She’d become a crone. Adeathcrone. She’d reached the age when, according to a History Channel special she’d watched one night when her husband was out of town and she was too tired to get up off the couch and go to bed, her Stone Age tribe would march her out to the tundra and urge her to take the Long Walk.
Given that she was the most decrepit member of the clan, her death would allow the others to successfully ration the remains of the wooly mammoth they’d just killed and survive the winter.
Leaning forward, she looked at herself again. Really looked this time.
What had become of her? The witty person who excelled at Scrabble and loved Jane Austen novels and had friends to sit with at children’s sporting events? The emergency room nurse who specialized in making trauma patients feel both safe and comfortable? The high school basketball star who’d led her tiny hometown to victory in the state tournament so many years ago?
Where had that person gone? And how had this become her life?
No friends. No hobbies. No profound thoughts on books, movies, politics, religion, war, peace, AI, or the future of humanity. Just damp, stringy hair in a pizza-stained T-shirt and jeans that no longer fit, listening to “Jessie’s Girl” play through tinny speakers at a truck stop on the Pennsylvania Turnpike at five o’clock on a Saturday night.
Heaving a sigh that emanated from the very marrow of her bones, she left the restroom and walked back to the minivan. An indecisive rain began to spit down from the sky, casting a fine mist that shrouded the world in gray.
She got in the car and glanced in the rearview mirror. The little blanket settlement was back up again. She couldn’t see faces. Just lumps.
“Everyone ready?”
Now it began to pour, fat drops thumping the roof of the minivan.
She called out again, louder this time, pitching her voice above the pounding rain.
The boys didn’t respond, probably because they were wearing headphones.
Too tired to harangue them for a response, she pulled out of the parking lot, headlights cutting through fine needles of rain, and headed home.
Chapter Thirteen
Piper
Piper turned off the GW Parkway, then turned right again, onto a smaller road that twisted downward, toward the Potomac.
The road ended abruptly at a cul-de-sac where six massive homes sat side by side, fronting the river. She slowed her car and took in the scene, trying to figure out where to park.
Tasteful landscaping lights illuminated five of the homes. A homey yellow glow emanated from somewhere deep inside each one, probably a family room or a kitchen with river views on the backside of the house.
But the home in the center blazed like a sparkler at midnight on the Fourth of July, every door and window open, spilling wanton light into the rising dusk of a mid-September sky.
And not just light ... but sound too. She cocked her head and listened as thumping bass notes infiltrated her car.
A suburban block party ... or a rave?
She opened the driver’s side door and stood on the running board of her SUV, craning her neck as she tried to see around the corner of the house, searching for the bouncy house, or the Build-A-Bear mobile workshop, or the American Girl doll tea party, or even just a lone magician.
Instead her gaze landed on a tiki bar beside the pool and a woman wearing a vintage cigarette girl costume with an ostrich plume in her hair, handing out Jell-O shots in small plastic cups.
Piper gripped her purse a little tighter. This wasnotwhat she expected when she set out to speak to the fellow parents of a Hollin Terrace Middle School student.
She glanced at the number above the front door: 783 Potomac Shores.
The right house, but everything felt wrong.
In her experience, people with school-age children did not have the energy to attend, much less throw, wild parties with thumping bass music.
Wild parties were tossed overboard the moment parents arrived home from the hospital with their first child and sleep suddenly became the single most important survival tool in the parenting lifeboat.
Maybe that’s why this party was happening at 6:00 p.m.? Maybe these people had found a way to combine the pleasures of youth with the responsibilities of middle age? Maybe their parties began after the last youth soccer game of the afternoon ended and wrapped up promptly at 10:00 p.m., when it was time to take the babysitter home?
She glanced up at the stone-and-stucco house as a blond woman in a low-cut sequined dress waved energetically from a turret and hollered to someone named Trey.
