by Monica Ali
Amber groaned. “I wouldn’t admit this to anyone but you guys. So today I found myself daydreaming, about Phil, of course. And I was imagining maybe I get trained as a dental hygienist and we go to work together every day, and maybe we don’t get to talk that much because we’ll be busy, but there’s the lunchtimes . . . and, well, you know, I wrote the whole romance in my head.”
Lydia, Tevis, and Suzie looked at each other. “Amber,” said Tevis, “you are nuts. Do you know how dull that would actually be?”
“I know!” said Amber, squirming her shoulders.
“What about Closet?” said Lydia. “Where would that fit in?”
Tevis grew serious. “One step at a time, Amber. Treat it like a fling for now, don’t run ahead of yourself, and certainly do not start thinking of your life in terms of his. Maybe he’ll turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to you. Maybe he’ll turn out to be a jerk. Don’t go all dizzy over a kiss.”
“Oh, I won’t,” said Amber, “not really. I’ve got my feet on the ground.” She raised her glass to toast the fact, and give it some much-needed bolstering.
When Suzie came back from the restroom she sat down heavily in her chair, as if exhausted by the excursion.
“What is it?” said Lydia. “Are you okay?”
Suzie chewed on her bottom lip. Lydia saw that she had used concealer under her eyes. Perhaps she wasn’t sleeping properly.
“I’m fine,” said Suzie. “No, I’m not. I’m worried about Maya. The principal called me into school the other day.”
“Mrs. Thesiger?” said Amber. “What did she want? I had to see her last year—remember Tyler and the graffiti in the bathroom business? She was very good about it, very calm. Is Maya in trouble now?”
“I wish she was,” said Suzie. She forced a smile, a flash of teeth, their bold irregularity.
“Is it her grades?” said Tevis. “I wouldn’t worry about that. She’s a smart kid. She’ll tune in when she’s good and ready. Or when the teacher actually has something interesting to say.”
“It’s not that,” said Suzie. “You remember how it was when you were in school, how all the kids banded together, kind of into categories? So at lunchtime you’d get the druggies sitting together, the jocks, the nerds?”
“The hippie types,” said Tevis, shaking her auburn hair in front of her eyes. “The Deadheads.”
“It’s still like that,” said Suzie, “only now you get these new groups. The anorexics, the cutters, girls who just want to . . .”
“Dissolve,” said Lydia.
“It’s a self-esteem issue,” said Tevis.
“Maya’s started hanging out with them,” said Suzie. “Mrs. Thesiger said she wanted to bring it to my attention.”
“With the anorexics or with the cutters?” said Amber.
“There’s an overlap, apparently.” Suzie chewed her lip again. “Anyway, she said maybe it would be a good idea for Maya to see the school counselor. When I got home I was shaking. Maya’s not even fourteen for another five months. She still plays on the swing in the yard. Then I got to thinking, she’s been saying all these things about her lunch box, about throwing food away, and I’ve just been ignoring them. What a shitty mother I am.”
“All mothers feel like bad mothers at least some of the time,” said Amber. “That’s what being a good mother means. You’re not a bad mother at all.”
“I don’t know,” said Suzie. “So when the school bus drops her off I practically pounce on her at the door. I try to talk to her about it but she gives me the most withering look. I mean, you should see this look. It could strip a tree of its leaves. And really, I want to slap her. Really, I do.”
“But you didn’t,” said Lydia.
“No, I didn’t. But you know she’s always wearing those long-sleeve T-shirts. I never get to see her arms. I’m not allowed in the bathroom when she’s taking a bath. So I grab her, I actually grab her, and I pull up her sleeves, and she’s got these little cuts up her left forearm.”
“What did you do?” said Tevis.
“What could I do? She won’t talk to me. I call Mike, he’s out on patrol, but he comes over, and she won’t talk to him either. She shuts herself in her room.” Suzie massaged her temples with her fingertips. Her short black hair tufted out and when she lowered her hands again, Amber stroked it gently down.
Amber said, “Have you arranged the school counselor yet?”
