“It’s fine,” I told her. “I like dogs.”
“We’re trying to teach her not to jump on people, but maybe that ship has sailed.”
I pet the dog’s head cautiously. I wanted to show that I was, in fact, fond of dogs, but I didn’t want her to think I would encourage bad behavior.
“What did you say her name was?”
“Flower,” she said, rolling her eyes. “That’s what happens when you let a two-year-old name a dog.”
“I think it’s cute.”
“I think so, too,” she said, and laughed. “Come on in.”
She wore a black linen dress and no shoes. Her legs were not shaved. She apologized for the boxes spread out across the floor of the living room. The dining room was cordoned off with plastic and tape while a crew of men painted it a pretty bluish green. I waved at them awkwardly.
Katherine took me upstairs. Flower trotted after us, whining quietly. Though the steps creaked, there was something very appealing, I had to admit, about a spiral staircase. Good bones, I imagined the real estate agent telling them.
First, she showed me Ruby’s room. The walls were white, painted with animals: lions, tigers, pandas, cows, cats, chickens, and polar bears. I wondered who had painted them. They didn’t quite look professionally done. There was a rocking chair by the window. Katherine gestured toward it.
“Ruby likes to be rocked before she goes to sleep, and that’s usually when we read to her.” There was a white wooden bookshelf in the shape of a dollhouse. I recognized some of the books I had liked as a child. Ruby’s bed was made of white wood, with a pink-and-white-striped coverlet. At least a dozen dolls and stuffed animals were arranged neatly by the pillows.
“She loves dolls. We tried to raise her sort of, you know, gender-neutral. We bought her a plastic tool kit. She dumped all the tools out and wore it as a purse. What can you do? Her dress-up kit is over there, that little trunk by the bed. You might be subjected to some royal tea parties. I hope that’s OK.”
“That’s great. Imaginative play is so important for kids.”
Katherine raised her eyebrows at me, and then smiled.
“I agree, actually. My husband wants her to spend all day running around in the sun, but that’s not the kind of child she is. She’d much rather be putting on a play, doing some kind of art project, that kind of stuff.”
It was the first time she mentioned Blake. I felt a dull pressure at the back of my skull, but I continued to nod politely. She led me to a slightly smaller room next to Ruby’s.
“This one would be yours, if you decide to come work for us. You can decorate it however you want, of course. Only downside is you have to share a bathroom with Ruby.”
“I’m sure I’ll survive,” I said, brightly. I wanted to sound as cheerful and amenable as possible without revealing how desperately I wanted the job. If you decide to come work for us, she had said, as if she had already made up her mind to hire me, but I wasn’t sure.
“My husband and I sleep down there,” she said, pointing to a closed door at the end of a narrow hallway. “Let’s go back downstairs.”
She showed me around the kitchen, living room, dining room, and playroom. “Everything’s a mess right now, but it’ll all come together soon. We won’t be living in chaos for much longer, I promise.”
“I’m sure it’ll be gorgeous when it’s done,” I said, and then kicked myself for being so obsequious. I felt the pressure in my skull again. But Katherine smiled at me. Maybe she was convinced.
“And here’s the backyard,” she said, leading me outside. “This is really what convinced us to buy this house. I’m sure you’ll see why.”
It was an expanse of perfect green, interrupted by only a few trees. Katherine led me to the end of the—field? It was far too big to be called a lawn—where there was a thin brook.
“The water is so clean, you can drink from it. Here, try.”
She cupped her hands and filled them with water, and held them to my face. I drank, obediently.
“Wow,” I said. “It’s like a children’s story.” It actually was.
“I get nervous about all these rocks, of course,” she said. “It’s not quite deep enough to swim in, but you can certainly wade around. Ruby likes that.”
“Where is she?” I asked.
“Playdate. She’ll be home soon. I thought the two of you could play together for a little bit while I do some gardening, see how you get along. Does that sound good?”
“That’s perfect.”
