“You were just as into it as I was.”
And, in a way, he was right. God, I hated that most of all, but in a very real way he was right. He’d pushed all the right buttons, and my body had responded exactly as it always had, exactly as he wanted it to. Exactly as he expected it to.
That damnable moment of pleasure ultimately just prolonged my pain.
Most of it was emotional. I could get over the physical. I’d done it before. The most painful thing was that he’d just lured me in, against my will, again, and he’d done it so easily. Piece of cake.
I was sleeping with the enemy, not just because I was afraid of him but more because I was afraid of my own weakness. As long as I was anywhere near him, I was never going to be able to let go.
In that sense I was my own enemy.
He turned and went back to bed.
And I? I followed. Just as I always had. But this time I didn’t snuggle up against him, wrapping my arm around him and spooning up against him. (Did it mean something that I was always the one doing the holding and he was always the one being held?) This time I turned away from him and sniffled quietly in the dark as my pillow grew more and more damp from my tears.
I couldn’t live like this anymore. This wasn’t even living. It was killing me. It was time to let go. I didn’t know if I had a chance at life at all, but I knew that as long as I was with Leif I would not be long for this world.
The problem was, I had nowhere in the world to go. My parents were gone; my sister, Meghan, was estranged (in part because she’d never liked Leif, though the truth was she wasn’t much more likable than he himself was).
So the bare fact was that I was really all alone in the world without him.
In fact, maybe that was another reason I’d stayed so long. Once upon a time—when I was young, stupid, and madly in love with him—I had dreamed of the family we’d have together. I’d planned on it. After we got married, he changed his tune about wanting children, however.
Now I was twenty-nine and looking at a long, lonely life if things didn’t change.
I spent a long, sleepless night thinking about it. I stayed on my side, facing away from him, even while my arm and shoulder cramped and grew sore. I could not face him.
I didn’t know that I could ever face him again.
But I couldn’t kill him, either. I wanted to say the idea had been tempting, but the truth was that it had only felt like a “solution” because it was theoretically possible, not because I’d actually do it. It was my cyanide pill, and, like all who carry a cyanide pill, I knew that eventually this situation was going to kill me.
I was going to be the only casualty.
He would skate by, as he always had, looking out for number one and apparently having a great time doing it. The only price he ever paid was the occasional few minutes of mollification and seduction he had to spend on me.
I couldn’t harm him.
I couldn’t even faze him.
All I could even try to do was to save my own life.
* * *
IN THE MORNING, as he got up and got ready to leave, I pretended to be asleep so he didn’t talk to me. So I didn’t have to look at him.
Partly, God help me, so I didn’t weaken toward him.
It seemed like it took forever, but finally he left the room and I heard the front door slam behind him. I often thought he did that on purpose, slammed the door in a last-ditch effort to wake me up or make me uncomfortable. Just one more way to niggle at me.
This time, though, it just signaled relief. He was gone.
Thank God.
I got up and began to pack. I didn’t know where I was going or what I would do. The shared bank account that I had access to had only a few thousand dollars left in it, but I would take everything I could. It wasn’t like I was going to be able to use my credit cards. Or even my car. I was going to have to leave that behind as well.
I was going to have to leave everything I had and everything I knew behind.
And once he saw what I’d done, I knew, he’d never forgive me. This was a game-ending move, but I had no choice.
With my suitcase packed and my phone charged, until I could get a cheap TracPhone, I stopped in the kitchen one last time and poured myself a shot of vodka and sipped it slowly while I looked at all the choices he’d made that created his home instead of ours.
All he had ever cared about was himself. Why had I thought I could change that?
That’s when it occurred to me that there was one person in the world who would understand this. One person who might—just might—be a friend to me at this time.
I opened my phone contacts and dialed my best—and absolute only—hope for salvation.
CHAPTER SIX
Twenty-five Years Earlier
The party was beautiful. Glitz. Glamour. Glitter. Fancy. Champagne and hors d’oeuvres went by on silver platters. All the servers and the bartender were in black tie.
Unbelievable. And this was her future. She’d gotten the job! Not only did she get to live for free in this big, gorgeous house, but she’d be paid to do it!
Boy, for a girl from the wrong side of the tracks in Silver Spring, this was living.
And it was living exactly the life she was meant to have.
She was born to be a mother. As a child, she had put her dolls to bed every night and played elaborate pretend games with them that involved feeding them, playing with them, and teaching them. In college, her friends had even jokingly called her Mom. She was always the caretaker, whether she was the five-year-old tucking in a plastic baby doll or the twenty-one-year-old emptying a water bottle down the gullet of a drunk friend.
Though suburban life—husband, 2.5 kids—was probably where she was headed (she didn’t understand the disdain for it), she was sure going to enjoy the time she spent nannying for the Tiesmans.
Always a dreamer, Elisa felt like she was living out her fairy tale. Or at least a semi–fairy tale: the glorious house, no money worries (not that she’d be rich, but she was frugal anyway, and this position would include room and board), she wouldn’t be hungry or cold …
The father, Charles Tiesman, was incredibly nice. Warm and kind. His friends even called him Charlie—wealthy and powerful as he was, he was Charlie! Imagine that!
