The Last Mrs. Parrish

by Liv Constantine

  “I’ve got a good feeling about this, Daphne. Jackson Junior. That’s what we’ll call him.”

  I looked at him from the corner of my eye. “Jackson, what if—”

  He cut me off. “No negativity. Why do you always have to be such a downer?”

  As the ultrasound wand moved around my belly and we looked at the heartbeat and the torso, I was making such a tight fist that I realized my nails were digging into my palm.

  “Are you ready to know what you’re having?” the doctor asked in her cheery, singsong voice.

  I looked at Jackson’s face.

  “It’s a girl!” she said.

  His eyes went cold, and he turned and left the room without a word. The doctor looked at me, surprised, and I came up with something on the fly.

  “He just lost his mother. She always wanted a girl. He was embarrassed for you to see him cry.”

  She gave me a strained smile and spoke stiffly. “Well, let’s get you cleaned up, and you can go home.”

  He didn’t speak to me the entire ride home. I knew better than to try and say anything to make it better. I had screwed up again, and even though I knew that of course it wasn’t my fault, I felt my anger turn inward. Why couldn’t I just have given him a son?

  He stayed in the New York apartment for the next three nights, and I was grateful for the reprieve. When he came home the next night, he almost seemed back to normal—or whatever normal was for him. He’d texted me to let me know he’d be home at seven, and I’d made sure to have stuffed pheasant ready for dinner, one of his favorites. When we sat down to eat, he poured himself a glass of wine, took a sip, then cleared his throat.

  “I’ve come up with a solution.”

  “What?”

  He sighed loudly. “A solution to your ineptitude. It’s too late to do anything about this one.” He gestured at my stomach. “Everyone already knows you’re pregnant. But the next time, we’re getting an earlier test. CVS. I looked it up. It can tell us the sex, and we can do it well before your third month.”

  “What will that accomplish?” I asked, even as I knew what the answer would be.

  He raised his eyebrows. “If the next one’s a girl, you can abort it, and we’ll keep trying until you get it right.”

  He picked up his fork and took a bite. “By the way, can I trust you to remember to send in Tallulah’s application to St. Patrick’s preschool? I want to make sure she gets into the threes program next year.”

  I nodded mutely as the asparagus in my mouth turned to mush. I discreetly spit it into my napkin and took a swallow from the glass of water in front of me. Abortion? I had to do something. Could I get my tubes tied without him finding out? I’d have to figure something out after this baby was born. Some way to make sure it was the last pregnancy I ever had.

  Forty-Eight

  The children were what helped me to keep my sanity. As the saying goes, the days were long but the years were short. I learned to put up with his demands and his moods, only occasionally messing up and daring to talk back or refuse him something. On those occasions, he made sure to remind me of what was at stake if I screwed up. He showed me an updated letter from two doctors certifying my mental illness, which he kept locked in a safe-deposit box. I didn’t bother asking what he had on them to get them to go along with his lies. If I tried to leave again, he said, this time he’d lock me up in the loony bin forever. I wasn’t about to test him.

  I became his pet project. By the time Bella was in first grade, both girls were in school all day, and he decided my education should continue as well. I had a master’s degree, but that wasn’t enough. He came home one night and handed me a catalog.

  “I’ve signed you up for French lessons three days a week. The class starts at 2:45. That way you can still get to the foundation on your two days there and the gym beforehand.”

  The girls were doing their homework at the kitchen island, and Tallulah looked up, pencil poised in the air, waiting for me to answer.

  “Jackson, what are you talking about?”

  He looked at Tallulah. “Mommy’s going back to school. Isn’t that great?”

  Bella clapped her hands. “Yay. Will she come to my school?”

  “No, darling. She’ll go to the local university.”

  Tallulah pursed her lips. “Didn’t Mommy already go to college?”

  Jackson walked over to her. “Yes, my sweet, but she doesn’t know how to speak French like you two do. You don’t want a stupid mommy, do you?”

