Harry and Vivian Make a Plan
Her last summer at the lake, Tess heard the voices almost every night, more often than ever before.
She stayed up late arranging the crayons in her box alphabetically or recording the sixth letter on each page of her copy of The Hobbit or lining up Legos on the floor of her closet.
She shared a bedroom with Vivian, so she always knew when Vivian came to bed—and when Vivian did not come to bed.
Tess often had to scramble back under the sheets from her desk or her closet—wherever she happened to be doing the voices’ bidding—when she heard Vivian’s footsteps in the hall outside her door.
She had not told anyone about the voices, even though as the summer wore on, they become more insistent that if Tess did not do some mindless, meaningless act, something horrible would happen.
What will happen? she wanted to ask. Tell me what it is and then I’ll decide if that’s bad enough to make it worth my time doing all these silly tasks.
But the voices never answered such questions.
Conversations with the voices were distinctly one-sided.
One night, when she still heard their echoes even though she had written down all the integers from one to a thousand, she cracked her door, hoping the unintelligible whispers of her father and Vivian chatting by the fire, as they did every night, would lull her to sleep.
But as soon as the door was open, she felt drawn through it by those voices.
She crept down the corridor and hid behind the couch, close enough to hear every word—words that imprinted in her psyche and made this the second of the nights on the island she would never forget.
“Are you sure want to do this?” asked Vivian. “What about Marie?”
“I’ve given the past fifteen years to Marie,” said Harry. “It’s time we did this. This may be our only opportunity.”
“And Tess?”
“If everything goes well, it won’t affect Tess at all.”
“That’s a big if. We can’t do it while they’re on the island.”
“They’ll be in the house; we’ll be in the woods. They’ll never know,” said Harry.
“I’m still not sure.”
“What do you think is going to happen? Do you think lightning is going to strike us dead?”
“What if they find out? You know how Marie feels about this.”
“And she knows how I feel. Marie will forgive me.”
“For doing something she’s begged you again and again not to do?”
“Marie will forgive me.”
“And Tess?”
“We’ll explain it to Tess. When she’s older.”
“Sometimes I think that girl is smarter than you and me put together,” said Vivian. “We shouldn’t wait too long.”
“She’s twelve,” said Harry. “It will wait.”
“I worry about her.”
“Don’t.”
“Have you ever heard of obsessive-compulsive disorder?” said Vivian.
“OCD? Sure, I’ve heard of it.”
“I think Tess might have it.”
“That’s ridiculous. Tess is fine.”
“You don’t know Tess, Harry, not like I do.”
“Of course I know her.”
“When was the last time you went into her room in the daylight?” asked Vivian.
“I can’t just barge in there. She deserves her privacy. So do you, for that matter.”
“She organizes things, Harry.”
“Okay, so she organizes things. Big deal. She gets that from her mother.”
“I don’t mean she keeps her socks matched and her T-shirts folded. I mean she lines the Legos up along the closet wall—one day by color, the next day by size. She sharpens pencils until they’re all exactly the same length and if she uses one to write, she starts all over again.”
“Tess has always been precise.”
“This goes beyond precise. You know psychology isn’t your strong suit, Harry. You might need to trust me on this one.”
“Fine, when we get home, I’ll take her to see someone. But in the meantime—I want to do this. We need to do this.”
Tess found the part of the conversation that concerned herself the least interesting.
She arranged the Legos and sharpened the pencils because if she didn’t, something bad would happen.
Not because she had some disorder with initials.
But the fact that Harry and Vivian planned to do something Marie had begged them not to do stunned Tess.
She trusted no two people in the world more than Harry and Vivian.
But now, her father and her aunt were going to…
she had heard the word affair and, at twelve, Tess had enough of a handle on the concept of marital infidelity that she had a good idea what Harry and Vivian were talking about doing.
One of her classmates had divorced parents and a father who lived with another woman.
Is that what Harry had planned? Would Tess be shuttling back and forth between her house and some apartment where Harry and Vivian lived together and slept in the same bed together?
As much as she loved Vivian, the prospect was horrifying.
Her legs had started to go numb, but the information she had gleaned was worth the discomfort of the cramped space behind the couch from which she eavesdropped.
She peeked out of her hiding place long enough to see the silhouettes of Harry and Vivian sitting motionless in the dying light of the fire, then crept back to her room to write integers backward from one thousand to one, just like the voices told her to. Vivian did not come to bed that night.