birthday is a special day. She can’t wait for the love of her life to text her on his own birthday. Sometimes even a child has to take liberties.
A husband’s phone dings before eight A.M., while he is in the shower.
It’s an hour or so later when Maggie receives deathcall. Outside, the snowstorm is absolutely beautiful. She is looking out the window, remembering the way their love story began while she was in Colorado, when she sees his name on her phone. For the rest of her life, a ringing phone will frighten her.
Hello! Happy Birthday!
That’s it, he says in response. It’s over. She saw your text and now it’s over.
He’s in his car. His voice is cracking and he sounds scared but the message is unimpeachable. There is no changing it or going back in time. The ornaments have come down on the season. All that remains is the final and lingering frost.
Sloane
After the first time when she and her husband brought another person into the bedroom, Sloane considered what it meant that she had been willing. That beyond feeling sexually excited, she had also been charmed and experienced moments of tenderness and love, between herself and her husband, between herself and the other woman. That she felt warmth even at watching her husband with the other woman—except of course for the several moments when she felt she might die.
Was it normal to like the rest, though? She couldn’t tell too many people. Perhaps, she reasoned, the people she couldn’t tell were the repressed ones and she was the healthy person. But none of the books she read and none of the television shows and films she enjoyed reflected that lifestyle. There had to be an anomaly in her. Somewhere, sometime, she must have been wicked or suffered at the hands of something untoward. She considered her own childhood, the ways in which her parents factored.
Sloane describes her own father, Peter, simply as Andover, Princeton, Harvard. You’ll know what I mean, she says, when I say that. She doesn’t intend to boast about education or money. Her feelings about where she came from were metabolized long ago. Now they are a Chanel suit in a cold closet.
Sloane could define her mother, Dyan, in a few words, as well, but she finds it more difficult. Blond and prim, Dyan Ford is nearly ecclesiastical in her propriety. Sloane might describe how her mother greets her after not having seen her for a long time. Dyan doesn’t immediately hug her daughter. She asks about the drive or the flight and comments on the weather. She motions inside, to where there might be cucumber tea sandwiches and a pot of Earl Grey waiting on the kitchen counter.
Dyan grew up, one of four, in Memphis, Tennessee, with a father who flew his own airplane and a warm and homemaking mother. At seventeen, Dyan was driving in the car with her mother, with whom she was very close. She may have felt, the way we always seem to remember feeling in the moments before devastation, a sort of divine providence. Look at my long, tan legs. My soft blond hair. My body, which has finally been filled to all of its edges with blood and shape.
Suddenly there was a scream. There was the feeling of having been hit and the sound of squawking metal. When Dyan came to, hours later, she was in a hospital bed. She cried out for her mother. A nurse came to the room to deliver the news that her mother had died in the accident. It took Dyan several seconds, perhaps even a full minute, to visualize the interior of the car that morning, to remember it was she herself who had been in the driver’s seat.
Not too long after the funeral, shortly after the sympathy pies stopped arriving at their doorstep, her father sent her to live with friends. Dyan didn’t need to be told why. She knew he couldn’t look at her, she who had killed his wife, the mother of his three other children, for whom he was now solely responsible.
Dyan wasn’t too far from home but it felt like a different universe. New kitchen towels, bathroom soap. Unspoken rules, and no one who ever touched her forehead, even her arm, passing down a hallway. She felt the loss of her mother as a void but also as a severing, because her whole family had been taken from her, too. Implicitly, she knew she must keep away