Dean turned on the radio for the ride home, searching for WINQ, the oldies station he and Stephanie used to sing along to together. Once, they had been buddies, best friends. She had tagged along to every game, and sometimes even to practices, doing homework in the stands. She’d been three years old when he met Nicole, the young widow no one wanted to date — or maybe, the young widow everyone wanted to date but was too cautious to approach. Dean had no idea of her previous marriage. And neither did Stephanie. As far as she was concerned, Dean was her new father. He’d never pictured himself marrying a woman who already had a child, but after their first week together, he was already sitting next to her in a church pew, unwilling to be apart from her for any part of the weekend. He’d never fallen for someone so quickly, and it was exhilarating. When he and Nicole broke the happy news to Stephanie, she seemed confused. It took them a while to realize that she thought they were already married. They let her pick the wedding cake, and she chose to have it decorated with pink and purple flowers. She wore a ruffled pink-and-purple dress to match.
Now Stephanie was a different kind of girl altogether. She didn’t fantasize about wedding cakes and she never wore pink. She had gone to her junior prom wearing a torn slip and a man’s blazer, her date a boy who was not the least bit interested in girls — a fact that unsettled Dean, though he was careful not to say so. Nicole was even more disappointed than he was. Stephanie had started high school on her mother’s path: a cheerleader, a churchgoer, a smiling girl with smiling friends. But she started to change at the end of ninth grade. Nicole noticed before Dean did; it began with her clothes. Stephanie stopped shopping with Nicole at the mall and instead went to thrift stores to find items that no one else had. New clothes led to new friends; that was how it worked with girls, apparently. The new friends weren’t bad — they were smart and polite — but they mystified Dean with their dark clothes, their dark looks, and their dark under-the-breath jokes. What did they have to be depressed about? There had been a war going on when he was in high school. He blamed the culture, the muddy-sounding music. He would watch MTV with Stephanie to try to figure it out. One of the singers mumbled so badly that his lyrics were put up on the screen, like subtitles. This guy wore a dress onstage. When he killed himself, Stephanie wanted to take a day off from school. An absurd request, Dean thought, not even worth acknowledging, but somehow it turned into one of her and Nicole’s bigger fights. Sometimes it seemed as if the two of them could not even breathe the same air. Dean’s policy was impartiality. Nicole thought he was taking Stephanie’s side.
Dean turned onto Iron Bridge Road, a lane divided into two sections: one old, narrow, and badly paved, and the other new, wide, and smooth as a highway. Dean lived in the old section, where the road’s namesake, a wrought-iron bridge, had once stood. It was demolished in the late seventies and replaced by a plain cement structure with thick safety rails made of corrugated metal. Dean might have seen the original if he’d arrived in Willowboro just a couple of years earlier. He was genuinely sorry to have missed it. He’d had a fondness for Iron Bridge Road even before he lived on it. When he first moved to the area, he would take long bike rides in the country, lacking anything better to do. He remembered discovering the old part of Iron Bridge Road and thinking it would be a good place to build a house. He had been surprised, later, when Nicole agreed. Her family all lived close to one another on a farm on the outskirts of town. He assumed she would want to stay near them. But she had wanted a change.
They ended up buying an old house and constructing an addition, instead of building something new. It was a simple two-story stone house, similar to others in the area, made from gray limestone and white mortar, with small square windows, evenly spaced and white-silled. The house’s selling point was a double-decker side porch, a real Maryland porch. In the summer, the boys liked to spend the night there, dragging their sleeping bags right up against the window. Mornings they’d come downstairs with imprints of the screen on their cheeks. Their real bedroom was downstairs, in the addition. Robbie had been planning to move into Stephanie’s upstairs bedroom after she left for college, but he hadn’t mentioned it recently. The boys had once complained about having to room together; now they seemed pleased to have a shared retreat, a reason never to be alone.
Dean didn’t see Stephanie’s car in the driveway as he approached his house. He pulled in and saw that it wasn’t parked in the shady side yard, either.
He cursed aloud. He had wanted to say good-bye before she left. He was becoming superstitious.
There was no note in the kitchen and the boys weren’t in their usual spot, playing Nintendo in the living room. He checked their bedroom, but it was empty.
He went to the back porch and called for them in the yard. “Robbie! Bry!” Then he went upstairs to check from his bedroom window, where he could see into the backyard and surrounding fields. His door was closed, which was odd, since he usually left it open. Nicole was the one who would close it — a signal to him to leave her alone. Had he left her alone too often? Not enough? It was impossible to know in retrospect.
With Nicole so strongly in his mind, Dean wasn’t surprised, at first, to see her clothes strewn across the bed. It was a sight that had greeted him many mornings when he emerged from the shower. “What’s the weather like?” she would ask, as if their bathroom was a portal to the outdoors. He always said, “Partly cloudy.” One day he added, “with a chance of hail,” and that stuck for years, becoming funny for no good reason. At some point she stopped asking.
He gazed at the clothes, the layers of patterns clashing with the bedspread. Florals, bright colors, lots of blue — to bring out her eyes. Stephanie must have been going through them to see if there was anything she wanted to bring with her to college. He’d told her to take a look in the closet before he gave them away, but he didn’t think she actually would. He began to pile the clothes into the hamper. They rustled and he thought he heard whispering. “Nic?” he said aloud, involuntarily. The room was silent. He didn’t believe in ghosts. He didn’t even try to talk to Nic in prayer. Still, he felt that someone was in the room with him.
“Boys?” he called.
He heard the whisper again. It was coming from underneath the bed.
“Boys?” Dean knelt to lift the duster. There they were, squeezed together, their eyes bright like little animals’. “What are you doing?”
“Playing hide-and-seek,” Robbie said.
“Who are you hiding from?”
“Steffy.”
“She said to tell you she went to work,” Bry added.
“No, she didn’t.”
“She did so — ow!”
Dean stood up. “Look, I don’t care, just get out from under there.”
“Can you go down to the kitchen and we’ll meet you there?” Robbie asked.
“No,” Dean said, sharply — too sharply, he knew, but he was losing patience. They were hiding something, obviously, something that was probably nothing, but in their kid brains it was worth lying about.
“Please,” Robbie said.
“Hurry up,” Dean said. “I’m waiting.”
There was no movement, and Dean thought he was going to have to lift the box spring off the frame, but then Bry began to wriggle out on his stomach. At first, Dean noticed nothing unusual about his eight-year-old son’s appearance. His dark-blond hair was its usual cowlicked mess, his cheeks flushed, his fingernails dirty. It wasn’t until Bry’s torso was completely exposed that Dean realized his son was wearing a woman’s white blouse. Nicole’s blouse. He was wearing a skirt, too. It was green with tiny yellow polka dots. The skirt, which had been knee-length on Nicole, hit Bryan midcalf. Dust bunnies clung to the hem.