Under My Skin

by Lisa Unger

  Alvaro shifts toward me. “I wish I could tell him that I finally understand. He was always the smart one.”

  I swallow back my sorrow.

  “I’m happy for you, and for Maura.” It’s the truth, despite the pain. “Jack would have been, too.”

  That seems to please him, something lightening in his gaze. But this is not why I came to see him.

  “Was there ever anything that happened—on assignment, or when you were out without me?” I ask after a beat. “Can you think of any reason that someone would want to hurt Jack?”

  He looks away, then bows his head and looks down at his folded hands. When he looks up again, that softness is gone.

  “Everybody loved Jack. Who would ever want to hurt him?”

  It feels like a dodge, a nonanswer.

  “Someone did. Someone did want to hurt him and now he’s gone.”

  He runs a hand over the crown of his head.

  “The detective was here, asking more questions—questions like yours, about people we knew and things we might have done even long ago,” he says. “But I told him and I’ll tell you, there was nothing like that. Jack—you know—he was always a straight-up guy.”

  The phone in his pocket rings, he takes it out but declines the call, keeps his attention on me.

  “When you went to see Sarah,” I say. “You brought her a photograph I’ve never seen.”

  He nods, a shadow crossing his face. “Yes, just a picture of the three of us, one of the last nights we were all together.”

  “Where was it taken?”

  He shrugs, wrings his hands. “Some club downtown.”

  “Morpheus?”

  “Yeah, maybe something like that.”

  “Who took the photo?” I ask. “Who was with you that night?”

  He rises, issues an uncomfortable little laugh. “The waitress, I suppose. Those nights were pretty debauched, Poppy. I hate to say it. They’re all kind of blurred, run together a bit.”

  There is a gallery wall of black-and-white pictures behind him—all of him in various shoot locations around the world, with other photographers, accepting an award, one of Jack and him in a blind photographing a wall of parrots in Guatemala.

  “That club—it was in my dream. It means something.”

  He looks at me oddly, an expression I can’t read. “Maybe he mentioned it to you? It was a while ago that we went there.”

  It makes a kind of sense. Maybe long ago, he did mention that place and my subconscious just held on to it. That’s how dreams work, details from your life, even things you’ve forgotten get woven into their fabric.

  “You said something odd to Sarah. That you wish Jack hadn’t been such a good guy. What does that mean?”

  He’s still standing, carrying some tension now in his shoulders. “Did I say that? Maybe I just meant that he was too good, you know? Doesn’t it seem like the best people get taken from us?”

  It does seem like that—my father, Jack. The rest of us are just left to muddle through without them, to try to make sense of the world in their terrible absence.

  “What are you doing, Poppy?” he asks softly. “What are you looking for?”

  I’m looking for Jack, for myself.

  “Answers,” I say. “I want to know what happened to my husband. It’s been a year and we’re still no closer.”

  “I wish I had those answers for you,” he says. He bows his head. “But I don’t.”

  Another dead end.

  Alvaro disappears into the darkroom.

  “I have something for you, too,” he calls through the door.

  He returns with a print of Jack and me on a dance floor. Jack’s wearing a tuxedo, and I’m in a gauzy dress that drapes nearly to the ground. My hand is in his, his arm firmly at the small of my back. He’s whispering something in my ear, a look of mischief on his face. My smile is bright and wide, head tipped back.

  Where were we? The upstate wedding of our friends Bill and Claire Simpson, hence Jack’s rare formal attire. He complained miserably about the black-tie dress code, but he was devastatingly handsome that night. I’m literally swooning, I told him. We drank too much champagne and danced like idiots, had a blast with Alvaro and his then girlfriend—can’t even remember her name, some shy blonde. This was maybe six months before Jack died. Before the second miscarriage, and all the fighting and tears that followed.

  “This photo says everything about the two of you—how you loved each other, how you laughed. Look how relaxed, how intimate you are. His eyes shining. Your smile. The way he holds you.”

  We both regard it. A sliver of our time together, so long ago—or so it seems. I ache for it, for him. I haven’t thought about that wedding in ages. How happy Bill and Claire were, how beautiful was the weather, the venue. It was a wonderful evening, not boring or stilted like weddings can be. It was easy and light; we truly had fun. Was it the last time I felt so free and easy, before all the heartbreak that would follow?

  “It was just a moment.” I feel oddly guilty that he thought that one joyous moment typified our life together. Other moments that followed between us were not so lovely. Not something you’d post on Facebook, or put in a frame.

  Alvaro puts a heavy hand on my shoulder.

  “But our lives, they’re just a series of these moments. Some people never have one like that with anyone.”

  God. I miss Jack. So damn much. I want to reach through that picture, go back and tell myself: Hold on to him, don’t let him go. Don’t fight over things that can’t be changed. Don’t waste time.

  “I was jealous,” Alvaro says when I stay silent. “Not sure I even realized it. But I was. I wanted what he had. His talent, the love you two shared.”

  More surprises. His dark, disapproving stare; his eyes always on me. It felt like judgment, dislike, but it was envy.

  “After my miscarriage, you told him that he dodged a bullet,” I say.

