by Adam Mitzner
As soon as I enter, Stuart shouts, “We’re up here!” I hear Jacob’s laugh, followed by a splashing sound. I make my way upstairs to find my son and husband in the bathtub, surrounded by bubbles. When it’s dry, Jacob’s curls fall lightly onto his shoulders, but now Stuart has sculpted his hair with shampoo so it sticks straight up, like a Mohawk.
“Lieutenant Stuart and Captain Jacob, reporting for duty,” Stuart says with a mock salute. Then to Jacob: “Skipper, salute our commanding officer, Rear Admiral Mommy.”
My son raises a soapy hand to his forehead and mimics his father’s salute. I play my part, returning it. “You two get good and clean. That’s an order.”
“The captain and I were at the officer’s mess at . . .” Stuart pauses to do the calculation. “Seventeen hundred hours. Mac and cheese. But with the Rear Admiral’s permission, I would gladly join her for a glass of wine and second dinner, after the captain settles into his quarters for the evening.”
“That sounds good,” I say.
I retreat to Jacob’s room. My son runs in a moment later, as naked as the day he was born. His hair is damp, and the sweet floral smell of his shampoo fills the room.
“Jammie time,” I say as I toss a pair of pajamas beside him.
“No. I want to wear Spidey,” he says.
I look back at what I selected—Ironman. I rummage through the drawer a bit more. Batman and Superman are present, but not your friendly neighborhood Spiderman.
“I don’t see Spidey,” I say.
“I wore him before my bath.”
I glance over to the hamper. They’re right on top.
I know that better parenting would be to explain to my son that just as he is now clean, it is important that his pajamas get laundered too. But I’m not willing to risk his being disappointed in me, so I scoop out the pajamas he wants and hand them to him.
He pulls the web-slinger’s shirt over his head. I try to help him with the arms, but from under his shirt he tells me to stop because he can do it himself. When his face reemerges he’s wearing a satisfied grin of independence.
I don’t even ask Jacob to choose a book. Instead, I reach for Mike Mulligan as he wiggles his way under the covers. When he’s all set, I begin to read.
After the story is completed and Jacob rolls away from me, I lie in bed beside him. Tonight Jacob rewards me by falling asleep in my company, and I spend a few minutes watching his little chest rise and fall with each breath. And thinking about what I’ve done.
“I keep meaning to ask whether the school moved that boy away from him,” I say to Stuart when I return to the living room.
“Which boy?”
A week or so ago—before Lauren’s murder, which now seems like ages ago—Jacob came home crying because of some altercation with a boy who sat next to him during story time. Among the boy’s other infractions, he tapped on the desk as if it were a drum, and Jacob found it annoying. I wanted to call the teacher, but Stuart convinced me to give it a day. Then Lauren was murdered and I had a more serious crime to investigate than tapping with intent to annoy. Now I fear that nothing has been done to rectify the situation—yet another failing in my son’s life for which I’m culpable.
“The tapper.”
“Oh . . . Ross. It turns out that he and Jacob share a love of some video game, and now they’re besties.”
“Really?”
“Yup. If only all problems could be so easily resolved, right?”
On our third date, Stuart told me that his father had taught college mathematics, and that as a child he imagined professional mathematicians to be the kind of people who live in the abstract ether, detached from the rest of humanity. The kind of misanthropes who would rather work a good proof to completion than have a discussion with another human being.
“He was never home,” Stuart explained. “Always logging long hours at the university. So I developed this worldview where I saw mathematics as a kind of calling, like the priesthood, compelling its chosen few to pursue it above all else, including family.”
We were sitting in front of a restaurant fireplace, drinking bourbon. I hadn’t considered Stuart to be particularly handsome before that night, but there was something about the way his profile was illuminated by the flame, the warmth I felt from the alcohol, and the way he was opening up to me that caused me to realize he was much more attractive than I had previously thought.
