by Darcey Bell
The blog was reassuring. I could leave my husband and son with Stephanie without being afraid that they would fall for her bullshit. Hilarious.
The joke is on me, as they say.
We all wish for what we don’t have. Stephanie envied my career at Dennis Nylon, though she would never admit it. All I wanted—or thought I wanted—was to stay home with Nicky. With lots of money, in some gorgeous place. And without having to work. I wanted to risk getting caught—and not get caught. I’d deal with boredom later. If I got restless, Nicky and I could always figure it out.
Stephanie was deluding herself if she thought she could do my job. With her constant blabbing about Miles, she wouldn’t have lasted five minutes at Dennis Nylon. No one there wanted to hear about kids. At first no one had families, either because they were gay, or if they were straight, because they were young and scared. Then the gay couples began having more kids than the straight scared ones. Occasionally someone at work would ask me how Nicky was, but not often, and Dennis didn’t want to hear about Nicky. At all.
On paper we were child friendly. But that didn’t mean friendly friendly. I didn’t have Nicky when Dennis hired me. I’m not sure he would have hired me if I’d had a kid. Every time I mentioned Nicky’s name, Dennis shut down, and I changed the subject to what Dennis was thinking of doing for his next collection. Dennis gets his power from being a genius and switching his attention on and off like a faucet.
If I needed someone to take care of Nicky when it was time to disappear, there was no one I could hire that would be as good as a Captain Mom. You can’t pay for childcare like that. Who could have predicted that Stephanie would interpret her duties to include sleeping with my husband?
Really, I should have known. At first I thought that Stephanie’s blog was just harmless, tree-hugging bullshit. But after I got to know her, it was interesting to observe the gap between the woman she pretended to be in her blog and the person she was. Reading the blog, you’d think she was the picture of respectability, the best and most honest mom who ever lived, when in fact she was a woman who had had a long passionate affair with her half brother and who may have been responsible for her husband’s suicide.
I chose to see what I wanted to see. I should have taken her lies as a warning.
Of course she didn’t tell me all her secrets right away. But she always hinted that there was something a little extra, something dark in her history that was maybe a bit kinky, something that would hold my interest if my attention chanced to stray from the fascinating question of how the boys were liking their teacher, and her efforts to get Miles to eat vegetarian.
Her secrets were her capital. In the beginning, our conversations were like a guessing game. She would hint at these secrets, and I would have to manipulate her into telling me what they were. Or at least what they were about. It was all fake. She wanted to tell me. She couldn’t wait.
I knew how her husband and brother died, but I pretended not to. And it was such a sad story that I cried. Real tears. That meant a lot to her, because she’d thought I was reticent, even chilly, though I had been trying my best, working overtime to seem cozy and warm.
After we’d cried together, she said how great it was to have a friend, a best friend, like we did when we were teenagers.
It was hard for me to respond. Not that it mattered. She was so sure that she knew who I was and how I felt about her, she was never curious about the truth.
Stephanie was weak but pushy and forceful in her weakness. She willed us to be best friends forever. As if we were teenage girls. She studied me: my clothes, my style. How I talked to Nicky. It’s flattering when someone wants to be you, even if it gives you the creeps. Single White Female is one of the scariest films ever made.
Sean and I reminded ourselves: It was all about Nicky.
I didn’t want a best friend. I wanted a character witness and a temporary caretaker for my son.
Stephanie poured her heart out to me. I could have been a priest or a reverend or a rabbi or her therapist. It’s hard to know what to say when your son’s best friend’s mom tells you that she had an affair with her half brother. An affair that lasted from when she met him at eighteen to not long before he was killed—and that may have caused her husband to kill himself and his wife’s lover. His brother-in-law.
“Wow,” was all I could say.
“Wow indeed,” Stephanie said.
What did I have to trade her, secret for secret? Isn’t that how a friendship is supposed to work? I complained about Sean and how stressful it was to visit his mom in the UK. I told her what a fabulous lover he was. I complained about how hard I worked. I complained about Sean thinking he was smarter than me and not giving me credit for how much I did. All of which was true, but I couldn’t tell her the big secret, which was that all this—every conversation, every after-school glass of white wine and greasy burger and game of miniature golf—was part of a plan that Sean and I had put in motion.
I’m not sure she ever listened. She needed to talk, to hint that there was more, something else she had to tell me, something darker that she was holding back. The carrot at the end of the stick of my fake friendship with Stephanie.
She picked a strange place to tell me that last big secret, which, to tell the truth, I already intuited, and I’d been expecting.
It was a Saturday in August. Sean had to work in the city. Stephanie and I decided to take the kids to the county fair. I told myself it could be fun: the heirloom chickens and prize-winning pigs, the blue-ribbon bottles of pickles. The boys would like the farm animals and the cotton candy and the carousel.
But the day was extremely hot. The fairgrounds were dusty and airless. The roiling vats of frying onion blooms and (new this year) deep-fried Oreos hung in the air, an oily, sweaty mist. For a few minutes I thought I was going to faint or vomit.
