“Girls’ night?” I smiled and made my eyes wide, my gaze vulnerable, as if I couldn’t wait to sit beside her, sharing secrets and getting tipsy.
“How sweet. I’ve missed our friendly dinners.”
I frowned gently and looked down at my feet. She could read my saddened expression as being equally regretful, without any need to add words to the lie. I looked back up at her. “They’re nice and chilled, we shouldn’t let them sit.”
“Let me change.” She was wearing pink sweat pants and a pink and blue flowered bathing suit top. She flapped her hands and looked anxiously at the glossy polish.
“You’ll wreck your nails.” I didn’t see why she needed to change her clothes. It wasn’t a party, just a drink in the living room.
“It’s cold out there.”
“The drink will warm you.”
“Not really. Can you put a quilt over my shoulders after I sit down? And can you bring my phone?”
“Sure.”
She followed me to the living room and settled on the couch. She pulled her lower legs onto the cushion, crossing them at the ankles. I tugged a small white and green quilt off the back of the couch, laid it across her shoulders, stuck the phone beside her leg, and handed the drink to her.
I sat beside her, picked up my glass, and took a sip.
“Aren’t we going to toast?”
“What for?”
“The renewal of our friendship.”
“Okay.” I took another sip to downplay the phony toast, then touched my glass to the edge of hers.
“Sometimes, you’re not very nice,” she said.
“That’s true.”
“You should try harder.”
I took a few more sips of my drink. She stared at me over the top of her glass, waiting for me to promise I’d get to work on altering my personality. The quilt slid off her shoulder and the bathing suit strap followed it.
“Oh, can you fix me?”
“Come on, Noreen. I’m not your personal assistant.”
“You’re the one who made drinks without checking whether it was a convenient time for me.”
I pulled the quilt over her shoulder. As I moved away, her drink splashed on the back of her hand. Fortunately, none got on her sticky nails or she probably would have asked me to touch up the polish.
“My strap. It’s bugging me.”
“Enjoy your drink and you’ll forget about all your little discomforts.”
Her phone chimed. She glanced at the screen and took several rapid sips of her drink. She moved her leg to cover the phone. It chimed a second time.
“Do you need to answer that?”
She shook her head. Her expression was somber, her eyes slightly glassy.
“Are you okay?”
She stared at the gently swaying candle flames.
“Who’s texting you?”
“It’s…” She lifted the glass to her mouth and drank some more. “It’s my brother.”
“You look upset.”
“We haven’t spoken in a long time. That’s all. Never mind.” She turned toward me and smiled. Her stretched lips looked parched despite the recent contact with vodka and vermouth.
I put my glass on the table. “So…I wanted to ask you — why did you tell me Jared destroyed the bathroom mirror?”
“Because he…”
“He didn’t do it.”
“He’s lying.”
I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t that. “I don’t think he is.” I stood up and carried my drink across the room. I stood by the candle and lifted the glass close to my face, breathing in the cleansing aroma of alcohol to blot out the sweet gardenia scent wafting from the candles.
“How would you know?”
There wasn’t any way to know. There’s no way to ever know with absolute certainty who is telling the truth, a partial truth, or an outright lie. We all have our own truths. We filter the truthful things we say through wishful thinking and faulty memory and ego and manipulation. In fact, it could be argued there is no such thing as pure truth. Still, there was no reason for him to lie about it. At the same time, there was no sensible reason for her to destroy a piece of her home. The only indisputable truth was that the mirror was so badly scratched it was unusable.
“I asked you not to talk to him about it,” she said.
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Your loyalty is deficient.”
“I wasn’t aware I owed you loyalty along with the rent.”
“I thought we’d be friends. We live together. Our bedroom doors are ten feet from each other. We eat the same food and breathe the same air. We should be taking care of each other.”
Maybe we were all using each other. Jared was using us to enhance his spiritual practice, I was using them as a stopgap until I could find a more suitable home. And Noreen was using us to create a makeshift family. Her original family fractured abruptly, and the only love affair she’d ever experienced had been sheered off even more suddenly. Noreen was a lost lamb, wandering around looking for her flock. But she picked the wrong person. Two wrong people. Jared wanted to stay further away from her than I did. For all her list of shared housing rules, she hadn’t mentioned that she wanted our companionship and loyalty and access to our souls. I shivered and the candle flickered in response to the ripple of disgust that ran through my body. “I know you destroyed the mirror. I don’t understand why you’d make up a lame story like that.”
“Why do you believe him and not me?”
It was a good question. Was it his puppy brown eyes? Did I believe him because he was male and our whole culture is geared toward expecting men to be guileless and women cunning and manipulative and false? It’s commonly believed that most men don’t have hidden agendas and secrets. Most men will tell you what you see is what you get. I’m a simple guy with simple needs. Of course there are the big headline scandals erupting out of men who keep dangerous secrets, but not the average guy. The guys who grab headlines are sociopaths and megalomaniacs who think they can have whatever they want. Did I believe Jared because he was good looking? Did I not believe Noreen because she was a touch homely and her expression was a permanent blend of fear and need? And part of me wondered why I cared. All I wanted was a new mirror, it didn’t really matter who trashed it or why.
