How Lucky You Are (9781455518548)

by Kusek Lewis, Kristyn

  “Ame?” I try again. I glance at Emma, who is now happily stacking alphabet blocks on the coffee table.

  “Yeah?” Amy says, still picking up the toys.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” I don’t know what else to say, but that mark…the way she’s acting…

  “Waverly, what is with you?” she says, not looking up at me. “I’m fine. I just fell down the stairs. If something was broken, I wouldn’t be able to move.” She tosses a handful of crayons into the bin. “When Mike gets home, I’ll have him take a look at it.”

  I watch her. Something isn’t right about this. There is no way that a fall down the stairs caused that thing on her back. I am sure of it. “But how did it cut your skin?”

  Amy sighs, her back still toward me, and shakes her head. “I don’t know. The cheap carpets we had put in, maybe?” She places the plastic bin in a corner of the room and starts collecting Cheerios off the floor.

  I nod and watch her tidy up. The bitter tone of voice isn’t like her, the flaking on the luncheon isn’t like her either, and normally, when you’re a guest in Amy’s house, you have her undivided attention. Even if you just swing by for a minute, she forces you to sit down and plies you with snacks, and she never makes you feel in the way, not like she is doing now.

  She keeps cleaning, limping around the living room. I would try to help, but it is obvious that Amy doesn’t want me pitching in, or doing anything, really.

  “So, I’m, um, going to go,” I say after a few awkward minutes. I wait a beat for her to beg me to stay, the way that she usually would.

  “Okay.” She turns toward me. “Thanks for stopping by.”

  I nod. When our eyes meet, Amy looks away. I start toward the front hall and Amy follows behind.

  “If you talk to Kate, tell her sorry about the luncheon,” Amy says as she opens the door. “And I’ll send her an email later.”

  “Okay.” I play with my keys as I stall for a moment and squint at Amy. One last look.

  “Jesus, Waverly.” Amy sighs. “How many times do I have to say it? I. Am. Fine. I promise. I’ll call you after Mike gets home and let you know what he says.” She reaches to give me a hug.

  “Okay.” I carefully wrap an arm around her, as if she’s a feeble-boned old woman. “Promise?”

  Amy groans. “Yes, I promise.” She fakes a smile again and I turn away. I don’t want to see it.

  An hour later, back at the bakery, I sit at the old wooden desk in my small office behind the kitchen. I try to concentrate on the numbers on my computer screen. Payroll. My least favorite part of my job, especially lately, when there’s hardly enough in the pot to go around.

  I bite into the toffee cookie that I snagged from one of the cooling racks on my way in and stare at the screen, drumming my fingers on my mouse pad. This is useless.

  A single thought hangs over my head like the banner that was draped behind Brendan at the luncheon. When it first occurred to me, pulling out of Amy’s neighborhood, I slammed on the brakes, making a woman who was walking her dog on the sidewalk jump like I was about to careen into her. I keep trying to ignore it but it’s like trying to ignore the barrel of a gun being pressed between your shoulder blades.

  I sit up, my spine cracking, and take a deep breath. I swipe the crumbs from my fingertips and log on to Google. Into the search field, I type, “how to tell if a friend is being abused.” I click on the first search result. There is no way, right? It really couldn’t be this.

  “Warning Signs of Abuse” reads the heading in big, block letters. My eyes scan the list of bulleted items underneath, and each line makes my throat tighten like somebody is closing their hands around my neck.

  A victim might seem uncharacteristically anxious, worried, or depressed. She or he may exhibit symptoms of low self-esteem and may withdraw from usual social activities. Fear toward the victim’s partner may be evident. The partner may seem unusually jealous or critical, even controlling.

  And then:

  The victim may have repeated injuries, the explanations for which might seem odd, even far-fetched.

  I press my hands to my lips and shut my eyes. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. It can’t be this bad, can it?

  I hop up and close the office door, then pick up the phone and dial Kate’s cell.

  “Hey! So what did you think?” Kate answers. It sounds like she’s outside, the whir of the wind making it hard to hear her.

  “Hi.” I gulp. “Kate, I need to talk to you.”

