by Leigh Himes
I immediately began scanning e-mail, staring eagerly as it downloaded 170 messages. I read through them carefully, hungry for details of how Abbey van Holt spent her days. Mostly it was spam from shops and online retailers, but there were some appointment reminders, event invites, and missives from Gloria’s school that helped fill in some blanks. The only e-mails that looked important (mostly because the subject line said just that) were from Alex’s campaign manager, a man named Frank Klein, who, despite being someone who refused to use punctuation, was at least very verbose and detail oriented (thank God!). He e-mailed a daily schedule of campaign events, complete with type of event, address, time, and who was to attend. I noticed only a few were marked “abbey optional.”
I closed the e-mail app and, on impulse, called my home number in Grange Hill. After fourteen rings, I admitted defeat and hung up. Then I tried Jimmy’s cell phone. It rang twice, but instead of the usual “Lahey Landscape” greeting, I heard a man’s gruff “Hello.”
“Jimmy?” I whispered.
“Who is this?” said the voice. My throat went dry.
“Is this Jimmy Lahey’s phone?” I asked.
“No, you’ve got the wrong number.” Click.
Then I tried the only other number I knew by heart—Mom. I dialed and waited. After four rings, I heard her voice and was flooded with relief. “Mom, it’s Abbey,” I started to say, before realizing it was her voice-mail greeting: “Roberta here. I may be ignoring you, but I have good reason. I’m cruising the Mediterranean until November fourteenth. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you when I return. If I return, that is.”
Shit, I thought, gone until the fourteenth. That was more than two weeks away. What in the world was she doing on a cruise? She hated cruises, called them “floating Ruby Tuesdays.” I left a message asking her to call me as soon as she could. I also sent her an e-mail with a simple subject line: “Call me.”
I opened up the phone’s browser and began to type but found it maddeningly slow. I stood up and began searching for a computer or an iPad, looking in all the cabinets again, the kitchen’s one wide drawer, and even the pantry. Finding nothing, I moved into the family room.
It was cozier and more lived in than the rest of the apartment, with a thick red-and-blue Oriental rug, floor-to-ceiling cherry shelves, a big leather sectional, and a huge flat-screen television. A few puzzles and children’s books littered the floor, and stacks of decorating magazines were piled on the coffee table. In one end table were some remotes, tissues, and a hairbrush, while the other stored more magazines. I was about to give up when I noticed an inch of matte silver peeking out from beneath the coffee table. I pulled out an Apple laptop, opened the lid, and pressed it on.
It was time to find out what had had happened to me. “C’mon, Google, don’t fail me now,” I whispered aloud as I watched the screen load.
My first search term? “Head trauma.” Google offered a vast list of causes, symptoms, and case histories, but way too many to examine. I narrowed the search by trying “head trauma and confusion.” Again, Google produced pages and pages of Web links, but most pertained to memory loss, and I knew that wasn’t my problem. If anything, I had too many memories, not too few.
More clicking revealed additional diagnoses. One doctor argued that head trauma coupled with psychological trauma could result in “delusional psychoses.” But that didn’t seem right either. Returning a Marc Jacobs bag was disappointing, sure, but certainly not traumatic enough to make someone crazy. I kept typing.
One promising explanation was called dissociative fugue, where an individual is confused or unaware of his or her identity and will travel “in psychological journeys away from known surroundings.” But, again, that wasn’t me. I knew exactly who I really was.
An hour and a half later, most of the Internet-proposed theories dismissed, I turned my attention to the scientific community, more specifically to physicists. A June 2013 issue of Physics Today described a young MIT professor’s belief in the concept of a “multiverse.” The prize-winning Japanese physicist presented a new theory of existence: Our world is just one bubble in a giant foam of bubbles, with universes separated from others only by thin, fragile membranes. I stared at his photo, his face smiling from a podium, while I tried to grasp his words. Had I gotten mixed up in someone else’s bubble? Had my bubble burst? Or was this bubble running alongside my real one, with this Abbey and the real Abbey separated by just a thin, glistening wall? Perhaps she was still out there somewhere, begging Gloria to eat, brushing her teeth in the car, and downing Nutella by the jarful.