He took a sip of the bourbon and shook his head with a laugh. “So then I leave for college, and everything is good. But when I come home for my first Christmas break, my mother tells me that she’s kicked my father out—finally. I remember how she said that word. As if it had been a long time coming. And I swear I didn’t have the first inkling that my parents were unhappy. I just thought my dad worked all the time, but I considered that to be the price of being a mathematical genius. I figured my mother had made peace with it long ago. I don’t remember exactly what I said to get her to explain the reason to me. Maybe I asked where he was living, but the upshot was that my father had a second family in the same town where we lived.”
Stuart stopped then to take another mouthful of bourbon. His eyes looked as sad to me as I imagine they must have when his mother first told him this truth.
“What do you mean, another family?” I asked.
“Like you hear sometimes about these guys who are traveling salesmen or truckers or whatnot, and they have one family—you know, kids, a wife, a dog, a house with a mortgage—and then in another town there’s the same thing. Just like that, except my father didn’t see the need to leave town to have both. He had literally married someone else—of course, not legally, but the other woman didn’t know that. They also had a little boy—my half brother, Stephen, six years younger than me. And a house, and, yes, a dog too. So there you have it. My father wasn’t this genius closed off from the actual world staring at a blackboard late into the night. He was a guy juggling two families.”
“Is he still alive?”
“No. He died four, maybe five, years ago. After my mother threw him out, he downsized to one family and that suited him just fine. I didn’t talk to him for the rest of the time I was in school, but a year or two after I got out, it occurred to me that everything I knew about the man was a lie. I wanted to know the truth. I didn’t tell him this, but the reason I sought him out back then was so that I could learn how to avoid becoming him.”
“And did you?”
“I sincerely hope so,” he said with a chuckle. “One of the things he said, which I remember quite vividly, was that he became a mathematician because it is the only discipline where utter perfection is achievable. He said that a great poem or piece of music could never be perfect because it was always subject to the eye, or ear, of the beholder.”
“And so you became an art teacher,” I said.
“Well, first an artist, then a teacher. But the point’s the same. I wanted to create things of beauty, not strive for perfection.”
Stuart never wavered from being the man he was that night. A hopeless romantic, looking for true beauty in the world.
I was drawn to that optimistic worldview like a moth to a flame, even though I was never truly a holder of the faith. Prosecuting comes with the occupational hazard of seeing people actually become their worst selves. On some level, I always knew that would someday be true of me too. But I was thirty-seven and realized that the window for starting a family was fast closing. Stuart seemed to be my last, best chance at having a regular life, and he loved me with more passion, more ferocity, than any man I’d ever known. It was almost as if I thought that love in a marriage mattered in its totality, so that Stuart’s overabundance would make up for whatever I lacked.
22.
ELLA BRODEN
I always begin the transformation to Cassidy with music. My phone even has a playlist entitled “Cassidy.” Three such playlists, actually. Tonight I put on the one that starts with “Sympathy for the Devil” and wonder why I’ve never covered t
hat at Lava.
With the music blaring, I start by applying makeup. It’s the eyes that make Cassidy. Smokey and dark. Tonight I decide to make them metallic too. The first time I did Cassidy’s makeup, I actually followed a YouTube tutorial. By now I’m an expert, and it takes me less than five minutes to establish that sultry-and-dangerous look that Cassidy rocks. Once my lids are fully painted, I put on false eyelashes. They’re the longest I could find. The lipstick tonight is blood red. That’s actually the name on the tube. I paint my nails a matching color and then hold my finger to my lips to admire how closely I’ve matched the hues.
My face and nails done, I do Cassidy’s hair. It’s actually the easiest part because it amounts to little more than shaking my head vigorously. The idea is that she should look as if she’s just finished having great sex. I haven’t cut it since I began performing, and in another month or two it’ll actually be the length I’ve always imagined Cassidy would favor.
