The Woman Next Door (22 page)

“Thank you,” she said and put a soft kiss on his lips. Feeling the first tingle of true arousal that she had felt in months and having neither the time nor the know-how to deal with it, she stepped back, gave the mirror a dismayed look, and returned to the bathroom to redo her face.

***

The funeral was held in the white-steepled church in the center of town, and if anyone thought twice about the fact that the deceased had taken his own life, it didn’t show. The flowers were lavish, the photographs of Quinn plentiful. Students sat with students, though many of their parents were there. Obligated to sit with the faculty, Amanda spotted Graham only once. He was gone by the time she left the church.

She held the image of him with her during the day, and it was a comfort. Though the atmosphere in the school corridors was subdued, there was only a handful of teary-eyed students dropping into Amanda’s office. Quinn’s closest friends had forgone school entirely and returned to the Davis house after the burial. Sports practices and a lacrosse game had been canceled out of respect for Quinn.

By three, the school buses had left and the grounds were eerily quiet. What few stragglers remained sat on the ground in small
groups. Amanda sat at the bottom of the tall front stone steps for a while, and two girls did come over to talk. They didn’t say much, just seemed to want to be near an adult who might be more comfortable with death than they were.

Amanda stayed with them until they left. Returning to her office, she sat there a while. Fred Edlin dropped by to thank her, and to compliment her on how well the crisis team approach had worked. “Write it up,” he advised. “Every school system in the country ought to have something like this.”

Amanda thanked him, but the fact was that with recent school tragedies having been highly publicized, many school systems did have crisis teams. It wasn’t a new concept, and what she had done wasn’t worth documenting.

Besides, she didn’t want acclaim. She simply wanted to help the students she had been hired to help. The fact that the team had worked this time gave her a deep sense of relief. Quinn’s death was still too raw—and too personal for the counselor in Amanda—for her to feel much satisfaction.

“Good job,” Maddie crowed as soon as the principal had left.

“Thank you,” Amanda said and removed a treat from the bag under the cage. It was snatched from her hand the instant she offered it.

“Sweet treat.”

Amanda smiled sadly. “It’s so simple to please you. I think that’s the delight in having a pet. Easy to please. Uncomplicated. What you see is what you get.” She turned at the sound of footsteps in the hall.

“Heeeere’s Johnny,” said Maddie and, sure enough, Mr. Dubcek appeared at the door. He had been at the funeral wearing a baggy brown suit, and had changed back into his usual green work pants and shirt, but his face was dolorous.

“How was things today, Mrs. O’Leary?” he asked in his rusty voice.

“All right. The shock is wearing off. It’ll be a while before the reality sets in—the finality of death.” She would continue to work with the faculty to look for warning signs in those students having the most trouble coping. They were keeping a list. Everyone agreed that being proactive would be better this time.

The old man’s furrowed brow grew even more so. “Fifty years of working here, and this never happened to me. We had kids getting sick and fainting dead away on the floor. We had seizures. You know, epileptic. We had kids die in cars and one in a plane crash. We had kids kill themselves at home. But never here before. I shouldn’t’a let him stay here. I should’a sent him home.”

Amanda smiled kindly. She understood the guilt. Indeed, she did. “If Quinn was determined to kill himself, he’d have found another way. If you’d sent him home, he might have gone out into the woods and done it there. It would have been a lot longer before anyone found him.”

“But if I’d come back right after he did it, he could have been saved. The paramedics said so.”

“Believe me, I’ve been asking myself many of the same questions. If I’d gone out and dragged him in here, instead of sending him an e-mail—if I’d shared my concerns with the administration or with his coach—if I’d told his parents that he was in enough pain to hurt himself—but none of us knew that. We had no idea what he planned. It was the last thing any of us expected from a boy with so much going for him.”

The janitor pressed his mouth shut and shook his head. “Waste. A terrible waste.” He returned to the hall.

“Fuck it,” Maddie said.

“Oh yes,” Amanda replied with a sigh.

