The Black Widow

by Wendy Corsi Staub

“If you think we went out to a nice dinner, Jacinda”—she echoes the deliberate emphasis on her cousin’s given name—“we did.”

  “And that’s all?”

  “Ladies, have you decided?” Summoned to the rescue by Gaby’s subconscious mind, the waiter materializes with his pad in hand.

  “I’ll have the challah French toast,” Gaby tells him, and adds, with a gleam in her eye, “She’ll have the deep fried goat brains.”

  “Goat cheese omelet,” Jaz amends. “And here I thought you weren’t listening.”

  “Yeah, well . . . I’m a multitasker.”

  “I guess so. Juggling Ryan and Ben . . .”

  Pen poised on his pad, the waiter asks, “White, rye, or whole grain with the omelet?”

  “Whole grain, please. No butter.” Jaz smiles at him sweetly, then turns back to Gaby. “Does Ben know about Ryan?”

  “Hash browns or fresh fruit?” The waiter again.

  “Fruit.”

  “Got it.” The waiter departs.

  Jaz looks expectantly at Gaby, who sighs.

  “Yes,” she says, “Ben knows about Ryan, but—”

  “Does Ryan know about Ben?”

  “Know that I was married and now I’m divorced? Yes, he knows that.”

  “But does he know that you and your ex-husband are—”

  “No, because we’re not anything. We saw each other. We’re in touch again. That’s it.”

  Jaz is silent.

  Gaby toys with the cloth napkin in her lap, rolling and unrolling the hem.

  “I love you, mami,” Jaz says at last. “I just don’t want you getting hurt. You were so excited about seeing someone new, moving on . . .”

  “I’m still excited. I’m still moving on.”

  “You can’t move on if you’re with your ex.”

  “I’m not with him.” She picks up her cup, sips her coffee, fights the urge to take out her phone to check the latest text.

  “Is it because you saw his profile on InTune? You said you weren’t going to get in touch with him.”

  “I didn’t. I ran into him.”

  “On purpose?”

  “No! By accident. We were both at Yankee Stadium the other night.”

  “When you went with Ryan? You didn’t tell me you saw Ben.”

  “I know.”

  “But you’re still going out with Ryan tonight?”

  “Yes. Of course.” She tries to sound enthusiastic.

  She’s been trying to feel enthusiastic, but ever since that night with Ben at her apartment, she’s found it hard to look forward to seeing Ryan again. She can’t remember what she found so appealing about him, or what they talked about, or why she’d reacted so passionately to his kisses.

  But Ben—she can remember everything about Ben. Everything they said, and did, and the way it felt to kiss him and fall asleep in his arms . . .

  She was half asleep when he left before dawn that morning to go home to shower and get ready for work. He kissed her forehead and told her he’d be in touch.

  “Don’t you want to take your box with you?” she asked groggily.

  “Not now. I’ll get it later,” he said before slipping out the door.

  A few hours later she got an e-mail from him at the office, asking for her new cell phone number. Since then, they’ve been texting back and forth. Mostly just casual comments and questions, although he did ask to see her tonight. Tempted to cancel her plans with Ryan, she thought better of it and told Ben she’s busy.

  She didn’t elaborate, and he didn’t ask her to; just wrote: How about Sunday then?

  Not busy, she responded.

  He invited her to go to the beach with him. She said yes. She didn’t ask him where. She knew: Orchard Beach.

  Now, she finds herself confessing the plan to Jaz.

  “So many memories there for you, Gaby. I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

  “There are memories everywhere, Jaz. We were together so many years.”

  “I know.” Jaz takes a long sip of her coffee, holding the cup in both her hands and staring at Gaby over the rim. When at last she sets it down again, she says, “So you’re dating him, basically. That’s what you’re telling me.”

  “No! It’s a Sunday afternoon. We’re just going to the beach. Some of the guards from the old days are still there, so we can visit them, maybe take a swim.”

