way to end Friday night.”
But Thalia was wrong. It did change everything. While Laurel was whispering with her sister, her body was already busy making Shelby.
Sex with David was a continuing revelation, even while Laurel was pregnant, even after. She’d always been body-shy, the girl who took her gym clothes to a bathroom stall while everyone else stripped off in the locker room. She didn’t want to be like Thalia, who paraded naked from shower to closet and then stood there dripping and glaring at her clothes, saying, “Who do I want to be today?” Dale had visited Laurel’s body briefly and by candlelight, like a tourist, and she had pulled up the sheet the second he rolled away.
With David, she left the lights on and kicked the covers back. Growing Shelby, she ballooned up to what felt like twice her normal size, but in their bedroom, he stayed innovative; she stayed shameless.
The sex held Laurel during that difficult first year when they had only each other and the mixed blessing of Thalia. Mother had dreamed of Laurel in a cap and gown, then a wedding dress. Laurel hadn’t given her either, and she was aloof and overly polite in her disappointment.
David’s mother and grandparents wanted him in tweedy jackets with suede elbow patches, getting paid for understanding string theory and marrying some physicist from Harvard. Instead, he’d taken some computer code, his hobby, to a company all the way down in Florida, near Laurel’s family. He’d traded grad school for Laurel and a high-end corporate job that came with a fifty-thousand-dollar signing bonus and insurance rigged to cover her “preexisting condition.”
David was working crazy hours, proving himself invaluable in the hope that the company would let him work at home, away from all the people. So Laurel was alone, learning to be a mother and the wife of a near-stranger who hardly ever spoke to her.
None of it mattered, not when she secretly felt they did sex different and better than anyone else in the world. And David listened to her. She could talk about sewing or their neighbors or her long, lovely baby days with Shelby or tell rambling stories about her childhood. He pricked up his ears and gave her the same attention that he would have given Albert Einstein, and sex was how he answered back. Sex was where Laurel knew she knew him, and talking was the way she called him to her.
Now she said his name softly, and he immediately glanced over his shoulder. His eyes were as empty as hollow glass balls, unseeing, but as she watched, they filled up with her husband.
He turned back to the monitor and depressed a button on his keyboard, saying, “Hold on. I need a couple of minutes.”
His office took up most of the basement, with only the laundry room and a small bathroom walled off behind it. David’s ancient futon was up against the wall behind his desk. Laurel sat down on it, prepared to wait, but almost immediately, he swiveled in his chair to face her.
“I thought you were sleeping,” he said, concerned.
“I was. For a minute,” Laurel said, one finger tracing the ghost of Molly’s blood on her palm. “David, I need Thalia over here.”
“Or for the house to catch fire. That’d be good.”
David’s answer had come so fast it seemed automated. Behind him, on the screen, his plane began spiraling downward. He hadn’t paused his game properly, and the green and brown earth came into view.
“I mean it,” she said.
He gaped at her and said, “Have you met Thalia?” He leaned toward Laurel, bracing his elbows on his knees, long hands dangling, oblivious as his plane hurtled down and crashed behind him. Laurel heard the faint rumble of the impact and explosion. “You can’t be serious,” he added.
“I am, though. This isn’t a regular day. This is the kind of day Thalia is good at.”
It was true. Thalia didn’t fit inside the hours set aside for lawn mowing and trips to the grocery. She chafed against their edges, pushed until she burst their seams and ruined them.
David touched the pads of his fingers to his forehead. He sat up and dropped his hand, then pressed his forehead again, as if he had something stuck up there and was pushing at it, trying to manually make it drop down and come out of his mouth. At last he said, “I don’t know how to respond to that.”
“That detective. Moreno. She barely asked us anything,