***

She stayed at school until five, mostly answering the phone and talking with parents who were worried about their own children and unsure of how to deal with them. One of Quinn’s teachers stopped by. He, too, was thinking back, looking for signs, wondering what he might have done differently.

In time, she locked up and headed home. The sight of Graham’s truck in the driveway was warming, as was what she saw when she crossed the breezeway on her way to the kitchen. There in the backyard, on a carpet of grass, against a background of hemlocks and pines, stood the wrought-iron table with its two pretty chairs. The table was set with linen mats and napkins, wineglasses, and candlesticks.

Touched, she went into the kitchen. Graham was reading the directions on a box of rice pilaf. On the counter were the steaks they were to have eaten Friday night.

“I thought we’d try again,” he said. Setting down the rice box, he opened the refrigerator, took out a bottle of wine, filled two waiting goblets, and handed her one. “It’s been a while.”

She nodded. In recent months, when she had been so frantic to conceive that she had taken to reading stories on the Internet, she had refused to take so much as a sip of anything remotely alcoholic. “For what good
that
did,” she murmured and held her glass out to his.

“To life,” he said.

Given the few days it had been, given the few
years
it had been, Amanda couldn’t have said it better. “To life.” They touched glasses. She sipped hers and let the wine linger on her taste buds while she inhaled the bouquet from the glass.

“You look better,” Graham said.

“I don’t feel so raw.”

“Any major problems after the funeral?”

Still somewhat pensive, she said, “No. Not with kids. I worry about some of these parents. They’re so bright and so opinionated. One mother stopped me at the funeral and had nothing good to say about Quinn’s parents. She insisted that no child of hers would ever self-injure. When I said that children who come from all kinds of homes do it, she denied it. I’m sure she’ll be all closed up if her daughter needs to talk about Quinn. So the girl will go to friends, who don’t have any more answers than she does.”

“But they’ll get comfort from each other, won’t they?”

“Yes. Knowing other people feel the same is a help. I like to think it’s a help when people like me are available. Not that I have answers, either. But I’m an adult. They can lean on me.”

Graham frowned. “You need a break.”

“I’ll get one next weekend. But being there for the kids helps me, too. I’m feeling just as bad as they are.”

“You need to draw lines, stay a little bit apart.”

“That’s hard, with something like this. I can’t
begin
to imagine what Quinn’s parents are feeling.”

“I can,” Graham remarked, sounding suddenly desperate. “It must be something like what I felt when you got your period last week. We lost a baby. All the hopes and dreams and plans we’d had went right down the tubes.”

Amanda would have chosen different words. The image he painted was graphic and harsh. “We’ll have other tries,” she said softly.

“You seem content to wait.”

“No. Not content. Never that.”

“Are you going to want to start again in a month?”

“Want? No.” She wanted to make a baby the usual way. “But I will.”

He held up a hand. “Hey, if this is for my sake, you shouldn’t. A baby is a lifetime commitment. If you don’t want it, let me know.”

“And then what?” she blurted without planning to, but the question had been festering in the back of her mind for days, weeks, months. She would have taken it back when his eyes went cold, but just as teenagers needed to know how death happens, she needed to know this.

“Do you
not
want kids?” he asked, seeming hurt. “Has it been for me all along?”

“I want them. I’ve told you that. But what happens if they don’t come?”

He looked confused.

She hurried on, just weary enough from the ordeal of the past few days to be reckless. “What happens if there’s never a baby? What will you feel?”

“Not having a baby isn’t an option. I can’t consider it yet.”

“I can. I do. All the time. I lie awake at night worrying. What if there’s
never
a baby? What happens to us then? Will you blame me? Will you blame yourself? What will your family think? What will they
say?
Will they push me farther away than I already am? How much
do
you want a baby? Is it a necessary part of your psyche? Tied up with masculinity? If we go through another round of artificial insemination and then move on to in vitro and still don’t conceive, what then? Will you still want me, or will you want to try with someone else?” She caught her breath and swallowed hard. “I think about these things all the time, Gray. They
haunt
me.”

