The Happiness Thief

by Nicole Bokat

  They’d been driving down a twisty hill when the car began to sway. Her mother said, “Sorry, honey. I’m feeling a little woozy.”

  “Maybe we should go home if you’re sick,” Natalie said.

  “I’ll be all right.” Her mother flashed her a smile and reached for the Dunkin’ Donuts travel cup she carried around with her everywhere. “That’s why I brought my coffee to shore me up.”

  Natalie had gone back to reading Jane Eyre when a huge light loomed outside, and she heard her mother’s voice. “The light’s blinding me. For Christ’s sake, what’s going on? Garrick?”

  Natalie’s heart had broken into a canter. Suddenly they whirled without warning, faster than any spin she’d done ice-skating. Shrieks. Then, the noise and spinning stopped.

  It felt as if a heavy helmet were sitting on her head, pushing it down so her chin fell onto her chest. She smelled the bitter coffee and something else, oil or gasoline. Someone was standing above her, lightly pressing fingers onto her throat. She whispered, a female voice, and pointed the flashlight at Natalie. “You should never have done this, shone this in her eyes. You did this.” When Natalie looked up, she caught only a glimpse of a hooded jacket and, around the woman’s neck, Ellen’s red scarf.

  twenty-three

  —

  THE HOTEL LOBBY WAS BUSTLING. THERE WAS A FLURRY OF VISITORS in structured business suits, carrying leather bags slick as seals. Natalie figured many were participants in the Happiness symposium. She’d read about the featured speakers, had scrolled down each of the site menus. Along with Isabel, there were five other psychologists and a mustached-psychiatrist with “eclectic interests in Eastern medicine, Buddhism and strength-based positive psychology.” Natalie watched a mother with a toddler clutched to her chest, his sleeping face burrowed into her neck, a man with a cell phone pressed to his ear, shuffling forward as if gum were stuck to his shoes; a woman in a tight skirt and black jacket gusting by in her designer boots.

  Oh, to be like them, leading normal lives. Of course, Natalie had no idea what secrets they carried. The mother could be selling opiates to support her child. The man could be arrested any day now for insider trading. Or, like she, they could be trying to unsnarl a constrictor knot of lies.

  For days, Natalie had tried to analyze her flashback, the woman jutting above her, checking for a pulse. She could swear it had been Ellen—that red scarf.

  Garrick and his assistant could have arrived home from DC in time to follow her mother to Dr. Strout’s. Maybe Ellen had deceived Natalie about the events on Garrick’s behalf, still loyal to him after his death. But she couldn’t square this scenario with her stepfather’s confession, the forfeiting of Isabel as a scapegoat. She couldn’t ascertain who was the liar. Father? Daughter? Other woman?

  Or all of them.

  Natalie had dangled the possibility in her mind, like a bright mobile, that Ellen and Garrick had created a fanciful alternative reality for her benefit. Please, please, please. Still, she avoided Isabel, didn’t attend the workshop that week, responded to her stepsister’s calls with cryptic text messages. She didn’t share her discussion with Ellen or the contents of the letter with anyone. One late morning, standing over her kitchen sink, Natalie heard her mother’s voice, which sounded like the sea captured in a shell pressed to her ear. “Come to me when you’re upset, not to Isabel. She’s a very different kind of person, tricky and not always what she seems.”

  Tricky was an ambiguous word. It didn’t mean black sludge on a brain scan. But it didn’t not mean it either.

  A planned meeting would be a mistake. A café was too public—the clank and shuffle and chatter—and the phone too distant. She had to track down her stepsister, to meet her someplace unexpected. If startled, Isabel might lose her composure, might even crack open to reveal what was hidden, the fiend crouching inside.

  On the far wall of the hotel lobby was a photo of the Victorian brownstones on Commonwealth Avenue, adorned by the dogwoods in full bloom. This regal area was the proper setting for the beatific Isabel, who Natalie now glimpsed walking from the open doors of the meeting room dressed in the soft pink and white of those flowering trees. She was engaged in conversation with two men. When her stepsister noticed Natalie, puzzlement flashed across her face. She smiled, waved, held up one finger as she turned to her colleagues.

