by Darcey Bell
I went through two orders of potato skins with cheese. I was hungry and nervous. I didn’t know what to expect or what I was about to encounter. Was Emily setting me up to betray me again? Would this be another trick, another deception? Another chapter in her plan to punish me for sleeping with her husband?
I told the waiter I was expecting a friend. I don’t know what he imagined. Boyfriend, maybe, or girlfriend. Who else would arrange to meet here except adulterous lovers on the down low?
This was nothing like that. It was my friend. It was Emily. Right there.
I searched her face for any signs of anger or lingering resentment, for any indications that she meant to hurt me—again. But I saw nothing like that. All I saw was the familiar face of the friend whom, despite everything that had happened, I still loved. And who still loved me.
I jumped up from the table. The elderly tourists watched us hug. Emily smelled like she always had. I pulled back and looked at her. She looked like Emily. Radiant. Beautiful. As if nothing had happened.
But something was different. She looked . . . I don’t know. Sad. As if half of her was missing.
She was dressed for work. The way she would have been dressed that evening, months ago, when she came to pick up Nicky on her way home from Dennis Nylon.
But she hadn’t come home. She owed me an explanation.
I ordered a gin and tonic, though I never drank in the middle of the day. Certainly never before I was supposed to pick the boys up from school. Emily drank one margarita, then another. All the time we didn’t speak, until I finally couldn’t stand it.
I said, “The man who’s following you . . .”
She said, “Stephanie, please, can we talk about that later? First I need to know that you trust me. I’m sure you have some questions. Ask me whatever you want to know.”
Her laying herself open like that made it hard to ask anything at all. It all seemed like such an intrusion. I didn’t know where to begin. Why did you pretend to be dead? Why did you involve me? Are you still angry at me for what happened with Sean? What were you thinking? Who are you?
But all I said was, “Why didn’t I know you had a sister? Why didn’t you tell me you had a twin?”
I don’t know why I led with that, out of all the questions I could have asked, the accusations I could have made, the mysteries I wanted explained. I suppose because it was the first question that popped into my mind.
“I don’t know. I really don’t.” Emily opened her palms and closed them. A familiar gesture, but something was different. She wasn’t wearing her ring. I had the ring, in my purse. The ring that had turned up on a corpse in a lake in Michigan.
“I compartmentalized,” Emily said. “You understand how that can happen. You know exactly how someone can not talk or even think about things she doesn’t want to think or talk about. How she can have secrets even from herself. That’s one of the reasons we’re friends.”
I’d never thought about that before. But Emily was right.
“What was your sister’s name?” I said.
Tears popped into Emily’s eyes.
“Evelyn.”
“What happened to her?”
“She killed herself at the lake house in Michigan. I rushed out there to try to save her. That’s why I didn’t get in touch with you. I’m so sorry for what I put you through. But I was frantic about Evelyn, and I had no time to explain to people who didn’t even know I had a sister. Can you understand that?”
“Yes,” I said, though once more I wasn’t sure that I did.
“I tried every way I knew to help her. At first I thought I’d won. I’d thought I’d convinced her to live. She swore to me that she wouldn’t kill herself.” Tears slipped down Emily’s cheeks. “She did it when I was asleep. And I’ll never get over it. Never. Sometimes I feel as if I’m dead too. I knew that you and Sean thought I was dead. It was easier for me that way. I didn’t want to see anyone. I didn’t want to talk. I couldn’t explain. I didn’t want to exist.
“But finally I missed Nicky too much. And I missed you.”
I said, “Do you think that was fair to us?”
“Us?” said Emily. “You’re joking.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Sean believed you.”
“Actually,” she said, “he didn’t. I was right to think I couldn’t trust him. That’s why I never told Sean about Evelyn. About how my love and fear for my sister controlled my life. I couldn’t trust him with that information. I controlled information, that was my job. But I couldn’t control something so . . . personal. So painful.”
