NIGHT OF THE SHOOTING STARS

Excerpt

Chapter 1

Her Happy Place

Eva

Tuesday Evening

When seventeen-year-old Kylie Rose failed to show up for dinner that Tuesday night at the lake house, Eva, her mother, didn’t panic. Not at first, anyway. Assuming Kylie Rose would show up at any minute, she drained the ears of corn and brought them out to the picnic table on the porch and told her son to go ahead and start. She herself went back to the kitchen and brought up the locator app on her phone, thinking a red dot would pulse with Kylie Rose’s location and she could at least find out where she was, without having to call or text – not wanting to distract her, should she be driving.

But there was no red dot.

Well, that didn’t mean anything except that Kylie Rose’s phone was probably dead.

Still, why wasn’t she charging it in her car? Had she forgotten her charging cord?

But Kylie Rose never forgot her charger, because the cord stayed plugged into the old blue Toyota that they’d just passed down to her for her senior year.

Kind of odd.

Don’t go down any rabbit holes, she warned herself, so she pocketed her phone and went to join twelve-year-old Ryan at the table. Their summer camp was on the eastern shore of Lake Auclair, a small lake nestled amongst the rolling hills of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. From where she sat, through a break in the shoreline cedars, she could see the weathered gray dock jutting out into the water, with its array of rickety Adirondack chairs. It had been a hot day and the lake was still, the water peachy-rose from the low sun. On their little sandy beach, a screaming-green kayak lay tilted on its side. She would go for a swim late tonight, under the stars. Maybe even skinny-dip, like she and Dan used to do.

“How’d the crayfish catching go today, bud?” she asked Ryan. Beneath the dock, little brown crustaceans lolled about in the shady water, and Ryan liked to trap them in a battered wire cylinder.

“I only got three,” he said glumly. He took a gargantuan bite out of his cheese sandwich. He probably wouldn’t touch the zucchini she’d put on his plate, or the corn, but as a mother, she couldn’t be faulted for trying to get him to eat something other than a cheese sandwich every night, could she?

“Tomorrow will be a better day,” Eva promised. “Try some zucchini, honey. It’s just like cucumber,” she said brightly, “only cooked!”

Ryan suspiciously eyed the three pale green rounds on his plate. “Zucchini is actually a fruit,” he said.

“And you like fruit!” Eva said. “Tell you what. If you eat a bite, you can have a Ding Dong for dessert.” She was stooping low here, but it was the lake house. Rules didn’t apply at the lake house.

He poked at the rounds with his fork and made a gagging sound. Was it for real, or was he just being dramatic? Eva couldn’t tell. He should eat better, she knew, but maybe lay off tonight, she told herself. Things could easily dissolve into a meltdown. You never knew, with Ryan. Sometimes something as little as encouraging him to eat some zucchini could trigger a tantrum. Don’t push the boy, Dan would say, and she would fret that Ryan lived on white bread and sugar, he was going to become diabetic, and Dan would say We’ll cross that bridge when we get there.

That was Dan for you.

“Want to stay up late with me tonight, and watch the shooting stars?” she asked.

Ryan raised his eyebrows.

“Yes,” he said, rather stiffly. But this was typical of Ryan. “With Kylie Rose too?”

“Of course! We’ll make popcorn and bundle up in blankets and watch the show,” Eva went on. “And you can tell us everything you’ve learned about shooting stars since last year.”

“Shooting stars are tiny bits of space shrapnel!” her son said eagerly. “Big ones are called bolides. Some of them make it to Earth. If I had a metal detector, I could find them.”

Eva pictured her son on the beach with a few old men in their Bermuda shorts, all of them swinging their metal detectors methodically over the sand.

“Maybe we can find you a metal detector on eBay,” she said. “Who knows what you would find in our back yard. Dad lost his father’s watch out in the woods,” she said. “If you found it, he would be so happy!”

Ryan looked immensely pleased. The three zucchini rounds remained untouched on his plate. She looked at them from his perspective. Cooked cucumber? Disgusting. She thought of mashed turnip, her alimentary nemesis, and shuddered as she heard her mother urging her to belong to the Clean Plate Club. What was she thinking? Poor guy!

“Did you get that corn from the farm stand?” called Uncle Buck from his wicker chair at the far end of the porch.

Eva turned around. Uncle Buck had to sit slanted back in his chair, to accommodate his big belly. “It is,” she told her great-uncle. “Do you want some?”

