By the time she got to Tom’s, he was making waffles for the kids and, although she felt a little shy for the first few minutes she was there, Piper didn’t feel like yelling at him anymore.
It wasn’t until she lay awake in her own bed that night that she went back to the touch. Tom’s fingers brushing her neck and her body’s reaction. Did she regret it? Stupid question. How could you regret what you didn’t make happen? It would be like regretting getting rained on, she decided. Whatever she’d felt on the sofa had been completely involuntary, but what to call what she’d felt on the sofa? Oh, for shit’s sake, say it, she thought. Lust. Of course, lust. Lust like a house on fire.
She looked around at her Anjou green bedroom walls, imagined them going up in flames, and half laughed, half moaned, “Piper Truitt, you’ve lost your marbles.” But someplace in her psyche, a few levels down from the laughing, moaning, regretful, discombobulated level, she acknowledged with a shiver of wonder that the experience, from pretending to sleep to naming the feeling on the sofa, was the bravest thing she’d ever done.
Still, as she turned off her bedroom light, her last thought was that it could have been anyone who set her off. For what seemed like forever, she had been touched by men—Kyle, her hairdresser, her dentist—in entirely predictable ways. When was the last time she’d been caught off guard by a man’s hand on her skin? It wasn’t Tom, specifically. Tom? Please. It could have been anyone.
They spent the night again the following week. Then twice the next week. On the third week, they established what would become a routine: Monday, Wednesday, Friday nights. This was also the week that Piper left a toothbrush for herself in a drawer of the vanity in the first-floor bathroom, but it wasn’t until the following week, after forgetting her pajamas and sleeping in her jeans and a starchy white shirt, that Piper left a pair of sweatpants and a loose T-shirt in the downstairs linen closet, clothes that were assuredly not pajamas, that were merely pajamalike. She continued, despite Tom’s cajoling, to sleep on the sunroom sofa.
On Thursday morning of the fourth week, as Piper was leaning over to tie her sneakers, preparing for her crack of dawn departure, she heard footsteps, and said, still tying, “You’re up early.” Then she peered through her veil of hair to find two small bare feet on the floor in front of her. Piper nearly jumped out of her skin.
“Carter! Sweet pea.”
“I heard you cough,” explained Carter. He pitched himself onto her, his head whapping her squarely in the chest, his arms around her neck. At some point in the past couple of months, the child had turned into a freight train. He loosened his grip just enough to grin up at her with his tiny, square, tile white, symmetrical teeth. Ever ahead of the pack, Emma had lost her first tooth a week ago and refused to put it under her pillow. Instead, she had tucked it into the very back of her ballerina jewelry box “to keep for Mommy.”
“I knew it was you,” squealed Carter. “You sleeped over, too?”
When asked a direct question, Piper was fundamentally incapable of lying to her children. It was not that she believed in a strict adherence to the truth—she played the Santa Claus/tooth fairy/Easter bunny game like everybody else—it was that when caught in the clear blue beam of their gaze and asked, lying felt so utterly counterintuitive that she never managed to eke one out. The only time she’d come close was when Carter asked where Elizabeth went after she died, and, without hesitating, Piper had answered, “Heaven,” but because Piper was not 100 percent convinced that this wasn’t the case, her answer was not 100 percent a lie. So now, instead of answering, she began to tickle Carter’s neck, his favorite tickle spot, and said, “What are you doing up so early, early bird? Catching worms?”
“Catching Mommy!” cried Carter, which made Piper give a long, silent, ironic groan. Carter wriggled away and flopped sideways onto the sofa, burying his face in the pillow that Tom had insisted Piper use. He looked up with his nose wrinkled and exclaimed with glee, “The pillow smells like Mommy!”
The next night, surrounded by yelping, leaping children, Piper carried her toothbrush and her non-pajamas up to the guest room, where she would sleep that night and the Monday, Wednesday, and Friday nights to come, but to which she never retired until after all of them, including Tom, had gone to bed. Picturing herself and Tom climbing the stairs together and then saying good night in the hallway embarrassed her beyond measure. But sleeping in the guest room put her within earshot of the children. It made absolute sense.