“Got an appointment right away. But Maya just sat there, apparently. Gave him the napalm stare.”
“I could try,” said Lydia. “If you want.”
Suzie looked at her gratefully. “Maya loves you. And Mike says I’ve got to lay off her and stop being so anxious. Says he’s going to take me down to the station and lock me in the cooler if I don’t calm down.”
“I’ll take her out somewhere,” said Lydia. “At the least we’ll have a nice evening.” She hoped Suzie’s gratitude would be justified.
“Let’s get another bottle,” said Tevis. “And I know we’re all going home to eat, but would anyone share a plate of antipasti and maybe a little garlic bread?”
They got more prosecco and a platter of antipasti, fava beans, artichoke hearts, red peppers, pecorino, and green and black olives, fat and garlicky.
Suzie said, “Mike won’t want me breathing on him tonight.” She smiled and the heaviness seemed to have lifted from her.
“Garlic is actually supposed to be good for your sex drive,” said Tevis.
“Where do you come up with this stuff ?” said Suzie.
Lydia was reassured by this return to form, Suzie throwing out quick jabs like affectionate little punches on the arm.
“I’ll bet you can’t keep your hands off him this evening,” said Tevis. “Then you’ll see who’s right.”
Suzie picked a whole clove of garlic out of the olive oil. She put it in her mouth. “Fat chance,” she said. “I can barely remember the last time we did it. Maybe a couple of months ago, maybe even three.”
“It can come and go in phases,” said Amber. “Is it you? Or is it him?”
“Me,” said Suzie. “I still find him attractive. We’re still affectionate with each other. It’s just . . . I find myself making excuses, you know, more and more these days.”
“That’s okay,” said Amber. “When I was married, and I didn’t feel like it, I’d go through with it anyway. Then he’d be kind of mad at me, because I wasn’t really into it. One time he just rolled off and snatched up his pillow and went to the spare bedroom. Said he’d had more fun picking his nose. Guess what I mean is, if you don’t feel like it then it’s good that you can say.”
“Your husband was an asshole,” said Tevis. “But we already knew that. Did you tell him where to get off ?”
Amber made a neat little grimace, wrinkling her nose. “No. I started faking, that’s what I did. You know, ooh, aah, oh yeah, there, shudder, gasp, collapse.”
“Ha,” said Tevis. “Every girl knows how.”
“It’ll come back,” Amber said to Suzie. “With you and Mike.”
“Sometimes,” said Suzie, “I fake that I’m asleep so he won’t try to start fooling around. Sometimes I fake a headache . . . I’m always so tired at the end of the day, it just seems like it’d be another chore, you know, like another load of laundry when you thought you were already done. And I can’t be bothered, honestly. I think maybe I’ll feel like it tomorrow, and then I never do.”
“Does he mind?” said Lydia. “Do you talk about it?”
“I mind!” said Suzie, sitting up and declaiming. “I mind. God, when I think back to how I used to be. Me not wanting sex? Please! I was the girl with the feather cut, the pink bomber jacket, the snuggest shorts, the hottest ass.”
The restaurant was starting to fill up with diners now and Lydia had to tuck in her chair to make more room for the table behind them to be seated. She glanced back at the elderly couple who was waiting courteously for Suzie to notice also and let them pass.<
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“Me and Mike, we got together in high school and we went at it. I mean we went at it. I could do it standing up. I could do it in a broom closet. I could do it in roller skates.”
“Roller skates?” said Amber.
“Roller skates, up against the wall. It was tricky,” said Suzie. “Now it feels like too much effort to even open my legs.”
“Suzie,” said Lydia. “You need to let these people through.”
“Oh, excuse me,” said Suzie, shuffling her chair. “I do apologize.”
“That’s okay, dear. Thank you,” said the lady. She held herself like a dancer, shoulders back, chin parallel to the floor, one foot pointing out at an elegant angle. She reached back for her husband’s hand. “About the sex, dear,” she said to Suzie. “You think your libido’s died. But it hasn’t, it’s just gone into hibernation. When it wakes up again—” She pulled her husband’s arm around her trim waist and leaned her head back so that they came cheek to cheek. “Well, it wakes up again and it is, simply and beautifully, the most marvelous surprise.”
