Page 8

I went inside and began searching for proof of whatever had happened. The pool house where I’d lived when I told my parents I needed space, and they’d offered it with almost insulting generosity. A stack of Rolling Stone magazines sat beside the turntable. A bottle of Bain de Soleil lay on the counter, orange gel visible through the plastic. My cutoff shorts hung over a chair. A banana clip waited beside the sink, along with a tube of frosted lipstick I’d adored.

The refrigerator held a six-pack of Tab, a jar of mayonnaise, and three cans of beer hidden behind the orange juice, which meant my father had been here.

I closed the refrigerator and saw the newspaper folded next to the radio.

The Wisconsin State Journal.

My hands were steady until I opened it.

Saturday, August 11, 1984. I was twenty-three again.

I read the date three times, then looked toward the free Maple Bluff Savings calendar hanging on the wall next to the refrigerator. August showed a sailboat leaning into blue water, and my mother’s neat handwriting filled several squares.

Today: Lorrie off work. Tennis at 9. Henry at 3.

On Saturday the 18th: Patricia and Alan, dinner.

And a red circle marked Friday the twenty-fourth.

Club at 7:00. Ellsworths.

The room seemed to draw in around me, not spinning, exactly, but tightening at the edges, as if the morning had suddenly shifted.

Thirteen days.

The knowledge arrived whole. I didn’t hear a voice, didn’t see a flash of light, or receive instructions carved into the Formica counter. I simply knew it with the same strange certainty that I knew my name, my children’s faces, and the same wish I’d made every birthday since 1985.

I had thirteen days. Thirteen days until the dinner at the club, when Paul would stand in front of both our families with a ring in his pocket, and I would do what everyone expected. I would say yes, choose the safe life, the kind life, the life with good insurance and a husband who remembered oil changes. The life that would give me Claire and Ben and twenty-seven years of ordinary love braided with loneliness.

Or…I could do something different. I could find out whether the girl I’d buried under sensible choices still existed, whether Dean Wyatt had been a beautiful regret polished by time, or the man I should’ve been brave enough to love.

My gaze dropped to the cassette case beside the radio.

Purple Rain.

The label was clean and white, Dean’s handwriting curling across it in purple felt-tip pen.

Lorrie Hale.

Not Ellsworth. Not Mom. Not Mrs. Paul Ellsworth at the charity luncheon table, nodding while someone explained silent auction baskets as if they were matters of national defense.

Hale.

I sat at the little round table and picked up the cassette, careful with it. When I’d held it against my chest last night, back in Cleveland, it had been warm.

In Cleveland. My breath caught.

Paul.

Claire.

Ben.

Only then did the full terror of it hit me. Was my fifty-year-old body still on the blue sofa with the throw over my legs and the cassette pressed to my chest? Had Paul come downstairs after his shower and found me asleep, unconscious, or dead?

Was Claire calling my phone, irritated at first because I hadn’t texted that we were home, then frightened when I didn’t answer? Was Ben making some joke to keep everyone steady, the way he always did?

Or had I simply vanished? That was worse, somehow. I could picture the living room empty, the throw fallen to the floor, my slippers by the sofa, my purse on the kitchen counter, and Paul standing there in his robe while water dripped from his hair onto the collar. Paul loved instructions and procedures. He could handle an emergency if it came with a binder and a list of numbers. A missing wife on a Friday night after her fiftieth birthday dinner would offer him none of that.