a great day.”
“You sure you don’t need help?” Stepping away from his bike, he put his hand on her shopping cart. Was he allowed to do that? Wasn’t that like putting your hands on someone’s pregnant belly? Against some sort of Super Stupid food shopping etiquette? “I’ll help you put your 12-pack of Diet Coke into your car. You far?”
“No, no.” No, no was to the help, not the far. He wasn’t listening, already pushing, as she walked next to him, slow. Before she found the unlock button on her key ring, a thought flashed: is he safe? What if he’s one of those … I don’t know. Didn’t she hear about them? Men who abducted girls from parking lots?
And did what with them?
Plus he wasn’t a man.
Plus she wasn’t a girl.
He looked exotic, his brown eyes slanted, his cheekbones Oriental. He looked sweet and scruffy. Who would abduct her from a parking lot? And, more important, why?
And even more important, how did she feel about being abducted?
And was that a rhetorical question?
And furthermore, how come all these thoughts, impressions, fears, anxieties, reactions, flashed in her head before her next blink, like a dream that seems to take hours but is just a couple of seconds before the alarm goes off? Why so much thinking?
And was that a rhetorical question?
She lifted the back hatch and he said with a whistle, “Awesome Escalade. All spec’ed out.” Like he knew.
It took him all of twenty seconds to load her groceries into her luxury utility vehicle. Slamming the liftgate shut, he smiled. “You okay now?”
“Of course, yes.” She was okay before, but didn’t say that. It sounded rude.
He began to walk back to his bike. “Have a good one. And stay away from hairdressers,” he added advisedly. “It’s not like you need it.”
When Larissa got home, she left her bags in the car, left her purse in the car, crashed through the house from back door to the front, limped to the full-length mirror in the entry hall and stood square in front of it.
She wore a lichen parka, gray sweats from college, a taupe torn top. She had not a shred of makeup on her face, and her pale hair was unwashed a day and unbrushed since two hours ago. Her lips were chapped from the cold, her cheeks slightly flushed and splotchy.
Whatever could he possibly mean? She stood in front of the mirror for an eternal minute until she startled herself back into life, and rushed out, Quasimodo-style, to pick up her youngest child from school.
While Michelangelo cut and pasted for school, and munched his cup of dry Cheerios, a string cheese, a cookie, a glass of milk, and a fruit cup, Larissa puttered around, looking inside her freezer, realizing belatedly that she hadn’t bought meat. Now she was searching for some ground beef she could hastily defrost for a casserole or a pie. Maybe she could leave Michelangelo with the two oldest; they should be home any minute—
And there they were. The back door slammed, the backpacks thumped to the floor, shoes flew off. They bounded into the kitchen, opened the fridge and … “There’s nothing to eat in this house,” said Emily, slamming the refrigerator door. “Mom, we gotta go. Last week we were almost late to my lesson and I don’t want to be almost late again.”
“Okay, honey,” said Larissa. “I’ll hurry with dinner, so you won’t be almost late again.”
First was cello. Then karate for Michelangelo and guitar for Asher. Mondays were busy.
“Track is starting next month,” said Asher from the back. “I’m joining.”
“Is that before or after karate? Is that before or after band?”
“It’s with, Mom.”
“Is that before or after the orthodontist at five tonight?”
“With, Mom. With.”
Ezra had called when she was out, saying he needed to talk to her, but when she called back he was out and Maggie was cryptic on the phone, saying only that he would talk to Larissa Saturday night at dinner.
When Jared got home, he took one look at her and said jokingly, “Oh, hon, don’t get all gussied up on my account.” Her plain face, her unsmiling mouth didn’t deter him from kissing her, tickling her, from heartily eating the hamburger pie she made, from taking the garbage out, and getting the poster board for Asher’s project on hooligans, from looking at the eight boxes taped and stacked against the bedroom wall and saying, “Whoa. Whoa right there. What in the world have you been doing? Is that why you didn’t answer the phone all day?”
And then it was night and everyone was asleep, everyone but Larissa, who sat in bed, with a People magazine in her lap, staring at her peacefully sleeping husband, the vampire hunter, and the carousel spinning round and round in her head was it will soon be gone and no one will ever know how much she had loved it all.
Chapter Two
The external life is all Larissa knows, most of the time. She married the man she fell in love with in college. She loved him because her friends were either hippie potheads like Che, or sesquipedalian book chewers like Ezra, but Jared had the unbeatable combination of being both, plus a baseball jock. There was something so adorably sporty and cerebral about him. He wore baseball caps and black-rimmed glasses and pitched until his arm gave out, but couldn’t live without baseball, so he got a job teaching English and coaching Little League, and then, according to Ezra, completely sold out and got an MBA, instead of the long-planned PhD in fin de siècle American Lit, but the difference between the two terminal degrees meant that Larissa and Jared weren’t broke anymore, and Ezra and Maggie were.
They bought a gray-colored sprawling colonial farmhouse on Bellevue Avenue on a raised corner lot overlooking the golf course, the kind of house that dreams are made on, the house of twelve gables and white-painted windows adorned with black shutters. Through the pathways and the nooks thirty clay pots sprouted red flowers summer and winter—pansies, impatiens, poinsettia.
Larissa and Jared owned sleek widescreen televisions and the latest stereo equipment. In the game room, they had a pool table, a ping-pong table, an ice hockey table; in the backyard, a heated pool and a Jacuzzi. Their closets were organized by two professional closet organizers (how was that for a job description), and three times a year a file organizer came over to assess their files. Jared paid the bills. He drove a Lexus SUV, she her Escalade. Their appliances were stainless steel and there was marble in their bathrooms. The floors were parquet, the countertops granite, the lights recessed and on dimmers. The sixty windows that needed to be professionally cleaned four times a year were trimmed in white wood to match the crown mouldings.
She lived a mile away from Summit’s Main Street, and five minutes drive from the upscale Mall at Short Hills, with Saks, Bloomies, Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus and Macy’s. It had valet parking, sushi and cappuccino, a glass ceiling, and every store worth shopping in.
The children, who were once little and required all her time, were now older and required slightly more. Emily had been the perfect child at eleven, playing championship volleyball and all-state cello, but now at nearly fourteen was exhibiting three of the five signs of demonic possession. The flying off the handle at absolutely