by Jane Haddam
The woman in Fortnum & Mason’s that morning in July had been nothing at all like a frump, and her clothes hadn’t come from some bargain knockoff place where all the seams gapped while the clothes still hung on their hangers. That was why it had taken Emma as long as it had to believe she was seeing what she was seeing. She was in Fortnum & Mason’s with a tour group. She and her husband—George Bligh, from the class ahead of theirs at school—had joined it to celebrate their fifteenth wedding anniversary. Neither of them had been to Europe before, and the idea of having a guide and an itinerary to protect them had seemed like the only sensible choice. Emma remembered staying up all night the morning before they were supposed to leave, worrying about everything that could go wrong. What if something happened to the plane? What if they weren’t able to make the right connections at JFK in New York? What if they got mugged? What if they got robbed? What if they got lost? Emma did not like to travel, not really. It was too unsettling on too many different levels, and there was always the danger that she would come back somehow changed, so that her own real life wouldn’t feel real to her anymore. It was the same problem she would have had if one of the girls had wanted to go somewhere fancy for college. That sort of thing changed you—it had even changed Maris—and Emma had never really believed that a change could be for the better.
It was their last morning in London before moving on to Wales. The tour guides thought that Fortnum & Mason’s would be a good place to go for novelties and souvenirs. Emma had already decided that it was not, because it was far too expensive, and the things it carried were far too odd. One whole aisle was taken up with food she could have bought anytime she wanted to, at home, but at prices so exorbitant they made her breathless even before she did the currency conversion from pounds into dollars. Kraft macaroni and cheese, Miracle Whip, Skippy peanut butter, Niblets brand corn, Twinkies—women in plain cotton shirtwaist dresses and thick cawing British accents snapped them up, telling each other how it was much less expensive when they got a package sent to them from their married daughter in New York, but she was pregnant now and not able to get around as easily as she used to, so they had to pay the prices here. Other aisles contained things Emma didn’t know if she believed: eels in gelatin, tins of pate made out of lamb brains and strip bacon and butter. The worst thing was the big glass case with the candy in it. Emma loved candy. It was why she weighed nearly 250 pounds by the time she’d had her second daughter, and had probably weighed 50 pounds more than that on that day in London. No matter how expensive it was, she would have bought candy if she could have found any she liked, but the glass case was full of abominations. Candied violets turned out to be candied violets. They had a bright purple flower hardened by sugar on top of a chocolate shell, and when people bit into them they oozed a bright purple creme. Candied ginger turned out to be candied ginger, too. When you bit into that, it burned your mouth.
When the woman in the yellow dress walked through the door, Emma’s first thought was: Oh, my God. That’s Betsy Wetsy. Then she backtracked, because she couldn’t quite figure out how she knew. Most probably she didn’t know, she told herself. What would Betsy Wetsy be doing in London, and how could she have transformed herself into this, this—what? It wasn’t that this woman was good-looking, although she was, in an odd way that had nothing to do with what Emma had always called “cute.” It was the aura, if there was any such thing, the easy grace that came from a radiating confidence so complete it drew attention from half the people in the room. It was a big room, and crowded, and noisy, and the woman in the yellow dress wasn’t speaking much above the level you’d use to talk to a good friend in a quiet corner over tea—but people were looking at her anyway, as if she were royalty or a movie star, somebody they felt they ought to know.
Emma pinched George on the elbow and said, “George. Listen. Isn’t that Betsy Wetsy?”
“Who?”
“Betsy Toliver. From Hollman.”
“There’s nobody like that in Hollman,” George said confidently. “I’d have noticed.”
“I don’t mean from Hollman now,” Emma said. Sometimes George made her so frustrated, she wanted to break his neck. “From when we were in high school. Betsy Toliver. You know. The girl who was locked in the outhouse at the park the night Michael Houseman died.”
George squinted, as if that could make him see better. He’d run to fat, just as Emma herself had, and for most of the time they had been on this tour he had been uncomfortable. Everything the Europeans made—chairs, sofas, beds, the aisles in theaters and fancy stores—was just so small, he couldn’t fit into it. Once, at a restaurant in Scotland, he’d had to have a chair brought especially from the manager’s office so that he could sit down at all.