  “Still a date.” Jaz sighs heavily, then brightens. “Maybe it’ll rain and he’ll cancel.”

  “Come on, Jaz.”

  “What?”

  “First, the weather is supposed to be great—”

  “That’s not what I heard. And maybe you should cancel anyway, because—hello—you’re divorced! He left you! He broke your heart!”

  “Maybe I broke his first.”

  The words spill out of her unexpectedly, obviously catching Jaz by surprise—but catching Gaby off guard as well. She hadn’t even realized she’d been thinking that way, but . . .

  Maybe it’s true.

  After all, he was the one who’d wanted to keep talking, keep trying, go to therapy . . .

  And you? You just wanted to be left alone with your sorrow.

  Her response to the tremendous surge of grief had been to shut down her emotions altogether, anesthetizing herself against experiencing not just pain, but anything at all—including love. Yes, she’d gone through the motions of working on her marriage—but if you can’t feel, how can you heal?

  At last the numbness has finally begun to give way to genuine emotion. Not just because of Ben, but because she’s finally allowed herself to start living again.

  Part of the credit for that goes to Jaz.

  Gaby reaches across the table and squeezes her cousin’s hand. “You always have my best interests in mind. I love you for that. Thank you for not turning your back on me and letting me wallow.”

  “You know I’d never do that. You’ve been through hell, but it’s behind you now. That’s what I thought, anyway.”

  “It is.”

  “When he left you, you told me that you never wanted to see him again.”

  “I didn’t.” She takes a deep breath. “I know you’re trying to protect me, but trust me—I know what I’m doing.”

  Before Jaz can respond to Gaby’s words—essentially, a lie—their food arrives.

  “I should have gotten the French toast,” her cousin decides, looking at Gaby’s plate. “Want to switch?”

  “No! I told you I’m not in the mood for eggs.”

  “Neither am I. How about if we just share yours?”

  “You do this every time we go out to eat.”

  “So? You love me anyway.”

  Laughing and shaking her head, Gaby pushes her plate to the center of the table.

  Saturday is Alex’s day off.

  Ordinarily she sleeps in.

  But last night, she didn’t sleep at all. She tried, but her thoughts wouldn’t stop churning and her entire body was tense, still, from her ordeal.

  Not just the shock of discovering Carlos’s bloody corpse, or the unexpected rigor of transporting it up to the woods and burying it with the others, or even the painstaking clean-up that involved lugging pails of hot water and bleach to the basement room and scrubbing away the bloodstains.

  It was the tremendous letdown that put her emotions, and her nerves, over the edge.

  Carlos had seemed so right. His name even began with C-A-R . . .

  Well, she’d been correct to take that as an omen. Just—she should have realized that it wasn’t necessarily a good omen.

  The first thing she does, after giving up on the hope of sleep and crawling out of bed at last, is open the medicine cabinet and take out the pregnancy test she’d been saving.

  Always before, there’s been an air of anticipation when she holds the box in her hand. Today, for the first time, that spark is missing.

  It makes her sad, in a way. But more than sad, it makes her angry.

  He robbed
her of the excitement she should be feeling as she opens the box, pees on the stick, and carries it back to her bedroom. There, she sets the egg timer she keeps in a drawer of her bedside table. She could just use her phone’s stopwatch, of course, but this is the good luck timer she used when she found out she was expecting Dante years ago.

  She paces, usually remembering to bend her head at the farthest points of the room where the sloped ceiling gets too low. Sometimes, though, she forgets and walks right into it. Her head throbs, and her fury grows with every step.

  This should be a peaceful, hopeful time, and yet—

  He robbed her of the ability to say the familiar prayer that’s become a mantra. She does pray, but not for a positive result.

  Please . . . please . . . please . . .

  Please let it be negative.

  As much as Alex longs to find that she’s carrying a child again, she doesn’t want it to be his. A positive test will mean that the bad luck has taken root inside of her, and she’ll have no choice but to destroy it.

  Closing her eyes, remembering how she’d slaughtered the yellow roses in the garbage disposal, she knows now that it wasn’t enough.

