Laura Lippman - I'd Know You Anywhere

“Iso, you’re grounded,” Peter declared. “For two weeks.”

“What does that mean?”

Several days in, they were still trying to figure that out. Could Iso walk Reba? That was a tricky one. It was nice to see Iso taking an interest in the dog and volunteering to do an essential task, but also unusual. “If you take Albie,” Eliza had decreed. Iso decided she didn’t want to walk Reba after all. Could she call a friend about homework? Only if she did it from the kitchen telephone, within earshot. If Albie was watching television and Iso joined him in the family room, could Iso at least mention to him that there was probably a better program? No. Because Albie would give Iso anything she wanted.

It was true, Albie was a completely indiscriminating television watcher. Today was Sunday, a gray, drizzly one that managed to be at once humid and chilly. Peter had gone into the office, and Eliza was trapped in the house with Albie and Iso. That was the problem with having a child under house arrest. One had to stay with her. Early in the afternoon, the three found themselves in the family room, regarding one another warily. A game? They couldn’t agree on one. A jigsaw puzzle? Iso couldn’t be bothered with anything that uncool. Books? Even Albie seemed to find this appalling. Eliza grabbed the remote and turned it to the only channel she really liked, TCM. If she could design her perfect cable system, it would have only TCM and maybe AMC, although she hated the way the second network edited films and inserted commercials.

Mist-shrouded mountains, clearly a set, rose into view. Gene Kelly, Van Johnson—“Oh, it’s Brigadoon, ” Eliza said. “That’s a wonderful movie.”

Albie, who probably would have watched a test pattern without complaint, crawled onto the sofa and nestled into Eliza’s side, and she tried not to show how overwhelmingly happy this made her. Iso lay on the floor, chanting, “BOR-ing.” But eventually Gene Kelly caught her attention.

“I don’t get it,” Albie said. “How does the town sleep for a hundred years?”

“It’s magic,” Eliza said.

“But that funny man said they worked out a promise with God. Is God magic?”

Big question. Eliza and Peter had not given their children much of a religious education. Part of her, the reflexively honest part, wanted to say, “Yes, religion and magic are pretty much the same thing.” But she imagined Albie carrying that wisdom to school, the hell to pay later. Instead she said, “God is always seen as an all-powerful entity, whatever religion you believe.”

“That doesn’t really look like Scotland,” Iso complained. She spoke on some authority. The family had taken a driving trip through the Highlands the summer before last. “It doesn’t look real .”

It didn’t, and Eliza missed Gene Kelly’s usual archness, that slight smirk of ego he brought to most roles. Here, he was just a straight-up romantic, while Van Johnson got to be the dissolute wisecracker. Still the movie was marvelous and so romantic. Except, of course, for the character of Harry Beaton, who had to watch his true love marry someone else, knowing all the while that he must stay in Brigadoon or the village would perish. Brigadoon’s bargain with God was fine, if your true love happened to be there already. But what was a Harry Beaton to do? He really had drawn a tough hand.

Eliza’s sympathy for Harry vanished when he attacked his true love at her wedding, lashing out: “All I ever did was want you too much.”

Of course it ended happily—at least for Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse. But what of the other Brigadooners—Brigadoonites?—who might not meet their true loves in the small village, or who might not love with a ferocity that awakens a town that otherwise would slumber for a century? What would happen over the years, as the town’s residents became more connected by blood?

A phone rang. A single phone, up in her bedroom.

“The security phone!” Albie sang out, thrilled to be here to witness the mysterious instrument in action. Her instinct had been to ignore it, but now she would have to go answer it, refuse Walter’s charges, and tell the children that it was just a test, like the test of the Emergency Broadcast System. In the case of a real emergency…

And as Eliza headed to the stairs, she was reminded that Iso was not the only liar in their family.

By the time she reached the phone, it had stopped. She glanced at her watch: 2 P.M., on a Sunday. She did not think Walter would have broken the rules, at least not so quickly. Over time, she could imagine him becoming careless, forgetting what he was supposed to do, or no longer caring. But not on this, his third call. A wrong number? How could one know unless the phone was answered? Why hang up?

“I thought it was going to be Homeland Security,” Albie said wistfully. “I thought we were going to be told to evacuate. That would be exciting at least.”

“I think,” Eliza said, “we can come up with something to do that might be almost as exciting.” They spent the afternoon making cupcakes, with much emphasis on decoration. Even Iso, denied the television, joined in, and eventually Peter. They ruined their appetites, filling up on cream cheese frosting and miniature cinnamon disks and squiggles of pressurized decorating icing, straight from the can. Their appetites destroyed, they ended up driving over to Five Guys for a late supper of hamburgers and fries, passing the very mall that had cost Iso her freedom. Eliza saw Iso cast it a wary glance, as if the mall itself was the source of her problems. In a sense, wasn’t it? Whether it was the apple in Eden, the Roy Rogers on Route 40, or Bonnie Jean, betrothed to another in a village where there was no chance of meeting someone new, and no chance that the love of one’s life might ever disappear—in the end, wasn’t it yearning that led one astray, the pining after something or someone that had been denied?

Iso’s punishment was to end the next day, and Eliza found herself wishing that she might commit a new infraction in the remaining hours, resulting in another week of forced companionship with her family. Hadn’t she noticed how much fun they’d had? Didn’t her sides ache from laughing at her father’s antics with the frosting, the froth of family jokes that had carried them through dinner and then to Rita’s, as if there had never been all those cupcakes? That night, as she tucked in Albie, he said: “Can we do that every Sunday? Cupcakes and Five Guys and Rita’s?” She understood. She felt the same way. But unlike Albie, she knew how hard it was to replicate a perfect day. Wasn’t that the story of yet another movie?

Back in her room, she took Iso’s phone from the nightstand. Tomorrow, at breakfast, she would have to give it back to her, and the wall would go up again, separating Iso from the family.

The phone rang—but not the phone in her hand, the one that sat by itself, dedicated to one caller and one caller only, a caller who had been told never to call on weekends or evenings. It rang once, twice, then fell silent, like someone poking her in the back and running away.

BARBARA LAFORTUNY SAT OUTSIDEthe Baltimore train station, parked in the line reserved for those waiting, staring idly at the enormous man/woman statue with the glowing purple heart. Purple heart made her free-associate—from war, and the honors given for valor, to the old Baltimore thrift store by that name. When she first started teaching, Purple Heart was a terrible taunt used by the children in her class about wearing clothes from there.