> I’m really concerned about you.
This is how Madeline responds. This is how she leads him along. Afterward, she steps away, staring at the computer screen, a painter admiring the last few strokes of a masterpiece. Then, she stands up and tells Gillian to compose her messages for her. When she speaks, Gil types.
Gillian always seems so logical, but she is as under the spell as Audrey.
She would stab a pregnant actress.
She would carve a swastika into her forehead.
She would step out of a crowd and fire at the president.
Gillian’s fingers move on the keys, and the words appear on-screen.
> You have been really unhappy, haven’t you?
They wait. There is only the waiting, because they are all too afraid to speak without Madeline’s approval.
A series of messages appear in quick succession.
> Yes.
> I don’t know why I feel this way, but I do.
> The thing you said,
> Sometimes I think about it.
> Like, seriously think about it.
“Oh, we know you think about it,” Audrey says from behind them. She sounds like a malfunctioning bird. A cockatoo with Tourette’s.
Madeline directs Gillian to type.
> If only your dad really cared to get to know you, maybe it wouldn’t be this way.
A long pause. Mary Ellen feigns disinterest, but her eyes remain glued to the screen. She may not like the direction of this conversation, but she has to see where it goes.
> It’s all just your garden variety, private school white boy stuff. He works too much. He ignores me. He believes I’m weak and won’t let me see a therapist. He thinks depression is a choice.
> Sometimes there’s only one way to break through the noise.
> I can’t talk to him about it anymore.
> Then fuck talking. SHOW him.
> How?
It is abundantly clear to Mary Ellen at this moment that he is fishing. Everett Coughlin is looking for an out. He doesn’t want it to end this way.
But it will.
And though she hesitates for just a moment, eventually Madeline gets down to it.
> You know how. We’ve discussed it.
> I’m not doing that. No way. I’m not. It’s just. I’m not.
> Suit yourself. If you want to be miserable forever...
> I don’t. I DON’T! But I don’t know if I can do that. It’s like they say: a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
> But you’ve said yourself in the past: your father never learns. He never WILL learn. He only knows control. Only knows how to keep people in line. He demands LOYALTY.
> Right. But is...that...the solution?
> This is coming from a person who cares for you THE MOST. Why continue to suffer, if the people who SAY they love you do not intervene?
> Maybe. I mean, I have...everything I need in the garage.
And then Madeline plays her trump card.
> Ev, I think I love you.
Three of the four wait in exultant, delirious silence. Only Mary Ellen seems unhappy to be there, and she must hide her discontent if she doesn’t want to end up on the other end of one of Madeline St. Clair’s pernicious attacks.
> I’ve been waiting for you to say that. I love you, too.
They scream banshee wails of approval, like the climax of some furious dance.
> Then you know what you have to do. It’s time.
The wait this time is breathless and extended. No one looks around or makes a sound. It is as though they’ve just read aloud an incantation and need to see if it’s worked.
> I trust you. If you think I should...
> I do. I really do. I really really do.
> Ok
Just like that, it is done.
7
NOW
Bobbi Jo’s Barbecue and Chicken Shack is precisely what it sounds like, only it’s not dirty and dingy and full of shadows. It’s meant to look like a hole-in-the-wall, but the truth is, Audrey—as the financial backer—has pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into the establishment to make it seem cheap.
Still, there’s local beer on tap, and the chicken smells divine.
I get the tenders—medium—and park behind my sunglasses to keep the sunlight out.
The hangover hurts worse than the time we mixed vodka with white grape juice after seeing There’s Something About Mary at the Green Hills Mall. I can feel the little men chiseling away at my sinus cavities, and even though the beer is good, it can’t keep the tired, drained, absolutely undead feeling from creeping up and dragging me down into the depths.
Audrey has invited me out to apologize for the night before. It’s her way of mending fences, but part of it is, she just wants me to see how successful she is.
Whatever. I’m beyond caring. I just need something in my stomach.
As we wait for the food, I try to make small talk, but it’s like starting a fire with wet wood so eventually, I just go for the real thing.
“Madeline came to see me last night,” I say.
“And how is the Bitch of Belle Meade doing these days?”
It’s like code for them. See, Audrey, she wants me to know that she doesn’t want to talk about Madeline. But what she doesn’t realize is that I don’t have to play by their rules anymore. As much as they’d like to paint me as the girl from high school who played the role of John Proctor, dying for my principles, it’s not like that.
“She was drunk and crying, like someone had just broken her heart.”
And, just like that, I can play both sides.
Audrey smiles, in part because she knows there’s blood in the water, and though I should feel guilty about it—Madeline is in a vulnerable place—I don’t feel anything. Nothing at all. My whole life has been chasing down or running away from feelings.
Right now, I am living novocaine.
Audrey’s eyes light up, and suddenly there is life to the conversation. Madeline St. Clair’s downfall has always been an interesting point of contention in our friend group. We all knew she would be a superstar, even back in high school, so a secret game we played had to do with guessing when she would flame out.
Nobody expected her to live this long.