I looked at my friend and saw a whole new person. A more tormented person than the strong, glamorous, have-it-all mom with the personal assistant and the fashion-industry job. A more complicated and more human person.
She said, “Sean couldn’t have understood. He was an only child. My love and fear for my sister was part of why I’d had problems with alcohol and pills. She and I were keeping each other company in our self-destructive addictions. And then I turned off that particular path, and she went on ahead, on her own.”
Emily was finally being honest about her brushes with substance abuse—and about her sister. And about her husband. Our friendship would never be the same. There would always be that little hiccup now. That edge of . . . discomfort. We could thank Sean for that.
I felt as if she was reading my mind when she asked, “Did you bring the ring?”
I took it out of the zippered pocket in my purse where I’d put it for safekeeping.
“How did you know that Sean had it?” I said. “How did you know that I knew where it was?”
A silence fell. I held my breath.
“I didn’t know,” she said. “I hoped. I gave it to Evelyn before she died. I wanted her to have it. It was the only thing I had with me that I could give her that I thought might last. And I knew that it was important to Sean. He gave me the ring early in our courtship. It was his love gift to me. A memento of those happy early days. It had been his mother’s, and she had given it to him so he could give it to me.”
I braced myself against the pain I expected to feel when I heard about Emily’s happiness with Sean—another reminder that Sean would never love me as much as he loved her. But the fact was, I felt nothing. Being with my friend was so wonderful. I was over Sean already. Sean was history.
Emily slipped the ring on and spun it around her finger.
“Look,” she said. “It’s loose. I must have lost a little weight during my . . . time-out.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You look gorgeous.” And she did.
With the ring on her finger, it was like magic. Emily . . . transformed, is all I can say. She changed from a sad woman grieving for her sister into the force of nature she’d been when I knew her. Something—determination?—reanimated her features, or maybe it was just that she started moving her hands in front of her face, like the old Emily, and the jewels in the ring caught the light—what little light there was in the hotel bar.
Emily was back.
With tears streaming down her face, she finally told me the horrible truth: Sean had begun abusing her a few months after their marriage.
“He knew how to hit me without leaving a mark. But he only rarely did that. Mostly he threatened me. Whenever I made him mad, he told me how easy it would be to get his company mega-lawyers to do him a favor. The city’s sharkiest custody lawyers would prove that I was an unfit mother. They would demolish me in court, citing my history with alcohol and pills. They would use my working in the fashion business against me. They would make my job sound like I was doing PR for Sodom and Gomorrah.”
How terrified my friend must have been, to keep these things to herself, even after I’d confided so much and made it clear that she could trust me. We’d always assumed that I was the neurotic person in the friendship. But really, she was the paranoid one. Paranoid and skittish. Imagine recording my confession by the submarine ride in case she would ever have to use i
t against me! Why would she ever have had to use anything against me? Being friends meant that we were on the same side. How sad that she hadn’t trusted me. But I knew what it was like, having problems with trust.
Did Emily think that she was the only woman with an abusive husband? I knew that such illusions were often part of the pattern of abuse. The husband makes the wife feel as if she’s alone in the world. But Emily was never alone. She had Nicky. She had work. She had me.
I said, “The guy that’s been following you . . .”
“Right. In a minute.” Emily held up her hand. “There are some things I need to say first. Stephanie, I don’t blame you. You thought that I was dead. I don’t even blame Sean, but I can’t forgive him for the things he did that gave me no choice but to leave Nicky. And you. I couldn’t tell anyone, not even you. I’m only glad that he didn’t turn his rage against you.”
It was a lot to process at once. Sean had never seemed like an angry person. Even after Mr. Prager’s visit, I did not see signs of the fury that so frightened Emily. Sean had always just seemed sad. But according to Emily, he was a skillful actor—and an evil one. It’s amazing how convincingly we can pretend to be something we’re not.