“You know,” he said. “I think it is. I think it is Betsy Toliver.”
She was standing at the side of the candy counter, attended by a deferential man with a clipboard, her head bent, listening. There was, really, no mistaking it. It had to be Betsy Toliver. It could be no one else. What Emma had thought was the one conclusive proof she was not—she was too tall—turned out to be a pair of two-and-half-inch-stacked high heels. The man with the clipboard was nodding, pointing to things on the paper in front of him. Betsy was pushing one long-fingered hand through the thick permed cloud of her hair, and as she did the large diamond on her fourth finger glinted in the uncertain illumination of the display lights.
“Yes, madam, everything is very much in order,” the man with the clipboard was saying. “The package will be delivered to Hollman, Pennsylvania, USA, no later than noon on July twenty-fourth. It’s all arranged. Once it reaches New York by international carrier, it will be carried inside the United States by the United Parcel Service.”
Emma was standing so close, she could have touched Betsy on the cheek. Some part of her was signaling that she should do just that. Wasn’t there something odd about running into an old … acquaintance … thousands of miles from home, and not even making yourself known to her? If she went back and told Belinda and Nancy and Chris just how this had happened, they would think she was off her head. It didn’t make any sense to run into Betsy Wetsy in Fortnum & Mason’s and not even find out what she was doing with her life. Still, Emma made no move in Betsy’s direction, and George didn’t either, because he recognized exactly what she did: there was something about Betsy, something that put her totally beyond their reach, so that either one of them would have been ashamed to have her see them the way they looked now.
The man with the clipboard held it out to Betsy. She took it, took the pen off the metal clasp, and signed. When she handed it back, the man had a candied violet to offer her, and she laughed.
“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for everything. I’m going to go eat this on the sidewalk so I don’t get the urge to buy a pound and take them home. Have a good afternoon, Terence. I’m sorry I put you through so much trouble.”
“It was no trouble at all, madam. I hope very much we can be of service to you again.”
“Twice a year, Christmas and her birthday. You’ve been wonderful. Thank you, again.”
Betsy turned around and went across the large open front section between the candy case and the front door, and then she was gone. For a moment, Emma could still see her through the windows, striding out onto the sidewalk. In no time at all, though, she had disappeared, and Emma found herself counting it all up in her head: the yellow dress, real silk, and fully lined; the shoes; the handbag; the hair; the diamond engagement ring, backed as it was by a thick gold band more like the ones men wore than the ones women did. Emma looked down at her own shoes, good sensible canvas ones so that her feet wouldn’t hurt if she walked too much in the city. She looked at her own diamond engagement ring, which George had bought her when she had only been out of high school a year. She looked at the canvas tote bag she was carrying instead of a real purse, because she thought it would be better for carrying the things they bought when they went to the kind of places that reall
y interested her, like the Tower of London.
“Well,” George said. “She’s changed a lot, hasn’t she?”
“You’ve given me ten cents too much change,” the old woman said, tapping her knuckles against the counter next to her brown paper bags. “I don’t think you’re paying attention. I don’t think you’ve heard a single word I’ve said the whole time I’ve been in here.”
“Sorry,” Emma said. “I’ve been a little distracted today.”
“You can’t expect to keep customers if you don’t listen to what they say,” the old woman said. “You take me, for instance. I won’t be back here again. You’ve got good stock, but I won’t go where I’m not being listened to. I’m a customer with money to spend. I have a right to be listened to.”
“Yes,” Emma said. “Of course.”
“You’re only saying ‘of course’ because you’re trying to humor me,” the old woman said. “I won’t be humored. I’m not some senile old cat.”
“Yes,” Emma said. Then she stopped. She had been about to say “of course.” “I hope you enjoy your things,” she said, instead.
The old woman looked ready to start up again, but instead she just gathered up her bags, and looked Emma over —fat cow, Emma could almost hear her say—and left, making her feet hit the floor with particular emphasis, and slamming the door as she went out.
