A week after Pierce was arrested, Krull and I went to Nate’s funeral together, and sat alongside Jenna and Ezra. “Does Uncle Nate get to take all those flowers to heaven?” Ezra asked as the minister spoke and many of his beautiful costars—male and female—wept into handkerchiefs.
“Sure, honey,” said Jenna. “He gets to take his Emmys, too.”
Nate’s three older brothers were there, all of them handsome in that Nordic/Minnesota kind of way, but none so sparkling as their brother had been. As they lowered the casket into the ground, I watched Nate’s parents, staring at that closed box so raptly, as if they were still hoping, somehow, for a happy ending.
Sydney didn’t make it to the funeral. She flew out the next day. Yes, flew out, because she was living in California. She’d never left.
WLUV was broadcasting her via satellite, and the whole “live” thing was just a publicity stunt that entailed some sort of confidentiality agreement. “You should have told me,” I complained during her visit, over glasses of wine at the Stanhope’s bar. “I wouldn’t have said anything. And besides, I’m your daughter.”
“Oh, Samantha,” she said. “You of all people should know I’d never move to New York. You know what the humidity does to my hair.”
She’d never even thought about moving, as it turns out. Yet so many other changes have occurred in these two short months: Yale got the part in The Mikado, with the director’s caveat that he “Please lighten the hell up.” Shell broke down, said, “Screw the ring,” and started sleeping with En again. And, in a truly surprising turn of events, the actress who played Juliana left Shakespearean Idol to portray Blythe’s long-lost sister on Live and Let Live—and was replaced by none other than Tabitha—sorry, Tabs Meeks.
I’ve changed too, but on the inside and not really for the better. Here’s what scares me now: Sterling roses, The Wizard of Oz, polar bears, the color green, collages. Clowns too, but that’s an ongoing thing.
Also, if a stranger pays me a compliment, or if any straight guy, other than Krull, looks into my eyes for more than three seconds, I start to hyperventilate.
I know I’ll feel different someday. But when you’re bound to a bed with a bald killer straddling your chest, it’s going to make an impact. Right now, there’s love, and then there’s that other, awful emotion—the one you have to watch out for.
I haven’t met Ethan yet. Sheila thought we should take it slow—but that’s going to change today. Krull has him for the whole weekend, and I’m meeting the two of them at the playground on Twelfth and Seventh, where Sheila likes to drop him off. I have to say, I’m nervous. Before Krull left our apartment this morning, I asked his opinion on four different outfits, all of which he very unhelpfully called, “Fine.”
I’m heading west on Twelfth now, in my fifth outfit—a red hooded sweatshirt under a peacoat with jeans—which I’m feeling pretty good about, though my heart is pounding harder than it ever has on any date, even my high school prom. I really hope he likes me.
I reach the playground and spot them immediately: Krull standing at a distance as Ethan inches up one of the tallest playground slides I’ve ever seen.
“Dad?”
“You can do it,” says Krull.
Ethan nods, then takes the ladder one step at a time until finally he reaches the top. From my experience as a preschool teacher, most kids want an audience when they scale a height like that. “Watch this!” they yell. “Look at me! Look how high I am!”
But when Ethan gets to the top, he just slides right down—no announcement, not even a pause. Just that look of pure joy, then completion, as his shoes hit the sand.
“One more time!” he says. His eyes are so much like his dad’s that it breaks my heart. Then Krull turns and waves and I think, Family.
As I start walking toward them, I feel a chill up my back—that unsettling sensation of being watched by someone, somewhere. But for now, I see Ethan smiling at me, and I’d rather ignore it.
Turn the page for an excerpt from
Alison Gaylin’s
debut suspense novel
Hide Your Eyes
The first novel to feature
Samantha Leiffer and John Krull
PROLOGUE
Your Spiritual Lifeboat
“I’d kill for publicity like yours,” said Shell Clarion yesterday morning. Shell has said this many times within the past month, but I’ve never responded because it annoys me in so many ways.