As the boys ran ahead of us, never out of sight, Stephanie and I wondered: What mother in her right mind would let her kid ride that creaky, ancient roller coaster? I would have loved to ride it, but I didn’t feel I could say that.
The one ride that the boys were old enough to go on by themselves, and that they didn’t think was insultingly babyish, was a ring of little cars made to look like submarines. Attached to a central pole by rods, the mini-subs turned slowly, rising slightly in the air and gently dipping toward the pool of water beneath them. A toddler ride.
It looked completely safe, but still I was surprised that overprotective, neurotic Stephanie let Miles go on it. She and I leaned on the fence that encircled the ride and watched our boys turn and dip. I wondered if she remembered Strangers on a Train. I’d made her watch it with me. She’d been very disturbed by the carousel scene. I don’t think she ever finished the book, though she pretended she did.
Stephanie said, “Look at Miles. Look when he comes closer.”
“What about him?”
“Take a good look. Do you remember I showed you those pictures of my brother, Chris?”
“Of course.” I recalled a dark, handsome, muscular guy in a white T-shirt and jeans. Shy in front of the camera, slightly shifty. I could see why she’d been drawn to him because I’d also seen photos of her husband, Davis, and the brother was way more attractive. I remember her showing me his picture along with her parents’ wedding photo and pointing out the resemblance between her dad and her half brother. Between her mom and her.
Then Stephanie said, “I need to tell you something I’ve never told anyone ever.”
She’d started a lot of conversations that way. Some of her stories had been intense—her affair with her brother—while other “secrets” seemed so insignificant that I instantly forgot them.
Miles and Nicky passed in their little submarines. They smiled and waved, and we smiled and waved back.
I was thinking about the scene in the Hitchcock film. The merry-go-round spins faster and faster, further and further out of control as Farley Granger and Robert Walker struggle to the death. The only person who
knows how to stop it is a little old man who crawls under the carousel. Watching him put himself in danger is far scarier and more suspenseful than the fight.
What would we do if Miles and Nicky were spinning faster and faster? Who would crawl under the merry-go-round to save our boys? The girl who took tickets was texting someone. I realized that I was having the kind of thought that Stephanie would have. You’re Emily, I reminded myself. Not her.
I went around to Stephanie’s other side and switched on the fancy tape recorder I’d started carrying in my pocket for moments like the one that was about to happen.
The submarine ride was playing disco classics but not very loud. The ticket girl was keeping the music down in case she got a phone call.
Stephanie said, “I’m pretty sure that my half brother, Chris, was Miles’s father.”
“Hi, honey,” she called out to Miles, and I waved at Nicky.
“Why do you think so?” I asked, trying to sound calm. “Stephanie, are you sure or not?”
“I’m sure. Davis was away for a while. On a site in Texas. Chris came over. Miles looks just like Chris. He doesn’t look like Davis at all. Davis’s mom says she can’t see one single gene from her side of the family in her grandson.”
I’d known she was going to say that. I’d been expecting it for a long time. Still, it was shocking to hear her admit it.
“Miles looks like you,” I said.
“Do you think people suspect?”
“Of course not.” No one was going to figure it out. Surely not Miles’s teachers. Maybe Miles himself, later, when he asked to see pictures of his father and his uncle.
No one except your dead husband, I thought. But I wasn’t going to say that.
“Emily, you know me so well. I love you so much. It feels so good to tell someone, not to have to keep it bottled up inside. Am I a terrible person?”
As their submarines came around again, Miles and Nicky seemed to have slipped into a trance.
“The boys are great,” I said, as if in answer to Stephanie’s question. She would think it was the answer.
The kids had two, maybe three more times around before the ride ended. Under pressure now, Stephanie spoke rapidly. “I can’t bring Miles to the doctor without feeling like a liar and a fraud. When they ask for the medical history of his father’s side of the family, I pretend they’re talking about Davis. Obviously, I don’t mention that his dad is my half brother.”
The ride slowed and stopped. The boys got off. They wanted to talk about the fun ride. It was hardly the moment to press Stephanie further on the subject of her son’s father.
I couldn’t believe that anyone would confess something like that. That kind of information gives someone so much power over you. Power to use however they want. Stephanie always said that you can never truly know anyone else. But she thought she knew me—and that I could be trusted. That was her mistake. She chose to forget that what I did for a living was to control information. To bend and use it in the most helpful way.
A few days later, in bed, I played Sean the recording of what Stephanie told me at the fair.
He said, “No wonder she always looks as if she’s afraid of getting arrested.”
Did a statement like that suggest that my husband found her attractive? I think not. I thought not. Another joke on me.
* * *
There was one thing I hadn’t worked out: how to make it seem as if I was really dead so we didn’t have to wait forever to collect the insurance money.
A solution presented itself. It landed in my lap—and I knew that it was time to move. At least Sean was smart enough not to ask what that solution was. He was better off not knowing.
Would everything have worked out differently if he’d trusted me when I said “Whatever happens, don’t believe I’m really dead”? Maybe he wouldn’t have slept with Stephanie. I wouldn’t have wound up spying on them from the forest behind my own home.