  Tallulah’s eyebrows furrowed. “Mommy’s not stupid.”

  He laughed. “You’re right, sweetie. She’s not stupid. But she’s not polished. She came from a poor family where they don’t know how to behave in polite society. We need to help her learn. Right, Mommy?”

  “Right,” I answered through clenched teeth.

  The class was right in the middle of the day, and I hated it. The professor was a snobby Frenchwoman who wore fake eyelashes and too-red lipstick and talked about how crass Americans were. She took special delight in pointing out the flaws in my accent. I’d only been to one class and was already sick of it.

  I was nonetheless getting ready to go back the next week when I got an emergency call from Fiona at the foundation. One of our clients needed to get his son to the hospital, and his car wouldn’t start. I offered to take him, even though it meant missing a class. Of course, I never mentioned a thing to Jackson.

  The following Monday, I received a frantic call from the girls’ school just as I got back to the house after a long massage and facial.

  “Mrs. Parrish?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ve been trying to reach you for three hours.”

  “Is everything okay? Are the children all right?”

  “Yes. But they are quite upset. You were supposed to pick them up at noon.”

  Noon? What was she talking about? “They don’t get dismissed until three.”

  An exasperated sigh on the other end. “It’s a teacher planning afternoon. It’s been on the calendar for a month, and we sent a note home. You should also have received an e-mail and a text.”

  “I’m so sorry. I’ll be right there. I didn’t receive any calls on my cell,” I said apologetically.

  “Well, we’ve been dialing it for hours. We couldn’t reach your husband either. He’s apparently out of town.”

  Jackson wasn’t on a business trip, and I had no idea why his assistant hadn’t put her through.

  I hung up and ran to the car. What could have happened? I pulled out my phone and looked at it. No missed calls. I checked my texts. Nothing.

  At the red light, I searched through my e-mails and didn’t see any from the school. A sick feeling wound its way from my belly up to my chest. Jackson had to be responsible, but how? Had he deleted the e-mails and texts from my phone? Could he have blocked the school phone number? And why would he do this to the girls?

  I skulked up to the main office, dying of embarrassment, and took my little girls from the office of the disapproving headmistress.

  “Mrs. Parrish, this isn’t the first time. This behavior cannot continue. It’s not fair to your daughters, and frankly, it’s not fair to us either.”

  I felt my cheeks go warm, and I wished the floor would swallow me up right then and there. Only a couple of weeks before, I’d been over an hour late for pickup, and Jackson had been called to retrieve the children. Earlier that day, he’d come home for lunch, and after he’d left, I was suddenly exhausted and lay down for a quick nap. I didn’t wake up until the three of them came in the door at four o’clock. I had slept right through the phone alarm.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Sinclair. I don’t know what happened. I don’t have any of the e-mails or texts, and for some reason my phone never rang.”

  Her expression made it clear she didn’t believe a word I was saying. “Yes, well. Please see to it that it doesn’t happen again.”

  I went to take their hands, and Bella pulled hers away, st
omping ahead of me toward the car. She didn’t speak to me the entire ride home. When we got to the house, Sabine was waiting, fixing a snack for them.

  “Sabine, were you here this afternoon? The school was trying to reach me.”

  “No, madam. I was at the grocer’s.”

  I picked up the house phone and dialed my cell. It rang in my ear, but the cell phone in my hand didn’t buzz. What was going on? With a sinking feeling, I unlocked my phone and went to Settings, tapped Phone, and looked at My Number. My mouth dropped open as it revealed a number I didn’t recognize. I took a closer look. It was a new phone. My old one had a tiny crack in the plastic by the home key. Jackson must have replaced it. Now I wondered about the other time I’d been late for pickup. Had he drugged me?

  “Daddy’s home!” Bella squealed.

  As she ran into his arms, he leveled a look at me over her head. “How’s my girl?”

