“Why, Freddy?” Susannah said. “Why have you been doing this? Leaving notes for Max? Do you know how much this scared us?”
Freddy shook his head angrily. He wouldn’t look at her, only up at Max. “I didn’t leave them for you, Max. I left them for her.”
IT WAS AS IF ALL the air went out of the room. The middle of the day, the cusp of summer, and the three of them just stood there looking at one another. The air was close and warm. Freddy, who had been tremendously enjoying all the unease, the notes, the secret he’d carried with him for months now, hadn’t adequately planned for this moment. He looked from his mom, her motor starting to run, that absent look in her eyes, over to Max, who looked angry. Freddy thought Max might strike him and had never thought that about Max before.
There is memory—the things you remember—and then there is the half-light of memory, the events that for years you can only feel, deep inside you, until they grow and take shape, like stepping away from a mosaic until it comes into stark relief.
That night was like that for Freddy. The older he got, the clearer it appeared to him, the gauzy dream of it giving way to something clearer than sky.
Was it a noise that startled him? Voices in the night?
He was five years old. He was in his narrow wooden bed, the one his parents jokingly called the Pilgrim bed since it was small and wooden and from another time. He woke up from a bad dream and he wanted to cry but instead he lay there with his stuffed bunny tucked close to his body and looked up at the star stickers on the ceiling above his bed. His bedroom faced the alley and the one window always had the blinds pulled down. The alley scared him, how close the other building was with its own windows. He used to worry someone could climb from one of those windows into his own, but his mom said, “Don’t be silly, Freddy, no one could do that. It’s not possible, honey, okay?”
But the good thing about the alley room was that he couldn’t hear any noise from the street. In the other parts of the apartment, sounds drifted up, voices of drunks walking home late at night, sirens, and the horns of the cabbies. But the alley room was like a cocoon. It was usually whisper quiet. It was just Freddy and Bunny and the stars and nothing to bother them, ever.
Lately, his mom and dad had been trying to get him to stay in bed for the night. He often woke, and when he did, he took Bunny and went and climbed in bed with them, sliding his body as close to his mom’s as he could.
“You’re getting older, Ferdinand,” his father said to him. “When you have a bad dream, I want you to take a deep breath, remind yourself it was just a dream, and try to go back to sleep yourself. You can do it.”
Freddy gripped Bunny tightly and thought of this while looking up at the stars. But then he heard something, voices coming from the other room, his mom’s and dad’s. But why were they up?
He climbed out of bed. He walked across his room with Bunny. His door was slightly ajar—he never wanted it completely closed. The apartment was dark except for light coming from his parents’ room, from underneath the door, a strip of pale yellow.
He wore red jammies that had padded feet built in, and when he opened his door and stepped out onto the hardwood floor of the narrow hallway, he made no sound as he walked the eight feet that separated his room from his parents’.
At the door, five-year-old Freddy stopped and stood in front of it. He was going to call out, then heard something that sounded like fighting—his mom’s voice, followed by his dad’s, quieter as usual than his mom’s, and this time hers was loud and angry and Freddy didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all.
Freddy reached for the handle, turned it, and slowly opened the door. “Mama,” he whispered.
But she didn’t answer. He opened the door until he was staring at their bed, ten feet away, and he didn’t walk in farther for what he saw stopped him and confused him.
His father was on his back, on the side of the bed closest to the door, where he normally slept. His mother, though, was on top of him, straddling him as if she were riding a bike, and she was leaning over his father’s head and there was a pillow over his face and she was pressing down on it hard and her face was strained and his father’s arms were in the air as if he were doing some kind of weird dance or reaching for her head but he couldn’t get there somehow.
She kept pressing harder and harder. His father’s hands stopped reaching for her, and his arms fell down like spent balloons. Freddy’s mom stopped pressing the pillow down. She let go of the pillow and leaned back like riding a horse into the wind without hands, and she was breathing hard and making a funny sound like crying but not quite.