  “Okaaaay, so we’ll talk about the speech later,” she says, her voice flat. “Actually, can you hold on?”

  She always does this. It drives me crazy.

  “Why did you bother to answer the phone if you can’t talk?” I shout into the receiver, but instead of a response I get the sandpapery rustling of Kate putting her hand over the phone.

  Oh God, Kate, come on, I think, wishing I’d called Larry instead. I realize that she’s talking to Brendan. “Yes, I’ll see you at home later,” she says. “Oh, you won’t? Oh. Well, okay, then. I’ll just see you later, then. No, it’s okay. It’s fine. I’ll just see you later.”

  Kate sighs. “Sorry, I’m in the parking lot. Just leaving the campaign office. Finally heading home and can take off these fucking shoes. You wouldn’t believe all of the press they made us do after that thing. I had no idea that there were so many newspapers in the state of Virginia. And blogs, local news stations, radio shows…it’s amazing that people actually care so much about this crap. Anyway, I really need a glass of wine. Do you want to join me? Leave early. You never do.”

  “Kate, I need to talk to you.” I hear the ding-ding-ding of Kate’s open car door, then hear her slamming it shut.

  “Okay, what is it? Is something wrong?” The ignition starts. “I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to talk to you at the luncheon. It was shitty of me to make you sit through that and not even spend any time with you.”

  “Kate, this has nothing to do with you.” I wonder for a second whether I should just bag this entire conversation and call Larry.

  “Okay, well, what is it, then?”

  “It’s Amy.”

  “What about her? Did she end up coming? I couldn’t get a good look at your table from where I was standing. I’m sorry about that, by the way. I would have put you in the front but there were VIPs, and—”

  “Kate, just listen to me, okay?”

  When she doesn’t respond, I can’t tell whether she’s actually obeying for once or if she’s become distracted by her BlackBerry or a hangnail or a stray hair underneath her brow that she’s spotted in her overhead mirror. With Kate, it could be anything. “She didn’t show up,” I say.

  “What?” Kate crows. “Why wouldn’t she show up?”

  “I went by her house afterward.”

  “Wait, you went by her house just because she didn’t come today?” She laughs.

  “I know. But she’s been acting strange lately, and then she didn’t call. I just had this feeling that something might be wrong.”

  “Slightly paranoid of you.”

  I hold the phone out from my ear and take a deep breath before I continue. “Just listen, okay? So I get there and she was a mess. Dressed like she had just woken up, the house looked like it had exploded, she was acting weird, and she was limping.”

  “Did she fall or something?”

  “She said she fell down the stairs, but I saw these marks on her back, Kate. And they didn’t look like something from a fall.”

  “But she’s okay?” she says impatiently. “I don’t understand where you’re going with this.”

  “Kate, it just seems weird!” I shriek. “You know how Amy is, always put together and happy. She was totally the opposite today.”

  “So, what? People can’t have bad days?”

  “No, no, it’s not that. It’s just that Amy hasn’t acted bitchy or withdrawn in the fifteen years we’ve known her. Now all of a sudden she’s moody. She has an injury that certainly doesn’
t look like it came from a little fall down the stairs. Her husband’s turned into an absolute nightmare.” I tick off each statement with my fingers. “I don’t know. Something’s up.”

  “What are you saying?” I can hear her changing radio stations.

  It’s harder to say it out loud than it is to think it. I close my eyes and whisper into the phone, “Do you think that it’s possible that Mike is hitting her?”

  “Mike?” Kate gasps. “Hitting Amy?” She laughs. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Kate, I’m being serious.”

  “Waverly, I really don’t think so,” Kate says, lowering her voice into the patronizing tone she uses when she’s being a know-it-all. “She probably actually fell down the stairs—that can be painful if you do it the right way. Trust me, I did it several times during college. Mike’s a jerk, but beating her? No way. No fucking way.”

  “Do you really think so?” I lean back in my chair and look up at the exposed pipes on the ceiling. “Maybe I am jumping to conclusions.”

  “Waverly, you’re letting your imagination get the best of you. Let it go. We’d know if something was really going on.”