“No!” he barked. “I told you, don’t offer me food!”

Eva shrugged off the sharp retort. Uncle Buck was 90, and mostly blind, and he had arrived for his annual two-week stay by announcing that he was tired of living and planned on starving himself to death here. He thought it would be a good place for his final exit, having come to the lake house every summer since buying the place with his brother John back in the nineteen fifties. Eva didn’t think he was serious, but she humored him and said nothing when he had Ryan sneak him a bowl of chocolate ice cream late at night.

As she slathered butter on her corn, Eva heard the crunch of tires on gravel. Oh good, there’s Kylie Rose, she thought. But instead of stopping, the car continued on to the camp next door. Eva checked her watch. 6:40. She promised herself that when Kylie Rose did get home, she would calmly have a reasoned talk about driver responsibility now that they’d as good as given her the old Toyota.

She wished Dan were here.

Ryan, who’d wolfed down his first sandwich, started on his second without having touched the zucchini. “What car are you going to give me,” he said, in that flat way he had, of asking questions, “when I get my driver’s license.”

“Kylie Rose is seventeen,” said Eva, “and remember, we didn’t give her the Toyota. We’re lending it to her. As long as she stays responsible, she can drive it. If you’re responsible when you’re seventeen, maybe we’ll let you drive it.”

“Kylie Rose isn’t responsible. Not if she doesn’t come home when she’s supposed to,” said Ryan.

Uncle Buck’s chair creaked as he shifted positions. “In my day kids didn’t have their own cars,” the old man said. “We got around on our bikes. We’d bike twenty miles to watch a movie down in Plymouth, and then we’d bike twenty miles home. I could use some more water,” he said. “And I heard you talking earlier with one of your cousins. Don’t you remember the appendium?”

She didn’t really have the mental energy for another one of Uncle Buck’s stories right now. She went into the tiny camp kitchen and refilled Buck’s water bottle at the ironstone sink. Yesterday Buck hadn’t drunk very much; in the middle of the afternoon, he keeled over in his chair from what the ER doc over in St. Johnsbury later said was dehydration. On the way home from the hospital, Eva told him if he wanted to starve himself, that was fine, but he would have to hydrate in the meantime, because she couldn’t be taking him to the ER every day. (It did occur to her that she could just let him die of dehydration. Cruel, but quick. The fact that she could even have such a thought troubled her.)

Now she handed him his water bottle and squeezed his shoulder, which made him flinch; Uncle Buck wasn’t used to physical displays of affection.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” she asked gently.

“Do what?”

“Starve yourself. This is Vermont, there are easier ways.”

Buck shook his head. “You have to have a terminal illness. Believe me, I checked. I’m not terminal, I’m just old. And goddamn blind.”

He was a grump, when it came to his disability. But who could blame him? In retirement, back when he’d had his full vision, he’d taken up pottery, throwing plates and bowls on the wheel, and sometimes when it was just her and Buck alone on the porch, he shared his ideas for different glazes, for sets of bowls he wanted to make as gifts. His plans kept germinating, as his eyes failed him. It broke her heart.

“When you have a moment, then,” said Buck. “You and your cousin are worrying over nothing.”

“In a bit,” said Eva absently, watching as Ryan returned from the kitchen, this time with a jelly sandwich. He was willing to forego the Ding Dong, she saw. And she would probably let him have the crème-filled chocolate cake in the end anyway.

She looked at her watch again; it was past seven. Good lord, she thought, Kylie Rose really ought to be home at this point! And now she couldn’t stop the thoughts from cartwheeling: she imagined the Toyota wrapped around a tree, or a group of boys up from Boston with a perverted gang initiation in mind; her daughter passed out and ignored at some terrible teen party over in Littleton.

At what point should she call the police?

Dan would know.

Her phone rang; the word “spam” popped up on caller ID, but she picked up anyway, full of hope.

It was indeed spam.

“In my day, we ate what was put in front of us,” Uncle Buck remarked. “We didn’t have the money to go make a sandwich if you didn’t like the dinner. If you didn’t eat what was on your plate, you went to bed hungry.”

