After I'm Gone

by Laura Lippman

  “Hamish may have agreed to raise our children as Jews”—the plural gave Rachel another pang, and she bit back a caution on hubris—“but he’s not superstitious. Besides, he didn’t want to paint the nursery after we brought the baby home. Even with the new eco-friendly paints, he didn’t like the idea of all those fresh chemical smells. And he was keen to do it all himself, which will be harder once the baby is here. Did you see what he did with the closet? And the changing table—he made that, from his own design, so it can be converted to a straightforward chest of drawers once we no longer need a changing table.”

  Of course he did. Hamish the handy hand doctor. Hamish the perfect. Hamish the wonderful, Rachel thought, feeling very much like the bad fairy at the christening. But maybe the bad fairy had a backstory. Maybe it wasn’t just a misplaced invitation that put her in a pique. Maybe the bad fairy had authentic heartache.

  “I haven’t gone upstairs yet,” said Rachel, who had arrived late hoping to miss the obligatory nursery tour. “I haven’t even seen Hamish.”

  “He’s in the outdoor kitchen,” Michelle said, motioning to the large fieldstone patio off the indoor kitchen, which was positively Brobdingnagian. She wasn’t being grand. Now that Michelle was entitled to put on airs, she never did. The patio was better equipped than the kitchen in Rachel’s first apartment—a gas-powered grill, an oven with two burners, a refrigerator, an ice-maker, and a wine refrigerator. Hamish presided over the grill, of course, surrounded by the friends he called mates. Rachel couldn’t help feeling that the wafting smoke was really just the heat of all that collective testosterone rising into the soft May evening.

  Twenty months ago, Michelle had dented Hamish Macalister’s Jaguar in a downtown parking garage. Being Michelle, or the Michelle she was then, she had written a note that read only: “Sorry!,” a cover for any possible witnesses. She had not counted on the video cameras that captured her license plate or the dogged Scotsman who tracked her down on sheer principle, determined to make the girl glimpsed on the video do the right thing.

  The strangest part of the story was not that they married eight months later but that Michelle actually paid for the work on Hamish’s car. Not even Michelle took for granted the appearance of a handsome Scottish hand surgeon on her doorstep.

  Plus—a Jaguar, Rachel thought meanly. Michelle could assume he was rich as well. And he came with a cohort of rich friends, surgeons and entrepreneurs, weekend rugby players who had found one another in a faux Irish pub that broadcast rugby, hurling, and World Cup matches. Their wives were now Michelle’s new besties, stay-at-home moms who lived in similarly huge houses and drove similarly enormous SUVs and could afford the similarly outrageous things on Michelle’s baby registry. They also were, Rachel was realizing, extremely nice, shockingly nice. Well, why not? They were young, untested by life so far. She could not resent them or their extravagant getups, could not resent Michelle’s thirteen-thousand-square-foot house. Could not even resent Hamish, who had seemed to stride out of the pages of a romance novel and make a beeline for—Rachel had to be honest—the least-deserving of the Brewer girls.

  But the baby? The baby that Michelle had conceived on her very first try or two? That was something else. When Michelle had announced her pregnancy at Hanukkah, Rachel had excused herself from the table at the first possible moment and locked herself in Linda’s bathroom, where she had cried for twenty minutes.

  “You look gorgeous,” she told her baby sister now, grateful to find an easy compliment. Rachel had never envied Michelle’s beauty.

  “You know, Bert Gelman once told me that I would come into my prime in my thirties, as Mama did. I was terribly insulted at the time, but I think he may have been right.”

  Bambi still looked wonderful, Rachel thought, watching her mother beguile Michelle’s new friends. She looked better than she had in years. Leaving the house on Sudbrook Road behind had been good for her, even if she had fought with her daughters over the most random stuff, refusing to downscale as she should. She had a bit of Great-Aunt Harriet’s hoarding gene, right down to the random shoeboxes crammed with stuff. Bambi had initially resisted Hamish’s invitation to move to a small condo downtown, the “bachelor” apartment that, he insisted gallantly, he didn’t want to give up because he would lose money on a sale, virtually impossible in this market. Hamish had even redecorated his condo for Bambi. Or, more precisely, undecorated it, removing anything that was masculine and boysie-boy, leaving a plain and neutral space that Bambi could make her own. And even with all the mortgages she carried and the fact that the Sudbrook Park house had to be sold “as is,” she had a nice sum left over, more money than she had had in years, almost $100,000. That should last Bambi several years, in her new circumstances.

