To the Power of Three

by Laura Lippman

  “We can ask,” Perri said, “but they’d probably insist on supervising.”

  It did not have to be said that no activity, no matter how desirable, was worth bringing outsiders to their circle. Even if they did not consider themselves the Ka-pe-jos anymore, even if they visited the circle only once a month or so, the place was still sacred.

  When Kat’s father moved out, she refused to talk about it, even to Perri and Josie, and she stopped eating. By the end of their first semester as freshmen, she was almost too thin—and too beautiful, if such a thing were possible. Kat’s fat had been like Nana’s suit, hiding something gorgeous and true, and Josie was almost worried for her friend as she observed the commotion she created in the high school. Kat, however, seemed oblivious, wearing her old clothes, ill-fitting and baggy as they were, and ignoring the boys who buzzed around her. And it turned out that cool kids didn’t have boyfriends and girlfriends anyway. Everything was about hooking up, hitting this or that, friends with benefits. Given that choice, Kat preferred safe, platonic relationships with boys they had always known, such as Seth and Chip.

  Her only concession to her new body was an increasing physical ease. She began running and going to the gym. She asked Josie to show her how to do some of the simpler gymnastic tricks, and although they never said it was a secret from Perri, it somehow became one. Yet when they both made the JV squad freshman year, Perri congratulated them wholeheartedly, and no one seemed more impressed when Josie scrambled to the top of the pyramid, her tiny stature finally an asset. Similarly, when Perri landed the role of Joan of Arc in The Lark, a remarkable honor for a freshman, Josie and Kat attended every performance and sent her roses at the final curtain call. And in the school talent show, they appeared together, doing their own riff on the updated version of “Lady Marmalade,” although they were not allowed to dress quite so provocatively.

  They had trumped the system, built a friendship that transcended the confines of the school’s cliques. Yes, they were cheerleaders, but they didn’t take it seriously, and Perri may have been a drama geek, but she wasn’t a geeky one. They ate lunch together and continued to see each other on weekends. It began to seem their friendship could survive anything.

  Then Peter Lasko, home from first year of college and back in his lifeguard chair, had fallen in love with Kat. Perri had always said she wasn’t jealous in the slightest, and she did have a sort-of boyfriend of her own that summer, the boy who was playing Beau to her Mame in the summer production. And when Peter dropped Kat, brutally and swiftly, their friendship continued as if it had never been interrupted, as if Kat hadn’t spent most of the summer with Peter. There were no recriminations, no envy. If anything, Perri seemed to forget that she and Josie were the ones who had once hung around the community theater’s rear entrance waiting for Peter to emerge. She told Kat he wasn’t anyone special, that Kat was better off without him. These were the right things to say, of course, and Perri said them with uncharacteristic tenderness.

  But if Josie were pressed to find the precise moment when things began to fall apart, she would go back to that summer when Perri was Mame, when Kat was newly thin, when Josie was learning to fly to the top of the pyramid—and Peter Lasko had taken Kat from them, however briefly. Although they never acknowledged it out loud, it proved that something, someone, could come between them. Separated once, they were all the more vulnerable to being separated again.

  PART FOUR

  last

  year’s

  funeral

  monday

  18

  “What do you want?” Chloe said by way of greeting when Dale made the long trip up from the city Monday morning, marveling all the while at the heavy traffic in the other direction. The commute hadn’t been part of his life for four years, and memory was imperfect, always. Still, the congestion had to be exponentially worse than it had been even a year ago. Why did people live like this? Oh, because his father had enabled them to—his father and the builders and the state officials, who delivered the wide, smooth roads, which persuaded people that the trip to the city would be a snap. After all, it seemed an easy enough drive on a Sunday afternoon, when optimistic families made the journey to tour the open houses. On a Sunday you could make it downtown in thirty minutes. But come the first weekday after all the paperwork was signed, it would take almost an hour.

