Free And She Was by Alison Gaylin

thinking about that bike . . . A rotting thing, hiding in the shadows of this coddled house. Over the phone, Nelson Wentz had told Brenna that after Lydia left town, she’d placed her home on the market fully furnished. She wanted to leave it all behind , Brenna had thought. All the furniture, all the memories . . .
    But Iris’s bike, standing in that spot like it hadn’t moved in years . . . That was something different. Was it a provision of Lydia’s? Sell the house, do what you want with the furniture, but the bike stays . Maybe Lydia saw the bicycle as something for Iris to grab on to, should she ever come back alive. Something to tell Iris that her mother might have left, yes, but here, Iris, look at this. Kick the training wheels, run your hand over the seat, feel the imprint of your six-year-old signature. Here is your yellow ribbon, Iris. Here is your proof that you’re still missed, still loved, still my child, always my child . . .
    Or again, maybe Brenna was projecting. She had a habit of attaching such deep meaning to inanimate objects when the truth was, sometimes a cigar was just a cigar—and the same could be said for swing sets and bikes. Things got left outside for years because they’d been forgotten—not remembered.
    A sprinkler caught Brenna in the back of the legs. She moved closer to the window and peered in. The house was dark, but when Brenna pressed her face to it, she could make out a wooden kitchen table, a straight-backed chair at either end, a tall coat stand, and a dry sink, stacked with plates. Fully furnished, all right.
    Brenna stepped back. To the right of the door was the alarm system, its red light glowing over the keypad. She got her penlight out of her purse and shone it on the numbers. Odds were, the Neffs’ alarm system was as unchanged as the rest of the house. And if that was the case . . . Well, most people used significant dates when coming up with combinations, so it was worth a try.
    She would go back to the day she met Lydia Neff.
    Brenna closed her eyes and took a few breaths. She shut out the crickets’ chirping, the whisper of the breeze through the trees behind her. She focused her whole mind on the swish of the sprinklers, because it was water that was important to the memory, the controlled splatter of a fountain.
    The date came to Brenna first—October 23, 1998. Soon after, she felt the air start to chill, for, as she recalled, the two-week-long heat spell had broken on October 22. Instead of the cotton skirt she was wearing, Brenna could feel her old black jeans hugging her legs, the tug of Jim’s hooded Knicks sweatshirt, which she’d put on that morning for comfort and to cover the bruises on her neck.
    Next, Brenna could taste the bottom-of-the-pot coffee she’d forced down before leaving her house. Her mind ticked off that morning’s events: kissing Jim good-bye as he left for work, dropping Maya off at day care, taking the subway to a new car rental place—a Budget on Lexington and Forty-third; accepting a dark blue Chrysler LeBaron from a clerk named Cindy with a distractingly shiny nose; Cindy warning her that the previous renter had been a smoker and giggling before and after the word—as if “smoker” were some sort of euphemism.
    Then she was behind the wheel and heading up Fourteenth Street to the West Side Highway and over the Major Deegan bridge and the Cross County Expressway, all the while trying to ignore the stale ash-stink in the car, how it brought out her headache, how it crept into her skin and made the damage from last night . . . the ache in her face and stomach, the cuts on her knuckles, the bruised flesh about her jaw and shoulders . . . how that smell somehow caused all that pain to come alive again, to blossom . . .
    The freshness of the hurt makes her nervous—as if she’d managed to cast a disappearing spell on the wounds, but only for this morning, and now it’s wearing off. Brenna checks the side of her face in the