If She Were Dead

by J. P. Smith

  “It’s Richard. I’ve been trying to reach you for the last twenty minutes.”

  “I was being interviewed, Richard. I was on a radio show in LA. I’m trying to sell books so I can make a living.” She sounded as though she were addressing a delinquent child.

  “Oh, sorry. How’s LA?”

  “I’m not there.”

  “Then how—”

  She briefly explained how it worked.

  “What can I do for you, Richard?”

  “I just wanted to know how Nina seemed to you.”

  “You spoke to her on the phone when she was here the other day.”

  “I know, but…”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Why this attitude, Amelie?”

  “Because I was in the middle of a long-distance interview.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Don’t call me in the middle of the day. You know I’m working.”

  “You were answering someone’s questions.”

  “That was work, too.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were being interviewed. I haven’t seen Nina for a few weeks and was just wondering. I know she’d been having some trouble with a boy.”

  “He’s not a boy, he’s a man.”

  “A man?” Undoubtedly he pictured some gent in his fifties in golfing pants and polo shirt with a Buick, someone named Ned.

  “A young man, Richard, a college student, prelaw with a pierced ear. And she’s back on with him.”

  “I’m just concerned for her, that’s all.”

  Amelie said nothing. She knew she should appreciate Richard at least for being a good father to Nina. She said, “How’s Sharon?”

  “Oh, she’s fine. Thanks for asking.”

  “I bet she’s big.”

  “We’re having a little girl.”

  She could hear the smile in his voice. She remembered when she was pregnant with Nina, how pleased she was with herself, how she liked to look at her swollen body in the mirror.

  “A girl,” she said. “Nina will be thrilled to death.”

  “We’ve talked about it, Nina and I. She’s going to be okay.”

  “And you’ve been all right?” she asked Richard.

  “Not bad, thanks.”

  “Work okay?”

  He told her about the recent successes of his design company, his trips to Hong Kong and London and Geneva. Actually she didn’t care about his work; she had in fact always found his work extremely boring. He had always wanted to be a writer, and having written one very long, unpublishable novel had given it up, started his own company and made a medium-size fortune within the first two years. “I’m also involved in a project in Berlin.”

  “Great,” she said. “I’m glad things are going well for you,” though of course she was nothing of the sort. Or at least she wished she could have come back with something better—not the success of her career, which was evident to him, but of her private life. She wanted to be able to tell him that she was seeing an architect, smart and attractive, but he would catch it at once, he would remember the man he’d talked to on the playing field of Nina’s old school, and Richard would delight in seeing his ex-wife mired in the quicksand of what he would perceive as the kind of sordid suburban scandal she’d made a career of writing about. As though somehow, through the words and sentences she’d written over years, she had created her own tragedy.

  He said, “I told you how much I liked your new book.”

  “Thanks, Richard. I appreciate you saying so.”

  “It’s funny, I’ve been seeing you everywhere.”

  She shifted forward in her seat. “What?” Had he been spying on her, following her, had he been making inquiries into her private life?

  I see you everywhere: it was what Ben had said to her on one of the first occasions they carried on a conversation. Then, of course, she was flattered; he had seen her because he had noticed her the first time, he had remembered her, and he had seen her subsequently because he had sought her out.

  For Richard to say that meant something else was afoot, something sinister. He had Sharon. He would have his new baby. What would he want from Amelie?

  “You’ve been getting a lot of great reviews,” he said. “Sharon saw the piece in Vogue. Wow, I mean, you look amazing.”

  “Oh, that. Thanks.” He had only seen her, as it were, because of publicity exposure. This time her publisher had pumped serious money into her launch, with full-page advertisements in newspapers and the few remaining book supplements, national radio exposure, some TV, readings in New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Monterey, where, she was told, she’d fit right in.

  She couldn’t feel an ounce of pleasure in her book or the reviews. She needed something more, something that would elevate not just her spirits but the whole tone of her life. Richard was going to be a father; she was going to be middle-aged. And having the Vogue people fussing over the cushions on her sofa and the hair on her head and the curtains on the windows didn’t make it any better for her. She couldn’t bring herself to appreciate Richard. She’d been so desperate to have him out of her life, have him and his woman excised from her existence, out of her sight and her hearing, unsmellable and beyond taste, that now they were divorced she could feel only a lingering guilt about this man who treated her with decency and respect.

  “Everything else all right?” he said.

  “By the way,” she said suddenly. “I’m getting married.”

  34

  It was funny how Richard had reacted to her announcement. Amelie herself didn’t know why she’d said it, and yet she knew that turning it into words was a kind of magic, setting free the idea as an entity apart from her, much as when she endowed a character with a name: what had been an aggregation of letters on a page became a person with a past, present, and future, someone against whom other characters could be defined.

  The phone rang.

  “Hi.” She hadn’t even glanced at the screen. She listened. The breathing was regular, relaxed. “Yes? Hello?”

  “Sorry, I just…” The voice, a woman’s, was unfamiliar to her. “Amelie?”