  “The funeral director thought it would be nice to have a photograph of Kat at the service. He’ll have it enlarged, but it requires something more formal than I have.” Dale had many snapshots of Kat, in his condo and the office, but they were not only too casual but also too old, the most recent taken during her sophomore year. How had he gone two years without acquiring a new photograph of his daughter?

  “Do you want the painting?”

  “God, no.” After all these years, he still couldn’t tell whether Chloe was ironic or obtuse. “She was ten when that was painted.”

  “Eleven,” Chloe contradicted, then waited, presumably for him to acknowledge that she was correct. Chloe loved to catch Dale in errors, no matter how small, and insisted on verbal affirmation that she was right and he was wrong. Today, however, he stayed silent. “Okay, wait here, while I go look for something.”

  Wait here? Wait here? It was as if he were a repairman or some shifty deliveryperson, denied permission to venture farther than the foyer. This was his house, no matter what the deed said, no matter what the lawyers had decided when they were carving up Dale and Chloe’s property so gleefully. The old stone house, the last original structure within the boundaries of Glendale, had been his father’s wedding gift to the couple, and Chloe had complained about it endlessly. But came the day when this house was all she wanted—the house and the eight acres behind it, which were virtually worthless as long as the Snyders and the Muhlys refused to sell their land. She had claimed that she wanted the house for Kat’s sake, but Dale never doubted that Chloe’s real purpose was to deny him something he loved.

  Defiantly, he left the foyer and wandered the first floor. Given its age, the old farmhouse was a quirky place, in some ways the polar opposite of the homes that Glendale’s architects had designed and refined over the years. Its rooms were small, the ceilings low, the pine floors almost wavy with age. It was, in short, lousy with charm—beamed ceilings, plaster walls that made it a bitch to hang anything, a huge kitchen with a stone fireplace. While other families gathered in the “great rooms” that were endemic to all the Glendale homes, no matter the price range, the Hartigans themselves had spent most of their time in this kitchen/dining room, not unlike the families who had lived here since it was first built in the late 1700s.

  And it had been redone, Dale realized with a start. Redone at great expense. New cupboards of wide-planked pine paneling, with the same finish on the dishwasher and the refrigerator, a design trend he loathed. Why should appliances be forced to disappear from the kitchen in this trompe l’oeil scheme? Chloe also had installed a new freestanding sink, although “new” was a bit of a misnomer, for the piece was an antique, cleverly reworked. In fact, Dale had seen this very island at Gaines McHale, a high-end antique dealer that also trafficked in custom-mades. “Trafficked” was the right word, for it was a pricey place, more ruinous than a cocaine addiction for Baltimore’s décor freaks. At Gaines McHale such a piece would cost at least twenty-five hundred dollars. Perhaps this was the reason Chloe had ordered Dale to stay in the foyer. She didn’t want him to know how much money she was spending, even as she was bitching about how hard it was to make ends meet.

  The portrait of Kat, in all its tacky glory, still dominated one wall over the dining room table. The painting had been his Christmas gift, the year Kat turned ten. (Chloe was wrong about that. Kat was definitely ten, not eleven.) Behind his back, Chloe had hired a society painter, someone best known for painting dogs. But the painter was technically quite skilled, and her work usually appreciated in value. Unfortunately, she had let Chloe call the shots on Kat’s portrait, and the resul
t might as well have been painted on black velvet and offered at one of those starving-artist sales at the flea market.

  In the painter’s version, a falsely thin Kat was imprisoned in a white ruffled dress, quite unlike anything she had ever worn in real life, posed amid the ruins of some ancient civilization. But while the landscape was ominous and foreboding, the sky above it was cloudless blue, marred only by the yellow of a kite flown by Kat. If the painting had been the work of some addled religious zealot or prison inmate without any training, it would have been a masterpiece of outsider art, suitable for the Visionary Arts Museum. As it was, it was simply an embarrassment, a reminder that Chloe’s membership in the bourgeoisie was an eternal high-wire act.

