Woman No. 17

by Edan Lepucki

  My phone rang again; this time it was my mom.

  “Anyone I know?” Lady asked.

  “For some reason, both my parents are bugging me this morning.”

  “Maybe they’re conspiring against you.”

  “I think the only time that’s ever happened was the moment I was conceived.”

  “No wonder Seth wants to be your friend. You’re horrible.”

  “I’m serious! My mom and dad don’t talk—at least, not since I turned eighteen.”

  I turned onto Mulholland and Lady took out her phone.

  “How can you check it right now?” I asked. “With this view?”

  The canyon below was cloaked in haze but the sandy mountainside to our right was craggy and spotted with cacti. The land seemed wild despite the mansions sitting just a private drive away. I could never look away.

  “Bah,” she said. “I see it all the time.”

  “Please. You’re addicted to Twitter,” I said. “You don’t have to hide it.”

  “Maybe. But I haven’t stopped being ashamed.” She meant it as a joke, but she wasn’t lying either.

  “It’ll turn out fine,” I said.

  “Karl and I are over.”

  “You were separated. You don’t have to tell him.”

  “It doesn’t have anything to do with that. Karl doesn’t even know about Marco, or he didn’t when he decided he couldn’t wait any longer for me to get my act together. I think I was just testing him when I asked him to move out…and he failed that test, he didn’t keep fighting for me. He’s getting his own apartment, he’s moving on. It only took him a couple of months to shake me off. How messed up am I, for believing that’s what I wanted?” An ugly sob dropped out of her. “God, what have I done?”

  I tried to soothe her with a hush, the same technique I used for putting Devin down to sleep. I hoped she wouldn’t notice the similarities. Lady was wiping her eyes with a napkin she’d found in the console.

  “I always cry into Starbucks napkins too,” I said. She actually smiled.

  We had descended into Laurel Canyon, the newer part, no bohemians here, the part my father liked because the roads were wider and paved better, but it was still the Canyon if you squinted your eyes. Eucalyptus trees and dust. It was funny how Lady’s part of the hill was close to all of this, but so different. Where she lived, there was no community, only money.

  “What if Seth wants to live with Karl?” Lady was saying now. “Custody for Dev will definitely be fifty-fifty. I’ll move. I have to. I can’t stay in that big house by myself.” She let out another little cry, and hiccupped.

  She turned to me. “But you’ll still work for both of us. Right?”

  Once Devin had asked Lady if he could eat an entire cake himself on his birthday. She’d said yes because that was months away, he would never remember her promise, and it was easier than saying no.

  “Sure,” I said.

  Lady tossed the balled-up napkin into her purse and went back to fiddling on her phone.

  A few more turns and we were out of Laurel Canyon and into the Hills. There were work trucks congesting the narrow roads, and women speed walking in yoga pants. They all looked my age—at least from the back. At the corner of Sunset Plaza: a clusterfuck of Open House signs. Around the corner: yet another mansion was having its 1990s glass blocks removed. I was about to point it out when suddenly Lady leaned forward, her seat belt straining against her chest. Her phone was still in her hand but away from her face, like it was alive and rotting.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  Lady reached out as if to punch me, or strangle me, and I almost slammed into a Land Rover barreling toward us.

  61.

  @sethconscious:

  Hey, @muffinbuffin41, guess what? Im fucking The Sitter.

  62.

  “You’re going to kill us!” I yelled, and pulled the car to the shoulder where the road turned to rocks. A ficus hedge blocked Lady’s window and filtered the car greenish, the whites of her eyes gone gray like an overboiled egg yolk.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” I asked. “I almost hit that car back there.”

  Lady still had her phone out and she was holding it inches from me, shoving it in my face.

  “You and Seth…” She stopped, like she was struggling to trudge on. “You fucked?” That was the word she’d read, I realized. “He wrote”—here she finally pulled back and read the screen—“ ‘I’m fucking The Sitter.’ ”

  The edges of my vision flickered. “Asshole.”