I lose patience when I’m expected to accept blatant lies. If you’re going to lie, at least be clever about it. Clearly she was the liar because if she were telling the truth, and she had any shred of normality, she would have made Jared pay for the mirror. If she worried that confronting him and demanding payment might dampen his desire for her, she would have replaced it herself. She would not have hung a useless, too low mirror in my bedroom. No one styles their hair or puts on makeup in the bedroom. Maybe they did in the last century, when women had huge vanity tables with mirrors, and they perched on delicate chairs with puffy pink cushions and frothy skirts to cover the chair legs, admiring themselves as they powdered and painted. But not now.
I returned to the couch. “Why are you going out of your way to make Jared look absurd instead of simply telling me why you trashed it? And replacing it?”
“If I could trust you, if I felt you were a true friend, I might tell you. But you’re one of those women who bonds with men instead of being loyal to your girlfriends. I know your type. You think nothing of betraying my friendship by telling my secrets to him.”
I stretched out my legs and put my feet on the coffee table. I leaned my head back and closed my eyes. After a few minutes of silence, feeling her eyes on my face, expecting something from me that I couldn’t discern, I moved my legs and sat forward. I finished my martini in one swallow. “If you want something to be a secret, you have to tell me. And I really no longer care why you destroyed the mirror. But I rented a room with access to a functioning bathroom. I want it replaced.” I stood up and carried the empty glass to the kitchen. I left it on the counter and started toward the hallway.
“Wait.�
��
I stopped. I crossed my arms and leaned against the corner of the wall.
“Can I trust you to keep my feelings just between us?”
“Yes.”
She looked so pleased, I wondered if she really believed it was that simple. Tell someone your thought is a secret and extract the words you want to hear and all is good. It’s incomprehensible to me how foolishly trusting people can be.
“You really don’t know, do you,” she said.
I raised my eyebrows slightly.
“You have no idea why I would do that?”
I waited.
She picked up her glass and stared into it. Without moving her gaze away from the dancing liquid, she started talking in a low voice. “I see how he looks at you. I’m perfectly aware how much prettier you are. It’s not fair.”
“Men care about more than a pretty face.”
“And you think mine is dull.”
“It doesn’t matter what I think.”
“So you do think it’s dull?”
“You’re not bad looking.”
She put her glass down and wiped her eyes. “I walk by the bathroom and see you looking in the mirror. You’re happy, smiling. You can go without any makeup, or plaster it on. You look great either way. You don’t have to try and fail every day to make yourself look better. You never even consider whether guys will be attracted to you, because you know they are.”
“You have a distorted perspective. Maybe it’s from looking at a damaged mirror.”
She didn’t laugh.
“I saw you putting on mascara,” she said. “Smiling at yourself. I could tell, the way you flicked the brush around, it was just something to do. You didn’t need it. You knew you looked good.”
“Okay.”
She finished her drink and took the olive out of the glass. She popped it in her mouth and held it there for a moment before she chewed. “Anyway. You left for work. I’d been chopping carrots for the stew and I went into the bathroom. The mirror was a little steamy and it seemed like your face was still there, smiling at me, looking superior. I went a little nuts with the knife.”
Even though I’d seen the evidence, thinking of the frenzied knife scraping across the mirrored glass was unnerving. I uncrossed my arms. “News flash, Noreen. We aren’t competing.”
“Yes we are.”
I shrugged and walked around the corner. I went into my room and closed the door. I stuffed earbuds into my ears, and tapped over to my Rachmaninoff play list. I clicked up the volume until I felt the piano inside my head, chords crashing against my skull, drowning out crazy. I kept my eyes open so I didn’t form an image of her taking that carving knife to my face.
24
Running in the fog was a pleasure I hadn’t experienced before I moved to Aptos. It makes the world feel silent. No one can see anything but a shadow moving through the white. It was rare when fog that low and thick came off the beach and into the streets where I ran, but when it happened, I took a longer than average course — at least seven miles, sometimes ten. The feeling of disappearing into the whiteness was an added exhilaration on top of the run itself, which consumed every part of my body, transporting me to another dimension.
It was mostly the silence I liked.
Fog makes some people anxious. They freak out that the low visibility makes it dangerous to drive, and walking or running is deemed even less safe. Cars reveal themselves to each other with headlights, while a small body, even in reflective clothing, disappears. The whole point is the lack of visibility. It feels like running in an alternate reality. The houses fade into nothing and it’s just you and the pavement. Running in the fog is like having the entire world to myself — the streets belong to me, casual observers glancing out their windows are unlikely to see me, and if they do, I’m just a shadow moving past. Fog mutes the sound of my footsteps. My breathing fills my head as if I’m wrapped in a cocoon. It’s quite a trip.
In honor of the fog, I didn’t wear one of my usual neon outfits. I wore a white sports bra, a thin white hoodie that would be removed the minute I was warmed up, and white running shorts with black and white shoes. I put on the Chopin playlist and strapped my phone to my upper arm. I tied my hair in a ponytail and drank half a glass of water. I don’t drink water when I run. A lot of runners do, but I don’t like the extra weight, and I don’t like the change in pace required to pop open a bottle and swallow water without splashing it all over my face.