  Natalie closed the guidebook and stood up, stomach burning. Here we go. A crowd was gathering at the elevators, most likely the guests returning to their rooms now that the convention had ended for the day.

  “This is a surprise.” Isabel materialized beside her.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “I’m so glad. I was worried.”

  “Do you have a room in the hotel?”

  “Of course not.” Isabel’s eyes shone with curiosity. “I’m on my way home.”

  Natalie placed a hand on her belly. “This is where you stayed when Simon was in town.”

  “Oh, God, Nat. Is that why you’re upset? I haven’t seen him in ages.”

  Liar. You slept with him in this hotel.

  “There must be somewhere we can speak alone.”

  “You chose an odd place for that.” When Isabel touched her elbow, Natalie flinched. “Sweetie, what’s up?”

  “Why don’t you ask if you can use a room for ten minutes?”

  “All right.”

  Natalie was terribly thirsty. While Isabel strode to the information desk, she considered buying a drink from the shop at the entranceway but determined that was a risk. Isabel might get caught up in an unexpected encounter, run out of time before needing to meet her lover—or a colleague or whomever—and this opportunity would be lost.

  “The manager was very accommodating,” Isabel said when she reappeared. “Let’s go, the third floor.”

  It was a large space with two adjacent doors. Long tables lined the room, draped in pleated cloth that reached the floor. There was a pitcher of water on each table, slices of lemon floating to the top. Isabel motioned for them to sit, but Natalie poured a glass and took a long sip.

  “What’s going on?” Isabel asked.

  Natalie felt the breath wrenched from her. “I got Garrick’s envelope from Ellen. Turns out she made a copy of everything.”

  Isabel’s stare, so hot, it could burn through Natalie’s retinas. “Ellen couldn’t stay out of our business.”

  “According to the report, there was someone else on the road. Garrick suspected that you and your boyfriend chased us in his car.”

  “I told my dad. We went for pizza. Thomas drove us.”

  “Garrick said you were the one going to therapy with Dr. Strout, you were the one they wanted to send away. Not me.”

  There was a moment of silence. Even the air was excited. Isabel stood very still and straight. “That’s true.”

  “Garrick said you were seeing him because you were out of control. Sleeping with that boy in the house, that you’d thrown a dish at my mother’s face.”

  “It wasn’t at her face. Thomas, yes, so what? I was sixteen. You caught us once. You weren’t traumatized by it.”

  “But you twisted it around, said I was the fucked-up kid.”

  “All these years, I tried to convince you that you weren’t responsible while you insisted that you’d killed your mother. Isn’t that true, Nat?”

  There was the pull of belief, like a faith Natalie had rejected. It was incredible, this strong habit of love. “Why were you seeing Dr. Strout?”

  Isabel fussed with the collar of her silky blouse, although it lay perfectly flat, then pushed through the top button, which had slipped halfway out of its slit. Nothing had been revealed but the scoop of her neckline, her skin the color of bleached bones.

  “I was noncompliant. What a joke. It’s called being a teenager. But I was the daughter of Sigrid, so it was easy to blame genetics. But your mom … no one should threaten to ship off a sixteen-year-old. You’d never do that.”

  “You’re right. But Hadl
ey isn’t you. She’s clever, but not like you, even back then: the smartest girl in the school, always. The best at everything.”

  Isabel smiled wanly. “Not everything. You can’t imagine how bored I was. I admit it was hard for me to follow the rules.”

  Natalie nodded. “But that’s what made you so amazing. You didn’t care what other people thought, did what you pleased. You never had to study like I did to get good grades and ace every subject.”

  “School was easy. All I had to do was show up and impress the teachers with the right answers, with good test scores. But, at home, it was a nightmare. My dad never paid attention to anything but academics. But Laura, always watching, always judging. She should have left me alone. I would have come to it on my own, stopped drinking, and getting high.”

  “She couldn’t. You have to see that,” Natalie said in the softest voice she could muster. “I wouldn’t let Hadley do those things.”

