The last reading she did nearly ended her marriage.
She pushed the book across the desk and pointed.
“Nate. They’re tarot cards.”
• • •
Bridget had a cat. A petite gray-and-white stray that she adopted a month after Holden died, an ill-advised decision. She named her Sunny, after the prostitute in Catcher in the Rye. It was her own simple, obtuse memorial to her husband, but also she loved irony. The cat was both gray and grumpy. So, Sunny she was, or more likely, she wasn’t. No one ever got the joke, but then again, most people didn’t get Bridget’s jokes, with the exception of Holden.
Lord, how she missed him.
It had been less than a year since his death. Two years since his diagnosis, and ten since they married. Bridget liked to imagine her life in timeline form, and sometimes, if she’d had enough to drink and it was late enough at night, she envisioned it hovering there above her head. A single line with dots, like a subway map, green up to the fall of 2012, red and bloody for that year between 2012 and 2013, and muddy-water brown thereafter with a blinking red You Are Here somewhere along the interminable brown. She couldn’t see anything past today.
There was a tiny bit of freedom in being alone. She popped a frozen dinner into the microwave, waited the requisite two minutes, and pulled it out with two fingers, dropping it onto a paper plate. She poured white zinfandel into a red Solo cup because she hated doing dishes, and took her dinner to the living room. Holden would have died, had he been alive. He liked expensive cabernet, from certain regions in France—she had no idea which ones. He was also a particular eater and had specific, bizarre notions of what could and should not be eaten together. Steak and potatoes. Pasta and pork. Chicken and rice. Only in those two combinations. In restaurants, she’d feel endlessly irritated at his requests: whole potatoes, not mashed, no garlic, extra pepper.
Now she could eat whatever she wanted. Strange how she’d welcome back in a heartbeat all the things she used to wish away. When she talked to him, which she did sometimes, not enough to be called often, she didn’t look at his picture or up to the ceiling. She talked as though he was right there next to her.
“Tomorrow I’ll cook something, H. I promise. Maybe.”
You never make promises to the dead that you don’t intend to keep. She wasn’t religious, but Mama’s voice often floated up from the swamps of Georgia just to smack her in the head.
Sunny kneaded at her leg, bucking his head under Bridget’s chin. She ran her nails down the cat’s back, scratching just above his tail. She popped the last bite of gluey mashed potatoes into her mouth, took a deep drink of wine, and reached across the sofa cushions for the journal.
It was black; many of them were. They could pick their own, a request they’d all initially groaned at. But later they’d come in with leather-bound notebooks that reflected their personalities, handing them in shyly as if a glitter-pink cover or gilded pages revealed something otherwise unknown about their souls. They were teenagers; black and angsty was their jam. The class, creative writing, held both juniors and seniors as an elective. The seniors were edging toward college, the sweet lick of freedom bittersweet on their lips, so they weren’t as moody as the juniors who were stuck in Mt. Oanoke for another eighteen months. The seniors were coming full bloom, all the things that had seemed so confining starting to take on the rosy glow of nostalgia. High school was in their rearview mirror.
She flipped the pages. Lucia’s journal was erratic, with changing handwriting, drawings, and block letters filled in with pen. She didn’t read all the entries in anyone’s diary. The exercise was more for the idea of journaling, writing down their brainy, brilliant thoughts, just to get them on paper. She didn’t care about the content, just if they were done on time. They’d ask her, did you read mine? For all their complaining, they seemed to crave the approval.
I’m not a virgin. That’s a joke, right? No one thinks that. I’m a slut. A skank. A witch. A fetish. Never a real person. Except to you. And maybe Taylor, although she’s been flaky. Cares more about Kelsey and Riana and, depending on the day, Andrew.
I couldn’t care less about any of them. I care about you, though, so there’s that.
Bridget closed the journal. She’d never heard anyone call Lucia a whore, a slut. Most of the girls steered clear of her with her sharp, red mouth and sharper tongue. She was more likely to be the one flinging names around. The boys mostly avoided her, but some hung around a bit, too. She clung to the edge of the right crowd—Andrew Evans and Josh Tempest—Taylor clicking up behind them, double step to keep up, and Lucia hanging back. Andrew always watching her, his eyes sliding around, his mouth with that sideways smirk that the girls fell all over themselves for.
A lesson from science class: in nature, the prettiest things are poisonous.
Bridget was tired. It was only seven thirty, but she was always tired. Sleep was both an escape from the everyday weight on her chest and a possible chance to see him again. Touch his soft stubbled cheek, if only in a dream. It was worth the crushing moment in the morning when she realized none of it was real. Maybe it was worth it.
The old house brayed and whistled in the wind. She’d moved in hating this house—an inheritance from Holden’s great-aunt—everything it represented, the cold, unforgiving north, the life she’d left behind. They moved, ostensibly to fix it up, sell it. Move back south. Give it one year. If you want to leave in one year, we’ll go. I promise, back to the swamps and the bogs and the heat and the y’all. We’ll go. Then she’d gotten a job as a teacher and they stayed. They met Nate and Alecia and she made the house her own and the year came and went with hardly a whisper. That was almost eight years ago.
The house sat back from the road, the original farmhouse for the land that had since been developed. Three-acre lots with three-thousand-square-foot McMansion developments on either side. Commuter families, driving to North Jersey or New York City, coming in late in the evening but with hefty paychecks. Unlike when they’d first moved in, when the town was still reeling from the closure of the paper mill. Now they had neighborhoods with kids and bikes and winding cul-de-sacs and neighborhood barbecues. Mommy nights out and golf games and Super Bowl parties and first birthdays.
There Bridget sat, high above them all. Keeping vigilant watch over a life that wasn’t hers to have.
CHAPTER 4
Alecia, Saturday, April 25, 2015
School was canceled for the rest of the week. The EPA vans came, testing air and water. The Pennsylvania Department of Health collected little black birds in Ziploc bags all over town, mostly from around the baseball diamond—437 at the field alone. People stayed inside, not in any official way—there was no curfew, no police or health official directive—but the eeriness of it all kept people peeking through their curtains rather than sitting on their front porches. The bikes lay in empty lawns, their wheels spinning in the wind.
Alecia’s phone rang like crazy. Libby Locking, whom she’d met briefly when Gabe attempted preschool and who’d stuck to her like a bur ever since, wanted to know what Nate thought killed the birds.
“Libby, how would Nate know?” Alecia asked, pushing her hair off her forehead with the back of her dry hand. She was cutting chicken, her fingertips coated slick, and she kept the phone pressed between her cheek and her shoulder as she sliced.