I started down Seacliff Drive, past the houses facing the ocean. Each time my foot hit the pavement, the impact shot up through the bones in my leg. It’s commonly believed this isn’t good for your body longer term because joints deteriorate and injuries start to take over your life. But the body exists to move — to dance, fuck, walk, climb, run. My joints are just fine. I don’t always run on concrete sidewalks and I think my body is durable and flexible enough to handle the impact on an occasional basis. Sitting in a chair for hours at a time turns your joints into rusty hinges, eventually immobilizing them. Running on a hard surface can’t do any worse.
Fog pressed against my face and drifted in through my nostrils with my long, easy breaths. As I increased my pace, it became something solid, filling my lungs, drifting softly inside of me. I was part of the fog, wrapped up in its damp blanket while it stroked the inside of my body.
About two miles into it, as I crossed the small bridge leading to the path that a quarter mile later branches off to a road with a hairpin turn, winding up toward the cliffs again, I felt a car twenty or thirty feet behind me. I hadn’t heard it approach, but the speed was matching my own. I ran faster. The car mirrored the increase in speed. I slowed. I wasn’t going to turn and let the driver know he had power over my sense of tranquility, my thoughts. He already had it, but he didn’t know it, tapping the power right back onto my side of the table.
The engine revved and the car pulled ahead of me — a pewter Boxster. Seeing it wasn’t surprising. I’d seen him multiple times, cruising by the bungalow, driving up the hill from the beach, parked at the top of the cliff staring out at the ocean with music thumping through closed windows. He was, without much subtlety, watching the house. But his timing was always off. As far as I knew, he never made his forays through the neighborhood when Noreen was the only one home.
I heard the window slide down.
“Hey.”
I lifted my hand in a wave and kept running.
“Can you stop for a minute?”
“I’m running.”
“I can see that. I wanted to ask you a question.”
I stopped abruptly, turned, and put my hands on my hips.
“I went by the house, but there’s a white BMW in the driveway. Does Noreen have company?”
“The car owner lives there.”
He nodded. “Okay. I really was hoping to catch her alone. Maybe you could help me with that.”
“Why would I do that? I have no idea who you are or what you want.”
“A long lost relative. Wanting to surprise her.”
It slipped out easily enough, and seemed plausible, but if it was that simple, he would have mentioned it when I first met him, if you can call it a meeting when no names are exchanged. “How would I help you?”
“I could give you my number and you can text me when she’s there by herself.”
“If I’m not there, I’m not going to know for certain when she’s by herself.”
He rubbed his forehead, pushing his hair to the side of his face.
“Your behavior could be interpreted as creepy,” I said.
“Am I creeping you out?”
“No.”
“Then why did you say that?”
“Just telling you how it might look to someone who isn’t me.”
He laughed. “Do you want to go get coffee with me? We can figure it out, how I can surprise Noreen and not creep anyone out.”
“I’m running.”
“Not any more.”
I began
jogging in place. His gaze immediately moved below my face. I changed the jog to a straddle hop from side to side. His eyes remained locked in place and he smiled just a bit.
“If she hasn’t seen you in a while,” I said, “Why don’t you just text or call? Isn’t that a surprise enough?”
“I want to see the look on her face.”
I nodded, keeping the side to side hop going. “It looks like you’re SOL.”
He moved his gaze back to my face. “You’re a very intriguing person.”
I nodded.
“You’re agreeing with me?”
I shrugged.
“Why no coffee?”
“You’re a complete stranger.”
“Yet you sat in your yard and talked to me. And now you’re standing here talking. Didn’t you mother tell you not to talk to strangers?”
“No.”
He smirked. “Now what?”
“Now nothing.”
“I think you like talking to me,” he said.
I smiled.
“Can you stop jumping around? What do I have to do to get you to have coffee with me?”
“Tell me your name, or tell me how you’re related to Noreen, or get out of the car and kiss me.”
He steered the car close to the curb, shut off the engine, opened the door, and climbed out.
“So how are you related?”
“I liked the last option best,” he said.
Of course he did. I was fond of it myself. It really didn’t matter what his name was. He didn’t know mine either. Flirting with someone, relative or not, from Noreen’s world was dangerous. But what fun is life without danger? It’s important to stir up the animal instinct, stay in the center of life. Danger makes me feel alive, in most cases. Not always. Not water, the most dangerous force of all. Or maybe kissing is the most dangerous force since he was moving toward me and my heart pounded as if I were nearing the end of a sprint after a seven-mile run. Blood pushed against my skin, making the fog steam around me as if my body heat might burn away the thick white clouds before the sun did.
It was a strange situation. Jared was so much better looking. This guy wasn’t hot, but he was sexy in a rock star kind of way — thin, with a funky haircut and a bony face and a seductive way of moving. He had longish fingernails and he was dragging the nail of his index finger along my cheek. I shivered.
The Woman In the Mirror: (A Psychological Suspense Novel) (Alexandra Mallory Book 1) Page 13