With trembling hands, I typed in my name, my fingers zipping on the familiar ten letters. I held my breath as I waited for the results. But the only matches were for a college kid in Texas and a school board superintendent in Boise. I tried it again, this time using “Abigail.” But still, there was nothing relevant, nothing pertaining to me.
Next, I tried “Jimmy Lahey.” It returned a million hits, but none of them referred to my Jimmy. I tried “James Lahey,” but again the links led to other men with different jobs, different families, different faces. I paused and forced my mind to bring up Jimmy’s face, but the image that appeared was one of the last ones I’d seen: his angry scowl from our fight over the purse. I shut the computer, leaned back, and closed my eyes.
When I opened them again, my gaze landed on the shelves across from me. Mixed in with the books and burnished silver bowls were several silver-framed family snapshots. I looked closer and saw my own face staring back at me.
I walked over and examined them, one by one. Gloria covered in pink frosting on her first birthday. Aunt Aubyn on a horse. Me awkwardly holding Sam in a long, embroidered christening gown. Alex and me together in some tropical paradise, him shirtless and me with a flower behind my ear, both of us tanned and laughing. Alex on skis; Alex with his parents; Alex and me with Colin Powell at a charity function.
I looked at the few photos of me and saw my eyes, my smile, my slightly lazy left eye. I scrutinized my shoulders, my long arms, and, with toes sinking into soft sand, my size-nine-and-a-half feet. I was there at these parties, on these trips, a part of this picture-perfect family. But these were cherished memories I had no memory of. They belonged to another Abbey, whose younger self had made a different choice and now lived in a very different world. One small word—yes, not no—had very big consequences.
Curiosity gnawed at me. Who was this woman?
I started pulling open drawers and cabinets. I found the usual evidence of family life—board books, diapers, Vaseline, markers, and Barbie limbs—along with some receipts, DVDs, instruction manuals, power cords, and some marked-up blueprints for a house with several balconies. The cottage, perhaps?
From the back of one cabinet, I pulled out some dusty yearbooks from Mercersburg Academy, which I took to be Alex’s prep school. I flipped through to find his teenage face grinning out from a variety of group photos—glee, debate, lacrosse. I put them back and kept searching.
In the last cabinet, I found an enormous black leather box embossed with a date: “June 19, 2004.” Inside was a silver-tipped album so heavy I needed two hands to lift it out. As I opened the heavy cover and gazed at the first photo, I swallowed hard. It was twenty-seven-year-old me. On the day I became Mrs. van Holt.
I stood in a long, lacy veil and 1930s-style white gown, its train artfully pooling around my feet and spilling onto the lawn at Bloemveld. My dress was elegant and demure, and I looked pretty and poised, if perhaps a bit too thin, the diamond bracelets slipping down from my wrists to circle my palms. My cheeks flushed gently pink and my hair shone in its tight, flaxen chignon. I held a bouquet of white tulips, their stems encased by a tight white ribbon. With Alex beside me in his black morning coat and striped tie, both of us leaning languidly against the side of an antique car, we looked like a duke and duchess from another era, only with better teeth.
Each page of the album was more achingly beautiful than the next: Alex and me
next to a rose-and-ivy-covered pillar; flower girls (eight in all) in their cream-on-cream silk; me with Jules, her auburn hair so pretty against her sage green bridesmaid dress; and then the entire well-heeled wedding party, all walking toward the camera on a lawn so thick it looked like a rug. One photo showed Alex and me with our mothers, and I couldn’t help but cringe at how different the two women looked, one in an oyster-colored skirt suit and the other in low-cut electric blue satin with matching shoes. What had Mirabelle thought of Roberta? And what had she thought about me, for that matter? Surely she would have preferred a daughter-in-law with a more patrician lineage. But if she had, she certainly didn’t show it. Of all of us, her smile was the widest.
I flipped back to the first photo, the official wedding portrait. I stared at the bland white flowers again, so different from the mixed bouquet I’d held on my wedding day to Jimmy. And at my hair, which was so sleek and tidy compared to the wisps that blew around my face as I said my vows to Jimmy in the warm September sand of Rehoboth Beach. I understood how different choices lead you down different paths, and how on those different paths you find even more choices.
