Flown

Wendy can’t help hovering outside the den when her fourteen-year-old daughter’s older friend Harris first comes over to play video games on a Saturday. They’re talking about a woman named Cora Goodnight, all over the local news for killing (probably) her three husbands and her pastor. The church-directory photo posted with each telling of her story shows a pale woman with listless brown hair, ashen cheeks, and an undernourished, unsmiling mouth. Only her startled eyes suggest the energy Wendy imagines murder must require.

“The megachurch Cora went to?” the boy is saying. “It’s basically a cult.”

“No wonder she offed the preacher,” Megan says. “I mean, she goes to this place for peace and comfort, and they just mess her up more.”

“They must have been brutal. Brutality masquerading as holiness.”

It could be Wendy and Fiona talking—if they still talked. She’d known the boy must be Fiona’s as soon as Megan named the senior she’d met in the high school band. Harris McAllister. She pronounced it tenderly, wistfully, as though he were a dream anyone would want to have. And he is, Fiona’s boy, seventeen now, a lovely young man, a dream—the first newborn Wendy ever kissed, his warm wrinkled head soft and yeasty, fresh from her best friend’s tortured insides. She last knew him as a gleeful two-year-old, smearing chocolate across a dingy duplex wall blocks from Tate Street Coffee, where Fiona and Wendy, in their thrift-shop dresses and steel-toed boots, used to study and plot.

Fifteen years Wendy’s heard not a word, and then this boy appears at her door wearing a bold, busy knitted hat with side tassels, a hat that looks like it can’t decide whether it’s Peruvian or Norwegian or the result of an abandoned attempt to knit an Orthodox Jew out of stoplight-colored yarn. That’s the sort of thing Wendy used to say to Fiona to try to make her laugh.

Here were Fiona’s quick dark eyes flashing at Wendy once again—the boy grinning at her and Megan through the storm door, September bright and hot behind him, the leaves still clinging to the trees—and she’s as weak for that flash as ever. How could she not make a feast of the boy? She took his polite extended hand, clasped it a little too warmly, and pulled him by his long spiderish arm over the threshold. She offered seltzer, coffee, cookies, and welcomed him to sit on the sofa next to her daughter to hunt demons or zombies or whatever the fuck it is they go after.

Sophomore year, UNC Greensboro, 1991: Wendy’s smoking out front of McIver after Renaissance Poetry when this lanky girl with dyed-black hair borrows her lighter. As cleaner-cut students cross the sun-dappled campus paths, the girl tells Wendy the filthiest joke she’s ever heard another girl tell. Delighted, Wendy asks her name. Fiona. Delighted again.

The following afternoon, there she is in Intro to Theater—the dirty-joke girl! Wendy liked acting; Fiona, the black-clothed tech jobs. Important things occurred out in the world—the aftermath of the Gulf War, Waco, the Rodney King trial—but what was all that, next to The Taming of the Shrew or The Little Foxes? Semester after semester, each play was a self-contained world they inhabited intensely for a time, then left behind forever.

They became Wendy and Fiona, a package deal wherever they went. Back then, she’d have told you their kids would grow up as close as siblings. Instead, Megan and Harris are slowly getting acquainted over the noise of their games. Megan made Wendy promise not to spy on them when Harris came over. Wendy’s husband, Chris, demanded just as adamantly that she keep an eye on the kids.

“What on earth can they do with the door open and me wandering around the house?”

“You never know.” Chris scowled.

“Megan’s a good girl—she makes straight As.”

“So did you.”

True. Wendy made dean’s list the same semester she rode high and shirtless down Battleground Avenue in Fiona’s crappy car, scarfing hot Krispy Kreme donuts and screaming the words to “Welcome to the Jungle”—ironically, of course—as the wind whipped and mingled their long hair.

She said to Chris, “Dude, after all that mess in middle school, you should be grateful she has a nice friend.”

“I’d be grateful if he was also a freshman. And a girl.”

Quick peek into the den: Megan sits cross-legged against the pillows banked in one corner of the sofa. She watches Harris, who’s leaning forward, elbows on knees, gripping the bat-shaped controller. He watches the figure on the screen intently, as though if he could, he’d eat it, or kiss it, or worse. The figure runs, jumps, shoots, jumps, circles back, pockets treasure, and runs again. As Harris frantically taps buttons, he explains to Megan details about the game’s strategy that she’s belabored to Wendy many times.

“Oh,” Megan says to him, “it’s super smart you figured that out.”

Not a shred of sarcasm. She’s fawning. Pretending it’s all news to her, and he’s the genius. Ugh. Did Wendy teach her to act like that?

Back in the day, Fiona and Wendy would have had things to say about such a performance.

Pretty soon, Wendy would’ve said, this girl is going to be sorry.

Oh, this girl, Fiona would’ve answered—sliding a loose fist back and forth near her lips and pretending to gag—pretty soon, this girl is going to wind up on her knees.

