Free Aquamarine by Carol Anshaw Page B

is the only regular churchgoer in the group, says the blessing, thanking God for Olivia (with whom she is still tentative, edging slowly into grandmotherhood) and for “new friends.”
    After dinner, after the coffee and pies—pumpkin, mince, and chess—have gone around, they all groan and push themselves away from the table and totter off, either to clatter away in the kitchen with dishes and leftovers and vast sheets of foil and plastic containers, or to find soft spots in the living room, where they can collapse and digest.
    Jesse takes Olivia upstairs to nurse her, something they both enjoy. Jesse is nuts about this baby. She couldn’t have guessed this. She had no idea she had this particular set of feelings inside her. A lot of the time it’s as though she is drunk with love. And it’s a right love, about something real and permanent. Not some riling thing making all the hairs on her neck stand up and setting everything else on edge.
    All that is behind her; she can feel herself sealed away from it. She has put it on the other side of the liquid wall she sees as the border of her life as she’s living it. Beyond this, hidden from view, are the rejected choices, like Wayne.
    Also the unmade ones. Even though she can’t see these clearly, she feels them pulsing out there, all the unmet others, all the untried ways of pushing against the fates. She knows they exist, though, by the shape of their absence, by the shadows she can just barely make out on the other side of the membrane.
     
    When she has put the baby down for a nap, Jesse joins the others in the living room. The TV is on one of the soaps, but not the right one. Everyone’s talking, though, nobody’s really watching, and so Jesse picks up the remote and clicks it to “M.D./R.N.” Rhonda is on the witness stand, lying about where she was on the night of Stephen Poole’s death. (The net is closing in on her.) But Jesse is not really listening. She’s bothered by the bandage on Rhonda’s hand. She has been wearing it since sometime in late summer. Supposedly this was about an accident in her kitchen, something she did to herself on account of being rattled about the murder. Jesse never bought this. Anyone with the presence of mind to shoot a guy, then stuff him into a garment bag and drag him out of her apartment and down the service elevator and dump him into the river with dumbbells tied to his wrists and ankles is not going to accidentally stuff her hand in the food processor along with a bunch of carrots.
    They try not to show it—the hand—but this is hard in close-ups, like now, when Rhonda is bursting into tears in the courtroom (a big show for the jury), sobbing violently into her hands, one of them wrapped tightly in gauze. She suspects the hand problem is not Rhonda’s, but rather belongs to the actress who plays her. She’d like to know what happened. It bothers her to seem to know whatever there is to know, to operate on all the information that’s offered, and still be missing some piece of knowledge, the one that would make everything come clear.
    This has been the first blue day to surface from weeks of gray, and the afternoon is in its last spectacular moments as they head home. Jesse is driving, Neal next to her in the front. Willie is catnapping in the back. The baby, in her car seat, is patting the top of his head and making soft noises, a private song.
    “Eighty,” Neal says. He always keeps a casual eye on the speedometer when Jesse’s driving. She lifts her foot off the accelerator, and simultaneously lifts her eyes from the road in front of them. There on the clean slate of sky is a smoky script being scrawled by a plane, just coming off the loop of the final “e” of Jesse. Her heart takes a thrilling deer’s leap and she feels her fingernails cut into her palms around the steering wheel.
    It’s hard to pretend not to notice skywriting, but Neal manages.

Old Souls

July 1990 New York City
    J ESSE IS STANDING at the