Monsters

by Liz Kay

  “So how long are you in town?” Elaine Parsons asks me. Elaine Parsons. Christ.

  “I leave tomorrow,” I say, taking a sip of champagne. I wish it was vodka. Champagne is lovely and all, but it never seems to do any real work.

  “Tomorrow?” she says.

  She widens her eyes and glances at Tommy, who’s half turned away. Someone tapped him on the shoulder and now he’s standing with his back to me, really deep in conversation. It’s so loud in here, I can’t really tell what he’s saying, but he has his fingers twisted tightly through mine, and this makes me feel—not exactly grounded—but at least held in place.

  “Well, when you come back, we’ll have to have lunch.” She smiles broadly. “Tommy and my husband and I go way back. I’ll fill you in.”

  “That would be great,” I say, though it sounds pretty awful. I already don’t like her, the way she’s studying me, how she keeps glancing past me to see who else is walking by.

  “Why don’t you give me your number?” she says just as Tommy turns back, slipping his arm around my waist.

  “Daniel has her calendar. He can set it up.”

  She stares at him for a minute, her smile tight. “Great,” she says finally. She looks away from him, looks me straight in the eye. “Don’t let Tommy keep you all to himself now.”

  I laugh, shake my head.

  “We’ll set something up,” she says, patting my arm and eyeing Tommy a last time before she turns away.

  “You could have told her to fuck off. You can tell any of these people to fuck off,” Tommy whispers in my ear.

  I turn toward him, let him brush his fingers along my neck. “I thought these were your friends.”

  “Tough to say,” he says. “How loose a definition are we working with?”

  • • •

  It takes Tommy three tries to punch in the door code because we’ve been drinking, and now he’s kissing me, and my hair is in the way. I slip under his arm and move behind him, and he hits the right buttons and pushes the door open and pulls me inside. My shoes are already in my hand, and he takes them from me, drops them on the floor.

  “God, I’ve missed you,” he says. His mouth is on mine, his fingers spread across my shoulder blades.

  “How much?” I say. “Tell me how much.”

  He laughs, and he takes my face in his hands and kisses me over and over. He takes my hand in his and pulls me down the hall and through the great room. But when he flips on the light in the master, he says, “Fuck,” and steps backwards, blocking my way.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” he says. He flips the light off and turns to face me. “You go. I’ll be right up.”

  I frown.

  “Stacey, go upstairs,” he says, but I don’t. I push past him and turn the light on, and of course, there she is. That little actress, the neighbor’s wife, naked, passed out across his bed.

  “I’ll get her out,” he says. “Someone’ll come get her. Don’t let this ruin our night.”

  I can’t seem to turn away. She’s got these perky little tits, dark brown nipples.

  “Stacey,” he says. He puts one hand on my shoulder to nudge me out of the room, but I shake him off.

  “How’d she get in here?”

  “Stace, come on.”

  “She has a key?”

  “No.” He shakes his head. “I don’t know. She knows the door code or something.”

  “You gave her the code?” I turn to look at him, but he looks at his phone.

  He gestures toward the door. “C’mon. I’ll take care of it.”

  “You’ve been seeing her this whole time?”

  “Stacey, stop.” He takes my face in his hands and leans his head against mine. “She’s no one. She’s nothing. I love you.”

  “Then what the fuck is she doing here?” I shove him back hard and walk past him into the great room, and then farther still. He’s already making a call, and I don’t want to listen. I go into the living room and sit in Sadie’s chair. I hold my hand over my mouth and pinch my lips. I think how it will always be like this, Tommy making a mess, someone coming to clean it up.

  I hear the front door open and close. It’s quiet, then still quiet, and then there’s a commotion in the hallway. She’s half awake now, mumbling, crying. I can’t hear what Tommy says to her, but his voice sounds like a threat. I wonder if they’ve dressed her or just thrown a blanket over her shoulders on the way out. I wonder if I’ll find her clothes in the morning, tucked around the house like little clues. I close my eyes and take a deep breath.