In fact, what made the enterprise of spending nights at the Donahues’ possible for Piper, despite her newly discovered underground wellspring of bravery, was its sheer practicality. That and the fact that it made the children feel safe. More than safe. Happy. Although at first the happiness made Piper anxious.
“Do you think we’re interfering with some kind of natural mourning process?” she’d asked Tom during one of their nighttime conversations. Unaccustomed to admitting self-doubt, Piper felt shaky asking the question. Her voice actually shook. She cleared her throat.
“You mean, are we making their lives too stable?”
“Of course not,” she snapped. “Children’s lives can’t be too stable.” Maybe that was what she meant, though. Piper herself experienced Elizabeth’s absence as a ragged hole, a wound in the universe. Every single day, there were moments when she felt nearly crazy with missing her. It had happened just that evening, when she slid her hand into Elizabeth’s oven mitt. “I just mean that maybe we’re distracting them from what they’ve lost. I don’t want them to get slammed by it someday because they never faced it.”
“We talk about her,” said Tom, meaning Elizabeth. This was true. They talked about her a lot. Emma had taken her mother at her word when she’d told her she would always be with her. “Mommy’s watching you eat your broccoli, Peter,” she’d said the other day. “She’s proud of you.”
“They all know what they’ve lost.” Tom’s voice was quiet. “And they’ll probably get slammed by it anyway, probably over and over again.”
This is what the grief books they read said. Graduations, weddings, the births of children, death casting a shadow across every joyful event. The thought made Piper sick to her stomach.
“Anyway, Elizabeth would approve,” said Piper. She’d imagined Elizabeth cheering her on as she walked up the stairs to the guest room. Whatever the kids need, she would have told Piper, and to hell with anyone who thinks differently.
“Oh, yeah,” agreed Tom, “Elizabeth was an iconoclast from way back.” As soon as he said it, Piper realized it was true. Piper had always scorned people who defied public opinion (she had always been public opinion), while all the while her best friend had been one of those people. Maybe that’s what I love most about her, she thought now. Loved. Love.
Tom was grinning now. “Elizabeth would approve. Kyle I’m not so sure about.”
“Fuck Kyle,” said Piper, vehemently.
Tom shot out an incredulous laugh. “You say ‘fuck’?”
“Of course not,” said Piper. Then she smiled.
But if Piper was not quite the person she used to be, she also was not different enough to approve of their situation quite as unreservedly as Elizabeth would have. She never mentioned it to a soul, including Ginny, who must have had her suspicions, and she maintained her habit of getting up and out of there early, walking home in the grainy morning light to shower and change her clothes before most of the world was up. Strolling alone through the crisp air, away from Tom’s house, on the sidewalks of her neighborhood where she had every right to be, with each step, Piper felt lighter, more blameless.
One morning, she ran into Cornelia. It was a dim, chilly morning and Piper was remembering the conversation she’d had with Tom the night before. A woman at work had asked him if Peter and Emma had gone to their mother’s funeral. When he’d told her they hadn’t, she’d pursed her lips, frowned with her eyebrows, nodded, and said, “Interesting move.”
“Like we were playing fucking chess
,” spat Tom to Piper. But Piper had seen something else in Tom’s eyes, under the anger, a hauntedness she understood. They had made the decision together, along with Astrid, to honor Elizabeth’s request—her “vote” she’d called it—to keep the children home, but sometimes Piper wondered, too, if they had made a mistake. The children had been with Elizabeth almost until the very end. They had watched her die. They had lit candles and made good-bye-I-love-you cards and told stories and sung songs the evening before the funeral. They had said their good-byes. Still, Piper wondered.
Lost in these thoughts, she didn’t see Cornelia until she was almost on top of her. All in black, Cornelia was balanced on her left leg like a flamingo, pulling on her right foot in what Piper recognized as a quadriceps stretch, and when Piper gave a startled “Hey,” Cornelia yelped, “Holy Moses!” and almost fell over. The two women gaped at each other.