First of all, there’s the tone: I’d kill for publicity like yours, as if she were talking about metabolism or pore size.
The truth is, when you’re in the papers, everybody stares at you. You can’t buy things like condoms or facial depilatory cream. And you can forget all about spitting, or saying “fuck you” to a bike messenger who nearly knocks you unconscious, or doing anything even remotely unphotogenic, because you will be noticed and it will make Page Six of the New York Post under some self-fulfilling headline like “Is the Pressure Getting to Her?” and then you’ll be even more paranoid than you were to begin with.
There’s also the unspoken implication that I should be doing something with this publicity—writing a book, for instance. I don’t want to write a book. I want to teach prekindergarten and work in the box office of an off-Broadway theater. I’ve been doing both for years, and neither requires a spokesperson.
Most important, there’s the fact that I did kill for publicity like mine, and if Shell honestly wants a bunch of cameras shoved in her face when she’s buying tampons at Rite Aid, all she needs to do is kill someone too. But she has to understand this first: No amount of publicity can make up for the dreams you have, every night, after you take someone’s life.
Of course, I didn’t tell this to Shell, because she is an aspiring soap opera actress who chose the name of Shell Clarion, and you don’t want to discuss existential pain with somebody like that. So instead I said, “I bet if I punched you in the face, we could both make the six o’clock news.” Worked pretty good. Wish I’d said it earlier.
My name is Samantha Leiffer. Even before the killing, the last name sounded familiar to people because of my mother, Sydney Stark-Leiffer, self-help author and lover of publicity.
In her latest book, Your Spiritual Lifeboat, Sydney talks about the simple ways we can all stay afloat in “the sometimes placid, sometimes roiling sea called living.” Meditation or prayer is the life vest—“the puncture-proof floatation device that you wear close to your heart.” The planks of the lifeboat, described in the following fourteen chapters, include self-education, exercise, career fulfillment, family, laughter and friendship. The rudder—the thing that gives the boat direction—is love.
Sydney’s sold about a trillion of these books, so I hate to disagree with her, but my lifeboat has always been constructed differently than that. Until recently, it consisted of two planks getting tossed around in a choppy ocean, with me lashed to the top. The planks were my two jobs. Love was the school of hungry sharks circling just below the surface. Forget about the life vest; the sharks would swallow it whole.
The odd part is, love was what brought me to New York in the first place. I’d met Nate during my senior year of college when I stage managed King Lear and he played Edmund the Bastard. He was so freakishly beautiful, Nate. A shimmering blond museum piece, with brains and talent and an ass you could rest a full martini on, and he claimed to love me. I guess I’m attractive, but not like Nate. Nate literally caused traffic accidents.
I’d often wake up in the middle of the night and stare at his closed eyes—almond shaped, with thick, honey-colored lashes—and wonder, What is wrong with him?
Turned out there was something wrong with Nate—or, at least, with Nate and me. I found out after I’d followed him to New York and taken the job at the box office and learned, through a series of cryptic answering machine messages and a bouquet of irises on the doormat, that he was screwing his commercial agent, Susan, every day after I left for work, and his theatri
cal agent, Gregory, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings, when he was supposed to be at his Method class.
Through my mother’s most recent ex-husband, a real estate developer, I found a decent-sized, lower Chelsea studio on the twelfth floor of a prewar building, overlooking an airshaft but rent stabilized. Then I called a furniture rental place called Rent 2 Own and ordered a roomful of blond wood and beige cushions. The idea behind that decision was: light, modern, very temporary. Yet I wound up renting the stuff so long I owned it, and found myself stuck with an apartment that looked like a dentist’s waiting room.
Still, the place was convenient. Only ten street blocks north of the Space, which is the theater where I work; an additional three avenue blocks east of the Hudson River, where I like to take walks; five street blocks south and two avenue blocks west of Sunny Side Preschool, where I began teaching a year after the breakup, when I decided my lifeboat needed a sturdier, more buoyant plank.
