by Darcey Bell
I came in about a minute. When I came, I laughed out loud. It was no surprise by now that I was a perverted person. Was I a lesbian too? I didn’t want to have sex with Emily. I just liked pretending to be her. I took her clothes back upstairs and hung them neatly in the closet where I’d found them.
In the guest room, there was a deco vanity table with a big round mirror, the sort of thing that might seem irresistible at an auction but when you got it home you wondered why you thought you needed a vanity table that a 1930s movie star would sit at to powder her nose.
In one of the drawers, I found a manila envelope full of birthday cards. Drugstore greeting cards. They were still in their envelopes, addressed to Emily Nelson (she’d never taken Sean’s name) at the addresses she’d lived in at different stages. Her college dorm at Syracuse. Her first apartment in Alphabet City in Manhattan. You could track Emily’s progress up through Dennis Nylon Inc. as you watched the addresses get more upscale. Then the cards went to East Eighty-Sixth Street—where she’d lived with Sean after Nicky was born. But when had she lived in Tucson? She never told me about that. Or maybe she was just visiting for her birthday, and her mother’s card caught up with her there.
The cards were standard stuff. Flowers. Balloons. happy birthday to my dear daughter. happy birthday to our dearest daughter.
There was nothing more personal than that, no notes or endearments. Nothing handwritten but the salutation, To Emily, and the signature, Love Mom. The handwriting, always in brown ink and with a real fountain pen, belonged to another era, when girls were graded on their penmanship. The penmanship was stellar—spidery yet assured.
In the top left-hand corner of each envelope, in the same handwriting, it said, Mr. and Mrs. Wendell Nelson. And there was an address in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
Emily’s parents’ address.
I took the envelope and put it in my dresser. I felt it was important to have the address, though I couldn’t have said why. If anyone could help me clear up the mystery of who my friend was, her mother might. I knew she suffered from dementia, but I remember hearing that she had her good days. Maybe I could visit on one of those. I would never have the nerve—or the time or freedom!—to go see her. But I liked having her address.
There was one more thing. An important thing. And that was completely by chance.
One afternoon Sean called from work and asked me to look in his top desk drawer for a piece of paper on which he’d scribbled a client’s contact information. He’d forgotten to bring his phone to the meeting with the client, and then he’d forgotten to enter the information into his contact list. And he needed the guy’s number. Right away.
I could tell he was embarrassed; he thought he’d screwed up. I kept reassuring him, saying it was nothing. People forget more important things. He’d been under a lot of stress. I didn’t say, Give yourself a break. Your wife died. But we knew what I meant. I told him I’d look for the paper and call him when I found it.
The scrap—torn from a yellow legal pad—was where he’d said it would be, along with a lot of bills and receipts, old phone chargers, and a tangle of those ID badges people wear at meetings. I was surprised by the mess. Sean is such a neat person. But no one’s perfect. And I’d seen how he could let things get out of hand when work was involved. When we first moved in together, I often had to (neatly!) clear files and stacks of paper off the dining room table so we could have dinner.
Just before I closed the drawer, I noticed a small box, covered in deep blue velvet that had gotten slightly dusty. A jewelry box. It was as if I heard a voice warning me not to open it, but that same voice made it irresistible.
I opened it. And there inside was Emily’s ring: the sapphire surrounded by diamonds.
I held it between my fingers. And then I saw her. I saw Emily. I saw the diamonds flashing in the air as we sat on her sofa and she moved her hands, talking about the books and movies she loved, about Nicky and Sean, the things she cared about. As we laughed and joked and celebrated the gift of our wonderful friendship.
On impulse, I held the ring up to my face. And it seemed to me that I could smell the cold, dark waters of the lake in Michigan, and beneath that, a faint whiff of decomposition. Of death. It was impossible that a ring could smell like that. But I was sure of it all the same.
