A Simple Favor

by Darcey Bell

  Carrington said, “This has been reposted on Facebook. There have been hundreds of likes. It’s gone viral, as they say. Mildly viral. Treatable, perhaps.” His chuckle was dry and mirthless. “The so-called truth is beside the point.”

  “Dear God,” I said.

  “Dear God indeed,” said Carrington.

  “What does all this mean? For me?”

  “It means that even as we speak, somebody is figuring out if they can prosecute you. And if they decide to do that, things could happen rather quickly.”

  “Bloody hell,” I said.

  “Bloody hell indeed.” Carrington had a habit of waiting till someone else cursed and then repeating it.

  He said, “You’re lucky that I like you. And that I believe you, except for the part about not knowing about the insurance scheme, which doesn’t bother me, myself, though it would have generated some unfortunate publicity for the company if you’d been caught. Meanwhile I have an idea. We need someone to handle the sale of a plot of land on the Irish coast where a client is planning to build a retreat. Not a big client, not a big retreat, maybe a bit of a tax dodge, but everything perfectly legal. Perhaps you could arrange it. A temporary relocation. The golf in that part of the world is supposed to be outstanding.

  “And as you said: Distance and time. As soon as matters are sorted out, we can work on the question of your return.”

  There were several things that Carrington didn’t need to say. I was a British citizen. No one was going to extradite me for suspicion of spousal abuse or assisting a suicide or even attempted fraud. The insurance company would be thrilled not to have to pay. Prager could move on to another assignment.

  Carrington was a good man, a nice man. I recognized his offer. The rope thrown to the drowning. The rescue from the burning building.

  Carrington said, “The position would start immediately.” He couldn’t look at me, which was just as well.

  “Excellent,” I said. “Thank you. Really and truly. Thank you.”

  “Once is sufficient,” Carrington said.

  I knew that it was temporary. I needed distance and time. I’d go away and come back and get Nicky. His mother and I could still work things out in a more or less civilized way.

  Civilized? What did that word even mean when I was talking about Emily, my wife, the woman I’d loved and thought I knew. What I knew now was that, most likely, she wasn’t done with me. Did she still have some evil plan in store to punish me for what she’d imagined I’d done. I couldn’t help thinking that she wouldn’t rest until she’d made me suffer more than I already had.

  There was nothing to do but wait. To hold my breath and wait.

  43

  Emily

  Sean rolled over, in an email. He’d been assigned to a project on the coast of Ireland. He didn’t know how long he’d be there. It was a great opportunity. He asked me to give Nicky all his love. He said he would be in touch about Nicky as soon as he knew how long he’d be gone and when he was coming back. It was very surprising. I thought that he’d fight harder.

  But I wasn’t complaining. It was what I’d wanted. I couldn’t imagine a better way for things to have turned out.

  There was one bad night. Maybe the fear was all in my mind. But no one could have told me that then.

  It was the first night after Sean moved out. I’d moved back into the house. I’d spent the day restoring my home to its pristine pre-Stephanie condition, throwing out the disgusting teas with which she’d filled the pantry, restocking my wine cooler, dumping the repulsive “Bless Our Happy Home” cross-stitched pillow she’d had the gall to bring over from her house and put on my couch, and arranging for the priceless design pieces and my personal items to come out of storage.

  Then it was only Nicky and me. The two of us. We had a delicious dinner of crusty, perfect mac and cheese I’d made from scratch. Nicky chattered happily. The kitchen was warm. I’d been living like a hunted animal, but I was again a human being. I’d risked everything. I’d played hard. I’d won.

  I knew that I had never been happier. I vowed to make this last, to do everything in my power to overcome the impulse to tear my life up into tiny scraps and fling the pieces in the air. I promised myself that I would make it work, that I would never get restless again, that I wouldn’t let everyday things bore or annoy or scare me, that I’d stop trying to control the truth and instead live in the truth.

  For as long as I could.