He didn’t speak. She looked to his expression for a hint of his thoughts, but they were an enigma. His mouth was a flat line through his beard, though she didn’t know whether he was angry or merely troubled. His green eyes were dark and wide—startled— though she couldn’t tell whether he was feeling cornered, or simply
surprised by her questions. As for his silence, it could have meant either that he didn’t know the answers, or that he knew them and didn’t want to say.

When a sudden knock came on the frame of the screen door, both of them jumped. Amanda looked quickly back. It was Gretchen Tannenwald.

To his credit, Graham didn’t fall over himself to get to the door. He didn’t move at all. Amanda was the one to do it.

Wondering how long Gretchen had been there and what she had heard, Amanda cautiously approached the door. The closer she got, the more she could see that something was wrong.

Innate civility bade her to open the screen, but it was womanly intuition that put the concern in her voice. “Is something wrong?”

“Yes,” Gretchen said, her voice trembling. “I need Graham.”

I need Graham.

Every one of Amanda’s worst fears suddenly surfaced. In that instant, she was convinced not only that Graham was the baby’s father, but that he and Gretchen were wildly in love. That Gretchen’s eyes—
huge
blue eyes—had moved past her to Graham gave credence to it all. The woman looked desperate.

Desperate? Amanda got a grip on herself. Not desperate. Frightened.

Graham came forward. “What’s wrong?”

“I, uh, I think—I know someone broke into my house,” Gretchen said in something of a monotone, clearly upset but reining in the fear. “There’s been damage. I just got home and saw. I don’t know if that person is still there.”

A break-in. Amanda would have laughed in relief had she not been startled. Break-ins didn’t happen in Woodley and certainly not on a street like this where someone was always around.

“Theft?” Graham asked, sounding startled, too.

“Damage. To Ben’s art. M-my art. I didn’t put the alarm on. I knew that you were here, and the Langes, and Karen Cotter. I—I didn’t even lock the back door. I only went to the store to get fruit. I wasn’t gone more than thirty minutes.”

Amanda had been home herself for nearly that long. She hadn’t seen anything unusual or odd in the street when she’d driven up. But an interloper might have come through the woods.

Graham went out the door, gently easing Gretchen aside as he passed. “I’ll check.”

When Gretchen started to follow him, Amanda caught her arm. She felt a trembling there. “Let him go alone. Just in case.”

Gretchen swallowed. “Maybe he shouldn’t. He could get hurt. Maybe I should just call the police.”

But she looked too shaken to do anything, and it was Amanda’s husband who was taking the risk. Drawing Gretchen into the kitchen, Amanda made the call herself. She gave the police the information they needed, and then led Gretchen back outside. They went down the driveway and waited on the sidewalk, in clear view of Gretchen’s house, albeit safely across the circle. Graham had been gone long enough for Amanda to become concerned.

Julie Cotter was playing on her steps with a doll, while the twins, Jared and Jon, sailed around the cul-de-sac on scooters. None of the three seemed to think it unusual that Amanda was standing on her front walk with Gretchen Tannenwald. Other than a wave from Julie, the children paid them little heed.

It occurred to Amanda to send them inside. Being right there, they would be hostage material should a madman run from the house. But she decided that was an absurd thought. Besides, she was there, and Gretchen was there. That would make it five to one.

Of course, if he had a gun, the numbers wouldn’t matter.

“I’m sorry,” Gretchen said, standing close enough to Amanda to suggest that she might have had similar thoughts. “I disturbed your evening. But I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Don’t be silly,” Amanda said gently. “That’s what neighbors are for. Was anything stolen?”

“I don’t know. I saw the picture in the front hall and ran out. I probably could have called the police from there. But I only wanted to get away.”

“I’d have done the same.”

“I don’t have a car phone. Or I’d have called from the car.”

“You did the right thing,” Amanda assured her, but her worry was deepening. She had visions of Graham lying in a pool of blood, having been attacked by an assailant who had been hiding in a closet. Then again, it was possible that Graham was simply making a thorough sweep of the house. After all, he knew his way around. He had been there before. They both had, many times, at the invitation of Ben and June.