by Darcey Bell
She would stop at nothing to get what she wanted. And I suppose I was addicted to the uneasy feeling I got whenever I gave in and agreed to do what she said.
When we learned that she was pregnant, I was delighted. But I couldn’t shake the superstitious fear that there might be something wrong—if not physically, then psychologically—with a baby conceived in the Virgin Atlantic upper-class loo.
Nicky was perfect. But Emily almost died having him. I don’t know if she even knew that. The doctors didn’t say as much, not directly. But I could tell from the looks on their faces when they came into the room where she was in labor, the room that was decorated like a comfy living room as if that would lessen her pain.
Something changed in her after that. She adored Nicky, but she grew more distant from me. It was as if she’d fallen in love with her child and fallen out of love (if she ever was in love) with her husband. I’d heard the guys at work complain about something similar; mostly they were grumbling about the lack of sex after their kids were born. But with Emily it was different. We still had sex, good sex. The missing element was something else: warmth, affection, respect.
I was always a little surprised to come home from work and find her still there. Maybe she only stayed with me because I was Nicky’s father. Not that I seemed to have had much genetic input. He looked like her; he had Emily’s beauty. But he did resemble me in one way: he was nicer than Emily, more like me. I loved him. The three of us were a family, a little family. I would have done anything to protect us, to make our lives better. Anything Emily wanted.
I told myself that I liked the fact that she wasn’t one of those women who blather on about their feelings and want to know all about yours. She let me have my private thoughts. But something about Emily was . . . too private, I’d say. Even on the really good days, when I wasn’t working and Emily and Nicky and I would be going to some fun place in the car, enjoying ourselves, I’d glance at her, and I’d see something in her eyes, something restless, something worse than restless: the panic of a bird trapped in a house. Which is not exactly the look you most want to see on your wife’s face.
When Emily and I met, I had gone from being with the cool kids at university to being with my colleagues on Wall Street, definitely not the cool kids, though they thought they were. They were idiot savants who could do one thing and one thing only. They knew how to make money. But being with Emily proved that I still had something cool about me. I was married to the prettiest, coolest girl. She was always daring me, taking risks, inviting me to be her partner in crime.
I was afraid to not join in, to resist Emily’s wild ideas. All leading up to the preposterous insurance-fraud scheme. I never thought it would work. I’m a practical person. I’m grounded in reality and have an important job on Wall Street. But I let her convince me because she would have thought that I was a coward if I pointed out the obvious flaws in her plan. I told her that two million dollars wasn’t worth it. I made plenty of money. I could ask for a raise. But she kept saying that it wasn’t about the money. It was about the danger, the risk. It was about feeling alive. And God knows I wanted my wife to feel alive.
It was supposed to be so simple. So brilliant. She’d fake her accidental death. I didn’t ask about this part, and she appreciated my not asking. I could sign up for spousal life insurance from my company, and after the big payout, Emily, Nicky, and I would reconvene in some European paradise with enough to live on for a few years. After that we’d see where we were.
I wanted to believe that our plan could work. But I didn’t. The one thing I did know was that our marriage wasn’t going to last if I refused. Emily was blackmailing me, though we would never have called it that. She had a maddening way of making blackmail seem like consensus.
She was never supposed to die. I was blindsided. I couldn’t understand how it happened. She’d told me not to believe she was dead, but the autopsy report—the DNA result—was convincing. Better-laid plans than ours went disastrously wrong.
The one thing she did say about herself was that she’d had a bit of a drug problem when she was very young. She told me that she’d gotten the tattoo on her wrist to remind herself of how bad things used to be when she was using. And she’d stopped using, early on.
I didn’t believe for a moment that Emily meant to kill herself. She would never have left Nicky without a mother. I was certain it was an accident. She’d gotten high, had a few drinks, gone for a swim—and drowned. She was wearing Mum’s ring. That item on the autopsy about liver damage and long-term drug use—that made no sense at all. They must have gotten that wrong. Doctors make mistakes all the time. They operate on the wrong patient, remove the wrong kidney.