  And then what? Rachel asked herself, because over thirty years, and then what had been her question, hers alone. Daddy has left, but our house is paid off. And then what? Bubbie and Zadie will help with tuition at Park. And then what? The scholarships will cover almost all the costs. And then—what? There’s this amazing thing called an adjustable rate mortgage. AND THEN WHAT?

  Only now there was an answer: Hamish. The Brewer family’s personal Messiah had finally arrived in the guise of a six-foot-two hand surgeon who loved Michelle with a kind of gusto that the Brewer women had not seen since, well, Felix met Bambi at a high school fraternity dance in 1959. And only Bambi had seen that. Her daughters had to accept this secondhand version of events.

  But don’t let him be entirely like Papa, Rachel prayed inwardly, then felt better about herself. She did not wish her sister to be—what? A man was cuckolded. What did someone call a woman who was cheated on?

  A woman. A man who was betrayed required a special name. A woman cheated on was just a woman.

  Linda clapped her hands, summoning everyone to the family room to watch Michelle open her gifts. She handed Rachel a notepad, instructing her to keep a list of each item’s giver. Why not one of her new friends? Rachel thought grumpily. She couldn’t help noticing that neither her husband nor Linda’s had bothered to attend, although they were both crazy about Hamish. Yet all of Hamish’s friends were here. They took sperm seriously, these men, and celebrated whenever one of their clan’s found purchase.

  Lord, there seemed to be more gifts than people. Although Rachel had not traveled in the precincts of the rich for a very long time, she remembered how they did gifts. It wasn’t enough for a thing to be expensive—it had to be extraordinary, one of a kind. These women spent a lot of time shopping. They had to elevate shopping to an art, or at least a worthy cause.

  “Oh, it’s adorable,” Michelle said, holding up a miniature leather bomber jacket. “Deanna, you have such exquisite taste. Rachel, did you get that? Deanna gave us the bomber jacket.”

  “Uh-huh,” Rachel said, jotting it down. She wondered, as she had wondered with each gift from Hamish’s friends, what it cost. She figured the average was slightly less than her monthly car payment.

  “And here’s Rachel’s gift,” Linda said now. She had been fired a few months back, right around the time she and Henry were closing on a new house, and it had been a tense time. But she had picked up a paid position on a political campaign, deputy in communications for the Democratic candidate in the governor’s race. Rachel fretted that the candidate, the current mayor, would lose and Linda would be looking for a job yet again come this fall, but Linda was surprisingly calm. She seemed to be thriving on the very changes that were supposed to be so stressful—new job, new house—whereas Rachel, whose life had changed hardly at all, was the one on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

  Rachel’s gift was a selection of onesies that were a little offbeat—she had designed them herself. There was POOH HAPPENS (against the backdrop of a familiar bear shape, she didn’t dare use more for fear of copyright infringement); BREWERS ART, a tip to the family, but also a restaurant on which Michelle doted; and I’M SMARTER THAN THE PRESI
DENT. The last brought a few gasps in this crowd.

  Michelle smiled, but it was a puzzled smile: “I don’t remember putting these on the registry. Are they from that little store in your neighborhood?”

  “I made them,” Rachel said. Her voice cracked hoarsely, like an adolescent boy’s. “They’re one of a kind. You know I’ve been dabbling in silk-screening.”

  The new Michelle rallied beautifully. (The old one would have pouted at the idea of someone ignoring her stated desires.) “Of course they are—just like you! How proud I’ll be when Hamish III wears them.”

  Bambi winced at that. Rachel knew what she was thinking. She could tolerate the nursery, this party—but naming a child after a living relative. That was too far. Not only someone living, but a Hamish yet, a Hamish who would be one-half Russian Jew, one-quarter Scot, and one-quarter Iranian.