She was breathing really hard. Harder than she did while running up the three flights of stairs to their apartment, which she did sometimes.
“Mama.”
Her head swiveled, took him in. “Freddy. Oh, honey. Go back to bed. I’ll be right in.”
“I had a bad dream.”
“Just go back to your room, honey.”
“Can I get in bed with you?”
He watched her run her hands through her hair roughly. “Not tonight, okay, baby? Give Mama a minute and I will be right in.”
Freddy covered his face with Bunny and turned around. “Okay, Mama.”
He went back to his room. He didn’t know why, but he was scared. He lay in the Pilgrim bed and he hugged Bunny tight and he cried and he didn’t know why he cried or what he cried for but only that he was confused.
But then his mama was there in his bed with him and she was combing his hair with her fingers and saying, “Hush, baby, hush, it’s okay, Freddy,” and her arms went around his ribs and pulled him to her boobs and he felt better and fell asleep.
In the morning the apartment was full of men, men in uniforms, other men, and Freddy came out into it all and it was like walking toward the sun. “Mama, what is it?”
He saw she was crying. The tears fell down her face when she talked to the men.
She whispered to the men and came to Freddy. “Come with me.” She led him back the way he had come, back into his bedroom, and she got down on her knees in front of him and put her hands on his shoulders and looked him in the eyes but she didn’t stop crying.
“Your dad went to heaven.”
Freddy pictured her on top of him, pressing and pressing that flat, fat pillow into his face but Freddy didn’t say anything. He couldn’t say anything. He knew what heaven meant. In time, he would completely forget seeing it, except in that part of him where the past always sang in darkness but could never stay buried forever.
MAX FELT THE WEIGHT IN the room. The room was fucking pregnant with the weight of everything. Max looked at Freddy, still sitting down, that one word written, YOU, so perfect, and part of Max wanted to make Freddy finish the note right here and right now. Tell us what you can’t actually tell us, you little bitch.
“Freddy,” Max said sternly. “Look at me, Freddy. Why are you writing these notes? Did you write all of them? The three on the door?”
Freddy nodded.
Max stepped back and felt how coiled he was, his muscles in his legs tight as if he were about to jump, and the vein in his neck that popped when he was stressed. He looked over at Susannah. She looked as if she was about to crack, the panic coming, wolves clawing at the door, but he was so far beyond giving a fuck. He thought of David Hammer, going under and rising up, the surprise on his face, Max’s hands on his shoulders, and then the rock as Max slammed into it and sank in the turbulent spring water.
“Why?” Max asked. “Why did you write them?”
Freddy looked away. He looked toward the wall. He wouldn’t look at either of them.
“Tell me, Freddy,” Max said, raising his voice just a hair.
Freddy turned back and met Max’s eyes, though he still wouldn’t acknowledge his mother. Freddy’s eyes were damp with tears being held back.
“She killed my dad.”
“Freddy? What?” Susannah said. “Why are you saying this?”
“I watched you. You didn’t think I would remember. But I did. I was there. I saw you. I saw all of it. You on top of him. Suffocating him.”
“Honey, no. Really. This is crazy.”
“You’re crazy,” Freddy spat back.
They were silent then, the two of them, staring at each other, and Max looked from Freddy to Susannah. Freddy looked resolute and relieved, and Susannah looked tight, her face that brittle mask that came on in moments of great panic. Looking at the two of them, Max knew that Freddy had spoken the truth. That Susannah had killed Joseph and that Freddy had witnessed it. Max could feel that truth in his bones the way you can feel the cold of winter when it first arrives.
Max looked at his wife and he saw her differently all of a sudden. He saw her as he first saw her, back when she took his breath away as he came off the elevator expecting someone else entirely, that crazy rawboned beauty she had, the red hair and the deep brown eyes, as if the years were stripping away in front of him. It was funny how this happened sometimes: the way people we know will build layers over time, practically dermal, so that it takes something like this to see them again as we once did, when they were new and pure, a blank canvas waiting for lust to be painted on it.