Soon it’s a regular thing, Harris and Megan gaming on Saturday afternoons. Whenever he stays for dinner, he wears his silly hat at the table—slight points off for Fiona—but he says please and thank you, unlike Chris, too busy shoveling food into his mouth to do more than nod. He eats the same way he fucks, Wendy told Fiona, before she knew she’d love him, much less marry him. All hulked over and in a rush, like he’s got somewhere he needs to go after. Then, she took his haste for passion. Now, she knows it’s mostly appetite.

Harris always responds graciously to Chris’s barrage of questions. Talking comes naturally to the boy. He has his mother’s gift for putting people at ease. At parties, Fiona lavished attention on everybody she met, asking them all about themselves, enthusing over whatever they said without ever sounding fake. Meantime, Wendy would hook up with any old boy, needing a talkless way to pass the time until Fiona was ready to go.

“I’m working at a pizza place now,” Harris said, the first time he accepted Wendy’s invitation to dinner. “But I want to major in graphic design when I go to college. If you don’t mind me asking, sir, what do you do?”

Megan gave Wendy the quick secret smile they share when they’re getting the best of her dad and he doesn’t have a clue. Wendy wondered if her daughter primed Harris to ask this question. Chris loves explaining the intricacies of his duties as shipping and receiving manager for an easy-chair company.

“Well, basically, I run interference between the salespeople, the warehouse staff, and the bossman’s incompetent son. Everything’s a puzzle, all the time, and it’s up to me to solve it. Like today, for instance, I had to figure out why my Lubbocks in Desert Sand went to my Charlotte store instead of here to Greensboro.”

Since his promotion to manager, he’s all “my.” My chairs, my stores, my trucks, my guys.

“So you’re like constantly putting out fires,” Harris said. “Sounds like a tough job—you must be really organized.”

“It’s a lot to keep track of, that’s for sure.”

He began to warm to the boy—after all, Chris likes a pat on the head as much as anyone. Every year at the company holiday party, his gross boss puts his gross arm around Wendy and says he doesn’t know what he’d do without her husband. It’s Christmas, so she plays nice. She says, “Me either,” and Chris beams. He thinks she’s forgotten the first five years of their marriage, when she had to take care of everything—Megan, money, the house, everything—because he couldn’t stand growing up. Wendy always had a job—sometimes a full time and a part time—while Chris was always losing jobs because he was too hungover to go to work the morning after a Green Day concert or a night out with his buddies from his failed band. He left the dishes and laundry to pile up, never fixed a meal. He spent money they didn’t have and then forgot to pay the bills. He insisted Megan stay in day care because he needed to look for work, then dragged his feet about looking for work.

Wendy laid down an ultimatum. He apologized, he begged, he loved her more than the sun and the moon, I wrote you a song, baby, don’t go. The whole bullshit package. More ultimatums, more scenes. She would have left except she was a sucker for contrition. And then: a miracle. When Megan was four, he got the job at the furniture company, which he turned out to be good at, and—miraculously—actually liked. Wendy stopped having to worry about whether she could depend on him for basic things. Chris stepping up to his responsibilities felt like all the miracle she’d ever need in her marriage. She knew plenty of women who weren’t so lucky.

“And what about you?” Harris said that first evening, turning to Wendy. “What do you do?”

“Me? I’m an administrative assistant in a law firm.”

“Any chance you’re working on the Cora Goodnight case?”

“Oh, brother,” said Chris. “Wendy’s obsessed with that woman.”

“I’d be nervous if I was you, Dad,” Megan joked, making a stabby motion with her spoon.

“We do family law, not criminal cases,” Wendy said.

“I’m stalking Cora Goodnight.” Harris grinned. “Online, I mean.”

Wendy understood. That same morning, after reading the latest developments in Cora’s case—they’d finally assembled a jury, and the evidence was now being heard—she’d googled Fiona again: two old addresses and a Facebook page with forty-seven friends, set to private. No Twitter or Instagram, no LinkedIn, not even Goodreads. Wendy had searched her name in the county tax records to see if she owned a home and, if so, where she lived. Nothing. No internet sensation, Fiona McAllister.

“She was super devious.” Harris paused to lick chili from his hat’s golden tassel, then launched into an informed analysis of Cora’s lethal combinations of ordinary household cleaners. Megan raised her eyebrows at her mother: See how smart he is?

“That woman had a hard life,” Chris said, reaching for the bread.

Journalists relished detailing the lifetime of abuse heaped on Cora: drunk mother, hands-on stepfathers, charlatans paid to miracle-heal her limp. At eighteen, she married a man no better than the other people she’d tried to love. He died prematurely, as did her second husband, and everybody said she had the worst luck. Then she wed a third time, a wounded Persian Gulf veteran who regularly laid his cane across his wife’s back to remind her that her weakness exceeded his. Before long, he turned up dead too, another “accident.”

“You kids are lucky. Guys in my warehouse—they’ve got dads in jail, moms on drugs, poor situation, no opportunity. You have to think about what that does to a person before you judge.”

“Who’s judging?” Megan protested. “Don’t get mad at me! Everybody knows her life was horrible.”

