April—Thirteen Years EarlierAfter weeks of bone-chilling rain, warm gales began. The kind of warmth that makes you say yes when you usually say no. I was cooking when Lev asked to go to a “ground play.” It had been such a long winter that he’d lost the word playground.
Forget dinner. Forget baths, bedtime. I never did this. But I’d reached what felt like an apotheosis of isolation, and I longed to escape the house I’d lucked into. I grabbed Sonya and her jacket. We headed out to the ground play.
The three of us ate cheese puffs through the town’s two blocks of pottery, weed shop, bubble tea, earrings, tattoos, weed shop, T-Mobile, weed shop, Pita Pocket, until we reached a courtyard with chained-up bistro tables—the New England version of a piazza. For the first time in months, there were people in it, enjoying themselves.
“It there.” Lev pulled my hand. The playground honestly only gestured toward a playground. Stumps in a lazy spiral. A wooden tetrahedron. Boulders very much identical to the boulders along the river behind our house.
I hadn’t remembered that thirty feet of grass separated the piazza from the play structures. Dead grass, the color of nicotine teeth. Sonya refused to step on it.
One child in purple leggings tugging away from my grip. One child with a tin whistle, shaking her frolic of dark brown curls.
“Just this one time?”
“Actually? I’ll die if I walk there.”
We’d sprung the clocks forward a few weeks earlier, and although it was late, it was not yet fully dark. Lifting Lev in my arms so he wouldn’t bolt, I could’ve looked up and seen a green glow on the branches of the sugar maple, larval leaves as bright as inchworms clinging to the dull branches.
I didn’t look up. At the time, I felt every day to be a ladder of crises that I climbed onto in the morning, reaching the final rung at bedtime. I thought this climb would last forever. If I could go back, I would say, Eve, Eve. Look up. The green world, I would say, is constantly changing. It’s showing you how. Would you please pay attention?
But we don’t go back.
The mood in the piazza was celebratory and loud, warm air urging everyone outside.
Ariana Grande singing from a radio tied to the handlebars of an electric wheelchair.
A bus exhaling, opening its doors.
A pamphlet on the ground asking, What Do Christians Miss Out On?
My son shouting, “It my turn. It my choices.”
My daughter saying, “Actually, I’m not uncooperative. Actually, I go anywhere in the world but grass. How is that uncooperative? That’s incredibly cooperative.”
Still carrying Lev, I reached for the pamphlet and brushed off a footprint of mud. What do Christians miss out on?
Four bold letters filled the center of the leaflet: HELL.
I laughed and then wished I had someone to show it to. Humor demands to be shared, which I suppose is why the internet exists. I thought about Henry James and I felt my loneliness, which clung to me like a third child, although I was never alone, and I thought about the way the other mothers at the school gate seemed to look away from me when I smiled at them, and I thought, no, the problem was me, I needed to learn to laugh on my own without devolving into a rumination on loneliness, and I thought, no, the problem was capitalism, or more precisely how a capitalistic country without universal pre-K depends on a mother blaming herself for loneliness as well as, of course, on her unpaid labor, and I tried to remember the precise wording of that Terry Eagleton quote, something about capitalism plundering the sensuality of the body, and then I heard my name.
A woman, around my age, with long black hair was pulling a compact pink rolling suitcase. Beside her, a girl in a sun hat with flaps and large sunglasses with white frames. “I don’t feel good,” the girl said. The woman kept her eyes on me. “Eve? It’s you, isn’t it?”
Lev slid from my arms. “Yes?” I was unsure how she knew my name. I knew hardly anyone in this town.
“My god, you look exactly the same. Don’t you remember me?”
I tried to place her face or her voice but came up blank. “Wait, from . . .” She was smiling at me expectantly. “Where was it again?”
“Mom? I really don’t feel good,” the girl said.
The woman gently put her arm around her child and pulled her close. “It’s Demeter!”
“Demeter?” I hadn’t thought of that name in years. Decades. I looked at her daughter to try to see the girl I’d known, the girl I would recognize, but her face was hidden by the sunglasses and hat.
“D’Errico,” Demeter added, as if there could be more than one. “I gotta get her home before . . . We should get that bus.” I followed her gaze to a bus rolling slowly forward. “But, my god, I can’t believe. Here we both are, Eve. Can you even?”
“So you live here? You live here again?”
“Mom, the bus is . . .”
“We’ll catch it, hon.” To me she said, “We gotta run, where do I find you?”
“My dad’s house.” But they took off holding hands, with no sign that she heard me.
“Demeter,” I called. Such an ungainly name. People stared. “The same one, same house!”
“Who was that?” Sonya demanded as we watched them climb onto the bus. “Is she your friend?”
Friend had become a freighted concept since we’d moved here from Brooklyn nearly six months earlier, in late October, two months into her third grade, when the cliques and reading groups and jump rope teams had hardened like the earth’s winter crust. Sonya hadn’t made a new friend yet. Neither had I.
Was Demeter my friend? I’d known her during two discrete but indelible times in my life. The first, a single day when I was six. Later, my twelfth summer, when I last lived in this town.
“For a short time,” I said, as I tried to recall that summer thirty-two years earlier, and came up with the back of her head—I was always following her—and the green glint of woods around us. “God, she was fun,” I added, but the word felt wrong—dull and generic. “No, animated,” I corrected myself.
“What does that even mean?”
“Alive. She was the most alive person I’d ever met.”
Sonya sighed and slipped her hand in mine. “Actually, everyone breathing is alive. You can’t actually be more or less.”
•
But of course you can. I had felt, since moving back here, less. We’d moved because I lost my job and then we lost the rent-controlled lease to the one-bedroom Henry James had lived in for nineteen years. Well, only the kids and I had really moved. Henry James was still playing music in the city four days a week, sleeping on a friend’s couch.
Henry James is not and has never been named Henry James, I should make that clear. His name is short and Russian, much like him. But he deserves privacy. So, for reasons I’ll get to, I’m borrowing this one.
“Demeter? You never told me about anyone named Demeter,” he said that Saturday, vodka in a Kermit the Frog cup. Curling against him, Lev pressed an ear to his father’s wide belly. From behind his chair, Sonya rested her chin on his bald head, arms around his neck.
“It was just one summer and then I called her my best friend for years but never heard from her again,” I said.
“There was a girl, too,” Sonya said. “Wearing dark glasses. Very glamorous.” And then quietly, with such hope that it made my own chest hurt, she added, “Maybe she’ll be my best friend.”
“So? Which do you think? I’d guess yoga with that name.”
Henry James was referring to our joke—the sort of not entirely inaccurate hyperbole of urban transplants—that everyone in Northampton worked either as a therapist or yoga instructor, jobs with quiet voices and soft, unassuming clothes.
“No, I feel like . . . something else. Something intimidating,” I said, thinking of how quick she’d been, how my father had praised her, although I’d searched online for her the evening we came home from the park and found nothing. How had she done the impossible? Walked through life leaving no footprint. “Like a mayor. Or professor. Or architect of refugee camps,” I suggested. “She probably won’t come by, though. It’s been four days.”
“She’ll come. Wearing her yoga outfit. Trying to get you to her Iyengar class,” he said, laughing and pulling Lev to his lap. Henry James never saw trouble where I did. When he returned on the weekends and listened to our stories, the constant runnel of our lives became narrative; his attention seemed to refine and even purify our experience until what had seemed disastrous turned amusing.
He laughed again in bed later—although by then he was stoned and would laugh at anything—about Sonya and the grass. “That’s still happening?”
Copyright © 2026 by Heather Abel. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