Sitting in the hotel bar, she told me how she’d had to work through her shock and sorrow. She’d been forced to survive the loss of her sister without being able to see Nicky, who would have been so helpful, so comforting with his love and warmth and sweetness. But she’d had to leave Nicky behind and go into hiding because she was so afraid of Sean and of what he might do to her.
I wanted another gin and tonic, but I had to drive all the way back and pick up Nicky and Miles.
“Sean will say I abandoned Nicky. He’ll claim that everything was my idea. He’ll make you testify for him. What choice will you have? He’ll blame it all on me, when he was the one who came up with the insurance scam. He was the one failing at work. His company was only too glad to put him on half-time, especially when they knew that it wouldn’t be great PR to fire a guy whose wife was missing and who had a little son. He believed he was doing it for me, because I wanted to do it. But that was a lie he told himself. Two million dollars wasn’t a fortune, but it was an attractive golden parachute for a guy who might lose his job.
“There wasn’t a single day when I wasn’t afraid that Sean would turn on me and take Nicky and ruin my life. You have to believe me, Stephanie.”
Suddenly, everything made sense: why Emily vanished and why I was the only one she had the courage to reach out to, why she appeared to Nicky before she tried to contact me.
It explained why Sean had so stubbornly refused to consider my suggestion that Emily might be alive. He knew that she was alive, which is why he’d tried to convince me that it was all in my imagination. He knew she was pretending to be dead. He wanted her to disappear and me kept in the dark. It was all part of his evil plan.
How could Sean do that to Nicky? His own son. Even when I had doubts about Sean, I never doubted that he was a loving father. My God, I’d left Miles with him when I went to Detroit. It scared me to think about that now.
I understood why Emily hid the fact that she was a twin. How excruciating it must have been, losing and finding and losing a sister. And now she’d lost her forever, just as she’d feared she would.
I’d believed that Emily was my best friend, but I hadn’t known her at all. Now I had to help her. She still seemed so lost, so damaged. For once, I had to take charge.
“The man who’s been following you,” I said. “Let’s talk about him.”
“Right,” she said. “I confronted him. I agreed to meet with him. Today, actually.” She looked at her watch. “How perfect. Stephanie, would you come with me to talk to him? Would you be there for support? I guess I should have asked you before . . .”
I considered it for a minute. Maybe it was a good idea to see Mr. Prager again, this time as a friend of Emily’s, this time to demonstrate that I was the trusted friend of a decent, loving family that had been having problems. They weren’t criminals! I wouldn’t have been friends with people who could commit criminal fraud. I would insist that things were going to work out, that everything had a simple and innocent explanation, that Mr. Prager’s investigation would turn up nothing illegal or even shady.
“Exactly when are you meeting him?” I asked Emily.
She checked her watch again, even though she just did. She was obviously nervous.
“In half an hour.”
“Where?” I said.
“Out in the parking lot. Trust me. Let’s have another drink.”
“In the parking lot?”
“You need to trust me. Can you trust me, Stephanie?”
I couldn’t even trust myself to speak. I nodded.
With half an hour to kill until our meeting with Mr. Prager, we sat in the bar and strategized. What should we do about Sean? Emily had some ideas. Some sounded—well, I guess you could call them vengeful. But others seemed reasonable. Let the punishment fit the crime. We had to be careful. But should we rule out the shock element in dealing with a liar and a bully like Sean?
I was the one who should have been in shock. The man I had lived with and fallen in love with—or almost fallen in love with—was a monster.
Now all the complicated and confusing things that Sean had done turned out to have simple and clear explanations. He’d wanted me on his side so he could enlist me as a character witness in the event that Emily resurfaced and wanted to tell the truth. You can never know anyone. People keep secrets. I’d let myself forget that all-important fact.
I trusted Emily. I believed her. I was so sorry for what she had been through. But she and I would survive. We and our beautiful sons would get through this and make a wonderful life for our kids and not dwell on the past. Together we would move on.