But it’s like marine biologists say: Sharks don’t evolve because they don’t have to.
So I just keep talking. I reveal every detail, and when I’m done, Audrey’s chin is almost touching the straw of her Diet Coke.
“She did that? She cried? Like, on your shoulder and everything?”
My beer is starting to reach room temp, so I gulp the rest and replace the pint glass on the table between us.
“It seemed like she had something she wanted to say. Like she had something she meant to get off her chest.”
“To apologize, maybe?”
“She did that,” I say. “A big, wet, blubbering apology. So it had to be something else.”
“Any ideas?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it all morning. Madeline is not one to unburden her soul.”
“She’d need one first.”
“Harsh,” I reply. “But fair. If history’s any indicator—”
“She’s straight up playing you.”
“Could be.”
“Don’t let her fool you, M.E.,” she says. “She hasn’t changed, M.E. Trust me. She’s the same old mean bitch she was in high school.”
Audrey raises a hand to the barkeep, and he brings over a second beer for me.
I take a sip and then lean back in my chair. “Maybe so,” I say. “I just don’t think so. I think maybe whatever she’s going through, it’s leaving a mark on her.”
With a flick of the wrist, Audrey dismisses the whole thing. “Bullshit,” she says. “The woman wouldn’t know humility if it turned her around and fucked her from behind.”
“Christ, Audrey.”
She smirks. “She’s just angry she met he
r match.”
“Colton Ambrose is the real deal,” she says. “Whatever Mads thought she was—the Queen of Nashville—Colton actually is. His family basically owned Nashville before the Civil War. Some of the stuff that’s named after the Brileys and whatnot—yeah, that actually used to be named after the Ambroses.”
The food arrives, and I’m forced to contemplate this new information as each of us arranges and organizes our plate.
I vaguely remember this guy, Colton. He went to school out-of-state, so we only heard about him second-hand. He was friends with Jefferson Bisby and Lyle Renault, and they told us a crazy story about Colton slamming his dad’s Porsche into the side of a White Castle wherever he went to school. One kid died, we heard, and Colton had to go to rehab. He was into Oxy before it was mainstream around the trust fund division of Nashville.
The other strange thing about him—this I found out through Google-stalking him when they first got married—is that he’d also been friends with Everett Coughlin.
How small the world grows when you are from Nashville.
“You know, she never truly wanted to accomplish anything on her own,” Audrey drones on, after sipping from her Diet Coke. “She just wanted an M-R-S degree so she could stay home and spend her rich hubby’s money.”
She wraps her mouth around an awkward bite of potato salad, and I think about that. Madeline never seemed to care about things. She only ever gave a shit about people, and it was mostly out of a desire to destroy them.
“I mean,” Audrey continues, as she tangles with another bite of her side item, “I went to college for business, and then I came back—yes, to make money—but also to give back to the community. This is my home, and I don’t intend to just feed on the city.”
She plucks at another hunk of potato.
“But Madeline,” she continues, “she has done nothing but use Nashville.”
“Like what?”
“Huh?”
“What has she done? Be specific.”
“Colton sleeps around, or so I’ve been told. But at least he has the decency to do it when he goes out of town on business. She fucks people he knows, her friends’ husbands. She’s subhuman. I wouldn’t wish her on my worst enemies.”
Madeline never had friends. She had acquaintances.
We were her only friends, and Audrey knows that.
“Anyway,” she continues, “I hear Colton’s hired a private investigator to keep tabs on her.”
“Oh.” It’s my turn to be obtuse. I don’t know what to say, and I can tell by the way Audrey is staring at me from behind her sunglasses she knows something’s up.
Still, she goes back to her plate, dipping fries into a glob of ketchup. “He’s got millions upon millions of dollars,” she says. “If she can successfully prove there is a repeated pattern of infidelity, he can royally fuck her in the divorce, which I hear is more painful than that other place men like to get women.”
“You don’t think Madeline would allow such a thing to happen, do you?” I ask.
Imagining her pulling some kind of Hitchcockian switcheroo to peg Colton. Maybe she has recordings of him. Maybe she paid someone to sleep with him. It isn’t beneath her, and it isn’t that far-fetched, honestly. Big plans are for big people, and Madeline is the biggest around.
I have dirt on her. Everyone she knows has dirt on her, but nothing seems to stick. She gave a handy to Blaine DeSotel in the theater at Hundred Oaks. She convinced Ryan Adwell to cut Sissy Weaver’s hair after prom. She mailed nude photos of Lynne Stockton to that poor girl’s parents while they were on vacation in Tahiti.
The original revenge porn.
And one rainy night in the spring of our junior year, she first typed the sentence, Maybe you should just kill yourself, then.
“Don’t know,” Audrey replies, after a long pause. Perhaps she is also thinking of all the wrongs people have suffered under the tyrannical rule of Madeline St. Clair.
“This time, though, I think it’s different.”
You can see it in Audrey’s eyes, the desire to see Madeline publicly humiliated. It’s just too close for her to say it aloud, as if speaking the words might somehow rig it against her.