Last is the clothing, or more accurately, the costume. Tonight I want to wear color. That narrows it down quite a bit, as most of Cassidy’s wardrobe is black. But there are two items of a different palette in my closet to choose from: a body-hugging gold minidress, and a backless red dress with a plunging neckline. I reach for the red.
Lava is hopping when I enter. The bar is full and the crowd is already thick, even though I’m not scheduled to go on for another twenty minutes. I’m wearing a long, black coat over my costume, so I don’t draw too much attention to myself as I push through the patrons to check in with Karen.
“There she is,” Karen squeals like a teenager.
She kisses me on both cheeks, as she always does. Then she looks me up and down, her other greeting ritual.
“Show me,” she says, as lasciviously as any man might utter that line.
I open my overcoat. First one lapel, then the other, the way I might if I were trying to seduce her. Rather, if Cassidy was trying to seduce her. Ella wouldn’t play this game with anybody, much less her boss.
“I like it,” Karen says, literally licking her lips. “I like it a lot.”
“Thank you kindly,” I say with a slight curtsy.
“After you blow the roof off this place, come find me. I have some . . . news.”
She looks at me mischievously, obviously enjoying knowing something I don’t. I assume her news has to do with Liam’s offer last week to let me transition into their set. I’d thought Gabriel scared Liam sufficiently to put the kibosh on that, but maybe not.
“Sure,” I say. “You’ll be the first person I’ll come to after I . . . blow the roof off.”
Most of my set is a blur. One moment I’m being introduced by Karen—or rather, Cassidy is—and a second later, I’m beside Karen again, my thirty-minute performance completed.
The only part I actually remember is doing “Never Goodbye.” I thought about not doing the song at all, fearful that I wouldn’t be able to get through it. I felt as if I owed it to Lauren to sing it in her honor, but from the first words I could feel the words fighting me. Three minutes later, I breathed a sigh of relief when the last note was played.
“Keeps getting better and better, Cassidy,” Karen says, after once again kissing me on both cheeks.
“Thanks. It was a tough one tonight. I had a death in the family earlier in the week.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry. Is everything okay now?”
“Yeah,” I lie. “Thanks.”
“Well, maybe my news will cheer you up,” Karen says.
I had forgotten that Karen had teased some news before I took the stage. Now I await her reveal.
“Want to open Saturday night?”
“This Saturday night?”
“The very same. You’ll be opening for Onyx. They’re awesome. They wanted a female lead-in, and I thought of you, of course. But wait . . . there’s more. The money is twice what you’re making now, and I hear that there’ll be some record people in the audience.”
She’s waiting for me to accept on the spot. And she’s right that this should be a no-brainer. It’s the break I’ve been waiting for. The break every singer waits for. Still, old habits die hard, and for a moment I hear myself turning her down. I’m on the verge of telling her that while I appreciate the opportunity, I don’t know if I’m ready. That I’ve suffered this personal thing, how tonight was a struggle just to get through my set, and I don’t want to go on if I’m not completely mentally prepared for it.
But I catch myself. That would be Ella talking. Cassidy knows to leap at the opportunity and not look back.
“Sounds amazing. Thank you so much, Karen.”
She kisses me on both cheeks yet again. This time it ends with a strong hug.
“Thank me by blowing the roof off like you always do,” she says.
It’s slightly past eleven when I arrive home from Lava. Gabriel is still awake, lounging on my sofa.
After I remove my coat, he says, “Jesus. I can’t believe any self-respecting man would let his woman out in public wearing that.”
He wasn’t here when I left, so this is his first time seeing tonight’s outfit. I know that he’s kidding. At least, I think I do.
“It was a tough one tonight,” I say. “Give me a few minutes to morph into Ella. She’s got some good news to share.”
In my bathroom, I transform back. First by washing away Cassidy’s mascara and eyeliner, then taking special effort to rub the lipstick off her mouth, and finally by tying my hair back. From the hook in my bathroom, I grab my flannel PJs, put them on, and return to being me.