  “He is not!” And then, “Is it true?”

  “Do you guys call me The Sitter all the time, or just online?”

  “So it is true.”

  “No—he isn’t fucking The Sitter. Well, in a way he is, with that.” I flung my hands at her stupid phone. “It’s over between us and he knows that. Why would he tell you? And like that?”

  Lady mewed like a wounded animal and I realized I had confessed.

  “It’s true,” she repeated. “How could it be true? You just told me—”

  I knew I was supposed to be tender and kind, and that I should acknowledge my lie, but I was too angry at Seth.

  “Your son slept with me just so he could tell you about it,” I said.

  She slapped me with her free hand and I heard myself cry out as if it weren’t my own voice. My mom had been the last person to slap me. Five years ago. We’d been in the parking lot of the apartment complex we were living in. I had just told her that I’d decided to go to Berkeley instead of UCLA. She had hit me and said, “Leave me then. Just go. Go have your perfect life.” My face felt the same way now: raw and stinging, brittle-edged. At least Lady hadn’t used her phone.

  I thought I heard her crying. She had her hands to her face and I looked back to the windshield as if that could give her privacy.

  “Today I found out that my mom died,” she said.

  I turned to her. “She did? Why didn’t you say anything earlier?”

  Her face was red and puffy, uglier than I’d thought possible. “This hurts.”

  “I swear, I didn’t want to hurt you.” I paused. “But I think Seth did.”

  “You’re kidding, right? This isn’t some elaborate revenge scheme,” she said. She laughed. “Besides, he already has one in motion.”

  “He does?”

  “By not speaking,” she replied.

  63.

  SEEKING BABYSITTER FOR PRECOCIOUS TODDLER—Hollywood

  Looking for a new babysitter for my smart and chatty toddler, effective immediately. 2–3 days a week, live-in option to be considered after a 6-week probation period.

  Requirements:

  5+ years of experience working with kids

  References from previous childcare positions

  Driver’s license and full background check

  Also, I have another son who is (barely) an adult. He suffers from selective mutism. If you’re unlucky enough to meet him, I ask that you refrain from getting involved in his mind games.

  If you’re an artist of any kind, please look elsewhere. I’ve had enough of you for one lifetime.

  64.

  I replied to Seth’s tweet with a link to my new craigslist ad, and afterward I lay on my bed face-first like a corpse in a river. The sheets smelled of no one. Devin—good little toddler—never got out of his bed, and Karl’s scent had been laundered away weeks ago. The futon I’d shared with Seth for so many years had been smaller, queen-sized, with a slight dip in the center, no headboard.

  I could still conjure his innocuous kid musk, how his sweat would stain the pillowcases and the pillows beneath too, how he would wake with his curls matted to his neck as if we slept not in L.A. but a humid jungle with bugs the size of scissors. If he woke from a nightmare he might grab my arm and pull hard, yanking me from my dreams. “What is it,” I’d say to the dark, and when he was younger he would curl into me, a heated little coil of a boy. When he was older, he simply wouldn’t let go o
f my arm.

  Karl—perfect Karl—had changed all that. He moved me into his California king and set up Seth with his own Tempur-Pedic. It was for the better. But now Karl was leaving me and so was Seth, and by tomorrow S would be gone too. I’d have partial custody of Devin and the rest of the time I’d wander this big house like a ghost, smelling only myself. That must have been my mother’s lot, alone unless you counted her collection of high heels, her flowers, her beauty.

  Stuck like this, rolling across my huge bed, I would even start missing Marco. I’d long for him again, at least to keep the stink of solitude off me. He was an idiot, yes, but he hadn’t lied to me, from the very start he’d shown me what he lacked, what he was incapable of.

