“I really need to talk to you more, Rikki,” Debbie said. “There are a lot of unanswered questions here.”
“How about tomorrow? I’ve got little kids to attend to, you know.”
: : :
Erica’s head ached even more the next morning, a wracking heavy pain unalleviated by five cups of coffee. Clouds of amorphous fear pressed upon her like an infection. She got Jesse and Jake off to camp with clean towels and bathing suits and then plodded through putrid LIE traffic to meet Anders. She didn’t like him. He was a sullen, scowly sort with greasy hair and pimples across the bridge of his nose. She didn’t know him: whether he had a wife or girlfriend, what kind of music he liked or how he spent his days when he wasn’t hanging out in this godforsaken park that even the teenage moms and the old men seemed to have abandoned. She joked with him about the T-shirts, asking whether they were tie-dyed, or pastel green, or bearing Columbia logos. He stared at her blankly and handed her a paper bag. She handed over her money. “Have a good one,” he muttered and left.
Her skin hung loose over her bones, and her limbs were antsy, anxious to move. She didn’t feel like driving home yet, where the walls closed in on her, where Sam’s grotty cage awaited, lacking water and greens, where there was fetid laundry, mail to sort, bills to pay, and phone messages to listen to. Most particularly the phone. One only needed to wait for more bad news to arrive.
Sophia struggled with the stroller seatbelt, attempting valiantly but unsuccessfully to master its mysteries. She chewed on the strap and then fell asleep. Erica wandered past gas stations and auto repair shops.
The air lay dank and thick. Really, what was she thinking, raising her children on this tapped-out chunk of earth, between two highways spewing benzene, bordered by an oily ocean? Bloody Tampax, Jared had told her, was a punk band from Hicksville who had gone to the beach one day and found a raft of plastic Tampax holders washed up on the litter-strewn sand like scallop shells. What did it matter if she poisoned her body? The air and the water were doing a good enough job on their own, even without her assistance. She dreamed of distant, unattainable places: Ethan’s parents’ wooden A-frame bungalow, surrounded by beds of fiery nasturtiums, framed in the cool mist like it was behind etched glass; the night air in the Smoky Mountains, moist and piney.
She was out of breath; her chest ached. She walked the many hot smelly blocks back to the car and drove home, where the phone machine was, of course, blinking. She put Sophia in her playpen. She promptly clambered up the fabric diamonds of the wall, perched herself on the rim, and jumped off. She did this several times in a row. Erica folded up the clearly pointless playpen and stuck it in the basement. Untethered, Sophia wandered through the house like a miniature Godzilla, dislodging everything within reach.
The phone rang.
“Where have you been, Rikki?” Debbie asked. “I called you several times this morning. I should stop leaving you messages. You never answer them.”
“I took Sophia for a walk.”
“You shouldn’t have taken her outside. Don’t you know there’s an ozone alert?”
“I haven’t read the paper,” Erica said, pulling a Happy Meal action figure out of Sophia’s mouth.
“Ron thinks it might be a kidnapping, though deep in my heart, Rikki, I fear he’s run away again. That little bitch Ashley is missing too. Why on earth, really, would anyone want to kidnap my Jared? What kind of security do they have at that Pritima Center? How much more of this can I take? My stomach is in such pain, Rikki. I’ve run to the bathroom ten times this morning.”
“My stomach doesn’t feel so great either,” Erica said.
“By any chance, if you speak to Mom and Dad, please don’t tell them anything about this,” Debbie continued.
“How could I speak to them?” Erica asked. “They’re in Eastern Europe.”
“Well, if they call. They called me collect from Vienna, though God knows what the phone bill’s going to be.” Debbie paused and then spoke in a breathy whisper she reserved for disturbing medical information. “Dad has angina, you know,” she said. “Or didn’t Mom tell you?”
