Jason, I thought, but I couldn’t say it.
“Maybe one of her friends?” someone ventured. “Or her brother? He’s a senior, right?”
The guard looked around the room. “I’m going to need to call the police. That’s procedure. Back in a minute.”
He stepped outside, but before he reached for his car radio, I intercepted him. “Please don’t get him in trouble. If it was her brother, Jason … we don’t want to press charges.”
“You think it was him?”
I nodded. “I’m sure it was.”
The guard sighed. “Breaking and entering, destruction of property … that’s pretty serious. You girls should start locking your doors.”
I looked back at our house. If someone came in and climbed the stairs, my room was the second one on the left.
Maybe being questioned by the police would inflame Jason even more. He might blame me for that, too.
After the police came and took photographs and collected evidence, I put on shoes so the glass from the smashed lamp wouldn’t cut my feet and helped my sisters clean up the mess. As hard as we scrubbed, we couldn’t remove the ugly words from the wall. A few of us went to the hardware store to pick up paint.
As my sisters considered the various shades, my cell phone rang. I reached into my pocket. Undisclosed number, the screen said, which probably meant the call originated at a pay phone. In the instant before the dial tone sounded in my ear, I thought I could hear something.
Breathing.
“Vanessa, what do you think of this color?” one of my sisters asked.
My body was rigid and my mouth dry, but I managed to nod and say, “Looks great.” Then I walked directly to another aisle, the one containing locks. I bought two, one for my bedroom door and one for my window.
Later that week, a pair of police officers came to the house. The older of the two officers informed us that they had questioned Jason, who’d admitted to the crime.
“He was drunk that night and he’s sorry,” the officer said. “He’s working out a deal to get counseling.”
“As long as he never comes around here again,” one of my sisters said.
“He won’t. That was part of the arrangement. He can’t come within a hundred yards of this place.”
My sisters seemed to think it was over. After the officers left, they dispersed, heading to the library, to classes, to their boyfriends’ places.
I stayed in our living room, staring at the beige wall. I could no longer see the words, but I knew they still existed and always would.
Just as they would always reverberate in my head.
You killed her.
* * *
My future had seemed bursting with possibilities before that fall. I’d been dreaming about cities where I might move after graduation, considering them like a hand of cards: Savannah, Denver, Austin, San Diego … I wanted to teach. I wanted to travel. I wanted a family.
But instead of racing toward my future, I began making plans to run away from my past.
I counted down the days until I could escape from Florida. New York, with its eight million residents, beckoned. I knew the city from my visits to Aunt Charlotte’s home. It was a place where a young woman with a complicated past could start anew. Songwriters composed passionate lyrics about it. Authors made it the centerpiece of their novels. Actors professed their love for it in late-night interviews. It was a city of possibilities. And a city where anyone could disappear.
On graduation day that May, I donned my blue robe and cap. Our college was so large that after the commencement speeches concluded, students were divided up according to their majors and awarded diplomas in smaller groups. When I walked across the stage of the Education Department’s Piaget Auditorium, I looked out into the audience to smile at my mother and Aunt Charlotte. As I scanned the crowd, someone caught my eyes. A young man with red hair, standing off to one side, away from the other graduating students, even though he also wore a shiny blue robe.
Maggie’s brother, Jason.
“Vanessa?” The dean of our department thrust my rolled-up diploma into my hand as a camera flashed. I walked down the steps, blinking from the light, and returned to my seat. I could feel Jason’s eyes boring into my back for the rest of the ceremony.
When it ended, I turned to look at him again. He was gone.
I knew what Jason was telling me, though. He’d been biding his time until graduation, too. He wasn’t allowed to come within a hundred yards of me at school. But there were no rules about what he could do after I left campus.
A few months after graduation, Leslie emailed a newspaper link to a few of us. Jason had been arrested for drunk driving. The ripple effects of what I’d done were still spreading. A tiny selfish burst of relief went through me, though: Maybe now Jason wouldn’t be able to leave Florida and find me.