  “But you wouldn’t send her to a place like that, a place that would have ruined her chances. The students there were all classified, Nat. Do you know what that means: mental illnesses and personality disorders and addictions? I’d never have gotten into Harvard or met George or achieved any success, much less this.” Isabel waved at the desks, the chairs, as if building hotel furniture was her profession. “She would have taken away my life.”

  “I understand, I do.” Natalie tightened her grasp on her glass, cool from the ice. But a glass was not an anchor; it could shatter.

  “Give me that before you hurt yourself,” Isabel said. “Sit down.”

  Natalie listened because that’s what Isabel had trained her to do. She sat on a chair. Her arms and legs were shaking. “I thought it was Ellen and Garrick following us. But it wasn’t. It was you.”

  “I just wanted to talk to her, to get her to change her mind about seeing Dr. Strout. That moron came up with sending me to Pine Mountain. Laura never would have had the idea by herself.”

  “So, explain it. You thought that somehow you could persuade my mother by letting your boyfriend take you in Garrick’s car and cornering her outside the doctor’s office?”

  Isabel studied her, unflinching. “Thomas came with me, but I drove the car. He didn’t have the guts to … I drove so quickly—I was going over eighty—to catch her. I could have been the one to hit that tree, but I was sober.”

  “You flashed the headlights?”

  “Of course not. I never—“

  Natalie interrupted her. “If you don’t tell me, I’ll show George the letter. I bet George wasn’t thrilled about your request to cash in stocks, the mess you’d made of things, was he?”

  “We got through it,” Isabel straightened, thin and taut. “George will forgive me.”

  “Yes. Reckless about money is one thing. An affair is worse. But murder is unforgivable.”

  Isabel stared at her without wavering, but her eyes were vacant vessels, like Simon’s. She outstretched her arms. “Nat, c’mon. I’ve always been there for you, never asked for anything. You said so yourself. Now, you need to be there for me. We do that for each other.”

  “Just say what you did.”

  “It was impulsive, just a momentary thing. Laura would have crashed anyway. She was swerving all over the place. She was so volatile, reckless.”

  No. That was you.

  “You whispered to me that I did it, that I shone my flashlight in her eyes. That’s why I believed it all these years.”

  Isabel shook her head so that her chic high ponytail swayed. “You must have imagined that; you were concussed.”

  “You’re lying! You lie all the time. But, you can’t get away with this anymore.”

  “There’s nothing to get away with. It wasn’t either of our faults, yours or mine. Laura was driving on tranquilizers. That was in the coroner’s report. She could have killed you. Do you realize that?”

  “You left me there.”

  “I made sure you were okay. Don’t you see how trapped I was?”

  “Is that why you didn’t call an ambulance?”

  Isabel paced between the tables, an obstacle course. “I knew one would come. It was a calculated risk. We’d both be safe—you and I.”

  “You abandoned me with a brain injury.” Stay even, factual. Natalie fed the beast with a steady hand. “I saw you there even though everything was blurred. I thought you were Ellen with that red scarf.”

  “That was a last-minute thing, just in case we were spotted. I wore one of her famous scarves that I’d found in Dad’s car, years before. I always wondered what that meant about the two of them. Thomas wore one of dad’s old fedora hats.”

  “What about my mom? Why didn’t you check on her?”

  “You don’t want to hear about that.”

  Natalie said, “You have no idea what I want.”

  “I always know what you want!” Isabel stopped pacing. “There was no reason to take Laura’s pulse. Her head was split open. There was blood in her hair and on the wheel of the car.”

  “She might have been alive. How could you be sure?”

  “Her face was twisted. I saw it in her eye. She was dead.”

  There was a terrible taste in Natalie’s mouth, a sense she was gagging. “FedEx swears they didn’t lose the envelope. Did you have something to do with that?” When Isabel didn’t respond, she said, “You stole it.”

  “I intercepted it. For your sake. For your peace of mind. It was a pain in the ass, showing up three days in a row, making sure you never saw me. I had to clear my schedule and wait around in your building for the truck.” Isabel sighed. “I used your key to go inside and ring the guy in, then met him in the hallway.”