“Holy Moses?” said Piper, skeptically, and Cornelia laughed.
“I didn’t expect to see anyone.”
“What are you doing out at this hour?” Shit, thought Piper. Now why had she thrown that question of all questions out there for anyone to get their hands on?
“Teo’s been working like a fiend lately, and I’ve been missing him,” explained Cornelia. “So I decided we should go for a walk together, a little warm-up before his real morning run. I can use the exercise. But the man’s legs are the length of my entire body.” She smiled ruefully at Piper. “I petered out early on.” She swept one hand through the air. “Teo’s out there somewhere. Runs his wife into the ground and takes off like a jackrabbit.”
Piper noticed the way Cornelia said she missed Teo, without a trace of sheepishness or theatricality, as though it were a natural thing to tell someone. Piper tried to remember what it was like to miss Kyle, not to be impatient at his lateness, not to miss having a husband like everyone else, but to miss Kyle, specifically.
“Oh,” she said suddenly. She took a step back and eyed Cornelia. “You’re due when? August?”
“July,” said Cornelia shyly. “You could tell? Even through my jacket?” Piper recognized her tone: the honest delight under the pretend dismay.
“You’re showing, sure, but actually it was your lips. The lips are a dead giveaway.”
“Really?” squeaked Cornelia.
“Every pregnant woman has lips like Brigitte Bardot.”
Cornelia tapped ruminatively on her lips with two fingers. “Ooh la la, I think you’re right.”
Admit it, Piper said to herself, you like her.
“Congratulations,” said Piper, with a catch in her voice, and then her arms were around Cornelia, who hugged her back.
“Thanks, Piper.”
Oh, why not? Why the hell not? “Kyle moved out.”
“I know,” said Cornelia.
“Oh,” said Piper. “I guess everyone’s heard by now.”
“I didn’t hear, not the way you mean. I’m not exactly a person who hears things.” There was a tiny note of bitterness in her voice. “Unless it’s from Teo, who is oblivious to gossip. Or my friend Lake, who hears less than I do.”
“So how did you know?” asked Piper.
Cornelia lowered her eyes and rubbed the bridge of her nose in a delicate gesture of embarrassment. “Um. He told us, actually. He came over to ask Teo for a hand with some boxes of books, and he just told us.”
Piper snorted. “Kyle’s an idiot packer. I bet he put every book he owns into a washing-machine box and then expected to carry it to the car.”
“At least twenty-four hours afterward, Teo was still clutching his back and claiming to be a mere shadow of his former self,” Cornelia said, grinning, “so I’d say that’s pretty accurate.”
“Cornelia, if you want to get some exercise, forget walking at the crack of dawn. Why don’t you come with me to step class? I did it up until my thirty-ninth week both times.”
Cornelia looked doubtful. “What if I don’t know how?”
“Hello? That’s why they call it a class?” said Piper, with her hands on her hips. “It’s a cinch. Come on. I’ll pick you up tomorrow at nine.” She resisted an urge to advise Cornelia on appropriate step-class attire. The world wouldn’t end if she wore the wrong thing, would it?
After a pause, Cornelia smiled. “Why not? I mean, apart from all the obvious reasons, most of which involve my falling flat on my face.”
“You’ll be fine,” said Piper, firmly. She smiled back. “You’ll get back up.”
As Piper walked up the steps to her front door, she realized that Cornelia was the first person who had talked to her about Kyle leaving without offering Piper sympathy. Maybe she knew that sympathy was useless and patronizing and made Piper want to slap people. Something about Cornelia made you believe that she’d know a thing like that.
Then Piper realized that Cornelia hadn’t asked her what she was doing out at that hour. It was a question anyone would ask. But maybe Cornelia just wasn’t the nosy type.