“No,” Erica said. The phone slipped through her sweaty hands. A spasm rippled through her belly. “I really gotta go, Debbie,” she said. “I have to go to the bathroom really bad.” Somehow her robot self still managed to utter coherent sentences. “Keep me posted, okay?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Erica followed Sophia around as she marched through the house like a drunk windup doll, into the kitchen, out to the hallway, around to the living room, through to the family room, back into the kitchen again. For variety, they marched back and forth across the backyard, in and out of the play castle. Sophia stuffed wood chips in her mouth. Erica liked the smooth feel of the inside of Sophia’s mouth, the sensation of her saliva on her finger. She could follow Sophia about endlessly, dumbly. Her diapered tush rounded out her yellow polka-dotted sundress, and the ringlets of her hair covered the bandage on her neck. She probably didn’t need that bandage anymore. Erica gently ripped it off, spitting on her finger and wiping off some gooey residue and a drop of dried blood. The IV insertion site was barely visible, a faint mark at Sophia’s throat. The grass felt wet and sticky under Erica’s feet, despite the fact it hadn’t rained for days. The sprinkler must be malfunctioning. She should call the sprinkler people, but she didn’t feel like facing the phone again.
To satisfy Lisa and Justine, she’d elaborated details of her fictitious Hamptons weekend: the Bulgari choker worn by her hostess, the $300 bottle of wine served at dinner, the sighting of Billy Joel at the East Hampton ice cream parlor. Justine demanded details of the Grant Fishel debacle too, in that it was splashed all over the paper, but there Erica brushed her off, changed the subject. She couldn’t fabricate anything credible about that.
Ethan was due home in two hours.
Sophia refused to nap, allowing Erica no opportunity to wash her hair, which hung limply about her face but frizzed untidily at her shoulders. She sprayed hair glop on it to no avail, finally pulling the unruly mass back with a banana clip. She splashed her face with cold water and rubbed toner on her cheeks and the back of her neck and put on a lime-green sundress she’d bought in Florida. It gaped unflatteringly at her shoulder blades, so she changed into shorts and a tight Benetton top. She ate a few spoonfuls of tuna fish as she followed Sophia around the house once more, picking up toys in her wake.
She heard Ethan’s key in the lock.
Ethan lugged in a set of golf clubs and a duffel bag, wearing wrinkled khakis and his scoop-neck peach T shirt. They hugged.
There had been a period when she told Ethan everything. On the upper tier of his dorm room bunk and along the banks of the Charles River, washed of inhibition by too much pot and cheap wine, she shared all her secrets stored up over a childhood and adolescence. Ethan knew all about the World’s Fair, about the parties at the Mackay estate, about the time she drank her parents’ tequila and replaced it with water. He was the only person she’d ever told about her abortion. At the time, these had seemed like the keys to her private self, the biggest secrets she could ever imagine she might own. She felt they scarred her just enough to render her cool and edgy. By releasing them, she freed herself, merging herself with Ethan in the clear and clean and limitless universe of adulthood.
As Jackson Browne said, hold on to your illusions until they shatter.
Sophia toddled up to greet Ethan, and he flung her high into the air. “She’s so big,” he said. “I feel like I’ve been away forever.” He took a closer look at Erica. “You look washed out,” he said.
“Just tired, I guess.” Erica pulled up her loose shorts and hid her flyaway hair behind her ears. “So, how’s everything been going?” she asked.
“Okay.” Ethan jiggled Sophia about, making razzberry noises.
Erica poured them each a glass of ginger ale. “What’s goi
ng on with Grant Fishel?”
“I’ll tell you. I’ve got lots of stuff to tell you.”
“Let’s go outside,” Erica said, but as she opened the patio doors, thunder rumbled. The arborvitae rustled in a sudden wind. They sat down in the family room instead. Sophia pulled more records out of their jackets and rolled them over the carpet.
“I think we should put those away and get some CD storage,” Erica said.
“Whatever you like,” Ethan said absently, setting his glass down. “Say, Erica, what would you think about seriously moving to Florida?”
Erica imagined leaving the toxic air, the oily ocean, Debbie, Ron, Nick, and Anders behind, living safe within a flower-scented paradise with turquoise water where palm trees waved their wide funny leaves to the sky.
“I’d like it,” she said. “But why? Did you do that insider trading or whatever it is they’re accusing Grant Fishel of doing?”
