You Could Be Home by Now (5 page)

“Please,” Seth said. “Tell me about the picture.”

“It was a picture, okay? It was old.”

“And?”

“And you've basically told me you aren't interested.”

“I am.”

She shook her head.

“I'm more interested in
you
.”

Half a smile.

“C'mon. That's a good line.”

“Maybe. But not exactly a get-out-of-jail-free card.”

“I just wanted to hear about—”

“How's this? A crazy girl in a bikini told me I should put my hair in a braid when I run.”

“And you told me about Adah's picture first?”

“I had to think if I wanted to tell you.”

“Because?”

“I'd rather talk about the picture.”

“You know your hair looks fine.”

“It's not that. Look. I ran on my lunch hour, right?” As usual. Seth could see the firm outline of her calves even when she didn't flex. Her clothing hung loose. Thank God for that seersucker patch of stretch marks beneath her navel. It hadn't been her fault; it hadn't been his; all the doctors said there'd been no way to foresee. But sometimes the thought twisted through him: a criminal, purging the scene of her crime. “There's a loop I like,” she said, “out by Daylily Crescent? Sometimes they run the sprinklers.”

“Sounds nice.” If Alison were still Alison, she'd be drafting petitions about the water waste.

“Usually. Today there were all these sirens. Police, ambulance. I guess you could say I rubbernecked. A whole bunch of people were standing around. Bikini girl was there. She walked up to me and said I shouldn't wear a ponytail.”

“Weird.”

“A pony is a horse. You don't want to look like a horse, do you? She said it like that, completely calm.”

“Strange kid.”

“I think she might have been in shock. She was the one who called the police.” With Timothy, Alison hadn't gone into shock, not for an instant. Instead the noises that had come from her throat, the fluorescent clarity of the delivery room.

“Let me guess,” he said. “Someone had a stroke.” It was an awful thing to say, but so be it.
These
were the people who were supposed to be dying.

“It was a kid.” Alison opened her menu then shut it again. “You get why I'd rather talk about Adah Chalk? They brought a kid out on the stretcher. Six years old? Five? I can't tell. A little boy.”

“Fuck. Ali.”

“Don't say anything nice to me. They were taking him to the hospital. One of the neighbors rode along.”

“A neighbor? Where were his—”

“He was alone in the house. And there I was, jogging along—”

“You couldn't have known.”

“I said, don't say anything nice to me.”

Cara arrived with their usual, unasked. Alison's 7 and 7, a cold pint for Seth. From the next booth a pair of the countless McCains debated the specials in excruciating detail. “Hey,” he said. “Tell me about the photograph.”

“She had a dark dress with a white lace collar. Kind of like a Puritan. Glasses. Little round ones. That's all. Your turn.”

“What?” Seth was zonked and they had nineteen innings ahead of them. That was more than twice a normal game.

Ali echoed him. “Tell me about your day. Something I'd never guess.”

He'd had to run five fucking birth announcements. Adair Lewis-Stamp, Molly Flemming, Zachary Bierbaum, Brandon Wilcox, Riley-Claire Stouser, and happy birthday to them. There'd been pictures, too: Adair swaddled, burrito-style, Zachary with wide unfocused eyes. “I was jealous of Nicky,” said Seth. “Just now.”

“Oh, ha.”

“He was flirting.”

“He was practicing. For all those girls this fall at Rice.”

They paged through their menus. Seth had already tried everything that sounded remotely interesting. When she brought out his sandwich, Cara had swapped rings for fries without his having to ask. The Homeplate only showed the latter half of the game. Someone had cued it to start at the top of the eighth. It made sense, logistically, but what a slap in the face. They should've done something to acknowledge those first seven innings of outs.

The next morning, Jeffrey Stouser called to complain that his granddaughter's name was spelled Riley-Clare, not Riley-Claire.

The weekly public safety report landed on Seth's desk. Police had tended to victims of a golf cart collision at the corner of Buckthorn and Ratany Streets. They were investigating the disappearance of a charm bracelet from the ladies' locker room at The Sun Wren Pool and Spa. They'd been called to the scene of a purported home invasion that turned out to be raccoons and rendered assistance to a minor resident of 16 Daylily Crescent.

