“We just don’t know all the facts yet,” the lawyer says.
“But I think it’s fairly open-and-shut, isn’t it?” the anchor asks. “They have a witness, the sister. They have a motive.”
“We just don’t know all the facts yet,” the lawyer says again.
Carol changes the channel. She doesn’t like to watch that kind of filth. It pollutes the mind. She runs to clear her head and think of new book ideas. But then again, the cellist’s story is an intriguing one, full of interesting contradictions. In his picture he looks like such a mild-mannered man. They say he worked in a stationery store, of all places. He was capable of producing such beautiful music, and yet he committed this horrible crime. Carol has never explicitly written about murder. She’s never inhabited a killer’s head (a type of head she has always assumed to be very different from her own). Already she is constructing a plot, an intricate one, with so many characters and story lines that she’ll hardly have to focus on the murder at all. She’ll be able to write all the way around it without touching the dark sticky thing itself.
The treadmill makes a disconcerting whipping noise, the belt kicks sideways, and it spits Carol off the back end. She rolls into a stationary bike, and its gray plastic pedal nicks her neck. She is the 342nd person injured by this type of treadmill. It leaves a small, light scar.
Later that year she joins the class-action lawsuit against the manufacturer, which coincides with the cellist’s trial. In spite of herself, Carol finds herself tuning in for the highlights every evening. They say the cellist is guilty; the cellist is not guilty; the cellist lost his mind; the cellist was depressed; the cellist was lonely; the cellist was a good man in a bad situation; the cellist was a bad man who had always acted like a good man; the cellist was jealous; the cellist had been treated poorly; the cellist had so much to be grateful for; the cellist is deeply sorry; the cellist should be put to death; the cellist should be put in a hospital; the cellist should get locked up with his cello but without a bow and rosin ha ha ha; honestly, who cares about the cellist?
Eventually Carol loses interest in the cellist like everyone else. She doesn’t write a novel about him. Instead she does what everyone wants her to do, which is write a sequel about the stupid beekeepers.
Babies Falling Down SUPERCUT
“Are you liking it?” Amy asks, and flicks the cover of the beekeeper sequel.
“Not really,” Beth says, dog-earing her page. “It’s not as good as her first book. The main character just got back together with her husband because he promised to give up his violin for her. It all feels a bit contrived.”
They are in the park down the street from Beth’s house. Beth hasn’t been snowboarding in years, but she does have a credit card now that earns her frequent-flier miles. She and her husband, Randolph, try to go on at least one adventure a year.
Her friend Amy is visiting from Georgia with her five-year-old daughter. Beth’s own daughter is only a few months older. The girls are on the seesaw: up and down, up and down. The playground equipment is shiny and new, the mulch beneath it still humid and smelly. There are rope ladders and tunnels and shaky bridges and towers and bubble-windows and slides and poles and swings. Playground isn’t the right word for this place. It’s a play-kingdom.
“They should make playgrounds for adults,” Beth says.
“I think they’re called bars.”
“No,” Beth says, “I mean it. If this place was twice as big, we would be out there playing too. Admit it.”
“Why don’t you just go ride a roller coaster?”
Beth and Amy lived on the same street as girls, and their mothers were best friends. That life can repeat itself so neatly is a fact that Beth, depending on her mood, finds either comforting or unsettling. But having her friend here for the week has illuminated certain differences between them. For instance: Amy’s suggestion that they just pick up some fast-food biscuits for the girls on their way to the library yesterday morning. Beth tried her best not to sound like a judgmental yuppie, but really — fatty lard biscuits? And later, when Beth broached the idea of dropping the girls off at a yoga class for kids, Amy looked at her like it was the funniest thing she’d ever heard: “For five-year-olds?” she asked. “Next you’re going to tell me you’re raising a little whirling dervish.”
So what if she was? Beth wanted to ask. Amy never left Georgia, and while it would be easy to blame their differences on geography or class, Beth knows those aren’t the culprits. Their lives deviated long before Beth left their home state, and besides, Amy lives near Atlanta, where there are probably a dozen kids’ yoga studios and where there are enough yuppie mothers to keep a thousand organic-only farmers’ markets in business.
When their girls are finished on the seesaw, they come running toward their mothers, elated.
Deep inside the ear is a mazelike structure of bone and pink tissue called the labyrinth, and at the end of the labyrinth is the vestibular system, which governs balance and helps us stay upright. Amy’s daughter battles constant inner ear infections and suffers from bouts of vertigo. The little girl falls forward onto her knees and palms. She doesn’t cry and she isn’t hurt or embarrassed. She stands and continues as if it never happened, though the moment is preserved, temporarily at least, on the traffic camera across the street.
After the park Beth and Amy walk their daughters to Pop-Yop, the ice cream shop, where customers don’t pay by the scoop but by the ounce. The cashier actually weighs the cup after you add the toppings. Beth can’t help thinking of livestock as they shuffle forward in line. They sit outside in the sunshine as the girls devour every drop of ice cream (Amy’s daughter actually licks the cup clean), and then Beth leads them on a slightly circuitous route back to the house, hoping to wear out the wee ones and kill the sugar rush. The strategy is semi-effective. It takes some singing and cajoling and reading, but thirty minutes later, they have the girls down for naps in Beth’s big bed.
“I can’t tell you how rare this is,” Amy says. “She hardly ever takes naps anymore. This is so nice. I feel like I should celebrate. What do you have to drink?”
“I think someone left a bottle of Prosecco here a few weeks ago. You want me to get it?”
Amy nods and so Beth pours the bubbly liquid into two wineglasses. They sit down on the couch together and appreciate the silence. Spread out across the coffee table there are a series of messy half-finished watercolor paintings. Amy picks up one. The painting is of a red street and a gray building and, behind that, a flat and tall mountain. Beth’s daughter painted it. In a closet upstairs there are at least twenty other paintings just like it.
“This is beautiful,” Amy says. “She saw it on a vacation or something?”
“No, we’ve never been anywhere like that.” Beth has a few theories about the painting, but she isn’t sure what Amy would think of them. Her friend is slumped down in the couch, feet propped up on the coffee table, the Prosecco balanced on her belly button. She looks exhausted. Beth decides to tell Amy everything — about how she occasionally finds her daughter changing all the sheets, collecting all the towels, about how her daughter sometimes insists that she isn’t a little girl but a maid in a fancy hotel, a maid with a fiancé who works on a ship and who comes to see her whenever he can.