After I'm Gone

by Laura Lippman

  “Yes,” Julie Saxony said. She sat in a dining-room chair, but she didn’t invite Rachel to sit. Her posture was impeccable, her hands folded in her lap. Oh, aren’t you the lady, Rachel wanted to sneer. In some part of her mind, she realized she was having the fight with Julie that she couldn’t have with Marc, much less his piece on the side. But that was okay, she reasoned. Being angry would help her get what she needed.

  “Why were you at my sister’s bat mitzvah?” It wasn’t where she had planned to begin. She realized she had no plan, not really.

  “I told you—I was observing the caterer. I hired him. He’s going to be the chef here. He’s already trying out menus and we hope to open this fall.”

  “So it was just a coincidence.” Julie Saxony said nothing. “I didn’t think so. Did you spy on us a lot?”

  She thought of her own mother, taking the older girls by Horizon House, pointing out Julie’s apartment. But that was just once. That didn’t count as spying.

  “Did you?” she repeated. Her words had real authority to her ears. She felt dangerous, and it was thrilling.

  “Certainly, I was interested in Felix’s family.”

  “Don’t say his name.”

  “I think,” Julie said, “this is going to be a difficult conversation if I’m not allowed to say his name.” A pause. “More difficult, I guess I should say.”

  “You stole my family’s money. My mother told me.”

  “I’m sorry, but that’s a lie. If your mother couldn’t live on what was provided, then that’s probably because she wasn’t willing to economize.”

  “Economize? Economize? You try to economize with three daughters in private school, with college tuitions and a house that’s falling apart at the seams. You try to find a job when you dropped out of college at eighteen and became a mother by age twenty.”

  “I didn’t even finish high school,” Julie said.

  “Yes, but you had an advantage my mother doesn’t have. You were willing to sleep with another woman’s husband.”

  Her words hurt, she was sure of it, although Julie’s composure did not crack. She said only: “I loved your father very much.”

  “Then you should honor the woman my father loved and give her the money that is rightfully hers.”

  “There is no money. What I had, I invested, and it was mine. I’m sorry, but that’s true.”

  “My mother’s about to lose her house. She’ll be humiliated. Don’t you get it? She’s not just an ordinary citizen who can be foreclosed on in private. The house will go to auction when her balloon note comes due and the papers will write about it and it will all be dredged up again, just like the stupid article about you dredged it all up. My father loved my mother, above anyone. I don’t care what he told you or promised you. He loved my mother. You weren’t the first, you know. You wouldn’t have been the last.”

  Julie licked her lips. “I don’t have any money. I just don’t have it. Not that I would give it to you if I did. I’m sorry if your mother has been improvident—”

  “Such big words from the stripper,” Rachel said. Who was this person? Who had she become? It was horrible. It was strangely delightful, too, like playing a villain in a play. She was channeling the fury she felt for Marc, for every woman who had been cheated on.

  “I’m sorry if your mother has been improvident.” That word again. “I really am. But it’s not my fault. What’s mine is mine.”

  “If only you had been so clear about ownership when you started sleeping with my father. He loved her, Miss Saxony. Her and his daughters. Not you, never you.”

  She sensed this was her best weapon, the only way to hurt Julie Saxony. And if Julie Saxony wasn’t going to help her, then Rachel wanted to hurt her. Men couldn’t cheat without women’s cooperation. Sure, there were men who lied, who misled their partners into unwitting adultery. But not her father. And not Marc. Believe someone the first time they tell you who they are. Marc had been a player in high school. He had been famous, Rachel remembered in wretched hindsight, for breaking up with girls by starting new relationships, then waiting for his ex to confront him. Everyone knew what he did, and every girl assumed it would be different for her.

  The difference now was that Marc wouldn’t admit his behavior. He called her every night, asking her to come back, but he wouldn’t confess to his indiscretions, Rachel realized now, because they were going to continue. Just more discreetly. Marc loved her, but he had no intention of changing. Instead, he said: Have a baby. Please have my baby. If we have a baby, everything will be okay. The thing was, he thought he was speaking theoretically, about a baby that did not yet exist.