But still I was baffled. I’d always hated tulips.
I was still sitting on the floor of the family room when the petite nanny returned with Sam. I had been so deep in thought, she startled me, and I returned the album to its shelf and hurried to the kitchen. The baby greeted me with rosy cheeks still flushed from the autumn cold.
“Do you want a snack, nuu jaa?” the nanny asked him.
I started toward the refrigerator to get it for him, then realized she was already on it. I watched her pick him up, wash his hands, and plop him in his high chair. I walked over and tickled his belly. He squealed and blew saliva bubbles.
She gave him some blueberries and sliced mango and instructed him to say “thank you.”
“Tank yoo,” he answered cheerfully, then dug his tiny hands into the bowl. I watched in disbelief as my carb-addicted son scarfed down the colorful fruit. And I mean real fruit, not the kind squeezed from pouches or molded into the shapes of Disney characters.
“No gym today?” It took me a minute to realize she was talking to me.
I shook my head. “Moving a bit slow today.”
“Mr. van Holt will be here soon,” she said, eyeing my jeans and unbrushed hair. “Saw his car pulling in.”
“Oh.” I smoothed my hair, and wished desperately that I’d brushed my teeth, when in walked Alex, looking like the movie version of an airline pilot in a navy suit and white shirt that set off his blue eyes and dark hair handsomely. Following him were two other men: a balding, bearded guy in a worn sports coat and olive corduroys and a young African American man in pressed jeans and a techy zip-up sweatshirt. All three were intently engaged in their phones; then, as if on cue, they thumbed them off, slipped them into their pockets, looked up, and smiled.
At the sight of his father, Sam started hopping in his chair, gurgling with glee. I understood how he felt, the room suddenly brighter and the air more electrified as Alex entered. My eyes couldn’t help but follow him, and I felt a little tingle of excitement down deep. I recognized the feeling, one I hadn’t felt in years—the giddy exhilaration of a new relationship. My cheeks reddened and my stomach fluttered.
I looked down, trying to hide it, knowing Abbey van Holt would have reacted more indifferently. Ten years of marriage would have muted the thrill, even with a ball and chain as gorgeous as Alex.
The older man, whom I took to be punctuation-challenged Frank Klein, turned my attention by shouting my name: “Abigail!” He walked over and grabbed my hand, then kissed it with mock chivalry. “Thanks to your little spill, our poll numbers are up for the first time in weeks. I know it wasn’t fun, but your accident has captured the media’s attention. And the public’s sympathy.”
“Glad I could help,” I said, laughing. “I guess being a natural-born klutz finally came in handy.”
“You’re not a klutz,” said Alex as he stared into the fridge. “You just never were any good on moving objects. Remember that elephant in Sri Lanka?”
“Of course,” I bluffed. “That elephant.”
“It’s specifically with women over forty,” interrupted the young black man. “Four points. I think it was leaving in the middle of that speech for the hospital. The clip is all over the news. Classy move, van Holt.”
“Well, I guess my natural chivalrousness finally came in handy,” he said, giving me a wink. I looked down and blushed.
Alex walked over and lifted Sam out of his seat, tossed him up in the air, and tickled him until he shrieked, then handed him to me.
“I have lunch at the police station on Spruce, and then I have that rescheduled KYW interview,” he told me. “I figured you could use another afternoon to recover, so we didn’t book anything for you today.”
I looked at him, forcing another expression besides my usual “deer in headlights,” and he added with an eye roll: “Except for tonight, of course. I know nothing will keep you from tonight.”
Not knowing what to say, I just smiled and gave him the thumbs-up sign.
“You all right?” he asked, laughing. “Need some more coffee or something?”
But before I could answer, he turned and looked at the nanny. “Actually, I could use some too. May?”
May! And better yet, coffee! My eyes widened, eager to solve the mystery of the invisible coffeemaker.
May put down the sippy cup she was rinsing, smiled sweetly at Alex, and walked toward the back wall, pausing in front of a rectangle of black glass above a perforated steel box. She tapped the glass and it came alive with a row of glowing buttons. She hit a few and, thirty seconds later, handed him a steaming latte.
