I thought about suggesting we get another dog, maybe a different breed. But I never did. And so our home—no pets, no children—shrank back to being just a house.
I began to loathe it, the constant silence that never let up.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
I PLACE THE POSTCARD with the German shepherd back on Aunt Charlotte’s desk. I have missed so much work. I can’t be late again. I tuck the letter to Emma in my purse. I will deliver it after my shift. I imagine I can feel its weight pulling down the strap on my shoulder as I begin my walk to Midtown.
I’m halfway there when my phone rings. For a brief moment, I think, Richard. But when I look down, the number flashing is Saks.
I hesitate, then answer and blurt out, “I’m almost there. Another fifteen minutes, tops.” I pick up my pace.
“Vanessa, I hate to have to do this,” Lucille says.
“I’m so sorry. I lost my cell phone, and then…” She clears her throat and I fall silent.
“But we need to let you go.”
“Give me one more chance,” I say desperately. With Aunt Charlotte’s condition, I need to work now more than ever. “I was going through a rough time, but I promise, I won’t— Things are turning around.”
“Being late is one matter. Repeated absences are another. But concealing merchandise? What were you planning to do with those dresses?”
I’m going to deny it, but something in her voice tells me not to bother. Maybe someone saw me remove the three black-and-white floral knit Alexander McQueen dresses and hide them in the stockroom.
It’s futile. I have no defense.
“I have your final check. I’ll mail it to you.”
“Actually, can I come in to pick it up?” I hope I can convince Lucille to give me another chance in person.
Lucille hesitates. “Fine. We’re a little busy at the moment. Stop by in an hour.”
“Thank you. That’s perfect.”
Now I have time to deliver the letter to Emma’s office instead of waiting until after work and leaving it at her home. It’s only been twenty-four hours since I last saw Richard’s fiancée, but that means it’s a day closer to her wedding.
I should be using this time to plan my speech to Lucille. But all I can think of is how I can linger outside in the courtyard and see if Emma steps out for a coffee or to run an errand. Maybe I’ll be able to discern from her expression if Richard told her about his visit.
The last time I entered this sleek high-rise building was for Richard’s office party. The night it all began.
But I have so many other memories of this place: coming here from the Learning Ladder to meet Richard and watching him conclude a business call, his voice so intent it was almost stern, while he made goofy faces at me above the phone receiver; commuting in from Westchester to join Richard and his colleagues for dinner; stopping by to surprise Richard and having him lift me off my feet into a joyful hug.
I push through the revolving door and approach the security guard’s desk. At ten o’clock, the lobby isn’t busy, for which I’m grateful. I don’t want to bump into anyone I know.
I vaguely recognize the guard, so I keep my sunglasses on. I hand over the envelope with Emma’s name printed on it. “Can you deliver this to the thirty-second floor?”
“Just a moment.” He touches a screen on his desk and types in her name. Then he looks up at me. “She no longer works here.” He pushes the envelope back to me across the desk.
“What? When did she—did she quit?”
“I don’t have that information, ma’am.”
A UPS deliverywoman walks up behind me, and the guard shifts his attention.
I take the envelope and walk back through the revolving door. In the nearby courtyard is a little bench where I planned to wait for Emma. Now I collapse onto it.
I shouldn’t be so surprised. After all, Richard wouldn’t want his wife working, particularly not for him. I briefly wonder if she has taken another job, but I know she wouldn’t do that right before her wedding. I am equally certain she won’t return to work after she is married, either.
Her world is beginning to shrink.
I need to get to her right away. She threatened to call the police if I approached her apartment again, but those are not consequences I can focus on now.
I stand up and go to put the letter in my purse. My fingers graze my wallet. The one containing Duke’s picture.
I pull the small color photograph out from its protective plastic covering. Rage descends over me; if Richard were here now, I would fly at him, clawing his face, screaming obscenities.
But I force myself to return, yet again, to the security guard’s desk.
“Excuse me,” I say politely. “Do you have an envelope?”
He hands me one without comment. I put Duke’s photo inside, then I search my purse for a pen. I come up with a gray eyeliner and use it to write Richard Thompson on the envelope. The blunt-tipped, soft liner leaves a trail of progressively messier letters, but I don’t care.
“Thirty-second floor. I know he still works there.”
The guard raises an eyebrow but otherwise remains impassive, at least until I leave.
I need to go to Saks, but as soon as I am through there, I intend to walk directly to Emma’s apartment. I wonder what she is doing at this precise moment. Packing up her things in preparation for the move? Buying a sexy nightgown for her honeymoon? Having a final coffee with her city friends, promising she’ll be back all the time to see them?
My left foot hits the pavement. Save. My right foot comes down. Her. I walk faster and faster, the words echoing in my brain. Savehersavehersaveher.
* * *
I was too late once before, when I was in my final year in Florida at the sorority. That will not happen again.
On the night Maggie vanished, I came home from Daniel’s just as the pledges were returning to the house, wet and giggling, smelling like the sea.
“I thought you were sick!” Leslie yelled.
