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“I did.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to hear what he had to say for himself. And punch him in the face, though that was his suggestion.”

“You what? You’re not making sense.”

“No. Nothing is.”

She fell silent, her hand massaging her foot idly. I could tell by the way the muscles in her neck loosened that the worst of the cramp had passed.

“Is that it?” I asked.

“No. I’ve been sitting here, trying to think of a way … trying to make you believe me. I know it’s always been hard for you that Tim and I were together. I know you’ve wondered about him, about us.”

I didn’t deny it. How could I?

“I’m not saying that I don’t understand how you feel. I’ve always known, really, and it’s something I should’ve worked harder to correct.”

“Because I was totally in left field?”

“Not totally, but not in the way you mean.”

“So you haven’t been harbouring some secret wish that he’d come back? Declare his undying love for you? Beg you to take him back?”

She smiled uncertainly. “Of course I have, or a small part of me has, anyway. Just like I bet what’s-her-name—Lily—is wishing that same thing about you sometimes, no matter how happy she is right now.”

“But the difference is, I haven’t turned up.”

“Right, but you have to let me have that, Jeff. That’s the part of girl-Claire that was hurt by the first person … it’s not real, is what I’m trying to say. It’s revenge. And revenge isn’t sweet. And it isn’t the point.”

“What is your point?”

“Do you remember why I told you I came back here? Why I wouldn’t move away with Tim?”

“Because of your dad? That promise you made him?”

“Right. I know it sounds stupid, and part of me was probably just testing Tim, but it was important to me to do what I said I was going to do. But if I’m being perfectly honest, if Tim had shown up in those first few months, I probably would have left. My dad would’ve been hurt, but Beth had already broken his heart. He would’ve gotten over it. Anyway, all this to say that he might be the reason I came home, but he’s not the reason I stayed.”

“What’s the reason, then?”

“Do you really not know?”

“I only know what you tell me.”

“I hope that’s not true, but I will say it. I’ll say it if you promise to believe that I’m telling you the truth.”

I turned away, looking into the gloom beyond the puddle of light from the reading lamp. Little balls of it reflected off the photographs on the wall leading up the stairs where our son was sleeping, oblivious to the chaos in his own house.

“All right. I promise.”

She placed her hand on my arm. “I came back for my dad, but I stayed for you, Jeff. I stayed for you.”

And because I’d promised, I believed her.

And in the end, I stayed too.

After Tim Leaves the daycare
, I receive a curt email from Connie that I know will be followed by a Chinese water torture of communication until I comply. So I let the staff know I’ll be gone for a couple of hours and walk from Playthings to the conservatory.

On my way, I wonder, as always, what it is about this woman that removes my free will. She’s had my number since the first time I met her (both figuratively and literally), and I’ve never known how to keep her from using either.

“Because you like it,” Jeff would say. “She pushes you. And it feels crappy at first, like the first round of golf after winter, but by the back nine, you’re loving it.”

He was right, of course. Somewhere along the way, I’d lost the ability to push myself, to get outside myself, inside myself. Music was the way I’d always done that in the past, and Connie pushed me hard enough to realize that it still worked after all these years. It was still something I needed in
my life to feel whole, happy, connected. It was a fundamental part of me and always had been.

And as I walk down the quiet side streets, empty and abandoned by the parents at work, the children at school, I realize that this too has been missing since all this happened. There hasn’t been any music. None coming from the radio I won’t turn on, the iPod I will not play, and the piano I have not touched. As a result, it’s too quiet up there in my head, and this has let the noise in.

So after I do a few scales and runs to warm up my fingers, and Connie puts a new piece in front of me, something modern and dissonant, I dive into the score. I play it clumsily and loudly, these off-kilter notes, until they work their way inside my brain and the volume’s turned up loud enough that there isn’t room for anything other than the music.

