At flag raising, Rachel looked over at Matthew as he was yawning. He caught her glance and smiled with half his mouth, like he wasn’t sure if he was supposed to or not.
Rachel offered a mischievous smile back, then flipped her hair behind her. She grabbed Fiona’s arm, and they walked arm in arm to the dining room. He followed behind them the whole way. Rachel had never liked coffee before, but at breakfast she was so tired that she decided she wanted a cup. In the dining hall, boys and girls sat on opposite sides, but as Rachel went up to the coffee station in the middle—which was supposed to be for counselors only—Matthew came rushing toward her.
“Hey,” he said conspiratorially. “Are you allowed to be up here?”
“I don’t know,” Rachel said without an iota of worry.
“Let me get it for you,” he said, taking the cup from her.
“Skim milk, two Sweet’N Lows,” Rachel said, which was the way her mom fixed hers.
He handed the coffee and the Sweet’N Low packets to Rachel and said, “Want to sit together on the lawn during free period?”
He was just a boy again—nervous and human. Whatever he had been the night before, in the middle of all the sweating and heaving, that was not who Rachel was looking at now. Now he was a boy who would do whatever she wanted.
Fiona could have her stupid horse.
“Maybe,” Rachel said, and turned away, flipping her hair behind her once more.
When she got back and sat down at the table, Fiona leaned against her. She had been watching. “Did something happen with him last night?”
“Maybe,” she said.
“What did you guys do?”
“None of your business,” Rachel said, stirring the Sweet’N Low into her coffee.
The excitement on Fiona’s face fell away. “That’ll give you cancer,” she said about the Sweet’N Low.
“See if I care,” Rachel said, and took a scalding sip.
2
Denise smoked one cigarette after another on the drive home, lighting each new one with the butt from the last. She felt a stronger urge to smoke in the country than she did in the city, as if it were the clean air that didn’t belong in her lungs. She had the radio tuned to classic rock and was pushing eighty on the Taconic. She just wanted to get home.
The blue lights of a police car lit up in her rearview mirror. She knew immediately that they were for her. “Fuck,” she muttered to herself, and put on her blinker as she slowed and pulled onto the shoulder of the parkway.
She put out her cigarette in the car’s ashtray and turned off the radio. The cop car, with the words HIGHWAY POLICE stamped on the hood, slowed and parked behind her. She checked her reflection quickly in the overhead mirror and pinched her cheeks and lips for a flush of color. As the officer walked toward her, he grew larger in the side-view mirror. Aviator sunglasses obscured his eyes. She rolled down her driver’s-side window.
“Hello, Officer,” she said. He pushed his sunglasses to the top of his head, and now she saw what she was working with. He was probably in his early twenties, with chubby cheeks and a hint of a moustache that looked like it was having trouble growing. She took a quick look at his name tag: OFFICER DANIEL MCGILL.
“Ma’am, are you aware of how fast you were driving?” Officer McGill asked, tentatively peering into Denise’s car.
“Was I speeding?” Denise had at least fifteen years on him. “I had no idea.”
“I clocked you going eighty-three in a fifty-five.”
Denise gasped—which, as soon as she did it, felt ridiculous to her. But she did what she had to do. “I’m so sorry, Officer McGill,” she said, bringing an equally ridiculous hand to her mouth.
He took a pad and a pen from the breast pocket of his uniform and wrote something down. “License and registration, please,” he said.
Denise beamed up at him. She wasn’t as young as she used to be, but she was still attractive. Only, he wasn’t even looking at her.
“Do you have kids, Officer?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“I was visiting my daughter at camp,” Denise said. “I still have another six weeks without her, and she’s so young.” She saw this elicited no response from him. “She’s all I’ve got,” she tried.
“It sounds difficult, ma’am.” His voice cracked into a higher register, and he cleared his throat. “But if you could just give me your license and registration, I can run your information, and this will be over in no time.”
She imagined how freeing it might be to start the ignition and drive over the divider onto the other side of the Taconic and go back in the direction she came from, to scoop up Rachel and bring her home. Every summer, Denise would see how happy her daughter became when she got to camp. But then, during Denise’s drive back to the city, her regrets would grow. Rachel didn’t belong there. She was a city girl, like Denise: hard and street-smart and tough. Denise knew it took two people to make one kid, but she resented every hint of Mark she saw in her daughter. Every time Rachel asked for a designer bag or went to the suburbs to ride horses with Fiona, Denise’s heart flinched. That kind of spoiled, materialistic behavior could only have been borne from him.
“Let me tell you,” Denise said, trying to make herself emotional. “It’s the biggest sacrifice of your life. Don’t ever do it.” She wiped a fake tear from her eye. “They need you, and they need you, and then, just like that”—she snapped her fingers—“they don’t need you.”
“Ma’am,” Officer McGill said, “I’m sorry that you’re upset, but if you’re not going to cooperate, I’m going to have to ask you to step outside of the car.”
“And you know why?” she said. “It’s because you can’t give them what they need anymore. Imagine that. A mother, not being able to give her own daughter what she needs.”
Denise opened her purse and took out her wallet. She opened it, and then remembered the unpaid tickets. For some time now she had been receiving the envelopes with the red block letters on the front of them, and she had ignored them, quietly hoping they would go away. Mark always paid for a rental car in the summer for Denise and Rachel, for camp. Somehow last summer she’d managed to get pulled over several times. She couldn’t help the feelings of rage that fucking camp brought out in her.
Quickly, she closed the wallet.
“Officer, I completely forgot my license back in the city,” she lied, rapidly thinking of ways to get out of this.
“Ma’am, if you don’t have your license with you, I’m going to need your name and Social Security number.”
“Does it really need to come to that?” she said. He didn’t smile back at her. So she took her hand and reached outside the car window, toward his leg, and grazed his inner thigh with her fingers.
But she could make contact for only a moment before he slapped her hand away and pulled the gun from his holster, which, she then realized, in an instant of panic, was inches from the spot she’d touched.