Such a Quiet Place by Megan Miranda
CHAPTER 12
AS I TURNED IN to Hollow’s Edge, past the stone sign and the fresh flowers and the mock lanterns at the entrance, I caught a glimmer of the lake before the road curved, and my breathing stilled, like always. On the drive in, it sometimes felt like you were sliding toward the water, especially in the dark, with only the porch lights to guide you down. I knew the graded roads and elevated plots were to give the impression that each house could have a view, but sometimes it created the illusion of the entire neighborhood sloping toward the lake, like we were all fighting some gravity.
But for all our differences, this was it—what we were here for, what drew us in. We were a group who appreciated a certain aesthetic, a certain lifestyle. We gravitated here, and to one another, from this commonality alone. We assumed things about one another because of it. We assumed we were alike.
We had kayaks and paddleboards and fishing lines. We spent summer weekends in our bathing suits underneath cover-ups, coolers ready to go, an assortment of insulated mugs to keep our drinks cold. We had midday happy hours and late-night barbecues, hair tangled from the wind or the water.
Maybe Brandon and Fiona hadn’t known what they were getting into when they moved here. To be fair, neither did I. I’d toured the area with Aidan before we moved, thought it looked calm and peaceful and quiet, that it was the type of place that would settle into me—that it would settle me. Turn me into someone still driven but more carefree, like Aidan. But that was before we were both ultimately surprised by the people we turned out to be. Seeing each other for the first time out of context when we moved here. Maybe Aidan seemed so academically driven only because he preferred it to the finality of what came next. Something he was actively avoiding.
And maybe I seemed outdoorsy and adventurous only because I’d been pushed outside all my life, sent to camps, enrolled in activities—anything to avoid the pitfalls my brother had fallen prey to. Maybe I became this way only because my parents were terrified of what could happen to me when I remained stationary. Like there was something sinuous that targeted stillness, always waiting to sneak up on me, sneak into me. This fear that I was at the whim of something greater, outside my control.
It was easy to forget now that the Truetts were one of the first families in. And maybe that tainted their perspective, too—that someone was always moving in, changing the rules, changing things on them.
A large subset of us at Hollow’s Edge overlapped at work. It wasn’t just Brandon and me, in the admissions department, and Ruby, who had been a student. It was Tina in the health center and the Seaver brothers in grounds and security. Paul Wellman in alumni giving; Charlotte, as a counselor; and Tate, who helped coach lacrosse as a second job.
It was the reason, I believed, that our neighborhood sometimes took on the approximation of dormitory living. Like we were an extension of the college in both location and age. Conforming ourselves to the unique structure of a private post-secondary education.
Except for the Truetts.
Every time they lodged a complaint (the backyard parties on summer weeknights; the fireworks on New Year’s Eve; the garbage can left out too long), the animosity grew around them. No one knew why they wanted to live here. They were never seen down at the pool on weekends. They had never shown up at a neighborhood party. Had never walked barefoot from the edge of the road, through the woods, straight into the water.
The shore wasn’t technically for swimming, though we all did it. The finger of water kept us sheltered from the current in the main channel. It was private and belonged to us alone, just one more secret of the community.
In the drought over the last few months, though, something had gotten lost. The hidden edges of the shore had slowly been revealed, the roots and mud and dirt and debris. The trash brought out on boats and left behind, washing up, catching on the decaying logs. Secrets rising from underneath.
Sometimes, at night, you could hear rats scurrying out from the edge.
Sometimes I thought all of this was because of Brandon and Fiona Truett. That nothing beautiful could ever last here again. That the story we told ourselves about this place was rotten, and now this, too, must rot.
RUBY WAS OUTSIDE.
She stood on the corner of my street, in front of the Seaver house. Currently no less than six feet from Mac, who was halfway down his walkway, rocking back on his heels, hands on his hips.
Five feet now, as he stepped even closer.
I tapped my brakes as I approached, then eased to the curb. Ruby was turned away from me, but Mac was smiling at something she’d said. His expression didn’t change as he saw me pull up beside them.
I lowered the window. “What’s up?” I called.
Ruby turned quickly, ponytail whipping behind her. “What’s up with you?” she asked. “I woke up and you were gone.”
“Had to grab some things from work for later,” I said, and Ruby frowned, quick and fleeting. I said to Mac, “I ran into Preston on campus. Thought maybe you’d be working this morning, too.”
