Blair
In Henry’s bedroom they kiss and kiss, until he asks if he can unbutton her jeans.
She is nervous and excited and afraid, and she says yes.
He asks if he can touch her, and she says yes to that too, and guides his hands in the way she’s learned she likes when she’s experimented, alone in her room, when everyone else has gone to bed, or sometimes in the bath, the rush of the water into the tub filling her ears, the pressure building and building in her body until there’s a catch sprung somewhere within her, then the helpless, glorious release.
At first it’s strange, dreamlike, having someone else touch her in places only her own fingers have known.
After a little while, he seems to understand what she likes, the pressure, the direction, and she lets her hand fall to the bed, lets her eyes close and her head fall back, lets herself feel everything until she gets hot all over, and the sensation spreads throughout her body, and she has no choice but to let go.
She rides her bike home in the chill of the autumn air, tender against the seat, little aftershocks traveling up her spine as she shifts and pedals, the feeling alternating between pleasant and nearly unbearable.
There’s a smell of the first fires in the air, woody and sweet.
She had felt so self-conscious saying goodbye to Henry’s mom in the driveway, her cheeks flushed and hair mussed.
She had hoped to leave before Diana was back, but she and Henry couldn’t stop kissing goodbye.
So there she was, in the driveway, sticky and slick between her legs, Henry’s mom telling her how she had just been with Iris, how they had filled all the balloons for the fall homecoming carnival together and how beautifully Iris had planned everything.
She almost calls her mother out—Diana said you did it last night—but then she realizes what she has.
Iris is lying. She wouldn’t normally think much of it, but since finding those things in her mother’s closet last week she’s got a question fizzling in her mind.
The note in a stranger’s writing lit up in her head like a neon sign.
It feels absurd to think it, yet she can’t help it: Is Iris having an affair?
She parks just behind Iris’s crossover and sets off on the trail she knows her mother favors. She is surprised to see how many construction vehicles line the road, at how loudly the machinery booms as they take down trees, lines of orange caution tape marking the perimeter of the site.
The path slopes downward, and Blair takes the hill, looking out for her mother’s pink sweater between the trees.
She’s lost in thought until she hears a snap of a branch.
She slides behind a trunk and peers downhill.
Her mother is alone, carrying something.
Blair squints. Iris has three big stones in her hands.
She’s bringing them from the direction of the construction site, walking downstream.
There’s an old stone wall that runs through the woods, remnants from the town’s Revolutionary War days, and Iris steps over the wall and disappears from Blair’s view.
When Iris steps over the wall again she’s empty-handed.
She walks back in the direction she came from, returns in a few minutes with another armful of stones.
A third time, Iris disappears, then comes back, this time the stones smaller, and she has to cradle them close to her body to keep from dropping any.
She looks blank but determined, and Blair can’t help but wonder if she’s watching her mother have some sort of psychotic break.
The small stones seem to be the last, and across the distance Blair can hear the clink of them together, her mother hidden but busy underneath the boughs of the tree, arranging the rocks. Then it’s quiet for a long time.
She waits for five minutes, ten, fifteen, but her mother doesn’t come back up the path.
There are shouts from the construction site, the sounds of saws and stump grinders working away at the woods.
Blair waits another five minutes before she tiptoes her way back up the path to her car.
On the way home she wonders if she should call her father, call Aunt Margot, call someone who can help her understand, or even just marvel at, the insanity she’s just seen.
Her mother saving a bunch of rocks from demolition? It doesn’t make any sense.
At the carnival Iris looks tidy as ever. Not even a crumb of dirt on her pink sweater. A bright smile for each person she sells a ticket to. The other mothers on the PTA compliment her on a job well done.
“How’d it go with the balloons?” Blair asks her.
“Oh, easy with the helium tank.”
Blair stares at her, in wonder and awe. How easy it is for Iris to lie to her.
As the carnival winds down, Iris tells Blair to order takeout at home—she’ll have to stay here and help clean up, but Blair should go enjoy her Saturday with her friends.
Normally Blair would relish the time alone, but she’s uneasy.
She doesn’t leave until she watches Iris absorbed in the task of collecting paper plates, boxing up extra food which she’ll donate to the homeless shelter.
Instead of heading home, Blair drives back to the construction site. It’s dark now and she only has her phone as a flashlight, but she makes her way down the path, this time descending all the way to the creek, to where the stone wall bisects the woods.
She pushes the pine bough aside to see the place where her mother had been hidden from her earlier that day. She stands before the two tidy piles of rocks, nearly identical in size, the largest ones arranged at the base, the smaller ones piled on top.
Cairns, she remembers, a word from her history class. Monuments. Memorials. Used across cultures, an ancient practice. Her teacher, Mr. Corrigan, sweeping his arms to indicate the vastness of distance and time.
In front of the cairns there’s a patch of dirt that’s rougher than the rest, as though it had been dug up.
Her mother had a trowel with her. Had she buried something here?
Blair hasn’t brought any tools, so she breaks a branch from a nearby tree and begins to scrape at the earth.
She digs until she’s sweating and her fingers ache.
The night has gotten cold and it creeps into her lungs.
But she keeps working until she hits something hard, then finds a rock to scrape through the rest of the way.
With numb, swollen fingers she gets her phone from her pocket and shines the flashlight on what looks to be the top of a small metal box.
Blair digs some more until finally she can pry the box loose with her fingers.
She stares at it for a moment before she springs the latch, her fingers and nails caked in filth and throbbing with the strain.
Inside is an envelope. Blair handles it tenderly and still muddies it with her fingerprints.
Unlike the note in the duffel bag, she recognizes the handwriting as Iris’s immediately.
She sits and reads in the light of her phone flashlight. When she is finished she feels dizzy, out of breath.
The wind picks up and rattles the orange tape marking the perimeter of the construction zone. She places the message back in the box and with shaking hands buries it best she can as the cold of the descending night seeps through her sweatshirt, sinks into her skin.