Dead to Her

by Sarah Pinborough

  “No business when socializing remember? William hates that. Anyway, why does it matter? What’s wrong with you today? It was work.”

  “Like jumping in the creek was work.”

  There was a long pause after that and her heart raced. Finally, Jason put his beer bottle down on the counter and stared at her. “Why are you acting like this?”

  She stared right back at him. “I think you like her.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” He looked so appalled she very nearly believed him, until he uttered the death knell of denial. “She’s not my type.”

  The words were a slap in the face. He did want her. And not just in a yeah, she’s hot, I so would jokey way.

  “Really?” The word dripped from her, heavy with sarcasm.

  “For God’s sake, Marcie, am I never supposed to look at another woman, ever? Is that how you’d like me? Castrated?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying!” What was she saying? “This seems different, that’s all. It makes me feel odd and I don’t know why.” She suddenly felt teary. She was making it worse.

  “I don’t want to sleep with her,” Jason said, softened by her upset. “I just find her . . . refreshing, I guess.”

  “Refreshing?”

  “You know”—he shrugged—“a bit wild. Young. Different from our friends.”

  Your friends is what she wanted to snap at him, but she bit it back. They weren’t Marcie’s friends, they’d simply absorbed her into them. Scrubbed her up and made her respectable. She hadn’t fought it because she loved him. She’d allowed it.

  “I’m not boring,” she said, and he burst out laughing.

  “No,” he said. “No, you’re not. A bit crazy maybe, but not boring.” He reached out and pulled her close, kissing the top of her head. A sterile kiss. “She’s young, that’s all,” he breathed hot on her scalp. “Too young for me.”

  Thought no man ever.

  Later that night when she snuck away to take her no baby, thank you very much pill and had locked the dressing-room door, she stood on her vanity chair and carefully removed the overhead vent cover. Up on her tiptoes she reached as far as she could and pulled out the small tin sandwich box she kept hidden there. She calmed a little just running her fingers over the surface.

  Why was she feeling the need to look inside? Keisha Keisha Keisha, that was why. Remembering how Jason had looked at her in the water, how desperately eager he’d been to abandon Marcie and jump in to join her, Marcie wanted to kill him. It was what men never understood. The little disregards hurt the most. The shift from adoration to feeling comfortable. Taken for granted. Disrespected. She had never wanted that. She didn’t want that. Her blood ran too hot in her veins.

  She stared at the box. Her reminder of how far she’d come. Her anchor. Whenever this life she fought so hard for made her feel suffocated, all she needed was to look at the box. Yeah, life wasn’t the perfection she’d hoped for, but things could be a lot, lot worse. She didn’t need to open it to know that the first item, the one that covered all her other memories, was a photo of her and Jason, her arms around his neck, both laughing. Free. Back when they’d first met. When everything was passion and they’d have died for each other. God, how she missed that passion.

  Thrill seekers seek thrills and that’s all there is to it.

  No, she thought, that’s not true. People can change. People do change. Everything was going to be fine. Marcie and Jason Maddox were meant to be.

  Weren’t they?

  6.

  Keisha couldn’t get back to sleep. She wished she could turn off the air-conditioning and feel the night heat, which might help soothe away the ants in her brain that were keeping her awake. The worries. The sense of isolation. The anxiety and dark muddled thinking that had plagued her since she was a child and now were threatening to return.

  Her eyes kept glancing to the corner of the room where the shadows stretched longest. When she’d woken she’d been sure she’d seen him there. A ghostly boy emerging from the gloom, as if he’d followed her from her childhood and her dreams to this place so far away from home. She’d shivered, repeating the words that had been her mantra all her life—there was no boy, there was no ghost—until her breathing evened out. Still though, she felt panicky, lying so still and awake in the night. Billy wouldn’t sleep with a night-light on. He’d laughed at her when she’d asked him. He laughed at her a lot. Or shouted.