  Chloe picked up on Dale’s horror the moment he unwrapped it. He tried, he really tried, to pretend to the emotions that would make Chloe happy, but she had always been quick to see through him.

  “What’s wrong with it?” she demanded, not even waiting until Kat was out of earshot. She never waited.

  “Nothing,” he said. “It’s beautiful. I’m just overwhelmed that you and Kat managed to keep a secret such as this.”

  “It took almost a whole year,” Kat said, studying the painting. “I had to go for sittings every week.” Dale’s stomach clutched a little as he tried to figure out the cost of such an extravagance. (He was still working for his father then, and earning less than he might, for Glen was receiving the exact same salary for doing nothing.) It wasn’t that he begrudged Chloe the money, just that such an expensive gift demanded to be hung in a prominent place, where everyone would see it.

  “It’s beautiful,” he said, adding, with far more sincerity, “You’re beautiful. But you’re even more beautiful in real life than you are in this picture.”

  A week later, on New Year’s Day, Chloe looked up from her checkbook and said, “I need ten thousand dollars.”

  “What on earth for?”

  “The painting. I put the deposit on my credit card and carried the balance month by month, so you wouldn’t know. But now that you’ve got it, I can pay it off.”

  “That painting cost ten thousand dollars?”

  “She sometimes gets as much as fifteen thousand. It was a deal.”

  “And you carried ten thousand dollars on your credit card for twelve months, incurring finance charges?”

  “Don’t be stingy. It was only, like, a hundred or two hundred a month. I cut some things out to make up for it.”

  “Such as…?”

  “Things. What do you care? It was for you. It was all for you.”

  Chloe began to cry. They had been married long enough by then that the effect of these lusty tearfests, as Dale thought of them, was not as great as it once was. Still, he hated to see Chloe cry, if only because she seemed so dangerous and out of control.

  “I wasn’t being critical, Chloe. Or ungrateful. It’s just that…ten thousand dollars is a lot of money for a painting, and the finance charges probably added another thousand dollars to the cost.”

  “It’s a work of art. It’s one of a kind. You can’t put a price on things like that.”

  “And yet someone did.” He thought his droll remark might undercut the tension in the room, but Chloe’s fury only escalated.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. It was a lovely idea. I just think that whenever you consider spending that much money—whether it’s for a gift for me or something for the house—we should talk about it.”

  “You don’t like it,” she wailed.

  And because this was back when Dale still lied to spare his wife’s feelings, he swore that he did. But Chloe was not stupid. She realized that she had erred, made one of those mistakes in judgment that revealed the gap between her roots and her aspirations. Brought up in Colorado, in hardscrabble circumstances, Chloe was terrified of being seen as tacky or déclassé. Her solution had been to study newspapers and certain magazines, then throw money at the things she thought could transform her into a natural-born member of the upper middle class. Nine times out of ten, she got it right, winning praise for her clothes, her hair, and especially the house. But every now and then she suffered a costly misstep, a bitter reminder that she was faking it. Since the divorce it had been a relief to hear of such things secondhand, usually through Kat. Once, just once, Dale had stepped in and warned Chloe that aboveground swimming pools were banned by Glendale’s covenants. (And how glad he was to have that excuse, rather than be faced with trying to explain to Chloe the real reasons they were undesirable.) Otherwise he no longer had to pay the price, figuratively or literally, for Chloe’s errors in judgment.

  “I told you to wait in the hall,” Chloe said, coming into the kitchen as if she had been looking for him everywhere, mail in her hand.

  “I always liked the view from here.” He pointed to the huge picture window in the kitchen’s dining alcove. It framed a deceptively bucolic scene—a meadow sloping down toward a creek, the fringe of trees that Kat had insisted on calling “the woods.” This house was probably the only place in Glendale where a man could look out a window and see something other than another house. Although developing the property would have meant a big windfall, he had always been secretly glad that the Muhlys and the Snyders wouldn’t sell. Kat would have grieved so to see this view spoiled. Kat. Kat. He should have realized that just coming to this house would be like entering a minefield. She was everywhere, even in this redone kitchen. He felt sorry for Chloe, alone here with so many ghosts and echoes. It would drive him mad. Madder.