  “How?” I honestly want to know.

  “We just would. Hell, you knew she was pregnant before she told us.” It was true. I dreamt about it three weeks before Amy finally fessed up that the reason she’d stopped drinking wasn’t her new allergy medication.

  “Okay, but you could look at it the other way, too. I mean, if I had a hunch about that and I have a hunch about this…”

  “No, no way. Think about who you’re talking about. They’re far too normal for that kind of thing. Amy sends out all of those ‘happy family’ emails with pictures of Emma nearly every other day.” It’s true. I’ve started to just skim through the slideshows—Emma at the zoo, Emma at the botanical garden, Emma on the swings at the playground—because the Hallmark-perfect pictures began to depress me when I realized that my own life could be summed up with a photo of me, sweaty and flour dusted, hunched over a stack of unpaid bills.

  “They’re at home in that house together every night,” Kate says. “Plus, it’s Amy. Do you really think that if something was happening, she wouldn’t tell us? She’s transparent about everything. And she’s so close to her family. She’d be in North Carolina by now.”

  “I guess.” Maybe I am overreacting.

  “I think you need a drink more than I do.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “Come on. Why don’t you come over? We’ll go for a walk or something. That will clear your head.”

  “I don’t think so.” I have to finish payroll, among a zillion other things. And maybe, if I’m lucky, find some time to actually cook.

  “Okay, suit yourself. But seriously, I don’t think we have anything to worry about. So stop worrying.”

  “Okay.”

  “I just don’t think—”

  I’m tired of hearing her voice. “I know, Kate.” I feel worse than before I called. Spent and exhausted, like I’ve just walked away from a fight.

  Later that night, I climb into bed next to Larry, who’s reading one of his Harlan Coben paperbacks. “Lare?” I say, turning toward him. He smells like Listerine and the pasta pesto I served for dinner.

  “Hmm?” He drops his book to his chest.

  “Do you really think I’m crazy for thinking this?”

  “Crazy? I’ve always thought you were a little crazy.” He lifts his head from the pillow to kiss my forehead.

  I jerk away. “Larry, come on.” He’d had the same reaction as Kate when I came home from work and told him the story. “You know, I’m starting to feel like a little kid who can’t get anyone to believe that there’s a monster under her bed. Why doesn’t anyone believe that this could be plausible? Am I really so deluded?”

  “No, babe,” he says, laughing. “I just don’t think Mike is the wife-beating type.” Larry pulls at me, trying to kiss me again.

  I sit up, ignoring the defeated look on his face as he drops his hands to his sides, and look down at him, his head propped up on two pillows. How can he be so lighthearted all of the time? I think, hating him for a moment. It’s like he thinks he lives in one of his beloved comic strips.

  He cuffs his hands around my arms and pulls me back toward him. I give in and flop down next to him, knowing that if I don’t, it’s going to become something we’ll have to talk about. “I’m sorry, you’re right,” he says, weaving his fingers into my hair. “It’s not funny. But I wouldn’t joke about it unless I really didn’t think that there was anything to worry about. We know them too well. It would be more obvious.”

  “How do you know that, though? I mean, you never really know what’s going on with people. You’ve seen the stories on the news. It’s always the respected pastor who ends up killing his family or the beloved teacher who ends up being a pedophile, or some soccer mom disappears and then they discover that her husband buried her beneath the doghouse in the backyard. It’s always the last place on earth that you would expect it.”

  “That’s true, I suppose. But still.”

  “But what?”

  “Hon, come on,” he says, squeezing me so close that I can feel the dampness beneath the armpit of his undershirt. I wiggle away. “You’re just fixating on this for some reason. It’s like that time that you thought you had a brain tumor because you had those horrible headaches, and then you remembered that you’d given up caffeine a few days earlier.”

  I don’t say anything. If he isn’t going to take me seriously, why should I bother? It isn’t a good habit and it isn’t something I’m proud of, but I’ve discovered over the course of our relationship, and especially the past year, that I excel at giving him the silent treatment.

  “I’m serious, babe,” he says more carefully, now that he realizes I’m angry. “I think you’re getting worked up over nothing.”