  I could have told him about Seth, that he couldn’t speak. I should have said that there was no medical reason for him not to. That all the doctors, the specialists, and the therapists had explained as much to me over the years in their benign, condescending tones. If nothing was wrong, it had to be something else. What had happened to him?

  I happened. I was the trauma, I am the trauma. Whatever I did to him I keep doing it.

  I got off the bed and stood in the center of the room, surveying its contents as bloodlessly as I could. There was no way I was staying in this house if everyone else was leaving. It was haunted, most of all by me. I knew if I looked out the window to the pool below, I’d glimpse the dead rabbit there like a single cloud in a blue sky.

  I went to the window to confirm my suspicions, and when I saw S below, I stepped away from the glass abruptly, surprised. I didn’t want her to see me, but I also wanted, badly, to see her.

  Warily, I returned to my perch and watched as she got on her hands and knees at the edge of the pool, a pair of blue dishwashing gloves on her hands. Her Lady costume had been replaced with cut-off jean shorts and a black tank top, the hem of which was getting wet as she leaned into the pool with her arm stretched toward Peter Rabbit. Now she was scooping him out of the water, and she was doing it slowly, tenderly. I couldn’t see her face well enough, but I was sure she wasn’t wrinkling her nose or closing her eyes against the sight of the bloated animal. Even now I couldn’t hate her.

  She dropped the rabbit into a plastic bag and whispered something to herself—a prayer or an apology—before tying it closed. Then she dropped the bag on one of the chaise lounges, presumably to dispose of it the next time she walked to the garbage cans. Now she was running a toe through the water. Could she be contemplating a swim?

  I had enjoyed slapping her. I didn’t regret it, and I probably never would. That didn’t mean I wouldn’t miss her though.

  As if she could feel me watching her from above, she looked up. Someone was knocking at the door.

  65.

  I ran my fingers through my hair before I went downstairs because I couldn’t fathom who might be waiting for me. The Sparkletts man had come two days ago. I hadn’t ordered anything online. “One minute,” I called out.

  When I got to the door I peered through the peephole. A man and a woman, maybe ten years older than I was, stood outside. The woman was doing a little soft-shoe dance and the man was smiling straight ahead, as if he were getting his photo taken at the DMV. I realized he must be posing for me.

  I opened the door. “Can I help you?”

  The woman was already trying to peer around me, as if casing the joint. She and the man didn’t fit together. Judging by his white teeth, his tidy gray hair, and his sunglasses with their Transitions lenses (already turning less dark in the shade of the porch), the man was well-off. The woman, on the other hand, her face showed traces of long-ago beauty, but she was beginning to prune, and there was a hardness to her face that revealed a life of not-enough, be it sleep or money or maybe even love. And too much of something else: sun, drink, risk, misery. She wore a T-shirt that read STOP INTERRUPTING ME WHILE I’M TRYING TO ANNOY YOU!

  The man spoke, his voice a little too loud, a little too practiced: “You must be Lady.”

  “And you are?” I asked.

  “We’re looking for Esther,” the woman said. She had an appealing voice: deep and raspy, with just a twang of nasal to it. She had no idea she possessed such a gift, which made it even better. “Esther Shapiro,” she said.

  The man nodded, and I wondered if he too heard what was magical in the voice.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “The young woman who’s taking care of your son,” he said.

  “You mean S? Her last name is Fowler.”

  “That’s my name,” the woman said.

  Now I was really confused. “Okay…?”

  “S Fowler,” the man said, and clapped his hands together.

  “S Fowler?” the woman repeated with an eyebrow raised.

  “That’s her current nom de plume, Kathy,” the man explained.

  So there it was. “You must be the parents,” I said. “Please, come in.”

  The woman, Kathy, stepped in first, and then S’s father.

  “Steve Shapiro,” he said, and put out his hand. His shake was vigorous; on his wrist was an elaborate waterproof watch. “It’s so wonderful to meet you!” he said. “This is Katherine.”

