“Ma’am, no. Go back to your homes. We’re cordoning off the area, but you’re safe.”
“But my grandson—”
“It was a deer, ma’am.”
In the shadows below us, I saw a figure crouching between the bushes of the neighbor’s house. As the candy lights flashed nearby, they briefly illuminated a lock of his hair, the set of his chin. Miles. Hiding from them? Or from me?
“You should tell us more about what’s happening. This is our neighborhood,” I said huffily. “These are our children.”
“Ma’am, I know you’re all on high alert because of the child missing, but there is simply a fire in a playhouse at the end of the street—that’s all I can say.”
“Are you sure it’s a playhouse? And not a shed?”
He didn’t answer me. He just gave me the kind of look you give a naughty child and turned away. I thought I saw him shaking his head, as if I had been making a joke and wasn’t perfectly, deadly serious.
“My daughters are in that she shed down the street,” I screamed. “Twenty women are there, in the she shed!”
“It’s a playhouse,” he called over his shoulder. “An empty playhouse.”
I told Morgan to go home and to text her mother’s cell phone and make sure she was all right. She said no, she wanted to stay with me. No, I insisted. I told her I’d be back in a minute.
The lawn was wet and uneven near the street, full of pocked, sloping indents, soupy, like it wanted to be a stream and a landscaper had refused to let it happen. I stepped slowly, grateful I had on sneakers. Surely, Miles heard me coming or knew I would be, but he waited until the cars were past us. Their lights took them elsewhere, past the book club house, all the way to the end of the street.
I was about to bend the bushes, to whisper his name, when he stood up.
He held something in his arms, bigger than a baby, smaller than a person. He started to walk the opposite way, toward the neighbors’ house, as if I wasn’t there.
“Miles!” I said it sharply, necessarily, I thought.
As he turned, I saw the shape of the fawn in his arms.
I felt my breath traveling the length of my throat, down my body.
“We can’t take it home,” I said.
“I know.”
“You have to leave it here,” I said.
“But it’s not dead yet.” His voice was cold and matter-of-fact, a mile from tender.
“The vet won’t take a wild animal, Miles. It could be sick. It could make you—”
I saw the arguments not adding up in front of him. His rejection, his lack of belief in everything I was saying. He lived in a different world from mine.
“It can’t die alone.”
My breath again. What did that mean? Was he planning to kill it? Put it out of its misery? Did he expect me to, like his father would, in a heartbeat? A sturdy rock, a glancing blow. A twist of the neck like Mike did with a bird in the field? His father would not hesitate. Had he taught him these skills? At his age, some young boys in Pennsylvania killed and gutted deer without blinking an eye. Others brought home the wounded to feed and tend and refused to eat meat. Which side was he on? Why couldn’t I tell?
“Miles,” I said evenly, “you have to leave it here, for its mother. The mother will come if you leave it.”
It was the best argument I could offer. But I did not want to witness his choice. I decided to trust him, because I had to. If he was going to kill it, if there was a knife in his pocket or a garrote up his sleeve, anything that justified the chill running up my spine, I didn’t see it. Before I turned, a plume of smoke rose in the air above our heads, darkening the sky. The first smell of something burning, comforting as camp. But then the next breaths came, singeing us with threats. I coughed and told him we needed to go back now.
I didn’t wait. I left it in his hands. But he did not come back to the house.
Seven
Hannah
The fire didn’t put an end to book club. No, it just added some fuel to it. Secrecy, gossip, and something to watch from the large patio connecting the main house and so-called shed while everyone drank their champagne and sauvignon blanc. That seemed to be the prevailing attitude—that it was there for their entertainment and speculation.
“Probably torched it for the insurance money,” a woman named Anne said. Her hair was blond and thick, her sunglasses pushed into it, holding it back, like a hasty headband. She wore no makeup, had a normal number of wrinkles but was still very pretty, with large brown eyes and expansive white teeth. Naturally white, not that electric white that looked as if it might glow in the dark. If she hadn’t just accused her neighbors of being criminals, Hannah might have thought at first glance they could be friends.
“Is that a mob joke? Just because they’re Italian,” Hillary said. “Cut them a break.”
“Half Italian,” someone added. “He’s Italian, not her.”
“She’s Venezuelan.”
“Oh, she looks Italian.”
“Who cares what they are? They’re my neighbors. They’re my friends. God, you guys,” a woman named Monica said. “I hope it’s wet enough from all the rain that the fire doesn’t spread. So many leaves and branches this time of year.” Monica picked up her phone and called her caretaker, who was still at her house and assured her that all was safe.
Hannah couldn’t remember her name, the allegedly Venezuelan neighbor, which didn’t seem important at the time. She couldn’t be expected to learn who everyone was right away.
Susan was the woman hosting, a small woman with a head slightly too big for her body, like someone who’d shrunk everywhere she could. She had on a chunky sweater with suede boots and large mesh earrings, everything textured and designed to be noticed or touched. She reminded Hannah of a girl in college who told her sorority sisters she always wore cashmere or angora because it made her boyfriend want to cuddle, like a blanket. Susan made up for her size by making big sweeping gestures with her hands and face, proudly showing off her new shed, which was almost as large as Hannah’s house and had nicer appliances and several arrangements of fresh flowers that matched the cover of the book they’d read—peach and green.
Hillary had told Hannah there was no need to bring anything, and she quickly found out why—Susan had the event catered, with tuna sushi sandwiches and radishes and pea pods wrapped in spring lettuce and the smallest desserts Hannah had ever seen, truly bite-sized. Beautiful, delicious, fancier than the word shed would lead you to believe. And small. The real estate was large, but everything else, including most of the women, was small.