The Devil You Know

by Freida McFadden

  “So do you want to pull over at a rest stop?”

  “No, I just want to get there already.”

  “MOMMY, WHAT’S A GAG?”

  Ben whips his head around to look at Leah, his eyes flashing. “Leah, will you be quiet for one goddamn minute?”

  Leah stares at him, astonished. Ben never yells at Leah. Ever. He’s usually happy to let me be the bad guy. There was a tiny chance that this might have actually shut Leah up for the duration of the drive, but I know my daughter, and I was pretty sure this wasn’t going to be the case. Instead, Leah’s face crumbles and she starts wailing hysterically.

  “Maybe some music,” Ben mumbles as he turns Mozart back on.

  Leah cries for the entire rest of the drive. By the end, I’m starting to get worried that Ben might crash the car on purpose and kill us all. But somehow we make it to his mother’s house in Reading, Massachusetts (pronounced “Redding”) with our lives intact. I’m not sure if I can say the same for Ben’s sanity.

  Ben’s mother Nancy lives all alone in a four-bedroom house that’s so gigantic, it feels like a constant hint that we should visit more. He does have two brothers with kids who visit with some frequency, so that takes a little of the pressure off us. Nancy keeps her house spotless and the bedrooms look like they’re out of a hotel, always perfectly made up when we arrive. She even puts, I swear to God, a mint on our pillows. I sometimes call her house Chateau Ross.

  “How are you both?” Nancy asks as we struggle with our bags in her foyer.

  “Good,” I lie.

  “Fine,” Ben mutters.

  Nancy brushes us both away and grabs Ben’s luggage to haul it upstairs herself. She’s thin and small, but wiry. I’ve seen her carrying two huge sacks of laundry down to her basement without breaking a sweat.

  “Mom, you don’t have to do that for us,” he protests, although to be honest, I think he likes being babied by his mother.

  Leah tugs on my jacket. “Mommy, where’s my present?”

  Oh yeah. At some point during the drive, I told Leah that her grandmother would have a present waiting for her, and if she kept crying and complaining, she wouldn’t get the present. It helped. For about five minutes.

  “I got you something very special, Leah!” Nancy chirps. She takes Leah by the hand and leads her to her expansive living room, where she’s got three carefully wrapped presents on her coffee table.

  Leah’s eyes light up like it’s Christmas all over again. “Presents!” she shrieks as she hurls herself at the packages.

  “That was so nice of you, Nancy!” I exclaim.

  A minute later, Leah has stripped the first package of its wrapping paper. She pulls out the contents and her little face falls when she holds up a sweater. “It’s clothes!” she cries, crestfallen.

  “But it’s so pretty!” Nancy says.

  Ben and I exchange looks. “Mom, why would you get a three-year-old girl clothing as a present?” he asks.

  “I’m just trying to buy some beautiful clothing for my granddaughter!” Nancy says, looking just as crestfallen as Leah. I’m not sure which of them to comfort first.

  You know what? I don’t even care. At this point, I’m just relieved we’re not in the car anymore.

  _____

  I’ve got definite misgivings as Ben, Leah, and I walk into the Museum of Science.

  Boston also has a large Children’s Museum, where I suggested we take Leah today. That was an hour-long argument. Ben didn’t want to go to the Children’s Museum because it wouldn’t be interesting for us. I pointed out that if we go to a place that isn’t interesting to Leah, we’re definitely not going to have any fun. He shot back that the Museum of Science would have plenty of exhibits that would be interesting to Leah.

  So anyway, you can guess who won that argument.

  The entrance to the Museum of Science has two lifelike models of dinosaurs. Ben nudges me, “Isn’t that cool?”

  I shrug. “Not that cool. The T. rex doesn’t even seem all that big.”

  “What are you talking about?” He waves his hands expansively at the dinosaurs. “It’s really big!”

  “It’s big,” I admit. “But it’s not so big that it could just step on you and kill you. I mean, it looks like you might be able to fight with it a little. In any case, it wouldn’t be a total blow out.”

  Ben looks skeptical. “You would be able to fight with a T rex? Jane, you can’t even open a jar of spaghetti sauce.”