I never found out more—whether he went to jail or rehab or was simply let off with a warning again. But about a year later, just before the doors of my subway car closed, I saw a slim frame and shock of red hair—someone was hurrying through the crowd. It looked like him. I burrowed deeper into the cluster of people on my subway car, trying to hide myself from view. I told myself that the phone was in Sam’s name, that I’d never changed my driver’s license to a New York one, and that since I was renting, he wouldn’t be able to find a paper trail that led to me.
Then, a few days after my mother surprised me by placing an engagement announcement in my local Florida paper that listed my name, Richard’s name, and where I resided, the phone calls began. No words, just breathing, just Jason telling me he’d found me. Reminding me in case I’d forgotten. As if I could ever forget.
I still had nightmares about Maggie, but now Jason entered my dreams, his face twisted in fury, his hands reaching out to grab me. He was why I never listened to loud music when I jogged. His was the face I saw the night our burglar alarm blared.
I became acutely aware of my surroundings. I cultivated my sense of gaze detection, to avoid becoming prey. The sensation of static rising over my skin, the instinctual lifting of my head to search out a pair of eyes—these early-warning signs were what I relied upon to protect me.
I never made the connection that there could have been another reason why my nervous system became exquisitely heightened immediately after my engagement to Richard. Why I obsessively checked my locks, why I started getting hang-ups from blocked numbers, why I’d pushed Richard away so hard when my loving, sexy fiancé had held me down to tickle me on the night we watched Citizen Kane.
The symptoms of arousal and fear can be muddled in the mind.
I was wearing a blindfold after all.
CHAPTER
THIRTY
I EXIT SAKS for the last time, avoiding the security guard’s eyes when he checks my bag, then I begin to walk to Emma’s apartment. I try to tell myself that it is also for the last time. That after this, I will leave her alone. I will move on.
Move on to what? my mind whispers.
Ahead of me on the sidewalk, a couple strolls hand in hand. Their fingers are interlaced, and their gaits are in sync. If I had to make a snap determination of the quality of their relationship, I would say they are happy. In love. But, of course, those two feelings are not always intertwined.
I consider how perception has shaped the course of my own life; how I saw what I wanted to—needed to—during the years I was with Richard. Maybe being in love carries the requirement of filtered vision; perhaps it is so for everyone.
In my marriage, there were three truths, three alternate and sometimes competing realities. There was Richard’s truth. There was my truth. And there was the actual truth, which is always the most elusive to recognize. This could be the case in every relationship, that we think we’ve entered into a union with another person when, in fact, we’ve formed a triangle with one point anchored by a silent but all-seeing judge, the arbiter of reality.
As I stride past the couple, my phone rings. I know wh
o it is before I even see Richard’s name flash.
“What the fuck, Vanessa?” he says the moment I answer.
The fury I’d felt earlier when I looked at Duke’s photo comes roaring back to me. “Did you tell her to stop working, Richard? Did you tell her you’d take care of her?” I blurt out.
“Listen to me.” My ex-husband bites off each word. In the background on his end, I can hear honking. He obviously just received the photograph, so he must be on the street outside his office. “The guard told me you tried to deliver something to Emma. Stay the hell away from her.”
“Bought her a house in the suburbs yet, Richard?” I can’t stop goading him; it’s as though I’m letting out everything I was forced to repress during our marriage. “What are you going to do the first time she makes you mad? When she isn’t your perfect little wife?”
I hear a car door slam, and suddenly the background sounds on his phone—the city’s ambient noises—cease. There’s a hush, then a distinct voice I recognize as one that runs on a loop on New York Taxi TV: “Buckle up for safety!”
Richard is adept at being a move ahead of me; he must know exactly where I’m going. He’s in a cab. He’s trying to get to Emma first.
It’s not even noon; traffic is light. From Richard’s office to Emma’s apartment is maybe a fifteen-minute drive, I estimate.