  She should have incinerated them instead. She should have—

  The egg timer dings, curtailing her raging thoughts.

  She takes a deep breath and crosses the room to check the plastic indicator.

  Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease . . .

  Negative.

  Grateful, she closes her eyes and tilts her face to the ceiling.

  Okay.

  Okay.

  It’s over. Thank God it’s over.

  Now she can make a fresh start. And she will . . .

  Today.

  Something is not right.

  Ivy Sacks is certain of it.

  It’s been exactly two weeks now since Carlos Diaz e-mailed to tell her that his father had been killed in a car accident in Costa Rica.

  Horrified by the news, she wrote back right away, extending her sympathy and telling him to take all the time he needed. She also asked about the funeral arrangements, wanting to send flowers. A few days later he e-mailed again, from Costa Rica, to say that the funeral was on hold because his mother was still in intensive care and that he couldn’t leave her.

  No, of course not. Ivy felt terrible for him. She wrote back again, asking if there was anything she could do. She worded the message carefully, straddling the fine line between colleague and friend.

  His reply was a terse, No, but thanks.

  That was it.

  But it was enough to arouse her suspicions.

  She’s since written back—twice, in fact—to inquire about his mother’s condition. Both queries were met with silence. Maybe he assumed she was nudging him because she wanted to know when he plans on returning to work.

  But it isn’t that at all. She’s just worried. As a boss, and a friend, and . . .

  All right, as a woman who’s been secretly infatuated with Carlos from the moment he set foot in her office a few years ago. He was married then, and so her feelings were utterly inappropriate . . .

  Of course they still are, even now that he’s divorced. A boss should not have romantic thoughts about an employee. Or at least, if one can’t control one’s romantic thoughts, one shouldn’t act on them.

  Ivy hasn’t. That’s why she’s spent the last two weeks trying to distance herself, emotionally, from Carlos’s personal tragedy. But it’s taken every bit of restraint, as this second week wore on, not to pick up the phone and try to contact him directly in Costa Rica.

  Eventually the restraint wore thin.

  Yesterday morning she arrived at work before anyone else and slipped through the dark, deserted halls into his cubicle to check his computer files. Yes, she knew it was wrong—but her intentions were noble. This time, anyway.

  She wasn’t sure what she was expecting to find—perhaps evidence that he’d been planning a secret vacation with the woman he’d dated that last weekend—but the files yielded nothing out of the ordinary.

  Nothing, that is, other than the fact that his social networking accounts appeared to have been canceled. But that’s probably not unusual, given the circumstance. In the aftermath of a family calamity, Facebook and InTune undoubtedly feel frivolous at best—and are a blatant invasion of privacy at worst.

  Finally, back in her own office with the door closed, Ivy broke down and called Carlos.

  She dialed both his apartment and his cell phone, leaving messages on both voice mails. Then, feeling like a seventh grade girl with a crush, she closed her office door and did some lunch hour sleuthing on the Internet, looking for more information about his parents’ accident.

  She learned that fatal car accidents are by no means a rarity in Costa Rica, which apparently has one of the highest traffic death rates in the world. There had been many over the past few weeks. But none that she could find seemed to fit the circumstances of Carlos’s parents’ tragedy.

  That probably means nothing—but it could mean something.

  That Carlos lied? Why would he lie about something so horrible?

  Common sense tells her that he wouldn’t. That would be a sick thing to do, and Carlos isn’t like that. He can’t possibly be that twisted.

  Yet there’s some part of her—some irrational, immature part—that can’t stop wondering. Maybe she doesn’t know him as well as she’d like to think she does.

  What if he’s really just off on vacation someplace, with some woman?

  For all she knows, he’s skipped town and has no intention of ever coming back.

  Sheer speculation, of course.

  Still, the more she’s thought about it over the last twenty-four hours, the more her genuine concern has given way to anger and resentment.

