Her Perfect Life

by Rebecca Taylor

  “For the week.”

  Clare scowled at him, but Charlie licked her face. “This dog, he’s your dirtiest trick yet.”

  “A week?” He kissed her other cheek, then her lips.

  “Fine, a week,” she said, pulling away. “But if I’m even still a little mad by next Sunday,” Clare declared and started back up the stairs with Charlie in her arms, “I’m going to find a way to publicly annihilate that puffed-up bitch. But don’t worry, it’ll be subtle.”

  So, that was settled. The plan was a subtle, public annihilation—they were maybe going to need two weeks.

  Chapter 4

  Eileen

  The last-minute flight from Denver to San Francisco had cost a fortune. Eileen put it on one of their almost maxed-out credit cards and hoped the charges would clear. For the last six months, the realization that she was almost assuredly going to have to go back to spending her days doing work she hated had sunk in deeper with the arrival of every ballooning credit card statement.

  As usual, she pushed the thoughts aside. She didn’t have the strength to mourn her sister and worry about money at the same time.

  Her afternoon had been spent moving mountains. Buying a ticket, picking kids up early from school, cancelling afternoon music lessons, arranging rides for the rest of the week—trying to explain to everyone why she was leaving. A whirlwind of purpose driving her forward, keeping her busy, and her mind off the fact that her only sister was not in this world anymore.

  It didn’t seem possible.

  “Aunt Clare?” Paige had asked, bursting into tears almost immediately. Cameron and Ryan had followed her lead. Holding it together while her children had an opportunity to fall apart…that was the toughest mountain of all.

  Next was walking out the door with a suitcase before their father was able to get home. “I’m so sorry,” Eileen told her kids at the door.

  Paige, who was only fourteen and had only that morning been fighting with her little brother, gave her a hug. “Don’t worry, Mom. We’ll be fine.” She stepped back and placed her hands on both Ryan and Cameron’s backs. “I’ll make some mac-n-cheese. We’ll do homework in the dining room.”

  Eileen stared for a moment at her daughter, suddenly taller than she remembered, then gave them all a kiss. “Thank you. And I won’t be gone long,” she said, although she had no idea if that was even true. “Sara’s driving you for the rest of the week. You have her cell?”

  “I’ve got it. You’re going to miss your flight,” Paige warned her.

  “Okay, you’re right.” The tears she’d been fighting all afternoon welled up. “It’s just…” Her voice cracked, and all three of her kids rushed in and held her.

  “It’s okay, Mom,” Cameron said.

  She took a breath and swallowed the lump in her throat. “Okay, yes, I’m okay.”

  “And we’re okay,” Ryan added.

  Eileen nodded. “Okay.” She picked up her tote and lifted the handle on her rolling suitcase. “Your father should be home”—she checked her phone for the time—“in three hours.”

  “We know… Go,” Paige said and kissed her cheek.

  She didn’t want to leave them, but she gave them each a big hug, kissed their foreheads, then turned and walked out the door. “I’ll call you when I get to the airport,” she said over her shoulder as she dragged the case down the porch steps and out to Eric’s car.

  He would be stuck with hers for several more days.

  Since she’d made it out of her house about two hours before rush hour, the expressway out to the airport had been practically empty. Denver International Airport, with its peaked white canvas roof, was a beautiful mini range of snowcapped mountains sprouting up in the middle of the Colorado plains, still mostly surrounded by nothing but grass. Only a few hotels and restaurants had staked claims. Suburban homes and neighborhoods were beginning to creep closer every year; and once the enormous convention center was completed, Eileen imagined this once-remote architectural wonder would eventually get dwarfed and hemmed in.

  She parked Eric’s car out in the economy lot, rode the shuttle bus with her suitcase and tote into the terminal, collected her boarding pass at the automated kiosks, and blew past security with no more trouble than an extra look at her camera and the one extra lens she’d packed safe into the center of her case. By the time she was on the concourse checking the departure board, she had an hour to wait before her flight boarded.

  It occurred to her that she was both hungry and thirsty. She’d been in such a storm of activity all day that food had never even occurred to her. She turned away from the departure board, set on investigating the restaurants in the B concourse, and came face-to-face with her sister.

  The Tattered Cover, one of Denver’s independent bookstores, had a small airport shop. She stood staring into it. Other passengers browsed the shelves. One man and his son were purchasing something at the counter, and two women stood at the center display table picking up copies of Clare’s newest book, A Perfect Life.

  Eileen watched the two women as they noted their common interest. She couldn’t hear them, but the woman in yoga pants and a sweatshirt said something to the woman wearing the gray pantsuit. They both furrowed their brows, shook their heads, then took their copies of Clare’s book to the register.

  The news about Clare’s death was out.

  Eileen pulled her suitcase to the display table and stared down at the stacks and stacks of hardcovers with her sister’s name. In true sibling rivalry fashion, it had been years since she had either purchased or read one of her sister’s books. At the beginning of Clare’s career, it had been easy to support her. A struggling writer, no different from the millions of other struggling artists, Clare had lived in a run-down one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn with three other starving artists, subsisting on canned soup and apples. Back then, confident in her choice to put her camera down and pursue accounting as a major, Eileen had enthusiastically read every story draft her sister sent her. Most of them had been mediocre at best, and not a single one of them was ever accepted for publication.

