The Knockoff

by Lucy Sykes

  He raised a bushy eyebrow.

  “I do indeed.”

  “Will you follow me?”

  <<< CHAPTER ELEVEN >>>

  Imogen couldn’t ignore a burning sensation close to her left nipple. It came in waves that made her bite down hard on her lip. In a wash of guilt, she didn’t want to wake Alex. Had she been taking good enough care of herself over the past few months? Or had she been so focused on Eve and her job that she neglected to pay attention to her recovery? In the days following the surgery, when she pushed everything but healing out of her mind, she fixated on every detail, caring for the surgical drain and getting rid of the fluid every couple of hours. She religiously exercised her arm to keep the muscles strong, but she hadn’t done it since she went back to work. The doctors had warned her to stay on top of all these things to prevent an infection. She definitely didn’t want to wake Alex and complain.

  “Mommy.”

  “Hey, John-John. Why are you awake so early on a Saturday?”

  “I had a nightmare.”

  She lowered the seat of the loo and sat, lifting him on her lap, which only aggravated the pain in her breast.

  “Tell me about the nightmare. Was the witch there?” He nodded his blond curls up and down. “I’ll bet she was scary. What did you do?”

  “I hides.”

  “Brave, smart boy. Where did you hide?”

  “In a tree!”

  “Trees are the best place to hide from witches!” Johnny’s frightened face turned proud.

  “You know what I want you to do next time that mean and nasty witch pops into your dream, darling?”

  “What, Mommy?”

  “You don’t have to hide. You can stand right up in front of her. Close to her face.” Imogen put her face right in front of Johnny’s, making him giggle. “And you tell her, ‘You don’t belong here. I belong here. This is my tree and this is my dream.’ ”

  “You’re so smart, Mommy. You’re smart and you’re so soft.” He nuzzled into her, rubbing the lace of her slip against the parts of her chest that hurt, but she balanced the pain with his need to be as close to her as possible.

  “I always like to hear that, darling. Do you think you can go back to sleep?” He nodded again, this time his eyes already growing droopy. She bit down hard again on her lower lip as she lifted him up in both of her arms, favoring the right one. He made his small snuffling noises as she laid him in his bed. She peeked into the next room at Annabel. Her daughter had left her laptop on her bed. Imogen brought the machine downstairs instead of going into the bedroom to grab the one she and Alex shared and risk waking him.

  When the screen flickered back to life Imogen closed out twelve tabs of instant messages, videos of Siamese cats, Reddit and a fan page for a band composed of three boys with asymmetrical haircuts. Facebook was the last page she closed out. Her daughter was the main reason Imogen forced herself to be on Facebook in the first place, thinking it added a layer of accountability to Annabel’s online life to know her mom was (albeit feebly) somewhere on the site too. She loved the photo Annabel had as her profile picture, an adorable shot of her trying to hold both Johnny and Coco on her lap. She didn’t want to snoop, never wanted to snoop, but couldn’t help but notice that there was a new comment on the page: “WHATz WRONG WITH YOU? Do you Cry when u look in the mirror bc u r so UGLY?”

  Imogen physically doubled over as if she had been punched in the gut. Candy Cool again. It didn’t sound like anyone’s real name, but Imogen did the Google anyway to see if anything came up. Only the Facebook profile appeared, a picture of a smug little brunette with a perfect complexion except for small scar in the shape of a half-moon on the right side of her chin. Bitch. Did I just call a ten-year-old girl a bitch?

  Despite Tilly’s strategy of noninterference, Imogen’s immediate instinct was to protect her sweet and friendly daughter from the words, to toss the computer across the room, shut down Facebook or at the very least delete the offensive post. She began clicking with little direction around the comment, wishing there was a very clear button that just said, “Click me and this will be erased forever.” Damn it, why wasn’t there a button like that? An “erase me from the Internet forever” button.

  Imogen tensed with frustration that she was so impotent. Then. Finally. She found an arrow at the top right corner of the comment and clicked a pull-down menu that allowed her to hide the offensive post from the timeline, feeling a small sense of accomplishment. Maybe she could protect her daughter from the evils of the Internet.