THE FEAR, FOR SUSANNAH, ALWAYS came back to feeling trapped. Small spaces, tall buildings, elevators, airplanes, subways, traffic, even lines in the supermarket. All around her, her entire life, makeshift prisons had emerged, some of her own creation, others handed to her by others and from which she had to break out.
For it was when the walls closed that the white bear came.
Susannah wasn’t a horse to be broken. But sometimes that’s what it felt that Joseph was up to: he was trying to break her with his games. Come to think of it, her father was the same way, though he did not play games. He practiced beliefs, things he carried deep about how to live, though when you got right down to it, she wasn’t sure there was any difference, at least in the end result. It was always about control, it was always about putting her in a box and saying, You are stuck here.
Other couples lied and didn’t show the world all their truths, but the ones that she and Joseph hid were different, were they not? No one could know he still treated her. That she was his client, his patient.
This wasn’t a secret so much as it was an agreed-upon lie. Every couple had an origin story—Hey, how did you guys meet? And they didn’t shy away from theirs. They told different variations, but this was to be expected. “He was my therapist,” Susannah might say, or “One day she showed up in my office,” said Joseph. “It was love at first sight,” and on and on and on.
But they never told the real story and they couldn’t tell the real story for Joseph could lose his license. He should have stopped treating her the moment they slept together, not that even that would have passed an ethical smell test, but it would at least have shown a willingness to acknowledge a lapse and to do things differently.
Instead, they had been together six years and he was still bringing her in once a week, to that chair across from him, the ticking clock on the shelf behind, the painting of the mountain and the valley above it, vaguely Buddhist and poorly done. Such a cliché of what a progressive therapist in New York would hang on the wall. Stare at this blandness, people, it said, and know that I am righteous and kind.
Joseph believed he was the only who could cure her. He thought he alone held the key that could unlock her mind. But honeymoons are honeymoons for a reason, and after a time, she had lost faith in what he could do for her, that maybe it was time for her to not be in treatment. Therapy could be a trap like any other. Sometimes it ran its course, as she knew Joseph told other patients, but he had never said that to her. Instead, it was a weekly expectation, like church when she was a kid.
A night in December: outside the windows of their apartment snow fell in the city and Susannah liked snow in the city at night, how it muffled the sounds of the traffic, how, for a moment, everything looked clean and brand-new. Tonight, though, she didn’t care.
Joseph had put Freddy to bed because she couldn’t. She was too upset—she and Joseph had had their weekly session, and afterward, when they ate a dinner of Chinese takeout, Joseph reminded her that she needed to keep that wall intact, the one between a session and the rest of their life.
The rage came over her like a winter wind, but not in front of Freddy, she wasn’t going to do that, which was another way of pushing the bear down when she shouldn’t. Instead she seethed silently, but Joseph knew, and Freddy probably knew, too, because kids felt energy the way dogs do.
In session that day, Joseph had made her close her eyes for he was always making her close her eyes. In the years she had been seeing him, her husband, her therapist, whatever followed closing her eyes was sure to be something that unsettled her.
Susannah had been jittery all day, before the session and even more so once it started, one of those days when the panic seemed about to breach the walls she had put up and come rushing in like a dam-burst of water. She didn’t want to play games, not today. She told Joseph this, too, letting him know that on a scale of one to ten, her baseline today was about a four, and so please could they just talk today? Maybe they could talk about pleasant things? Maybe they could talk about the future, about dreams, about possibilities to lift both of them out of this moment, this small room with the snow tumbling outside the window?
But Joseph had different ideas and he ignored her.
“Close your eyes, Susannah,” he said in his measured, calm voice.
“No, not today. I won’t.”
“Close your eyes.”
“Can we just talk?”