My friend was gone. This was all that was left—this ring and our memories. I put the ring back in the velvet box, put the box back in the drawer, and slammed the drawer shut. I began to cry—harder than I’d cried since we learned that Emily was dead.
I pulled myself together. I called Sean. It was all I could do to keep from falling apart again as I read him the client’s number. Sean thanked me. I wanted to tell him I loved him, but this was not the moment. I wanted to tell him I’d found Emily’s ring, but I knew I never would.
I stopped searching the house for clues. There was nothing else I wanted or needed to know.
We settled into a routine. The boys went to school and Sean went to work. Maricela came on Wednesdays, so I didn’t have to clean. I kept busy, straightening up the boys’ rooms and collecting art supplies for making projects when they got home. Baking muffins and making model airplanes.
I tried to forget about Emily unless I could remember her in a good way. A helpful and positive way. I decided that the boys saying that they’d seen her, and Nicky smelling like her, and my own doubts—that was just part of our grief. Our refusal to believe that she was gone.
But she was gone. Sean had seen the autopsy report. The DNA results. If that wasn’t her body in the lake, whose was it? Even in a Michigan town, they didn’t make mistakes like that.
I read cookbooks and learned to make dishes—eggplant parmesan, Korean tofu stews—that Sean and the boys resisted at first but came to like. Or maybe they ate them to humor me. They ate them, just the same. I didn’t want us to eat meat every night. I started feeling good about being in Emily’s kitchen. I was feeding the people she loved. Food was sustenance. Food was life. Emily had put together a kitchen and married a husband and found a best friend who could take care of her little boy after she was gone.
Everyone was making compromises. Nicky stopped acting out and was as nice to me—or almost—as he’d been before his mother vanished when the four of us did fun things on Fridays after school. I turned the guest room—the one with the vanity table—into a kind of office, and decided that soon I would go back to blogging. Enough time had passed for my readers to accept that Sean and I were a couple.
I would have a lot to say about the challenges and rewards of raising two boys instead of one. Easier in some ways, harder in others. So far they have still never fought. I was grateful, but I wondered if it would last.
Sex with Sean was as amazing as it had been at the start. Or almost as amazing. The heat dies down when you can have the person whenever you want. That’s only natural. Unless you do it every night, which you do at first and then not so much. Some nights you lie there side by side like sister and brother. And you notice, though you try not to.
Maybe that was why the heat never died down between me and Chris. Because we couldn’t have each other when we wanted. Not by a long shot.
The boys never again mentioned seeing Emily near school or anywhere else. I decided to pretend that it never happened. I remembered reading about cases of mass hysteria, where a group of people all have the same hallucination at once. It is especially common with school children. It had happened with Nicky and Miles, but they showed no signs of lasting damage.
We’d come through it, I thought.
We had a quiet Thanksgiving, just the four of us. The boys helped me cook the turkey. It was perfectly done, crispy skinned and moist, the stuffing was delicious. Sean sweetly pretended not to know what the holiday was about so the boys could tell him what they’d learned at school. How the pilgrims had come here and how the Native Americans had showed them how to plant corn and grow their first crops so they could survive the cold New England winters.<
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That night, after the boys were asleep, Sean and I sat on the couch, finishing up the wine. He put his arms around me and said that maybe we should all go away together somewhere for Christmas vacation, the four of us. Someplace warm. An island. Someplace that was only ours. He didn’t have to say: somewhere he’d never been with Emily. Mexico maybe, or the Caribbean. A guy at work had gone to Vieques and loved it.
Rum drinks. Hammocks on the beach.
I said that sounded wonderful. And it did.
We stayed up and made love. I thought, Maybe this will work.
The next morning, I dropped the boys off at school and took Sean to the station. Then I came home. I had begun to think of it as home. No longer Emily’s house, or Sean’s house. But home.
I made myself a cup of coffee. I sat at the sunny kitchen table. Then I took my coffee into the living room and settled into the couch. For a second, I thought, Emily’s couch, then I made myself stop thinking that way. My couch now.