  That’s an exaggeration. Sometimes I can’t open spaghetti sauce. In my defense, sometimes when I hand the jar over to him, he can’t open it either. Why do they make it so hard to get at spaghetti sauce? “They’re entirely different skills.”

  “Leah,” Ben says, “you think it’s cool, right?”

  Leah shrugs. “It’s not that big. I like the bones ones better.”

  She’s talking about the skeletons in the Natural History Museum. At the time, she actually didn’t seem overly impressed with them, but right now, I’ll take it as a win.

  We make our rounds through the museum. Ben tries to interest Leah in an exhibit called “Mathematica.” I’ll give you three guesses how that turns out. The optical illusions exhibit doesn’t seem to catch her fancy either. Then they have an exhibit involving live butterflies, which Leah usually loves, but suddenly she announces that she’s “’fraid of butterf’ies.”

  “How can you be afraid of butterflies?” Ben demands to know. “They’re butterflies! They’re the least scary animal in existence!”

  Leah won’t budge.

  Finally, after an exasperating forty minutes of dragging her around the museum, Leah discovers an exhibit called “Science in the Park.”

  “See-saw!” she shrieks as she runs excitedly toward a see-saw that’s probably supposed to teach my four-year-old about levers or something else she doesn’t care about.

  I feel some of the tension leave my shoulders now that Leah finally seems placated. Unfortunately, Ben is now unhappy.

  “We’re not going to spend the whole time here, are we?” he says.

  I shrug. “Why not? She’s happy.”

  He looks around at the swings and see-saw. “Why did we spend a hundred bucks to take her to a museum then? We could have just taken her to the park by my mother’s house for free.”

  “Well, she didn’t like anything else here,” I point out.

  “We didn’t even try to show her everything.”

  “Actually, we did try.”

  “Barely.”

  Ben and I glare at each other. Honestly, what’s the problem? Leah is finally happy. Why drag her away from the one thing in this stupid museum that she actually likes?

  “Look,” he says, “I’m not spending the entire time I’m here in a playground exhibit. I want to see the rest of the museum.”

  “So fine,” I say. “Just… go.”

  He folds his arms across his chest. “I’d rather you come with me.”

  I gesture at Leah, who is playing happily. “I’m not dragging her away from here.”

  “Okay…” He glances behind him. “I guess you can text me when you’re ready to leave then.”

  “Okay.” I bite my lip, hoping maybe he’ll decide to stick around. Maybe he’ll decide spending the afternoon with his family is more important than a science museum. But he already left me at a party in Ronkonkoma. It apparently gets easier each time.

  Chapter 20

  When I got married, I’d always imagined that my mother-in-law would be like Mom Number Two. I’d be able to call her up to chat any time I wanted, we’d share books and recipes, and she’d babysit every weekend.

  It isn’t really like that with me and Nancy. Don’t get me wrong—I like Nancy. And I think she likes me. But there’s always been a distance between us for reasons I don’t entirely understand. Maybe she’s just overprotective of her son. Maybe she thinks I don’t coddle him enough.

  Tonight I convinced Nancy to let me help her with dinner, which was h
onestly like pulling teeth. Not that she’s given me any real responsibility. Right now, I’m cutting the stems off green beans. And she keeps watching me to make sure I’m not screwing them up. Like there’s some restaurant critic who’s coming to dinner tonight and will give us a bad review if a single green bean is cut improperly. Honestly, Leah will probably throw most of hers on the floor.

  “Don’t cut them too short,” Nancy advises me.

  I smile, thinking about something Ryan once told me. In surgery, the main job of medical students is often to cut the ends off of knots tied during surgery. It’s the absolute most menial of tasks, yet med students are constantly being criticized for cutting the knot either too long or too short—two years of grueling education and they can’t even get that right. Ryan told me that when he had a medical student he didn’t like, he’d always tell them their knot was the wrong length, regardless of whether it was or it wasn’t. And he didn’t like most of his medical students.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  I almost expect Nancy to relieve me of my responsibilities and shoo me out of her kitchen, but she allows me to keep chopping. She, on the other hand, is hard at work rubbing some sort of yellow goo on a whole raw chicken.