  I reach over him and pick up his book where he’s rested it on the mattress. “Here, go back to your reading.”

  He takes the book from me. “You’re pissed now?”

  “I’m fine,” I lie. “I guess if you and Kate think it’s ludicrous, then it must be.” Could it be?

  He sighs, looking at me sideways. “Is sarcasm really necessary?”

  “Larry, just forget it. I’m fine. I’m tired.” I turn over and close my eyes, knowing that he’s waiting for me to say more. Finally, I hear him pick up his book and flip the pages to find his place.

  Thirty seconds of fretting with my eyes squeezed shut is all it takes to convince me that it’s useless to try to sleep. I reach for the red notebook on my nightstand. It’s mostly filled with notes for the bakery; there are ideas for new menu items, flavor combinations that I think up while washing my hair or driving to work, recipes copied from my mother’s musty cookbooks, and—from before I got too poor to eat out—notes on really good and really bad restaurant meals. I browse through the pages, looking for inspiration for the spring menu. “Ginger peach shortcake?” I’ve scrawled across one page. “Orzo salad: kalamata olives, artichokes, thyme,” reads another. After a few minutes, I realize that this is useless. Everything sounds as bland and uninspiring as dry toast.

  Larry turns to me. “What’s going on with you?”

  “Are you kidding?” I say.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Well, like I told you two minutes ago, I think one of my best friends is being abused by her husband. Let’s start with that.”

  “No,” Larry says, sitting up. “I’m not asking about Amy; I’m asking about you. There’s been serious distance between us lately, Wave. We both know it. Every time I try to touch you, you pull away from me.”

  “That’s not true,” I say, thumbing the edge of my notebook.

  “You know it’s true,” he says, snatching it out of my hands. “Look at me, Waverly.”

  “Don’t talk to me like I’m a child!” I say, turning away from him.

  “Waverly, come on, look at me,” he s
ays, almost pleading. I didn’t think it was possible for me to feel worse about the way I’ve been treating him, but now, hearing his voice…“What is going on with you?” he begs.

  “I just have a lot on my mind,” I say.

  “Talk to me about it.”

  “I have talked to you,” I lie. “Work’s crazy right now, but it’s nothing out of the ordinary. And this thing with Amy—it’s really worrying me. Anyway, you have your own stuff to think about right now, with work and all.”

  He studies me for a moment, and I know he’s weighing whether to push further.

  “I’m sorry if I haven’t been completely myself lately,” I say. “I know I haven’t been as attentive as I should be.” I mean it—I really do—but I know that I’m only saying it right now to appease him. The last thing I want to talk about is our relationship.

  He nods. “Thanks,” he says. He reaches out for me.

  I lie down next to him, reluctantly. He doesn’t deserve this, but I can’t bring myself to give any more tonight, not when I can’t stop thinking about Amy. All I can see is that mark on her back and the possibility that maybe, maybe, I know far more than I’m supposed to about where it came from. I close my eyes, knowing that Larry will leave me alone if he thinks I’m falling asleep.

  He turns over and reaches to shut off his lamp. After a few minutes, I sit up in the dark, find my notebook, and grab a pen off of the mess of stuff on my nightstand.

  “Where are you going?” Larry calls as I step out of bed.

  “Don’t worry about it. Go to sleep,” I say.

  In the living room, I turn on Babci’s Tiffany lamp and sit cross-legged on the couch. I haven’t kept a “real” journal—a deep-thoughts, hopes-and-dreams kind of diary—since…well, ever. But I put the date on the corner of a new page and start to write.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Later that week at work, I’m sprinkling hunks of feta cheese onto a roasted vegetable salad and happily listening to Jeannette tell me about her recent Internet-dating adventure. It feels so good to be laughing after my last few days have been consumed with worrying about Amy. Yesterday, when I asked her on the phone if she was feeling better, she insisted that she was completely back to normal. When I probed further by asking whether Mike thought that the wound looked as bad as I did, she said that he said it was no big deal, and then quickly—I think, suspiciously—changed the subject to a story about an annoying neighbor she’d encountered at a three-year-old’s birthday party that morning.