  “Rachel—”

  “Don’t say my name.”

  There was a spike of fury in Julie’s words now. “Don’t say your father’s name, don’t say your name—why are you so proprietary about names? What’s the big deal? Brewer probably wasn’t even your father’s family’s real name, back in Russia or wherever they came from. I’ll tell you this much—if your father had stayed, if he hadn’t been forced to leave, I’d have his name by now. He loved me. He wanted me.”

  “Keep telling yourself that,” Rachel said. “Tell yourself whatever lies you need to tell to get through.” She had an inspiration. “He knows you stole from us. He couldn’t do anything about it, where he is, but he knows. He never loved you, not really, and now he hates you. You destroyed the thing he loved most of all, his family.”

  Finally, she had gotten a rise out of the woman. She was quite livid, almost in shock.

  “He—he talks to her? To this day?”

  “To this day.”

  She left Julie’s inn with that feeble, hollow victory. The situation hadn’t changed, despite her triumph over Julie. Her mother needed money, now, or she was going to lose the house. And Rachel knew what she would have to do to get it. It took a little longer than she anticipated, almost a week, but when her mother returned from the beach, Rachel was able to present her with the money she needed.

  “Where did you get this?” her mother demanded.

  “Let’s just say that Julie Saxony made good on her debts,” Rachel said. It felt like a safe lie at the time. But Rachel was an inexperienced liar and did not know all the ways even a safe lie can go wrong. Maybe she should have asked Marc for some pointers as part of their settlement, a settlement brokered by her mother-in-law, who was very happy to void the prenup if it meant Rachel would grant the get that Mrs. Singer desired, then go away forever—and take the stain of the Brewer name with her.

  5:30 P.M.

  The minute she said July 4, Bert had demanded another conference. Bambi granted his wish out of courtesy, but her mind was made up.

  “Bambi, I may have to withdraw as your counsel,” Bert said, “if you insist on going forward with this.”

  Was that all he had? “Then withdraw. I’m ready to tell this story, with or without you. You can’t say what happened on July fourth, can you, Bert? So you’ll just have to listen.”

  A tape recorder was set up. Both detectives made eye contact in their individual ways. Nancy Porter was bright and focused, the kind of grade grubber who sat front and center back at Forest Park High School. The sad-faced one looked as if he knew every unfortunate thing that had ever happened to Bambi. Lugubrious, Bambi thought. That is the only word for how he looks. She decided to look at neither detective as she spoke, focusing on a point between their heads. They probably thought she was trying not to cry. Well, she was trying not to cry.

  “She came to my home on July fourth. She brought me money, quite a bit. I needed it to pay a balloon note on a mortgage. You see, I was very foolish and these one-year ARMs, they were quite new then. I didn’t understand how it worked. I just knew that if I took out this mortgage, I would get a very large lump sum. Enough to pay for Michelle’s bat mitzvah, repairs to the house. So I took out this loan. I didn�
�t realize that I had to pay it back in a year, that I had to find the cash equivalent in the form of another mortgage, and I had—well, I had bad credit, I thought it just converted. I . . . I froze. I didn’t know what to do. I felt so stupid. I owed on the mortgage, I had maxed out my credit cards. I needed money fast.”

  “Jesus, Bambi,” Bert said. “You could have come to me.”

  “But I was always coming to you. Always. There had been ten years of coming to you at that point. I tried my mom, my aunt Harriet—they couldn’t help me. But then I saw in the paper how that . . . that Julie Saxony was expanding her bed-and-breakfast into a proper inn with a restaurant, and I thought: She has money. She should give me the money I need. She came to my house that day to give me the money.”

  Something changed, then, in the detectives’ faces. Sad-face scribbled something on a piece of paper and passed it to the girl. She had a poker face. Bambi couldn’t discern anything from it. But maybe it was just that she was a woman and Bambi had spent so much of her life trying to understand men and what they wanted. The two got up and went outside.