  That first night, I’d put Nicky to bed, and I was finishing the Highsmith novel I’d started all that time ago. Those Who Walk Away. I assume my subconscious picked that right off the shelf.

  Maybe reading that particular book alone in the house (except for Nicky) was a mistake. I’d just read a spooky part about the vengeful father of the dead woman following the son-in-law, whom he plans to kill. The older man lurks in shadowy alleys of Venice like the creepy red dwarf in that sexy horror film with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland.

  I was reading on the couch when I got the feeling that someone was out there. Watching me from the woods. Maybe I only thought that because I’d been the one watching the house. Poor Stephanie. I’d tormented her. What a waste of energy. Neither she nor Sean had been worth it.

  I wanted to think I knew what a person might sense if someone was out there. I knew I would have been more aware than Stephanie and Sean had been. I’d been the watcher, I was being watched.

  I heard a noise. A rustling in the woods. Sean was out there. I could feel it. I sensed his presence. His anger. His malevolence. Was he going to come in the house and try to steal Nicky back? He would convince himself that I deserved it.

  I heard whistling in the distance. The sound got louder—then stopped. Nearby.

  Did Sean whistle? Why did that tune sound familiar? Maybe it wasn’t Sean at all—but a stranger, a killer. The angry ghost of Mr. Prager.

  I wanted to look outside, but I was afraid. I turned off the lights and peered into the moonless, opaque night. Then I was afraid to be in the house with the lights off, so I turned them on. Suddenly I hated having so many windows. Why had we thought that we needed so much light?

  I could have put Nicky in the car and driven somewhere safe. To Stephanie’s, as much as it would have cost me to ask for her company. Her protection. Maybe I’d caught her paranoia, imagining a vengeful husband.

  But finally, waking Nicky and leaving seemed like so much trouble . . . for nothing. I decided to take one of the sleeping pills Sean left. He’d never needed them when he was with me! But to be fair, I hadn’t yet disappeared and died, and he hadn’t moved someone else into my place, and I hadn’t threatened him with my alternate versions of the truth.

  I lay down next to Nicky. Sean would have to wake me first if he tried to take my son.

  Just as I was falling asleep I remembered Stephanie saying that Sean’s pills could make someone psychotic. Maybe he’d gone insane. Maybe he’d lost it—and he really was out there.

  Or maybe I had. I’d taken one of those psycho pills. I was wide awake, my heart slamming against my rib cage. I took another pill and passed out and slept until Nicky woke me the next morning.

  Daylight streamed in through the windows. I was in Nicky’s bed. I’d fallen asleep with all my clothes on. Sunlight splashed onto the bedroom floor.

  “Good morning, Mom,” Nicky said.

  I kissed his damp, smooth forehead, and we snuggled under the covers. It was bliss.

  I want Nicky to have a father. I’ll stay in touch with Sean. Meanwhile I’ll file for divorce. For full custody. Just in case. These international transatlantic lawsuits can take ages to settle.

  I don’t know what Stephanie expected from me. Perhaps she imagined we’d become real best friends now. That we’d pool our resources and children and live together in some experimental cooperative-kibbutz kind of thing, dividing up childcare and laundry.

  That was never going to happen. Even living with Sean would have been better than that.

>   I went back to Dennis Nylon and negotiated a substantial raise which I used to hire a full-time nanny. I persuaded Dennis to support a foundation that rescues and shelters street kids, and we named it after my sister. I’ve also worked out more flextime that I can spend with Nicky and that allows me to work part-time from home. I suppose that sometimes you have to leave to make people appreciate you, though this approach can backfire as I discovered with Sean.

  I never would have imagined that I could be satisfied with a life like the one I’m leading now. Home, motherhood, work—minus that terrifying boredom, that unstoppable urge to cause trouble, to make something dramatic and awful happen for myself and for everyone around me. I’m doing a pretty good job of fending off that sense that I’m not fully alive unless I’m in control, in flight, or in danger. Maybe all the suffering I’ve been through—losing my sister, being separated from Nicky—has taught me a lesson and brought me some sort of wisdom. Or maybe not. It remains to be seen how long this truce with my demons can last. But for now it seems to be holding. Who knows how long I can keep this up—or what the future will bring.