  Don’t fuck this up, she told herself. Fuck. Billy didn’t like it when she swore and she’d tried hard not to speak like she had at home, where cursing was part of the vernacular. Despite the Egyptian cotton sheets, soft against her naked skin, she was consumed with a longing for home. The traffic noise, the dirt, the tiny flat on the tenth floor of a building where the lift mostly didn’t work. Where the stairwells stank of piss and the corridors were filled with broken old people trying to hold on to their dignity in a changed, uncaring world, while teenagers tried to sell you crack.

  Everything was different here, and not just the way of life and the quiet, still nights. In London, her family and all the other girls at the club had laughed at Billy’s pathetic romantic overtures until they realized what he was worth and then it didn’t matter that he was old and fat. Then they’d all made sure his pursuit of Keisha was serious. The dollar signs were lit up bright in everyone she knew.

  Think of the money, her uncle Yahuba had said, eyes flashing sharp with endless greed. Dolly had said the same, teeth gritting with envy and all the other women nodding along. They were hard girls at the club, no goodness in them, grifters, graspers, making hundreds of pounds by night and none of them with the sense to save a penny. Smile, dance, and take the money. Drink your way through it. More fool the men.

  But Keisha, Keisha with her odd moods and erratic behavior, had not been like that. The dancing she could do, the feeling of being lost in music under a spotlight, real life forgotten, but not the men, and so she’d become a drinks waitress, her tight clothing staying on, no hands allowed to paw at her. She certainly didn’t do afters, even knowing she could have made so much more, enough to break free of her uncle’s control perhaps, to pay her family back what they said she owed them for raising her, and then maybe enough to run somewhere even her awful dreams couldn’t find her.

  The air-conditioning clicked and started to hum again, the sound enough to keep her awake without the addition of Billy’s sleeping pig grunts and snuffles beside her.

  Her sleeping prince, her hero, she had hit the jackpot with him. Her. Everyone had seen. A rich lonely American widower. She’d have been stupid not to grab at it, and once her uncle and auntie had seen the gifts he’d bought her she’d had no choice. Back then, at the beginning, she hadn’t even minded. Billy was kind. He was fragile almost. He was saving her and maybe she could help with his fear of being old. Dying. Rotting away like his first wife. He was a man who had been forced to look in the mirror and realize that time was no longer on his side.

  Auntie Ayo had told him there would be no lingering cancer for him, after the long and awkward wedding celebration where Keisha had been forced to take him to Peckham and watch her relatives circling like sharks. They’d both drunk too much to get through it; Auntie Ayo said he wouldn’t die in his own shit. People believed her, said she had a gift, a knowing—it shone through—and Billy was no exception, although Keisha could see that Auntie Ayo slightly scared him too.

  He’d fallen for Keisha harder after that, seeing himself as her knight in shining armor saving her from her wicked relatives. He’d said she was his lucky charm. She made him feel young, as if there was clean new breath in his lungs, and she’d thought a life with Billy, even with everyone else clamoring for her to clean him out, could be good. An escape.

  Her past wouldn’t haunt her. Perhaps no more dreams of the boy who was never there, the ghost boy who cursed her. She couldn’t wait to get here. But now she was living it, and everything was different.

  He’d changed too, now that they
were in this hot alien place that was his comfort zone. He was shedding his lonely-widower skin.

  “Don’t ever embarrass me like that again,” he’d said on the way back from the boat this afternoon, his warm smile dissolving as soon as they’d gotten in the car, his whole demeanor suddenly colder than any chill the AC could put out. “This isn’t some trashy part of London, and my friends aren’t your revolting family. You can’t talk like that here.” She was so stunned at the sudden shift in his mood—only seconds earlier he’d been holding her hand as they said their farewells—that it took her a moment to realize he’d meant her comment about the coconut water.

  “Everyone laughed,” she’d answered softly. “It was just a joke.”

  “You sounded like a whore.” His words were bile, raw acid hitting her.