  She refocused. Into Google she typed: Breast cancer AND pain. The top hit was Warning Signs of Breast Cancer. She was already too familiar with the light pink website. Sign eight was “a new pain in one spot that does not go away.” It was the same as before. They didn’t get all of the cancer. She had known this was a possibility. It was one she dwelled on during the early days after her surgery, worrying about going through this all over again and maybe again after that, living in a constant state of recovery, never being able to fully return to a normal life.

  She wanted to scream. She wanted to cry. She cursed herself. She cursed her job. She cursed Alex for not taking the high-paying corporate job he was offered two years ago that would have meant she was no longer the breadwinner of this family, even though she had told him not to. She cursed Worthington for turning her goddamned magazine into an app that she didn’t understand. She just stared for a while. Out the window, across the street, she could see a small man walking a very large dog, a Great Dane. Johnny loved Great Danes, had ever since he was small. He referred to them as the ponies of the Wet Billage, which was the way he had pronounced West Village until just last year. She desperately wanted a cigarette and understood the irony of wanting to smoke when she learned she had cancer again, and didn’t care. She wondered if she still had packs hidden in the house. When she first quit she used to hide them far back in the freezer just in case she needed one. She knew they weren’t in there now. That was a year ago. She’d been good, only bumming a fag here and there at a party after a cocktail or two. She needed to call the doctor. It wasn’t even seven a.m. No one would answer before nine. She threw on her favorite worn Lanvin cardigan and walked around the block to Jack’s Stir Brew Coffee to stand impatiently in line behind two women in tweed pants debating the benefits of adding lavender to their coffees. The mommies at school had started drinking lavender-infused everything. People will buy anything if they think it’s good for them. They will pay extra if it’s beautiful. A real lavender moment was happening right now.

  Back outside on the street she said a quick hello to Jack, the shop owner, who was sitting on the bench outside the bright red door, The Times sprawled across his lap as he sipped on his hardcore Ethiopian brew. Jack was a former banker who had used his parents’ money to create more money and then lost most of it in a real estate deal gone wrong. The coffee shop was his second act, which came with a second wife and a new baby.

  The smell of coffee wafted through the air, promising the next best thing to nicotine—caffeine. She felt more human already.

  “I haven’t seen you in ages,” Imogen leaned in to kiss his scruffy cheek.

  “We haven’t gone out since Kip was born.”

  “You poor love. It gets better, I promise.” She must have been wincing.

  “Imogen, are you okay?” She held back the tears threatening to spill down her cheeks.

  “I’m fine, darling. A bit sleepy. Hoping a bit of your delicious coffee will snap me out of it.” He nodded in understanding.

  “I can’t wait to sleep again.” He groaned. “Maybe once he’s eighteen?” Imogen laughed and nodded in mock seriousness. They made a small cheers with their respective caffeinated beverages and Imogen headed back toward her house.

  Walking through the door, she felt the fire in her breast flare up again. She’d quit the serious painkillers just a week after her surgery. They made her feel woozy and not altogether there
, but she couldn’t take it any longer. Her arm shook as she reached for the little orange bottle. The tears finally came when she couldn’t get the lid off. She swallowed three in quick succession and then lay down next to Alex.

  Imogen woke to a light slap across her cheek.

  “There you are. I nudged you, I squeezed you, I touched you inappropriately and you wouldn’t open your eyes. I was starting to get a little bit worried. Imogen Tate never sleeps past noon.”

  She stretched her arms over her head and in doing so felt the pinch again, letting out a cry mixed with surprise and pain.

  “What’s going on, babe?”

  She didn’t want to keep it to herself any longer.

  “The cancer’s back,” she whispered.

  Alex’s face switched from cuddly hubby to rapid-fire litigator.

  “What? That’s not possible.”

  “It is. I’m in so much pain. It’s one of the symptoms. It’s one of the ways you know they didn’t get it all. I have pain in a new spot, a spot that never hurt before. It feels like it’s on fire.”

  Alex grabbed his glasses off the night table.

  “Show me.”

  “Show you the website that told me this?”

  “Show me your breast. Show me where it hurts.”