Later, as Piper stood under the shower, an alternative reason came to her like a thunderclap: maybe Cornelia hadn’t asked because Cornelia already knew. Piper stood under the bitingly hot water, her pulse going haywire, but then, from out of nowhere, like a snapshot dropped in her lap, she saw Cornelia with Elizabeth, laughing at the black-and-white movie, and she understood that there was nothing to worry about. Piper, who knew better than anyone that women friends were untrustworthy, had trusted Elizabeth. And she could trust Cornelia, too. She felt it in her bones.
“Since when did you get so intuitive?” she asked herself with disgust. Even the word “intuitive” set her teeth on edge, always had. But after a moment she answered, “Since now.”
There was a step in Piper’s spot.
They had arrived early so that Piper could go over a few fundamentals with Cornelia and had found, as Piper had anticipated, an empty studio, empty except for the step that Piper would never in a thousand years have anticipated and which felt like a well-placed jab, a charley horse to the psyche.
Piper had been taking this step class for three straight years with near-perfect attendance, even during Elizabeth’s illness, far longer than any other member of the class. Everyone knew that Piper always put her step in the same place, in the front row, just left of center. No divisions in the mirror on the wall interfered with Piper’s view of herself. She was not close to a speaker. Her spot was, in every regard, perfection, and so patently hers that she no longer even bothered to get there early to claim it. If she had thought about it, Piper would have assumed that, on the few days when she’d been absent, the spot had been left open, out of respect for her.
But here was someone else’s step, stretched out like a teal-and-black leer on its two sets of risers, with someone else’s towel and water bottle placed not beside it, but, in a glaring act of insolence, on top of it.
“Is something wrong?” asked Cornelia, following Piper’s gaze. “Because we can go if something’s wrong.”
Piper turned in a way that made her hair bounce. “Oh no, lady,” she scolded, “you’re not getting out of it that easily.” She cocked her head in the direction of the step, and said, crisply, “There’s just such a thing as exercise etiquette, but sometimes newbies take a while to catch on. That’s been my spot for three years.” She gave a crisp little laugh. “And that’s three exercise-class years, which is equivalent to about thirty regular years.”
“Great,” groaned Cornelia.
The step turned out not to belong to a newbie at all, but to Margot Cleary, a not very interesting, pronouncedly pear-shaped, peripheral member of Piper’s circle whose daughter Tansy was in Carter’s class at Tallyrand and whose lip augmentation had created a very minor buzz a few months before. Now, as she wiggled her fingers and gave Piper a saccharine smile, her mouth seemed composed of two slabs of glistening organ meat. Even Cornelia noticed, pooching out her own lips and throwing a quizzical look Piper’s way.
Piper made an injection motion with her fingers, whil
e stage-whispering “Gore-Tex,” which sent Cornelia into a silent fit of laughter that warmed Piper’s heart. It was a bonding moment as old as the hills: two women sharing a laugh at the expense of another woman who richly deserved it. But this feeling didn’t quite dispel the cold dread that had been stealing over Piper since the first second she saw Margot’s step in her spot.
After class, as the room emptied of people, Piper told Cornelia, “Awesome job, superstar. Not a single face fall.” Cornelia hadn’t taken to it like a fish to water the way Piper had her first time, but she was light on her feet and tried very, very hard.
“It was fun,” said Cornelia, then she laughed and said, “theoretically.”
“Meaning?” Piper felt an itch of impatience. Cornelia and her quirky remarks.
“Meaning it was a fun activity, and I can see how, in time, I might actually have fun doing it.”
After processing this explanation, Piper was surprised to find that she knew exactly what Cornelia meant. She was about to tell her so when Piper caught a glimpse in the mirror of Margot Cleary approaching her from behind. Piper spun lightly around, a frosty smile in place, prepared to accept Margot’s apology with the appropriate stony graciousness.
Margot crossed her arms over her chest. A painfully thin woman named Erin Gustafson, another minor, far-flung light in Piper’s social firmament, skittered up to stand next to Margot. Ever since Kate had told her the rumor that Erin suffered from trichophagia, a disorder involving the compulsive eating of one’s own hair, Piper found it impossible to look at Erin except out of the corner of her eye.
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