Seth could have simply run the report. He almost did. But there were questions: What was the child's current condition? Where were his parents? Why had he been left helpless and unsupervised, and shouldn't Child Protective Services be involved? There were rules about children at The Commons—why was he here at all?

Seth opened a blank document.

There were questions, yes, and also: He hadn't moved them to Arizona for this. Ali, brittle at The Homeplate, then up most of the night with that photo of Adah Chalk. Ali, tossing a handful of blueberries into her morning yogurt. Their life here was meant to deliver a certain kind of mindless peace. But those berries. All Seth saw was the chart in the book they'd bought with such giddy anticipation. At eight weeks Baby is the size of a blueberry. At thirteen the size of a peach. The first time she saw it, Alison crossed her legs and said, please God let it stop before watermelon.

D
ER
F
ÜHRER
LIVED.

The hot tub had been empty. He spent two nights at the hospital and came home wearing a cast. A heavyset woman—by the power of deductive reasoning, his grandmother—accompanied him, toting an enormous stuffed rabbit. She had the posture of someone who knew she was in trouble but wasn't letting on. And she
was
in trouble. Big trouble. Because the papers—first the rinky-dink Commons one and then the
Daily Star
—all said that
Der Führer
wasn't allowed to be here. The Commons had a covenant. All residents agreed upon it. No full-time resident shall be under fifty-five years of age.

Gran spied them right away. Of course. She'd become a twenty-four-hour Rosko channel. All Lily and her heroic rescue, all the time. She'd begun introducing Lily to her friends here as—
gag
—The Angel of The Commons.

Some angel.

Lily was freaking literate. She read the news. Mona Rosko had been hiding her grandson in her home for half a year. Now that
someone
had blown their secret, the pair were facing eviction. The papers all wanted to know where the grandmother had been when the kid fell. A social worker was involved. Clearly Lily was in the running for neighbor of the year.

“We should bring them a dish,” Gran said. She had a second freezer in the garage, packed solid with foil-wrapped trays. “These days, it's easier to freeze the extra than to scale back my recipes for one. I'm not a math whiz like
some
people.” Gran winked, like a dose of cute would cancel out the fact that she was cooking for one because Grandpa was dead. Gran ran her index finger from tray to tray. “Something with pasta. Kids like noodles.” She handed Lily a stack of three. They walked over, Lily's fingers going icy at the tips. Gran rang the bell.

Nothing.

“We could leave the trays,” Lily said. “Write a little note.”

Gran rang again, leaning on the bell. As if that would make a difference.

“Let's go. Please.”

“Why, Lily, I've never known you to be shy.” Gran's words came out hyperdramatic and bizarrely accented, Deep South by way of Dublin with an inexplicable hint of Jamaican, mon.

“The kid's grandma's in trouble. I saw it in the papers. He's not supposed to be living there and—what?”

“Half my friends' grandkids don't even read the news.”

They probably did online. Grandparents were required by law to be proud of things, but really. “He's not supposed to be living there,” she said again, shifting the stack of frozen dinners. “No one would know if I hadn't called nine-one-one.”

“He'd be dead if it weren't for you. He wouldn't be living anywhere.”

“That's what my friend Sierra said.” They'd actually gotten to talk last night. The Angel of The Commons, availing herself of her techno-ban's landline loophole. Sierra'd said Gran's dead-if-not-for-you thing verbatim, which was kind of creepy. She and Gran were a Venn diagram Lily'd never expected to overlap.

“She sounds like a smart girl. Have I met her?” Gran rang the doorbell once more, then did that deliberately casual thing with her eyes that marked her as the ten thousandth person to assume that Sierra was Lily's secret girlfriend. Sierra liked it. She said it added to her mystique. Sometimes Lily wondered if instead of the Laws of Cheese they should have drafted Rules about the Limits of Using Someone Else to Further Your Own Ends, but it stood to figure that if you
knew
you were being used and didn't do anything, then you were probably getting something out of it, too.

From inside the Rosko house, curtains rustled.