There were times when it would be upon her suddenly, a surge inside her, like an electric current with no place to discharge. The enormity of what she’d done, the pain of losing her children, the pain that she had caused them.
She sat in the Sport Trac outside Carson’s house and leaned her forehead against the steering wheel. If she could break open her rib cage with her bare hands, she would rip out her heart. If she could drive a knitting needle through her skull, she would mash up her brain. If that would stop the memories from coming unbidden, then she could be peaceful now.
A single image had floated into her mind. Her youngest in his high chair, with his fat cheeks and downy hair and his vague little yet-to-be defined eyebrows. His brother’s eyes shining with pride as he turned for her approval because he had just fed the baby with puréed carrot from a plastic spoon.
She thought about Lawrence, how he’d worried that she would be upset when she saw her boys growing up happy without her. Even Lawrence, who understood everything, didn’t understand about that.
Carson’s house smelled of cedarwood. He’d made a new handrail for the staircase a few months ago. When he’d bought the house several years back, it had been a wreck. It was an old house, older than the town, cross-gabled and wood-shingled, with a grand Palladian window on the upper floor that let in the wind. The shingles regularly fell off the walls and roof and Carson kept patching them up.
“When are you going to sort out the curtain?” said Lydia.
“I’ll get around to it,” said Carson.
“Says the man who doesn’t like to leave a job half done.”
He raised an eyebrow at her. “It’s functional, isn’t it?”
“Carson,” said Lydia. “It’s a sheet.”
He looked at the sheet in question as if the observation had taken him by surprise. “When I found this house and fell in love with it I knew none of my old stuff would look right here. I didn’t have that much. It was a modern apartment and it was pretty minimalist.”
“So’s this,” said Lydia, looking around at the sparse furnishings.
“Mostly I worked on the house. I redid the guttering, repaired the eaves where they were crumbling, worked on the antebellum plumbing, needed some help with that in the end. It was satisfying, anyway. And I wanted to get some furniture that looked right. First thing I started with was the couch.”
“It’s very nice.”
“Maybe, but it took me so long to find it, it was so much effort, and then once you’ve got it, you sit on it and you never think about it again. What’s the point?”
She laughed and walked over to the Ping-Pong table that was folded against the wall. “Least you’ve still got room for this. I’ll give you a game.”
“I’ll go easy on you,” he said.
“You better not. I’ll know if you’re letting me win.”
They played three games and he didn’t let her win. He tried to teach her how to spin the ball by slicing it. She was watching his eyes more than his hands. She was examining the hollow of his throat, the way it always looked a little sunburned. She was looking at the freckles on his forearms.
“I’ve got to have a rest,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said, “you wore me out.”
She hit him on the leg with her paddle. “What was the job you had?” she said. “Where did you go?”
He sprawled on the couch with his thumbs through his belt loops. “It was a burn job. A house in Alabama.”
“Didn’t they have someone more local?”
“It wasn’t even my company. I was just helping out.”
“Why? What happened? I mean, is that normal?”
“That sheet’s not so bad, is it? If I start looking for curtains I know it will drive me nuts. I won’t know what to get.” He actually looked worried.
“Leave the sheet up,” she said. “It’s fine. You were saying about the job?”
“This guy’s house burns down in the middle of the night and he puts in a claim. His insurer checks through his history. You do that as a matter of course. Anyway, the adjuster sees he’s got two previous, both with my company.”
“You make it sound like a criminal record.”
“Some people have a run of bad luck. They say lightning never strikes twice. You work in this job long enough you know that’s not true.”
“But three times?” said Lydia.
“I turned down his second claim. The first one was before I joined the company and on the forms he said he was intending to rebuild but he didn’t. That always gets my interest.”
“I like your neck,” said Lydia. “I’ve been meaning to tell you that. But carry on. I am listening.”