When I get home from the day, there’s glue in my hair and a tiredness that’s familiar, workable. Beth’s left a note that she’s gone to the gym, but Seth is there, and I make dinner for him for the first time since that Friday. Less than two weeks ago on the calendar, but we’ve been through a time machine since then. And like in the Stephen King novel I was reading shortly before all this happened, the time that’s elapsed since I stepped through the wormhole bears no relationship to real time. Two weeks, two minutes, two years. Any of these is a possibility.

I throw together a mismatch of foods left by our friends and neighbours, who I still have not thanked my mother’s voice reminds me. There’s chicken curry, a chickpea salad, and rosemary potatoes. As Seth picks at his food (the Tupperware crew really didn’t have a twelve-year-old boy in mind in their
act of kindness), he tells me that two women he didn’t even know dropped off the latest batch when he wasn’t-watching-TV after school.

“Thought you’d slip that in there, did you?”

“But I wasn’t.”

“Of course not. You’re a good kid, Seth.” He scowls.

“Did I say something wrong? Being a good kid not cool or something?”

“No one says ‘cool’ anymore, Mom. Jeez.”

“What do they say, then?”

“I don’t know? We don’t talk about it.”

“So you’re saying that kids today all get along, and there are no cliques, no geeks, no loners. It’s a real utopia over there?”

“No … I … what does utopia mean?”

“It’s like an ideal place, the perfect place.”

“I don’t think that’s right.”

“That’s what it means.”

“No, I mean that’s not what school’s like.”

I ruffle his hair. “Of course it isn’t. It never has been. But it’s not worse than usual, right? Are people—”

“Everyone’s being
fine
, Mom. Like I told you. Nicer than usual, even.”

As if to confirm this, the phone rings. Seth skips over the floor to answer it. I can hear the high tones of a teenage girl’s voice coming out of the receiver.

“Hold on a sec.” He lets the phone dangle. “Gonna take this upstairs. Can you hang up?”

“Sure.”

He bounds from the room and I pick up the phone, slammed by the déjà vu of a thousand similar instances from when I
was Seth’s age. Back before Twitter and Facebook and IMs and texts, all I had was the phone, pressed against my ear for so long after dinner every night that it took on my body temperature. If I had a fever, the receiver might’ve melted.

“I got it!” Seth bellows from upstairs.

I raise the phone to put it back in its cradle slowly. A few words tumble out, a giggle, a how are you? Seth’s voice a little deeper saying he’s all right, you know? Considering.

“Are you eavesdropping?”

I jump and put the receiver down louder than I meant to. I’m busted now, and Seth’ll probably have something to say about it, as he should.

I turn towards Beth. “A mother’s prerogative.”

Beth smiles through her red face. Her hair’s slicked back, like she’s just had a shower, and she’s wearing a loose pair of sweats. She leans in towards the counter and stretches her legs behind her.

“That did me some good. You should join me at the gym sometime.”

“And run like a rat in a cage? I don’t think so.”

“There are lots of other things you could do. Besides, they say that …”

She bends over quickly, touching her toes, like that was her plan all along.

“That exercise is good for depression?” I ask, more aggressively than I should. But the thought of it, the thought of falling back into that dark place with no joy and no light, and no light even at the end of the tunnel, makes me feel like fighting. I have to fight that, no matter what, with everything I’ve got, and then some.

“I, well …”

“I’m not depressed, okay? I’m sad. I know the difference.” She straightens up. “I only meant, if you were looking for something to do … ah, hell. Forget I said anything, all right?”

“Okay.”

She moves to the fridge and asks me about work. As she assembles some of the same food we just ate, I tell her about how crazy Mandy was being, and about Tim stopping by.

“What did he want?”

“To see the place. He didn’t stay long.”

“I see.”

“What?” I ask, though I know what. I’ve never been able to keep anything from Beth, and she knows all about that rainy day. She barely spoke to me for months after I told her; having been on the receiving end of deception, she had trouble forgiving me. I’m still not sure she has.

She brings her plate to the table and sits. She pulls the newspaper towards her, though that doesn’t mean she’s done talking. That’s my sister, always doing three things at once. “I’m surprised he’s still here.”