Stephanie doesn’t look at Sean as if she’s scared of being arrested. She should feel guilty—guiltier than she’s ever felt about anything. She looks at my husband as if he’s a god, the lord of the manor who sneaks down to the kitchen to make out with the besotted cook.
One thing that made me choose Stephanie as our fish was how obsessively she blogged about trying to feed her son healthy food. It was almost unendurable to hear her talk about it, but if I was going to leave Nicky with her, I liked it that she wouldn’t be letting him live on candy-colored cereal and french fries and junk food burgers.
I didn’t expect the rage that surges through me when I watch her in my kitchen. When I see how happy, how (Stephanie’s word) fulfilled she looks.
Like a calming prayer, I repeat to myself: She is feeding my child. It would upset me more to dwell on what she is doing for my husband.
Does Stephanie know that Sean knows who Miles’s father is? I doubt it. She believes that she’s making Sean happier, making Nicky less miserable, filling in for her dead best friend. She’s being a Good Samaritan. She imagines I would thank her if I knew. If I were alive.
Stephanie is as transparent as Sean turns out to be opaque. What is he doing with her? He’s the one I never knew. Now I wonder: Who is this guy who creeps up behind my “friend” as she’s doing the dishes and nuzzles the back of her neck and acts like they’d be having sex on the kitchen counter if the kids weren’t in the next room? How could I not be enraged? Has Sean fallen in love with her? Lost his mind? In my opinion, that would amount to the same thing.
We’d agreed that for six months we’d stay out of touch. By then the interest in our case would have diminished. For six months, I would be dead. A suicide, some people would think. A drunken, pill-addled accident, Sean’s lawyers would insist. And they would prevail.
But our separation wasn’t supposed to be permanent. We weren’t supposed to find someone else. That is a serious departure from our plan, and it changes everything.
One perk of working in the fashion industry is that everyone is about fifteen years old. They pride themselves on knowing how to use burner phones and open fake credit card accounts and set up phony email addresses and get bogus IDs—skills implying that being young and single in New York is the equivalent of being a criminal. A rebel. If they don’t know how to do something illegal, they know someone who knows someone who does, usually in Bushwick.
We got a passport for Nicky. I got a fake passport, for when I would need it. I wore a wig and glasses, changed my appearance for the photo. I would use that look when we traveled. After I had my picture taken, it took me about ten seconds to lose the wig and glasses and go back to my “natural” look. What a relief—to look like myself again.
Sean and I each got a sworn affidavit giving the other permission to leave the country alone with Nicky. I was going be a stranger that Sean met in Europe and remarried after a suitable period of mourning for his wife—for me. And we would live on the insurance money from the accidental death of his first wife. Also me. Strangers would assume that we were an appealing, independently wealthy American expat couple.
I told the kids at work that I was having an affair and needed a fake identity for calling and renting hotel rooms. They loved it that the middle-aged head of publicity and bourgeois suburban supermom was cheating on her hunky Brit husband. They were delighted to help. They swore to keep their mouths shut. I was afraid they would tell, but they didn’t. They liked the secrecy, the romance.
When my death was announced, they were genuinely sad. But they also liked knowing the inside gossip. They liked being privy to the fact that I was having an affair. They assumed my secret romance had something to do with the pills and booze, the suicide or accident. How tragic.
I figured out how to keep hidden. For a while I stayed in our family cabin, on the lake up in northern Michigan. Then I ditched the rental and took my mother’s car. I moved to a house in the Adirondacks that belonged to friends of my parents. I’d gone there as a child. I knew it would be empty. I even knew w
here the key was. Neither the lake house nor the Adirondack cabin had a TV or internet connection. It was great to go off the grid. People find it hard, but I loved it. I didn’t miss anything about my life—except Nicky.
It wasn’t till later that I began to read Stephanie’s blog and figure out what was going on. What she and Sean were doing. How Nicky was, or how another woman thought he was.
It is putting it mildly to say that I was appalled. It took a while for me to admit: I should have seen it coming.
It was all about Nicky. I couldn’t stay away. I couldn’t not see him. I missed him too much.
For once, I wasn’t lying when I agreed with Stephanie: Motherhood had been a shock. The force of my love for the baby kicked in the first time I held him. I was lucky, I knew. It takes longer for some women. Even now, every time I see film footage of a birth, any birth, tears well in my eyes. And I am not a weeper—or a sentimental person.
Becoming a mother is like getting hit over the head, which I suppose is Stephanie’s idiotic blog boiled down to one absurd sentence.
When I was hiding out, pretending to be dead, I dreamed about Nicky. I thought about him all the time. I wondered what he was doing.
I reached the point at which I felt that I couldn’t live another day without seeing my son. I didn’t know how I’d imagined that I could bear it. It had been insanity to try. Being without Nicky for six months was like being without an arm. Without a heart. I noted that I didn’t feel anything like that about Sean—and that was even before I knew about him and Stephanie.
I stationed myself outside the school yard where the kids played during recess. I made sure Nicky saw me and the teachers didn’t. Just seeing him was pure joy. I waved to him. I put my finger to my lips. The fact that I was alive was our little secret.