“What are you doing over there?” he asked.
“Nothing. Go to sleep.”
He closed his eyes, then opened them again, pulled back the sheet and patted the mattress beside him. “Come on—I’ll help you get back to sleep.”
She understood this was an invitation to reciprocate the sex he’d received earlier, but she ignored it.
“Sweetheart?” Ray asked then. “What’s wrong?”
She sat down on the edge of the bed. The mattress gave slightly beneath her in a solid, pleasing way. The first good mattress she’d ever slept on. She touched Ray’s cheek. Darling, I could have killed you.
“What’s wrong?” he asked again.
Create a diversion: “Actually,” Evelyn said, “I was thinking about that girl.”
“What girl?”
“The one Liz Luce was talking about at the party. The Newell Academy girl with no place to go.”
“So what about her?”
“We could take her.”
“What?”
Evelyn took a deep breath. “I was just thinking. We have plenty of room here. Plenty of rooms. I mean, if she doesn’t have anywhere to go—”
“I don’t think a teenage girl would want to come stay the whole summer in Randall with a couple of boring grownups.”
“Are we boring grownups?”
“From her point of view, I meant.” Ray put his arm around her belly and kissed her cheek. “Come here.”
“Why don’t we just meet her?”
“The girl from Newell? Why?”
Because I could have killed you. Aloud she said, “I just think—I think it would be nice to have someone stay for the summer. It’s not exactly thrilling around here while you’re at work, you know. Maybe it’d be fun.”
Ray leaned over and switched on the light. He was fully awake now, and there wasn’t going to be any more sex. He thought about what Evelyn was asking. It had been obvious at the party last night that despite all his reassurances, she still felt she had to prove herself in the eyes of his friends. If only she were content to be herself, things would go better all around: she would be happier, and they would see why he’d married her in the first place. But she couldn’t relax, and as a result, she made things hard for everyone. Maybe having a young person around, someone she wasn’t so intimidated by, would help. But a girl who’d been suspended from school? He touched the bandage on his head, which was beginning to itch. Hadn’t he had enough trouble with juvenile delinquents this weekend already?
“Ray.”
He looked at his wife. The skin under her blue eyes was bruise-colored from lack of sleep. She didn’t ask him for much. If she wanted this, well, why not?
“I suppose we could meet her,” he said.
Evelyn leaned over him, brushed her cheek along the side of his face, his mouth. Then noses touching. Then her warm lips were all over him. Kissing.
4.
It was 2:25 p.m. when I opened my eyes, and Mister, I wasn’t too happy about it. My head felt like it had been stomped on by castanet dancers all night long. But I had to get up. I had to go meet a client.
Ingrid carried her bicycle up out of the dorm basement and coasted down Academy Road through a light drizzle. When she’d asked if she could go meet the Shepards by herself, she hadn’t really expected Ms. Luce to say yes. But the dean, harassed with pending graduation duties and unaware that it had started raining again, had let her go.
As soon as Ingrid was off campus she started to feel better. The light rain on her face felt good, and the slick green of new leaves on the trees was almost fluorescent. Ingrid shifted into high gear and pedaled down the next hill so fast the handlebars shook. Speeding like this—the wind hard on her face, the tires skidding dangerously over sandy patches of wet asphalt—the ride seemed to clean away the poisonous residue of having talked to her father’s girlfriend Linda the night before.
“Are you surprised you were suspended?” Linda had asked. “You’re such a bright girl, I can’t believe it hasn’t crossed your mind that dressing like one of those punk rockers—”
“I wasn’t suspended for wearing a Black Flag T-shirt,” Ingrid said.
“But you know what I’m trying to say. It’s your attitude. Now I realize spending the summer with me and Melanie isn’t your first choice—”
“You’re right about that,” Ingrid said. Melanie was Linda’s daughter. She was two years younger than Ingrid and wore plaid hair bands that matched her plaid skirts. She plastered her bedroom walls with posters of boy pop stars. Ingrid kicked her toe against the wall beneath the pay phone. There were a lot of dark scuff marks there where other students had kicked before her. Kicking the marks made her feel slightly better. She knew arguing with Linda was futile, but arguing seemed to be the only way Ingrid could keep from having some vital part of her sucked away, out through the phone lines and into the vortex of Melvin, California, where she would never get it back again.
“I know you miss your father,” Linda was saying. “I understand that what you really want is to stay with him—”
“What I really want,” Ingrid interrupted, “is to stay here at Newell and go to Summer Intensive.”
“—But your father’s in a position of great responsibility at the lab, and given your history of acting out, he has no choice but to have you come to our house.”
“What history of acting out?” Ingrid said. She wasn’t trying to bait Linda. But everything Linda said was a little barbed hook.
“Melanie and I will give it a try if you will,” Linda said. “And Ingrid, you may not believe me now, but once you get here I know you’re going to see how much fun a family can really be. When everyone’s willing to give it their best shot, everything just has a way of—”
Ingrid didn’t hang up. She just let the receiver dangle gently against the scuff marks and walked down the hall.
Did she miss her father? The question fell into the category of things she didn’t think about, things that wouldn’t matter anyway if Reagan started a nuclear war. It was true that she had loved spending time with her dad when she was younger. He’d taught her to identify constellations, to read a compass, and which desert plants were safe to eat and which were poisonous. When he was too busy to play with her, she’d even tagged along with him to work sometimes, wandering around the lab at his old job at the University of California, Irvine. But that was years ago, back before he disappeared into his über-secret, high security clearance job for the Department of Defense.
Once, when Ingrid was seven, her father brought her a piece of uranium ore. She was watching television in the house they lived in then, a split-level they had moved into when her father married his second wife, Cathy. He came into the den with a metal box in one hand and a surprise something in the other.
“Hold out your hand,” he said, and dropped a small rock into her palm.
“Huh,” said Ingrid, unimpressed. Except for some yellow, lichenous crusts on one side, it looked like any rock you might pick up on the playground at school. She turned back to Gilligan’s Island.
“Now watch this,” her father said, and set the metal box on the coffee table. It was about the size of Ingrid’s lunch box, and had a circular gauge on one side and a silver tube on the other. “This is a Geiger counter,” he said. He held the tube against the rock in Ingrid’s hand and the needle on the gauge jumped. Ingrid heard a ticking like a