“I think he feels like he should be here for his folks. And this has been hard for him too.”

“Losing a brother he’d barely spoken to in twenty years?”

“That’s not fair, or accurate. They’d … they’d been in touch again these last few years.”

Beth gives me a skeptical look, but it’s true. Though I hadn’t spoken to Tim since that day until he came home last week, he had something to do with Jeff forgiving me, with him agreeing to see if we could try to get past it all.

And though I don’t know the details (because part of our tacit agreement for trying to put it behind us was that the only relationship Tim had with our family was on Jeff’s terms), I know
they’ve been communicating off and on over the last couple of years. That Tim had reached out, and Jeff had responded. Gifts arrived sporadically for Seth. Always age appropriate and something Seth had been hankering for. And Jeff’s casual references to Tim in conversation, every once in a while, were an acknowledgment that his forgiveness was real, and remained.

“Holy shit!” Beth says.

“What?”

“Have you seen this?” She hands me the paper, her finger stabbing at a small article whose headline reads:
Driver in Accident That Killed Local Hospitalized
.

“Oh. Yes. Um, what’s his name, Marc Duggard, told me that when he came to give me … Jeff’s effects.”

My eyes track to where the bag’s still sitting on the kitchen counter, half hidden by unanswered mail. A growing pile of things I cannot face yet.

“And you didn’t mention it to me because …?”

“I haven’t thought about it that much.”

“Seriously?”

“What’s the point?”

“If it were me? I’d be insisting they press charges.”

“I’ve never been you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. As Seth would say, jeez.”

She smiles, but she doesn’t let it go. “Okay, but still. Aren’t you bothered by this?”

“Of course I am. I … can you imagine? What it must be like for her? I mean, she killed someone. I’d be on suicide watch too.”

“I don’t give a shit about her, and you shouldn’t either.”

“It was an accident, Beth. It could’ve happened to anyone.”

“But it didn’t happen to anyone. It happened to you.”

“It happened to Jeff, actually.”

She stands. “That’s my cue to leave.”

“Why?”

“I have some work to do, but mostly because I don’t feel like fighting right now.”

“I’m not trying to fight.”

“That’s why I’m leaving.” She gives me a quick hug, and then I’m left alone in the kitchen. I try to keep busy with little tasks but find myself pulled towards the pile of mail and the bag sitting behind it. I lift it in my hand. Jeff’s wedding band clicks against his cell phone, his watch, the only things he had on him. Where are his keys, I wonder. Did he lose them? Is that why he was walking home?

I reach for what I think will cause me the least amount of harm, his cell phone. The ring and the watch are things I gave him, things that are connected with me, with us. His cell phone is all him. Our house has been so silent since he left, and silly as it might sound, this broken cell phone is part of the reason. There are no longer any dings or buzzes or swooshes of texts being sent and received. He spent so much time on his phone that sometimes I felt like he was lost in there. And the mystic part of me wonders if he still is, if that’s where he’s really gone.

I sit at the table, holding the smashed device in my hand. I plug it into the charger and press the power button, not expecting anything to happen, but after a few moments it starts to whir. The screen flashes and then goes dark, flashes again. It feels warm, as if it’s been placed in a microwave, and it’s emitting some kind of current that makes my teeth hurt. Then it vibrates and the screen comes briefly to life. A message pops
up. It’s a notification of a text message from Patricia Underhill. I tap the notice with my finger, but the text doesn’t open.

I lean forward, confused, trying to make out what I’m seeing, when the phone vibrates again and a black line begins crawling across the screen, eating up the pixels in its wake like Pac-Man. It eats and eats until the phone goes dark and cool.

It all happens so quickly that when I’m staring at the black screen, moments later, I can’t help wonder if I’ve imagined the whole thing.

He caught me at the right moment
.

That’s what I always remember thinking of Jeff in the days after we started speaking, emailing, spending time together in the ways that we could. When I was trying to figure out what I was doing. What it was about him, about me, that was pulling us together and holding us in place. Why I let him in.