Eva let the comment go. She glanced down at her own plate. Despite the fact that she’d gotten the corn at the farm stand that very afternoon, it was gummy and stuck to her teeth, like cow corn. She carried her plate into the kitchen and scraped things into the garbage and checked to make sure all her phone notifications were turned on, so she wouldn’t miss a message. Then, although she knew she should go back and keep Uncle Buck and Ryan company, she went out to what they referred to as the back porch, which faced not the lake but their gravel driveway. Much of the space was taken up by an old-fashioned drink cooler, the kind that used to work with a tub full of ice water, where you would squint to read the caps of the bottles and reach down into the water and pull up a grape soda, say, or a Moxie. Her grandfather John, Buck’s brother, had bought it years ago, so people could get a cold drink without tracking sand into the cottage. It no longer worked but it was too big and bulky to move, and these days everyone used it to store extra six packs of beer and cartons of LaCroix.

Now Eva reached behind the cooler and felt for the pack of cigarettes she kept stashed away on a small ledge. She allowed herself one a day; that way she could say she wasn’t a smoker. This was her second one today. She tapped it out, and lit it, and hurriedly smoked it.

There. Better.

*

Truth be told, Eva Schlaeffer was having a difficult summer. Things started off with a bang when Dan moved out. Even though it was more or less a mutual decision, and a temporary one at that, she hadn’t gotten used to it; it was just too unnatural for their family, an empty chair at the table, a grapefruit dome languishing on a plate, and she felt like she was just plodding through the days without him.

So she was alone for the Summer of 2021 with the two kids, during Covid no less, and no Dan to distract them the way he could, no Dan to draw Kylie Rose out of one of her PMS moods with some music and goofy dancing, no Dan to get Ryan off his duff and out on a bike ride. In spite of there being one less person in the house, things felt more crowded than ever, especially with Eva herself managing her family law practice from home.

And despite heroic efforts, Kylie Rose hadn’t been able to find a job as a waitress, even though with the vaccine, people had started venturing out to eat again; you would have thought restaurants would be hiring, but not in Gilman, New Hampshire; and without a purpose Kylie Rose slept late and hung out on Tik-Tok the rest of the day, which irritated Eva. Absent a waitress job, shouldn’t her daughter be babysitting at least, or dreaming up some scheme that would look good on her college applications, like raising funds for a school in Uganda?

Finally, there were her ailments, as Dan called them. Eva didn’t consider herself superstitious, but lately she’d been wondering if the gods had it in for her. There were her chronic stomachaches, which she’d had since adolescence – deep pain that sent her to bed in a fetal position for several hours. Then back in January she started getting shooting electrical shocks in her right thumb and index finger. Based on a quick Google search, she became convinced that it was carpal tunnel syndrome – and it was, her doctor said. She’d always meant to lower her keyboard so that her wrists weren’t angled up like an eager dog, but … well, she really needed a whole new desk set-up, and where were they going to get the money for that? And not only was it painful, but she had to wear a wrist brace, which had her asking Ryan to open a jar of peanut butter or mayonnaise whenever she made lunch!

In March her migraines started kicking up. Eva didn’t experience an aura, she just had a sharp ongoing pain behind her right eyeball often triggered by bright lights, or changes in the weather – which made her feel like a loony old-timer. Her usual medicine didn’t seem to work, so her doctor prescribed oxygen, which is how Eva found herself with two bulky green tanks in the bedroom, looming as if to say You are sick, girl. You are weak. You are defective.

But the crowning blow came when she began to experience discomfort in her left heel, starting in May. She felt it in the morning when she stepped out of bed; she felt it when standing up after sitting at her desk for a few hours. She kicked out her leg and twirled her ankle, thinking it was a circulation problem, but this did nothing for the stabbing pain she eventually began to feel at all hours of the day. She bought new shoes, with plenty of cushion. She tiptoed around the house. She rolled her foot outward and walked on the edge. Nothing helped. Finally she went to the doctor – yet again.  A simple case of plantar fasciitis, he said cheerfully. Stay off your feet. Rest. Wear orthotics.

“Simple!” she exclaimed to Dan that night. “I can’t walk! I can’t hike! How is that simple?”

This was particularly egregious for her because Eva generally speed-walked three miles a day; it released all the tension that had built up during her day at work. Not only that but two years ago she’d set out to climb all 48 of the 4000-plus footers in New Hampshire. She didn’t consider herself an athlete, but she figured she could put one foot in front of another, and by now she’d bagged a total of 19, including 11 last summer. She thought her foot condition would go away, but by June, when the snow had melted and trails were beckoning, she was no better, and her hiking boots remained in the closet, unworn, unloved.

