When she looked down, she saw the blackness gleam, like oil. Now, at midnight, it was darker than you could imagine, so it was like a sixth sense, the feeling of open space in front of her. There were turf grains in the silk of it that turned the lake brown, even in daylight. And she was drunk, so the pathway down to the little boardwalk was patchily remembered, her experience at the time also patchy, though it slowed and cleared when she dropped her dress onto the still-warm wood and looked out over the water. Her body also a finer thing, back then, if only she had known it. The dress was a blue linen shift, loose and practical, her underwear possibly quite fancy and impractical in those days before booster seats and children with sleepovers and phones that told you which way to turn. Getting naked in the deserted woodland in the middle of the night was a taunt to both of them-either one would do. And neither of these men would later become the father of the boy now sitting in the back seat. Of course there was a man in the group who was not, actually, the man she was seeing at the time he was some other, forbidden man. It was in a lake, in the Irish countryside a gang of them coming back from the pub, no moon, no sex, at a guess-not that morning, or the night before, when they were supposed to have their holiday-cottage sex-and she pulled her dress up over her head as she made her way, in the darkness, toward the lake. She was taken, as she drove, by the memory of a night swim, many years before Ben was born. “Would you rather?” Ben said, then he stopped. But they did not take the motorway they took a network of small streets, some of which she had driven down before-this was the way to the garden center, that was the way to the dog groomer’s-without knowing that you could cross from one to the other if you turned at the right place. ![]() Clare Crescent, which was somewhere near the motorway, apparently. Ben’s friend was called Ava, and she was new. The phone app was taking her down a familiar street, though it was an unfamiliar route, one she would not have known to take herself. She drove on while he watched the Dublin suburbs: spring trees, semidetached houses, a bundled old citizen walking her dog. They were so perfect, and then they were not perfect. They were so temporarily beautiful, her children. In the rearview mirror, she saw his hand move toward his hidden face. “Of course you like basketball,” she said warmly. “That’s so gay,” he’d said at dinner, and his little sister missed a beat. Recently, he had used the word “gay” as an insult. What was it about her eyes on him that made him shrug and shift under his clothes? She wondered why he couldn’t speak when they were face to face. ![]() If they’d been at home, he would have said, “Dunno,” or “Just . . .” In the car, he said things like “I like boys, though. Now he looked out on the real world as though mildly surprised it was there. It was hard to read the little arrow through the disaster of Ben’s cracked screen-the thing was rarely out of his hand, unless he dropped it. ![]() She had it down by the gearshift, propped up on the gray plastic fascia. He was up on the booster seat-Ben was small for eight-and he looked out the window at suburban streets and parked cars, while she used his mobile phone to map the route. Though she did like the privacy of the car, the feeling of his voice coming over her shoulder as she checked the mirror and slowed to make a turn. She was driving Ben to a friend’s house, and this added journey was the cause of some irritation in her day she had too much else to do.
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