Emma took a chamois cloth and gave the counter a quick rub, just to give herself something to do. What bothered her about her talks with Belinda was that endless complaint: it isn’t fair. What frightened her, ever since she had first started hearing Betsy’s name on television, was that it might be very fair, there might be something about Betsy that really deserved to be famous, if only in a minor way, something about her that the rest of them, even Maris, did not have. It was not something that Emma herself wanted, but it was something that the rest of the world might easily judge to be better than what she had, and she hated the thought of that, much in the same way she had once hated the sight of Betsy in the hall at school with the top button of her blouse buttoned tight, even though everybody knew that when you wore a blouse that way you looked like a jerk. Now Betsy was coming home, moving back into that big brick house in Stony Hill, and everything would be ruined.
4
It had been a bad day, one of the worst Peggy Smith Kennedy could remember in at least six months, and that, she told herself, was why it bothered her so much that nobody had thought to call and tell her the news about Betsy Toliver. Of course, there wasn’t much news about Betsy Toliver. There wasn’t anything she didn’t know. Unlike most of the others, she didn’t try to hide her interest in what Betsy was doing by buying People or the tabloids up in Johnstown or out at the mall. She could even remember the first time she had realized that Betsy was becoming Something Important, and it had burned into her brain the way such incidents do, the ones you think later were the billboards that announced your life had changed. Peggy had a lot of those incidents emblazoned on her brain, but not quite enough of them. She tried to remember the first time Stu had hit her—really hit her, so that she came right up off the floor and slammed into something—but she always came up blank. It seemed to her that he had always hit her, even when they were children together, even back in high school. She knew that wasn’t true. She had pictures of herself—homecoming queen, prom princess, president of the student council—and in those days her eyes had been as clear and unclouded as the water in one of those Japanese pools, those oases of serenity. She did remember the first time she had ended up in the emergency ward, with Stu pacing the corridor and her left arm held away from her body at an odd angle, broken in one place, dislocated in another. The doctor who had seen to her had had eyes as flat as the eyes of an android in the science fiction movies Stu liked to see when he wasn’t loaded. When he was loaded, he came home with porn, slick black videotapes that looked as if they had been rubbed all over with linseed oil. He made her sit with him and watch women do things she didn’t have words for, that he said she wanted her to do to him, but that they never did together, ever, for some reason that seemed to be clear to him but that she couldn’t figure out. What bothered her was that she was sure the doctor knew exactly what had happened. When he looked at Stu, his eyes became even flatter than they had been at the beginning. He looked almost two-dimensional. She suddenly realized everyone knew, everyone in this emergency room, everyone (maybe) in town, so that all the energy she had spent trying to keep this secret had had no purpose at all. That was one of those moments that was emblazoned on her brain, because ever afterward—this morning, for instance—when she went into town and walked down Grandview Avenue, or when she left her classroom to go to the teachers’ lounge at school, she was sure that people could look straight at her and know her for exactly what she was. Not a homecoming queen. Not a prom princess. Not a student council president. Not even one of the girls who had gone up to UP-Johnstown to get her teaching certificate, unlike the others who had had to stay home and settle for junior college, or worse. What she really was, was one of those people who are nothing, not a thing, without any value whatsoever, so that it didn’t matter if they were beaten bloody twice a month or if the one baby they had ever managed to conceive had died in a miscarriage brought on when their husbands kicked them senseless on their own kitchen floors—it didn’t matter because they deserved it, they deserved it, God marked some people out from birth to be the ones who deserved it, and it was only an accident that she had been able to hide the truth about herself for so long.
“I couldn’t let you have a fucking baby,” Stu had said, when she came back from the hospital after the miscarriage. In the hospital, he had been different, not only sober but reasonable, so reasonable that the doctors had finally had to stop asking the questions that danced around the whole issue of what had made her lose the child. Once they got home again, he had started drinking. To give himself a bigger kick, he had done four lines of cocaine from her tortoiseshell hand mirror while she was in the bathroom. When they were both in college, after her junior year at UP-Johnstown, he had wanted her to try cocaine, too. He had even laid out the lines for her so that she wouldn’t have to struggle with them herself, in the back of his van, out in the parking lot of the little supermarket across from the Sycamore. Later, that would seem significant, too, that they had stopped going to the Sycamore, where all their friends went, even then. If she had really been what she thought she was, if she had really been somebody to be proud of, Stu would have wanted to go on showing off their relationship in front of all the boys who rightly should have envied him.