Unconsciously, I’d arranged my life in a tight, safe circle in which even subways were unnecessary. I had my kids to keep me company from eight ’til noon; my aspiring actor coworkers at the box office to entertain me from two ’til curtain. Then I had a microwavable dinner on my blond wood dinette in front of the Shopping Channel, and bed.
My mother said I wasn’t realizing my true potential. “Who moves to New York City to teach nursery school?” she’d ask over the phone from L.A. “Who goes to Stanford to work in a box office?”
I don’t know, Mom, I’d want to reply. Who gets divorced three times in six years and then writes a chapter called “Love Is the Rudder”?
Mainly, I was happy—the kind of muted happy that you don’t notice at the time, but see clearly after it’s gone.
There are seven people, including the manager and me, who work in the box office of the Space. That’s about six too many. But in a textbook case of putting the cart before the horse, the rich owner believes a busy box office attracts big ticket sales. Or so she says. I think it’s a tax scam.
Before I tell this story, I should list the names of my box office coworkers. The kids at Sunny Side have normal, human names like Daniel Klein and Nancy Yu. When I introduce them, you won’t go, “What?” and stop paying attention to the story in order to digest the syllables. The Space staff, though—aspiring actors—have the most blatantly changed names this side of the porn industry: Besides Shell Clarion, there’s En Henry, Argent Devereaux, Yale St. Germaine and Hermyn. Hermyn is a woman—a feminist performance artist and the only person I’ve ever met with just one name. Each of us has a cubbyhole near the will-call window, for phone messages, mail and notes from visitors. On top of each cubbyhole, there’s a piece of masking tape with our initials on it. Hermyn’s just says “H.”
Until last month, Hermyn never spoke. Not a word. She’d taken a three-year vow of silence in order to shore up vocal power for Inanimate Womyn, a one-person show in which she mutated her voice into a whip, a brick and a feather.
My other coworkers thrill to the sound of their own voices. That includes my best friend, Yale St. Germaine, but I like the sound of his voice too.
When the rest of them have been sniping and singing and pontificating so much that it seems they’ve stolen all the air out of the room, Yale invites me outside for cigarette breaks. Even though he knows I don’t smoke. Even though everyone knows I don’t smoke. “How about some secondhand carcinogens?” he says. And I run.
Life would’ve been so different had I chosen to not smoke with Yale on that overcast day in February when I took a walk to the Hudson River instead.
I still wonder what made me stop at that ugly, abandoned construction site in the first place, let alone stay long enough to see what I did. Initially, I assumed it was boredom, or PMS, or possibly the loneliness that used to hit me so often, especially on overcast days in late winter when everything looks ugly and abandoned. In interviews, I’ve attributed it to claustrophobia—an occupational hazard for anybody who works in a box office. But lately, none of that seems right.
I’ve been thinking it was luck. Whether it was good luck or bad, I’m not sure.
1
Squad Watery
It was Valentine’s Day, or, as Yale St. Germaine liked to call it, “the only holiday with a massacre named after it.” Valentine’s Day depressed Yale because he’d had some gorgeous ones in his life—the kind with roses and candlelight and someone with moist eyes grasping both your hands over a white tablecloth and comparing you to various addictive substances.
I’d never taken Valentine’s Day seriously. It was fine for my preschool class, but to my eye it was a kids’ holiday, full of sweet but unsubstantial things like paper hearts and candy. And boyfriends.
The only valentine I could depend on was the one from my mother. It was the same postcard her publicist sent out to the media: a black-and-white headshot of her taken circa 1981, the year her first book came out. In the white space over the photo hovered a pink, cursive inscription: Open Your and Love Will Sail In. Despite the two decades that had elapsed since the shot was taken, Sydney looked more or less the same. Like me, with an Adrien Arpel makeover.