  “Hey.” Tommy’s voice is soft. He squats down in front of me, holds my hands in my lap. He holds my fingers up to his lips. “Stace, I know you’re upset.”

  “Upset,” I say. “You think I’m upset?” I pull my hands away and press them over my face.

  Tommy keeps his hands in my lap, rubs his thumb across my thigh. “Honey, come on. The girl is unstable.”

  “She’s not unstable,” I say.

  “I don’t give a fuck what she is.” He stands up and takes a few steps away. “Stacey, please. Let’s not start this shit. Not tonight.”

  My fingertips are black with mascara. I try wiping my eyes with the backs of my knuckles. Tommy watches me, his arms crossed, his lip curled just slightly like he doesn’t like what he sees.

  “You bailed on us. That was you.” He jabs one finger in my direction and then steps backwards, walks to the bar. I close my eyes, cover my face with my hands. I hear him pull a bottle down.

  “Am I pouring one for you?”

  I laugh through my hands, drop them into my lap. “Sure, Tommy. Pour us another drink. That’ll fix everything.”

  “Goddamn it!” he yells, and then a shatter of glass, a million tiny bells clattering against the floor. I turn to look at him, and he’s leaning hard against the bar, his head down like he’s studying the broken bottle.

  “There’s nothing to fix,” he says finally. “This just is what it is. You either want it or you don’t.”

  “Maybe I don’t,” I say. I turn my head away, rub my thumb along the arm of the chair. There are tiny markings in the soft finish, and I can almost see Sadie pressing her thumbnail into the wood, feeling the give as she tunes Tommy out. I wonder if that would work for me.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he says, but I don’t have anything to offer. I don’t know what to say. I just know the sound of his voice is too quiet, it’s too far away. I think, Come get me, Tommy, but he doesn’t. He slumps down against the wall, his feet sliding into the puddle of whiskey and glass.

  “You’ll ruin your shoes,” I say quietly.

  He looks up at me, shakes his head. “I can’t carry this whole thing. If you’re not going to be in this, really in this, I don’t want it. I’m not Michael.”

  Sometimes I wish he was. I wish he would hold everything together and make it easy for me. Michael would never just sit there the way Tommy is, his arms balanced across his knees, waiting.

  “You know this girl … That was not … You were gone,” he says finally.

  I nod, but then I shake my head. It feels impossible. It’s all impossible. “I wish we knew how to do this,” I say. I brush my fingers under my eyes and try to smile at him.

  He watches me for a minute. Then he sighs, lowers his head. “It’s late. You should go upstairs,” he says.

  I think about waking up without him, opening my eyes in the room upstairs that Sadie calls Stacey’s room, though I’ve slept there exactly once. I think it would feel lonelier now. I think everything would feel lonely without Tommy.

  I stand up and cross the room.

  “You’ll cut your feet,” he says, trying to shove a clear path with his shoe.

  I step through the wet of the whiskey, over his knees, and slip down into his lap, burying my face in his neck. He puts his hands on my shoulders, shifting me backwards, pushing my hair back from my face, and I lower my eyes.

  “Look at me,” he says.

  I look at
his eyes, at the skin around his eyes. He looks so tired. I put my hand on his cheek, run my fingers over the stubble along his jaw. I rub my thumb across his mouth. “Your lips are dry,” I say.

  “I spilled my drink,” he says, and I almost smile.

  “Stace,” he says. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say here. I don’t know what you want.”

  I lean into him, lean my head against him, and I feel his lips press against my forehead. I close my eyes and press my palm flat against his chest, count the dull knock of his heartbeat.

  Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two.

  “All of it,” I say. “I want all of it, Tommy. I want you.”