His wallet, she had noticed when he pulled out a twenty-dollar bill to cover her cab ride, had a picture of his daughter front and center. Her name was Lillian, but he called her Prinny—short for Princess, he’d explained with a proud little laugh. Elisa had resisted giggling when she heard it. She had a feeling the nickname would stick well into Prinny’s adolescent years—long enough that she’d probably feel too guilty ever telling him it embarrassed her.
Prinny was the kind of kid who walked around happily—and loudly—at all times. She was four, but had a spark in her eyes that made her look practically reincarnated from some hundred-year-old yogi from Tibet. Honestly, she looked like she truly understood everything in the world around her.
She had a belly laugh that was absolutely contagious, and bright eyes that beamed like lights, almost always happy and definitely always kind.
Charles’s wife (she was Charles’s second wife, after what Elisa had gleaned from the other workers was an acrimonious divorce from his first) was very thin and fragile-looking, but Elisa suspected that to be an illusion. When she did smile, which seemed reserved for genuinely happy moments, it was a big smile that reached her eyes. It was most often directed at her children, Prinny and, of course, the other—Leif. That would be the woman’s, Ingrid’s, stepson. She was so warm to him, but he was so cold back.
Leif was quiet and unsettling to Elisa. She couldn’t figure out why exactly; he was too old to need a nanny per se, so her job was primarily to take care of the toddler, Prinny. But Leif was still there; he was around a good percentage of the time, and Elisa had never felt the same kind of discomfort with any other child. Something about that pale complexion and his utterly colorless eyes mixed with his almost
constant, yet somehow hostile, silence was deeply unsettling.
If Prinny seemed oddly tuned in to her surroundings, Leif seemed strangely detached from his. Yin and yang. And frankly maybe a little too much on both their parts.
The cook, Lena, whom she had grown to quite like over the past few weeks, had warned her not to get too close to the situation at all. Not from any angle. Apparently other nannies had tried and failed and ended up hurt and fired as a result.
Hurt.
That was definitely not the plan. Elisa just wanted steady work in this beautiful place until she couldn’t stand the bliss anymore. So far she expected that to be never.
This was her first party at the Tiesmans’. She’d gotten the feeling it was going to be a pretty big deal, but had no idea how—and she knew the word made her sound like a rube—fancy it was going to be. She’d been to weddings far, far less extravagant.
Elisa arranged the slices of white cheddar cheese and Ritz crackers in a neat circle on the blue plate. She’d learned upon getting the job that this was one snack both children could agree on. Both of them were hungry, and neither of them was allowed out into the party, where tables were filled with caviar, salmon, oysters, filet mignon, lobster, salads, and a bunch of other fussy non-kid food.
To be honest, rather than building up a plate that would look like it was for herself (nanny steals caviar, gets the sack), she just went with what was in the fridge for the children.
Plus, this way she got to gawk at the party from the swinging doors without being in the midst of it.
She put everything away and took the plate back down the hall to where she had left Prinny quietly watching 101 Dalmatians.
Walking up to the door, she could hear that Leif was in there with her, and whatever they were doing, they weren’t doing it quietly.
She quickened her step and pushed open the door.
Leif—fourteen years old and too tall and too old to have any disagreements with his toddler sister, much less physical ones—was standing above Prinny, who was on the ground clutching her face, her chest catching in silent sobs.
“Leif!” Elisa exclaimed, rushing over. “What is going—”
He smacked the plate and the sippy-cup of grape juice Prinny had requested from Elisa’s hands before she had a chance to stop him.
She took him by the shoulders to calm him, but the effort lasted only a few seconds. As soon as she had a grip on him, his angry gaze shifted to behind her. He looked suddenly horror-struck.
Elisa turned and saw Mrs. Tiesman.
“What on earth is going on in here?”
Leif wriggled away from Elisa and backed up against the wall to point at his nanny.
“Prinny and I were playing—just kidding around! And then she smacked her and tried to wrestle me onto the ground!”
The impossibility of Leif saying this, making up such a lie on the spot, struck Elisa silent.
“Leif, again?” Charles Tiesman showed up at the door, and it was obvious from his urgent expression that the ruckus had been audible far beyond the room.
Prinny took in a sharp breath, her sobs now becoming audible. Elisa saw that a hot red had spread across one entire side of her face. Her heart twisted, and she longed to go to her and soothe her.
Her father did instead, before shaking his head in confusion at Leif.
“No,” he said. “Why would you—”
“Me?” Leif’s jaw dropped, and his arm shot out like a railroad gate, one boney index finger pointed at Elisa. “It wasn’t me. I didn’t do anything. It was her!”
“I beg your pardon.” Elisa straightened her spine. “Tell your parents the truth.”
His eyes shifted uncertainly. “I guess she thought I was trying to hurt Prinny, but I wasn’t! I don’t know why she had to get so”—he sniffed as though crying, but Elisa noted that he had no tears welling, and his pupils were like pin dots—“so violent.”
