Chapter 13
DI SAID SHE was spiraling. Losing her cool.
But despite Louisa’s recounting, Anna was convinced that it was Mimi who had sent her daughter flying into the pool on that May afternoon.
They were lucky that it hadn’t been worse.
Afterward, Anna had scooped Louisa up and inspected her foot—it was a deep cut, but nothing too serious, even she could admit that—and had gone into the women’s locker room while Di watched Ben.
She bandaged it with the help of one of the health club attendants and then called it a day, a day ruined by Louisa’s “accident.”
“It was just an accident,” Di said. “Kids trip.”
“You don’t understand,” Anna said. “First, she comes up to me with that weird speech. Then I see her, and then . . .” She trailed off.
Mimi had been sending a warning, waving at the door.
She wanted Anna to know that it was her.
But why? What was the point of all this?
It had been half a year since the drama surrounding the dance.
Anna had kept her head low, avoiding practically all of Hamilton.
The police report was old news at this point.
What could possibly be accomplished by any of this?
“I think that the best thing to do in all of this is to just let it go,” Di offered.
They had met at Stiles Pond, in Boxford, where a mutual friend was a member.
No more Life Time for Anna, she decided.
No more risk-taking this summer. She would find somewhere else to swim, and Di was up for practically anything.
Hadn’t they always been experts at seeking out the best swimming spots as kids, anyway, even when they didn’t have pools of their own?
Anna would return to her roots, then, rely on her wits to get her through the hot summer, avoid Hamilton and its ladies like the plague.
Except. Except, except, except. Mimi Mar waving at her from the doors.
Anna couldn’t let that image go. A woman unafraid to send a child into a pool like that was probably unafraid of pretty much anything.
And Anna, too, had always considered herself the kind of person who was unafraid of bullies.
Mimi Mar was a bully, and Anna had never had much use for those types.
Coursing through Anna’s mind were all the possible and probable remedies.
Complain to the school. (Useless.) Post to her (since deleted) social media.
(Social suicide.) Reach out to the state or local government.
(Possibly helpful.) File another police report.
(Unclear about its efficacy.) Demand that the superintendent remove Mimi Mar due to dereliction of duty.
(Maybe the smartest option.) Once again, she considered Denny’s reaction to all of this: no, no, no, no, just do not do any of this.
But he was non-confrontational, and where did that ever get you at the end of the day?
Problem-solving with a person like Mimi had to be aggressive, it had to be finite, and it had to involve a third party.
Denny had his own expression for Anna when she was agitated like this.
Poking the bear, he liked to say. He had grown up in the kind of house where everyone had been better served to keep a head down and mind his own business.
It hadn’t been the same, in Anna’s freewheeling childhood, where her hippie parents had encouraged all manner of free expression.
Her mother had wanted her daughter to become the kind of fully realized creative person that she herself had never gotten to be.
Gerhard Richter she was not, of course, and her dried-up paints—well, they could attest to that.
But Anna Plummer had certainly lived up to the part of the expectation set by her parents about speaking her mind.
She was, in this way, a ruthless interrogator, unwilling to give up if she felt some wrong had been done.
And here was her bruised Louisa, the girl not even aware of the crime perpetrated against her.
Anna couldn’t let it go. The more she wrestled with the idea of doing nothing—of letting it go—the more stuck in her conviction she became.
To walk away was to give Mimi exactly what she wanted: a crack at power, the knowledge that she had intimidated them in precisely the way that she had desired.
And Anna simply couldn’t live with that.
Kick a hornet’s nest and you must expect hornets.
It’s simple physics, though Anna did not know, exactly, how fierce or angry these hornets would be.
She wrote a letter—quickly, without thinking much—to Superintendent Morris about Mimi and what she had seen.
She wrote about the incident at Life Time.
About Harper and that look and the smile—proof of nothing, Anna realized, but still, it had felt like something, and wasn’t something .
. . something? She wrote about that newsletter, offering access to some, though not all.
About the police report. She attached some of the screenshots.
The accusations. Anna even mentioned the meeting she had with Mimi at Honeycomb, how Mimi had denied that Hamilton had any problems at all.
How could the president of the PTO claim perfection and still claim to be fit?
She wasn’t fit, Anna knew; she should be removed.
Of course, Anna already knew that she now seemed like the deranged one.