He caught me at the right moment. That much was clear.

But what I still wasn’t sure of a year later was what made the moment right in the first place?

The MRI shows what Dr. Coast expected it to, a normal, functioning brain with no mistakes in it. When we get the results on Monday, I can tell that Brian’s both relieved and unsatisfied, but I’m only relieved. When he says she’s going to be fine, my heart feels like a too-full balloon that’s been popped. All my anxiety rushes from me in a few, brief seconds, and I
collapse in on myself, a shrunken parody of what I once was. But then I take a deep breath, and I look through the glass of Dr. Coast’s office at my bored daughter slumped in a plastic waiting-room chair, who is going to be okay, she is, and my heart starts to expand again, taking a shape that can withstand being batted about.

There isn’t always an explanation for everything, I say to a still unconvinced Brian, parroting back what he’s told me plenty of times about his own patients. He nods and agrees, but he’ll be spending nights up late surfing the Internet, researching her symptoms. When I’d punched them into WebMD myself, it turned up too many possibilities to count, but the first one was something called “vasovagal syncope,” a fancy way of saying that it’s the body’s way of reacting to emotional or physical stress. Dr. Coast’s explanation, which I hoped he’d gotten from somewhere other than WebMD.

When we tell her we’re all done, Zoey seems happy to be done with the tests and anxious to put it behind her. She wants to go back to school today, even though the day’s already half over.

“Let’s wait till tomorrow, all right?”

“But I have to, Mom.”

“I’m sure the teachers will let you make up whatever work you’ve missed.”

She chews on the end of her hair.

“What is it, Zo? What can’t wait till tomorrow?”

“The longer I stay away, the bigger deal it’s going to be when I get back. Like, ooh, Zoey was all hiding because of that video. Check out the Freak Fainting Girl.”

Goddamn that little shit who posted the video. He should
count himself lucky that Brian’s been too distracted to carry through on his promise to track him down and teach him a lesson.

“But won’t it bring
more
attention if you show up in the middle of the day? Why not start fresh tomorrow in homeroom, like it’s any other day?”

“It doesn’t work like that. There’s no reset button. Unless some kid decides to shoot up the school, or something …”

“Zoey!”

“I’m just saying.”

“Okay, but it’s already lunchtime. You need to shower and eat, and by the time you do all that the day really will be almost over. Let’s relax this afternoon, take it easy. One more day isn’t going to make a difference.”

“Don’t you have to go to work?” she asks hopefully.

“One more day isn’t going to make a difference there, either.”

And if I have my own reasons for avoiding the office, that’s my problem, not hers.

She shrugs, giving in, and clomps up the stairs. I call after her that I’ll make us some lunch, maybe with that bacon we were supposed to eat the other day, but she doesn’t answer.

Brian emerges from his study, telling me he’s had a call from one of his patients, he’s needed, do I mind if he goes? He looks guilty for asking, but I reassure him. Everything’s all right here. I’d like a bit of time alone with Zoey, anyway.

He gets his medical bag and kisses me goodbye, and I go to the kitchen to assemble lunch things. I stop in front of the fridge. My flight itinerary’s tacked to it, held fast by a Cabo San Lucas magnet, right where I left it.

Springfield to Springfield and back again.

Oh, Jeff.

I hear a
thump
from upstairs, and then another and another.

“Zoey? Zo?”

Now there’s a crash, and more thumps. Something being pulled over, something being thrown. I take the stairs two at a time and find Zoey in her room on the floor surrounded by a tipped-over bookshelf, binders and notebooks, all full of her writing. Zoey’s room has always been a reflection of her pinwheel mind, but never like this.

“Zoey?”

She looks up at me like she doesn’t know how she came to be in the middle of this hurricane. Her face is wet with tears.

“Are you all right? What is it? Why did you …?” My eyes dart around the room and come to rest on her flickering laptop. A video’s playing, the video of Zoey stepping up to the mike, turning pale, falling to the floor, and then up again as it happens all over again. And now I understand. Although Ethan told her about the video, we’ve kept her from watching it, which was easy to do these last couple of days. I should’ve known she’d make a beeline for it the moment she was alone.