  Finally, last night, she decided it would be perfectly appropriate to take matters even another step further. Working late on a balmy Friday night, when it seemed most Manhattanites had escaped their concrete cages well before rush hour and fled the city for woodsy or beachy weekend retreats, she once again found herself virtually alone on her floor, other than the cleaning staff.

  It wasn’t hard to convince one of the janitors, who spoke very little English, to unlock the door to the human resources office. When at last he complied, she quickly got her hands on Carlos’s file, including his emergency contact page, and made a photocopy.

  She tucked it into her briefcase, carried it home, and tried to make herself forget about it.

  Now, in the bright light of the next day, sitting in the small studio apartment she shares with her cats, she realizes that her colleagues probably wouldn’t have batted an eye if she’d gone into human resources at any point this week to request the information. She could have—should have—voiced her concerns through the proper channels. No one would have suspected that her feelings for Carlos run deeper than professional concern.

  “Too late for that now, though,” she tells her fat orange cat, whose name, of course, is Garfield.

  Once, when she posted pictures of Garfield on Facebook, one of her friends—who, she has since decided, is not a true friend—made a comment: Garfield—what an unusual name for a fat orange cat!

  Ivy responded that he’d been named after the cartoon cat.

  For some reason, the friend—whom she has also since defriended—thought that was amusing.

  Later, Ivy’s younger brother Seth had pointed out that the comment was meant to be ironic.

  “You know—like a cliché,” he said. “Like—what else would you name a fat orange cat? It’s irony, Ivy.”

  Irony. Okay. She got it.

  She thought long and hard before she named her next cat “Snoopy.” He was all white—but he’s a cat, not a dog. Irony.

  Her Facebook friends appreciated that, judging by the number of people who clicked the Like button when she posted Snoopy’s picture and name. Ivy was pleased.

  Now, her mind on Carlos, she tells Garfield, “I don’t think I shoul
d wait until Monday morning to do something about this.”

  The cat purrs agreeably, rubbing his arched back against Ivy’s leg as she sits down at the computer with the photocopied file information.

  Carlos had listed someone named Roxanna Diaz as his emergency contact, providing both a home number and a cell phone.

  Is she his sister? His ex-wife?

  Only one way to find out.

  Well, two ways—but Ivy would rather do some snooping around online before boldly dialing one of those numbers.

  A Google search turns up far more women named Roxanna Diaz than she expected. Even when she narrows it to New York, there are many. It would take her a long time

  to even rule out all the ones who likely have no connection to Carlos.

  Instead, she Googles the name along with first one phone number, then the other. But again, she comes up with nothing relevant.

  Even more frustrating: each phone number, checked separately on a reverse lookup site, comes up with: Not in our data base.

  Meaning . . . what? That they’re unlisted? Or that Carlos made them up? Did he make up Roxanna Diaz, too?

  “You know what?” Ivy says to Garfield. “I’m just going to call. I mean, why shouldn’t I? Anyone would call, right?”

  Garfield, snoozing at her feet now, doesn’t even stir as she half stands and leans to reach for the phone on the nearby counter.

  That’s the nice thing about living in a tiny apartment—pretty much everything is in arm’s reach.

  It’s the only nice thing—well that, and the fact that she’s located in the heart of midtown, in a safe doorman building. That’s much better than having a lot more space in a sketchy neighborhood out in the boroughs, like Carlos.

  When Ivy bought this place ten years ago, in her late twenties, it was more than she could comfortably afford. But rent was a waste of money, and she figured she’d be making a lot more within a year or two. Anyway, sooner or later—most likely sooner, she thought—she’d meet Mr. Right, marry him, and move to the suburbs. When that happened, she could either sell the studio, keep it and rent it out, or she and her husband could use it as a pied-à-terre . . .

  But here she is, pushing forty, perpetually broke and in debt, making less, not more, than she was back then. Not only that, but she’s still single, and when she finally met Mr. Right, he was off-limits because he worked for her. To top things off, he’s now fallen off the face of the earth.