Throughout this, Dan tried to be supportive. When she lay in a dark room with an ice pack over her eyes, sucking oxygen, he cooked dinner for the kids and cleaned up the kitchen. He jerry-rigged a sliding shelf under her desk, for her keyboard. When she had one of her stomachaches, he delivered her gut-relaxing pills as she lay curled in agony on the couch. But with her plantar fasciitis, he faltered. In fact, did he actually roll his eyes?

“You’re kidding me,” Eva said.

“I totally believe you,” he said hastily.

“But?”

“But nothing.”

“Bullshit,” said Eva.

Dan walked away – never a good idea, with Eva – and Eva trailed him into the living room – sanctuary, for Dan, since Ryan was in there organizing his Magic Cards. Indeed, as soon as she noticed her son, she let the matter go, but it came out later that night, when they were both tired and crabby.

“You think I’m a hypochondriac,” she accused him.

“I do not think you’re a hypochondriac,” Dan sighed.

“My foot really hurts, you know.”

“I know!”

“So why’d you roll your eyes?”

“Eva? I’m really tired.”

“But why’d you have to do that? It wasn’t very nice,” Eva said.

Dan wrenched himself out of his sweater and tossed it on the bed. “Because I’m drained!” he exclaimed. “I love you, Eva, I really do – but if it’s not one thing with you, it’s another! Migraines! Carpal tunnel! Stomach issues! And now this … this plantar fasciitis. I’ve never heard of it. It sounds like peanuts, or Nazis.”

“You act as though it’s my fault,” Eva said.

Dan gave another sigh.  “I know it’s not your fault. But Christ, I have to pick up the slack all the time!”

“That is so not true. I carry my weight. I manage.”

“Really? Who takes over with your migraines?”

“I haven’t had one in three weeks.”

“That’s a low bar.”

Eva went into the bathroom and shut the door to put her pajamas on. She didn’t like undressing in front of Dan when they were having an argument. It made her feel too vulnerable.

“I’m sorry,” Dan said as she climbed into bed and drew the covers up.  “I’m just at the end of my rope.”

Eva felt stung. She didn’t know what to say. She imagined things from his perspective, and saw herself as a pain-in-the-ass wife. But just for a moment. She was reminded of their wedding vows, in sickness and in health, and thought Dan could show a little more grit.

She didn’t sleep particularly well that night, because she sensed that this spat, relatively minor as things go, nevertheless would add to the stack of problems that she and Dan were in the process of confronting every other Tuesday, in the spare white-on-white office of the marital therapist they had been seeing for the past seven months. Over the years, their main problems had always gotten sidelined so they could deal with more pressing issues – Ryan’s bedwetting, his lack of friends; her parents’ constant intervention; the weed they found in Kylie Rose’s room.  But in therapy, Eva could see herself raising the matter of Dan’s skepticism about her illnesses, and how it made her feel invalidated, and how actually a lot of things Dan did made her feel invalidated, like the way he always had to tap in more spice to whatever she was cooking, or the way he often second-guessed the gifts she’d bought for the kids for Christmas or their birthdays (“Kind of chintzy, don’t you think?”). Little things, but they added up.

And raise it she did, and Dan was shocked at the litany of examples she provided, and remarked that he didn’t know she was so insecure about her cooking, and the therapist said That’s not helpful, Dan, and Dan shrugged, and Eva asked out loud if he was committed to this therapy – and to their marriage in general, when he couldn’t admit he’d said something wrong in the presence of a neutral party. (Dan, for his part, wanted to focus on Eva’s sex drive, which didn’t match his, and made him feel unloved, and had she initiated things at all in the last year? Eva thought Dan should read a few more women’s magazines in doctors’ waiting rooms, and he would learn how typical this was, this imbalance, and how he shouldn’t take it so personally, and couldn’t he just go take care of himself in the shower sometimes?)

In any case, by June a definite chill had crept in, more so than in times past. They kept bugging one another – a sock here, an Amazon order there. (“How many black workout pants do you need?”)  The therapist insisted they were making progress, but they weren’t making progress, in Eva’s opinion. She felt she couldn’t mention her foot pain, felt she had to soldier through a migraine in the kitchen and get a decent dinner on the table. And she always had the feeling they were avoiding tackling some bigger issues in their marriage. Ryan didn’t seem to notice his parents’ dissent, but Kylie Rose did; she found every reason to eat dinner in five minutes and vanish for the evening.

“This isn’t good for the kids,” Eva pointed out to Dan one night, as they lingered, without direction, at the table.

“It isn’t good for us,” said Dan.

“Why can’t we just reboot, back to where we were ten years ago?”