  Only after she’d burst into startled tears, full of apologies, did he pat her on the knee, as if reassuring a scolded child, and tell her he loved her. It was a moment of revelation. Now that she’d married him, all the things he’d said wouldn’t matter actually did. He was well respected. He had power. He didn’t want to be embarrassed, not even by her. Maybe especially not by her. He wanted her to be perfect.

  She took a deep breath. She could do this. He’ll be dead soon enough, Dolly had said when they’d hugged goodbye. With you riding him every night. They’d laughed at that too, but even the sex was harder work than she’d expected.

  It went one of two ways. If he was feeling sweet and sentimental and hadn’t taken a Viagra he simply labored for hours with his head between her thighs, checking she was happy, while she fantasized until she finally came or faked it like a porn star, her sex chafed from his crude mouth. Either way, she made sure she climaxed noisily. A man like William would never understand a true female orgasm. Quiet. Intense. Private. What validation would there be for him in that?

  Then there was the other sex. The Viagra sex. Reclaiming his youth. All the things he’d never done with his saintly first wife he wanted to do now. With her. Of course she had to let him while finding the fine line between agreeing and not behaving like a whore. He wouldn’t like that.

  Tonight had been that kind of sex and she felt bruised and hollow. She wished her friends from the club—Dolly, Ange, and Sabena—were here. They’d know how to play this better than her. It had all sounded much easier in London.

  She pushed the sheets back and reached for her robe, pulling the thin silk around her strong body. She was too restless to just lie there, corpselike, as the hours ticked around until dawn. She needed to move, to remind herself of what she’d won, to shake off this feeling that she’d been duped into imprisonment so far from home and that it might break her.

  Downstairs, she went to the kitchen first, draining milk straight from the container to settle the acid burning her chest from an afternoon’s drinking. She stared at all the stupid individual cartons of coconut water that Billy somehow thought would make him young again. It did taste like sperm, however much he may not have liked the comment. She wanted to twist one open and spit in it. She closed the fridge and padded out into the vast hallway.

  Eleanor stared down at her in the gloom, her expression unreadable, and Keisha shivered. There was no space for the boy here. It was Eleanor’s ghost who stalked this house. The dead mother of the dead son. Keisha could feel her. She was on the walls and in the walls, her energy the blood that ran through the veins of this mansion. Her clothes were still in the closets of the master bedroom—Billy and Keisha used a different room for now—and her drawers were filled with her trinkets and memories.

  Keisha had looked, of course she had. Her need to know about what came before had been overwhelming. Tucked away in a cabinet against one wall were so many framed photos of Lyle, the dead son and heir, that Keisha had been afraid they would tumble out and her nosing around would be discovered. Lyle had died before Eleanor and William had moved into this house—his death and Eleanor’s grief the cause of the move—but it was strange to Keisha that all his pictures were hidden away, from kindergarten and with school friends to the proud young man in his military uniform, the uniform he’d die in, serving in Afghanistan, shortly after. Billy had said he’d been killed fifteen years before. If he’d lived he’d be older than Keisha. Would she have liked him more than his father? He had a sweet face, she thought. Shining eyes. No wonder Billy still couldn’t bear to talk about it. No wonder they’d hidden their grief away.

  On the dresser were more photos, displayed this time, old pictures of Eleanor and her friends or siblings maybe as children, and also of the happy couple—Billy barely recognizable as a young man and Eleanor aloofly elegant—and then in the drawers, hidden amid various items of carefully folded clothes, she found some jewelry and a small box containing far more interesting treasure: a bag of grass and cigarette papers and a sealed packet of syringes alongside a vial of morphine. That was a revelation. Perhaps Eleanor had kept a lot of her pain from Billy and her nurses or Iris and Elizabeth and whoever else looked after her. Maybe there had been more to the saintly Eleanor than met the eye. Everything about this world felt like an act.

