by Kate White
The apartment had been a refuge for her lately and she was looking forward to a quiet night at home. But when she stepped inside late that afternoon, it was hot and oppressive. The cat, Smokey, darted out to greet her and she patted his thick, black fur distractedly. After she turned on the air conditioner and poured a glass of wine, the phone rang.
“Everything okay?” It was Molly.
Lake briefly brought her friend up to speed.
“What a shithead,” Molly proclaimed. “Are you sure you don’t want to go out? You don’t always have to keep a stiff upper lip. You know, Lake, it might do you good to blow off a little steam.”
“Thanks, but I want to do some research online about custody. I need to know how bad this could get.”
“What’s the next step in the process?”
“An evaluation by a shrink. Till then I just wait-and keep my nose clean.”
“Don’t tell me men are totally verboten?”
“Apparently a woman can’t lose custody just because she’s had a few dates-or even because she’s had sex-but my lawyer says it’s smart to lay low, act like a nun, at least when the kids are around.” She looked at the clock and noticed the time. “I better go. I have to fax the kids tonight, too.”
The summer camp Lake had chosen for the kids allowed parents to send faxes, which were then distributed to the campers after dinner. She tried to write every day, loved coming up with things for notes, but today she had nearly run out of time. For Amy she scribbled a few lines about Smokey chasing a dust ball that morning. For Will she copied a riddle from a book she’d bought just for this purpose.
Faxes sent, she stayed in her small home office and Googled “custody battles” on her laptop. The news wasn’t reassuring. Mothers rarely lost custody, but there weren’t any guarantees. Judges could be unpredictable. Lake even found stories of good mothers who’d lost out and learned years later that the judge had been bribed.
The old Jack would never do something like that, but she wondered if the new one might. He seemed alien to her now, self-absorbed and greedy. It was like dealing with an animal she’d found in the wild-one that could bite her hand off without warning.
She skipped dinner-the glass of wine was all she could stomach-and undressed for bed. As she washed her face in the bathroom sink, barely concentrating, she suddenly caught her reflection in the mirror. Her father, long dead, once said that with her deep-brown hair and gray-green eyes, there was something actually lakelike about her appearance. She would hardly call herself a knockout like Molly had, but she knew that she looked good for her age and should just relish it. But it was difficult to let go of what she used to see in the mirror-the purply birthmark over her entire left cheek. It wasn’t until the age of fifteen that she’d flown from her home in central Pennsylvania to Philadelphia for the laser treatments that had removed all but the faintest shadow of it.
After splashing cool water on her neck, she ran her hands over her breasts. Unless she counted the humorless radiology tech who’d squashed them onto the X-ray tray for Lake’s routine mammogram last month, it had been nearly a year since anyone had touched them.
Lake marked the death of her marriage on the night last fall when she reached for Jack in bed, eager to make love, and he’d shrugged her hand off his shoulder. The rebuke had stung.
She knew, however, that things had begun to unravel six months before, when Jack’s business had gone through the roof. He was working even harder, but also going out more-socializing with clients, playing golf, always extolling the virtues of living large. She had oscillated between annoyance and the need to cut him some slack. After all the stress he’d been through, maybe he deserved a little fun.
But it wasn’t until he rebuffed her in bed-that first time, and then again and again-that she’d panicked. She searched his pockets and his emails, assuming an affair, but found nothing. She bought sexy lingerie and felt like a fool when he lay motionless next to her, like a hedgerow in the bed. Finally she tried to talk to him, but he claimed he was simply tired-couldn’t she see how demanding things were for him? And then suddenly she was the problem. He accused her of lacking spontaneity and fun. “Where’s your passion?” he’d ask, as if she was guilty of some moral failure. That’s ironic, she’d thought, considering you won’t even touch me.