The one trying to prove the unprovable. Still, she included a formal request that Mimi be removed as the president of the PTO.
She was sure there would be consequences.
To sit by idly, though, allowing Mimi to parade around with her posse of women, dictating the rules of Hamilton—who could stay and who could go—that Anna couldn’t stand for.
She thought about how many other girls had been tossed aside, how many mothers had come before, brushed up against the wrath, had cowered in deflection, had been scared silent.
Surely there had been people before her, women who had seen the flash of anger and who had walked away instead of confronting it.
It was never true, Anna knew, that a person was really alone in a battle, only that she was the first in pushing through the door.
Hitting Send on the email felt like a relief.
Whatever came next, that was the decision of the school, administrators, policymakers, the people who held other people accountable.
She had done the right thing, she was convinced, had told the truth when it was hard to come to the surface against people who were cruel for no reason.
She was always telling her kids to do things that were brave and uncomfortable, even when Denny was saying the opposite: that to ride the wave to completion was better than getting caught in the tumbler of it, better than getting caught in the bone-crusher, laid to waste over the rocks.
Later, Anna dropped the kids off at Di’s house for a playdate and drove out to Newburyport for a run.
It was a long, out-of-the-way place to go if you were just looking to knock off four or five miles, but Di got it; she understood this need to be alone, to get away when you were mobbed by feelings and family.
On the exit ramp, Anna’s was the first car at the light.
A bearded man stood at the corner, where a guardrail separated the highway. He held a sign.
I’m just trying to get through the day. Need some money to eat and survive.
Anna reached for her wallet, and then she stopped.
She pushed the button that locked the doors instead.
What was this impulse inside her, the one that made her see the worst in people?
This man, standing out in the June sun: Would he do it if he wasn’t earnestly in need?
And even if he was lying, so what? Why not give people a chance, like Di and Denny were always telling her to do?
The man with the beard locked eyes with her, but she looked away.
The truth was, she felt bad—about herself, about the fact that she would no doubt go on her run and stop for a donut afterward, about how just one split-second decision could have changed the trajectory of both their days.
But then the light changed and she applied just enough pressure on the gas to disappear into the wavy, soft-tar heat of the day, and she never thought of the man or the money or the things she had done or the things she hadn’t again.
But then, in the settling, late-day heat, Anna felt the rhythm of the road.
Clap, clap, clap, sneakers on pavement, which was a little soft and a little sticky.
She looped around the water, stared at the kids smoking cigarettes where the reservoir road dipped down low onto a bridge—Parliaments, of course—and picked up her pace where the maples and oaks created a nest of shade into the backwoods of West Newbury.
A calm had settled through her, here on the road.
She could hear her own breathing, her own heartbeat, and it was a miraculous thing to know that you had done something brave and smart and protective, that you had made a choice that might rise back up like sewage but that, for right now, rested in the hands of other people.
Turning at a fork in the road, she crossed over toward farmland, where a handful of colonial homes sprouted from the ground like the tall grasses that surrounded them, like they had always been there, like they, too, had been planted and nurtured with time.
She could, of course, run closer to her house, in the spiderweb of trails in Hamilton, but there was a certain peace in familiarity, in taking to the road where you had always taken to the road.
That’s when she saw a familiar face, Rachel Kincaid, formerly of Newburyport, now of Hamilton, wearing a singlet and running toward her.
Her mother, Anna now remembered, still had a house over on Carter Street, small and tidy, a Colonial with clapboard siding.
“Rachel!” Anna shouted, with a wave. It felt good to see someone familiar. Running was solitary, but she always liked to share the commiserative pain with someone who understood the sport.
But it was as if Anna’s voice had been swallowed up in the dust of July.
Rachel kept her eyes to the ground and ran right past her without even looking up.
That night at Riverview, back when she was picking up a pizza, it had all been different, but now, the water was tainted.
Even her old friends were enemies. Anna kept right on running.
Past the purpling flowers, the small and squat houses, she dipped back into the woods, just in time for daylight to take one final bow, and she tried to convince herself that this would be fine, that she would find resolution, that Mimi would be punished for what she had done to Louisa—and, of course, to anyone else she had harmed in Hamilton—that the world would be slipped back on its axis, that she, Anna Plummer, would come to run this road again refreshed, a new woman, armed with the kind of confidence one assumes when they have done the thing they know was totally and completely and unimpeachably right.