“All right,” she said. “Show time! Let’s go meet our friend Mr. Prager and have this delicate conversation.”
Emily paid the bill in cash, and we went outside. It was damp and chilly but bracing. Emily put on her gloves and a woolen hat that covered the top half of her face. As we crossed the parking lot, I felt as if we were two powerful cartoon characters—superheroines, superfriends—on our way to get justice, to speak the truth, to explain ourselves to a man investigating my friend for a crime she didn’t commit.
I recognized the car from across the lot, the car that had parked near our house. I felt strange and self-conscious as we approached it, almost as if I was performing. But for whom?
Mr. Prager was in the passenger seat.
“Look,” I said. “He’s sleeping.”
“He’s not sleeping,” said Emily.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“He’s dead,” she said. “Our friend is not waking up.”
“How do you know?” I said, a slight nausea creeping up on me.
“I killed him,” she said.
“This isn’t happening,” I said.
Nothing made any sense. If Emily was innocent, as she’d said in the bar, why had she killed him? All we had to do was talk to him. Explain things.
“Technically, it is happening,” she said. “This is as real as it gets.”
“Why?” I said.
“Because I couldn’t risk it. Because I didn’t think he would believe me. Because I was pretty sure that he wouldn’t believe me. I had one conversation with him, and I knew. Because I didn’t want to go to jail. Because I didn’t want to lose Nicky. What happens to him if Sean and I go to jail, Stephanie? Did you think that Nicky would be yours if Sean and I got sent away?”
I couldn’t look at her. How did she know that the thought had crossed my mind?
“Are those enough reasons for you, Stephanie? Or do you need more?”
I didn’t want to look, but I couldn’t stop myself from peering into the car. There was no blood, no indication of violence. Even though I knew he was dead, Mr. Prager really did look as if he was asleep.
“How did you do it?�
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“In my other life,” she said, “I got quite good with a hypodermic. I always knew where to get one, and I knew what to put in it. And I’m proud to say I still do. Our man OD’d. Who knew that Mr. Insurance Geek had a costly and unpleasant drug habit?”
There was an unsettling note in Emily’s voice—almost as if she was boasting. I thought of Miles, of Davis, of the life I loved. I was putting all that at risk. Implicating myself in a crime. A serious crime. A murder.
But what were my choices? Either I could run back to the hotel and turn Emily in, or I could get in my car and drive off. Or I could wait to see what happened. Or I could trust her, no matter what. I knew that I wasn’t thinking clearly, that I could hardly think at all. I was in no shape to make a major life decision. But I opted for believing in my friend, for taking things one step at a time and seeing what happened next.
Emily moved so that she was standing between me and the car, blocking my view of the dead Mr. Prager. That was considerate of her, I thought.
She said, “This is where I really need your help. A simple favor, okay?”
“Okay,” I whispered.
“We’re going for a little drive. You’re going to follow me in your car. And I’m going to drive Mr. Prager in his car to a secluded pull-off I found, just up the way, on a back road that has hardly any traffic. Not too far. When you see me turn off the road and head up a slight ridge—I’m going to be driving very fast so it looks as if Mr. Prager was driving and lost control and veered off the road—you need to stop and park. Park directly over my tire tracks. In case anyone drives by, which probably no one will, they won’t notice the tracks veering off the road and think something is wrong.”
Emily’s breathing had sped up, and she looked flushed, excited. If I saw her from a distance and didn’t know what she was talking about, I’d think, What a happy woman!
She said, “I’ll have stopped on top of the ridge. On the other side is a steep cliff. A chasm, really. The incline goes more or less straight down. No residents for miles around. No chance of collateral damage, no one watching us when we push Mr. Prager’s car over the ridge. Best case, explosion, flames, everything incinerated, burnt clean. Just enough forensic evidence to ID Mr. Prager. Worst case, the car sits there until someone finds it on the other side of the ridge. Which reminds me . . . please tell me you brought Sean’s hairbrush.”