“Close your eyes, Susannah.”
She did.
“The door closes,” he said. “The elevator begins to move. A moment later it rocks hard, lurches, comes to a stop. The lights go out. It is just you—”
“No.” Susannah opened her eyes. “I won’t. Not today.”
Joseph leveled his dark eyes at her. “Get in the crate,” he said coldly.
“No, Joseph.”
“Get in the crate.” He looked at her as if he were going to stare right through her. His eyes were hypnotic, commanding.
Susannah looked over to the corner of the room where Joseph kept a dog crate, though they didn’t have a dog. He’d bought it for this purpose, though she knew he told patients that he had a Labrador that some days he brought to the office. He had gotten the crate for her, and they had only tried it once and she swore never again.
But she rose out of her chair as if in a dream and went to it, opened it, and got down on all fours and climbed in. Joseph had gotten out of his chair when she had gotten out of hers, and behind her he closed the door to the crate and latched it shut. It was only large enough for her to fit on all fours or curled awkwardly. Joseph put a blanket over it and it was dark and she began to cry. She heard his footfalls across the room, and then the door to his office opening and closing. He left her in there, barely able to move, her back up against cold narrow bars, and for an hour she cried and she screamed and no one heard her.
In her head, among the competing voices, was her own steady one, her best-self voice. Never again, she told herself. Never again.
When he released her, Susannah pushed past him and went right down the stairs and out into the street.
She wasn’t wearing a coat and the snow that fell was heavy and sticky, clinging to the trees and the stop signs. She let it fall on her and she breathed in the cool winter air and she listened to the sounds of the cars on the wet pavement in front of her, but she didn’t see any of it because of the profound ringing in her head and she knew she needed out. If it were not for Freddy, she would just run now, up the avenue, and run until she reached the park and could disappear inside it.
That night, Susannah pretended to sleep while Joseph read next to her. She could hear his breathing as he read, the occasional clearing of his throat, the clogged sinuses he refused to blow, all the things she had grown to h
ate. When he fell asleep, she rose up and gently removed his reading glasses, placed them on the end table, took his book from his clasped hands, and put that on the end table, too.
She was determined to be patient. She listened to him snore, the apnea he had never treated, those moments when his body shuddered and went still. She listened to the deep snores that cascaded down and then came quickly to an end, the dead stop, his dying for a second.
Then she rolled over and climbed on top of him, and at the moment the snore stopped, she snuffed him out like a candle. His arms reached up toward her face. He then went dark. It was so easy.
Never again, she told herself. She was so focused that she never saw her Freddy standing there, watching.
THEY LEFT FREDDY IN HIS room. It was only midafternoon, but the day had been like five days, each one its own segment, starting with an awkward dawn at a Connecticut motel on the side of the highway. Max was out of his mind. All he could muster before they left Freddy was that they would talk about it later, and that was mostly because his focus had shifted so suddenly, with the power this woman had over him when she tripped into good lighting, as she had the moment he realized she had killed Joseph.
Everything else was now secondary to his lust. Relief would come later—when it would sink in that no one was, in fact, aware of his past. No colleagues were out there waiting in the wings and trolling him with handwritten notes. The whole thing was fucking Freddy.
In their bedroom, they practically crashed together—the door barely closing behind them and then locked, before Max pushed Susannah against the wall and she said, “Oh, really,” and he responded, “Yes, that’s right.”
Susannah moved against the wall, and Max said, “Get your hands up,” as if he were arresting her, and she did, put her hands with her palms flat on the wall above her head.
Oh, how he loved the curve of her from here, the way her back sloped down to her waist, the rise of her full ass under her jeans, those hips that he put his hands on as he leaned forward and kissed the back of her neck as if he meant it. It was primal, urgent sex this time, her pants coming down until she stepped out of them, his dropping to just past his knees, his hand wrapping around and silencing her mouth as he drove into her.
The Perfect Liar Page 17