“Thank you,” said Carson. “It’s nice to have my neck appreciated. So, Stevenson, this guy, the next house he has burns down too. It’s all around the town that he’s torched it for the insurance. This is Roxborough, it’s a hardscrabble town, and all the bars that Stevenson goes drinking in, I hear the same story, how he’s been boasting about the money he’ll get.”
“That doesn’t mean he was guilty, necessarily. Maybe he just liked bragging. Maybe a lot of people didn’t like him. You had to prove it another way.”
“I couldn’t,” said Carson. “I couldn’t actually prove it. Couldn’t locate the cause of the fire, no actual witnesses. I couldn’t prove it, but I could turn him down, and I did. In my view he was lucky he wasn’t in court for arson. He didn’t see it that way.”
“Was he angry?”
“Just a bit. Gave me some flack.”
“What sort?”
“Abuse, you know, calling my house in the middle of the night, that sort of thing. The difficult part was, even though I knew I was right, there was room for the tiniest bit of doubt. What if he was really the hapless victim, and I was making his life hell? This third house two years later laid that to rest.”
“How stupid must he be?” said Lydia. “Wasn’t it going to be obvious?”
“He moved state, he switched insurers. Lot of people don’t realize we access each other’s records.”
“Aren’t you concerned,” said Lydia, choosing her words carefully, “that he might find out you’ve rumbled him a third time? The guy sounds a bit . . . unstable.”
“He probably won’t know that. And even if he does, I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.”
“What if he’s, you know . . .”
“Crazy? Comes after me with a shotgun?” He took her hand. “Look at it from his point of view. The first time everything is plain sailing. No one dies, no one gets hurt, he gets his money, no one loses a thing. As far as he’s concerned the insurance company can afford it. Then I come along next time and mess things up. He was responding. He was pissed, but I never thought he was a nut job.”
While he was talking she leaned in and rested her head against him. She could feel the vibrations of his voice from his chest to her temple. At night when the
light was off and he spoke to her as they lay in the dark she felt as if that was all she needed, as if it would be possible to live suspended in a space where the only things that reached her were the touch of his breath on her shoulder and the sound of his voice in her ear.
She looked at Rufus, lying on his back on the rug, exposing and offering his soft belly to the world. He was always at home here. Esther would say that he was acting how she was feeling. Esther, just possibly, was right.
Carson took Madeleine and Rufus out for a stroll before bed. When he came back he lifted the sheet at the living room window and peered out at the front lawn.
“What’s out there?” said Lydia.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Admiring the view?”
“Did you hear Madeleine barking?”
“I did. I thought maybe she saw a squirrel, a raccoon.”
“She went for something in the oleander. I had to pull her away. I don’t know what it was.”
“Not a claimant?” said Lydia.
“Sadly,” said Carson, “I don’t think I’m important enough to have acquired a stalker of any kind.”
Chapter Twenty
Did the boyfriend know? Grabber was in the sitting room of the bed-and-breakfast, the parlor, as Mrs. Jackson called it. In less than an hour Lydia would be arriving. Mrs. Jackson was out getting a Brazilian wax or hiring an orchestra or something. It was difficult to imagine what more preparations she could be making. The entire day so far she had been scurrying around the bed-and-breakfast preparing. Five times, no less, she had apologized for disturbing him in his room. If only she knew who she was actually receiving she would self-combust on the spot.
Did the boyfriend know? Grabowski kept asking himself that question. Last night he’d had the notion that maybe he’d glean something by staking out the house. Somebody had to have helped her. Maybe it was him. He didn’t remember seeing the guy in the days before she “died,” but she had a lot of people swirling around her and that didn’t mean anything. A bodyguard who’d been on the yacht, maybe. It wouldn’t be her first time for that.
He didn’t even manage to get a shot of them together. He got a shot of her resting her head on the steering wheel as she sat outside. Clearly a lot on her mind. He remembered the day she had driven alone to Eton and sat just like that in her car before getting out. A private moment of reflection. Well, private if he hadn’t followed her there. At lunchtime the radio news announced the divorce. She’d been gathering herself before seeing her son, so he would be forewarned.