I mourned Emily. I was numb with grief. Or, more accurately, I veered between numbness and excruciating pain. But I had to stay strong for Nicky even if I dreaded getting up every morning. At first I didn’t want to go on living. I blamed myself for having gone along with my wife’s greedy, impossible, illegal—stupid—game.
I believed—I truly believed—that my wife was dead. Maybe the autopsy report contained some mistakes, but I had to believe the evidence: my wife’s DNA, my mother’s ring.
That was the only reason why I let myself get close to Stephanie. I would never have done that if I’d thought Emily was alive.
Stephanie does everything I want, and for better or worse, she never scares me. Never challenges me. Stephanie plays the music I like. She cooks my dinner the way I like it, without Emily’s friendly teasing, which I knew was barely disguised contempt for the boring British carnivore preferring his hunks of meat well done.
I don’t love Stephanie. I never have and never will. But I don’t mind having her around. I always know she’s going to be there when I get home. She doesn’t ask too many questions; she never seems distant. She lives to please Miles and Nicky and me. She is as eager to please in bed as she is everywhere else.
Living with her has kept me calm as I’ve discovered the negatives of Emily’s plan: one, Nicky’s misery; two, being questioned by the police; three, Stephanie’s suspicions.
And of course the major negative: Emily’s death.
Stephanie is right to be suspicious. She’s what Emily said that poker players call “the fish.” Stephanie is always hinting about dark things in her past, saying she wants to be an extra good person to make up for what she did earlier in her life. An extra good person? What does that even mean? I feel disloyal to Emily for not rolling my eyes so obviously that Stephanie notices when she says things like that.
She has no idea I know that her brother is Miles’s father. And what if I do? What do I care? She imagines that her secret puts her at the dark center of the world. But she’s the only one who cares.
She and my wife are both insane. They might actually have become friends if Emily hadn’t been looking for a fish, if Emily was capable of friendship.
Not for one moment did I imagine that Stephanie and I would stay together. But she was comforting and obliging as I struggled to recover from the loss of my wife, who as it turned out, was never lost.
I was at my desk at work when the text came in: peeping tom.
I shut my eyes and opened them. The two words were still on the screen. Two words that seemed too dangerous—too explosive—to read in my office. I jammed my phone in my pocket and took the elevator down. The smokers from my office all stood—just as the sign instructed them—at least twenty-five feet from the door. I waved to them as I rushed around the corner. I needed privacy. I needed air. I checked my messages again.
The two words were still there. It wasn’t possible. It just wasn’t possible. Either my wife was alive, or someone had found her phone. Her real phone.
I texted back: peeping tom.
I waited.
A message came back: dinner?
I kept hitting the wrong keys as I typed in: where?
dorsoduro.
It was the restaurant where I’d proposed to Emily.
My wi
fe was alive.
Dorsoduro was Emily’s choice.
I chose to see it as a statement. A romantic gesture. She still loved me. We were still together. Man and wife. Things could still work out.
The minute I saw her walking toward me across the restaurant, I knew that I would never love anyone else, not as long as I lived. She was so bright, so sleek, so elegant. So sexy. Everyone turned to watch her. She had that kind of energy. Something in the atmosphere changed when she walked into a room. Alone, or with any man lucky enough to be with her. Whereas—I couldn’t help thinking—when Stephanie walked into a room, you assumed that she must have come with some pitiful guy who was late or couldn’t find a parking space. Or maybe she was meeting a date who was going to stand her up.
I didn’t want to think about Stephanie. She was the last person I wanted to think about.
Seeing Emily again was like a dream, a beautiful happy dream, the dream that everyone most wants to have, the dream we so long to come true. The dream in which the dead beloved isn’t really dead.
Emily looked terrific. How had she managed, all this time, to keep her black Dennis Nylon suit in perfect condition? If anything, she was more beautiful in life than she was in my memory, or when we kissed goodbye at the airport.