Alex took two quick sips and put it down. He moved toward the door, following the other men. He paused at the kitchen doorway, then looked back.
He stared at me like he was looking for words, and I found my body frozen under his gaze, eager for whatever charming remark he might leave me with.
“Oh, and, Abbey?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t forget to pick up my tux.”
With my oversized Gucci sunglasses and black cashmere wrap, I looked like every other woman on Walnut Street, but as they paused before window displays and opened heavy salon doors, I kept walking, my eyes dead ahead. I had only an hour or so before Sam woke from his nap and Gloria got home from school, so I moved briskly, weaving around anyone in my way and noting each cross street I passed: Eighteenth, Seventeenth, Sixteenth, Fifteenth, and, finally, Broad Street. I paused for the light and to recheck the map on my phone. I was almost there.
When the light turned green, I moved with the crowd and crossed over the wide avenue. But halfway down the next block I had to stop again, derailed by a truck pushing a Dumpster toward a storefront under renovation.
I stepped back from the cloud of dust and waited. Looking up, I watched construction workers chipping away at an old wooden sign. I tilted my head to read it: “Ochs & Ochs.”
This, or what was left of it, was the old Ochs luggage store, one of Philly’s last independent retailers, a holdover from the days when luggage cost more than a box of diapers. I covered my eyes from the sun and peered inside, remembering old Mr. Ochs and his brother, always in three-piece suits, always yelling at kids not to touch anything. Now the shop floor played host to a row of white mannequins, indifferent to their nakedness and the workers who moved around them.
A construction worker strolled outside for a cigarette and I asked him what store was moving in.
“Beats me,” he said, lighting up. “I just do what they tell me.” After exhaling his first drag, he examined me further, letting his eyes linger on my ample chest. That’s a first, I thought. I decided to cross the street after all.
Finally arriving at Thirteenth Street, I entered a boxy concrete office building through revolving doors that spun me into an empty, dimly lit foyer. I scanned the directory of doctors’ office
s and law firms until my eyes found the name I was looking for: Agency X, Suite 1105. I stepped inside the elevator, hit the button, and waited for movement. Eventually, it jumped awake and heaved itself upward, each floor announced with a dull clink.
The eleventh floor was bright and open, with long white corridors punctuated with an occasional poster or plant. I breathed in Chinese food from one door and paint smells from another, and heard rap music from farther down. This must be where they put all the creatives, I thought, and I was right. The suites I passed were occupied by interior designers, Web developers, architects, advertising agencies… and a lone psychiatrist. How convenient for them.
I turned a corner and peered down another long hall. The last door at the end was bright white like the others, except for a large hot pink “X” painted stylishly and off-center across it. I smiled; this was definitely the place.
Hot pink had always been Jules’s favorite color. Maybe because it looked so good with her green eyes or maybe it was the one girlie indulgence she allowed herself, but as long as I had known her, she’d insisted on pops of pink in her decor, in her artwork, or in her wardrobe. In college it had been hot pink pillows; in our early twenties, it was pink streaks in her hair; and, later, when life demanded a more “mature” palette, she downsized to a single pair of pink leather flats. Luckily, she had a partner in crime in Gloria. They would sit for hours coloring hot pink butterflies and hearts and flowers, bonding over the shade like two old ladies discovering their mutual love for Judi Dench.
Heart racing and anxious, I entered the office suite. At the stark white reception desk, a bored young girl with a nose ring looked up to see what I wanted. Yes, I was here to see Miss Xavier. No, I didn’t have an appointment. Yes, she would know who I was. And no, thank you, I didn’t need a kale-and-pineapple smoothie.
I sat on the edge of the first chair I found and waited. And waited.
For almost half an hour I sat there, twisting my heavy wedding rings and observing the daily grind of a small communications firm. I had toiled in agencies my entire adult life, so some of the sounds were familiar to me—phones ringing, fingers tapping, young staffers hurling insults at one another—while others were less familiar—the beep-beep of a far-off video game, the gurgle of a fish tank, the soft whir of a fancy blender.