“Sierra's new,” Lily answered. Which was the point. Lily was out now, and everything was different. With Sierra, she didn't have to check the rearview. “She said she'd milk this hero thing for all it's worth.”

“There's a whole world between milking and accepting a bit of credit.” Gran shook her head, and then pushed up her sleeves like what was to come would involve serious manual labor. “And this neighborhood's been good to me. This year—” Gran fussed briefly with the fall of her hair. “I'd have curled up kaput without neighbors to make sure I didn't. So here's me, basking in all this community . . .” The weird accent was back. Apparently, that was how Gran did dramatic. “While right next door someone's struggling and I never even noticed. I don't like the kind of person that makes me.”

The door opened then, though Ms. Rosko kept the chain latched. She looked a good deal thinner through the chink.

Gran's greeting was bright. “Mona.”

Ms. Rosko eyed them. She had long, curling lashes, blond to the point of near-invisibility. The waste of it was almost Columbine tragic. “Sadie.”

“And Lily, my granddaughter.”

The door closed and Lily heard Ms. Rosko fiddle with the chain. She opened it again. “Lily. Of course. You must be the one I've been meaning to thank.” There was a soft, controlled quality to her voice.

“You don't have to thank me. Really.”

“No. I do.”

Gran stood beside her, so full of pride she looked inflated.

Lily shouldn't have come here. Not after blowing this woman's secret. She should have
told
Gran what it was like. How she kissed Lindsay Clements at the back-to-school cookout. How Lindsay's mouth soured. She went heavy on the lipstick, matte when she should have used gloss, and it made the expression infinitely blatant. The red curl of her mouth, seconds before so appealing, pursed around something delicious. Not the kiss but the fact of it. Lindsay was going to tell. Everyone. So Lily told first. And then she did Lindsay one better. She told the whole Internet. Once she was an Official Lesbian, her page views soared. Everyone at Day was reading
Lipstick.
So yeah, it worked out okay for Lily.

But for Ms. Rosko? Probably not so much.

“We brought you some dinners,” Lily lifted the trays. “They're frozen.” Usually she was better at talking. In Health and Human Relations, they'd had a week-long unit on self-esteem and why it was important. They'd had to write down twenty-five things they were good at. They'd had to read their lists in front of the class. Talk about a day to lie about cramps. Lily started making things up around number seven, but by the time she got to the twenties she remembered and wrote
I give good grownup.
Everyone laughed when she read that part, which was kind of the point, but the laughing didn't make it less true.

“You brought us some dinners,” Ms. Rosko parroted, as though she were translating from a language she knew only slightly.

“Yeah. I mean, yes. We did.”

“Chicken Tetrazzini, some stuffed shells, and a veggie lasagna.” Gran pointed at each tray in turn. She sounded like a flight attendant, but at least the reggae leprechaun was in check. “I tried to pick things the little fellow would enjoy.”

“Tyson. We call him Ty.”

The papers hadn't said that. They were all about preserving
Der Führer
's anonymity, which if you thought about it was completely naïvecakes. Take his grandmother's name, add half an hour with a search engine, and you could probably figure it out.

Ms. Rosko accepted the dinners. “Come on in. Ty'll want to thank you.” She had shockingly nice cheekbones. She'd probably had a good chin too once upon a time, gone loose now with soft skin. The house smelled citrusy and was scary clean. Carpet strands stood orderly from recent vacuuming. Tasseled throw pillows punctuated the sofa at precise intervals and a blue vase erupted with tulips.

“I should have brought flowers,” said Lily. “Or maybe a teddy bear for Ty.” The nickname felt dishonest in her mouth.

“We were so glad to hear he was okay,” said Gran. “The papers all said—”

If Gran were Sierra, Lily would jut a quick elbow into her ribs. Look at the woman's face. Ms. Rosko wasn't the least bit happy about the newspapers and the things that they said. Lily interrupted. “Look, I'm sorry if I got you in trouble.”

“You saved my grandson.”

“Even so. If it puts you out any.”

Ms. Rosko laughed, a staccato, joyless caw. “Ty's in here. We were having breakfast.”