She was the greyhound beside Stephanie’s yippy spaniel. The Mercedes beside Stephanie’s Hyundai. Stephanie cooked the steaks the way I liked them, but Emily had never bored me.
I rose to embrace her, but Emily’s stare froze me in an awkward position, half sitting, half standing. And all at once I knew that this wasn’t the happy dream of the resurrected beloved. I could tell that this was going to be a very special kind of nightmare.
“Don’t get up,” Emily said.
The maitre d’ pulled out a chair for her, and we waited until there was no one within eavesdropping distance before we spoke.
“I thought you were dead” was all I could think of to say.
“Obviously, you were wrong.”
“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”
“You didn’t believe me,” she said. “You didn’t trust me.”
“Then who is dead? Whose body was it? Who was wearing Mum’s ring?”
“You don’t need to know,” Emily said. “If I told you, you would probably just tell Stephanie.”
“That’s a low blow, Emily. That’s unfair.”
“Don’t you read her silly blog?” asked my wife. “All about your happy, healthy, perfect blended family, about her consoling poor little Nicky for the tragic loss of his mom.”
“I never read her blog. I didn’t . . . I wouldn’t . . .”
“Well, you should have,” Emily said. “It’s been very informative, I can tell you.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”
“Don’t,” said Emily. “Please don’t.”
That was when we should have gotten up and left. There was nowhere for this to go but down. And yet I kept on hoping.
Emily said she was hungry. We ordered food.
I told Emily that I didn’t care about Stephanie. I never had. She was like a nanny we didn’t have to pay. And she’d been helpful. Maybe I shouldn’t have said helpful.
Emily recoiled, then sat up very straight. I recognized her head shake. Her merciless implacable no. I tried to tell Emily that she was the only one, that she had always been the only one, that I was sorry. She yawned.
It was too late. I was a fool. Just as my wife had always secretly, or not so secretly, thought. She told me that she would never forgive me. She said that I would be very sorry.
Very sorry.
She was threatening me. But what could she do? Another foolish question. Emily could do anything. She’d accused me of underestimating her. But she couldn’t have been more wrong.
She got up and left.
The waiter came over and stood beside me as we watched her go.
“Hell hath no fury,” he said. “Shakespeare got that one right.”
“Fuck you,” I said. “It wasn’t Shakespeare who said that.”
The waiter shrugged. What did he do? A while later he sent another waiter over with the bill. I actually finished my veal chop. It was half raw and awful, but I was starving. I left the waiter a big apology tip. Why not? I’d been apologizing all evening.
I caught the last train out of Grand Central.
I went straight to Nicky’s room and hugged him, even though he was asleep. I didn’t wake him. I don’t know what I would have done if Stephanie had come into the room and tried to tell me how to put my own son back to sleep. If she’d instructed me in that annoying, cloying Captain Mom voice.
I went into my room and lay down next to Stephanie and rolled onto my side. I couldn’t touch her, nor did I want her touching me.
“Rough day?”
“You don’t know the half of it,” I said.
I didn’t move till I heard Stephanie snoring softly and making that gummy click at the back of her throat that had started driving me mad.
I got up and lay on the living room couch. I was awake all night.
The worst aspects of Stephanie’s personality seemed to have rubbed off on me. Her anxiety. Her cow-in-the-slaughterhouse-chute paranoia. Who would have dreamed that such things were contagious?
I couldn’t get over the feeling that Emily was out there in the darkness. Watching our house. She knew that Stephanie was here.
How long had it been since Stephanie asked me if I was sure that Emily was dead? Of course I’d been sure she was dead. Stephanie had said she was afraid that Emily was alive. And I didn’t believe her.
I no longer knew who or what to believe.
After that, I stopped sleeping. I tried Stephanie’s useless homeopathic remedies. Herbs and foul-tasting teas and whatever. Nothing worked. She said I didn’t give them a chance. I ignored her. Her voice got even more irritating when she felt she was being ignored.