  Natalie wanted to smear Isabel’s wan smile into a different shape, the way she would smear butter at a photo shoot. She imagined the dull knife in her hand. The hollow of Isabel’s throat appeared so deep, as if punctured.

  Her stepsister strode towards her. “People need to master their impulses in order to get what they want. That’s what I teach them.”

  “But you hadn’t mastered them when you were a teenager. And, lately, you’ve fucked up everything. So maybe you’re not the expert you profess to be.” Natalie stepped back, her hands trembling. She dug her fists into her coat pockets, a ballast, until she strained the fabric. “What did you do to my mother that Thomas didn’t have the guts for? It wasn’t driving fast.”

  “Let’s drop this. What good can come of it? Do you really want to trigger—”

  “I can find out whether you tell me or not. You want reporters around your classes? Around your career?”

  “What can you possibly find out? There’s nothing else.”

  Such a virtuoso manipulator, vaulting to success, leaving a chilly wind in her wake.

  “I slept with Simon, your cash cow,” Natalie said, winded. “You know what he told me? That you were alike, you shared all your secrets. He never rescued his brother that day they were sailing, and you did the same.”

  Isabel froze, the look on her face when she felt cornered. “It’s not the same. Simon wanted Charlie to die. I didn’t mean to kill anyone.”

  “He wanted his own brother to die?” Natalie asked, queasy. “How could anyone want that?”

  “Charlie was the golden boy, the favorite. Simon craved attention.”

  She moved closer to Isabel. “Did you kill my mother? It wasn’t just the headlights, was it? There was something more.”

  “What does it matter?”

  “It matters whether I know or I leak my suspicions to George, the media, everyone. Are you willing to ruin your career, your marriage? They’re almost ruined now, aren’t they?”

  Isabel stood still.

  The red pulsing muscle of fear beat in Natalie’s chest. “You’d go to any lengths, do anything, to save yourself.”

  “We are the same, you and me,” Isabel cried. “You told me you were willing to do anything to stay together. All these years, you thought you caused the accident. That was your guilt
talking. It doesn’t matter which one of us acted, which of us was the girl they wanted to send away. I did it for both of us.”

  “We’re not the same. I wouldn’t have—”

  “That’s why I had to. It was always me who had to save us, save you. I’ve been saving you my whole goddamn life. I knew what to do. She took that coffee mug with her everywhere. I mixed the Valium into her coffee.”

  This is Belle, my Belle.

  It hurt to speak, that’s how parched Natalie was, as if all the fluid had dried up in her body. “But how could we stay together if I was in that car? You could have killed me.”

  Isabel ran her fingers through her hair, over and over, loosening her ponytail. “You weren’t supposed to be with her. You were at your friend’s down the block. You got home a few minutes before she left. I said you should stay with me, that Thomas would go. But, still, she refused, said she didn’t trust me.”

  “But you let us leave together, let her take the coffee.”

  “It was too late by then.” Isabel’s eyes had a faraway look. “I couldn’t admit what I’d done. They’d have locked me away for good. But I realized that if anyone tested the coffee, they’d discover the Valium. So, I followed Laura. I had to get the mug from the car, to make sure the police didn’t find it.”

  There was a smell of terror in the air. Natalie was smothered, her breathing hindered, as if death was before her, reaching out a hand.

  “You understand that she forced me, left me no choice? I didn’t want to do it.”

  “I … I have to go now.”

  Isabel reached for the glass of water on the table and handed it to her. “Drink. It’s the shock. You don’t want to faint.”

  Natalie gulped it down.

  “You promised not to tell George. Not about this. Not about Simon. We had an agreement.”

  “I won’t say anything. I just have to get Hadley. I don’t want to be late, for her to think anything’s wrong.”

  “You should do that.”

  Natalie watched as her stepsister shape-shifted into her carefully constructed self: the softening of her features, the congenial tone. Isabel drew her into a goodbye hug, the way she always did, marking—Natalie determined in a flash—that everything was settled. Yes, she’d been forced to confess but, now that she had, life would return to normal. All Natalie had to do was comply, to relax into the embrace. But she stiffened, pulled away.