I pushed through the cluster of pledges and headed upstairs to my room. I was shattered, unable to think straight. I don’t know what made me look back at the girls, who were by then drying themselves with the towels someone was throwing over the top of the staircase.
I spun around. “Maggie.”
“She’s right—she’s right—” Leslie spluttered. Those two syllables echoing as my sorority sisters scanned the room, their laughter fading as they checked faces, searching for the one who wasn’t there.
The story of what happened on the beach emerged in frantic shards and fragments; memories distorted by alcohol and exuberance that had turned to fear. Some fraternity boys had crept along behind the girls as they’d marched to the beach, perhaps galvanized by the flash of that hot-pink bra. The pledges had all stripped, as instructed, then run into the ocean.
“Check her room!” I shouted to our sorority president. “I’ll go to the beach.”
“I saw her come out of the water,” Leslie kept saying as we ran back to the ocean.
But so had the guys. By then the boys had run onto the sand, hooting and laughing, scooping up the discarded clothing and dangling it just out of reach of the naked girls. It was a prank; not one we’d planned, though.
“Maggie!” I screamed as we sprinted now onto the beach.
The girls had been screaming, too, with some of the clothed sisters chasing the boys. The pledges tried to cover themselves with shirts or dresses the guys dropped as they withdrew farther back onto the sand. The girls had eventually gotten back the clothing and had run to the house.
“She isn’t here!” Leslie yelled. “Let’s go back to the house in case we missed her on the way.”
Then I saw the white cotton top with little cherries and matching shorts strewn on the sand.
* * *
Blue and red lights churning. Divers searching the ocean, dragging nets through the water. A spotlight dancing across the waves.
An
d the high, drawn-out scream when a body was pulled from the ocean. It came from me.
The police questioned us one by one, methodically forming a narrative. The local newspaper filled four pages with articles and sidebars and photographs of Maggie. A news station from Miami filmed footage of our sorority house and aired a special report about the dangers of pledge-week drinking. I was the social director; I was Maggie’s big sister. These details were reported. My name was printed. So was my photo.
In my mind, I always see skinny, freckled Maggie retreating into the ocean, trying to hide her body. I see her going out too far, losing her footing in the unsteady sand. A wave breaks over her head. Maybe she cries out, but her voice blends into the other shrieks. She gulps salt water. She spins around, disoriented, in the inky black. She can’t see. She can’t breathe. Another wave drags her under.
Maggie vanished. But maybe she wouldn’t have if I hadn’t disappeared first.
Emma will disappear, too, if she marries Richard. She will lose her friends. She will become estranged from her family. She will disconnect from herself, just as I did. And then it will get so much worse.
Save her, my mind chants.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT
I WALK THROUGH THE EMPLOYEES’ door and take the elevator to the third floor. I find Lucille refolding sweaters. She’s been shorthanded because of me; she is doing my job.
“I really am sorry.” I reach for the pile of pewter cashmere. “I need this job, and I can explain what’s been going on.…”
She turns to me as my voice trails off. I try to read her expression as she appraises my appearance: confusion. Did she think I would simply pick up my check and leave? Her gaze halts at my hair, and I instinctively turn to the mirror alongside the sweaters. Of course she’s perplexed; she has only known me as a brunette.
“Vanessa, it’s I who am sorry, but I gave you several second chances.”
I’m going to beg some more, but then I see the floor is filled with customers. A few other saleswomen are watching us. Perhaps it was even one of them who told Lucille about the dresses.
It’s futile. I put down the sweaters.
Lucille retrieves my check and hands it to me. “Good luck, Vanessa.”
As I walk back to the elevator, I see the black-and-white intricately patterned gowns hanging in their rightful place on the rack. I hold my breath until I’ve safely passed them.
* * *
That dress had fit me like a glove, as if it were custom-made for my curves.
Richard and I had been married for several years by then. Sam and I were no longer speaking. Duke’s disappearance had never been resolved. My mother had also unexpectedly canceled her upcoming spring trip to visit us, saying she wanted to go on a group tour to New Mexico.
But instead of withdrawing from life, I’d begun to ease back into it.
I hadn’t had a sip of alcohol in nearly six months, and the puffiness had dissipated from my body like helium slowly leaking from a balloon. I’d begun to rise early each morning to jog through the broad streets and gentle hills in our neighborhood.
I had told Richard I was focusing on getting healthy again. I thought he believed me, that he simply accepted my new behavior as a positive shift. After all, he was the one who’d printed out the itemized bills the country club emailed to him every month before they charged his credit card. He’d begun to leave them on the kitchen table for me with the liquor charges highlighted. Turns out, I had never needed to bother with the Visine and breath mints; he’d known exactly how much I’d been drinking during those committee lunches.
But I was changing more than just my physical health. I’d also begun a new volunteer job. On Wednesdays, I commuted on the train with Richard, then caught a cab to the Lower East Side, where I read to kindergarteners at a Head Start program. I’d gotten to know the program’s organizers while delivering books for the club’s literacy program. I only worked with the children for a few hours each week, but it gave me purpose. Stepping back into the city was rejuvenating, too. I was feeling more like my old self than I had since my honeymoon.