Whenever Harris stays for supper, they have to eat in the dining room instead of at the tiny kitchen table. Wendy’s never liked this room. At sundown, the yellow walls sour from cheerful butter to wan buttermilk, and once it’s fully dark outside, the windows become mean black patches that put them on display to anybody passing by.

“Paint the room a different color,” Fiona would have said. “And we’ll make some curtains. It’s not hard.”

Fiona on her best days got shit done. Wendy itches to ask Harris a million questions about her, but she doesn’t want Chris figuring out he’s Fiona’s kid, not yet. Chris used to call Fiona a user—not drugs, people—which was funny to Wendy, because Fiona thought the same of Chris. When either of them said it, Wendy thought I guess I have a type.

So far Harris has mentioned only that his mother sells plants at a nursery, is twice divorced, and named their cat Bogart, which Harris thought for the longest time was a reference to the boggarts in Harry Potter.

“Those dudes Cora killed totally deserved it,” Megan says one night when Harris brings pizzas and they’re all sitting in the yellow gloom.

“Ah, the moral certainty of untested youth,” Wendy says. They all ignore her.

Chris objects that nobody deserves to be murdered.

Harris can’t help feeling sorry for Cora, even though he’s 100 percent certain she’s guilty.

Wendy takes another slice and says nothing. Whenever she reads about Cora’s victims, all she can think is, What did you do, man, to push her that far?

In October, Megan cuts off the hair she’s been growing since third grade. New planes and angles emerge in her face. Her Instagram shows moments her mother’s not privy to in real life: Megan and Harris standing on the edge of the shopping-center fountain, pointing at funny signs, goofing around. They practice music together on the deck—Megan trombone, Harris trumpet—driving the neighbors’ dogs into frenzies of barking. And of course they play their endless bloody games, hour upon hour.

Months used to go by when Wendy didn’t think of Fiona at all. But now, eating a lunch salad at her desk at Crumpler, Bearden & Applewhite Family Law, or trying to fall asleep at night, she recalls episodes she hasn’t thought about in years. At first, each remembered incident is a solitary, gentle tug, but as the weeks pass and the trees grow bare, more memories wash up. By Thanksgiving, they’re lapping up one right after another, bringing a tide that pulls her out into bigger water. She begins to fantasize: first, a revival of their friendship; then, a deepening.

Recently her mind keeps returning to the night of the cast party for As You Like It. She and Fiona drank rum and cokes and smoked cloves in a ramshackle house where theater and music majors lived. They danced until their hair dripped with sweat, then wandered into a bedroom. On top of trench coats and peacoats and army-navy-surplus jackets, they tested each other’s softness with tongues spiced and boozy as a Christmas cake.

The specifics of the encounter have evaporated, mostly. Wendy remembers the scratch of wool under her bare leg as Fiona pulled up her skirt, a sliver of party light changing colors beneath a door, Talking Heads playing on a distant stereo. Touching Fiona / Fiona touching her felt deeply familiar and also unfamiliar . . . Fiona’s breasts were more compact than Wendy’s, her pubic hair finer. Wendy had never predicted she might shyly slide her fingers inside another woman (much less Fiona). Nor had she imagined how welcome it might be to encounter smooth, cool hands that didn’t try to knead and poke her into submission.

Fiona didn’t bother with incredulity. She did not hesitate, she did not rush. After a few minutes, neither did Wendy.

Where did they go after the party? Where did they sleep? What did they say? All Wendy knows is they never talked about what happened, not seriously. If one of them alluded to it, the other made a joke, subject closed. They shelved their encounter with all the ridiculous, fun, wonderful, irresponsible, dangerous things they did so many other nights when drunk or high or simply young.

For years Wendy told herself, when she remembered to think about it, that what happened was just a youthful experiment, meaningless. But now she’s convinced it must mean something, the fact that she still remembers that—that—as she sits eating the ten thousandth salad of her life under the fluorescent lights of Crumpler, Bearden & Apple-white. What she remembers is a mutual, tender confusion, edged with possibility. Then somebody threw open the door, looking for their coat, and the potential vanished like smoke. For so long she thought nothing had changed after, but now, as she eats salad 10,001, salad 10,002, salad 10,003, it dawns on her that there was a shift. Before that night, they functioned as different but equal partners in the friendship. Afterward, it seems to Wendy now, Fiona grew more confident, more vivid and appealing, while Wendy became paler, less distinct, slightly—how to put it?—reduced.

She’d known something was off but not how to fix it. Still, she continued eagerly following her friend’s brightness wherever it chose to go.

At the band’s holiday concert in December, Wendy spies on the other side of the auditorium a woman she’s sure is Fiona. She’s tall with dark hair and slouches exactly how Fiona used to, her boots up on the back of the wooden seat in front of her. Chris doesn’t ask Wendy what she’s looking at. He’s too busy fiddling with his phone camera, getting it ready to video the performance. The woman Wendy’s watching sits with her head tilted back, staring up at the ceiling. She doesn’t talk to anyone around her, which is unlike the Fiona Wendy loved but very like the Fiona she stopped talking to. Never once the whole evening does the woman look in her direction, even though Wendy wills her to turn her head, the way she used to try to move stuff with her mind when she was ten years old.