I manoeuvre around her things till I get to the laptop and shut the lid. “You shouldn’t watch that.”

“Ha! Too late.”

I sit down on the edge of her bed, still unmade from the day she left for the competition.

“It’ll blow over, Zo—”

“I want to throw this stuff away.”

“No, Zoey. No.”

“Yes. I don’t need it anymore. I’m not going—”

“Honey, please. You don’t have to do the competitions
anymore if you don’t want to, but trust me. You don’t want to throw this stuff away. It’s a part of you. And you’ll regret it if it’s gone.”

She pulls her knees up to her chest. She looks so thin.

“Have you not been eating, Zo? Is that what this all is?”

“No, it’s not, I promise.”

“Because it’s normal, you know. Lots of young girls—”

“
Mmooomm
, I’m not some stupid ana girl, okay? That’s so dumb.”

“Then what?”

She looks down at the floor. One of her earliest notebooks is open in front of her, from when she was maybe six or seven. Her green period, we called it, because so many of her poems were about grass and trees and
the soil they suck up through their roots
.

“You’re going to think it’s stupid.”

“I could never think that.”

She hesitates, a few tears still falling, wetting the slightly yellowed pages.

“It was the people.”

“The people in the audience?”

“In the cameras. All those faces I couldn’t see …” She shudders.

“Will you tell me?”

“If you mess up where you can see the people, you can make it all right again, because of that connection? Like, when I’m up there, in the lights, on stage, I can feel the people in the room. Especially when I’m speaking. There’s this, I dunno,
link
, between me and them, and I can make them feel things. What I want them to feel. Like magic.”

“Is that why you love it?”

She nods.

“What was different this time?”

“I don’t know, but I could tell, when I saw the cameras on either side of the stage with their red lights blinking, that something was wrong. And I was right. In the earlier round, the semis, it was awful.”

“But Dad said you did well. You scored the highest score.”

“Maybe, but it didn’t feel good. It felt like … you know how when you go into a room that you’ve lived in and everything’s packed away and it’s all echoey?”

I thought about it. “Like at Grandpa’s house, you mean?”

When my father died a few years ago, we’d all gone to the house I grew up in to pack everything away. As we were leaving, Zoey’s hand slipped from mine and she ran from room to room, shouting her name at herself as it bounced off the empty walls. When we got in the car to drive home, she was quiet. Sad. Grandpa was really gone, she said when we pressed her. The house had told her.

“Yeah, like that. Only, it felt like that in my heart. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. And when it was my turn in the finals, I looked into the camera and it was so black in there, I couldn’t see anything but me. A tiny little me. And that’s the last thing I remember.”

“So it was a kind of stage fright?”

“I guess.”

“But, if that’s what caused it, then what happened when you were on the phone with Ethan?” She flushes. “Don’t be mad, okay?”

“I won’t.”

“I kind of … freaked out when he told me the video was online, and I tripped on the sideboard and hit my head. I
was so embarrassed, but when I was lying there on the floor and you and Dad thought I’d fainted again, I thought … I thought that if I
had
fainted again, when the cameras weren’t there, then I could say it was some medical thing, like low blood sugar or something, and Ethan and everyone wouldn’t have to know the truth. No one would know it was because I was scared.”

This truth pulls me from the bed to the floor, the precious notebooks be damned. I take her into my arms, holding her close, holding her up.

“Thank you for telling me, sweetheart. That couldn’t have been easy.”

“You won’t tell Dad?”

“Oh, honey, he’s been so worried. He’ll be relieved. Not mad.”

“You’re not mad?”

“Of course not.”

“How come? I caused so much trouble.”

“Come with me and I’ll show you.”