  “You’re not a doctor.” Imogen pulled her sweater tighter across her chest.

  Alex sighed. “I just want to try to help. I don’t know what else to do. Did you call the doctor yet?”

  “No, I took a pill and fell asleep before I could.” Imogen grew defensive.

  “I’ll call her. You stay here.” Alex was back to being sweet. She couldn’t help but doze again once he left her alone in the bed. Sleep let her leave the pain behind.

  “Your oncologist is out at the beach for the weekend for her daughter’s birthday. She will come back late tomorrow night and see you first thing on Monday morning. Can you hang on until then?” Alex said when he reappeared.

  Imogen nodded and then shook her head.

  “Shit! I have to meet with Eve and Lucia van Arpels for breakfast Monday morning.” Lucia van Arpels was the best-known women’s contemporary designer and the woman single-handedly responsible for the creation of the wrap dress in the seventies and its resurgence in the early 2000s. For sale at more than $400 a piece, the dresses were a staple of every professional woman’s closet. She hadn’t yet agreed to let Glossy.com sell her pieces and Imogen knew she was stubborn about which retailers—brick-and-mortar and digital—carried her dresses. Imogen thought she could persuade her, had even asked Eve if she could take care of this one on her own, but the girl was adamant about meeting Lucia. She would probably try to take a selfie with her.

  “You can’t go.”

  “I can’t miss it.”

  She admired the furrow that cut through Alex’s brow as he was working something through in his head. “I’ll make you an appointment at eleven,” he said. “Go straight from breakfast.”

  Tilly didn’t mind working a few extra shifts through the weekend. Imogen spent the rest of Saturday and Sunday trying not to lift anything or even to move. Both kids were beyond sweet, bringing their iPads into bed to watch movies with her as she drifted in and out of sleep, careful not to lean too hard on her chest.

  —

  Lucia van Arpels arrived everywhere fifteen minutes before she was scheduled to be there so that everyone else had to be there a half hour early if they wanted to beat her to the punch. Arriving first allowed Lucia to scope out the room, choose the best table and then pick the best seat at that table. She preferred to control a situation. Imogen coveted the idea of that kind of control. And so the elegant woman was already on her second cup of coffee when Imogen arrived. High cheekbones made her look more severe than she actually was. Her brown hair all fell to one length and swung expertly atop the neckline of her simple cream cashmere sweater.

  Molly Watson had introduced Imogen and Lucia years earlier and the two women had remained friendly ever since, sitting on many of the same boards. Lucia’s granddaughter was in school with Johnny. They were trading photos when Eve flounced in the door wearing a bright yellow LvA wrap dress. No one wore the dress of the designer to go meet the designer. Before she sat down Eve snapped her fingers in the air at a passing waiter.

  “Can you bring me some lemons for my water?”

  At that moment Lucia’s phone beeped. She gave an apologetic look as she rose and picked up the device.

  “I’m so sorry. I have to take this quickly. We are about to do a major campaign in Japan and they are all about to head home for the day.” Imogen nodded.

  “That’s rude!” Eve said as the waiter delivered a pot of coffee to the table and placed a saucer of limes in front of Eve.

  Imogen watched Eve swirl Splenda into her drink. “We all take calls during meals. It’s how we live. You of all people know that.”

  Eve looked at the sliced fruit with disdain. “I asked for lemons. Does that retarded waiter think lemons and limes are the same thing?” Imogen cringed, as Lucia returned to the table.

  “Okay, ladies, you have my undivided attention.”

  First Eve slid a piece of black rubber across the table. The bracelet: “Good, Great, Gorgeous, GLOSSY.com!” “So Lucia, I brought this for you. All of the girls in the Glossy office wear them.” The woman picked it up and turned it over in her hand, squinting at it in confusion.

  Next, Eve established her list of bona fides. She prattled on about how she started working for Imogen at Glossy (she didn’t say “assistant”), went to Harvard for her MBA, graduated at the top of her class. Then she launched into her pitch.

  “Allowing us to sell your products will seamlessly integrate magazine content with retail sales. We have a reach of one million eyeballs in a single day, the majority of them high-earning young women.”