  “Stop lying, Bambi,” Bert said in a low tone. “They know you’re lying.”

  “I’m not lying, though. Julie Saxony did provide the money. That’s true. You could probably look up the bank records, see when I paid off the note. In cash.”

  “She didn’t come to your house on the fourth. You’re saying that because you know you were at the beach until the night of the third. We were all at the beach.”

  “Yes. We were all at the beach on the third. Agreed. But I met Julie on the fourth. On the tenth anniversary.”

  “You didn’t. Why are you lying about this? What are you trying to prove?”

  “Bert, you’re fired. Please leave.”

  “I can’t—”

  “You will. You are. Go.”

  He looked lost, confused, two expressions that Bambi had seldom seen pass across Bert’s face. Of course he was confused. Because she was lying, but what else could she do? She had run the numbers. Something, someone, had to be sacrificed. It was as if another onerous financial commitment had come due again. But this time she was going to take care of it. What a fool she had been, how inept. She had gone from her father’s house to her husband’s. She had lived in denial for years about what things cost. Thrown away her father’s money on a semester at Bryn Mawr. Let Felix throw money around, too, and never asked the price of anything.

  About two weeks before he had left, Felix had sat down with her and their checkbook. “Going forward,” he said, “you need to write down everything, keep the balance. Because—well, you’re just going to have to keep track. Because once I go away, the money, it will come in at a different rate. There will still be money, but it will be different, okay? You’ve got to learn to budget, Bambi. Can you do that?”

  She could have. Only, after he left, there was no money coming in. Twenty thousand dollars. That was what had been in their joint checking account in July 1976. Twenty thousand dollars. It had been gone in less than a year.

  Besides, at the time, she thought Felix meant prison when he said he was going away. It was not until the night before that she understood he was going somewhere else. She had been putting things away and discovered a pair of cuff links was missing from his drawer. Cuff links she knew well, for she had given them to him for their fifteenth anniversary. Yet there was Felix, in short sleeves—because it was, after all, July. He was packing, she realized. Squirreling things away, getting ready to go. She didn’t ask any questions. She didn’t want to know. And not because she feared the police and their questions. She could not bear to hear Felix tell her that he was a coward.

  Bert left the interrogation room, his broad shoulders slumped. Lord, how she had leaned on him over the years. Lorraine had been kind about it. But then Lorraine pitied Bambi. In the early days, the pity had been a way for her to mitigate all the things she envied about Bambi, and that had been okay. She had pitied Bambi because Felix had other women, then pitied her because he was gone.

  Bambi had forgiven Felix his indiscretions. They had been there from the first. The cowardice—that was different. Felix had slept with other women, but that didn’t mean he didn’t love her. Perhaps the opposite. Sleeping with other women was the only wedge he had against his love for her. Sure, she knew that sounded like a rationalization, but some rationalizations were true. No, it was in his flight that Felix had betrayed her and their children.

  The detectives returned.

  “For the record—you are speaking to us without a lawyer at your own behest,” the girl intoned into the tape recorder.

  “Yes, for the record I am.”

  “Okay,” said the sad-eyed detective. “You contacted Julie Saxony—when? How?”

  She looked at him long and hard. “I sent my daughter Rachel. On my behalf. She went to speak to her the week before. I’m not sure of the exact date.”

  “You sent your daughter Rachel, she asked Julie for money, and a week later, Julie brings you money? On the Fourth of July?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how did she get the money? Banks would have been closed. And, as you must know, Julie Saxony’s financial life was pored over. There’s no record of any big cash transaction in the weeks before she disappeared.”

  “I haven’t a clue. All I know is I got the money I needed.”

  “We should probably speak to your daughter.”

  “My daughter’s at the hospital.”

