Chapter Sixteen Kiersten
Chapter Sixteen
Kiersten
Kiersten wiped the tears from her cheeks as a neighbor she’d never seen before strode toward them on long legs, her caftan flowing in colorful waves as she moved. Tall, with red hair and scarlet lipstick, she looked sort of . . . dramatic.
If this woman were a state, she would not be Minnesota.
Her house across the street looked dramatic too. Instead of a tidy front yard like Piper’s, or an attempt at a tidy front yard, like hers, this neighbor had a sort of wildflower meadow sprouting on her lawn.
Wind chimes hung from her front porch, and she had little signs tacked up on the wall beside the front door, including one that said In this house, we believe the Force is with us, always.
Kiersten rummaged through her exhausted brain, trying to remember what Henry and Myrtle had told her about this lady who lived across the street.
She wrote geology textbooks or something? And she had a daughter in middle school.
A thirteen- or fourteen-year-old girl trailed after the woman, clad in some kind of cape, her short hair dyed blue. Behind her large round glasses, the girl’s eyes were rimmed with red.
Had this child been forgotten at a truck stop too?
“Is everything okay?” the woman asked, casting an anxious glance at Kiersten.
“Hi, Rosamund.” Piper rose and greeted the woman. “Thanks for coming over. This is our new neighbor, Kiersten. She’s had an . . . eventful . . . evening.”
“Can I help with anything?” Rosamund asked.
“Actually, would you mind ordering some pizza?” Piper asked. “And then maybe come outside and join us?”
Rosamund looked surprised. Perhaps she’d been hoping for a more dramatic mission . . . battling a grease fire in the kitchen or performing the Heimlich maneuver.
“Sure.” Rosamund nodded. “I can do that.”
“I’m gonna stay here with Kiersten until the situation is resolved. But my girls haven’t eaten dinner yet, and Kiersten’s kids are probably hungry too,” Piper explained.
Kiersten could read the desire to be helpful and the desire to know what the heck was going on wrestling across Rosamund’s face. “But is everything—”
“Everything is fine,” Piper assured her.
“It’s a long story.” Then she gestured at her own three girls standing at the edge of the driveway, looking worried and at the boys clustered on the porch.
“But the police are on their way,” she said, lowering her voice, “so if you could take all these kids out in the backyard and keep them occupied with pizza, that would help a lot.”
Rosamund opened her mouth, then closed it again, obviously making a heroic effort not to ask more questions. Instead, she nodded and waved her phone in the air. “C’mon, kids. Tell me what kind of pizza you want.”
Piper glanced at Kiersten as the crowd of kids surged into the backyard. “Do you want to go inside?” Piper asked.
She shook her head vehemently. “No.”
Her arms and legs felt heavy, as though sand filled every pore. She wasn’t sure she could walk inside even if she wanted to.
And she didn’t want to. She needed to see the patrol car the moment it appeared. And she wanted Johnny to see his mother the moment the police car pulled into the driveway.
They sat in silence for a few moments as Kiersten tried to absorb the terror and relief of the last twenty minutes. Slowly, the numbness paralyzing her mind and body gave way, and the horror of what she’d done flooded through her again.
“I left my son at a truck stop on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.” How could she have done such a thing? “I am a terrible, terrible, terrible mother.”
Piper shot her a sideways glance and flashed a wry smile. “But you remembered to bring the other three home.”
Kiersten looked at her neighbor for a long moment. She found no judgment in Piper’s brown eyes, just compassion. For a split second, her anxiety retreated, like the moon passing behind a cloud. Then a bubble of laughter rose up from somewhere deep in her gut. She tried to hold it back.
You remembered to bring the other three home.
She snorted. She chuckled. Then the dam broke and a torrent of hysterical laughter washed over her body. She laughed so hard she cried, shoulders silently heaving, until the gush subsided into a sort of hiccup-sob.
“This is impossible,” she said, wiping her eyes.
“What’s impossible?” Piper asked.
“Raising four boys in a place where I have no friends and no family to help me and a husband who travels all the time. Luke is dyslexic and flunking all his classes and got into a fight. Matthew has Little League shoulder and no friends. And on the rare occasions when I actually see my husband, we don’t talk, we discuss logistics.
My family is falling apart. And do you know what I think the solution is? ”
“What?”
“Driving.” Kiersten gave a bitter laugh. “Driving to Sports. Activities. Practices. Games. I seem to think that my children exist to be coached. Tutored. Driven. It’s all I do. It’s all we ever do. Drive to school. Drive to practice. Drive to games. And to what end?”
The corner of Piper’s mouth twisted in a rueful half smile. “At least you’re driving your kids to something that might lead to a college scholarship someday. I’m driving to Irish dance.”
Kiersten had heard of this, but they didn’t have Irish dance in her part of rural Minnesota. They had ice fishing. And hockey. Scandinavian culture didn’t seem to lend itself to the more exuberant forms of self-expression, like dancing.
“What is Irish dance exactly?” Kiersten asked.
Piper sighed. “It’s an extremely complex, highly technical, and very entertaining form of dancing. And you do it all without moving your arms.”