  “Yes?”

  A pause. Then: “It’s Janet. Sorry about that, I thought the boys had gone out but Ben had forgotten his phone… Okay, I can talk now.”

  Amelie sat back and tried to catch her breath. “Janet. Hi. Didn’t I hear you were in California?”

  “So you knew.”

  “Um, Nina said she’d spoken to Rachel. How’s the vacation going?”

  “It’s good. Really nice. My husband and Andrew just left to go to the store, and I thought I’d give you a call, just to see how things are.”

  Amazing how loaded a perfectly innocent question could be. “Things are…good, actually. Busy. You know. The usual.”

  “Writing?”

  “What else is there?” And she laughed, but only a little.

  “I was wondering… We’ll be back on Saturday, and…I was hoping that maybe you and I could get together. Maybe for an early dinner one evening next week?”

  “Um, sure, Janet, that would be nice.”

  She had called from three thousand miles away. Three thousand miles and four time zones just to set up a dinner appointment…

  “I had such a nice time with you after your reading. I just felt, I don’t know, that we could be good friends. I mean, most of the women I know are in the corporate world or they’re involved in research and development, and sometimes it’s good to have someone to talk to outside that whole crazy universe.”

  “Yes,” Amelie said. “Of course.” The call is perfectly innocent, she tried to console herself. Nothing to worry about.

  “Good, then,” Janet said. “Well, I’ll touch base again when I’m home. There’s something I’d like to discu
ss with you.”

  The call ended, Amelie went into full panic mode. Her heart was racing, her T-shirt soaked with perspiration. She tried to remember the tone of Janet’s voice, and was certain it wasn’t positive or gleeful or casual or anything even remotely friendly. It sounded serious, and she felt herself going slightly adrift, as if the earth’s polarities had suddenly switched and she had no idea which direction she was now facing.

  There’s something I’d like to discuss with you.

  Eight deadly words: like a surgeon about to break the worst news of all to her.

  Part Four

  35

  Saturday.

  Now Ben was back, he was home, it was nine in the morning and he was asleep in his house only a short drive from hers. Without realizing it, without even noticing the natural world around her, Amelie walked three rapid miles that warm morning, and everything smelled not so much ripe as decaying on this day she had been anticipating for a fortnight. Nature became a blur, smears of yellow and green, and the sound of bees and the song of crickets were nothing but the undifferentiated hissing of the wind in her ears.

  After her shower, just for a change of scenery she drove into town and ran into her friend Laura, who was about to drive her daughter to her riding lesson. She stood by her Range Rover and greeted Amelie. Laura wore khaki shorts and a T-shirt on which was printed the insignia of her daughter’s school, a creature bending its tusks against the pressure of her enhanced breasts.

  “Congratulations on the book,” Laura said. Everyone was congratulating her and yet only once or twice had anyone in her circle of friends and acquaintances actually come up and said she’d read it. Instead she would see them with other people’s novels, and always they would say that they were going to read her new one, they absolutely must read her new one, they would do it as soon as possible, and then she would hear nothing more because in fact they never did read her new one. Was it out of fear that they might see something of themselves in her tidy 70,000-word narratives? Or was it simply because they didn’t expect very much from Amelie Ferrar, nothing terribly exciting, just the usual tales of lusty suburbia?

  Of course Ben read her books, on his iPad, so that no one would see what might be perceived as evidence, and though he would always say how much he liked them, how wonderful they were, she wanted to hear more, about how successful she had been in drawing this character or that, or how moving the central conflict was. She would look at him and smile, because when he showed her photos of the buildings he had designed, she knew she could never intelligently comment on the things that really mattered to him, the flying buttresses and groins, the sense of spatial integrity, and she, too, would only say, “I like it, it’s wonderful.”

  Laura’s daughter joined her mother by the car. Amelie said, “I haven’t seen Alyssa for, what, a year now? She’s really grown.” Impeccable in her jodhpurs and paddock boots, the little equestrian gave Amelie a withering look and said, “I ride a horse named Popeye.”

  Amelie wondered why anyone would name a horse Popeye. “I bet he can see really well,” she said, imagining a visually adept thoroughbred raised on oats and spinach.

  “No. He’s just very strong,” Alyssa said, staring at this woman who seemed so amazingly stupid.

  “She came in second in her class at the last Labor Day show,” Laura said.

  “Great,” said Amelie.

  “Her jumping has improved, too.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Dressage is just around the corner.”

  “Fabulous.”

  Laura and Alyssa got into the car. Laura started the ignition. She said, “You know that architect at the school, don’t you? Andrew’s father?” She seemed about to add something.

  “Andrew’s in my class. He’s gross and disgusting,” the little girl said, making a vomit face.

  “Why?” Amelie asked Laura, and then realized it was the wrong response. She should have said yes in her bright manner and left it at that.

  “No reason,” Laura said, smiling and driving away, leaving Amelie mired in a swamp of speculation.