  And although the odds seemed stacked in favor of a dark-haired, olive-complected child, Rachel couldn’t help rooting for a boy who would look like Hamish’s father, whom she had met at the wedding last summer. He had pale gingery hair and a face that looked like a certain kind of Keebler cookie—Pecan Sandies—and slightly bowed legs below his kilt. He was a refreshing presence in a wedding party that otherwise ran to intimidating beauty, if one didn’t count Linda and Rachel—and Michelle didn’t. Bree Deloit, the wife of Hamish’s best friend, was Michelle’s maid of honor, as if Michelle had known her all her life. “But I couldn’t choose between my sisters,” Michelle said when Bambi confronted her. “This keeps everyone’s feelings from being hurt.” At least she seemed to be sincere. The old Michelle would have smiled a little smile, making sure that everyone knew she was stirring the pot.

  So why did Rachel miss the old Michelle? Why did she long for the petulant, peevish, nasty sister in place of this sugar-sweet one? It couldn’t just be the fact of the baby.

  Except it was. Rachel could overlook everything else that had fallen into Michelle’s undeserving lap. Her meet-cute moment with Hamish. Hamish’s prince charmingness, his willingness to submerge himself into the insanity that was the Brewer family.

  But for Michelle to be pregnant at age thirty-three, when Rachel had been trying to have a baby with Joshua for a decade, since she was only thirty-four—that hurt. That hurt quite a bit. And while New Michelle might be a better mother than Old Michelle could ever have been, neither version of Michelle could love a child as Rachel could. No one deserved a child more than Rachel.

  She fled to the bathroom, probably not quickly enough. Both Bambi and Linda knew the telltale signs of Rachel on the verge of tears. Michelle didn’t notice. She was the center of attention. She hadn’t changed that much.

  Only maybe she had. Ten minutes later, she waddled into the bath—not the downstairs powder room, where most guests would have gone, but the one attached to the master suite, an overly marbled retreat that Rachel secretly thought tacky—and said “Oh!” as if she didn’t expect to find Rachel there. Then, sitting on the toilet after yanking down her pants: “I have to pee all the time now. I wet myself at Superfresh yesterday.”

  “A sneeze?”

  “Not even. It just gave way. It was like”—Michelle thought—“like a flat roof collapsing after water had been pooling on it for a really long time.”

  “Sounds lovely.”

  “Oh, it was. I’ll probably never shop there again. Actually, I don’t. I usually go to Whole Foods, but Hamish went Scottish after he saw the prices last time.”

  It was one of Hamish’s tics that he was wonderfully extravagant—until he wasn’t. He himself described his pulling back as “going Scottish.” There was not, as far as Rachel knew, a complementary Iranian strain, although it was his mother whom Hamish resembled physically. She was gorgeous, so gorgeous that it seemed as if Hamish Senior couldn’t quite believe his good luck. Hamish’s mother looked if she couldn’t believe it, either.

  Or maybe Rachel was just projecting. She had never quite recovered from her first mother-in-law, and Hamish’s mother had that same queenly demeanor. She would have been a formidable opponent if they lived close by. But Michelle’s luck held—her mother-in-law lived in London.

  Michelle pulled up her pants. “I’m sorry. I know this is hard for you.”

  That was so unexpected that Rachel began to cry in earnest. “I don’t envy you anything—”

  “No, you don’t. And I’ve envied you so much. You have no idea, Rachel.”

  “You mean Linda and me.”

  “Mainly you. Yes, Linda and you knew Daddy, have real memories of him, and enjoyed the princess phase, whereas I only knew the garret part. Lord, how I hated that movie.”

  Rachel smiled at the reference to Sara Crewe in The Little Princess, the Shirley Temple film that Great-Aunt Harriet had thoughtlessly insisted they watch on the old Picture for a Sunday Afternoon, saying all children loved Shirley Temple. Aunt Harriet really was a bitch.

  “But you’re good, Rachel,” Michelle continued. “And you’re Mother’s favorite.”

  “Oh, no. Mama doesn’t have favorites.”