Kiersten worked to keep her expression neutral. That did sound a little . . . impractical. But she wouldn’t say that out loud to this incredibly wonderful neighbor who had just orchestrated the return of her lost and found son.
Instead she nodded, as though this made perfect sense. “Okay.”
“It’s really difficult to master,” Piper explained, resting her chin on her hand.
“You have to be both smart and athletic. And one of my daughters is really good. She’s a perfectionist, and she likes that it’s exacting and difficult.
But there’s no big payoff for Irish dance.
The best we could hope for is like”—she paused and waved a hand in the air—“a touring company of Riverdance or something. There are no Olympics. No Division I college scholarships. And yet, here I am, spending thousands of hours and dollars, driving my daughter to Irish dance at a studio in Reston on I-66, going west, at rush hour, three days a week.”
Kiersten shuddered. She’d lived in the DC region long enough to experience the vehicular horror of westbound I-66 at rush hour.
“Do all your girls do Irish dance?”
“Of course not,” Piper snorted. “That would be too easy. One does tap and ballet. The other one sings and plays piano. They do musicals. Children’s theater. And where does it all lead?”
“Anorexia and madness?” Kiersten asked.
“Possibly,” Piper conceded. “Or if they are very lucky, they could grow up to be Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.”
“What about Broadway?”
Piper shrugged. “My girls are talented. But I don’t know if they’re that talented.”
“So why do it?”
“Because what if they are that talented?” Piper asked, her voice plaintive.
“Am I going to be the person who sabotages their Broadway dreams? All because I was too lazy to do a little driving? And they enjoy it. Most of the time. Even Bella, who’s started to pull her hair out the night before auditions. ”
“Do you enjoy it?” Kiersten asked.
“Does it matter?”
“Maybe it does matter,” Kiersten said slowly. “Is your family happy?”
Piper paused and seemed to consider the question. “Happy enough? But I mean . . . happier than what? Amish people?”
Kiersten chewed on her lower lip and tried to find the right words. “I wish . . . I wish we could just drop out for a while and see what it’s like. To have something to compare our modern insanity with.”
“Didn’t we all do that during Covid?”
“That was different.” Kiersten shook her head.
“I’m not talking about isolating and avoiding people.
I’m talking about slowing down and finding a different way to do things.
Like our neighbor.” She jutted her chin in the direction of the home next door, with its charming window boxes and a tasteful pumpkin display.
“You mean the Influencer?”
Kiersten’s eyes widened. “She’s an influencer?”
Piper nodded. “Half a million followers on Instagram. Hygge Mom, or Urban Chicken Mom, something like that.”
“What does hygge mean again?”
“It’s like Scandinavian, for cozy and shit.”
“Well then, yeah,” Kiersten admitted. “Like her, but without aprons and a chicken coop.”
“Just quit . . . everything,” Piper repeated in a soft voice.
Kiersten nodded dreamily. “All of it. No school. No sports. No tutors. No screens. No so-called ‘enrichment activities.’” She made air quotes with her fingers. “An experiment. For the rest of the school year.”
Piper looked grave, as though Kiersten had suggested robbing a bank or going to Walmart on Black Friday. “No screens?”
“No screens,” Kiersten repeated. “We recreate our own childhood. We use our imagination. We play outside. We read.”
“What do you think would happen?”
Kiersten shrugged. “I don’t know what would happen, and that’s why I’m afraid to try it.
Maybe we’d still be stressed out and disconnected.
Maybe that much time with our children would make us even crazier.
Maybe they’d go into withdrawal if we took away Minecraft. Or maybe we’d be relaxed. Happy. Free.”
Silence settled over the front porch as she considered the implications of the word free.
Free from the rush of getting ready for school in the morning. The rush of after-school activities. The rush of being somewhere at a certain time in a certain uniform. The rush of weekends spent driving from one game or activity to another.
Free from the arguments and yelling about screen time. Free from homework and school projects. Free from the terrible rush of negative adrenaline when she checked the PowerSchool portal and found that Luke had all those missing assignments.
Or when she dug in the bottom of Johnny’s backpack and found the dreaded red homework folder and realized that she hadn’t checked it all week.
What would it feel like to be liberated from all that?
Free from expectations and competition and labels. Who’s in advanced math? Who’s in the gifted and talented program? Who’s starting? Who’s on the bench? Who has learning “issues”? Who’s “talented”? Who’s popular? Who’s not?
A beat-up Kia pulled up, and a young man exited with three boxes of pizza. Rosamund emerged from the backyard, paid him, and took the pizzas back to the kids. Then she returned to the porch and sat down beside them.
“Thanks for the pizza,” Kiersten said. “Let me know how much I owe you.”
Rosamund dismissed this with a wave of her hand. “Happy to help. We’ve had a rough day. And being with your kids back there . . . well, it’s been nice for Guinevere.”
Kiersten turned to examine her neighbor more closely, and this time she noticed smudged mascara under her red-rimmed eyes.
“Are you all right?” Kiersten asked.
“No.” Rosamund’s shoulders slumped. “I am not.”