Her eyes and skin are scrubbed raw by the insomnia; her logic is untrustworthy. Fortunately there is no practice scheduled. Not good for much else, she decides to make breakfast for the others. She’ll need to tell them about Minnesota, but not today. She’ll think about it more and make the announcement when her mind is working more swiftly. Now she concentrates on the simple work in the kitchen. She brews coffee, relieved by its smell as it begins to drip. She cuts into a pineapple, slowly, rendering it into matching cubes. She slices apple, squeezing lemon over the slices so they do not brown. She washes blueberries and blackberries, cuts up a kiwi. Next she mixes pancake batter, stirring in cinnamon and walnuts to make the recipe her own.
An hour or so later she is eating the food with Ben, Petra, and Adele. Suzanne smiles at everyone, foists seconds, pushes fruit, but only Adele seems happy with the breakfast. Ben’s aloofness is at its most marked. He and Petra do not look at each other and only occasionally look at her. Petra and Adele sign a little but not much. Petra looks haggard, as she often does these days. Her eyes are shallow on her face but shadowed by dark spots where they meet her nose. Underneath are bruised circles. Her normally straight back slumps as she sits. Suzanne feels fatigue pull on her own spine so lifts her posture and pulls back her shoulders, refusing to curl into the deep tiredness she feels.
When Petra returns from taking Adele to the summer camp at her school, she suggests a long walk. Suzanne begs off to practice a little and then nap, but her friend presses. “Please.”
They cut down the 206, keeping tight to the left side of the road until they can peel off into the woods surrounding Mountain Lake. The day is hot but not so humid as it has been, and walking feels good.
Suzanne quickens her step. “Let’s make it feel like exercise,” she says. “Maybe we’ll outpace the mosquitoes.”
They find the path that circles the lake. It’s a workday for most people, and they pass almost no one. A middle-aged woman jogging, two young guys fishing the lake with simple line poles, a man running a border collie.
Suzanne waits for Petra to talk — there must be something behind her uncommon invitation — but Petra just walks on. They cross the mucky section on the lake’s far side, near where an icehouse sat until it was taken down last summer.
“This lake was put here for ice; did you know that?”
Petra shakes her head. “I should come here more. It’s nice.”
“Back when I was trying to run, I came here a lot. Petra,” Suzanne starts, thinking she should talk to Petra about her drinking, which is beginning to take an obvious toll on her physically as well as emotionally. But she is so tired herself she is afraid she will get it wrong, and she is in no position to give anyone advice about how to live their lives. Maybe Daniel can say something to Petra, can talk to her about how he stopped and how he feels.
“I was up all night,” Petra whispers.
“Me, too. Full moon?”
Petra shakes her head. “New moon, totally dark.”
The path takes them away from the lake and then back around, up a long hill. The path widens considerably, though the foliage is thick on either side and in places obscures the lake below. Suzanne feels the climb in her hamstrings, her gluteal muscles, her expanding lungs. Maybe she will start running again, when she gets back from Minnesota. It feels good to be moving, to be breathing a little hard, to be outside.
As the path narrows near its end, where it will drop them back near the 206, Petra asks, “Have you talked to Ben much lately?”
“Every day, Petra. I talk to him every day.”
“I mean really talk to him. Mr. Aloof.”
Suzanne stops and turns to face her, but Petra keeps walking, saying over her shoulder, “You need to talk to him.”
Suzanne opens her mouth to ask Petra what she’s talking about, but Petra is already across the road and walking fast toward home. Despite the day’s heat, despite her physical exertion, Suzanne’s skin goes cold and she shivers, her stomach a core of ice.
Twenty-seven
It should even the score, what Ben confesses to Suzanne. She should forgive him the second he speaks, given her more extended offense. But human emotions are not balanced equations, and there is the wild variable: Petra is her best friend. Was her best friend.
Outrage chokes her, yet there’s a cooling relief in knowing that she is not a worse person than everyone else, that what she’s done isn’t off the charts. She sits on the very edge of their bed, not wanting to ask if it happened there and not wanting to sit further back in case the answer to that unasked question is yes. She imagines Ben and Petra here while Adele slept on the other side of the house, all alone. She feels the blood pulsing through her carotid arteries so hard it feels visible, and her vision fills with small black dots, as though she is about to lose consciousness.
“It just happened,” Ben is saying. “I don’t know, really, it just happened.”
She blinks, and the visual static clears. Staring at the small squares of her knees, she thinks that this is something she can understand, that she should understand. Still she says, “You just happened to take your clothes off with my best friend?”
Ben surprises her by saying, “More or less.”
“How many times?”
“I’m not sure.” He shrugs, looking helpless, looking like he wants to run from the room. He breathes a few audible breaths, settles into himself a little. “About five, I guess.”
“Each time that memorable?” She hears the ugliness in her voice, the predictability, the easiness and wrongness of the hypocritical path she is starting down.
“They kind of blur; they’re part of one thing.”
Suzanne swallows, tries to soften her voice. “Would you tell me when the first time was? Maybe it doesn’t matter, but I would like to know.”
“About a year ago, maybe. It wasn’t any particular day or event. You were out of town, and we were drinking — we were pretty drunk — and it just happened. It wasn’t a big deal, and we promised that it was just a fluke and we wouldn’t be weird about it. The next day or so we avoided each other, and then you came home, and it actually felt like it never even happened. Like it was a movie I saw once.”
“Until it happened again.”
“Not for a long time, not until a few days before that party at Elizabeth’s, a day you went into the city for some reason. I don’t remember exactly.”
“Is that why she was drunk and belligerent at the party?”
“It was different the second time, maybe because it was the second time, and she wanted to tell you right away and beg forgiveness.” Ben rubs his forearms, which are clenched, their veins three-dimensional and blue. “I told her not to, that I didn’t want you to know, not ever.”
“When was the next time?”
His voice is faded, not so much a whisper as his full voice eroded and made rough. “Don’t do this. To yourself, don’t do it.”
Suzanne stands, leans her forehead into the door of her closet, rests her weight there even though it hurts a little. “So why tell me now if you didn’t want to tell me ever?”
“I did want to tell you the truth, but I didn’t want to hurt you. And then Charlie died and I told Petra never again and she agreed and so I decided not to tell you. I didn’t want to hurt you, and I didn’t want you to leave. I was afraid you were going to leave when you found out I lied about my dad, and I figured you’d definitely leave me if you found out I was lying about something less … less sympathetic.” He shakes his head the way he does when he steps out of the shower and gulps a large breath.