  It was the first sign of genuine emotion in the female detective’s face. So she was a mother. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s not major. Her child needs cleft palate surgery. She’s adopted, from China. It’s pretty common now. For the children to need this surgery. If you don’t agree to a special-needs child, it’s much harder to adopt from there.” She found her speech speeding up. She was chattering, as if she was nervous. Why was she nervous? She had already done the hardest part. “It didn’t used to be that way. Foreign adoption has changed so much. And Rachel and Joshua, because they live in the city—well, it seemed unlikely that they would get a child domestically, in the city, and they were over forty, which makes them too old for most U.S. adoptions, and then Guatemala closed and Vietnam had problems and—well, China was it.”

  Nattering, nattering, nattering. Gathering her thoughts even as she appeared to be fraying. Maybe she shouldn’t have sent Bert away. What were her rights now? Did she get another phone call, could she demand a new lawyer? How could she get word to Rachel?

  “Look, I said I did it. Can’t you just arrest me? The sooner you do that, the sooner I can get before a judge, see if bond can be arranged. My granddaughter had surgery today. I can’t possibly spend the night here.”

  But in the end, that’s exactly what she did. They took her into custody and drove her out to Towson, locked her up in detention there and told her to be grateful for that. Granted a phone call, she swallowed her pride and called the Gelmans’ home, praying Lorraine would answer.

  For the first time in a long time, a prayer was answered.

  “Bambi—Bert told me what’s going on. He’s beside himself. What are you thinking? How can you turn your back on his help when he only wants what’s best for you? Why—”

  “Lorraine, you have to get to Rachel. Tonight. I think I bought her some time, but the police will come for her tomorrow. Whatever happens, she has to insist she was not at my house on July third, or that she didn’t see anyone there.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Lorraine, she’s my daughter. She finally has the only thing she ever wanted, her own child. Her life is worth more than mine, in so many ways. I know that I can’t say such things to Bert. He can’t allow me to lie, which is why I’ve had to let him go. But you’re my friend and a mother, not a lawyer. You have to let me do this. Whatever Rachel did—she did it for me. Now I have to do this
for her.”

  July 3, 1986

  Her room was as she had left it, a scant six years ago. It was not so much tribute as inertia. Her mother was fighting a running battle with Michelle, who wanted to claim one of her sisters’ rooms, then begin a costly redecoration. Easier to keep everything as it was.

  The thing that bothered Rachel, however, was that she felt younger and stupider than the girl who had left this room to attend Brown. That girl had been skeptical of her high school classmate, Marc Singer. That girl had high intellectual standards. She read serious books and aspired to be a poet. The “woman” who had replaced her was now spending her afternoons watching All My Children, One Life to Live, and General Hospital. She hadn’t washed her hair or taken a shower since Monday. She knew she was being foolish, that she shouldn’t be depressed about the decisions she had made. She was right to give up on Marc, to erase everything of their life together. She deserved better. He was never going to be faithful to anyone. She couldn’t live her mother’s life.

  But that thought, which occurred to her as she stared into the refrigerator, despite knowing its contents by heart by now, seemed treasonous. Her mother was such a good person. Who was Rachel to feel superior to her, to demand something better? It was her mother who deserved better, and now Rachel was going to give it to her. Wipe out her debt once and for all.

  She found a jar of olives and took it back to the sofa. If she had gone to the shore with her mother and Michelle, there would be crabs and Silver Queen corn and gorgeous tomatoes, hothouse at this time of year, but still good. The Gelmans entertained so well. A little showily, but that was okay. Her father, too, had been extravagant when it came to parties. He believed there was no point in having money if people didn’t know you had it.

  The corollary, as best Rachel could work out, was that people should never know that you didn’t have money. That was how her mother had lived for the past ten years, and that was what had brought her to near ruin this summer. But Rachel had saved her. At some cost to herself, but she believed it wouldn’t feel that way in one, two years. She would meet the right man, they would have a family. She was going to get a do-over. Marc was the wrong person for her. He wasn’t a good person. Her father broke the law, made his money from the poor and weak, cheated on her mother. Yet, somehow, he was a good person. Marc sold commercial real estate, was at his parents’ home every Friday for Shabbat dinner, cheated on his wife—then lied about it. Then acted as if she were the crazy one when she confronted him. That was evil. That was cowardice.