by Darcey Bell
Which is all to say that I wasn’t predisposed to like him. But since Emily disappeared, I’ve begun to sympathize with and respect him. It feels good to talk about Nicky. I like knowing that Sean trusts me enough to ask what I think about how his son is doing, about what we should tell Nicky. It’s a compliment because it must mean he admires how I’m raising Miles.
There’s something sexy about being in a state of perfect harmony and understanding with an extremely handsome single dad. What makes it less sexy is that this is not some random dad but the husband of my disappeared best friend.
If I want to be able to live with myself, if I want to keep thinking of myself as a decent human being and not a monster, I will have to do everything possible to ignore, to resist, to not even acknowledge the spark of something between us. Which is also sexy, in its way. So there’s a dilemma, one of those things you don’t blog about—not if you’re in your right mind.
I guess that’s why I keep thinking about the day Chris showed up at my mom’s, why being around Sean reminds me of the day my half brother entered my life. There’s that same jolt of attraction to someone inappropriate. Someone very inappropriate. That tingle of pure excitement.
I’d been attracted to the guy in my parents’ wedding photo. And now I was drawn to the husband of my friend. I wouldn’t have picked these men, but there it is. Does that make me a pervert or a criminal? Or simply a bad person?
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Stephanie's Blog
One News Flash after Another
Hi, moms!
First of all, I want to thank moms everywhere for your words of sympathy, love, and support. It’s in times of crisis like this that we have each other’s back and make our voices heard. The quiet moms who have been reading the blog and clicking through the comment threads without posting are now writing to say that their prayers are with me and Sean, Nicky, and Miles. In this sad time, it would seem gross and vulgar to tell you how many distinct hits on the site I’ve gotten in the last weeks.
Meanwhile I feel like the bad friend who flakes out when you need her or when you’re worried about her and you want to know what’s happening. I haven’t posted in a while, though I know how concerned you’ve been. But my life has been in chaos as I’ve struggled to keep up the search for my friend and to work alongside her husband to make sure that their little boy feels as safe as he can under the circumstances.
I know from your messages that many of you were following Emily’s story when it was in the news. Sean and I drew the line at trying to interest one of those creepy TV “investigative reports.” It would be too traumatic for Nicky in case he ever found it on YouTube. Still, we know those shows have sometimes located a missing person.
Some of you may be thinking that I am writing this now because of what you may have been reading lately in the tabloids or seeing on TV. I mean now that a new element (money!) has made the authorities more interested in our case than they were when it was just a story about a beautiful wife and mother who left for work one day and never came home.
As some of you have probably heard, just one month before Emily’s disappearance, a two-million-dollar life insurance policy was taken out in her name, payable to Sean.
Moms, do you see what’s happening here? Real life is starting to sound like one of those ripped-from-the-headlines TV shows, a script you probably can’t get made anymore because it’s been done too often. Husband takes out mega-insurance policy. Wife disappears.
Before they found out about the policy, the police questioned Sean. Briefly. Standard procedure. The husband is always the prime suspect, as everyone who owns a television knows. But his alibi checked out completely.
He’d been in England, where practically every moment of your day is monitored and recorded on CCTV. His snooty hotel was reluctant to cooperate, but when someone from the embassy there insisted, they surrendered the footage that showed Sean entering and leaving his hotel room. On the night Emily vanished, there’s footage of Sean having a drink in the hotel bar with a couple of the real estate developers he’d gone to the UK to meet. And then he went off to bed. Alone.
That Emily’s life insurance policy took so long to surface shows you the level of efficiency we are dealing with here, which you moms already know if you have ever tried to file a health insurance claim or register your child for pre-K. When the policy finally came to light, the cops came back for another (suspicious) look at Sean.
The truth is that the policy slipped Sean’s mind because he’d been under such stress. Which in my opinion proves he’s innocent. What kind of cold-blooded wife killer takes out a policy and then forgets about it? Seriously? But the police have it backward. They believe this suggests that he is guilty, that he’s pretending to have forgotten because the truth looks bad. So what are they thinking? That Sean took out the policy and hired someone to kill his wife? That he and I are in this together?
None of that happened.
Perhaps you moms will forgive me for not having posted for so long now that you know how much has been going on in my life, starting with this unfortunate and maddening development. The police have twice picked up Sean and held him without charging him. Is there justice in this country? Don’t we have laws against this? Even when you know your rights and have enough money and an excellent lawyer, as Sean does, and a Wall Street firm behind you—even that isn’t enough to scare some old-fashioned common sense into these small-town detectives.
Each time Sean is taken down to the police station, Nicky—who has been a brave little soldier until now—becomes nearly inconsolable, and I have to drive over to their house, whatever the hour of the day or night, and pick him up and bring him home and rock him to sleep on my lap and put him in Miles’s bunk bed. Sometimes I stand in the doorway of Miles’s room and watch them sleep and listen to their sweet, snuffly snoring, and I think how angelic our children are, how much they trust us, and how—try as we might—there’s no way we can protect them from the horrors that life may have in store for them.