“Open it,” he had said the night of the Alvin Ailey gala as I looked down at the glossy white box tied with a red bow.
I untied the silk, lifted the lid. Since marrying Richard, I’d grown to appreciate the textures and detailing that separated my old H&M staples from fine designer pieces. This dress was among the most elegant I’d ever seen. It also contained a secret. From a distance, it appeared to be a simple black-and-white pattern. But that was an illusion. Up close, every thread was deliberately placed, stitch upon stitch creating a floral wonderland.
“Wear it tonight,” Richard said. “You look gorgeous.”
He put on his tuxedo and I brushed aside his hand when he began to tie his bow.
“Let me.” I smiled. Some men in black tie look like boys on their way to the prom, with their slicked-back hair and glossy shoes. Others seem like pompous posers, the wannabe one percenters. But Richard owned it. I straightened the wings of his bow tie and kissed him, leaving a trace of pink glossing his bottom lip.
I can see us that night as if from above: Exiting our Town Car into the lightly falling snow and walking arm in arm into the gala. Finding our table card that said Mr. and Mrs. Thompson: Table 16 in flowing script. Posing for a photo, laughing. Accepting flutes of champagne from a passing server.
And, oh, that first sip—those golden bubbles crushing in my mouth, that warmth trickling down my throat. It tasted like exhilaration in a glass.
We had watched the dancers leap and soar, their sinewy arms and muscular legs whirling, their bodies twisting into impossible shapes, while drums frantically throbbed. I didn’t realize I was swaying back and forth and lightly clapping until I felt Richard’s hand give my shoulder a gentle squeeze. He was smiling at me, but I felt a flush of embarrassment. No one else was moving to the music.
When the performance ended, there were more cocktails and passed hors d’oeuvres. Richard and I chatted with some of his colleagues, one of whom, a white-haired gentleman named Paul, sat on the board of the dance company and had bought a table for the dinner benefit. We were there as his guests.
Dancers mingled among us, their bodies rippling sculptures, looking like gods and goddesses who’d descended from the sky.
Usually at these types of social events, my face hurt from smiling by the end of the night. I always tried to look engaged and cheerful to compensate for my not having much to say, especially in the dull silence following the inevitable question, the one strangers always think is so harmless: “Do you have children?”
But Paul was different. When he asked what I’d been up to and I mentioned volunteering, he didn’t say, “How nice,” and seek out a more accomplished person. Instead he asked, “How did you get into that?” I found myself telling him about my years as a preschool teacher and my volunteer work with Head Start.
“My wife helped get the funding for a wonderful new charter school not too far from here,” he said. “You should think about getting involved with it.”
“I would love that. I miss teaching so much.”
Paul reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a business card. “Call me next week.” He leaned in a bit closer and whispered, “When I say my wife helped with their funding, I mean my wife told me to write them a big check. They owe us a favor.” His eyes crinkled at the corners and I grinned back. I knew he was one of the most successful men in the room and that he was still happily married to his high school sweetheart, a white-haired woman who was chatting with Richard.
“I’ll make introductions,” Paul continued. “I bet they can find a spot for you. If not now, maybe at the start of the school year.”
A waiter offered us glasses of wine from a tray, and Paul handed me a fresh one. “Cheers. To new beginnings.”
I’d misjudged the force of our glasses connecting. The delicate, thin rims collided with a crash, and I was left holding a jagged ste
m while wine coursed down my arm.
“I’m so sorry!” I blurted as the waiter rushed back to me, offering his stack of cocktail napkins and removing the broken stem from my hand.
“Completely my fault,” Paul said. “I don’t know my own strength! I’m the one who’s sorry. Hold on, don’t move, there’s glass on your dress.”
I stood there while he plucked a few shards out of the fine knit, putting them on the waiter’s tray. The conversations around us had halted for a moment, but now they resumed. Still, I felt everyone’s heightened awareness of me. I wanted to melt into the carpet.
“Let me help,” Richard said, coming to stand next to me. He blotted my damp dress. “Good thing you weren’t drinking red.”
Paul laughed, but it sounded forced. I could tell he was trying to remove some of the awkwardness from the moment. “Well, now I really owe you a job.” Paul looked at Richard. “Your lovely wife was just telling me how much she misses teaching.”
Richard crumpled up the damp napkin in his hand, put it on the waiter’s tray, and said, “Thanks,” dismissing the man. Then I felt Richard touch the small of my back. “She’s great with kids,” he told Paul.
Paul’s attention was caught by his wife, waving him over. “You have my number,” he told me. “Let’s talk soon.”
The moment he left, Richard leaned closer to me. “How much have you had to drink, sweetheart?” His words were innocuous, but his body held an unnatural stillness.
“Not that much,” I said quickly.
“By my count you had three glasses of champagne. And all that wine.” His hand increased its pressure on my lower back. “Forget dinner,” he whispered in my ear. “Let’s head home.”
The Wife Between Us Page 23