His departure had had the abruptness of a prison break. He took just his clothes, some papers, and the stupid Abdominizer. She felt a kind of shame she hadn’t experienced since her days with her birthmark. But another part of her had been angry as hell at his betrayal. It was hard to imagine that he was the same man who once said, “You’re my rock, Lake. You saved me.”
Lake put on her nightgown and paced the apartment. What did Jack think he could use against her? Was he going to lie and make her business seem more demanding than it was? She went into Will’s room and touched his toys, fighting off a sob. Above the dresser was a framed collage she’d made for him, designed with snapshots and scraps of souvenirs. Jack’s face appeared twice, flashing the famous grin that had once captivated her. But it seemed satanic now. She fought the urge to smash the glass and ink out his face.
Finally, sick of thinking, she retreated to her room and slipped into bed. She’d expected to toss and turn, but, exhausted, she fell asleep within minutes.
And suddenly she was awake again-jerked out of a dream. She lay there for a few seconds, wondering why, and then heard the phone ring, for the second time, she realized. The clock on the bedside table said 2:57. As she fumbled for the phone, her mind went instantly to the kids.
“Hello,” she said, her voice hoarse from sleep.
“Is this the Warren residence?” a voice asked. It was a woman, she thought, but wasn’t sure. The voice sounded oddly distorted.
“Yes, who’s calling?” Lake asked anxiously. The phone display read “private caller.”
“Is this Mrs. Warren?”
“Please tell me who’s calling.”
“Are you the mother of William Warren?”
Her heart nearly stopped.
“Is this the camp?” she blurted out. “What’s wrong?”
The person said nothing but Lake could hear breathing.
“Please, what’s the matter?” she demanded.
And then there was only a dial tone.
2
LAKE KICKED OFF the sheet and tore down the hall to the foyer. Her purse was on the hall table and she upended it, spilling the contents. She pawed through the clutter until she found her BlackBerry and scrolled to the camp’s emergency number. Five rings, then a deep hello. It was the gravelly voice of Mr. Morrison, the director.
“This is Will Warren’s mother,” Lake said quickly. “He’s in cabin seven-um no, five, cabin five. Did someone just call me?”
“What?” he asked groggily, clearly not comprehending.
Lake explained the situation, trying to keep her voice even.
“No, it wasn’t me,” he said. “But let me go down to his cabin right away. I’ll call you back in ten minutes.”
Pacing the hallway, Lake tried to convince herself that nothing was wrong-the camp director would have known-but as the minutes passed without a call, her alarm ballooned. Had Will been abducted? Did this have something to do with Jack?
Fifteen minutes later, her BlackBerry finally rang.
“There’s absolutely no reason for concern,” the director said. “Will is fast asleep, and the counselor says he’s been fine all night. Sounds like it must have been a wrong number.”
It had to be, she thought. For one thing, Will’s name was just Will, not William and someone really familiar with him wouldn’t make the mistake. And why would anyone she knew call at this hour? Her mind flew back to Jack. Had he orchestrated it, because of his custody fight? But what would he gain from a stunt like that? After crawling back into bed, it took her over an hour to fall asleep again.
The next morning she woke feeling hungover from worry-about the phone call, about her conversat
ion with Hotchkiss. She’d felt so giddy yesterday as she’d dashed toward lunch, and she wondered now when she’d ever summon that feeling again. It was almost a relief to be on the Eighty-sixth Street crosstown bus an hour later, headed to the offices of her new client on Park Avenue, the Advanced Fertility Center.
Her plan today was to finish up her background research about the practice. She’d been recommended for the job by Dr. Steve Salman, an associate at the clinic whose sister, Sonia, had been a friend of Lake’s in college. Private fertility clinics, compared to those affiliated with hospitals and universities, had a bit of a stigma attached to them. The perception sometimes was that making money took precedence over making babies. Lake had been hired to help the clinic overcome that hurdle and to stand out among the burgeoning number of competitors.