An hour later, Zoey and I are standing between the peeling white pickets of our local driving range. A basket of chipped and dirty range balls sit in a wire basket waiting for us to hit them. The course is mostly deserted (it opened only a few days ago) and the grass is barely green. Giant oak trees line the range. A few birds twitter and screech from their still bare branches.
Where is everyone?
maybe they’re asking.
Did I get to the party too early?

Zoey’s holding one of my old clubs in her hand clumsily, like she doesn’t quite know what to do with it. I offered to
teach her a few times before, but she never showed any interest, and even today I had to insist.

I set a ball on a tee, narrating my actions for Zoey. Hold the club like this, swing back slowly, arc down through the ball like you’re scooping something off the ground, follow through, follow through, turn your hips, let your wrists snap so the club is over your shoulder.

The club feels heavy and raw in my hands. They haven’t healed properly from the other day, but I make good contact anyway, and the ball arcs away and up and lands within feet of the flag a hundred and fifty yards away.

I breathe in the scent of new grass and warming air and feel a piece of satisfaction, deep inside. I try not to think about the last time I was on a golf course. Or the time before that, either.

“That’s awesome, Mom. You’re good,” Zoey says when I’ve repeated the exercise a few times with the same result.

“Thanks. Now you try it.”

She looks skeptical but turns gamely towards her own ball, perched on its tee. She brings the club back too quickly and stabs at the ball. She’s not looking where she should, and I know what will happen a second before it does.
Thunk
. Her club shutters into the ground behind the ball and stops. The ball teeters, then falls over in defeat.

“I missed.”

“That’s okay. Happens all the time. Let’s try again.”

I spend the next twenty minutes breaking her stroke down. The backswing. The follow through. Showing her how to keep her eyes on the ball. On the thirtieth try she makes pretty good contact, though her shot slices badly and lands in the tall, dead grass left over from last year.

“Nice one, Zo.”

“It didn’t even go near the flag,” she says, feigning disappointment, though I can tell she’s pleased to have made contact at all.

“No, you’re doing really well. It usually takes much longer than that to make good contact.”

“How long did it take you?”

I hesitate but decide to tell her the truth. “I don’t remember, really, but your grandpa said I got it on my first try.”

“Wow.”

“He thought so.”

“You were like … a child prodigy, right? Dad told me.”

“He did?”

“Sure. He said that’s where I get it from. What I do. Not just the writing, but the timing of it.”

“When’d he tell you that?”

“Dunno. More than once. He doesn’t understand why you gave it up, though.”

“Mmm. You want to know a secret?”

“Okay.”

I turn back to my tee and flick a ball into place. “I’ve never really told anyone this, but I quit because I was scared.”

“You were?”

“Yup.”

“What were you scared of?”

I swing at the ball. It hits the sweet spot on the face and curves away, landing next to the first ball I hit. Like it always does. Like it was nothing.

“Same thing you were.”

“People watching you?”

I nod. “Invisible people. You’ve seen golf on TV, right?” “Were you on TV?”

“A couple of times. In college.” Another ball teed. Another shot at the flag. “I was there on a scholarship, a sports scholarship, and I was … good.”

“Like, how good?”

“Good enough to get to Nationals. Good enough for people to be talking about doing it for a living.”

“Cool.”

“Sure, for a while. Then my first big tournament was televised. And I totally blew up. Not cool.”

“You were probably nervous.”

“That’s what I told myself. And the next tournament I played in was a normal one, no TV, only a few spectators, and everything was fine, and I won. But then I had to go to Nationals.”

“TV again?”

“Yup.”

“Did you pass out?”

I lift my head and smile at her. “No, honey, but I played awfully. I couldn’t hit anything.” I point to the divots surrounding her tee. “It hurt when you hit the ground before, right?”

“Kind of.”

“My arms were aching by the end of the day. I almost quit.”

“But it was only twice. Maybe you could’ve gotten over it.”

“That’s what I thought, but it was the same thing every time. In practice, even in small tournaments, I was fine. I won. Everyone would talk about how I was the next big thing. But when it came time to perform for real, when anybody was looking, I tanked.”