She led me back inside. We drank green tea out of big white mugs, sitting on the back porch. “We’ll have nice wicker chairs out here soon, I promise,” she told me.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. Was she trying to impress me? I told her about what I’d studied in college, and about working at the nursery school.
She asked about my parents. I answered carefully. My father, I told her, was a research scientist. I didn’t really understand his work, but it had something to do with diabetes. My mother had been a lawyer, and then a stay-at-home-mom, and now she was considering going back to work. Katherine nodded and didn’t ask any further questions. She wasn’t interrogating me, of course. She just wanted to know that I came from a nice family.
We heard a car pull up in the driveway.
“That must be our girl,” she said, standing up. The way she said our girl tugged at something in my brain. “You can just put your mug in the sink. I’ll deal with it later.”
A woman, presumably the mother of Ruby’s playdate, brought her to the front door. She and Katherine spoke as Flower covered Ruby in kisses. Ruby’s hair was almost the same color as Flower’s fur. It was hard to tell where the girl ended and the dog began. I stood off to the side, like an idiot.
“Oh!” said Katherine. “Amy, this is Luna. Luna, Amy.” The woman and I shook hands.
“I better get going,” she said. “Ruby was an angel, as always. I’ll see you around!”
Katherine closed the door behind her.
“Ruby,” she said. “Can you say hi to Luna?”
Ruby gazed up at me. Her eyes were surprisingly dark.
“Hi,” she said.
“Stand up, please. Be polite.”
Ruby stood up. She was wearing shorts and a T-shirt with a sequined butterfly. “Hi,” she said again, more warily.
“Luna’s going to play with you while Mommy does some work. Is that OK?”
Ruby nodded.
“Why don’t you show Luna some of your books and toys?”
“OK,” said Ruby. She had a funny, solemn way of talking. “I will show you where they live,” she said to me. I allowed her to hold my hand as she led me up the spiral staircase. Children love to feel that they are in charge. I turned around to look at Katherine, who winked and gave me a thumbs-up.
“This is Elizabeth,” said Ruby, holding up the biggest of her dolls.
“Is Elizabeth your favorite?” I asked.
“No, but she’s the oldest.”
We went through all the toys on her bed. They each had names.
“This is Billy,” she said, pointing to a teddy bear. He was the most worn of all the toys. “My dad used to be Billy’s father, but then he gave him to me, so now I’m his father.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at that. It was so sweet. But I didn’t want Ruby to think I was laughing at her, so I said: “Wow! May I hold him?”
She considered for a moment. “No. But you can hold Moon Cat.”
I held Moon Cat. This went on for about an hour.
“Ruby! Luna!” Katherine called from downstairs.
“It is probably time for dinner,” Ruby explained generously.
“Maybe!” I said. “Let’s go find out.”
Katherine was at the kitchen table, slicing cucumbers into delicate circles. A tall man with a beard and very pale blue eyes was sitting next to her.
“Luna, this is my husband, Blake.”
He stood up to shake my hand.
>
“Pleased to meet you,” he said.
“Nice to meet you, too.” The sharpness in my throat spread through my body. Even my toes hurt.
“How did it go?” Katherine asked.
“Really well, I thought,” I said, looking at Ruby for confirmation. “Got to meet some new friends. Moon Cat and Billy and the whole crew.”
Both Katherine and Blake laughed at that. Ruby moved toward her father, who put her on his lap. He was handsome enough that I would have noticed him if I’d walked past him on the street. Next to him Katherine looked ordinary and a little old. I wondered if she knew that.
“Would you like to join us for dinner?” he asked.
“I actually need to get going,” I said. “But thank you so much. It was wonderful to meet all of you.”
“I’ll walk you out,” Katherine said.
“Thank you so much,” I repeated as we approached the front door.
“No, thank you. I think Ruby likes you a lot. I’ll be in touch this week. If you don’t hear from me, call, because I’ve probably just forgot.”
“OK.”