It was a challenge she relished. The trick in marketing was to find the unique aspect of a product or company-the unique selling position-and optimize it. To Lake it was like studying a drawing with a hidden object and then, with a thrill, finding it. Like most fertility clinics, this one focused heavily on in vitro fertilization (IVF), the process by which a woman’s eggs are removed from the ovaries, and then, after being fertilized by sperm in a petri dish or test tube, are transferred to her uterus or frozen for future use. The clinic had been particularly successful with women over forty. Lake needed to find ways to play that fact up without turning off younger patients. In a week and a half she would present her first round of ideas to the two partners.
As much as she enjoyed her work so far at the clinic, she always felt a moment’s hesitation when she first walked through the door. The reception area had been nicely decorated with minty green walls and plush carpeting, but to Lake the room seemed so melancholy. Though the women who sat there-some with husbands and partners, some without-hardly looked morose, Lake could sense how sad and tortured they felt underneath.
In a small way, she could relate to their anguish. Though she’d never grappled with infertility, her birthmark had created a deep sense of despair and hopelessness in her, starting in childhood. By eleven she’d become an egghead in school, caught up in endless art and history projects and pretending nothing else mattered, when all she really wanted was to be normal, to be pretty, to never again have to see that double beat of surprise and pity in people’s eyes. A doctor had saved her with his laser. She knew it didn’t take a psychiatrist to see why she found herself drawn to clients in the health field.
For the past two and a half weeks she had worked in the small conference room at the very back of the clinic office. Today, as usual, she made her way there through the crazy warren of short corridors-past the doctors’ private offices, the nurses’ station, the hushed exam rooms, the futuristic-looking embryology lab, with its sliding window to the OR, where the egg and embryo transfers were done. As she was getting started, spreading open a folder on the conference room table, one of the nurses, a dark-haired Irish girl named Maggie, passed by the open door and smiled hello. About fifteen people worked at the clinic, and Maggie had been one of the warmest to her. Along with Dr. Harry Kline, the consulting psychologist.
Alone in the conference room, Lake read through the last articles in the batch she’d collected as soon as she was hired for the job. She’d been consuming anything that had to do with the clinic: journal articles the doctors had written, press stories that featured the practice. It was often in these kinds of materials that she found nuggets that she could begin to work with and leverage as part of a marketing plan.
While she worked, she tried to keep yesterday’s meeting with Hotchkiss out of her mind, but it wouldn’t leave her alone. The strange phone call from last night also gnawed at her. Before she’d gotten very far with her reading, she called the camp director again. He’d checked on Will that morning, he said, and everything was fine.
About an hour later, Rory, the clinical medical assistant, poked her blond head in the door. She was about thirty, tall and pretty in an athletic way, the kind of girl who looked like she’d led her high school basketball team into the state tournament. And she was five months pregnant, which Lake realized must be tough for some of the patients to see. Rory’s blue eyes were rimmed with black liner today and her blond hair was scooped up on her head in a loose bun.
“Brie hasn’t been by here, has she?” she asked.
“No, I haven’t seen her,” Lake said. Brie, the no-nonsense, tightly wound office manager, normally ignored her. Lake assumed it was because until Lake’s arrival, Brie had handled any so-called marketing for the clinic.
“Dr. Levin wanted her to give you a bio.”
“I think I’ve got everybody’s,” Lake said, glancing down at one of the folders.
“Dr. Keaton’s?”
“But he’s just a consultant, right? Why-”
“He’s decided to join the group,” Rory said, smiling. “He’s leaving his West Coast practice and coming in with us.”
“Oh, um-okay,” Lake said. To her surprise, the news flustered her.
“Is something the matter, Lake?”
“No, I just hadn’t heard the news yet.”
“Oh well, Brie should have mentioned it to you. You should be kept in the loop about these things.”
“Not a problem,” Lake said. She appreciated that Rory seemed to have picked up on Brie’s passive-aggressive streak.
Rory turned to go. Lake wondered if she should try to engage her in some kind of small talk, but it often seemed that Rory preferred to focus on the next thing on her list.