  “Will this do?”

  The photograph Chloe had chosen was a class portrait, possibly Kat’s yearbook shot. Dale would have preferred something that wasn’t so obviously airbrushed; the very fact of alteration seemed to suggest that Kat had needed it, which she had not. But the photo was suitable, he supposed. He felt a sudden desire to reach out to Chloe, to find some kind of rapprochement. They had lost their daughter. They were in this together. They would need each other, going forward, to survive. Two people, left alone by some cataclysm, just like Kat’s poem for graduation.

  “She looked more like you every year.”

  “Really? All I see is my hair. Her face is yours—actually—” She stopped, unusual for Chloe, who never worried about how her words landed.

  “What?”

  “She looks like Glen to me. I know you don’t like to hear that, but it’s true. His face is just a little rounder. Gentler.”

  “My brother’s face,” Dale said, “has not been hampered by thought or stress. Instead of getting Botox, maybe more women should just smoke marijuana every day of their lives. While living off their parents, of course.”

  “You’re too hard on Glen,” Chloe said. “Always have been. It wasn’t easy being your brother. Not just your brother but your twin, for God’s sake. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”

  But I’m your worst enemy.

  “I don’t see how being my brother was such a disadvantage. I was the one who was told I couldn’t go to Stanford because my father thought it was unfair for me to go to private school across the country while Glen was at College Park.”

  “And you let Glen know just how much you resented him for it.”

  “You two always were thick as thieves.”

  “Thick as losers, you mean. That’s what we had in common. We were the only underachievers in the bunch. Even your mom, sweet as she was, made me feel scattered and useless.”

  “You raised Kat, and she was lovely. If you never did another thing, Chloe, what you did with our daughter would be a greater accomplishment than most people ever know in their lives.”

  To his astonishment, Chloe put her arms around him and began to cry, but not in the frightening, rage-filled way he remembered. She cried silently, her body heaving with tears, and he started to cry, too. He had cried frequently over the past three days, but this was different somehow. The grief was powerful yet pure. For a moment he was free of the desire to redress
or avenge, to somehow fix what had happened.

  But just as quickly Chloe broke the embrace, as if embarrassed to have dropped her guard in front of Dale. Disoriented, she began fanning herself with the envelopes she still clutched in one hand, then patted her cheeks with them.

  “Oh, shit, look at me—I’m trying to dry my eyes with the mail.” She sat at the table and slid a letter opener through one. “That reminds me—you didn’t pay child support this month.”

  “I’m sorry. I had meant to bring the check Friday night, when I came to take Kat out to dinner.” Despite the traditional every-other-weekend custody arrangement, Kat seldom spent full weekends with her father anymore, given the demanding social life of a high-school senior. So Dale came out every Friday for dinner and talked to her by phone almost every evening.

  “Do you have your checkbook with you now?”

  “No—why?”

  “For the check.”

  “What check?”

  Chloe’s voice was patient, practical. “The June child support.”

  “I’ve never examined this part of our separation agreement, but I have to think that child support ceases when the child is dead, Chloe.”

  “The check was due on the first. I agreed you could bring it out Friday, the fourth, rather than risk it getting delayed in the mail. But you owed me that money as of the first.”

  “I cannot believe you are busting my balls this way. Our daughter is dead, and all you care about is extracting more money from me.”

  “I just want what I’m entitled to. I’m sorry I don’t have the option of being so pure in my grief, Dale. But I have bills.” She waved the envelopes at him, then began tossing them at his feet one by one. “Utility. Water. Credit card—no, wait, that’s a new credit card application, because that’s one part of the world that finds a forty-five-year-old woman desirable: credit card companies. Oh, the Glendale Association—for the services and clubs I don’t even use. And—what the fuck is this?”