  Instead of pulling up her driveway she drove past her house. She had driven into town to buy a croissant and a coffee, though the minute Laura asked if she knew Ben, all her appetite had fled her. Now that she was in her car she could feel it, the vacancy in her stomach, the unlocatable ache that comes with hunger. But she wouldn’t stop, she couldn’t stop, and instead she drove on until she reached Ben’s street, slowing to a crawl as she passed his house, craning her neck to take in the windows, the driveway, the front door. All the blinds in his house had been pulled down. In the depths of his jet-lagged sleep was Amelie the object of his dreams?

  She hadn’t at first noticed the car that had drifted into view behind her, following her almost all the way back to her house, until she looked at the rearview and caught sight of it. She couldn’t make out who was behind the wheel, but there was something sinister about the whole thing. She eased over to the side, slowing to fifteen miles an hour, which the other car also did. And then she came to a stop. And so did the car.

  She put her arm out and waved the driver around her as the flashing blue lights of an unmarked police car snapped on from its grill.

  “Shit,” she said, putting the car in Park.

  The cop wore aviator sunglasses and was hatless. He took his time ambling over to her window. She said, “What’s the problem, Officer? Surely I wasn’t speeding.”

  “It’s that your driving seemed a little suspicious. Going slowly past houses like that. Like you were checking them out, especially as there’ve been a few break-ins the area lately. May I see your license and registration, please?”

  She took her registration from the glove box and the license with its embarrassing photo, making her look like a woman who had been incarcerated for several years for prostitution and narcotics and only now had seen the light of day, prepared to hit the streets again.

  He took them back to his car and did the usual thing, made her sweat it out while he probably listened to Howard Stern on Sirius. After several minutes he took his time getting out of his car and moseying over to her, handing back her documents.

  “You live just a few doors down from here.”

  “Yes, I do, Officer.”

  She tried to see if his name was on his badge or uniform, because she had a sick feeling that this was not going to end well for her, that he would drag her out of her car, cuff her, and throw her in the back of his vehicle, then take her to the wooded road by the recycling facility and have his way with her. She imagined what he’d say to her when he was finished zipping up. “You say anything, little lady, and I’ll tell that architect of yours everything I know about you.”

  Even in these moments before a potential citation, she made a mental note of it as something she might use in her new book.

  He said, “May I ask why you were all the way over by Bainbridge Road?”

  “I’m allowed to drive where I like, aren’t I? Free country and all that?”

  He grinned like Rod Steiger in that Sidney Poitier movie about the southern sheriff she’d streamed on Ben’s recommendation a few weeks earlier. “Well, you are correct about that. You can go now.”

  Even his words, as anodyne and boilerplate as they were, seemed to carry something ominous about them. Now she was off-balance; now her day had been further knocked askew. In the confusion that followed her encounter first with Laura and now with the law, she felt nauseated and fatigued. She drove up to her house and let herself in. She only wanted to call Ben, to have him hear her out, absorb her fears, settle her nerves. But, of course, that wasn’t possible.

  Eventually he would get in touch with her by email or text, and even if Janet was constantly by his side, scrutinizing his every action, her eyes bulging with suspicion, he would somehow allow his lover to know he was back and thinking of her. H
e was like something divine, capable of distant and subtle communication. The light in the sky would change; thunder would roil the cloudless heavens; the wind would carry the whispery ghost of his voice.

  By noon he still hadn’t gotten in touch, and when five o’clock rolled around Amelie was suffocating in silence. She sat on her deck sipping vodka and leafing through the latest New Yorker. She had written precisely zero words that day. That was not exactly true. She had typed the words She got into her car to meet the and then had deleted them, because for a moment she felt she was inside a novel being written by someone else, in a narrative moving in a direction of which she was completely ignorant. Was she the main character, or the antagonist? Or maybe just a subsidiary character, a bit of local color, a woman without much dimension who appears here and there to toss out a little witty dialogue?

  Instead of trying to write, she shut her laptop and opened the novel she’d bought on the night of her most recent reading. The one followed by the drink with Janet. That night.

  Chapter two, page seven:

  When Holly’s mother called her the second time, she listened to the spiteful words, then quietly set the phone down, uttering not a word in reply to the woman. Earlier, her therapist had reduced her to tears simply by once again referring to her family history and the event that had so marked her client. “Poor Holly,” the woman said to her. “You were only nine years old when it happened. Now you’re forty-four, divorced, and the mother of three children. You’ve lived with this burden for so long that, frankly, I think you can’t imagine living without it. Which means I’m not sure I can be of any use to you.”

  Amelie tossed it aside. She knew exactly what was going to happen. Through blurred eyes Holly was going to drive home, phone her mother, spit accusations at her, then try to kill herself, only to be found by Whatshername, her oldest daughter who’s married to that golf pro. She’d read the damned thing a year earlier as an advance reading copy, sent by the author’s editor to pry a blurb out of her. Which, of course, she failed to do.