  NOVEMBER

  WHEN I WAKE in the morning, I haven’t seen Tommy in almost three weeks, but he’s flying in tonight. The house feels empty without him, and of course I barely slept. When I walk out, I hear Bear’s collar rattle as he stretches, steps down off the couch. He’s too big to be on the furniture, and his nails are already leaving marks, but Tommy breaks all the rules for everyone. He keeps letting him up.

  I have an hour still before the boys will be awake, so I make coffee, sit at the counter, fire up my laptop. Erin sent me final edits on the third manuscript two days ago, and I need to look through her changes. She’s not asking a lot, shifting the order of a few of the poems, changing a line break or two. She doesn’t like a few of the titles, but I’m not going to change them. It’s going to press no matter what I do. I could drop a grocery list into the middle of it, and she’d still take it.

  In any case, next week is Thanksgiving, so I need to be done. Jenny and her crew are all meeting us in Turks and Caicos for the holiday. Neither she nor Tommy is completely looking forward to it, though I think things are warming up. Over the summer, they spent a week with us, and she spoke to him without scowling on three separate occasions. And only once during the whole trip did she call him a fucking dick. It’s possible she was holding back though. The kids were around a lot.

  When my phone rings, I almost don’t catch it. I’ve plugged it in to charge on the other side of the kitchen, and it’s on silent, but I hear it vibrating against the counter.

  “Hey,” I say, cradling the phone with my shoulder. I move to refill my cup. “Shouldn’t you be on a plane?”

  “Just boarding,” he says. “How much did you miss me?”

  “Very little,” I say.

  “How’s the writing?”

  “It’s good.” I take a sip of the coffee and wander back to the glass door. It’s early, but the sun’s already up, throwing the shadow of the house across the patio, the pool. “I wrote a villanelle.”

  “That’s a good form for you, all uptight and obsessive.”

  “I’m hanging up now,” I say, and he laughs. He sounds happy. He’s always happy when he comes home, and happy again when he leaves. It’s the in-between we’re still figuring out, how to make it through a Tuesday.

  • • •

  In Omaha, on an afternoon as beautiful as this, I would have walked the mile to the boys’ school and they would have run ahead of me on the way home, Stevie begging to take the short cut across the golf course. Absolutely not, I always said.

  Instead, I’m pulling up to the guard station at the front gate of their school. There’s a sticker on the front window of the car, so the guy just waves me through. What their school does not have is a uniform, which strikes me as a terrible injustice every time I see Ben trudging out of the school in his black jeans and T-shirt. Who keeps buying him these black jeans? Probably Sadie.

  “For thirty-five grand, they should get a uniform,” I’d said after Tommy brought me to look at the campus last spring. They’d given me all these glossy brochures on clubs and activities, and I had them spread across the coffee table in the great room.

  “It’s not that kind of school,” Tommy said, handing me a glass of wine. “And what matters is the education they’ll be getting.”

  “I’m just saying,” I said as he sat down next to me, “I wouldn’t mind that sort of safe, parochial image.”

  “They have great security there.”

  “You know what I mean,” I said.

  “You want me to send them to religious school?”

  “No.” I shook my head, took a sip of the wine. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  Tommy put one hand on my leg and rubbed his thumb across my thigh. “Ben’ll be twelve soon. You can’t keep them home with you forever.”

  “I know that,” I said, though I didn’t appreciate him saying it. I hadn’t wanted them to start a new school when we moved in March, so we’d just hired a tutor, and I kind of liked watching them doing their schoolwork in their bathing suits out on the patio.

  “He needs to get out, get away from you, make some friends, maybe find a girlfriend.”

  “I hate you,” I said. “I hope Sadie elopes with that fat boyfriend of hers and you end up a grandfather.”

  “Jesus, Stace.” He laughed though. “That’s a little below the belt.” Tommy actually likes the fat boyfriend, probably because he is fat and completely adores her.

  “Mom!” Ben pounds on the glass of the passenger window, and I startle. I hadn’t even seen him come out. “Unlock the door.” He rolls his eyes dramatically. “Jesus, Mom,” he says as he opens it and climbs in.