Elisa found her voice. “That is not what happened!” She was unable to keep the note of childish frustration out of her voice. As if she were one of the kids, too, and had to defend herself to the parent. “I just walked in and found him standing over the poor little thing, and she was sobbing her sweet heart out. Heaven knows what he was doing, or planning to do.”
“Ask Prinny!” said Leif, a look of disbelief on his face, and a posture that said go right ahead. But when he looked at Prinny, something in his expression shifted.
He looked scared of her.
“Prinny, were you and I just playing? Having fun?”
Elisa and the Tiesmans all looked to Prinny.
Her tear-filled eyes looked to Leif, and then to Elisa. She looked confused and afraid.
After a long moment, she nodded and looked down.
“Told you.” Leif crossed his arms, noticeably not looking at Prinny again. “Plus, she spilled that stuff everywhere.” He indicated purple stains on the white wool carpet. “Is Prinny even allowed to have juice this late? I’m worried the sugar will interfere with her sleep.”
The next ten minutes were a blur for Elisa, who was unceremoniously stripped of her job and turned out onto the street with her purse in her arms. The boxes of pastels and colored pencils she’d brought were still in the house, along with a cardigan she’d left the day before, but none of those things had sprung to her mind while the unbelievable happened.
She walked to the bus stop, wondering why, why that fourteen-year-old boy had done whatever he had done to his sister to begin with, never mind what he’d done to Elisa. In the end, he had lied to protect himself; she supposed she understood that. Kids didn’t understand the ripple effects of their lies. Neither did some adults, but he had time to figure it out.
But why was a big kid like him making a little girl like Prinny cry? It looked like it had been physical, its own heinous problem, but if it hadn’t, if it had been emotional torture, could anyone say that was better?
She wished she could have told the parents the truth before she left. Wished she could have warned them, as what she saw coming down the tracks was far worse for more people than losing this one job was for Elisa.
For a moment, she’d even thought she’d seen sympathy and openness in Mrs. Tiesman’s eyes. Certainly sympathy—the woman was always kind, but she was protective of her husband and the children to a fault. Inarguably to a fault. She seemed to just want a happy family, even though the truth was that the kid was troubled.
So even though Leif wasn’t biologically hers, anyone could see that she tried like hell to love him, and forcibly pull him closer in to her as a mother, and her daughter as his sister.
It’s just that anyone could also see that he was never going to let it happen. Not one cell in his body had any interest in having a close and loving family around him.
And, presumably, that family he did have didn’t want to know the truth about him, or they would have seen it long before Elisa was haplessly trying to convey it to them while getting the bum’s rush out of the house and her job.
Which left her with her own problems to worry about. Like figuring out how she was going to pay her rent next month when she had only three weeks of work with the Tiesmans behind her and unemployment took forever to process.
Oh, yeah, and how she was going to eat?
She really, really didn’t want to go back to exotic dancing. She’d sworn she never would. It was demeaning; it went against everything that she believed in. She’d sworn it was only a temporary way to fund college, but the money had been so good she’d let it go on a few months after college while she looked for the perfect position.
So to speak.
That was what she thought she’d found in the Tiesman household.
Not so.
Now, thanks to her previous career, she had about one month’s worth of expenses saved up. But that wasn’t going to get her very far if she didn’t find more work tomorrow.
Or more like yesterday.
The entire thing was so maddening. How dare tha
t punk risk her livelihood and career, just to save his own spoiled, mean-spirited ass?
Someday he’d pay for this, and, if he kept going on the path he was on, probably a whole lot more.
Karma was a bitch.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Prinny
“Should I do it in an Irish accent?”
“Irish?” Prinny reeled in her patience. “Why? Why an Irish accent? Why?”
Chelsea straightened her spine and, clearly, her resolve. Her acting chops were chomping. “Because, Prinny,” she said, enunciating every syllable, “the Irish were among the first to get into this, you know, Celtic Druid woo-woo stuff. People look for that here, just like they’re always looking for Enya music in our record selection. So.” She shrugged, as if she’d left Prinny in checkmate. “It just makes sense.”
“So maybe you should just record the message in Gaelic?” Prinny asked, feigning innocence. “Let everyone assume that if they don’t understand, it’s their shortcoming, not ours?”
Chelsea’s eyes lit up, and she raised an index finger. “You think you’re kidding, and I did not miss your sarcasm there, but you may be right! You said you wanted to set us apart from the rest. Why not do something radical? Just let me see if anyone else is doing it.” She took out her phone and started tapping on the screen.
Prinny sighed. It was the end of the day, and she didn’t have the energy to be exasperated. “Stop. Look, let’s just do it in the neutral newscaster sort of voice we agreed on. It’s a phone system, not a Meryl Streep movie. Do it like we talked about.”
“We just talked about cultivating business. How are you going to do that by being generic?”
“It’s a way to statistically track the percentages of calls for each given topic,” she said. “We can tell what people want by which number they hit, and when we know what people want from us, we can grow the business in the right direction.”
“They will only opt for what we offer them, and as we already discussed, we’re not offering that much.”
“So we offer a few things that maybe we’re not doing so much of, to see if there’s a market for them.”
One Less Problem Without You Page 6