When She Was Gone Read Free

seen the breakup through the glass. Linsey leaning in toward Timmy, touching his face, then removing herself, fingers first, then arms, then she got up from the wicker love seat and sat on a chair by herself, wrapped only in its arms. He saw them kissing good-bye, like they always did, mouthsfit together like wheel and cog, only their bodies told the rest, space between them, chests breathing independently.
    Early that spring, Mr. Leonard had watched Linsey and Timmy holding hands on the porch swing like a fifties couple, courting. He’d seen the way they made their arms and legs fit together, a single body for so many limbs. He’d seen the way the love flared off them, dazzling light. Now he saw Linsey’s sadness. Again. The window seat, like a crumpled child.
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    Mr. Leonard was a half-breed, his father a famous Jewish conductor and an agnostic, his mother a lapsed Catholic who’d died of anaphylactic shock in the picnic-blanketed audience while her husband wound his arms passionately around Mahler’s no. 8 with the Tanglewood Festival orchestra. Molly Leonard had never been stung by a bee before that day, at the renowned summer festival of outdoor concerts. Perhaps it was a paper wasp, perhaps an ordinary honeybee, perhaps she had squashed it absently with her thigh or perhaps it was aggressive, rising from the earth with a mindless malice—either way, Mr. Leonard was with a nanny at the pine-beamed rental cottage. He was eight. He would swim in Long Pond, he would drink pink lemonade, hand-squeezed by the nanny, lemons and pink grapefruit, quite a lot of sugar slushing at the bottom of the striped glass; he would change into his pale blue cotton pajamas—my little maestro, his mother called him—and eat nine squares more Lindt milkchocolate than was allowed, reading The Adventures of Tintin, while his babysitter talked with her boyfriend on the phone, winding the cord around and around. He would sleep once more before he knew his mother was dead.
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    Mr. Leonard would’ve like to have talked to Linsey’s mother—no longer Mrs. Hart; now she was Mrs. Stein, and she had taken a course at the reform synagogue for non-Jews who had married in and didn’t want to convert, but wanted to give their homes some Jewishness (Mr. Leonard thought about this: some Jewishness, like a twig from an olive tree: like a spray can of something, eau de prewar Eastern Europe: or better yet: German Jew, crystals hung in the windows, Viennese cakes with fig fillings), so she made Shabbat dinner on Fridays. Linsey loved eating the challah; Mr. Leonard knew this because she often took hunks out to the wicker landings of the porch, fed them to Timmy, before Timmy was banished—Mr. Leonard would’ve like to have told Mrs. Stein not to push her daughter so hard. To let her stay with Timmy: if they were going to split up, it would happen. Linsey was young, but she wasn’t stupid. Abortion was legal—for now, anyway. Children lived together now, they decided whether they fit together like puzzle pieces or whether they ought to share only meals and conversations and maybe sex but not the rest of life. The rest of life—Mr. Leonard thought—should belong to Linsey. Her mother was making the worst mistake, trying to conduct a soloist, trying to instruct her daughter’slife in a way it could not be forced to go. He had always been cordial with the Harts/Steins. He brought their papers up to the porch—stacked them neatly under the rocker, bundled the mail just inside the screen door, feeling presumptuous but helpful—when they went away on vacation. They didn’t ask him to do this, but he knew they appreciated it. Once, a hundred years ago when she was still a girl and he was still a teacher, Linsey had been sent over with a plate of brownies as a thank-you. She’d been eating one she had slipped out from under