  “What are you making?” I ask Nancy.

  “A roast chicken,” she says. “It’s Ben’s favorite.”

  Nancy is a Little Miss Suzy Homemaker. The opposite of me. Yet despite her domestic skills, things didn’t work out with her husband. The two of them got divorced when Ben was in grade school, for reasons he’s never been able to explain to me. A few times, I pressed him for details and he kept answering, “I have no idea.” I don’t understand how he could possibly not know though. I’ve got a detailed play-by-play on the chronic drinking problem that led to my mother kicking my own father out for good.

  But with Ben’s parents, it’s not as clear. Richard Ross seems like a nice, decent guy. He’s remarried, but only met his second wife years after the divorce so she wasn’t the culprit. I don’t get it. Why did they split? And moreover, how could Ben never have asked his parents that question?

  Men. They have no curiosity.

  “I use a special rub for the chicken,” Nancy tells me. “That’s what gives it such an amazing flavor.”

  “Oh,” I say. But what I really want to say is, Why did you and Mr. Ross break up? Was it because he abandoned you at the Museum of Science because he didn’t like the Science of the Park exhibit?

  “I’ve been making this for Ben since he was practically a baby,” she continues.

  “I don’t know if he likes any of my dishes very much,” I say. I take a deep breath. “Actually, the truth is, sometimes it feels like not much I do anymore makes him that happy.”

  Nancy continues to massage the raw chicken. Her fingers get into the crevices of the bird, and part of me starts to wonder if she even heard what I said. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that. After all, she’s his mom. What’s she going to say? “Yeah, my son can be a real jerk sometimes”? That seems unlikely.

  “Ben can be hard to please,” she finally says, although she still doesn’t look up from the chicken. “But you’ve always made him happy. At least, that’s what he’s told me.”

  A flush rises in my cheeks, although it could just be because of Nancy throwing open the oven. I’d like to believe I’ve always made Ben happy.

  “But sometimes that can stop being the case,” she continues. She lifts the pot containing the chicken and slides it carefully into the oven. “And it isn’t the worst thing in the world, Jane. It happens.”

  “Yeah,” I mumble, and I go back to chopping green beans.

  _____

  Nancy is putting Leah to bed tonight, which is amazing. Sometimes I think I have put her to bed every night of her entire life. That isn’t actually true, but I do feel like I could probably count on my fingers and toes the number of nights that I haven’t gone through some sort of bedtime ritual with her. At Leah’s age, kids are very attached to routine. If I don’t close the door to her room exactly the way she’s used to, she has a freak out. But since this entire house is new, she’s forced to make adjustments.

  That or she’ll just spend the whole night up crying.

  Ben and I are in the bedroom we usually occupy on the second floor of Chateau Ross. The first time Ben brought me here to visit, his mother gave us separate bedrooms even though we’d been dating for several months and were both around thirty. Maybe she was trying to preserve my honor? The first night, Ben snuck into my room after his mother was asleep. By the time we were ready to leave, we’d dropped all pretense of having separate bedrooms.

  Right now, Ben is on his side of the bed (the left), his laptop on his lap, with a screen full of code facing him. I’m on my side of the bed, surfing the internet news on my phone. Apparently, millennial buying habits are changing the face of retail. I must learn more.

  “Hey,” I say to Ben, “remember when your mom used to give us separate bedrooms?”

  He doesn’t answer. He acts like he doesn’t hear me, even though he’s literally one foot away from me. It reminds me of when Leah was an infant and she’d be crying her head off right next to him, yet I’d have to come in from another room to comfort her.

  “Ben!” I say more sharply.

  “Huh?” He looks up like he forgot I was in the room.

  “I was just saying,” I mumble, “that back when we first started staying here, your mom used to give us separate rooms.”

  “Oh right.” His eyes go back to the computer screen. “I wouldn’t mind that right now. I could use a few nights without you kicking me.”

  “I don’t kick you!”

  He nods. “Yeah, you do.”

  “Well, you snore.”

  “Whatever.”

  Ben starts typing at his keyboard, apparently done with our conversation. My phone buzzes with a text message. It’s from Ryan:

  Doing anything fun tonight?