  Nicky and Miles are still friendly, but they don’t have many playdates. Our new nanny, Sarah, drops Nicky off and picks him up at Stephanie’s house.

  I’m in occasional contact with Sean. I plan to set up a time in the (not-so-near) future when he can fly over and see Nicky, but that will have to wait until I feel that he is sufficiently sorry for what he did, for forcing me to disappear and to pretend that I was dead—and for contributing to my twin sister’s death.

  I haven’t yet decided how—and how much—I plan to make Sean suffer. At the very least I still want him to suffer as much as I have.

  I like being back at Dennis Nylon. Everyone there seems glad to have me back after all my adventures. I like being home to have dinner with Nicky or at least to put him to bed. I like my privacy, my solitude.

  I couldn’t be more pleased with the way things have worked out.

  44

  Stephanie's Blog

  All Is Well

  Hi, moms!

  All’s well that ends well. Though of course motherhood never ends as long as we and our kids are on this earth—and it lasts longer than that, as I’ve blogged about in the past.

  Emily and I are neighbors again, raising our sons to be the happiest, healthiest little people we can. Sean is out of the country, and it’s not clear when (or if) he’ll return. I assume, though the details of this are beyond me, that he might be facing some kind of legal trouble when (and if) he comes back. And knowing Emily, I’m sure she plans to make him pay—pay dearly—for what he’s done.

  I don’t see Emily as much as I’d like. She’s working so hard and being such a great mom, making up for lost time. But friendships wax and wane, and I know a time will come when we’ll again hang out on her big, comfy couch, if she still has it. Miles tells me that Nicky has some new stuff in his house, different from when we lived there. I don’t press him for details. There are some things, plenty of things, I don’t want to think about.

  Miles is doing splendidly at school, Nicky trailing only slightly behind.

  We’ve all been through a lot. But little Nicky is the one my heart goes out to. He paid the highest price. Losing his mother and getting her back and then losing his dad. How will he ever learn to trust?

  The only comfort is how strong kids are. How brave and tough and resilient. Nicky will survive this and grow from it—and grow up into an even more thoughtful, compassionate, wise adult. A more interesting person.

  There will come a time when each one of us will be able to move on and put this behind us, when we learn to live with our secrets, to value them. Because they are a part of us too.

  I couldn’t have gotten through this challenging time without the love and support of the moms community.

  God bless you, moms everywhere. Keep strong. Stay beautiful. And if you have a story like this, I encourage you to post it.

  More soon.

  Love,

  Stephanie

  45

  Emily

  A month or so after I moved back into my own house, a police car crawled up the driveway and stopped in front of our door.

  I told myself: This means nothing.

  Two plainclothes cops got out and rang the doorbell.

  The woman extended her hand first. “I’m Detective Meany,” she said. “And this is my partner, Detective Fortas.”

  I said, “I’m Emily Nelson.”

  “Yes, we know,” said Detective Meany.

  “Would you like to come in?” I said. I had nothing to hide.

  They came in and sat on the new couch I’d bought to replace the one Stephanie sat on.

  “I don’t think we ever officially met,” said Detective Fortas. “But we worked on your case. We met your husband—”

  “My about-to-be-former husband is in the UK at the moment.”

  “I see,” said Detective Meany. “That probably shouldn’t have happened. Someone will probably need to interview him at some point . . .”

  I was curious to know at what “point” that would be. But I kept my curiosity in check. I assumed I would find out, sooner rather than later.

  “Look,” I said, “I want to say . . . I’m so sorry I put you to all that trouble. It wasn’t entirely my fault. My husband worked himself into a frenzy, pushed the panic button when I went off the radar. But all I needed was a little time off to mourn my sister’s death. I really needed to unplug, to get way off the grid. It was a huge miscommunication that unfortunately intersected with an insurance policy I’d forgotten Sean had taken out.” I smiled.