But I’m closer to it than he is; my trip to Saks took me in the direction of her place. I’m just ten blocks away. If I hurry, I’ll beat him. I quicken my pace, feeling for the letter in my purse. It’s still there. A breeze tingles across the light perspiration on my body.
“You’re insane.”
I ignore this; those words from him no longer have the power to derail me. “Did you tell her you kissed me last night?”
“What?” he shouts. “You kissed me!”
For a moment my pace falters, then I recall what I said to Emma the first time I confronted her: Richard does this! He confuses things so we can’t see the truth!
It took me years to figure that out. Only by writing down all the questions that were battering my mind did I begin to see a pattern.
I started about a year after my mother’s death. I began to keep a secret diary that I hid under the mattress in the guest room. In my black Moleskine notebook, I logged all the statements Richard made that could be construed in more than one way. I recorded the supposed lapses in my memory—big discrepancies, such as my wanting to live in a house in the suburbs, or the morning after my bachelorette party, when I’d forgotten Richard was flying to Atlanta—as well as smaller ones, such as my supposedly mentioning I wanted to take a painting class, or thinking lamb vindaloo was Richard’s favorite dish.
I also painstakingly documented unsettling conversations I couldn’t ask my husband about—such as how he knew I’d gone to see someone other than my aunt when I’d secretly traveled into the city. I wrote down some of what had happened during that first clandestine meeting. After I’d introduced myself to the sympathetic-looking woman who’d ushered me inside, she’d gestured for me to sit on the couch across from an aquarium filled with colorful fish. She took the upholstered straight-back chair to my left and told me to call her Kate. What would you like to talk about? she asked. Sometimes I worry I don’t know my husband at all, I blurted. Can you tell me why you think Richard is trying to keep you off-balance? she asked toward the end of our discussion. What would his motivation be for this?
That was what I’d tried to puzzle out during the long, empty days when Richard was at work. I’d pull out my notebook and ponder how my cell phone hang-ups had begun immediately after Richard and I had gotten engaged and only seemed to occur when he wasn’t around. I wrote about how I was certain I’d told Richard I regretted insisting Maggie had to wear the blindfold, how much that particular detail—that I’d made her cover her eyes—had bothered me. I added, So why would he give me a blindfold to wear when we drove to the new house? I chronicled how I’d found the heirloom cake topper that had been manufactured years after Richard’s parents had gotten married. The words on my page smudged from my tears as I recalled Duke’s mysterious disappearance.
When my insomnia struck, I’d ease out of bed and tiptoe down the hall so I could fill pages with the insistent thoughts that invaded my brain in the darkest hours of night, my handwriting growing sloppy as my emotions grew heightened. I underlined certain notes, drew arrows connecting thoughts, and scribbled in the margins. Within months, my ink-stained notebook was more than half full.
I spent so many hours writing, my words unspooling across the pages, and in the process, unraveling my marriage. It was as if my relationship with Richard was a gorgeous, hand-knit sweater, and I’d found a tiny thread that I kept worrying between my fingertips. I’d slowly tugged on it, twisting and turning it, erasing patterns and colors and distorting the shape with every question and inconsistency I laid bare in my diary.
He’s, left foot, wrong, right foot. The words fill my brain as my legs churn even faster. I must reach Emma before he does.
“No, Richard. You kissed me.” The only thing Richard hates more than being challenged is being wrong.
I pass Chop’t and turn the corner, glancing behind me down the street. A dozen cabs are heading my way. He could be in any one of them.
“Are you drinking?” He is so good at shifting the focus, at exposing my vulnerabilities and putting me on the defensive.
But I don’t mind as long as he keeps talking. I need to keep him on the phone so he doesn’t warn Emma that I am coming.
“Have you told her about the diamond necklace you gave me?” I taunt him. “Do you think you’ll have to buy her one someday?”