After the concert they wait for Megan in the packed lobby. It’s impossible to find Fiona amid the sea of people bundling themselves up to brave the cold night, but as soon as Wendy sees Harris’s garish hat bobbing through the crowd, she makes a beeline. He’s standing with a blond woman, a man in a dark suit, and two little girls in velvet dresses and Mary Janes.

“Wendy?” the man says.

His name comes back like a bad penny.

“Hi, Reece.”

Harris’s father wears gold cuff links and has a thick expensive overcoat folded over his arm. He might be Crumpler or Bearden; his sculpted, painted wife could be Applewhite. She greets Wendy politely, without interest. When Reece mentions Wendy’s association with Fiona, his wife hurries the girls off to the ladies’ room.

“Wait, you know my mom?” Harris says to Wendy just as Chris and Megan break through the crowd to join them.

She pretends she’s never connected the dots before now. What a coincidence! Her acting training comes right back.

“Is she here?” She looks around at the dwindling crowd.

“She couldn’t make it,” Harris says.

Reece does a thing with his face that obviously means typical Fiona, which makes Wendy hate him extra.

In the car Chris carries on about how he knew something was shady about that boy, Megan defends Harris, and Wendy insists she had no clue he was Fiona’s kid.

“It’s Reece you ought to dislike,” she tells Chris. “The way he left Fiona high and dry when Harris was only six months old.”

After Reece left, Fiona clawed at the confines of single motherhood, desperate to open any hole that might let her breathe. Wendy moved in with her and kept the baby in the evenings so Fiona could wait tables. Occasionally, she didn’t return until the next morning, bearing donuts and tales of shenanigans Wendy thought they were getting a little old for. She liked it better when they fell asleep in her bed watching television, the baby bundled between them. Next morning, he’d wake happy, his smiles and babble cut from the same cloth as the sunrise and the birdsong.

In the evenings when Wendy came home from her office job—she’d been saving to go to graduate school to become a dramaturge, money she’d later spend on day care—she’d take Harris to the park so Fiona could shower and dress for work. Sometimes she bought him a Cadbury egg, a special treat. However delicately he bit, the egg always smushed in his hands, and they laughed when the sugary goo ran out—each collapse a familiar but still-funny punch line—while Fiona dampened a paper towel to clean up the mess.

Sometimes Fiona got so fed up caring for Harris that Wendy could’ve sworn she hated him. How could you hate your own baby? Wendy didn’t understand Fiona’s anger because she wasn’t really a mother yet. She was only pretending. Nor did she know what to feel when, other days, Fiona’s love for her son left no room for Wendy.

But they did okay. Harris was well cared for. Those two years may not have felt like an especially good time when they were living them, but now Wendy remembers that spell as a kind of honeymoon.

Then Reece remarried. Fiona crashed. Stopped going out, stopped opening the curtains. She ate only kid food: mac and cheese, Goldfish crackers, the grapes Wendy cut in half. Her lost, looping talk chased her ex-husband round and round. She loved him madly; she hated him madly. Whenever Reece took Harris for his allotted time, she got migraines—blindness, vomiting, the works. He’d married again only to punish her, he didn’t care about their child, he wanted to steal her child, he thought this new woman would be a better mother.

“I don’t think he and the deuce are actually all that interested in Harris,” Wendy said. “She probably wants her own baby anyway. Look, you freaked out about Y2K too, about the computers losing their minds and the power grid shutting down, and that didn’t happen. It’s going to be okay.”

But worry dogged Fiona. Misery leaked from her like sap from a tree until she was sticky with it. It was like living with Chicken Little, the hopeless sky forever looming closer. Wendy moved in with Chris. He was so much easier. Finally, when Fiona kept refusing to see a doctor for either the headaches or her depression, Wendy took oxycodone from her mother’s medicine cabinet and left the bottle on Fiona’s kitchen counter. The next time she dropped by, she handed Harris his egg and asked her friend if the oxy was helping her headaches.

“I’m not taking that shit. It’s addictive. I gave them to Jerry to sell.”

“Selling them on the street is illegal.”

“So is stealing them,” Fiona said in the flat, dead tone Wendy dreaded, the same one in which she droned to Harris minutes later—chocolate on the apartment wall, on his clothes—Honey, don’t do that.

How could you help a person who wouldn’t help herself? For a few days, Wendy didn’t call or go by, telling herself she just needed a little break, a breathing space. Their lives had been entwined so long she didn’t know how to pick them looser without tearing something crucial. The few days turned into a week, then two, and Fiona never called, not once. It hurt Wendy not to be needed or missed. The two weeks turned into three, four. The weeks turned into months.

Wendy mentioned the rift to her mother, omitting the pills, which her mother assumed she’d misplaced.