“I’m so glad you came by.” She hugged me, which surprised me. She smelled of pine and wax and cleaning fluid.
“I’m glad, too.”
I got into my car and drove for a few minutes, until I was sure I was completely out of sight of the house. Then I pulled over and laid my head on the steering wheel, expecting to cry.
I hate Blake much more than I loved Sara. I have no actual memories of Sara, because she died when I was two years old. I know her only as the bottomless hole of sadness she left in my father’s life.
My third-grade circle of friends included a girl who had been adopted from Estonia. Once, at a sleepover, someone asked her how she found out that she was adopted, probably imagining some kind of dramatic scene. But the girl just shrugged and said, “I didn’t find out. I never didn’t know.” It was like that with Sara. I just knew that I had a half sister and that she was killed by her boyfriend, the same way I knew my own name.
We didn’t speak about her often. It’s not that the subject was forbidden, but that there was very little to say. Sara and my mother were not close. From what my mother says, I suppose they were as friendly as a woman can be with her teenage stepdaughter. She said nice things about Sara, but they were generic. It’s not that I doubted that she was, in fact, nice and pretty and talented, but what else could my mother have said? It was possible that she didn’t want to speak ill of the dead, but it was also possible that Sara died before she got a chance to develop a real personality.
Sometimes a movie would come on television, and my father would say, “Sara loved this movie,” or he might point out Sara’s favorite kind of flower. As a teenager, I came to suspect that Sara did not really love Some Like It Hot, or white tulips, but that my father wanted an excuse to say her name, to impart some information about her to me, even if it was silly or false.
I never gave much thought to Blake until I was in ninth grade, when I was required to participate in a debate about the death penalty. I was assigned the “pro” side. I was never a great student, but the subject piqued my morbid curiosity, and I spent hours in the library researching Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy. My strategy was to find out as much as I could about the worst people we had ever heard of, in order to say to my classmates: Do you really want these men to stay alive? My opponents’ arguments about human rights and due process paled in comparison to our stories of boys under floorboards. My teacher was less impressed and gave me a B.
I’m not actually in favor of the death penalty, I don’t think. But reading about it made me wonder about the man who killed Sara. All I knew was that he was her boyfriend, that he was insane, and that he didn’t go to prison. I wondered if that was because someone else might have done it, but my mother told me no, that he had confessed. She had been at the sentencing, to support my father. They left me at home with a babysitter.
“If he definitely did it, why didn’t he go to jail?”
“They can’t send you to jail if you’re not sane. That’s the law.” My mother, a former lawyer, usually loved any opportunity to explain legal concepts to me, but this particular subject made her uncomfortable.
“So he just got to go home? That doesn’t seem fair.”
“I guess not. But that’s how it works sometimes.”
“Isn’t dad angry about that?” I was thinking about a video I’d seen, the father of one of Bundy’s victims, talking about what a relief it was when he was finally executed. But the father spoke like he was chewing glass.
“Your father forgave him,” my mother said.
“Why?”
“You’ll have to ask him that,” she answered, knowing, I’m sure, that I wouldn’t.
All teenagers grapple with the realization that the world is unjust. But for me this revelation was deeply personal, and it made me behave in bizarre ways. Some teenage girls torment their fathers by wearing short skirts or piercing their tongues. I asked mine questions about his dead daughter. He never answered them to my satisfaction, maybe because he couldn’t.
I got my shit together once I went to college. Partly because I found a therapist I liked, and partly because I became addicted to following Blake online. If I were a more mystical person, I might say this: because he killed Sara, he now possessed her, and tracking the minutiae of his life was how I connected to her. But it might also just be the same ugly curiosity that kept me in the library until midnight, watching interviews with serial killers.
For what it’s worth, I was a great nanny. Ruby wasn’t always an easy kid, prone to temper tantrums and crying when kids at the park didn’t want to play with her. She had an unusually loud voice for a kid her age, and I often had the impulse to cover her mouth with my hand, just to get a moment of peace. But I was good with her, patient but firm, and she got quite attached to me. Five is a weird age, developmentally, and I wonder if she’ll remember me when she gets older.