  He has the decency to hang his head. “I regret that,” he says softly. “I’m an asshole. I talk too much, say things I don’t mean.”

  I regret things, too. So many things.

  “I’ve made a lot of mistakes,” he says, voice heavy. “There are things I wish I could—undo.”

  Staring at the photo, my gaze moves to the other couples dancing, lights glittering overhead, a band playing. The image has a ghostly aura, cast in the shadow of everything that came after it. Mac and Layla dance beside us, both stiff, unsmiling. Layla’s eyes glance off into the distance. I find myself following the line of her gaze, scanning the other faces. Ben’s there, dancing with a willowy brunette. And someone else.

  Standing on the edge of the dance floor, clearly watching the dance floor, a slender woman with dark hair, piercing black eyes. Her expression is blank, unreadable. She’s still and grim, alone among the gleeful crowd, people chatting, laughing, dancing all around her.

  “Who is that?” I ask Alvaro, showing him the image.

  Alvaro looks at it, gives a slow shake of his head; there’s something strange on his face, the shade of a smile.

  “Not sure,” he says. “I don’t know her.”

  But I do. The woman on the computer screen in my dream. The bloody woman in my conference room. Elena. My breath is suddenly thick in my throat. Her face. I reach for it; it’s right there.

  Who is she?

  When I look back at Alvaro, he’s watching me. Is there a dark glee in his eyes? But then whatever I saw—it’s gone.

  “What is it?” he asks. “You recognize her?”

  There are footfalls slow and heavy behind me. The front door. Alvaro locked it when we came back here. The room feels small and hot. Is there another exit? Another way out. There must be.

  “Who else is here?” I ask him.

  “No one,” he answers with a frown.

 
But the footfalls grow louder, heavier, until finally he comes around the corner. Jack. The front of his sweatshirt is soaked with blood. His glasses are cracked.

  “Stop asking questions, Poppy,” warns my husband. “I promise you. You don’t want the answers.”

  He’s not there. A dream. A microsleep. Hypnagogia. I wipe the sweat from my brow, try to calm my jangling nerves and look away. Just breathe, Dr. Nash would surely say.

  “You don’t know this woman?” I ask Alvaro again. I don’t believe him, though I’m not sure why.

  “Do you know her?”

  I do. I should. This woman from my sleeping and waking dreams. Who was she to my husband? Why is she standing on the edge of our life, watching us?

  “She looks—familiar.”

  I push in deep like I used to when I was first trying to recover my memories. I sink back into the leather of the couch and dip my head into my hands. But everything shifts and swirls. She’s a ghost, there and gone. Just like Jack. Just like me.

  Someone I used to know.

  When I look back up, Jack is gone again.

  “Poppy, what can I do?” Alvaro’s face is a mask of concern. “Can I call someone?”

  You can tell the truth, I think. You can stop pretending to care about me. You can leave me alone. But I don’t say any of those things, because they make no sense. I don’t know if he’s my friend or my enemy. I never have known.

  “Can I keep this photo?”

  “Of course,” he says. He takes it from me, slips it into an envelope. “It’s yours.”

  I get up and start to move toward the door.

  “Stay awhile,” he says. “Let me call a car.”

  But I’m already weaving through the photographs, heading for the door. An image I recognize as Jack’s, a young woman in a burka, her dark sad eyes visible through the black netting, She’s hidden, deeply veiled, but she’s there looking out into the world. It’s the last thing I remember seeing.

  22

  The sun is dipping low when I find myself back in front of my apartment building. My reflection in the glass doors stares back at me, and I must confront the fact that I have no memory of the last couple of hours. I left Alvaro’s gallery and just kept moving. I remember my head spinning, trying to process what Grayson told me about Noah, the photograph Alvaro gave me. How the information twisted and tangled up with my grief, with the shadow on the edges of my life, with my conversation with Merlinda, the pack in my tote. There was a twister inside me, turning, shredding, filling my head with its roar. And then there was nothing.

  Dr. Nash: Our psyches are only designed to take so much. We all have a breaking point.

  The clock in the lobby says it’s almost five, that’s almost a full workday since I walked out of the gallery. Where have the hours gone?

  Before Jack, I would just head out in the morning with my camera and wander. I’d walk until I got tired, then get on the train. I’ve explored the city this way, been places most young female Manhattanites don’t go alone—the ruin of the South Bronx with its wide streets, crumbling towers and fields of rubble; the riot of Spanish Harlem, the avenues always crowded, legs dangling from fire escapes, music pouring from windows; the Meatpacking District with its daytime aura of desertion, where transsexual prostitutes used to rule after midnight, stalking in heels beneath yellow lamplight, and if you wanted to visit a bondage club, that was the place. You can go anywhere with a camera in your hand; you’re invisible.

  The city will hide you. You can lose yourself inside its grid, walk its streets endlessly. Thirteen miles from tip to tip, you can travel through time, through the world. You will pass thousands of people—the wealthiest and the poorest, the most successful and the most broken, the most beautiful, and the wretched—and still be completely alone. With a camera in your hand, you are recognizable for what you are—an outsider, an observer, not part of anything and so you fade into the scenery.