“Well, I never trusted that girl,” her mother said, before repeating her “two cents” about how exclusive friendships were unhealthy. Wendy regretted confiding in her. Her mother was a lonely woman who still removed an earring to talk on the telephone. She had few women friends and had never been able to grasp exactly what men wanted from her. Bosses, plumbers, salesmen—all were baffling. She had no clue how to repel the neighbors who came around when she was between husbands, wanting to advise her about car repair and lawn upkeep and the mailbox that kept falling over because the hole the post was buried in was too wide and forgiving.

“This is the best time of your life,” she said wistfully over her rosé. “You’re young, you have a nice man. You shouldn’t limit yourself.”

Wendy nodded, certain that her mother, as usual, had no idea what she was talking about.

Wendy is beginning to accept that she’ll never reconnect with Fiona when the judge declares a mistrial due to faulty handling of evidence and Cora Goodnight is released. The same week—unseasonably warm for February—Chris finally agrees to let Megan, now fifteen, go out with Harris in his car for the first time.

“As long as they come home right after the movie. Home by 9:30. Ten at the latest.”

Chris makes Harris give him his number before they leave, and Wendy can tell Megan wants to kill her father. When the kids finally ride off in Harris’s beat-up Toyota Corolla, Wendy opens beers. Chris grills burgers while she tosses a salad. The house is weirdly quiet without their daughter’s pulsing, thumping music, and it pains Wendy to know she’ll have to get used to that when Megan goes for good.

The sun sets, but it’s still not that cold. They put on their coats and eat off plastic plates by the backyard firepit, talking about vacations they’d take if they had more money. Chris wants to see Yosemite. Wendy votes for Seattle, where she and Fiona yearned to go, back in the hey-day of grunge. Chris says the new guy in the warehouse is turning out worse than useless. Wendy tells him Applewhite offered to pay for her to take a paralegal course.

“I was thinking it would be good to have a new thing to engage my mind, now that Megan doesn’t need me at home as much.”

“Mind, hell,” he says, “paralegal would be a good promotion. We could use the scratch.”

Mind, hell. For a minute Wendy doesn’t like him again, but then he hands her another beer and asks if she’s warm enough.

At 9:15, he starts checking his phone and pacing over to the driveway to see if the kids have returned. At ten, he says, “I never should have let you talk me into this.”

“They just lost track of time, Chris. I’ll text them.”

“Tell the kid he’s going to be wearing his dick for a necktie if he doesn’t get my daughter home thirty minutes ago.”

“Oh, Chris, listen to yourself. Maybe they had car trouble. That car’s really old.”

“Shit!” He holds up his phone. “She’s turned off her location so I can’t see where they are! That can’t be good. I’m just going to go look for them—that’s what I’m going to do.”

“Do you even know which movie theater they went to?”

“By now, they’re not at a theater, Wendy. Duh. How dumb can you be?”

He jabs the fire, stirring up a spray of orange sparks. A few drift over to her jeans, and one by one she extinguishes them with the beer bottle’s wet bottom: Megan helping Harris unhook her bra; her breasts shy and eager in his tricky hands; his mouth on her warm neck that has smelled since babyhood of oatmeal soap and lavender laundry detergent; his fingers under the waistband of the fifth pair of jeans she tried on this afternoon . . .

“Let me call her,” Wendy says.

Voice mail.

Chris jingles his keys. “You sit tight. In case they come back.”

“They’re good kids,” she calls, but he’s gone.

Sit tight. The phrase strikes her as vaguely funny, given that she’s sitting and she is tight after three beers. Overhead the stars blink as though fighting to come on all the way. Sit tight. Hang tight. Cora Goodnight won’t hang tight. She’s been released. She’s free. No death penalty for her. Wendy giggles, then chides herself: not funny. Besides, they don’t hang people anymore, do they? Is it electric chair still, or lethal injection? Gas chamber? Barbarity. Executioner. What a job. Murder should be personal. You should only kill someone because you’re certain in your heart of hearts they need to be dead, immediately, and no one and nothing else is going to get them dead fast enough . . .

. . . Megan wincing as Harris enters her . . .

Oh, look, Wendy’s drinking another beer. Well, why not, if it helps her worry less.

. . . Megan turning her head toward the stale back seat, scared that this weird intrusion is all her dreams will amount to . . .

Wait. Maybe beer makes her worry more? Not less? Maybe she’s on the wrong track. Has Harris even returned Megan’s flirting? Wendy’s not sure she understands what constitutes flirting between kids these days. She knows boys harass girls to send naked pictures on their phones. Or that girls offer them, unasked. She doesn’t think Megan would be dumb enough . . . but then again. Wendy knows what it is to want so much to please someone. Impossible now to count the long-ago mouths, the hands—in bathrooms and under bushes, on sofas and beds and beer-sticky floors—the tongues and hands she invited, opened herself to, praying they’d kiss and lick and stroke away all her wanting. All the while wondering what Fiona was doing . . . Later, when she recounted the sloppy details, hoping to make Fiona jealous, Fiona just shrugged and said it hadn’t been much of a party, and Wendy wondered why they’d bothered to go at all.

Then that one party, after which everything changed but they pretended it didn’t.