Because she still used it as her author photo, it had attained icon status among Stark-Leiffer enthusiasts: the sculpted, dark hair with its warm, professional-looking highlights; the pale eyes, embraced by kohl; the outlined and painted lips compassionately pursed. It was a photo that said, “I know how to accentuate my best features, but right now, I’m thinking about you.”
Sydney usually just scrawled her signature on my valentine, but this time she’d added a note. Have fun, Samantha, she’d written at the bottom of the card in bright red ink. Please.
I was carrying the card in my giant patchwork shoulder bag as I walked to Sunny Side that morning. And I was also carrying more February Fourteenth fun than Sydney Stark-Leiffer could shake her red pen at: twenty cut-out valentine hearts, five extra pads of construction paper, one bag of children’s scissors, eight packages of doilies, two jars apiece of red, silver, gold, green and pink glitter (and three extra jars of gold, because the kids loved gold), nine tubes of Elmer’s glue and twenty small boxes of crayons.
It wasn’t tons of fun, but it felt close to it. Who knew paper products could be so heavy? It couldn’t be helped, though. My classroom had been robbed twice. (I still found this hard to wrap my head around. A gang of West Village nursery school marauders.) In the latest heist, they’d made off with all my Chanukah decorations—including the Styrofoam latkes and the giant paper dreidel—so I was relatively certain valentine supplies wouldn’t be safe there overnight.
I shifted the heavy bag to the other shoulder, and that’s when I felt it. A creeping, cold sensation originating at the base of my spine, winding up through my vertebrae one by one, settling into the sweat on the back of my neck and pressing against it, like puddled ice. For a few seconds, I couldn’t breathe.
A man bumped into me as he passed. “Get the fuckin’ fuck out of my fuckin’ way!” he said. It always amazed me how many times New Yorkers could insert the word fuckin’ into a sentence, and normally I would’ve stared at this man, if only to see what someone who said “fuckin’ fuck” looked like. But I was too distracted. The awful tingling began to dissipate, though the idea of it lingered.
Dead Man’s Fingers. Chills up your spine for no reason. The sign of a bad premonition.
I don’t like to think of myself as superstitious, but I am. It comes from my grandmother, who lived with Sydney and me after Dad moved out and chastised us if we wore socks around the house. (If you wear socks with no shoes, you’ll lose all your money!) Grandma was forever spitting, muttering oaths, knocking wood and tossing salt over her shoulder. My mother thought it was obsessive-compulsive, but I bought right into it.
Ten years after Grandma’s death, I still didn’t wear socks around my apartment. Occasionally, I whispered keinahora to ward off the evil eye.
When you feel Dead Man’s Fingers, you’re supposed to stop
whatever it is you’re doing and do the opposite. That way, the premonition might not come true.
For me, doing the opposite would have meant turning around and going home. I imagined myself calling the principal, telling him, “Sorry, Terry. Dead Man’s Fingers.”
I tried to attribute the sensation to the bitter February cold, to a forgotten bad dream, to Valentine’s Day with no valentine. But then it returned, this time in italics: Dead Man’s Fingers.
I removed my bag again, shifted it to the other shoulder. Maybe that’ll suffice as doing the opposite. Suffice for whom? What am I thinking?
I pulled my coat closer to my body. It was the same coat that I always wore on cold days—a heavy, black, men’s wool coat that I bought at the army/navy store when I first moved to New York—and I found comfort in its enormity. It was about four sizes too big, because there is no such thing as a man (especially an army/navy man) who is my size: five-foot-one, one hundred pounds. For some military reason I’m sure, this coat had a hood, which I never wore because it made me look like a Druid. But one block away from Sunny Side Preschool, with Dead Man’s Fingers stuck in my nervous system and the sickening certainty that something horrible was going to happen, I pulled the hood over my head until it obscured the top half of my face.
I need protection, I thought. It seemed to make sense.
You Kill Me Page 19