  She stuck her lip out. “Mommy forgot us at school again. We had to sit in the office all day. It was terrible.”

  A look passed between Jackson and Sabine.

  He hugged her tighter and kissed the top of her head. “My poor darling. Mommy has been very forgetful lately. She missed her French class too.”

  Tallulah looked over at me. “What happened, Mom?”

  Jackson answered for me. “Mommy has a drinking problem, sweetie. Sometimes she just gets too drunk to do what she needs. But we’ll help her, won’t we?”

  “Jackson! That’s not—”

  I heard Sabine gasp.

  “Don’t lie anymore, Daphne. I know you missed your French class last week,” he interrupted. He took my hand in his, squeezing hard. “If you just admit you have a problem, I can help you. Otherwise, you may need to go back to the hospital.”

  Tallulah jumped up, tears springing to her eyes. “No, Mommy! Don’t leave us.” She threw her arms around my waist.

  I struggled to find my voice. “Of course not, sweetheart. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Sabine will pick you up from now on. That way, the school won’t get the wrong idea if Mommy forgets again. Right, Mommy?”

  I took a deep breath, trying to slow the pounding in my chest. “Right.”

  He reached out and touched the sleeve of my shirt. “And that’s a really ugly outfit you have on. Why don’t you go change? Bella, go help Mommy find a nice dress for dinner.”

  “Come on, Mommy. I know what would look pretty on you.”

  Forty-Nine

  All of a sudden, everywhere I looked, there were turtles. They hid behind photographs, peered out from bookshelves, perched menacingly on dresser tops.

  In the early days, before I learned not to share my soul, I’d told Jackson why I hated them. When Julie and I were young, my father bought a turtle for us. We’d always wanted a dog or a cat, but unrelated to her CF, Julie was allergic to both. My mom had asked him to get a box turtle, but he brought home a snapping turtle instead. It had been returned to the store after a year because its previous owner couldn’t care for it anymore. That very first day, I was feeding him a carrot, and he snapped and bit my finger. His jaw was so strong I couldn’t free it, and I screamed while Julie ran to find my mother. I can still remember the pain and my panicked feeling that he would bite it off. My mother’s quick thinking of offering him another carrot worked, and his mouth opened again. I pulled my bleeding finger out of its mouth, and we went to the emergency room. Of course, we returned the turtle, and I was left with a permanent fear of anything with a hard shell.

  Jackson had listened, murmuring comfort, and it had felt good to unburden myself of another childhood trauma. When Bella was a baby, I put her down for her nap one day, and as I was leaving her nursery, something leaning over the shelf caught my eye. It was positioned among her stuffed animals. I called Jackson at work.

  “Where did the turtle in Bella’s room come from?”

  “What?”

  “The turtle. It was in with her stuffed animals.”

  “Are you serious? I’m in the middle of a killer day, and you’re asking me about a stuffed animal. I have no idea. Is there anything else?”

  I suddenly felt foolish. “No. Sorry to bother you.”

  I took the damn thing and threw it in the trash.

  The next day, Meredith stopped by for a visit, and I invited her to have coffee in the conservatory. She walked over to the floor-to-ceiling bookcases and picked something up.

  “This is lovely, Daphne. I’ve never noticed it before.” She was holding a white-and-gold porcelain turtle.

  I dropped my cup, spilling hot coffee all over myself.

  “Oh my gosh, what a klutz,” I sputtered and rang for Margarita to clean up. “Jackson must have picked that up. I hadn’t noticed.” I clasped my hands together to stop them shaking.

  “Well, it’s quite beautiful. Limoges.”

  “Take it.”

  She shook her head. “Don’t be silly. I was only admiring it.” She gave me a strange look. “It’s time I was going. I’m meeting Rand at the club for lunch.” Then she put her hand on my arm. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes, just tired. I’m still adjusting to the baby’s schedule.”

  She smiled. “Of course. Try and get some rest. I’ll call you later.”