Faulty handling. Good for Cora, getting off on a mistrial. Wendy imagines the day Travis Goodnight fell. She pictures the roadside mountain overlook, Cora relishing the silence after his holler dwindles, then ceases, and she can finally breathe the still, open air, the miles of tree-tops a green balm to her eyes, the hawks wheeling free in the

—oh, shit, here he comes . . . Travis Goodnight . . . back from the dead.

No, that’s crazy.

But somebody is walking through the gate and across the backyard. Somebody tall. Chris? Harris? No. The stride is different.

A wiry woman in a peacoat, walking with her head up like a long-legged animal that gets its information from the air.

“Fiona!”

Wendy stands too fast. A dizzy molten heat flows across her chest and shoots up into her face. She’s played this reunion in her head a thousand times but never figured out how to make it go smoothly.

“Wendy.” Fiona keeps her hands in her pockets. There’s to be no hug, evidently.

“Want a beer?”

“I don’t drink anymore.”

“Oh,” Wendy says. “Well, that’s probably a good idea.”

“Why’s that?”

“For anybody, I mean,” she hurries to say. “Giving it up. Stopping. At our age. I mean, I should probably quit drinking myself. Then I wouldn’t babble incoherent shit when an old friend suddenly drops by.”

“Yes, you would,” Fiona says. She nearly smiles. Or maybe it’s just a play of the firelight across her face that makes Wendy think so.

“Look,” Fiona goes on, “your husband threatened Harris. Our phones are set up where I can see his texts.”

She held out her phone: “UR gonna regret keeping my kid out 2 late, you little shit.”

“Harris lets you do that? See his texts?”

“He doesn’t have a choice these days, not after some of the shit he’s pulled. He’s been in a little trouble, nothing serious, but Reece insists . . . Look, can we just focus on the problem with your husband right now? I see he hasn’t changed much.”

“Chris just gets really worked up when he’s worried. It’s Megan’s first time out in a car with a boy, and Harris was supposed to have Megan—”

“Who threatens a kid, though? Who does that?”

“Well, Harris was supposed to have Megan home by now.”

“Harris is a kid.”

A kid the size of a large man, Wendy thinks. Her phone bleats. Urgent texts from Megan, one after another, like storm warnings.

Stranded at park by science center 
near pond with paddleboats
dumb H lost keys. Went to look. Not answering text. 
I’m alone.
It dark.
Scared

“They’re stranded at the science center. But I’ve had too many beers to drive,” Wendy says.

“Gimme the keys to your car.”

“Wait, how’d you get here?”

“Lyft. We only have the one car, Wendy. My ship never came in, if you’ve been wondering.”

Wendy hands over the keys to her Prius. Neighborhood to neighborhood, a few lingering Christmas lights breach the darkness. By the time they pass the Krispy Kreme on Battleground Avenue, the silence is awful.

“Remember when we used to—”

“I’m not doing that memory-lane shit with you, Wendy. We’re just making sure the kids are safe. That’s all this is.”

Fiona stares at the road ahead, her profile insistently passive against the scrolling backdrop of closed stores and late-night restaurants.

“Okay. Well, did you see that Cora Goodnight got off? Harris says y’all have been following the case. I’m kind of glad. I didn’t really want her to go to jail.”

“Why not? She murdered people. She’s fucking terrifying. Why would you not want somebody like that to go to jail?”

“I don’t know,” Wendy says. Fiona’s vehemence surprises her. “I guess. . . it just seems like she had such a hard life, and all her victims were so horrible to her.”

“Plenty of people get treated badly but they don’t murder anybody.”

Wendy waits a few minutes in silence, then says, “I can’t believe you’re still so mad at me. After all this time.”

Nothing.

“You could have called me too, you know. If you really wanted me around.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!”

Fiona brakes hard, and the seatbelt cuts into Wendy’s chest. The stoplight’s glare reddens Fiona’s cheek as she turns toward Wendy. Her lips are thinner than they used to be, her mouth tougher. The half-inch scar on her chin looks old but is new to Wendy.

“That is just like you,” Fiona says. “You always had to be blameless, so you blamed everybody else.”

“I tried to help you, but whatever I did was never enough.”

“You were basically my son’s other parent, Wendy, and you fucking ghosted.”

There’s no denying that. The light changes. Fiona steps on the gas, and they hurtle forward.

“You know what happened after you left that shit at my house? Those fucking pills? I looked at the bottle for hours. Then I took one pill and put it on my tongue. I wanted to see what my death was going to taste like. Sounds dramatic, huh? But that’s exactly what I was doing. That’s where my head was at back then. And you knew it.”

They’re speeding too fast for comfort, lights and signs rushing by. Wendy feels sick.

“You said you gave them to what’s-his-face. To sell,” she says. “So you could buy groceries.”

“Well, I lied. You want to know what actually happened? What actually happened was, I mashed all the pills up and put them in a glass of Jack and coke. And I stared at that for a while. And then Harris started crying from his bed, and I poured that shit down the toilet.”