I thought about my life so far and about the chance that things had settled and come to rest. With luck, we could go on this way. That would be fine with me.
The phone rang. The landline which no one ever used.
I scooted over to answer it.
The caller ID said out of area. I picked up and was sorry. I heard the silence you hear just before the robocall recording comes on.
I was about to hang up when a voice said, “Stephanie. It’s me.”
It was Emily. I would have known her voice anywhere.
“Where are you?” I said. “You’ve got to tell me!”
“Outside. Watching you.”
I rushed from window to window. There was no one out there.
“Go around to the kitchen,” Emily said. “Hold up your hand. I’ll tell you how many fingers you’re holding up.”
I held up my hand. I raised two fingers.
“Two,” said Emily. “Try again.”
This time I held up both hands. Seven fingers.
“Lucky number,” said Emily. “You always were a clever girl. Okay, got to run. For now. Talk soon.” That had been Emily’s sign-off: talk soon.
“Wait!” I cried. There was so much I wanted to ask. But how would we begin that conversation, with me in her house, living with her husband?
“No. You wait.” Was I imagining that it sounded like a threat? She hung up.
I looked around at Emily’s things. Emily’s furniture. Her house.
There was no way that could have happened. Within a few hours, I managed to convince myself that I’d imagined Emily’s phone call.
I’d been lying on the couch. Maybe I’d fallen asleep and dreamed it. I’d been having vivid dreams ever since Emily died. Some of them had her in it. Maybe this was one of them.
I wasn’t convinced. Part of me knew it had happened.
The next morning, after I came home from taking the boys to school, I dropped off the groceries in the house and took a couple of deep breaths and walked out into the woods.
I calculated where Emily must have stood to see me in the window.
I stood there and looked at the house.
Nothing moved. It was spooky.
I heard branches crack deep in the woods. I could hardly breathe.
Then I saw myself in the window. In the house. And that was the scariest thing.
It was me. And it wasn’t me.
I was someone else. I was all alone. I was out in the woods.
Spying on myself.
Part Two
25
Emily
Peeping. Something about the word makes me almost physically sick, and at the same time I adore it. Peeping. The word gives me a feeling that’s like the tingly nausea jitters you get just before the roller coaster drops. Some people will do anything for that feeling. And, as the song goes, God, I know I’m one.
I’ve been peeping at Stephanie, Sean, and the boys. Just thinking the word is almost as nauseating and exciting as creeping up to my kitchen window and watching Stephanie pretend to be me. Sleeping with my husband, raising my child, overcooking disgusting hunks of dead cow in my kitchen. To be honest—I’m borrowing Stephanie’s phrase here; she’s always saying to be honest, maybe because she so rarely is—I’m more fascinated than furious.
Spying on Stephanie in my house is like playing with some weird 3-D live-action dollhouse. As if the people inside were all animated figurines that I can move around. I can make them do things. I can control them with my magic weapon: a burner phone.
Dial the magic number—and the Stephanie doll runs to the window.
Stephanie can have the house, but I want a few things back. She can have the husband, his hopeless stupidity proved forever by the fact that he’s fucking her.
I just want Nicky. I want my son back.
Even as a little girl, I was always hiding and spying. Crouching under the windows, lying in the grass, I waited for the grown-ups to do something dirtier and more private than make coffee or look in the refrigerator or (in my dad’s case) sneak a cigarette on the porch. I saw where Mother hid the liquor bottles and how often she had to get the big dictionary from the bookshelf. What was the word she needed to look up? Her bottle was behind the book. I saw my mother drink so much that it no longer seemed secret but just like something she did. I didn’t blame her. The poor woman was married to Dad, a popular gynecologist and exotic orchid breeder who named his new bioengineered orchid strains after his “favorite patients.”