Dan went into the kitchen and began scrubbing pots and pans.

There seemed to be no way out. It was as though their last spat had added an iron brick to their stack of problems. Your husband makes you feel like a pain in the ass? How bad was that?

Then one day, she was lamenting the situation with her friend Amy, and Amy mentioned that she’d taken her mother-in-law unit off Airbnb; it was not worth all the hassle, she said, having a constant stream of strangers coming and going. So there it was, sitting in their back yard, empty. Just a studio, with a Murphy bed and a kitchenette. If you need a break from one another, she said. If it would help.

It was the end of June; the gaudy rhododendrons had come and gone, and now roses were blooming all over town, filling the air with their loopy fragrance. Eva didn’t mention it to Dan that night; she herself thought it might be too drastic a solution. But when tempers flared the next day over who forgot to pick up milk and eggs, Eva told Dan that she thought it might help if they took a little break from one another.

“Break? As in what, you want a divorce?”

“Did I say divorce?”

“And how would we manage this break?” Dan went on. “You want me to go live in a hotel for a month? That’ll cost a pretty penny.”

She told him, then, about Amy’s unit.

Dan looked skeptical. “What do we tell the kids?”

“We tell them it’s temporary, we’re sorting some things out.”

“And what happens when you get a migraine?”

“I’ll cope, Dan,” Eva said. “It’s not like I’m in the ICU.”

“No need to polarize,” said Dan.

“I take it you want me to go live in this studio,” he said when he came home from work the next night (with duplicate milk and eggs). “Rather than you.”

“I’ve got my whole Zoom set-up here,” she pointed out. “And all my files.”

Dan hesitated. “We make it clear to the kids this isn’t a prelude to a divorce, right?” “Because it isn’t,” Eva agreed. “It’s just a break -- ”

“ – a temporary breather,” said Dan. “While we reboot.”

“Like for a month,” said Eva.

“At most,” Dan agreed. “And we continue therapy.”

And so Dan packed a duffel, and they explained it to the kids as a breather (“Whatever,” said Kylie Rose), and off he went. Immediately she felt a sense of unease. Was this a mistake? Was it, in fact, a prelude to a divorce? The next morning there were no coffee grounds dirtying the counter, no milky bowl in the sink. You would think she’d feel relief but she didn’t. She got through one day, then the next. Dan was in and out. He’d forgotten this or that. It was a delicate equilibrium, and she wondered if he felt this too, but then she thought of all the arguments they’d been having, the digs, the barbs, the impasses in therapy, and she was grateful to Amy for facilitating this break.

She realized this arrangement threw many of her summer plans out the window. No trips up the Maine coast, or down to the Cape. By July, she’d given up on the idea of any vacation other than their week at the lake house in early August. And she wanted to fall onto her knees and thank her lucky stars that their allotted time was on the books, had been for time immemorial; that come the second week in August, she and Kylie Rose and Ryan (if not Dan) would pile into the Subaru and drive the two hours north from Gilman, New Hampshire, to Auclair, Vermont, and settle into the old creaky camp amidst the cedars and forget-me-nots, with the clear lake water lapping at the shoreline all night long.

Because despite Dan having moved out this summer, she swore she was going to create some semblance of normalcy for that one week, and settle in at her happy place.

*

The Schlaeffer lake house had been in the family since the 1950s, when brothers John and Buck bought the place with an eye toward a multitude of cousins filling up the bedrooms. They imagined canoe races in the afternoon, fresh trout for dinner, spooky evening readings of Edgar Allan Poe. The house itself had been built in the 1890s, with a long, wide porch that looked out over Lake Auclair. Inside, dark beadboard paneled the walls of the first floor, and a smoke-stained rock fireplace dominated the living room, with a glassy-eyed buck gazing down from above. On the second floor there were six airy bedrooms of various sizes, all wallpapered or painted in different colors and patterns; for years Eva had slept in what was known as The Tomato Room, so-called because of the wallpaper’s scarlet pattern. The third floor consisted of an attic dormitory, always buzzing with flies and outfitted with a lineup of Army cots under the hot, bone-dry eaves that creaked and groaned with the wind.

Because it was so much bigger than most of the other camps on the lake, the 3-story Schlaeffer house was a landmark. But it was also well-known because of a Sunday evening tradition, when whoever was in residence moved two big speakers out onto the porch, and broadcast an hour of carefully selected classical music. People from all around the lake would paddle out in their canoes, and drift quietly as the music, amplified by the physics of surface water, filled the night air. The music could be heard as far away as the Auclair Inn on the other side of the lake, whose guests would enjoy the concert from chairs on the private beach.