  “Of course she does. I’m not saying that she doesn’t love each of us, and each in a special way. And she’s always been good about loving us as we are, not making comparisons. But you’re the family star. The good grades, the niceness. Wanting to fix everything and everyone. Rachel—would you wait here for me? I’ll be right back.”

  It was such a strange request that Rachel couldn’t deny it. But “right back” was a longish span of time, given the size of the house and Michelle’s slowed gait. By the time she returned, Rachel had gone through all the cabinets, if only to prove she wasn’t the nice one. The contents were uninteresting, although she longed to know what Michelle paid for her face creams, a brand completely unfamiliar to Rachel.

  Michelle had a glass of champagne in her hand and a cloth napkin full of cookies.

  “Oh, I’m fine,” Rachel said with a wave.

  “It’s for me,” Michelle said. “The baby’s cooked, after all, one glass won’t hurt, but Hamish would freak. You can have a cookie, though.”

  “Thanks,” Rachel said wryly.

  “Everyone tells you everything, don’t they?”

  “Not really.”

  “Mama does. And Linda. Everyone confides in you.”

  “I’m a good listener, I guess.”

  “You scared me. About the evil eye, Rachel. That was a terrible thing to say.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you.” Said formally, in a new tone. The old Michelle had neither given nor accepted apologies. “It’s not your fault. I’m scared because—I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve any of this.” She gestured, careful not to spill a drop of the outlaw champagne.

  “Of course you deserve to be happy, Michelle. You’ve never really been.”

  “I thought I was. Rachel—I had an affair. With a married man. For a while. I broke it off, about three months before I met Hamish, if you can believe it, but it was a horrible thing to do.”

  “I know.”

  “You know? How could you know? Do others know? Who it was, I mean? You don’t know that, do you? Because he was—well, he was well known. By Baltimore standards.”

  “No, no—I didn’t know who. And I wasn’t sure he was married. But I knew you were having an affair with someone. You were secretive, you claimed not to be dating at all. You haven’t been without a boyfriend since you were twelve. I figured it was someone you couldn’t talk about.”

  “Did you talk about it? With Mother or Linda?”

  “Linda. Not Mother.”

  “And what did Linda say?”

  “She said you had to be free to make your own mistakes.”

  “Boy, was I. The thing is, Rachel, that’s not the only thing. Remember Adam Gelman’s wedding?”

  “Sure.” Rachel was remembering something else,
how Michelle had disappeared that night. Was her lover there then? Who could it have been? Oh, Lord, what if she had carried on an affair with Adam? Younger than her by a bit, but he had had a crush on Michelle most of his life. Or maybe Alec, but why be secretive about Alec?

  “My lover”—Michelle made a face—“what an icky word. It makes it sound so, I don’t know, grand and sordid at the same time. And it was really just sordid. Awful. But he gave me gifts.”

  “The coat,” Rachel said. “The watch.”

  “And the car, the one I said was part of my package at that tech company. It was a gift, not a lease.”

  “Wow.” Rachel wasn’t sure what such a car cost, but she thought it was probably as much as she made some years.

  “So, at the wedding, this friend of Adam’s tried to ask me out and I turned him down. I wasn’t very nice about it, but I was in a bad mood. I was upset, about the relationship I was in; I didn’t care about anyone else’s feelings.”

  Rachel couldn’t help thinking: You never cared about anyone else’s feelings, not then.

  “So I was kind of rude to him. Anyway, it turned out that he was an IRS agent. And he opened a file on me.”

  “That can’t be legal.”

  “Doesn’t matter. He did some research—he found out my salary, found out what things cost. The coat, the car, the watch. He called me and said he believed that there was money, hidden money, from Daddy and he was going to investigate Mama.”

  “He wouldn’t have found anything.” Rachel was sure of that, at least.

  “No, but he said he would make sure it leaked to the newspapers, that he knew how to do that without leaving a trace. He made me come see him.”

  “Did you go?”

  “Yes, but with Bert Gelman. And—well, he had to know. Bert, I mean. About the lover. Because it turns out that the man I was seeing—some of the things he did were illegal. He should have paid a gift tax on some of the presents he gave me. But there was no way I was going to tell the IRS who he was, no matter how much they threatened me.”