On a stool behind the counter sat a plump older woman who’d been at the old library and who had a way of smiling that made you believe she remembered you, though it had been years. Angela handed her the book and looked beyond her. A seated young man with a silver hoop earring, gazing into a computer screen. That was all.

“Does Lindsay Suskind still work here?” she asked the woman.

The woman scanned the book and smiled. “Oh, yes. She’s taking her lunch break.”

Angela glanced about.

“She’ll be back in fifteen minutes, if you care to wait.”

Angela took the book and her card. “Thank you, it’s not important.”

She walked into the cafe annex and ordered a small black coffee and sat at one of the smaller tables and opened up the book.

The girl was parked at one of the larger tables, reading. Dipping her fork from time to time into a Tupperware. In a final act of amends or whatever you wanted to call it, the new library had installed Lindsay herself at the checkout desk, where she excelled. After a year, Angela heard, she earned her library science degree through the evening and weekend program at the university where her father taught and slept with graduate students, and the library had promoted her accordingly. Mike and Jeanne, separately, were prone to boasting about her in a way they hadn’t when the girl ran track.

Angela remembered the day—her own daughter walking in, hair still dripping from the Owensby pool, so brown and lean in her bikini, so beautiful it startled her. As if some undressed woman had come striding through her front door. You walked home like that? she was about to say when Caitlin ran damp and sobbing into her arms.

What is it, sweetheart, what happened? Her mind leaping to the worst—rape, pregnancy, HIV. It was like falling into blackness. Th e end of everything. A daughter was your life; it was as simple as that. Her body was the only body, her heart the only heart. Th e most absolute, the most terrible love.

Th e July sun was burning in the kitchen window. Th e air was roaring. Th e girl couldn’t, or wouldn’t, speak; her body was convulsing (the feel of that body pressed to hers, the wet and sun-hot skin, the softness and the firmness, the smell of the pool, of coconut, of the sun itself in her skin, in her dripping hair!).

It’s all right, just tell me, just tell me, sweetheart . . . She’d heard the sirens, she would remember later.

Lindsay, Caitlin said at last. Oh, Mom, it was awful . . . and Angela holding her the tighter and her heart crying, Th ank God thank God thank God, and only later thinking of her own sister, Faith, diving off the dock.

Then the day, the bright December day perhaps a week after returning from Colorado when she answered the door and a dark-haired girl was on the stoop in a wheelchair and for just a moment, just an instant, she’d thought, Caitlin.

Angela closed the book and walked over, and the girl looked up. Smiling in recognition, and then true recognition taking hold and the smile falling.

“Mrs. Courtland,” she said. “Gosh. Hello.”

“I’m sorry to bother you, Lindsay. I know you’re having lunch. I just wanted to say hi.”

The girl closed her book and set down her fork. “No, gosh.” She put a hand on Angela’s wrist. “Would you like to sit down?”

“No, you’re eating—”

“Please, sit down.”

Angela pulled out the chair and sat and the girl studied her, searching her face with large brown eyes. For a moment Angela was lost in them. Why had she come? What did she think she would say to this girl, this young woman whom she’d once picked up and dropped off, fed, watched over like one of her own?

“Mrs. Courtland, is there . . . I mean has something . . . ?”

“Oh,” Angela said. “No. No, I’m sorry, I should have said so right away.”

“It’s just, I haven’t seen you here. I mean I’ve never seen you here before. I thought maybe . . .”

Angela shook her head.

“I’m so sorry,” said the girl.

A man came to the counter and ordered something in a low voice, as though he didn’t want anyone to know, and the barista girl set to making it.

“I saw Ariel this morning,” Angela said.

“You did?”

“Yes. I was substituting.”

“You were?”

The girl didn’t want to look or sound surprised, Angela knew, but she couldn’t help it, she had no guile. Her heart had been through too much.

“I’m sorry,” Lindsay said, “I thought you were . . .”

“I was. But that was months ago.”

Lindsay nodded. “Did she behave herself—Ariel?”

“Yes.”

Angela stared at her hands where they lay upon the book. They looked like someone else’s. Her heart was aching.

“She’s gotten to be a pain at home,” said the girl.

“I’m sorry, Lindsay.”

Lindsay shrugged. “She’s what they call a teenager, I believe.”

“Not for that.” She held the girl’s eyes. “I’m sorry for the way I was that day you came to the house.”

Lindsay shook her head. “Don’t, Mrs. Courtland—I shouldn’t have come like that, out of the blue. It must have been a shock.”

“It was. But everything was. Everything. I didn’t know what to say to you.”

“It’s all right.”

“No, it’s not. I never came to see you at the hospital either. After your accident. I’m sorry for that too. That was hideous of me.”

“It was hard for people . . .”

“You were friends with my daughter. I was friends with your mother. I should’ve come.”

Lindsay looked down, and for a moment Angela saw her in flight, one long leg thrown out before her and the other folded under like a wing as she took the hurdle. Effortless, magnificent.

“Caitlin came,” Lindsay said. “Every day after school. Or after practice. I’ll never forget that, Mrs. Courtland.”

Angela smiled. Lindsay smiled. Without thinking, Angela reached and thumbed the tears from the girl’s face, one side, then the other.

“I’m sorry I ambushed you like this. I’m sorry to upset you. I just wanted to talk to you.”

“I’m not upset. I’m glad to see you.”

Angela stood to go.

“Mrs. Courtland?” said Lindsay.

“Yes?”

“I know about what happened.”

Angela stood looking at her.

“Between my mom and your—with Mr. Courtland. Years ago. I know about it. I know that’s why you and my mom stopped being friends. I know that’s why you didn’t come to the hospital.”

Angela stared at her. Then she remembered—but it was like something she’d lost, or buried. She had no idea what it once felt like to know that her husband had slept with—was sleeping with—Jeanne Suskind. She thought of her own mother in the nursing home, who sometimes called her Faith, who asked, Where’s Angela? Did the mind break down or did it simply correct? Vectoring away from pain? They’d never told her mother about Caitlin and they never would. The old woman would die without ever having lost her granddaughter.

“That was so long ago, sweetheart,” Angela said at last. “None of that matters anymore.”

“I know. But Caitlin and I talked about it sometimes. I think it made us closer. Almost like sisters. Weird as that sounds.”

Angela nodded. She smiled. “I’m glad I got to see you, Lindsay. Will you please tell your mother I said hello?”

“I will. And please—” The girl’s eyes filled again. “Please come back.”

Lindsay watched her walk away. From where she sat she saw Angela pass through the library’s automated glass doors and stop to open the small brushed-nickel door of the deposit chute, lift her book, and drop it in. She seemed to listen for the dull bang, then she let go the little door and walked on.

15

A whistle shrilled and three girls burst bare-legged down the black lanes, ponytails whipping, but then pulled up laughing and loped onto the field where other girls lay strewn and twisting on the grass. Cross-country girls, not sprinters, they’d mostly been freshmen when Caitlin was a senior, yet they all knew her and they all knew him, and when one girl contorting in the grass looked up the hill and saw him, and tapped the hip of the girl nearest to her, he turned and limped away.