John and Buck both had had sizeable families, and by the time those kids grew up and had families of their own – Eva and her cousins were third generation – there were something like 60 heads to count at a family reunion. In the 1990s John and Buck had the good sense to put the camp into a trust, with a designated trustee from each branch serving to make such decisions as whether or not to replace the old wood stove in the kitchen, or how to squeeze one more year out of a failing septic system, which occasionally seeped up alarmingly into the grass in their small side yard. The trustees also decided who got the camp, and when. Because of the sheer number of family members, it became necessary to parcel out time slots over the course of the summer, giving each sub-branch a week of vacation time. Eva had fought hard for the second week in August – the bugs weren’t bad, and July’s humidity had dried up. Most importantly, her birthday was the second week in August, and she always looked forward to celebrating at the lake. In the rudimentary camp kitchen, Dan would patch together a blueberry pie in lieu of a cake, and the kids always picked out something cheap and functional from Suthers, the local village store.

Her birthday was, in fact, tomorrow. She was turning 50, and her parents were coming over for the day from the Inn, where they were staying for a few days. Eva was not exactly looking forward to seeing them. They didn’t know about the separation, and she was going to have to come up with a good explanation as to why Dan wasn’t there. Also, if Kylie Rose hadn’t come home, Eva would have to deal with tamping down their worry and anxiety while inside, she herself would be freaking out. And quite apart from those issues, her father would invariably find a moment to pester her, as always, about her law practice – specifically, about why she didn’t expand so that it might be more lucrative. Eva’s clients were often low-income couples who didn’t pay their bills on time, and she had always struggled as an attorney. Fortunately they had Dan’s income from the shoe store, but even with that, it didn’t allow a lot of luxuries for their family, something that grieved her wealthy father, who thought they should be living up to higher standards at this point in their lives.

Eva told herself that her father just might let things go for the day; she shouldn’t be so pessimistic. She stubbed out her cigarette on a plate, just as a set of headlights came bouncing down the rutted road. Eva straightened up. Kylie Rose? No, this car also continued on to the next camp. She got another spam call; again she answered it, hopeful; again it was indeed junk. She lit her third cigarette, and wondered how she would face her fiftieth birthday if Kylie Rose failed to come home.

*

At seven thirty, she took two of the emergency stomach pills.

If asked, Eva would say that for the most part, she had a good relationship with her daughter. Of course, occasionally she lost her temper, like any parent, and said things she later regretted; and much of the time Kylie Rose was tight-lipped about life, which could hurt. But overall Eva thought she had a better relationship with Kylie Rose than most mothers of teenage girls. She didn’t yell at Kylie Rose to pick up her clothes, for instance. Or make her bed. Choose your battles. Instead of sitting her down and lecturing her about alcohol and drugs, Eva might take her skiing on a sunny school day, and she would ignore the awkward silence on the drive over, hoping she’d be rewarded on the ski lift, when if she was lucky Kylie Rose would open up and reveal who’d had an abortion and who’d gotten caught cheating and who was in the ER last Saturday night with alcohol poisoning; how the student council had voted in favor of providing free pads and tampons in the rest rooms and baskets of condoms at the school-wide assemblies. Then, on the way home, Kylie Rose would say thank you. Thank you! From a teenager!

Any lecture on alcohol and drugs seemed unnecessary after such a day, in Eva’s view. “We’re so lucky,” she would murmur to Dan, in bed, during better times.

“She’s a good kid,” Dan agreed.

Sometimes Eva found that it took a little more than simply waiting things out in silence for Kylie Rose to open up. Sometimes, if something was troubling her, Kylie Rose made every attempt to push her away, and then Eva would find herself in uncharted territory. This past spring, for instance, Eva had gone to the high school awards ceremony.  Because of Covid, the school hadn’t invited parents, but, knowing Kylie Rose was getting a math award, Eva snuck into the auditorium and quietly took a seat in the back, behind a student who was recording the ceremony for those parents who, ahem, obeyed directives. When Kylie Rose came out on the stage to receive the award, Eva was bursting with pride. She herself had never been very good in math and she’d witnessed her daughter breeze through a junior year of sines, cosines, and tangents.  Now she watched as her daughter took the shiny trophy, watched as she shook the hand of the principal – and then watched as Kylie Rose, leaving the stage, tripped over a loose cable. Down she went, flat on her face.

