of their dining table. Blair looks at Iris’s reflection, the pale oval of her face, her mother’s features blurry and indistinct.
BLAIR
She goes over to Henry’s house on Tuesday after soccer practice. His mom is on the PTA with Iris, and the parents are getting together to decorate the gym for tomorrow’s homecoming carnival fundraiser. Blair’s brothers and dad are home, while Henry is an only child whose father is in San Francisco for work.
In Henry’s bedroom they kiss and kiss, until he asks if he can unbutton her jeans. She is nervous and excited and afraid, and she says yes. He asks if he can touch her, and she says yes to that too, and guides his hands in the way she’s learned she likes when she’s experimented, alone in her room, when everyone else has gone to bed, or sometimes in the bath, the rush of the water into the tub filling her ears, the pressure building and building in her body until there’s a catch sprung somewhere within her, then the helpless, glorious release. At first it’s strange, dreamlike, having someone else touch her in places only her own fingers have known. After a little while, he seems to understand what she likes, the pressure, the direction, and she lets her hand fall to the bed, lets her eyes close and her head fall back, lets herself feel everything until she gets hot all over, and the sensation spreads throughout her body, and she has no choice but to let go.
She rides her bike home in the chill of the autumn air, tender against the seat, little aftershocks traveling up her spine as she shifts and pedals, the feeling alternating between pleasant and nearly unbearable. There’s a smell of the first fires in the air, woody and sweet. She had felt so self-conscious saying goodbye to Henry’s mom in the driveway, her cheeks flushed and hair mussed. She had hoped toleave before Diana was back, but she and Henry couldn’t stop kissing goodbye. So there she was, in the driveway, sticky and slick between her legs, Henry’s mom telling her how she had just been with Iris, how they had filled all the balloons for the fall homecoming carnival together and how beautifully Iris had planned everything.
The day aftershe spends the afternoon with Henry, Blair is eating breakfast when Iris asks her if she wouldn’t mind driving separately to the carnival. Her dad is with her brothers at a soccer tournament two towns over. “I’ve got to go early. We need to blow up all those balloons.”
She almost calls her mother out—Diana said you did it last night—but then she realizes what she has. Iris is lying. She wouldn’t normally think much of it, but since finding those things in her mother’s closet last week she’s got a question fizzling in her mind. The note in a stranger’s writing lit up in her head like a neon sign. It feels absurd to think it, yet she can’t help it: Is Iris having an affair?
Following Iris is easy enough. They each have location sharing enabled on their phones. They did it last year when they went to Disney World as a family so they could find one another easily in the parks. Blair hardly ever thinks about it, because she knows Iris doesn’t use it. Unlike some of her friends’ parents, who track their kids’ every step home from school, Iris seems to forget that she can find Blair whenever she wants to.
Blair watches the little dot that represents her mother move down their block, turn left on Oak, then right on Elm, the way she would if she were heading to school. Blair feels both disappointed and relieved, until her mother makes a left on Lafayette Drive. If she were on the way to the high school Iris would have stayed straight for another two miles. She watches the dot progress toward the outer limits of town.
What’s out there? Blair wonders. She pulls up street view but all she can see are trees. But then she remembers. The new housing development going in. How it was a source of endless debate. Luxurycondos that meant tearing down so many trees close to the creek so the owners could have good views. All these town meetings, her mother involved in some of them. She liked to walk along the dirt paths out that way, was always saying how sad it was that they would build there. It was so peaceful. But if she were going for a walk, why not just say so?
The dot is still for a long time, her mother parked. Blair feels a bolt of panic, dials Iris’s phone, but Iris doesn’t pick up.
Blair gets in her car, still in her pajamas, and drives there. It only takes ten minutes. If her mother catches her she can make up some excuse.You didn’t answer. I was worried. The carbon monoxide detector went off.
She parks just behind Iris’s crossover and sets off on the trail she knows her mother favors. She is surprised to see how many construction vehicles line the road, at how loudly the machinery booms as they take down trees, lines of orange caution tape marking the perimeter of the site.
The path slopes downward, and Blair takes the hill, looking out for her mother’s pink sweater between the trees. She’s lost in thought until she hears a snap of a branch. She slides behind a trunk and peers downhill. Her mother is alone, carrying something. Blair squints. Iris has three big stones in her hands. She’s bringing them from the direction of the construction site, walking downstream. There’s an old stone wall that runs through the woods, remnants from the town’s Revolutionary War days, and Iris steps over the wall and disappears from Blair’s view.
When Iris steps over the wall again she’s empty-handed. She walks back in the direction she came from, returns in a few minutes with another armful of stones. A third time, Iris disappears, then comes back, this time the stones smaller, and she has to cradle them close to her body to keep from dropping any. She looks blank but determined, and Blair can’t help but wonder if she’s watching her mother have some sort of psychotic break. The small stones seem to be the last, and across the distance Blair can hear the clink of themtogether, her mother hidden but busy underneath the boughs of the tree, arranging the rocks. Then it’s quiet for a long time.