  After she left, I searched online to find the turtle. Over $900!

  That night, I placed it on the table in front of his plate. When he sat down to dinner, he glanced at it, then back at me.

  “What’s this doing here?”

  “That’s exactly what I’d like to know.”

  He shrugged. “It belongs in the conservatory.”

  “Jackson, why are you doing this? You know how I feel about turtles.”

  “Do you hear how crazy you sound? It’s just a little figure. Can’t hurt you.” He was looking at me with that smug expression, challenging me with his eyes.

  “I don’t like them. Please stop.”

  “Stop what? You’re being awfully paranoid. Maybe that postpartum depression has returned. Should we talk to the doctor?”

  I threw my napkin on my plate and stood up. “I’m not crazy. First the stuffed animal, and now this.”

  He shook his head and made a circular motion with his finger by his ear—like kids do in school to indicate someone is cuckoo.

  I flew up the stairs and slammed the bedroom door. Flinging myself on the bed, I screamed into my pillow. When I lifted my head, two marble eyes were staring at me from my nightstand. I picked up the glass turtle and threw it as hard as I could against the bedroom wall. It didn’t shatter, but merely landed on the floor with a soft thud. It sat there, appraising me with its reptilian eyes, perched as though it was preparing to crawl toward me and punish me for what I had done.

  Fifty

  When you discover you are married to a sociopath, you have to become resourceful. There’s no point in trying to change him—once the pot is in the kiln, it’s too late. The best I could do was study him—the real him, the one hiding behind his well-polished veneer of humanity and normalcy. Now that I knew the truth, it was easy to spot. Things like the small smile playing at his lips when he was pretending to be sad. He was a brilliant mimic and knew just what to say and do to ingratiate himself into the affections of others. Now that he’d dropped the facade with me, I had to figure out how to beat him at his own game.

  I took him up on his suggestion to take more courses at the university. But I didn’t study art. I bought the textbooks for the art class and figured I would read up on my own in case he quizzed me. Instead, I signed up for psychology courses, paying cash for them and registering under a different name with a post office box. The campus was large enough that there was little chance of my French professor seeing me while I was pretending to be someone else, but just in case, I wore a baseball cap and sweats to those classes. It’s worth noting that by this point in my marriage, these measures didn’t seem extreme to me. I had adjusted to a life where subterfuge and deceit were as natural as breathing
.

  In my abnormal psychology class, I began to put the pieces together. My professor was a fascinating woman who had a private practice. Hearing her describe some of her patients was like listening to a description of Jackson. I took another abnormal psych course with her as well as her class on personality. Then I spent hours at the university library reading everything I could get my hands on about the antisocial personality.

  Interviews with sociopaths have revealed that they’re able to identify a potential victim merely by the way the person walks. Our bodies apparently telegraph our vulnerabilities and sensitivities. Spouses of sociopaths are said to have an overabundance of empathy. I found that bit of information hard to understand. Is there really such a thing as too much empathy? It had a certain poetic irony, though. If sociopaths are said to lack empathy and their victims to have too much, they would seem to make a perfect match. But of course, empathy can’t be divvied up. Here, you take some of mine; I have extra. And sociopaths can’t acquire it anyway—the lack of it is what defines them in the first place. I think they’re wrong, though. It’s not too much empathy. It’s misplaced empathy, a misguided attempt to save someone that can’t be saved. All these years later, I know what he saw in me. The question I still wrestle with is, what did I see in him?

  When Bella turned two, he’d begun badgering me to get pregnant again—he was dying for a son. There was no way I would willingly bring another child of his into this world. Unbeknownst to him, I went to a free clinic in another town, used a fake name, and got fitted for an IUD. Every month he charted my cycles, knew exactly when I was ovulating, and made sure that we had even more sex during that window. We had a big blowout one day when I got my period.

  “What the hell is wrong with you? It’s been three years.”