His hands were in his pockets as he shook his head. “Not me. The project is off this week. Half the crew was on vacation anyways.”
I shifted my gaze to Ruby, who made a show of stretching, leaning to the side, hands on hips. “Well, I’m running,” she said. “Preparing to run. Thinking about running.” She laughed to herself, and I heard Mac’s laugh in echo.
“If you wait a minute, I’ll catch up with you,” I said. Even though it was too hot and I was nursing a hangover. Ruby, on the other hand, seemed fully recovered.
“Oh, no,” she said, “I’d better embarrass myself on my own. Enjoy the peace and quiet, Harper!” And then she took off, slowly but confidently. I watched her in the rearview mirror until she disappeared down the road. Mac was watching, too.
“What did she want?” I asked.
“To say hey, I guess.” He scratched at the side of his face, in need of a shave. “I thought it would be worse if I ignored her. You know how she is. Persistent.”
Didn’t we both. “Hey?” I said, arm hanging out the window, practically searing against the hot metal in the sun. “That’s all?”
“Harper, come on,” he said, glancing to the side quickly before approaching my window. He bent down, tan arm resting beside mine on the window frame, his free hand tucking the hair behind my ear. “You’re the one who kicked me out the other night.”
I brushed his hand away. “Mac, seriously, what did she say to you?” I said. With Mac, I had learned to ask things directly, knowing he would be direct in response.
“I think she said, Hey, Mac, long time. How’s it been?” He smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling. I rolled my eyes, and he squeezed my arm. “Be fair, Harper. I’d think by now you’d do me the favor of at least acting like you trust me.”
And that right there was the reason I had stayed in this casual limbo, even though neither of us seemed interested in taking it any further. I did trust him, in a simple, straightforward way, and there was something to appreciate in that. He didn’t hide who he was or what he was interested in. I wouldn’t wake one day to find him halfway out the door with half my furniture in tow. It was the easy path. The simple path. The one that required no commitment and no promises.
He tapped the car door once as he stood. “Although,” he said, “she also wanted to know where you were. She asked if I’d seen you. Maybe she knows. Maybe it’s fine.” He lifted one shoulder in a slow shrug, half his mouth in a careless grin.
My eyes widened. Ruby had my number. She could’ve called if she’d really wanted to know. I hardened my gaze. Made sure he knew I was serious. That this was serious. “Mac, it never happened,” I said.
His expression shifted—confusion and something else. Resignation. Acceptance. He nodded once. “If you say so,” he said, stepping back, erasing all that had come before. Like we could rewrite history, undo our missteps, go back and take a different path. And it was like we both understood, right then, that it was over.
Our end, as easy as our beginning.
He looked toward the woods. “Better get out of here, then,” he said. “Before she makes it back around and wonders what you’re still doing here.”
THE NEIGHBORS HAD STARTEDemerging again. Whitney, sitting cross-legged on the top porch step, smiling at the phone in her lap; Tina, pushing her dad in his wheelchair with her mother beside her, waving to someone out of my sight. There had been a shift; a return to normal.
People could get used to any change. All we needed was time.
THERE WAS A PHONEringing somewhere in the house. Muffled, but with a high-pitched generic ringtone, coming from upstairs.
Ruby’s phone.
I carried my files from work upstairs but went straight to her room first. Her phone sat on the edge of her bed, facedown. I flipped it over before I could talk my way out of it, wondering who might be calling her.
An ID flashed on the screen—BB, a name she had added to her contacts. It took me only a second to work it out: Blair Bowman. It had to be. The lawyer whose name I’d seen on the television screen. The phone stopped ringing, now showing the message 5 Missed Calls.
The phone chimed once in my hand as I was staring at the display. A text this time, from the same caller: We need to talk. Pls call me back ASAP.
Definitely the lawyer, who couldn’t be bothered with the extra milliseconds needed to type out the word please.
A door opened downstairs, footsteps heading across the foyer. I dropped the phone back on her bed, hoped I got the positioning right, and rushed out of her room. I was just passing the top of the stairs, files still in hand, when Ruby started up in her new jogging shoes.
“That was quick,” I said.
Her steps slowed as she approached, a sheen of sweat over her exposed arms, the top of her chest. “What are you doing?” she asked, looking at the files.