I know this question is the equivalent of throwing a bomb through the window of his cab, and that’s exactly what I intend. I want to enrage Richard. I want his fists to clench and his eyes to narrow. That way, if he reaches Emma first, she will at last understand what he has so adeptly concealed. She will see his mask.
“Dammit, you could have made that light,” he shouts. I picture him coiled on the edge of the taxi seat, hovering behind the driver.
“Have you told her?” I ask again.
He is breathing heavily; I know from experience he is on the verge of losing control. “I’m not engaging in this ridiculous conversation. If you come near her again, I’ll have you locked up.”
I press End Call. Because right in front of me is Emma’s apartment.
* * *
I have wronged her so deeply; I’ve preyed on her innocence.
Just as I was never the wife Richard thought I was, I am also not the woman Emma believed me to be.
On the first night I met my replacement at the office holiday party, she rose from behind her desk in a poppy-red jumpsuit. She flashed that wide, open smile and extended her hand to me.
The gathering was as elegant as everything else in Richard’s world: A wall of glass overlooking Manhattan. Ceviche in individual tasting spoons and mini lamb chops with mint being offered by waiters in tuxedos. A seafood station with a woman shucking briny Kumamoto oysters. Classical music soaring from the strings of a quartet.
Richard headed to the bar to get us drinks. “Vodka and soda with a twist of lime?” he asked Emma.
“You remembered!” Her eyes followed him as he walked off.
It all began in that moment: A new future materialized in front of me.
For the next few hours, I sipped mineral water and made polite conversation with Richard’s colleagues. Hillary and George were there, but Hillary had already begun to distance herself from me.
The entire night, I felt the surge of energy arcing between my husband and his assistant. It wasn’t that they exchanged private smiles or ended up side by side in the same conversational group; on the surface, they were perfectly appropriate. But I saw his eyes slide to her as her throaty laugh spilled out. I felt their awareness of each other; it was a tangible, shimmering link joining them across the room. At the end of the party, he or
dered a car to see her safely home, despite her protestations that she could hail a cab. We all walked out together and waited for her Town Car to arrive before we got into our own.
“She’s sweet,” I said to Richard.
“She’s very good at her job.”
When Richard and I arrived home from the holiday party, I began to climb the stairs toward the bedroom, looking forward to rolling down the elastic band of the stockings that were cutting into my stomach. Richard extinguished the hallway light and began to follow me. The moment I stepped into the bedroom, he spun me around to face the wall. He kissed the back of my neck and pressed himself against me. He was already hard.
Usually Richard was a tender, considerate lover. Early on, he’d savored me like a five-course meal. But that night, he grabbed my hands and used one of his own to trap them over my head. With his free hand, he yanked down my stockings. I heard a ripping sound and knew they had torn. When he entered me from behind, I gasped. It had been so long, and I wasn’t ready for him. He thrust against me as I stared at our striped wallpaper. He came quickly with a loud, raw groan that seemed to echo through the room. He leaned against my body, panting, then turned me around and gave me a single kiss on the lips.
His eyes were closed. I wondered whose face he was seeing.
A few weeks later, I saw her again when she arrived at the cocktail party Richard and I hosted at our home in Westchester. She was as flawless as I’d remembered.
Not long after our soirée I was supposed to go to the Philharmonic with Richard. But I came down with a stomach bug and had to cancel at the last minute. He took Emma. Alan Gilbert was conducting; Beethoven and Prokofiev would be played. I imagined the two sitting side by side as they listened to the lyrical, expressive melodies. At intermission, they would likely get cocktails, and Richard would explain the origin of Prokofiev’s dissonant style to Emma, just as he had once instructed me.
I took to my bed and fell asleep to images of them together. Richard stayed in the city that evening.
I have no way of knowing for certain, but I imagine that was the night of their first kiss. I see her staring up at him with her round blue eyes as she thanks him for a wonderful evening. They hesitate, reluctant to part. A moment of silence. Then her lids sweep shut as he bends down, closing the distance between them.
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