“I can’t let you have a fucking baby,” Stu had said, lying on the couch while she sat huddled in an armchair that had springs poking out all over it. One of them was digging into the soft skin of her right arm, but she liked it. She kept rubbing her arm back and forth across it, trying to make it hurt more than it did. Stu had a six-pack of beer cans on the floor and his nose was running. “If I let you have a fucking baby, you’d kill it.”
The teachers’ lounge was full of potted plants. That had been true when she was a student at Hollman High School, and it was true thirty years later, when she was a teacher. She had no idea who brought the plants or who watered them. She never did either. The first time she’d realized that Betsy Toliver was becoming Something Important was on one of those weekends when Stu went off hunting—if anybody wanted to know how truly awful she was, she’d only have to tell them how often she wished that Stu would come back dead from hunting, Stu, whom she had known all her life, whom she had fallen desperately, hopelessly in love with at the age of six. She had had the house to herself, and she had pulled all the blinds down tight and locked all the doors and turned on the answering machine. She had wanted to be safe, just that once, not only from Stu but from everybody and everything she knew. She had a little stack of romance novels from Silhouette and Second Chance at Love that she had been keeping hidden in her work bag under the textbooks and assignment sheets she neede
d from school. Stu really hated it when she read romance novels. He said it made her stupid, and she couldn’t afford to get any stupider than she already was. Actually, he called her a stupid c——, but she couldn’t say that word even in her own mind, and she didn’t really hear it when Stu said it. Instead, let out into the air, it turned into something physical, the bouncing ball in those old Merrie Melodies cartoons, follow it and you don’t have to have memorized the words.
She turned on the television just to have noise in the house. She liked music, but there was no point buying CDs of Mozart or Bach. If it wasn’t what Stu liked, he broke it, at the first opportunity, and there was always opportunity. She thought vaguely that she would turn on PBS, or Bravo, where there were often orchestras on Saturday afternoons. She flicked clumsily at the remote and went through channels, channel after channel, the Sci Fi Channel, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, TV Land, MTV, and then, on her second run-through—how could they possibly have all three tiers, HBO, Showtime, everything, and still have nothing to watch?—it had suddenly occurred to her that the woman on the CNN panel show was vaguely familiar. She settled down to watch, a copy of a book called Reckless Desire held in one hand, idly, so that she would have something to fiddle with while her stomach dropped out of her body and her brain froze tight. It wasn’t that the woman was vaguely familiar. She’d known who it was at first glance. It was almost impossible to mistake that dramatic, high-cheekboned face—although, in spite of the fact that it looked the same, for some reason it now seemed handsome instead of ugly. Peggy had a line of bruises going up her arm from her wrist to her shoulder, dots of black and blue where Stu had held his fist against her so that his high school ring cut into her flesh. All of a sudden, all the bruises started to hurt, and all her muscles lost control. She was as cold as if she’d been locked into a butcher’s walk-in freezer. The people on the panel show talked, but she didn’t understand a word they said. She caught the fact that the host called Betsy “Liz,” and that was it. Then she was utterly, irrevocably sick, so sick she didn’t have time to get out of her chair and run for the bathroom. She leaned over and put her head between her legs and vomited, right there on the floor, vomited and vomited. So much stuff poured out of her, she thought she was vomiting up her own intestines. When she was able to sit up again, the show was rolling credits. Regular Correspondents, one category said, Michael Kinsley, Ramesh Ponnuru, Laura Ingraham, Elizabeth Toliver. Oh, she thought, Betsy must be some kind of liberal. Then she was vomiting again, and it had begun to occur to her that there was no way she was going to be able to clean it all up before tomorrow evening, to get it so clean that Stu would never notice what it was she had done. She could not have explained it to him, any more than she could have explained it to anybody else, this idea she had that a judgment had been passed, not only on her or on Betsy but on all of them.