They pass the park gate. Fiona makes a vicious U-turn and pulls the Prius up behind the empty Corolla. They get out and hurry past the locked gate and its warning not to trespass on city property after sundown. Under the clouded night sky, they can barely see the park road through the woods. Wendy turns her phone toward the pavement to light it.

“You might as well have put a gun in my hand,” Fiona says.

“It wasn’t what I meant,” Wendy starts. But what had she meant?

They follow the light jerking along the road, Fiona’s hands jammed in her pockets, Wendy breathing fast, trying to keep up.

“You could never just let me be,” Fiona says. “You couldn’t just let me be sad when Reece left.”

“He was horrible.”

“He was horrible,” she agrees. “He’s still horrible, actually.”

Wendy hears the slightest give in Fiona’s voice, a tiny relenting, and suddenly the old want bristles all through her. It grows as they walk on together through the dark wood, it increases until the trees and the air are pregnant with it. Even the dirt under their feet is fat with her wanting, that force she’s never figured out how to reckon with, as though it were some ancient pagan spirit too large and unknowable to be appeased.

“He was horrible, but I was sad anyway,” Fiona says.

“I know.”

“And you couldn’t just let me have it, my sadness. Because it wasn’t about you.”

“No.”

The road has led them to the pond. The low lights dotting its perimeter reflect as white smudges in the water. Toward the middle, the pond’s glassy surface voids into blackness. They pass swings and slides, walking toward the picnic area where Wendy used to bring Megan and, before that, but only once, Harris. The goats at the petting zoo scared him. He cried and refused his lunch. At home afterward, she read to him before his nap, and he pointed to a fox stealing an egg from a henhouse.

“That’s you,” he said. “Bringing my egg.”

Megan sits on a picnic table, her phone a footlight for her tragic face.

Safe, safe, is all Wendy can think.

As they walk back to the cars, Megan confesses that instead of going to a movie after dinner, they drove to Cora Goodnight’s house. They recognized it from the news: a dumpy aluminum-sided ranch painted sour-apple green, with a wreath of fake white flowers on the door. A normal, boring house—not murder-y enough, a disappointment. Wendy’s driven by it herself. She’s driven by Cora’s church too, a cavernous metal building next to a carpet outlet. But its plain facade told her nothing about what must have occurred there to blast the last sediments of hope from Cora’s face and bare the bedrock of fear that was her only dependable truth.

The first year of their estrangement, Wendy rode by Fiona’s duplex nearly every week. She was dying to talk to the old fun Fiona who, when she chose to, made Wendy feel like she was the only person Fiona cared about. But Wendy was scared that Fiona was gone forever, so she never stopped to share the news of her quick courthouse wedding or Megan’s birth. A few times she spied Harris in the yard, playing with an older neighbor child. She longed to show him the baby screaming in the back seat, furious at having for a mother a voyeur who never stopped to see what she’d come to see.

The two police cars parked on Cora’s street made Harris nervous, so the kids didn’t stick around. Megan won’t say what happened when they got to the park, and Wendy won’t press her in front of Fiona. Back at the gate, Harris is lying on the hood of the Corolla, face turned up to the sky.

Fiona shouts, “Find the keys?”

“Affirmative,” he says, in a robot voice. And then, “Stars are the whitest white in the white-a-verse.”

“Oh, shit,” Fiona sighs. She pulls him up to sitting. He’s laughing as she does it; he doesn’t care if he’s in trouble. She sniffs his jacket, then yanks off his hat and smells that too.

He puts his hands up in the air and says, “We didn’t smoke. Swear to God.”

“You don’t believe in God!” Fiona backhands his shoulder once, then a second time, harder.

“But He believes in me,” Harris says in a singsong, and laughs some more.

Wendy leans to smell Megan’s hair. Wow. How did she miss the skunk when they hugged earlier? She’s surprised. She thought kids didn’t smoke real weed anymore. Bona fide naturalists, these two.

Megan moans, “Dad’s going to kill me.”

“He’s not going to kill you,” Wendy says. “But obviously there will be consequences.”

“Obviously,” says Fiona. “Come on, everybody, get in the car. I’ll drive you home so you can work out the consequences.”

“Don’t you think they should be punished?”

Fiona stares out into the woods for a minute, making a show of choosing not to say what she wants to say. Then she turns to Harris.

“Give me the bag.”

“What?”

“The weed. Give it here.”

Harris digs around in his clothes and brings out a small plastic baggie. Fiona takes it, grabs Wendy’s arm with her left hand, and jams her right roughly into Wendy’s jeans pocket, straining the fabric as she shoves the bag in as far as the pocket allows. Her face nearly touches Wendy’s as she leans in and says, “There you go, Miss Consequences.”

She backs off, then says, “I have to go to work in the morning, so we’re all taking my car. Mr. Tough Guy can bring you to get yours tomorrow, Wendy.”

She throws herself into the driver’s side of the Corolla and slams the door. Wendy’s head thuds, the beers taking their toll. The old want has fled; the old disappointment is back, along with a terrible thirst. She walks over to the trash can at the head of the path and drops the bag inside.