Eva closed her eyes.

That afternoon Kylie Rose came home early and went straight up to her room. Eva ached for her daughter, imagining her humiliation, but she felt stuck; should she let on that she’d seen what had happened earlier and offer a hug? Or say nothing, and let her nurse her wounds in private? Oh, she just wanted to do the right thing!

Quietly she climbed the stairs and tapped on Kylie Rose’s door. “Go away,” Kylie Rose barked. Eva hesitated, then opened the door. Kylie Rose was propped up on her bed, her computer on her lap, her face dark with anguish. In the trash basket by her desk, the golden chalice of the trophy poked up out of a mess of tissues.

“Leave, Mother,” Kylie Rose warned. (Bad sign: Kylie Rose reserved “Mother” only for the most alienated of circumstances.) But Eva sat down on the edge of the bed and placed her hand on Kylie Rose’s foot, searching for the right words. Kylie Rose drew it away.

“I was there,” Eva finally said. “I know – “

“Don’t you dare say it,” Kylie Rose said, shaking her head.

“Say what?”

“That people will forget. They won’t. It’s on film, Mother.”

It was so impossible, knowing what would help!

“Something else will come along,” she pressed. “Kids will move on. When I was in high school – “

“Stop right there.”

Eva told herself to shut up. No words of comfort were going to make Kylie Rose feel any better. But in another gamble, she scooched closer and tentatively drew her daughter towards her, and to her surprise Kylie Rose didn’t resist. As Kylie Rose wept against her shoulder, Eva smoothed her hair. “Why did you even have me?” Kylie Rose said in a muffled voice. She continued to weep and Eva said nothing, just kept stroking her daughter’s hair, which smelled of coconut. In due time she handed her a tissue. Kylie Rose blew her nose with a juicy honk. Finally she drew back, and wiped her eyes. “Will you write me a sick note for tomorrow?” she begged.

“I’ll write you a thousand sick notes,” said Eva. “Whatever it takes, honey.”

Eventually Kylie Rose returned to school, but she never spoke of the incident again, and Eva, in all her maternal wisdom, didn’t raise it. The end of the year came, nobody died during the graduation parties, and the second summer of Covid began. Not the easiest summer for any of them, and Eva had been looking forward to their week at the lake house as a week of escape; she promised herself she would get Ryan swimming in the lake this year, and let Kylie Rose take the boat across the lake to visit friends. They would fill up on vegetables from the nearby farm stand, and without work to distract her, she would finish Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel. She would manage without Dan. And if any of the cousins showed up, she would welcome them for an afternoon swim but would pointedly not invite them to stay for burgers. This was their family time, their special time, and she would make the most of every single minute.

Which she’d been managing to do, until tonight.

*

By eight o’clock, with still no word from her daughter, she finally called Dan.

“Kylie Rose is two hours late and she’s not answering her phone.  In fact I think her phone is off.”

“Where’d she go?”

“New Hampshire. To meet Grace.”

Grace was Kylie Rose’s best friend. According to Kylie Rose that morning, she and Grace were going to meet in Littleton and do some shopping.

Dan didn’t hesitate. “Call the police.”

“That’s what I wanted to ask you. Do you think it’s too soon?”

“God, no!” said Dan. “Hang up and call the police and then call me back. Wait. How about Grace, did you call her?”

“Not yet,” said Eva. “I’ll call Grace first.”

She called Grace. But Grace didn’t pick up, so she called the police over in nearby Lamprey and reported the disappearance. She gave them a description of the car, the license plate, and Kylie Rose herself. They didn’t seem overly concerned. “Not until it’s been more than twenty-four hours,” the policeman told her.

Twenty-four hours! The things that could happen in twenty-four hours! She hung up and called the police in St. Johnsbury, a bigger department, and they at least said they would make some calls.  Then she called Grace again, for maybe Grace could put her fears at rest. She’s here with me. She lost her phone. She’s on her way home now. Don’t worry, Eva. All is well.

But Grace, when she took the call, was confused.

“I worked all day today,” she said.

Eva felt the back of her neck prickle. It didn’t make sense. If Kylie Rose wasn’t meeting up with Grace, what had she been doing today? Where had she gone?

She told Grace that if Kylie Rose happened to check in with her, would she please tell Kylie Rose to call her parents, who were very, very worried?

She hung up and speed-dialed Dan.