“No, I didn’t,” Ethan said, his voice flat and frustrated. “I make a product—that’s all. I got carried away with the elegance of the pro-duct, I guess. I couldn’t predict all the possible uses people would put it to.”
“What are those uses?” Erica asked.
“You wouldn’t understand,” Ethan said.
“Do you think I’m an idiot?”
“It’s not that you’re an idiot, Erica. It’s that you’ve never expressed the slightest interest in what I do for a living.” Ethan sighed and looked out the patio doors, where a heavy rain beat down on the open patio umbrella. “You should close that umbrella. The table could fly away in that wind.”
Erica got up to close the umbrella, stomping her bare feet on the ground. She walked back in, chilly and soaked. “So, is somebody going to be asking you questions? The FBI or the SEC or whatever? I mean, are you in trouble?” She wrapped herself in an afghan.
“After a fashion,” Ethan said, tickling Sophia on her tummy. “I don’t believe they care about me, but they care about people I know.”
“Like Stephan Langston?”
“Yeah, like him.” A sour smirk crossed Ethan’s face. “Did you ever call him about our Jamaica hotel?”
“Yeah, I did, actually.”
“Well, he’s not going to the Caribbean anytime soon, because he’s going to jail.”
Erica cast her eye possessively about the surroundings they’d built with Ethan’s paychecks and her taste: the leaf-green shag rug; the TV and Nintendo console; the flower-tiled kitchen at ten dollars a tile; even immense Sam the iguana, lolling in his cage with those impervious eyes. She stored it all in her mind for future sustenance. The world was closing in on both of them. She couldn’t figure out why she kept looking at the stuff, kept focusing on the stuff, but maybe it both symbolized and hid the things that really mattered. She edged closer to Ethan and curled her right hand around the tips of Ethan’s fingers.
“So why move to Florida?” she asked. “We could move to California like you keep talking about.”
“Well, there are various things—various things with the securities laws. It’s a more expeditious place to be.” Ethan hedged.
Erica couldn’t figure out whether he was being purposely obtuse or whether all this skirting around was a consequence of the abstractions that constituted his work, in deference to all the complexities she evidently didn’t understand.
“Grant Fishel wants me out of the New York office,” he said finally, spitting out the words like they were a chunk of steak he’d been choking on.
“You mean we have to move?” she asked. “We have no choice?”
“Well, yeah,” Ethan said. “If I want to keep my job.”
Outside, lightning flashed, and rain poured down. Everything within her line of vision appeared bleached of color, solid and still. Once, at a college party, extremely stoned, she’d experienced a similar sensation, uncertain whether she was actually living her life or floating somewhere above, watching it. So many years had gone by since then, and she could see them stretched out like a roll of film negatives. One moment followed upon another, and she could zoom in on any of those moments in fine relief: the expressions on people’s faces, the way light fell across their bodies, the split-second gap before things changed again. For a few minutes—she couldn’t say how long—she felt a strange clarity, a heavy calm.
: : :
The phone rang, jerking her out of her stupor.
“You’d better come over here right now, Rikki,” Debbie said, her voice short and breathy, uneasy. In the background, Ron hissed remarks she couldn’t decipher.
“I can’t come over now,” Erica said. “Ethan just got home, and he hasn’t been home in almost three weeks. Plus the boys are coming back from camp soon.”
She heard another sharp imprecation from Ron and rustling in the background.
“You’d better come now,” Debbie repeated softly. “It’s about Jared.”
Erica’s mind flooded with horrifying scenarios featuring Jared murdered by a narrow-eyed redneck, smashed by a truck, thrown in a ditch by the side of the highway. She shouldn’t have run out on him the way she did, leaving him standing on the beach without so much as a hug, biting his lip and crunching her hundred-dollar bills.
“Get over here now,” Ron barked.
“What is going on? Where is Jared?”
“Get over here right now, you bitch!”
All Erica’s free-floating dread congealed into one black knot.
She was not a bad person. She could explain. Let Jared be alive.
“You get your sorry ass over here, Rikki, or I’m going to break your door down!”
