Seven Minutes to Noon

wasn’t going to say anything,” Lizzie said. “Just come inside. You can still catch a cold in summer.”
    Even without speaking, Alice knew what Lizzie would have said. Something about the dangers of friends turning on each other. Well, Alice didn’t suspect Tim of anything. All she needed was an answer to one simple question, which she held back, tucked behind her tongue. They proceeded in a string of cars, through the pouring rain, to Greenwood Cemetery, where Lauren’s broken, robbed body would be given to the ground.
    Lizzie took Alice, Mike and the kids out to dinner that night. But no one, not even the kids, had much of an appetite. There was little to say; they were all deeply exhausted. As soon as they got home, everyone went right to bed. Alice slept without pills, thoughts or dreams.
    In the morning, Lizzie made French toast for everyone, directed conversation over breakfast, then let Mike clean up the mess. Alice went downstairs to shower, and when she came back up, she found Lizzie parked at the kitchen table with a pad of paper and the phone.
    Alice caught Mike’s attention and rolled her eyes at her mother’s irresistible urge to micromanage her production office from afar. But instead of responding in kind, he lifted his eyebrows and conspicuously shifted his gaze to the lined yellow pad.
    Alice walked over and looked at her mother’s list. In Lizzie’s loopy scrawl, she was stunned to see an outline for Alice’s own life. Smith Salon, Saturday 3 p.m., spa package (massage, facial, pedicure); Monday, 10 a.m.,Pam Short, Garden Hill Realty, meet @ office, see 3 houses.
    Alice’s first reaction was outrage. But then, as soon as she thought of both Mike’s and Lizzie’s imminent departures — he was going to the workshop “for a little while,” meaning all day, and a cab was coming in just over an hour to take Lizzie to the airport — she was overcome by gratitude. Lizzie was steering Alice away from pain to her own version of California, away from the longing that had turned her the wrong way into traffic two days ago. Away from the anxiety that had made her follow Frannie out of the funeral parlor yesterday, chasing ghosts and pointing fingers at friends. Lizzie had come all this way to build her only child an entrance ramp back into her own, sane life.
    It was a good list, Alice decided, and she would follow it. But it was incomplete. Another scheduling item that neither Lizzie nor Mike knew about yet hovered invisibly between the lines.
    When Alice was downstairs just now, Frannie had called her cell, the house phone’s call-waiting going ignored.
    “I want you to come in tomorrow,” Frannie had said. “Mike too. Everyone. We need to go over things again.”

Chapter 15
    Alice sat down on a stoop across the street from the precinct and waited her turn to be interviewed, again, by the detectives. There were still ten more minutes before her noon appointment. She didn’t want to wait inside, knowing that Tim was in there with Frannie and Giometti. They were being stacked into hour-long time slots — Simon, Tim, Alice, Maggie, and Mike — undergoing a mandated evaluation as if to find out what had gone wrong between them. As if they, as a group, had swallowed up Lauren and her baby.
    Alice propped her elbows on her knees and lowered her face into her hands, breathing deliberately, deeply, willing her mind to unwind a notch. The sounds of the street began to dissipate and she was transported thirty years backward into her mother’s bedroom. Scrunched into her mother’s bed, under the covers, eating a bowl of ice cream and watching Laugh In on TV. Her father had left them two weeks earlier for the bimbo with a doctorate degree. Pressed against her mother’s skin, in her parents’ bed, in her family’s house, Alice drank in the cruel loss, and held in her own pain as a policy against her mother’s dissembling. Alice’s ice cream that night was strawberry and sweet, and when it dropped from her spoon onto her mother’s pillow, nothing was said. The fear she had felt at that moment thirty years ago, in that awful silence, bloomed into her mind now as she sat on the stoop on Union Street. The sticky blossomof memory intruded on her brief rest and her mind sizzled awake.
    She thought of the risks people took with lives constructed of fragile compromises, pulling a favorite colored thread out of a whole tapestry, pulling and pulling, destroying years of well-earned love. The