“Work,” I said. “Grabbing my laptop.” Like I needed to account for any movement in my own house. And then, like I could beat her to it, save myself with a piece of the truth: “Hey, I heard a phone ringing. You just missed it.”
She stepped to the side, pacing through the loft. I could see the muscles in her calves, in her upper arms. The tendons in the back of her neck. “Probably spam,” she said. “I think I was given a phone number that must’ve recently belonged to someone else.”
I wanted to tell her, No, it was the lawyer. I wanted to hear what she had to say. But there was no way to do that without giving myself away.
She pulled one leg back into a stretch. “I barely made it around the block. It’s too hot to run,” she said. She started to laugh. “But Mac, my God. He acted like…”
I waited, hanging on her every word. Desperate to know what she saw, what she knew.
She wiped her face with the bottom of her green tank top. “You know,” she said, “he came to see me once.”
I shook my head slowly before finding my voice. “No, I didn’t know that.” I wondered if it was before or after the day he’d shown up in my kitchen, telling me about Ruby’s call.
More than that, I didn’t like where the conversation was going—the guilt that had lodged deep inside and was being dragged to the surface. I hadn’t gone to see Ruby. Not once. Cutting her out after the trial as someone who had existed and then no longer did. How easy it had been for the rest of us.
“I guess he wanted to make clear that we were over. Just in case I wasn’t sure,” she said.
I tried to picture it, Mac sitting on the other side of some plastic shield or maybe across a table—I didn’t know how it had gone. Ruby crying. Or not crying. Narrowing her eyes at him. Laughing at the situation, at his cowardice.
But no, I was the coward. Mac had been brave, had gone to see her where I had not. I had read him all wrong, pegged him as someone who avoided adult responsibility, when really, he’d been the only one to do what the situation called for.
“Now I look at him and I don’t remember what I saw in him,” Ruby continued. She smiled to herself. “Well, I do remember.” A single high-pitched laugh. “I remember, anyway, when I was too young for him. God, I loved the chase. Loved it because I knew he was always looking at me, even when he wasn’t supposed to.”
I flinched. Ruby hadn’t been a kid when they’d met. She’d been nineteen or twenty. Too young for him, yes, but not that young. From my perspective, he’d barely tolerated her back then. I wasn’t sure which of us was misremembering.
“Something about those Seaver boys, huh?” she asked. She gave me a look halfway between a grin and a wince. I didn’t know what she was implying. “They love them around here, those boys who never seem to fully grow up. Not the girls, though. Not people like me.”
She was right. Hitting on exactly how the neighbors here viewed her. Maybe it was because Ruby had been in college when we met her. She’d walked dogs and brought in our mail, come home late or not at all, owned roller skates and laughed loudly, spoken more from impulse than from tact. Maybe it was because her father never seemed to have a handle on her himself, always asking if we’d seen her.
“How’s your dad?” I asked her. As if she needed a reminder that she had somewhere else to go. Somewhere else to be now that she’d gotten what she’d come for. One of those missed calls, of course, could’ve come from him.
Her expression darkened, her eyes narrowing on the edge of mean before her gaze flicked away. “He died,” she said. “I thought you knew that.”
“Oh. Oh, no.” I shook my head, a sudden wave of grief washing through me, though I hadn’t had much contact with Mr. Fletcher other than when he’d neglected to accept Ruby’s things. He’d seemed too mellow for his daughter, too lost, like he’d given up attempting to control her long ago. The path my own father had taken with my brother, whereas my mother had gone to the other extreme.
When Mr. Fletcher retired, he moved to Florida. Perhaps figuring Ruby was old enough to figure things out on her own, like the rest of us. And she’d shuttled herself the two blocks over, to me.
“I didn’t know,” I said. I closed the distance between us, placed my hand awkwardly on her upper arm. “I’m sorry.”
“Well,” she said, stepping away, “I’m gross right now, sorry. I really need a cold shower.” And that was that.
Maybe the calls from the lawyer were about her inheritance. Maybe her staying with me was a waypoint on her journey, then she would ultimately collect her father’s estate and start fresh.
Ruby retreated to her room, but I settled on the love seat in the loft, listening for the call I knew she’d be returning. About her case, or her dad’s estate, or whatever she planned to do with the rest of us—the people who were going to pay.
But she remained silent. There was nothing, nothing, from the other side of the wall, until the sound of the water in the pipes. And then, moments later, the faint hum of her off-key tune in the shower.