  Eve was charming in her business school way. You could say a lot about the girl, but you could never say that she wasn’t smart.

  Lucia flagged down a waiter to order a yogurt topped with fruit and a light sprinkling of granola.

  “It has so much sugar,” she whispered to her tablemates. “Everyone thinks the granola is so healthy, but my nutritionist told me that it’s the granola that has been killing me.” Imogen ordered the same. Eve just asked for another coffee. She had been on a no-food diet for the past week.

  “We’ve already moved millions of dollars of merchandise,” Eve kept on.

  Lucia raised her hand. “I’m impressed by your website. I really am. I spent some time on it this weekend. I just don’t know if it is the right place to be selling the LvA brand. I don’t see the real benefit for us just yet. Dilution of our brand strength is a big concern for me.”

  Without warning Eve leaned forward importantly and reached her arm across the table. Before Imogen knew what was happening, all five of the girl’s bright red talons were covering Lucia’s mouth.

  “Shush,” she said, pressing her fingers into the fashion icon’s mouth. Imogen recoiled in horror. A nearby waiter dropped a saucer with coffee. Eve had just shushed Lucia van Arpels in public.

  “Lucia.” Eve couldn’t mask the condescension in her voice. “I have an MBA from Harvard Business School. You need to trust me. I know what is good for your brand better than you do.”

  Lucia’s eyes lit with rage, but she had lived enough lifetimes to know how to handle herself. In a single deft movement she raised her own hand to Eve’s and slowly peeled her fingers off her mouth.

  “Thank you for enlightening me, Eve.” She reached behind her to grab her scarf. “Unfortunately I need to head to another meeting. We’ll talk soon.” Lucia’s gait was even and clipped as she made her way to the door.

  Imogen raised her hand in the air to signal the waiter for the check so that she wouldn’t have to address what was happening.

  “I think she’s in,” Eve said when Lucia was out of earshot.

  Imogen felt her phone
buzz with a text. It was Lucia.

  >>>>Keep that little brat away from me. I will never do business with her. I don’t know how she was raised, but something is very wrong with her.<<<<

  “Eve, I don’t think it’s as simple as that. What you just did was ridiculously rude. You know that, right?”

  “What I just did was convince Lucia van Arpels to sell her dresses with us.” Eve showed no remorse.

  Imogen briefly considered showing the text message to Eve, but thought better of it. Her loyalty now was closer to Lucia than to Eve.

  “Eve, I think you just made a huge mistake.”

  “What do you know anyway, Imogen? You never even look at the website.” Eve stood to leave her at the table.

  “I’ll see you at the office.”

  “I have another meeting,” Imogen said. “I’ll be in right after lunch.”

  Eve shrugged. “Whatever.”

  <<< CHAPTER TWELVE >>>

  The examination table in her doctor’s office was surprisingly plush and spa-like. It could have been relaxing if she weren’t wearing a paper robe that tied loosely in the front and threatened to open with a sneeze.

  Imogen thumbed at Instagram to try to distract herself, feeling a small rush of euphoria at how many likes her previous day’s photographs had gotten. She liked a photograph of Bridgett standing in the middle of Seventh Avenue with traffic whizzing by her. God only knew how she had taken that picture. She liked Ashley’s #IWoke UpLikeThisSelfie, her eyes even bluer without liner and mascara, her pale hair fanned over half her face.

  She liked a photo of Massimo’s miniature Yorkie, Ralph. She liked a picture of a woman’s bright red nails, her fingers layered in elaborate cocktail rings, holding onto a Céline clutch in the same color. She checked the name on that picture, Aerin2006. The name wasn’t familiar, but she didn’t know a lot of people in her Instagram feed. She’d asked Tilly to help her find interesting accounts to follow and then left it in her nanny’s hands.

  She was about to search through the rest of Aerin2006’s photos when Dr. Claudia Fong walked quietly into the room. She was an unassuming woman with small glasses and pin-straight long black hair that reached almost to her backside. She shuffled when she walked and murmured when she talked. She was gentle and kind and the best oncologist in Manhattan according to last year’s New York magazine’s Best Doctors issue.