When I reenter the bedroom, Gabriel is sitting in bed shirtless, the rest of him under the covers.
“That’s the woman I love,” he says.
He’s begun saying it like that. Not quite an “I love you, Ella,” but always as a slightly indirect aside. I’ll say something funny and he’ll say, “That’s why I love you.” It’s as if he’s trying it on for size, getting comfortable with the idea of love before committing to it. For my part, I’m an all-or-nothing person when it comes to such declarations. I won’t say anything of the sort until I’m absolutely certain that I’m in love with him. I expect that to be soon, however. Very soon, in fact.
“Karen offered me the opening slot on Saturday night. There may be some record people there too.”
“Ella . . . that’s truly amazing. I’m so proud of you.”
Gabriel is the easiest man to read that I’ve ever known. It’s as if he can easily detect deceit in others but hasn’t the first clue how to pull it off himself. I’ve never seen a false emotion come out of him. When I first complimented him on his authenticity, he deflected, telling me that if he was truly out to be a master prevaricator that was exactly how he’d seem.
“Thanks. I almost turned her down. I was worried that it’s too soon after Lauren.”
“I’m glad you said yes. You worked hard for this.”
I climb into bed. When he comes closer to kiss me, I realize that he’s not wearing his boxers.
He leans over and kisses me deeply. Part of me wants to pull away. Since Lauren’s murder, I’ve felt guilty experiencing pleasure, which put an end to our streak of lovemaking. But I want this now—to be swept away from my grief—if only for a short while.
23.
DANA GOODWIN
Gabriel arrives at my office at nine sharp. This is the first time I’ve hosted, as we’ve previously met at One PP. The reason he’s here is because the first item on our agenda today is to tell Drake McKenney that we consider him a suspect in Lauren Wright’s murder.
With an outstretched arm, I invite Gabriel to take a seat at the small table I use for in-office meetings, but he must not catch the cue. He moves toward the collection of Jacob’s drawings I have taped on the wall next to the window. The largest of them depicts three semi-stick figures, none of which have feet or hands. It’s our family. I’m in the middle, drawn the tallest even though Stuart’s got me by a couple of inches.
“Is that y
our son’s masterpiece?” he asks.
“Yes. I also have a photograph if you want a more accurate representation.” I make my way back over to the desk and grab a silver frame that I keep angled away from guests. “This was taken last year, I think. That’s Stuart, who you met at the funeral, and our son, Jacob. He’s in kindergarten now.”
“Does your boy like Batman?”
At first I think Gabriel must be psychic, but then I remember that, in the photo, Jacob is wearing his Batman shirt, complete with cape.
“If it has the suffix ‘man,’ he’s obsessed. Spiderman, Batman, Superman, Ironman. At the kindergarten Halloween parade at their school, there were twenty-five superheroes and twenty-five princesses. Everyone gushes about how cute they all are—and don’t get me wrong, they’re friggin’ adorable—but nobody ever asks, ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’”
“And here I was just making random conversation,” Gabriel says with a smile. “Didn’t mean to hit a nerve.”
I can’t help but smile back. “Sorry.”
“No need to apologize. You don’t want your son to grow up to be a crime fighter. I don’t blame you at all.”
“It’s not that, it’s—”
“Really, Dana, I get it. If I could do it all again, I’d definitely be a princess too.”
“Exactly,” I say, now laughing. “I’m glad we’re on the same page on this. Why on earth would anyone want to risk their life and have to keep their work a secret when they could live in a palace, have beautiful gowns, and be married to a handsome prince?”
He laughs too. “Let’s go see the great man,” he says.
It’s long struck me as odd that as people rise to senior ranks in any organization, the larger their desks seem to get even though the amount of paper they actually deal with decreases. Aside from a thin sheaf, nothing burdens Drake McKenney’s desk except for trophies—the kind lawyers collect, like acrylic paperweights enclosing miniaturized court decisions.