  “Kathy,” she said as she moved across the foyer, her eyes upward, taking in first the sweep of the living room, then the staircase, then the sliding glass doors to the yard. She reminded me of S on her first interview: the unabashed nosiness, a comfort in her own body.

  “Is S—Esther—expecting you?” I asked. “She’s in the back packing up.”

  “Packing up?” Steve echoed. He shot a worried glance at Kathy, but she didn’t return the look. “She didn’t tell us.”

  “Tell you what?” I asked. “That I fired her?” Steve looked at me, stunned, and I had to admit, this was a little fun.

  Kathy started to laugh, and Steve said, “Kathy.”

  “I’m sorry,” she replied. “It’s just that I was also fired from my first nanny position.”

  “What a shock,” Steve replied drily.

  “Her plan worked out beautifully then. That’s my girl,” Kathy said, but more to herself, and because Steve didn’t ask her to elaborate, I didn’t either.

  “You’re probably wondering why we’re here,” Steve said.

  “I guess I am, yes.”

  “We’re worried about Esther.”

  “You, not we,” Kathy said and hitchhiked a thumb in the direction of her ex. “The guy hopped on a flight first thing this morning!”

  “Esther hasn’t been texting me back with her usual alacrity,” he explained. “She’s been drinking.”

  “Is that why you canned her?” Kathy asked.

  I shook my head. “She does drink a lot. But that’s not why I fired her. I fired her because she’s a liar.”

  “My daughter is the most honest person I’ve ever met,” Steve said, and for once he and his ex-wife seemed to agree on something, because she was nodding.

  “Children are different with their parents,” I said.

  “What did she lie to you about?” Steve asked.

  “Well, her last name, for starters.”

  I was about to lay it all out for them, what the hell, why shouldn’t I get S in trouble with her parents, when I heard the sliding glass door slurp open behind me.

  “Mom? Dad?” I heard S say.

  We all turned at once.

  She stood in front of the open door with the bagged dead bunny in one hand. She must have been on her way to throw it out and seen us through the glass. Milkshake trotted up to her from the kitchen and jumped onto her legs, trying to sniff the corpse. She kicked him off and then stood with her feet together, almost coy and feminine, in a way I’d never seen her before.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I was explaining to your parents, Esther Shapiro, that you’ve been fired,” I said.

  “I was going to quit.”

  “Waterbug,” Steve said softly.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming down?”
she asked him.

  “I was so worried,” he explained. “It was sort of a split-second decision. Clearly, my fears weren’t unfounded.” He looked her up and down. “Why is your hair cut like that? And you look so…tired. Are you all right?”

  Kathy hushed Steve. “She looks tired because she’s not wearing any makeup, genius.”

  “She never wears makeup,” I said, and Steve looked at me like I was nuts.

  Kathy skipped toward her daughter and almost immediately S dropped the bag and sunk into her mother’s arms, limp-limbed, her head kneading into her mother’s chest like a baby goat at a petting zoo. The comfort and familiarity between them wasn’t what I expected.

  “I thought you had mom rage,” I said as Milkshake inspected the dead animal on the floor.

  I was struck by how different S—Esther—seemed around her parents. Even her body language had shifted to some other register, one she had never shown me. Her limbs were loose and relaxed, but there was something more self-conscious in her facial expression. She cared about what she looked like.

  “Does anyone outside this house call you S?” I asked.

  “It’s a new thing she’s trying out,” Steve said when his daughter didn’t answer. She was still hanging on her mother.

  “That’s Peter Rabbit in there,” I said to Kathy, and nodded at the plastic bag on the floor.

  Kathy pushed away from S to get a better look.

  Steve leaned forward. “Who’s Peter—?”

  Kathy gasped. “What? He’s dead?”

  “He drowned. I’m so sorry.”

  Kathy kneeled by the bag for a moment, but it was as if it was too much to see, and she quickly stood. “Say what you will about me, Esther, but I would have never killed my own pet.”