  “Watch your language,” I say. “Where’s your brother?”

  “No idea.” He slouches down in the seat, his thumbs folded around the phone in his lap.

  “Who are you texting?”

  “Sadie. She wants to know if Dad’s coming home tonight. Her dad, I mean … Tommy.” He fidgets a little, clicks the screen to black.

  “He is.” I reach over, smooth a curl of his hair, and he ducks his head away. It’s pretty much what I expected. I pull my hand back, look past him out the window for Stevie.

  “How was school?” I say.

  He shrugs. I’ve never been good at this part. I’ve never had to be. Michael was the one with all the canned speeches about family. He’d put his hands on Ben’s shoulder and say, We have each other, and that’s what matters. He used to say that one a lot, and I always thought, That’s such bullshit. It’s not that easy.

  “You know he loves you, Benny.”

  “Who?” he says, and he turns toward me like he really needs the answer. Like he needs me to tell him what I haven’t been able to say.

  “Both of them,” I say. “Tommy. And your dad. They both do.” I run my fingers through his hair again, and this time he lets me, tilting his head into it.

  Stevie pops the handle on the back door, and Ben twists away from me, rubbing one fist across his eyes.

  “Hey, Mom,” Stevie says. “You know how to make salt dough? Because I have to make a map. It’s due tomorrow.”

  Fuck. I glance to the left behind me and pull onto the circular drive.

  “Salt dough?” I say.

  I look at the clock. Tommy should have landed by now.

  “You know who you should ask?” I click the call button on my phone, and it starts ringing through the speakers.

  “Tommy!” Stevie squeals as soon as he picks up. “Mom says you can help me with my homework.”

  “Homework? Must be math. Is it like a worksheet?”

  “No, I have to make a salt map.”

  “A salt map?” he says. “Great. Yeah. Okay. And your mom says? Can you put her on the phone?”

  “You’re on speaker,” I say.

  “Right,” he says. “Why don’t you pick up the handset, baby?”

  “I can’t,” I say. “Because I’m driving. It’s the law.” I pull through the gates and into the line of cars turning right.

  “Pick up the handset,” he says again.

  “Oh god, you know, the traffic here. I better go.” I can’t even keep the laughter out of my voice, and Ben snickers in the seat beside me.

  “You are such …”

  “I love you too,” I say, and then I touch my finger to the red circle on
the screen.

  “Good one, Mom,” Ben says.

  He turns to face the window, but I catch the slow lift of his lips, the start of a smile. Behind me, Stevie’s humming to himself. He kicks his feet against the back of my seat, and I don’t even tell him to stop.

  acknowledgments

  A tremendous thank-you to my agent, Susan Golomb, who said in our first conversation, You have a lot of work to do. A million thanks for taking me on and making me do it. Thanks also to Krista Ingebretson, Scott Cohen, and everyone at the Susan Golomb Literary Agency and now Writers House.

  Thanks, of course, to my editor, Tara Singh Carlson, and to Helen Richard. You are such smart, generous readers. Thank you for helping me shape this book.

  To my earliest readers, Anne Mancini, Anne Freimuth, Ken Brosky, Stephanie Austin, and David Mainelli, thanks so much for your insight and encouragement. Endless gratitude to Katie Benns, Sarah McKinstry-Brown, and Jen Lambert. You’ve each read more drafts of this than any person should have to suffer through. Thanks for never telling me to fuck right off.

  Thanks to the friends and family who encouraged and supported me and put up with my anxieties—those of you listed above, and also Ken Freimuth, Michele O’Donnell, Susie and Dennis Stieren (“life insurance, trust account, annuity”!), Marni Valerio, Rebecca Rotert, Steve Langan, Karen Shoemaker, and Natalia Treviño.

  Thanks to my sons, Devon, Ashton, and Brandon, for putting up with a mother who is too frequently caught up in her own head. I owe you a trip to Disneyland.