Only rarely did I break the spy code of watchfulness and silence. Drunk Mother sounded so stupid! I put water in her gin bottle. I watched from the window as she drank straight from the bottle, though she would have killed me if she caught me drinking milk from the carton. After the first swallow, she looked puzzled, as if trying to remember how it was supposed to taste. Then she finished off the bottle and put it in a paper bag and took it outside to put in the trash at the end of the driveway.
When I was in junior high, I began to take sips of her gin, then larger and larger swallows. She never noticed, or never said. My parents could have been cardboard cutouts for all their lively interest in me. Working at Dennis Nylon, you hear a lot of people, after a few drinks, talking about how unparented they feel. Every time I hear that word, I think: You should meet my unparents. Though that would be unlikely now. Father’s been dead eight years, and Mother is in no shape for a conversation about the mistakes she made as a parent.
Everyone has a hellish childhood, everyone still thinks it was supposed to have been heaven. That everyone else’s childhood was pure paradise. That’s the message we get from movies and TV. When you’re little, you think your family is the only one that isn’t as happy and cool as the ones in the sitcoms. The irony is that I would never let Nicky watch the modern versions of those mind-rotting television shows, yet his life (comfy upper-middle-class suburbs with a loving mom and dad) is closer to TV life than Sean’s and mine were, and we actually did watch those shows.
I want Nicky to be happy. It’s the one thing, the only thing, that I know I want.
When you grow up, you find out that you weren’t the only unhappy child, which is nice. Nice if you’re the kind of person who is cheered up to find out that someone had the same bad luck you did. Stephanie likes to think that everybody is walking the same rocky road. Even though she talks about how you can never know another person, she thinks you can. She likes thinking that another person is suffering exactly as much as (or worse than) she is. If you have a problem with your kid, it’s supposed to help to know that other mothers have the same problem. If your best friend disappears, it’s supposed to comfort you to learn about all the women out there whose best friends have vanished.
That’s a pretty small demographic, waiting for the call from Investigative Reports, waiting to tell the reporter how sure they are that the husband did it.
During the day, Stephanie sits in her little office corner of the sunporch—my sunporch—where she’s put an old-fashioned rolltop
desk the size of a tank and a round braided rug. Very homey, very corny. Mommy blogger paradise. But she seems to have stopped blogging.
Total strangers felt sorry for Stephanie when she lost me. Her best friend. They posted love and hugs and emoticon hearts and frowny faces.
From the day I disappeared, I was high on the self-restraint it took not to completely mess with Stephanie’s head. It was like having my brain in bondage. I’ve just dipped my toe into torturing Stephanie, and it’s mildly entertaining. But it’s painful too. At the end of the day, at any time of day, that’s my house, my husband, my son.
It makes me think less of Sean that he could stand to be with a person like that. Even if he’s using her to get over his grief about me. In theory I could give him another chance. Let him know I’m not dead. See how fast he drops Stephanie. That would be entertaining to watch.
But he’s already failed a test, two tests. I’m not going to give him a chance to retake the exam.
The point was that Stephanie isn’t that smart. That was what we needed. That was why I chose her.
I never told Stephanie about Mother’s drinking. It wasn’t anything I wanted anyone knowing, though Sean knew because his mom liked her big glass of sweet disgusting sherry, so Sean and I had that in common.
That was pretty much all Sean knew about me. I was careful with information. Controlling information is what I do, what I did, for a living. That’s why Dennis paid me. Before most people caught on to disinformation, I could make Dennis’s court-ordered stint at a boot camp desert rehab in Tucson look and sound like a wild two-week sex and drugs orgy in Marrakesh. I could make something seem like something else. I could make the failing Batgirl look the hippest thing on the planet.
I only told Sean the things that made him feel the same as me, nothing that would have made him feel different from me. Which meant leaving out some fairly basic things. God, how Stephanie used to go on about secrets. I’d listen to her, or half listen to her, and I’d think: We have to have secrets. We need them to live in the world. I have plenty. More than my share. You have no idea.