Anyhow, this seems like a good moment to get back to blogging and tell the moms community that an innocent man is being persecuted and harassed. It’s hard for me to explain how I know he is innocent. But I do. I know it with every cell of my body. During this anxious time that Emily has been gone, Sean and I have worked together to maintain our morale, to keep up the search, and most importantly to bolster the spirits of a courageous little boy.
You moms will understand that this hasn’t been easy for Miles. Knowing that his best friend’s mother could vanish into thin air has (naturally!) made him a little clingy. He’s reluctant to be left for a sleepover with Nicky. But once he gets past the separation anxiety, he loves it.
Several times I’ve had to drive away from Emily’s house (I still think of it that way) with my child’s sobs echoing in my ears. But I know Miles will be fine. He’ll have fun. And the reason I know this is because of the closeness and trust I have felt, over these difficult weeks, with Nicky’s dad. Do you think I would leave my child with a credible suspect in a murder investigation?
Anyhow, there’s been no murder. What keeps destroying the police’s nonexistent case is the absence of a body or any evidence of foul play. First Emily was driving in Pennsylvania; then she wasn’t. There’s no indication that she didn’t wake up one day and decide she’d had enough of motherhood, enough of the fashion industry, of Connecticut, of Sean. Of the whole package. Even Nicky. It’s possible that she took off to start a new life under an assumed name. The cops say it happens all the time.
This wasn’t the friend I thought knew! But if Sean has turned out to be the opposite of what I’d thought, couldn’t Emily as well? It’s crazy-making to find out that you could have been so wrong about someone. It’s hard to know what to feel. Should I be angry at her? At myself? Should I feel betrayed? Tricked? Honestly, I just feel very sad.
To end this post on a less gloomy note, I’m linking to the post in which I talk about my friendship with Emily. I wro
te it when I was still calling her E. But by now you know who I mean, even as I begin to think that maybe I never really knew who she was or what I meant to her. Or whether she really was my best friend, after all.
It’s going to make me cry to read this.
But I’m posting it anyway.
Love,
Stephanie
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Stephanie's Blog
(Blog Post Link)
Friends for Life
What is it that keeps us moms from becoming true friends? Do we resent other moms because we always wind up talking about our kids, as if we no longer have our own needs and hopes and desires? Do other mothers make us feel guilty for thinking about anything besides our kids? Or are we too competitive with other moms? How can we be friends with someone who tells us that her nine-month-old is walking when our ten-month-old hasn’t started to crawl?
I won’t lie about how lonely I was, staying home and taking care of my son. Until I had Miles, we lived in the city. I had a job at a woman’s magazine writing copy about new designs in furniture and decor, about household hints and shortcuts, storage tricks, spot removal, that sort of thing. Now that I have a household, I can’t remember one helpful hint.
My husband insisted that the city was no place to raise a child. It took a lot of persuading, but in the end I saw his point. I thought that living in the suburbs—the country, actually—would be fun, and it has been. The minute my husband saw our house, he fell in love with it, though I couldn’t see the potential, at first. But again, he convinced me, and now I love it more than I can say.
I went through a bit of a crazy time right after we moved. I forgot who I was. The only thing I cared about was being a superwife and supermom. I was living a nightmare from the 1950s. I made all my own baby food from scratch. I cooked elaborate dinners for my husband that he was too tired to eat when he got home from work, or else he was too full because he’d been taken to some fancy lunch while I snacked on the leftovers from last night’s dinner. And though I tried to be understanding and patient, we’d bicker.
As soon as my son was old enough, I enrolled him in all sorts of classes and programs. Toddler yoga. Baby dance. Swimming lessons. I was doing it so he would learn and have fun and meet other kids. But I also wanted to meet other moms, make friends, find caring women who were having the same mixed feelings, the same rewards and challenges, that I was.
But I could never get anything going with the Connecticut moms. They all seemed to have closed ranks, circled the wagons, and turned back into the mean girls they’d been in junior high. When I tried to start conversations, they’d look at each other and practically roll their eyes. They’d stare at me just long enough to be polite, then go back to talking to each other.
That’s why I started this blog—to reach out to other women who feel isolated, mothers everywhere dealing with the demands of parenting. Some of you may find it strange that a mom who can’t make friends in the real world would start a blog and give advice and share with friends in the virtual world. But what helped me get past my self-doubt was realizing that I couldn’t be the only mom feeling friendless and alone.
Being a widow makes everything—including motherhood—harder. My husband is gone. He’s the first thing I think of when I wake up in the morning, the last thing I think of before I go to bed. Wait—no, not the first thing. There are always a few blissful seconds when I wake up and forget and feel almost okay—and then I notice that his side of the bed is empty.
For months after the accident, I thought I was going to die of grief. And maybe I would have done something stupid—self-harming and irreversible—if I hadn’t had my little boy throwing me the life preserver of his love, keeping me from going under.
My brother was gone too, so I couldn’t rely on him. And that was a whole other kind of sorrow. I became an expert on the different varieties of pain.