The sad thing is, Audrey doesn’t know who she is, which is why Madeline was always the alpha, and Audrey was just her lap dog. Mads always rode Audrey hard, treating her like an animal to be trained. Even though Audrey conveyed a sense that she was Type-A, she always ended up groveling the hardest at Madeline’s feet.
She is successful now, but she is weak, and the more I stare at her, the more obvious and definitive her weakness becomes.
“So,” Audrey says, at last, “enough gossip. What about you?”
I roll the napkin splayed across my lap into a tight scroll and tug at each end.
I realize I don’t have anything in common with the woman across from me.
I did once. We used to drink beer and smoke cigarettes in Sevier Park, back when we felt like danger couldn’t touch us. We shot pistols with some skeevy-looking guys in East Nashville. We skipped school to go see movies, and we got into cars with boys we had just met.
And now, we are complete strangers.
“Your mother, is she doing all right? I know that’s why you came home, but...”
She trails off. Doesn’t quite know how to ask.
“She’s not dying,” I say matter-of-factly, even if that’s not the truth. “She fell. She’s going to get better. She just can’t take care of herself anymore.”
“Oh,” she responds. She pokes at the last of her fries. I’m pretty sure it’s dead, but she keeps forking it.
Once the food is done, so is the conversation. It seems to dry up, and even Audrey can’t quite put lipstick on this pig.
But then something happens.
She gets around to the thing she really wants to ask. “Mary Ellen, have you...been receiving weird messages?”
I peer at her from behind my shades. “What do you mean?”
“Like, text messages. Ever since the TV special, someone’s been harassing me. It’s not like in the past, when people annoyed me. This feels...more sinister.”
There’s this one thing stuck in my brain like a rock in the sole of an old pair of Adidas, but I can’t bring myself to speak it aloud. My eyes never quite leave her face, even as I risk silence.
Is this a test?
“I...don’t think so,” I reply.
It’s not true—I’m always receiving messages—but I need to hedge, just to see what she has to say about it.
It feels good to be in control.
“I mean, they’re not credible, I guess. Someone just straight-up threatening to murder me out of nowhere, but I suppose that’s what you get when you have a stalker.”
I can’t help but laugh. “You don't have a stalker,” I say.
Audrey was always a little dramatic.
Silly girl.
Then, she’s up and grasping her fry basket with one manicured hand. There is no eye contact, and her glasses seem darker than before as she flicks the whole plastic container into the trash and saunters out into the heat of the midday sun, trailing all that refinement with her.
I catch up to her by the treeline behind the chicken joint, where she’s actively looking for her keys in her oversized purse.
The strong me is momentarily replaced by the girl I was back in high school, the one who would have done anything for their approval. Even Audrey, whom we all derided in private.
I can almost feel the chicken coming back up as I let my emotions take hold.
Audrey looks around conspicuously and pulls a half-used pack of Parliaments from her purse, offering me one in the process. At first, I demur, but then I acquiesce and we’re both smoking in silence when I let her in on one of my secrets.
“I had a legit stalker,” I say, staring into the trees as if looking for something or someone to appear there. A bird coos and then takes flight, and I watch it disappear. “He got...aggressive, and I
ended up calling the cops. It got ugly.”
“Oh,” she replies.
“But I didn’t mean to laugh.”
“Is that an apology?” she asks.
“It’s the best I can do.”
“Well—I guess I can accept that, for now.”
“The real question is,” I say, changing the subject, “is, who has been contacting you?”
“It’s a random number,” she says, beginning to dig in her purse. “I haven’t blocked it because I didn’t want to—”
“Wait a second,” I reply. “You still have the messages?”
“Well, yeah.”
She retrieves her device and hands it over.
You can’t describe someone’s phone as a rat’s nest, but Audrey’s is as close as one can get. It’s a collection of broken text threads and mass messages with people whose numbers she doesn’t know, or barely knows. She cares about the breadth of her influence but not the depth. Most people are entered into her contacts by first and last name and also by company name.
Once she actually finds the messages—a process she undertakes by pointing over my shoulder at the phone—she says, in a quavering voice, “That’s them.”
One need only take a cursory glance at the messages to see that they were penned—or thumbed—by a maniac. Punctuation and spelling worse than the president’s, and there is a random quality to the capitalization that gives me pause.
There’s also the lack of violent threats in the messages that always seemed to accompany to ones I received. Whereas this person says something like You better watch You’re (sic) step Bitch, mine would say something like, When I find you, I’ll gut you like a fish. Leave your stomach lying next to you, like a designer handbag.
That sort of thing.
It sounds like somebody might be trying to intimidate Audrey, but that could be anything. To hear her talk, she’s a titan of the business world, so there’s a possibility someone is trying to keep her from investing in this business or raise money for that one.
Still, by the time I’m done reading the threats, my hands are shaking. I try not to let Audrey see, but they are practically thrumming, like hummingbird wings.
“It’s, um, it’s not him,” I say through a voice that barely sounds like my own. “It’s not the guy I knew.”
Suicide Blondes Page 7