  Until one day, one was.

  Eileen picked up her sister’s latest book and got in line behind the two other women clearly eager to read Clare’s last words.

  After she paid, with another credit card that made her hold her breath, the cashier asked her, “Would you like a bag?”

  Eileen forced a smiled. “No thanks.” She picked up her book, along with the free bookmark, and opened her tote. “Shit,” she said.

  “Excuse me?” the cashier asked.

  “Um, nothing. Sorry. I just realized—thank you,” Eileen mumbled and headed with her suitcase out past the other passengers, who were now congregating around the table displaying Clare’s book. Back out in the concourse, she opened her tote again and saw the large envelope addressed to Eric still in her bag. “Damn it,” she whispered. She’d meant to leave it on his desk in his office before she left.

  She pulled out her cell phone and checked the time; she still had forty-five minutes before they would start boarding her flight. She opened her recent calls list and tapped Eric’s contact. With her phone pressed to her ear, she stuffed Clare’s book in her tote next to the envelope and began walking toward the restaurants on the other side of the concourse.

  “Hello?” Eric answered.

  “Hey,” she said, adjusting her bag on her shoulder and taking the phone back into her hand. “I’m at the airport.”

  “Everything okay? You made it on time?”

  “Yes. I actually have a few minutes, so I was going to grab a bite.”

  “Is that Mom?” Ryan’s voice echoed in the background.

  “Yes,” Eric said, his mouth aimed away from the mouthpiece. “She’s at the airport.”

  “You’re at home?” Eileen asked, surprised. All the kids were now talking at once in the back
ground.

  “Yes. Guys, be quiet so I can hear. Yes, after you called, I cancelled my last meeting and came home. How you holding up?”

  Eileen found an empty table outside a Mexican food restaurant that looked cleanish and lowered her tote onto the empty seat. “I’m not sure. I think I’m just moving from one thing to the next.”

  “I’m so sorry. I wish I could be there with you.”

  Eileen closed her eyes. She wouldn’t cry again. Not in the middle of the airport. “I wish you were too. But honestly, I’m glad you’re home with the kids.”

  “Speaking of that…what have you told them, exactly?”

  “I said she had an accident. Not that she shot herself.”

  “They’re reporting her death on the news,” he whispered into the phone. “It won’t be long before the details come out.”

  Eileen took a deep breath. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “I’ll talk to them.”

  “I feel awful. I’m sorry. I never meant for you to have to handle that on your own.”

  “I think it will be awful no matter how they find out.”

  He was right, of course. “Anyway, I’m glad you’re there. I love you.”

  “I love you, too. We’ll get through this.”

  Eileen opened her tote, took out the envelope, and laid it on the table. “Actually, I was calling for another reason. Thank you, by the way, for taking my car in today.”

  “I’m happy to do it.”

  “But there was an envelope on your windshield this morning. I meant to leave it for you, but with everything, I forgot.”

  “An envelope? That’s weird… Oh, I bet it’s from Carl next door. We were talking last week. He’s started selling insurance on the side, trying to make some extra money. He hit me up. I didn’t know what to say. We don’t need to be messing around with insurance right now. He was going to put together some quotes.”

  “Do you want me to open it?”

  “Sure.”

  Eileen bent back the brass tabs holding the flap in place.

  “I’d say just throw it away, but I’m probably going to have to talk with him and find a way to tell him we’re not interested right now. God, I hate when friends try to sell you shit. No,” Eric said to the kids, his mouth away from phone. “I did not say the S word… Well, how about you mind your own business?”

  Eileen reached into the envelope and pulled out several thick pages.

  As she stared down at the pages in her hand, she vaguely heard Eric ask the kids, “What do you want for dinner?” She didn’t breathe. A sickness rushed through her bloodstream, stunned her senses, paralyzed her limbs.

  They were large, eight-by-eleven-inch black-and-white pictures. There were six. Her fingers gently pushed them apart, spreading them out across the table to reveal different scenes, different settings, but always the same main characters. Each picture a punch in her gut more powerful and painful than the last.

  She stared at them.

  There was a handwritten note in black ink torn from a spiral notebook paper-clipped to the photo that most clearly showed Eric and Lauren’s faces. The note was signed—Dave, Lauren’s husband.

  A man in a dark gray suit walked toward her table. Pulling a black carry-on suitcase, he held his phone in his free hand as he spoke into the headset attached to his ear. His eyes swept over the table as he passed by, then met hers for the briefest of moments, understanding igniting between them before he looked away. Eileen heard him keep speaking into his headset. “What was that? Yeah, sorry… Brian’s quotas weren’t met for that quarter.”

  She looked around, suddenly remembering she was in an airport surrounded by people. A woman with two small children sat at a table only three feet away, their paper-wrapped tacos half eaten.

  “Eileen?” Eric asked. “Are you there? Can you hear me?”