  Keisha wandered through the house, resisting the urge to go back upstairs and dip further into the dead wife’s possessions, instead taking comfort in the endless rooms and fine furniture. Her domain now. The demands of her family were an ocean away. Just the one man to take care of. Keep him happy, she thought. He’s nearly seventy. He’ll be dead soon. It was a harsh and horrible thought, but she couldn’t help it. There had been no prenup. It had all moved too quickly for that, her family pouncing while he’d been intoxicated by her, but he’d made her sign a postnup as soon as they’d landed, maybe the first clue that her knight in shining armor wasn’t so soft. She knew, even when he died, that she wouldn’t get everything, but she’d get enough. Plenty to get her family off her back and then maybe to flee somewhere wonderful where none of them could find her.

  Her stomach fizzed as she passed a wall of photographs, black-tie events at the country club with various politicians or local celebrities. There were a few now familiar faces smiling out from some of the pictures, and as her eyes lingered on one, a hand subconsciously floated up to her neck, teasing the skin there, imagining a touch as her heart raced. This was the bright light in her new life. She thought back to the laughter on the boat. Their eyes meeting. The way she felt in the excitement of a flirtation. Never had Billy seemed so old and ridiculous beside her. She’d felt breathless. Girlish. Giddy. Alive. An overwhelming surge of lust.

  She needed to be careful, she knew that. She couldn’t put all this at risk with one of her wild emotional obsessions. She had to keep her head straight. To concentrate on Billy—and that meant not getting distracted. She took a last glance at one of the photos before turning away. She had to keep those feelings boxed up for private moments. Something to fantasize about while Billy wheezed and slobbered all over her.

  She turned the alarm off and went out onto the terrace, the night a wall of heat to penetrate, no hint of a breeze. It calmed her though. She had to think kinder thoughts about Billy. He had rescued her from a life she hated and a family who scared her. This was a beautiful place. She had to find a way to enjoy it until it was all hers.

  Tiny yellow bulbs twinkled on strings in the trees, leftovers from the party. A light was also still on in the apartment above the garages, where Zelda lived. She must be a night owl too. What time was it? One in the morning? Two? The light went out as she stared up at the window and she smiled. Maybe Zelda had the right idea. It was too late to be awake. She should have taken a pill or something to help her sleep. There was only so long Billy would put up with her sleeping half the morning and the less time she could spend in bed the less chance there was of him pawing at her more.

  She took a last look at the glittering trees and then went back into the cool house. Her skin had goose-pimpled as she crept back under the sheets, and for a while she just lay in the dark, lost in her heated thoughts of eyes meeting, befor
e, finally, she fell into a fitful sleep of lustful dreams and family memories she’d rather forget.

  7.

  It was ten when Keisha woke, the sheets tangled between her thighs like a drained lover, and she squinted against the light that streamed through the large windows. It made her feel good. A fresh start. Today, she would be a good wife. She stretched for a moment before grabbing her robe and heading downstairs. Coffee. She needed coffee. Strong, lovely American coffee.

  She filled a mug from the machine in the kitchen and then followed the trail of noise to Billy’s office. Her nose crinkled as she passed several large vases filled with pungent flowers, a cacophony of color and scent filling the hallway that gave her a wave of cloying nausea.

  “Jesus, Billy,” she said, as she drifted into his office and went to kiss him dutifully on the cheek. “Where did all those awful flowers come from?”

  “Morning, honey.” He was leaning against his desk, face red from the treadmill, a carton of coconut water in hand. She should be glad he was making an effort, but the sight of him in his sportswear, so pleased with himself, made her want to cringe. Youth was for the young. His was gone. No matter how often he got on the treadmill, he couldn’t run from old age and death. He’d be better off making his peace with it.

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” The voice came from behind her. Elizabeth, sitting demurely on the leather couch, notebook and diary open on the coffee table. “It’s habit. I used to get them for Eleanor every few days. She loved all the perfumes. I did it without thinking.”

  “Oh no, I’m sorry,” Keisha said, feeling entirely not sorry. There was a brief glint in the secretary’s eye that made Keisha wonder if the flowers had been bought to remind her once again that she was simply a poor replacement. “Of course. Eleanor.” She spoke the last word softly. The dead wife who wouldn’t be laid to rest.