I worked for the Campbells from the end of May to the beginning of August. In that time I sort of lost track of why I was there, not that I had any great clarity of purpose to begin with. My parents are big believers in the power of routine, and it pained me a little to admit that they were right. I was on my feet all day with Ruby, which meant I slept better at night than I had since I was a child. Because my week was so busy, I really savored Thursdays, which were my days off. I usually spent them sitting on a towel in the backyard, reading, or just staring at the sky and the trees. It was, overall, a pretty happy time in my life, which might be why I got careless.
I brought very little with me to the Campbells, just jeans and T-shirts and underwear, a toothbrush and toothpaste and a hairbrush. All my jewelry, all my makeup, my watch, my journal, my nice clothes—I left behind. The one sentimental object I took with me was a handsome hardbound copy of Jane Eyre. It was a gift from one of the women I worked with at the nursery school. My full name written on the inside cover.
Katherine was always busy. She sewed heart-shaped bags of muslin filled with dried flowers, which she sold online and in their store. She cooked almost everything from scratch, often using things they grew in their garden. She took an adult beginners ballet class on Wednesdays. All Ruby had to do was mention milkshakes, and Katherine would be at the kitchen counter, making whipped cream by hand.
But she didn’t seem to take pleasure in any of it. She always looked tired to me, but maybe that was just her face. I wondered if she worked so hard to seem like an earth goddess because Blake was more beautiful than she was, because she felt that she needed to earn her place in the lovely world they inhabited.
I wondered what Ruby would look like when she got older, which of her parents she would resemble more. She was at an age where it was difficult not to be cute, but maybe someday her golden hair would darken, her rosy cheeks turn ruddy. I could easily imagine her as the same kind of chubby, sullen teenager that I was. Would Katherine have a hard tim
e loving a child who wasn’t beautiful? I suspected I would, which troubled me deeply.
One day, I took Ruby to Little Fairy World, a Disneyland knockoff thirty minutes from the Campbells’ house. I found that place, with all its off-brand princesses and puppet shows, extremely depressing, but Ruby loved it. Katherine suggested that I take her there because the house would be full of construction workers all day. When it was time to leave, I found that my car battery was dead. I had Ruby sit in a shaded area of the parking lot while I tried to call Katherine, but she didn’t answer her cell phone or her landline. Ruby was starting to melt down. I bought her another shaved ice and called Blake. While we waited for him to arrive, we watched one more puppet show and went on the Jolly Trolley, but neither of us enjoyed it. It was too hot, and Ruby needed a nap. Silently I begged her not to start crying.
When Blake showed up, he was wearing a suit.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “Did I interrupt something important?”
He waved me off. “It happens. Don’t worry. Hi, Ruby. Did you have a fun day?”
She nodded, staring up at him adoringly. He picked her up in his arms. “She loves this place.”
“I can tell,” I said.
I held Ruby while he jumped my car. She had calmed down now that her father was near, and I felt her fall asleep against my shoulder. When the car was ready, Blake turned on the air-conditioning for a few minutes. Once it was cool enough, he put her in her car seat and kissed her forehead. She shifted slightly but did not wake up.
“Thanks,” I said, quietly.
“Not a problem.”
“Are you headed back to the house?” I asked him. I’d almost said our house.
“Got to finish up some things at work,” he answered. “But I should be home for dinner. Will you tell Katie for me?”
“Of course.”
“Great. Drive safely.”
We stood there for a moment. I thought he might hug me. Eventually he shook my hand, which I thought was hilarious. Then we both drove our separate ways.
Jane Eyre resonated with me much more than it had in high school. I was enjoying it a lot, actually. One day, I left it out in the backyard, and Blake brought it inside to save it from an unexpected rainstorm. That’s how he caught me.
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