  “I remember,” said Detective Fortas. “We also interviewed a young woman, a friend, the mother of one of your son’s friends . . .”

  “Good memory,” I said. “That would have been Stephanie. Not my least neurotic friend, if you know what I mean.”

  Detective Meany smiled. She’d met Stephanie. She knew what I meant. The two cops laughed mirthlessly, as if they weren’t sure why they were laughing or if they should laugh at all.

  I said, “I don’t mean to be rude, but can I ask why you are here?”

  “Just a conversation,” said Detective Fortas. “A preliminary conversation. Over the last few days, someone found a wrecked and burned-out car not far from the interstate. Not that far from here. And in the car were the cremains of a man we believe to have been a Mr. Isaac Prager. This house was on the list of calls he made in the weeks before he disappeared. And naturally we connected this with your apparent disappearance, which, as we said, we investigated.”

  “How amazing!” I said. “What a coincidence!” I was flirting with both of them. I needed them to believe me.

  Detective Meany said, “There wasn’t much evidence left in the wreckage. Most likely, it was an accident. But there are some suspicious and . . . intriguing aspects here. And they did find a piece of jewelry at the scene that seems unlikely to have belonged to Mr. Prager.”

  She handed me a photograph. I knew exactly what I was going to see.

  Of course, I was aware that I’d lost Sean’s mother’s ring. But because I’d gotten out of the habit of wearing it, several days had passed before I noticed it missing. And the funny thing was I didn’t care. It had only belonged to my sister for . . . I didn’t want to think how long. Before that, it had been mine for a while. And before that, it had belonged to Sean’s mother. Now, when I thought about the ring, I heard Sean’s mother’s maddening voice, whining and complaining about her life as she did the dinner dishes in that smelly, beastly kitchen.

  I’d told myself not to worry about where I lost the ring. There were plenty of places it could have been beside the spot where I pushed a dead man’s car into a ravine. It seemed unlikely that the ring would be there, especially because I had worked so hard to convince myself (and Stephanie) that the whole thing had never happened. No crime, no consequences.

  I must have taken off my gloves after we finis
hed pushing his car. But I didn’t remember doing that. A lot of things about that day were blurry, difficult to recall with any certainty. I’d done my best not to think about it, and until now I’d succeeded.

  “Funny thing,” said Detective Meany. “My partner has a phenomenal—superhuman—memory for details. So when this image came up on the screen, this ring . . . my partner remembered a similar ring in the autopsy report. When they found the corpse that they thought was yours.”

  We both looked at Detective Fortas as if to see what wondrous kind of human being would have mental powers like that. But all we saw was a rather dull-looking fellow with a spray of pimples on his forehead and a wispy blond mustache.

  He said, “The ring that they found in Michigan and, we understand, they gave your husband, in the case—”

  “I know which ring you mean.” I heard myself talking through clenched teeth. The cops were smart enough to remember a picture of a ring they saw months ago but not smart enough to realize in advance that the “corpse” they’d mentioned was my suicided sister. My beloved twin. Only now, too late, they got it. Detective Fortas blushed an unattractive pink.

  “We’re sorry for your loss,” said Detective Meany.

  “That’s all right,” I said. But it wasn’t. And they knew it.

  “The funny thing is,” said Detective Fortas, “I remembered the first time we interviewed your husband. And your friend. And they were describing you. And both of them mentioned this ring.” He jabbed at the printout. “We’re pretty sure it’s this ring.”

  It was crucial not to hesitate. Not to flinch. Not to falter.

  I said, “My husband gave it to me when we got engaged. Later, my sister stole it to pay for drugs. Which is how it turned up in the lake.”

  Were they sorry for my loss? I was sorrier than they were.

  I said, “Let me ask you something. When you talked to my husband, in the midst of that . . . misunderstanding about my disappearance . . . you said you talked to him and a friend . . . Stephanie.”