  She listened to the sound of her husband’s voice. She loved him. Too much—that’s what Clare had once told her: “You love him too much.”

  “Yes,” she managed to say. “I’m here.” She raked the photos and the note together, aligned their edges, and hid them back in the envelope.

  “What was it?” he asked her.

  “What?” Eileen pressed the flap of the envelope down over the sharp brass tabs and spread them flat.

  “The envelope? Quotes from Carl?” he reminded her. “Are you okay?” She could tell from his tone that he was referring to Clare’s death. He was asking if she was okay. He was implying that maybe she wasn’t, because she had learned a few hours ago that her sister had shot herself. He had no idea what she’d just seen.

  “Eileen? Can you hear me?”

  “Yes. It was just insurance sales stuff…from Carl.”

  They had been married almost fifteen years. They had three children. She loved him more than she should—too much. “Sorry,” she choked. “Um, they’re actually boarding. I made a mistake about the times.”

  “Are you sure you should be traveling alone right now?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You don’t sound fine.”

  “Eric… I have to go. They’re boarding my flight,” she said.

  She hung up and placed her phone facedown on the table next to the envelope. Near her spine, a black hole cracked open and spread across her back, through her stomach, wrapped around her heart, pressed her lungs. An empty space of loss so large, her whole life fell inside out.

  Eileen closed her eyes, willed herself to breathe, and swallowed back the agony clawing its way up her throat. The images of her husband fucking Lauren Andrews were burned into her field of vision, as if she had been staring at the sun. Their entwined limbs, his naked ass, her spread legs. Eric on top of her, behind her. His exposed throat, her full tits. Expressions contorted at the height of orgasm.

  And worse. Their bodies spooned, outlined by only the drape of a sheet, faces slack with sleep. Eric’s arm hung over Lauren’s thin waist, her cropped brown hair spread across the pillow they shared, his lips resting at the base of her neck.

  Eileen put her hands over her face, pressed her eyes, willed the scenes to disappear. Images she knew she would never unsee.

  “You love him too much,” Clare had once said.

  Chapter 5

  Clare

  Two years before her death

  It was all a show, big talk, playing the part. Once Clare had convinced Simon she wouldn’t go online and start a public grudge match with Donna Mehan, she was free to retreat to the solitude and safety of her study. With only her little Charlie to bear witness, she locked her door, took a deep breath, and turned off her Clare Collins act.

  She could be fun, for short periods of time. She could also be useful—in television interviews, for example—but largely, being Clare Collins was exhausting.

  With the internet now functioning again, Clare sat at her desk and pulled up the New York Times to read for herself Donna’s “scathing” review of If You Knew Her. She didn’t have to look; it was the first one on the page.

  For years, international bestselling author Clare Collins has churned out book after book that has appealed to that wide audience that is either devoted, or addicted, to Collins’s signature, if oftentimes repetitive, plot structure: love gained, love lost, love gained again with a twist. So it was with great anticipation that readers, including this reader, who generally prefers a meatier book with more depth and substance than a typical Collins book, awaited the release of If You Knew Her. It’s Collins’s first self-confessed attempt at elevating her prose and leaping the chasm between an all-you-can-eat buffet and a fine dining literary experience.

  One can imagine Collins scratching at the surface of the story she wanted to tell, but when it came time to dig deep, she pulled back before truly daring to break ground with her characters. The result is a setup that makes a heady promise
—a promise that Collins’s unexcavated characters are unable to deliver.

  Collins has indeed leapt; however, If You Knew Her has botched the landing and unfortunately ended at the bottom of the canyon.

  Clare stood up from behind her desk and crossed her expansive study to face the floor-to-ceiling glass wall that looked out over the Pacific crashing below her. The overcast sky met the gray ocean out on the horizon and promised a storm to match her mood. She would give Donna her pound of flesh and read the rest of the review, but Clare already knew two things: Donna’s review had little to do with If You Knew Her, and it wasn’t going to get any better. This was personal, and ten years in the coming. Apparently, Donna’s National Book Award and subsequent improved sales had done little to help her move on.

  They had been friends, once upon a time in Brooklyn. Two struggling writers, going hungry together, sleeping on couches in an over-occupancy one-bedroom apartment. Hunting for silence, space, and the time to get words on pages. Wading through drifts of rejection, rejection, rejection, together with their other two roommates. It had been the four of them. Flynn had also been a writer back then but now worked as an editor for a midsized publisher uptown. Sergio was an actor who had eventually given up chasing off-Broadway and now lived in LA. Back then, their professional struggles were best weathered together, the pain of every “Thank you, no thank you” washed down with the biggest bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill they could scrape enough change together to afford from Roy’s Liquor around the corner.

  Their miseries loved each other’s company, but the company started to shift the day she came home, bottle in hand, wanting to celebrate some success. Clare’s struggle ended first and the most dramatically, despite the fact that it was Donna who was, without question, the most singularly talented of them all.

  She had her reasons to hate Clare, and in truth, Clare understood those reasons perfectly. It was easy to imagine being Donna, that very specific pain of watching your friend achieve professionally everything you ever wanted. Honestly, everything Donna deserved.