Debbie should never have married Ron. When he asked her out for drinks at the Williston Diner that first day she cut his hair—that alone should have been a warning sign; who with any taste would invite a girl to a dump like that?—she should have run like hell. She remembered the night they announced their engagement at Sunday family dinner, Ron’s long, knotty white arm twisted around her like a possessive eel, Debbie beaming with a settled pleasure, as if marriage to Ron would answer any open questions she had about her life and guarantee her smooth sailing forevermore. Erica should have talked her out of it right then and there, but the thought didn’t even occur to her. She was too intent on escaping Sunday family dinner and getting high with her friends at the Mackay estate. Besides, at that time, Ron didn’t seem significantly more odious than any of the other dull, blustery jocks Debbie seemed attracted to. Debbie wouldn’t have listened to her wayward sister anyway. Unbeknownst to Erica, she was already pregnant with Jared. Perhaps that was another reason behind her sated smile. No trips to Planned Parenthood for her. Debbie was marrying the father of her child. Fait accompli.
Erica felt the pull of Debbie’s soft dry palm, holding her back at the curb until the yellow-sashed patrol guard waved them across. Debbie’s hand grasping her tight and pulling her into the black murk.
Just let Jared be alive.
“Okay, okay, I’m coming,” she said.
Ethan insisted on going, saying he could hear Ron screaming all the way from the couch. They buckled Sophia into Vince Volvo and drove the three blocks to Debbie and Ron’s house. Rain gushed down the curbsides and pooled in the gutters.
The door stood ajar. The first thing Erica saw was Jared, alive and presumably intact. Then she noticed that he was standing in an odd formation with Ron and Debbie between the living room couch and the coffee table, as if they were practicing a skit.
“What the hell is going on here?” blurted Ethan.
“You should know,” said Ron.
Clinging together in their own family unit, Erica, Ethan, and Sophia faced Ron, Debbie, and Jared from the opposite side of the coffee table, where Debbie’s snow globes lay arranged in a flawless semicircle. Sophia buried her head in Erica’s shoulder, whimpering.
Jared shuffled his feet awk
wardly, looking down at the carpet.
“You asked why we’re all standing here like this.” Ron was swaying his upper body like a stiff and stringy rubber band, speaking in his soothing radio voice, all puffed up with the power that comes from the safety of your own territory. Debbie clasped her hands, smiling stiffly like a political wife.
“Yeah, I just might ask that,” Ethan said, exuding his own brand of languid confidence.
“I would have gone directly to the cops, but Debbie prefers to avoid the embarrassment and the consequences. She prefers to handle this matter privately if at all possible, so, against my better judgment, I’m deferring to her feelings.”
“And may I ask you what matter this is?” Ethan asked, still calm, still confident. He’d be like this facing a lawyer or judge, Erica knew.
“My private detective, Ralph Rossiter, picked up Jared in Ocean City, Maryland,” Ron pronounced, “with his friend Ashley. They were staying in a house with extremely shabby sanitary conditions where illegal drugs were openly used.”
Erica tried to catch Jared’s attention, but he only stared at the floor.
“Jared denies this,” Ron continued, and at this comment Jared did look up, shooting a defiant, pained look at his father, “but the Pritima Center tells us that Erica impersonated a nonexistent relative and also claimed to be a representative of the state agricultural department. That Erica kidnapped him from the Pritima Center.”
“I was in the Hamptons,” Erica said. “How could I be in South Carolina?”
“Yeah,” Jared said.
“Well, that’s not what Rossiter and the Pritima Center say. Their security cameras were fuzzy, but they indicate a woman who looked an awful lot like you, carrying a baby who looked an awful lot like Sophia. And Jared—this comes directly from Jared’s mouth, mind you—Jared told me you’ve smoked marijuana with him on numerous occasions. He told me you let him and his little girlfriend sleep together on your property. He told me you gave him money for their little adventure in Philadelphia.” Ron stopped his tirade for a moment, draping his arm around Jared. Jared fidgeted under his touch, looking at the snow globes, at the thick navy-blue drapes, at the blank television screen, at Ron’s shuddering chin and furious eyes, everywhere but at Erica.
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