Page 40 of Valley of the Moms
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Anna asked.
“It means that I have kids, too. You’re not afraid of these women, but maybe you should be.”
“Then you can be afraid for both of us,” Anna said. It sounded ridiculous, being afraid of Mimi Mar. Being afraid of Di! If anything, Di had been irritated with Anna, but hardly in a dangerous way. And anyway, that was a long time ago. Field hockey: a bust. Anna was in New York with an exciting life while Di was back at home, and if she had ever been jealous of the big life that Anna was living, well, she hadn’t exactly said so. She didn’t want New York, she didn’t want the Hamptons, she didn’t want to be exceptional; that’s what she always said. She only ever wanted to be comfortable. Anna never really spent much time thinking about what itwas her friend did want; she took her at her word—but sitting in Vera, she did think about it, for just a minute.
“We can get the check,” she said. “I’m ready to go.” She would pay. During their short friendship, she had already grown accustomed to the discomfort in Mary’s face when the bill came at more expensive restaurants, despite her husband’s job at Baupost in the city. She watched Mary fumble for a wallet for just a second too long before relieving the tension.
“I’ve got it,” Anna said. “Let me get it.”
On the way home, it began to snow, an unexpected spray of flurries along Route 1. By the time they reached Ipswich, the houses were already covered with a tidy first layer of snow, like frosting. The crumb layer, the bakers called it. Anna was always surprised by how moved she was by an evening snow flurry, by how stark the beauty was. You could see it a million times, that first cover of snow in darkness, and never tire of it.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Mary asked. The silence had all but consumed them, ever since dinner.
“Not really,” Anna said.
“I’m sorry,” Mary said. “I really didn’t mean . . .”
“It’s fine.”
The roads were all roads that she had driven down with Di a million times, smoking joints way back before weed was legal in Massachusetts, driving down back roads in a beat-up Volkswagen Golf in the late ’90s, speeding in the snow in winter, stopping just as the headlights hit a flicker of light in a deer’s eye, just in time to see a whole herd cross the road in the puddle-black of a winter’s night. They had driven off the road one of those nights, lost their grip in the snow, looping too fast around a turn right around here, on a night not unlike this one. With the car settled in a ditch, they called a friend on a flip phone and he hooked a tow hitch from hisJeep Wrangler onto the back of the car and flipped their car out like it was a little toy.
Back then, they had been having the time of their lives. Wild. Untethered. Unattached. No consequences. They worked as cocktail waitresses in the summer after college and tucked wads of cash into the black cloth aprons they wore around their waists and went out to the Thirsty Whale after work and played Golden Tee with the local boys and drank ice-cold Bud Lights and smoked Parliament Lights inside, because you could still do that then. They drove home with one eye open, tracking the lines of the roads with the headlights, not sober, barely surviving, living off French fries and egg sandwiches and iced coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts, keeping spare bathing suits and towels—it all smelled like mildew—in the car, even well into the fall, for drives out to Plum Island in summer. It all jumbled together: fall, spring, summer, winter. Anna had come back for one year after college, tumbled around before she got her life together again. Going nowhere. Swearing she would get it together again.
And all that time, she knew Di as well as she knew herself, could see in her friend her own reflection, knew the disappointments and the thrills. Or she thought she did. Looking at this same stretch of road all these years later, Anna was starting to wonder how much she really knew, how much she could trust about herself and about her memory, what was real and what was imagined. For all these years, she had constructed a life around the people she knew and trusted, and now she was beginning to have her doubts.
They crossed into Hamilton. The snow was beginning to accumulate. Anna slowed down, watched the trees sway in the night wind.
“It’s pretty,” she said, mostly to herself.
Mary nodded in the dark. “I’ve always loved the snow at night.”
“They’ll cancel school tomorrow, I think.”
That much was probably true. A snow day. Magical, maybe. Arespite, like when she was young, a day unspooling without plans. Pulling up to Mary’s house, Anna felt clear-headed again, reborn in a winter storm, a person full of possibility. In the morning, all of this—a white world—would be sullied with footsteps and car tracks. But now, it was still, perfect, clean. Mary opened the door, leaned in as if she was going to say something, thought better, raised her hand in a little wave. She walked back toward her house and, when Anna looked up again, she was gone in a swirl of white.
Chapter 23
You’re a witch.
But who was the real witch now?
When Di left, the house felt like a deflated balloon, a space that couldn’t quite retain its normal shape. Denny pulled on pants and a sweatshirt and wandered around the rooms upstairs, inspecting things he had never finished. Anna had wanted to replace a rug in Ben’s room. It was frayed at the edges. The dog had peed on it. It was old. Now Denny lifted his son’s bed at the edge, pulled the rug out and started to roll it toward him. He should have done this a year ago. He had waited. He had ignored it. The rug, like so much else, had just become background noise. Beneath it, the oak flooring was a slightly darker color. Hard to see the damage while it was happening.
Denny slung the rug over a shoulder and brought it downstairs, depositing it near the front door. He had left Anna’s office a mess, piles of paper everywhere. Di had been a distraction, and a purposeful one. One minute they had been sifting through thedetritus of his wife’s life, the next she had been smoothing the side of his face with a hand, then leading him upstairs, and he had not protested, had needed some kind of reassurance that he was still human, still a person with a true and beating heart.
Back in the mess that he had left behind, the moody blue room gave him new clarity. They had been talking about the notebook and then they weren’t. They had been looking through notes and then they were looking at each other. Di had known about the office and had come over unannounced, but had she come over to comfort him, or had she come over to distract him? Now Denny wasn’t sure. The notebook with Anna’s handwriting in it was gone, now in Di’s possession, but there were other books piled around the office.
Before Di showed up, Denny had been leafing through another notebook, the small black one, in someone else’s handwriting. He returned to it now. In it was a list of names, some of them familiar, others not. On the first page was Di’s name and then a name that he had heard a few times. Mary.
The book was full of to-do lists, divided by Mary, Di, and Anna. Unconquerable tasks. Questions, it seemed, asked by local community members. Notes written in red, black, blue, and purple. Maybe a code for them to follow, or maybe just a way to keep things interesting: switch pens, switch colors, make it lively. Mary’s handwriting, Denny learned, was looping and large, a happy cursive that filled the small notebook’s pages. She had designated tasks to Di and to Anna, had bullet-pointed things to remember and to address, where they were meeting, what they needed to take care of, what was next on the agenda.
All three of their names were printed on the first page. Diane Maguire. Anna Plummer. Mary Langley. A trio, in ink, and the first proof of the friendship that Denny had ever seen.
Six months after they started dating, Denny and Anna planned a trip to Vietnam. Anna had gone to the consulate in New York to get them visas, which were necessary to enter the country. She met him for dinner that night with a pink laminated piece of paper with his face on it.
“The adventure of a lifetime is set to begin,” she said. She wore a cowl-neck gray cashmere sweater and a smoky gray cocktail ring and tall black designer boots that were in desperate need of a polish, and her big eyes popped when she talked about all of her plans: the egg coffees in Hanoi and the Phong Nha caves near a farm stay she had booked and the War Museum in Saigon that a friend told her they needed to visit. They would take sleeper trains and eat Bún ch? and buy tailored clothing made from silk in H?i An.
Over dinner, they planned the whole thing out, leafing through copies of Lonely Planet and Frommer’s, highlighting restaurants and destinations of note. They had a whole month, all of his vacation time stacked together, the kind of adventure you can still take while young with no kids.