“What’d the police say?” he asked.

“They just took down the information,” Eva said. “They’re not going to do anything yet. It’s too soon. Oh, and Grace said she was working today. Kylie Rose never met up with her.”

“Oh … kay,” said Dan, and she could imagine him drumming his fingers and searching for a benign explanation, because that’s what Dan always did in a worrisome situation. Indeed, he suggested that maybe she’d driven over to North Conway, where there were more stores, to get Eva something for her birthday.

“Then why isn’t she home by now?”

“Maybe she had car trouble?”

“And why isn’t she answering her phone?”

“It’s dead?”

“She has a car charger,” Eva pointed out.

“She ran out of gas, so she can’t charge the phone,” he suggested, and for this, Eva didn’t have a comeback. Maybe she did run out of gas on the Kancamagus Highway. In which case wouldn’t the state police eventually find her, and all would be well?

“You still there?” Dan asked.

“I’m still here,” she replied. It was now 8:45. Kylie Rose should have been home almost three hours ago, and despite this possible out-of-gas scenario, Eva still had a bad feeling. She knew that as soon as she hung up, without Dan there, her mind would ricochet off the walls with one horrible scene after another.

“Got some alcohol?” Dan said.

He was half joking, but she looked in the cupboard. Cousin Tom had left half a bottle of cheap whiskey. Quite possibly the worst thing she could drink, given her migraines. She poured herself a half-inch.

“Don’t overdo it,” said Dan. “You want to keep your wits about you in case there’s news.”

“Do you actually think you’ll sleep?”

“Ha,” said Dan.

*

The first swallow of whiskey burned her throat. The second went down a little easier, but she prudently capped the bottle and put it back on the top shelf. Then she went out and sat on the swinging loveseat that hung from the rafters of the front porch and always squeaked. Buck was snoring softy in his wicker chair, and she was grateful for that, because she didn’t particularly want to listen to what he would have done if one of his kids had failed to come home on time.

“Still not back?” Uncle Buck murmured from his chair.

“No,” said Eva.

“I hope she’s not over in New Hampshire,” said Uncle Buck. “Given all those kidnappings.”

He was referring to two girls who had gone missing at the beginning of the summer, from the Lakes Region. They had not been found, and foul play was suspected. Eva didn’t need to be reminded of them now.

“Mom,” said Ryan. He’d appeared in the doorway. “Is it time for the shooting stars?”

Eva’s heart sank. She’d forgotten. She beckoned him with her hand, and he came closer. Any other child, and she would have stood up and put her arm around them. Not Ryan.

“I’m a little preoccupied right now,” she began. “Since Kylie Rose isn’t back yet.”

“Did she get in a car accident?”

“We would have heard from the State Police if she’d been in an accident.” A bald-faced lie.  “I’m sure she’s fine. But because of this, I don’t think this is a good night for me to go hang out on the dock and look for shooting stars. Can we do it tomorrow night? Would you mind?”

“Yes,” he said. “I would mind.”

Blunt, as always.

“But I can wait,” he said. “It’s okay.”

“Do you want me to come tuck you in?”

“Mom. I’m twelve,” he reminded her, and he padded off, and she heard the floorboards creak as he climbed the stairs inside the house. She felt even more awful now. But she just couldn’t bring herself to go down and watch the sky, as though nothing were wrong.

From out on the lake came the wail of a loon. Eva closed her eyes. She wasn’t religious, didn’t believe in God or the power of prayer, yet nonetheless she formulated a litany of pleas in her mind. Please let her show up. Please let the police find her. Please let her be safe. Please, please.

At 9:42 she got up and swept the porch floor and hoped the twinge in her right eye wasn’t the start of a migraine.

At 10:10 she helped Buck settle into his bed, which they’d moved into the tiny study off the kitchen, to make things easier for him.

At 10:25 she went upstairs and tucked a blanket over Ryan, who’d fallen asleep on top of his bedcovers.

At 10:30 she congratulated herself for holding it together.

But when at 11:48 the police called to say that they’d located the Toyota, and that it actually was over in New Hampshire, in Franconia Notch, in the parking lot to the Old Bridle Path trail up Mt. Lafayette, elevation 5149 feet; and that it was empty, no Kylie Rose, no purse, just a pair of flip flops, a jacket, and the remains of a sub – then Eva had to sit down in Buck’s wicker chair and put her head between her knees, because the world had now begun to spin, and nobody’s comforting theories were going to make it stop.