Laura Lippman - To The Power Of Three

“Dale,” Chloe said. It wasn’t even nine-thirty, but she was wearing a silk robe, which she had thrown over a decidedly odd outfit, even for Chloe-yoga pants and a tailored shirt. It was as if she couldn’t decide what part of the day she was inhabiting. She held a glass of wine in her hand, and Chloe had never much cared for wine. “What in…?”

“Can I have a drink?”

“Sure.” She closed the door on him, returning to the porch with a second glass and the bottle of Vigonier in which she had already made a considerable dent. “Let’s sit out here. It’s a nice night.”

She doesn’t want me in the house, Dale thought. She’ll never let me in this house again if she can help it.

“It will be loud,” he said. “All those kids driving around, the night of the Senior Ramble and all. The traffic on Old Town Road will be bumper to bumper.”

“I don’t mind noise these days,” Chloe said. “In fact, I find I need a constant wall of sound. I’ve started sleeping with the television set on.”

“I don’t sleep at all.” They were being competitive. Lord help them, they were competing to see who was suffering more.

“I don’t really sleep. I lie in bed, and I listen to CNN. There’s so much death in the world. Every day people die. Soldiers and civilians. Ex-presidents. A busful of people on their way to a riverboat casino in Mississippi.”

“But none of them matter. Not like Kat.”

“You only say that because she was your daughter, Dale. Our daughter. But everyone who dies is someone’s child. Or a parent, or a sibling. This is our grief. But we’re not alone. Every day someone in the world is grieving.”

“No, Kat matters more. She was extraordinary. She would have done important things.”

“Like you? Like me? What have we done with our lives that makes us so vital, so much more important than others?”

“Chloe-”

“We lost our daughter, Dale. You don’t need to make it bigger than it is. It’s big enough.”

Oh, Lord, the world really was upside down. Chloe was wise and calm, while Dale was the hysterical one, scattered and out of control.

From Old Town Road, they heard the first slow rumble of cars, the honking horns, the blasts of hip-hop music, and, over it all, the loud, exuberant voices of eighteen-year-olds flush with the success of surviving their education. The Senior Ramble was under way.

Senior Ramble sucked sober,Peter Lasko was realizing. Or maybe it sucked because he was so much older than these kids. All he knew was that he was bored out of his mind, going from party to party, restaurant to restaurant, all in the hopes of finding some fresh gossip on Josie, Kat, and Perri. Someone had to know something, but the only news was that Perri had been taken off life support this afternoon and Josie Patel had shocked everyone by refusing the Hartigan Scholarship and then ditching graduation altogether.

“I can’t imagine doing what she did.” The girl was Lauren something, a bright-eyed brunette who was going to Beloit, a fact she felt the need to interject in the conversation about every sixty seconds. Peter had semi-tuned her out early on and had no idea what the girl was referencing, but he thought it had something to do with Josie.

“Turning down a scholarship?”

She rolled her eyes. “No, Perri. Killing someone. Josie just had some sort of breakdown. Oh, Janie just came in-she’s going to Beloit, too.” The girl eeled away from him, as if he were less desirable than some high-school senior bound for a second-tier school in Wisconsin.

It was time to move on anyway. This party was dead, a chaperoned event in one of the newer houses. Peter decided to head out to the fringes, the places where the sophomores and juniors gathered for their unofficial parties. There was an old parking lot near the Prettyboy Reservoir, a somewhat risky spot, as the county police would know to check it throughout the night, but it was irresistible-hidden, with a dramatic view and lots of dark places that afforded privacy, or the illusion of privacy.

Yes, a small circle of kids was here, skeezers and skateboarders, drinking beer. It was a mellow scene, in some ways more tolerable than the giddy senior gatherings, where everyone was acting as if they’d just split the atom. Boy, Peter would like to see those self-important seniors in a few months, when they’d been broken down, reduced to freshmen again. He’d been cocky, too, heading into NYU, but he had never been as cocky as those kids. Beloit! Imagine being full of yourself because you had gotten into Beloit.

A boy offered him a beer-a PBR, which was pretty much ten minutes ago as a trend, but cheap as ever-and Peter tried to ease into the conversation as nonchalantly as he pulled the tab on the can.

“I hear Perri Kahn was taken off life support today. So I guess that’s it.”

The boy shrugged. “Saves the county the cost of a trial.”

“Unless there’s another person who was involved. You hear anything about that?”

No one picked up the cue. That was the problem with the skeezer crowd-they were almost too mellow. It was one thing to be nonjudgmental, another to have no opinions, no initiative, no ambition whatever.

A short, dark-haired girl emerged from the shadows, standing just a little too close to Peter, especially given how humid the evening was.

“I’ve heard that, too,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“In fact-” She stopped.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“What’s your name?”

“Eve.”

The girl that Kevin Weaver had pointed out at the funeral, the girl whose very name had made Josie so heated. A slut and a liar, Josie had said.

“You want to take a walk or something?”

“I came with my friends, in their car.”

“I’ve got a car.”

She hesitated, but he knew she wanted to go with him. He just needed to give her an excuse to ditch her friends.

“I’m…I’m so sad tonight, Eve. You know? Kat and I dated, way back. She was my girlfriend, and I knew Perri from doing theater stuff, and I’m just so sad and lonely. I need someone to talk to.”

“Let me find my friends.”

It had been a long timesince Dale had unhooked anyone’s bra one-handed and apparently just as long since anyone had tried this maneuver on Chloe, who was laughing hysterically. That is, she was laughing when she wasn’t letting him kiss her, sloppy and uncoordinated as he was.

He was not sure just when they had ended up on the sofa in the alcove off the kitchen, although he thought it was somewhere between killing the first bottle of wine and starting the second. Yes, that was it. He had followed Chloe into the house when she went to get more wine, and although she had ordered him back to the porch, he realized it was because she knew how susceptible she was to him. But she had started it, being so nice and tender, reminding him of the woman he had fallen in love with so many years ago. It had not been a mistake, after all, loving Chloe, marrying her. Lord, she had given him Kat. The only mistake was in not realizing that the woman he loved had always been here, buried beneath her disappointments and confusion and shame. He didn’t need to award a scholarship to honor his daughter’s memory. All he had to do was love her mother again. They would reconcile, make a new baby. Nothing would have made Kat happier.

“This is crazy,” Chloe kept saying, but if she wasn’t exactly helping him, she wasn’t fighting him either. It was like a test, a quest. He was a knight, and he just had to get past all these barriers-the bra, the yoga pants, which had an unusual side fastening, something with laces. Their history, which was more complicated still. He should have done this four years ago, just planted himself here when Chloe ordered him out of the house and refused to leave.