“Aw, man,” the boy moans. “What a fucking waste.”

Back home, Megan immediately runs upstairs to shower. Chris is washing dishes.

“You left the fire burning,” he scolds. “In the backyard. Lucky the whole neighborhood didn’t go up in flames.”

“What were you going to do, Chris? If you found the kids? Beat Harris up?”

He scrubs furiously, not looking at her. She downs a glass of water, then another. The kitchen light is harsh. Her head pounds. Tomorrow, she’ll feel like garbage when Chris drives her to the park to pick up her car. Tomorrow, she’ll have to decide whether to tell him the whole story. They were actually smoking real weed, she imagines telling him, not vaping some weird pot juice. You’d think it was cool if it wasn’t your kid.

After a minute he says, sheepish, “Is she okay?”

“Mostly. I’ll go check on her.”

Upstairs, Megan is studying the old glow-in-the-dark stars stuck on her ceiling. Wendy turns down the music and sits beside her on the bed. Megan swears it was her first time. She didn’t even do it right, she thinks, because she doesn’t feel high, just stupid.

“I told him I like liked him. So stupid. He actually laughed. He basically thinks I’m an infant. It doesn’t help that you and Dad treat me like such a baby.”

“Well, there is a big difference between a senior and a freshman.”

“And you! The way you’ve been acting this whole time, all super friendly to him. It’s so weird. It’s like you wanted him to have a crush on you.”

Earlier, as Wendy and Megan got out of the Corolla, Harris had said, “I hope we can still be friends.” She’d thought he was talking to Megan, but maybe that remark had been for her?

“Honey, that’s ridiculous. Harris doesn’t have a crush on me. I’m just an old lady to him. And if it seemed like I was being extra nice, it’s only because I have a soft spot for him. I mean, I was there when he was born. Before he was born. He was like . . . I don’t know.”

She almost said “like my child,” but she can’t say that, because Megan is her child and hates competition. And anyway, it doesn’t matter what Harris meant, because nobody is remaining friends. After he spoke, Fiona put her forehead down on the steering wheel, and when Wendy thanked her for the ride, she threw up a hand: Sure, whatever, go.

Oblivious that something in her mother has crumpled, Megan keeps haranguing her. “Honestly? You want my honest opinion? You’re so desperate for people to like you. You’re like a total ass-kisser who just begs for attention from literally anybody, even if it hurts your own daughter.”

Maybe she has a point. Maybe Wendy has always been so hungry for attention that she’ll take any kind. Why else would she sit here and let Megan try to humiliate her, unless she thinks abuse is better than nothing?

Chris opens the door, sees their faces, and quickly shuts it again.

They laugh.

“He’s afraid we’re going to cry,” Wendy says.

“Tears are man repellent,” Megan says. “They can’t handle it. At the park? After Harris said he wasn’t interested in me romantically? He was all like, Oh, no, don’t cry! Don’t cry! And I was like, Well, then don’t give me something to cry about!”

“Oh, honey.”

Wendy lies down and works her arm under Megan’s shoulders. The girl snuggles up. After a few minutes she says she wishes she could take back what she said.

“Forget it,” Wendy says. “We’re okay. Nothing could make us not be okay.”

In the den later, she turns on her favorite prison drama. Chris sits out back drinking one last beer beside the banked fire. Next, he’ll take out the trash and lock the doors, then come find Wendy. He won’t apologize for being hotheaded. She won’t admit maybe she was a little blind about Harris. In bed, Chris’ll either drop right to sleep or pull her toward him; she seldom has to wait to learn how things will go with him.

On the television one orange-clad woman hides her face between the naked thighs of another. Wendy hopes nobody barges in to ruin their good time. She knows better than to believe TV shows, but she can’t help liking when they claim it’s always possible to find love—even in prison, between the turf wars and shivvings and rapes, even if just for a moment. Wouldn’t it be ironic if Cora Goodnight, by evading conviction, missed her chance at love?

But what does Wendy know of prisons, really? She’s only ever driven past them. Each summer of her girlhood, she and her mother spent an afternoon in Raleigh at the art museum, next to which stood a glum compound of brick buildings, sharply fenced. Wendy believed this was the state penitentiary, and to stop herself from thinking about the horrors of the electric chair, she imagined the doomed men as spirits, free to wander, immune to the barbs of concertina wire. No longer dead men walking, they were not executed, but escaped. Flown.

Eventually she learned the facility was a youth prison—no electric chair. The fences and buildings are long gone, yet whenever she visits the museum with Megan, she still fancies her flown men are shadowing her in the museum’s dim carpeted galleries. Together they gaze on the antique beauty of Audubon’s mammoth folios, his stunning birds. Painted with such cruel precision, not from life, as she used to believe, but postmortem: killed purposely to make it easier for the artist to render them. What did you do to wind up here? she’d wanted to ask the flown, back when she was a girl. Now that she’s grown, asking seems rude, and anyway, she figures, they’d probably only shrug and repeat the question back to her.

Read more from Issue 19.2.