My doctor gave me sleeping pills along with a warning that two of his patients had had unpleasant side effects, in one case a psychotic episode. I said that I would be psychotic if I didn’t sleep. I would take my chances with the meds.
When Stephanie asked why I seemed jumpy, I blamed the sleeping pills. I said that my bad mood was worth it. Insomnia was worse. Nervousness was a side effect. Some people got psychotic.
I didn’t mention meeting Emily. I didn’t ask if she’d contacted Stephanie. To say that my wife was still alive would have felt like another betrayal. When Stephanie had suggested that Emily might be alive, I’d thought Stephanie was deluded. But I’d been the delusional one.
I have no excuse. I’m trying to keep it together. I am living with the wrong woman, and I am being threatened by my wife. I’m under a lot of pressure. I’m not thinking clearly.
That is my excuse. That was always my excuse. I have no excuse.
One Saturday afternoon, a car came down our driveway and stopped in front of the house. A light-skinned, middle-aged African American man got out and, checking our address against a sheaf of papers in his hand, walked up to our door. I watched him from the window. He reminded me of someone . . .
The blue blazer, the white shirt, and the dark bow tie snapped the memory into place. He reminded me of a man I used to know as a child, a Mr. Reginald Butler. Mr. Butler was the pastor of a local church, a kind of religious group, maybe a beneficent sort of cult, the Manchester Brethren. His parishioners were all immigrants and local people of color. He came to Mum’s door—much as this stranger was coming to our door now—seeking donations, warm winter coats to distribute to his flock. Mum invited him in, and they became friendly. Until Mum had a bit too much sherry and said something—I never found out what, and Mum never told me—at which Mr. Butler took offense. And we never saw him again.
Here he was in Connecticut. I opened the door. Of course it wasn’t Mr. Butler.
The man said, “Mr. Sean Townsend?”
I admitted that I was.
�
�I’m Isaac Prager. From the Allied Insurance Company. I’m working on the claim payable on the accidental death of your late wife. For which I am deeply sorry.”
Was he saying he was sorry that Emily was dead? Or sorry that he was working on the case? Or sorry that the claim was payable? Was it a coincidence that I’d just learned that Emily wasn’t dead? I hadn’t really had the time, or the peace of mind, to figure out my next step. Should I have notified the insurance company as soon as I came home from having dinner with my supposedly dead wife? It was way too confusing to explain what had happened and what hadn’t happened and what I thought had happened. And especially what we’d planned to happen. Everything I could think of to say made us look guilty, which, I suppose, we were. It had been easier to put my head in the sand and pretend that nothing had happened. And to hope for the best.
This was the moment I’d dreaded, even though—until quite recently—I hadn’t known exactly why. This was the moment when our game became real. Maybe I’d thought that Emily would give up our little charade before it came to this. I don’t know what I was thinking.
Prager said, “I thought about trying to reach you at work, but I decided that this might be the sort of conversation you would prefer to have at home. I tried to call you here, but—”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I only rarely pick up when I don’t recognize the number.”
“No worries. I understand completely,” said Prager. “Many people are that way.”
We were still standing in the doorway.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Please come in and sit down.”
“Thank you,” said Prager. “I’ll try not to take up too much of your time. This is just a formality.”
A formality! I took that as a good sign. Surely, if he’d come here to suggest that my wife and I had cooked up a scheme to defraud his company, the conversation would take quite some time and be more than a formality.
I willed Stephanie not to appear, to keep on doing whatever Captain Mom activities she was doing in the kitchen. But minding her own business was way beyond Stephanie’s capabilities. She appeared in the doorway wearing jeans and an old sweatshirt and fat socks that made an unattractive swish-swish sound as she walked into the living room. I wished I could have said, “Mr. Prager, this is Stephanie, our babysitter.” God knows what would have happened then.