My mother had died, not long after my dad. And I didn’t want to go like she did: dead of a broken heart. There was no one I could talk to. My friends in the city had moved on with their own lives, and I sometimes thought they looked down on me for getting married and having a child—for caving in and moving to the suburbs.
Everyone in our town knew about the accident that killed my husband and brother. I would have gained fifty pounds if I’d eaten all the casseroles and sandwich platters my neighbors brought over, all the cakes they left on my doorstep. But after a while, it was as if some kind of rebound effect set in. People began to avoid me, as if tragedy was contagious.
I got through it. Blogging helped a lot, as did the wonderful responses I got from moms all over the country and eventually the world: smart, brave, together women. I even heard from a few widows, and we poured our hearts out online. What did moms do before the internet?
And then, a few months after my son started pre-K, I met E.
It was a drizzly, unseasonably warm Friday afternoon in October. We’d come to pick up the kids at school. I’d forgotten my umbrella and was waiting in the rain—unlike the other moms, who wouldn’t get out of their cars if they thought a cloud might threaten their salon blowouts. E. beckoned me over to where she was standing, under the oak tree where she always waited for her son on Fridays. She had a huge umbrella, more than big enough to keep the two of us dry. It was a very distinctive umbrella, clear plastic over a layer of some kind of liquid in which happy yellow cartoon ducks swam around.
I’d seen her there before. I’d noticed because she always looked more natural and real than a woman you’d expect to be wearing such obviously expensive clothes.
She said her name was E. before she said that she was N.’s mom. Her son was in school with my son; they were friends. So right away we had that in common. The boys had worked that out.
Unlike the other shifty-eyed mothers, she looked straight at me. And I felt that she saw me.
I said, “Maybe I should blog about how we should always remember to bring an umbrella.” I could see that she was interested in the fact that I blogged.
She said, “Take this one. Keep it. It was a one-off. A prototype. My boss had it made by the franchise people, and then he didn’t like it and canceled the order.”
“I couldn’t,” I said. “Especially if it’s the only one like it.”
“Please,” she said. “Take it. Look . . . are you busy this afternoon? Why don’t you come to our place. It’s nearby. The boys can play. I can make them hot chocolate. We could have a glass of wine. My husband won’t be home for a couple of hours.”
I followed her in my car to her house, a few miles from school. Her home looked like a house in a magazine, though much more elegant and stylish than the houses in the magazine I used to work for. It was a big old Georgian, rather grand, and filled with museum-quality mid-century modern furniture. On the walls were prints and paintings by famous artists.
Over the mantel was a photograph of two twin girls. I won’t say who the artist was because I never drop household names on this blog. I thought it was a strange choice to have at the center of your living room. But E. was proud of it, and it was way more interesting than anything I’d seen in our town. For a house in which a small child lived, the place was extremely neat, almost like a stage set. I was relieved when I saw that her son’s room was just as messy as my son’s room.
E. said that her housecleaner, M., was responsible for keeping things in such good shape. E. said she didn’t know what she’d do without her.
E.’s home-decorating choices would have pleased my late husband. Every knife and fork, every glass, every place mat and napkin had been selected with thought and care. I marvel at people like that. How they know exactly what to buy and how to make their homes so perfect. My husband had made those decisions for us, and I’d been glad to let him. My mom would have had plastic slipcovers over the couches, like her mom had, if my dad and I hadn’t teased her.
The boys went off to play. E. and I opened a bottle of wine, and we began the conversation that has lasted througho
ut our friendship.
She’d moved here a year ago. Her husband, who is British, works on Wall Street. She and her husband and son used to live on the Upper East Side. But she couldn’t stand the other moms, the playdates, the constant competition over who had more money and fancier clothes and who vacationed in more exclusive ski resorts and Caribbean islands. She and her husband hoped that life would be less stressful for them and healthier for their son in the country. And they were right. I think.
When she asked what my husband did and saw the look on my face, she said—before I had to say a word—“Oh, I’m so sorry!” She could tell that something tragic must have occurred, but she’d moved here too recently to have heard about the accident. So I felt that I was starting fresh and could choose when and where and what I wanted to say about my family’s catastrophe.
It was just before Thanksgiving when I told her. E. and I were watching the kids cut out cardboard turkeys and paste paper feathers on them when I told her my tragic story. She began to cry for my loss—tears of sympathy and grief. She told me she wished she could invite me over for Thanksgiving, but they were using her son’s vacation time to visit her husband’s mother in England.
“That’s okay,” I said. “Miles and I will still be here when you get back.”
And that’s how it’s been ever since. I admire E. for working hard and being a fabulous mother and trying to be a good wife and a good friend—and for doing it all not only with grace but also with glamour. And I know she admires my blog. I haven’t had a friend like this since I was in grade school. Only some people—the lucky ones—have a gift for friendship, and it turns out we both do. We finish each other’s sentences and laugh at the same jokes. We like the same Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies. I read, or try to read, the detective stories she loves—when they aren’t too scary. My whole life seems brighter. I have more patience with myself and my son when I can look forward to sharing the everyday satisfactions and stresses with another grown-up.