“You look very nice today, by the way,” Lake said. “Do you have a special night planned?”
“My husband’s traveling this week,” she said, smiling ruefully. “But I try to make an effort anyway. I think it’s so important not to let yourself go just because you have kids in your life. I hope you don’t mind my saying this, but you’re such a perfect role model. When I’m your age I hope I look as good as you.”
“Oh, thank you,” Lake said, a little taken aback.
She chose to take Rory’s comment as a compliment and got back to work. At close to eleven she realized it was time for her scheduled interview with Dr. Sherman, one of the clinic’s two partners, about some of the more advanced aspects of in vitro fertilization. She had done a number of these sessions with the doctors just to familiarize herself with their work. As she picked up her pad and got ready to head down the hall, Keaton himself appeared in the doorway. She felt her pulse kick up a notch. He was wearing perfectly draped navy pants, a crisp lavender shirt and a lavender-and-purple print tie. He looked great-and she was sure he knew it.
“Have they still got you locked down back here?” he said, grinning. “That seems awfully cruel on a gorgeous day like today.”
“It’s not so bad,” she said. “Congratulations, by the way.”
“Oh, right. Thanks. I just made the decision last night, in fact.
“And actually,” he added, stepping into the conference room and locking his slate-blue eyes with hers, “you’re actually part of the reason I accepted.”
She felt flustered by this unexpected statement. Unsure of what he meant, she just cocked her head and smiled.
“Oh, is that right?” she said.
“Yup. This is a great practice, but it only gets a C-plus in marketing. Hiring you was a very smart decision.”
“Thanks,” she said, annoyed at how instantly deflated she felt. How ridiculous, she thought. Had I really thought he was going to announce that he came on board because I’d tantalized the hell out of him?
“It doesn’t seem fair,” she added, all business again, “but even a practice that should win on merit has to play the game and do its best to stand out.”
He stepped even closer and slid his butt onto the conference table. His tall, lean body was just inches from her now, invading her space a little. She could smell his musky cologne. She could also see a small, jagged scar above his left eye, a vestige perhaps of having been whacked hard with somet
hing like a hockey stick.
“You don’t strike me as someone who tolerates a lot of game playing,” he said slyly. Lake was sure he was talking on two levels now, and she didn’t know how to handle it.
“Well, sometimes in business it’s unavoidable,” she said, thinking she should change the subject. “Will you, um, miss L.A.?”
“A bit. But I trained at Cornell and I’ve been anxious to get back to New York ever since.” He tucked both hands in his back pants pockets, and as he did, his shirt strained against the muscles of his chest. “You know, all the great things about this city-rude waiters, packed subways…the smell of wet wool in the winter time.”
“Maybe I should suggest that idea to one of my beauty clients as a fragrance launch,” Lake said. “Manhattan Wet Wool.” God, that was lame, she thought, but he laughed, his eyes not leaving her face.
“Perfect,” he said. “But yes, I’ll miss L.A. a little. The weather, mostly. I should tell you that the practice I’m leaving is actually pretty good at marketing.”
“What kinds of things do they do?”
“Community events, glossy takeaways, interactive website.”
“I’d love to hear more about it.”
“When?” he asked, a little smile at the corner of his mouth. He held her eyes hard now. So this was eye sex, she thought.
“You tell me,” she said. Would he suggest coffee? she wondered. No, he was the kind of guy who went straight for drinks, no pussyfooting around.
But as he started to answer, Brie barged in, the ubiquitous clipboard on her arm.
“Dr. Sherman is expecting you, Lake,” she said curtly. Her thin mouth was like a slash today, painted a shade too red for her short auburn hair.
“Okay-I’ll be right there.”
Lake hesitated, waiting for Brie to leave but she didn’t budge. Then Keaton rose from the table.
“I’ll catch up with you later,” he said to Lake, smiling. Lake could almost read to be continued in his eyes.