  I was always happiest there, in the space of the observer, before Jack. It’s so much easier to stand apart from the chaos and document it, attached to nothing. As a child, if I just stayed quiet, I could move around unnoticed. My father always bent over those robotics texts, my mother zoned out in front of the television—soap operas and old movies. This was before the days of the helicopter parent, where every movement is monitored, every second cataloged. If I didn’t make noise, if I didn’t want anything, they let me be. I could watch them, their expressions, their unconscious gestures, body language; people are more knowable when they think they’re unobserved.

  Poppy the spy, my mother used to call me. It’s true. Stay quiet, stay hidden, so that you can see.

  I have a sense now—a memory of street noise, voices, the squeal and rumble of the train, the ache in my feet—that I’ve been doing that today, wandering like I used to. I reach for my phone, to see what pictures I’ve taken, but it’s gone dead, the screen blank. I feel a little jolt of alarm. Grayson told me to be easy to find; Layla is going to be worried.

  You forgot your tether, Jack used to tease about my smartphone. How will Big Brother know where you are? How will he communicate with you? He carried an old flip phone—no email, limited texts, grainy pictures. He’d leave it when he went out, or let it go dead. When did we give up our freedom? he’d ask when I complained.

  I push through the glass doors into the blissful warmth of the lobby, realizing for the first time that I’m chilled to the bone. As I near the elevators, I hear the doorman call after me, his footfalls heavy and quick behind me on the marble floor. But I let the doors close without waiting to see what he wants. I don’t want to talk to anyone; I can’t.

  In the hallway, there’s music, a faint strain of something classical; there’s the smell of something savory cooking. When I push through the front door, I realize that all of it is coming from my apartment. Oh, no.

  “Poppy? Is that you?”

  Mom.

  My mother sits primly in the living room, rises when I enter; Layla stands by the counter, arms folded across her middle. Mac stands behind her, an arm on her shoulder. There’s also a man dressed all in black; he digs his hands into his pockets and offers me a polite nod of greeting. He’s a stranger, but I have a pretty good idea who he is. Anger bubbles up from my middle.

  God, this is the last thing I want.

  “What is this?”

  “Poppy.” Layla moves over to me from her place by the tall windows. She puts her hands on my arms. “Where have you been? We’ve been—so worried.”

  I can see it etched in her face, the lines at her eyes, the flat of her mouth. I look over to Mac, who offers me a kind, worried smile. If he’s left the office to be here, Layla must have been a wreck.

  “Why?” I ask. “Did something happen?”

  She draws back a bit at my tone. “We—we couldn’t reach you.”

  “When did I give up my freedom?” I ask. My voice is sharper, angrier than I intended. But my anger is hot, to the boiling point. “Do I answer to you?”

  Layla steps back, hurt and anger coloring her cheeks.

  “Poppy,” says Mac softly. He moves toward me. “We were worried. Really worried.”

  “There’s a history, dear. Don’t act like we don’t have reason.” My mother, in her most annoying “be reasonable” voice. She looks slim and well turned out, as ever. She’s wearing her ash-blond bob a bit longer and it becomes her, highlighting the cream of her skin, her high cheekbones, how well she’s aging.

  “And you have a stalker,” says Layla, coming to stand beside her. Damn, they look so alike, it’s weird. Hands on hips, same expression of concern, worry. They could be mother and daughter.

  “Who’s this?” I gesture toward the stranger by the couch, who is watching the encounter, head cocked, taking in all the details.

  My voice bounces back to me, too sharp. Where is all this anger comi
ng from?

  “This,” says Layla softly, “is Tom. The man we told you about. He runs Black Dog Security and Crisis Management. He’s going to help us figure this thing out.”

  “What?” I move a bit closer to her. “I told you no, Layla. I don’t want this.”

  “We’re going to take care of you, Poppy,” says Mac. His voice is soft and pleading. “We owe that to you, to Jack.”

  “Mac and I are handling this,” says Layla. “All you have to do is come home, be safe.”

  Layla’s doing that thing she does, drawing back her shoulders and sticking out her chin. Mac and I. It drips with the condescension that comes, apparently, with great wealth. I have the means, it says, to bend the world, bend you to my will. She wears it well, as if she’s always worn it. And maybe, in a way, she has. Even though she comes from poverty and abuse, Layla has always been powerful. She wouldn’t have survived otherwise. Now, she’s put herself up high, where no one can hurt her.

  “I don’t want you to handle it.”

  “Poppy,” she says, her voice going cool. “We’re trying to help you. Where have you been?”

  I don’t want to tell her that I don’t know. I can’t tell these people that. My mom is watching me, her expression gentle, worried. She looks a little confused, too, like she’s not sure that what they’re doing is right. I move away from them, rage tickling at the back of my throat. I plug my dead phone in; it’s the only way I’ll be able to piece together my recent past. I decided last night to take pictures, to document. I imagine I stayed with that program during the last couple of hours. I hope I did.

  It stays dead, though, in the way it does when the battery is really and truly run down. It will be a few minutes before it comes back, even plugged in. I take a few deep breaths, and everyone is quiet, staring.