  I look over at Ben, who is still staring at that screen of code.

  I grip my phone, itching to send a reply to Ryan. But I know I shouldn’t. I’ve probably encouraged him more than I should have already. So I delete the text and wander down to the kitchen to eat some of the Frosted Flakes that Nancy always keeps tucked away in her cabinet.

  Chapter 21

  By the time Monday arrives, I’m very much ready to head back home. The plan was to get on the road mid-afternoon so that we could miss rush hour traffic both in Boston and in New York. But considering nobody is packed at the time Nancy is making us sandwiches for lunch, I suspect our plan is going to fall apart. I’m not looking forward to dealing with Ben in traffic.

  Leah and I are in the living room, watching one of her inane shows on television. I hate to admit that I have somehow gotten sucked into the plot. I don’t know how I can get drawn into a storyline involving a duck, a hamster, and a turtle trying to save a baby elephant in distress, but somehow I can’t take my eyes off the screen. This baby elephant is in deep trouble.

  Ben wanders into the living room, still unshowered, wearing the T-shirt he slept in and a pair of sweatpants. He blinks at us. “What are you watching?”

  “Some stupid show.” I look him over. “You really ought to shower. Didn’t you say you wanted to get on the road by three?”

  “Yeah.” He scratches his head, making his hair stand up. “About that. Listen, Jane, I was thinking…” He takes a deep breath. “I thought maybe I’d stay another couple of days.”

  I stare at him. “What? You know I’ve got to be back at work tomorrow!”

  “I know.” He tugs at the hem of his T-shirt. “I thought maybe… I’d stay here myself. And you could go back with Leah.”

  I get this sinking feeling in my stomach. He doesn’t want to go back with us?

  “I feel like I’ve had difficulty focusing on my work at home,” he says. “I just think… it’s so quiet here. I’d kind of like a couple of days to myself.”

  I don’t even know wha
t to say. It doesn’t feel like the right step in our marriage to be leaving him behind when I go back to New York. But at the same time, don’t they say that time apart can help?

  “How am I supposed to get back without the car?” I say.

  “You can take my car,” he offers. “Or take the train back. Or catch a flight.”

  He clearly desperately wants to be rid of us.

  “I don’t think I can deal with Leah by myself in the car for that long,” I tell him.

  He raises his eyebrows. “Seriously? She’s one kid. You really can’t manage one kid?”

  “Are you kidding me?” I shoot back. “On the drive here, you acted like you were going to snap and murder us all!”

  “No, I didn’t. Come on.”

  I let out an exasperated breath. “And what am I supposed to do with her alone for two days?”

  Ben throws up his hands. “Are you really this helpless? You can’t manage your own daughter alone for a couple of days?”

  “If it’s so easy,” I say, “why don’t I go home myself and leave her here? Then you can bring her home if it’s so easy.”

  It’s not a real threat. I’d never leave Leah behind.

  “Look,” Ben says, “I need a few days to myself. Please, Jane.”

  “A few or a couple?”

  He sighs. “What’s the difference?”

  “A few is three,” I explain. “A couple is two.”

  “Jane…” He lowers his head. “Please. I need this.”

  So when it comes down to it, what choice do I have?

  Chapter 22

  It’s been a long time since I’ve traveled on the Long Island Railroad, also known as the LIRR, pronounced “lerrrrr.” It’s the first time I’ve taken it with Leah, at least. We’re sitting together in the cushioned seats, her little head resting on my lap, while I try to figure out how the hell we’re going to get home from the LIRR station closest to where we live.

  It’s been a long journey. Ben drove us to South Station in Boston, where we caught the next Amtrak train to Penn Station. For the first hour or so of the train ride, Leah was super excited to be on the train, singing to herself, “Just a small town Mommy, living in a lonely Mommy. Took the midnight train going to Mommmmmmyyyyyy!” By the time we were on the train two hours, the novelty had completely worn off. Leah wanted off the midnight train going to Mommy. Fortunately, by the third hour, she had mostly passed out, her little stomach filled with everything the train’s snack bar had to offer.