Free When She Was Gone by Gwendolen Gross

instead of Wednesday so she wouldn’t have the lint of ordinary days to contend with before she had to contend with the women. She’d been thrown from her easy horse of order when Linsey had failed to show up to babysit for Johnny after camp yesterday—she’d come home fromJordan’s hovel just a few minutes late, but Johnny was sitting on the back step crying, locked out of his own house, because Linsey hadn’t met him there. Linsey had been so reliable; Reeva thought, for just a second, that she’d screwed up the schedule herself, but once they were inside and Johnny had a tall stack of apology Oreos, Reeva checked the calendar. It had been Linsey’s fault, and she didn’t ever answer her cell when Reeva called her for an explanation. Reeva didn’t have the parents’ number handy—they weren’t the type of neighbors whose number graced her bulletin board. She’d just suffered her small fury and moved on.
    Now here were Charlie’s leavings. The kids’ thousand plates. Only three kids, but they used twelve place settings for the few bites they consumed before their clattering departures.
    She wasn’t really in the mood. Never mind that she started the Group to begin with—just as she had started the Five back in high school. Her select few. Never mind that the weekly meetings kept her from changing the wallpaper in her own living room once a month now—like that postpartum-maddened woman in The Yellow Wallpaper —now that she didn’t have work to keep her distracted. Johnny didn’t need her as much as he used to. He was seven, and though he still had ADD, would always have ADD, he was getting by in camp, and in school. He had an IEP now, a plan to help him through the meltdowns and the times he sat at his desk lining up the bits of paper he’d torn from the edge of the holes on his notebook. No medication: Charlie had wanted to try it, sothey’d tried it, and it made Johnny’s mouth dry, kept him up at night, caused him to gain six pounds—though it was supposed to impede appetite. He didn’t need that, to be chubby as well as distracted. He had always been beautiful: pale gold hair, when her other children were brown haired. Green eyes, the kind with the golden center and rusty flecks in the irises. She’d loved him as a baby, perhaps more than her others, not that she played favorites, but Johnny had been hard to soothe, he’d needed her so much; she’d despaired of ever not carrying him in the snuggly, and then he was three, and then because the teachers had hinted he had something wrong with him, she was taking him out of the extended-day preschool all her children had attended. Then the gym class where he was the only one who wouldn’t come to circle. The two-hour Montessori class was too much independence; he dumped paint on the rug squares when all the other children carried their Dixie cups and brushes with care. They didn’t disparage him there, but they did suggest that at four he might not be ready for preschool. Then specialists, then a diagnosis. The drugs when he was five. One month later she took him off, not really consulting with Charlie; not really caring if he cared.
    Reeva met with the school social worker once a month or so. Things were under control. They didn’t even know at camp, hadn’t needed to know, which she considered a coup. The neighbors didn’t know; her mother-in-law didn’t know. Her sister knew, but her sister had breast cancer, which had murdered their mother, so she was deep into her own battleand didn’t help or hurt much for knowing. The Group didn’t know. She’d thought about telling them, but it felt like giving away a part of Johnny, her golden boy.
    By the time the women rang her doorbell and came in, not waiting for Reeva to open the screen door for them, more comfortable in her house then their own (or at least that was her