by Joy Fielding
That’s Vicki, pushing herself into the frame, making her presence felt, the way she did with just about everything in her life. At twenty-eight, Vicki was the youngest of the women and easily the most accomplished. She was a lawyer, and, at the time, the only one of us who worked outside the home, although Susan was enrolled at the university, working toward a degree in English literature. Vicki had short reddish-brown hair, cut on the diagonal, a style that emphasized the sharp planes of her long, thin face. Her eyes were hazel and small, although almost alarmingly intense, even intimidating, no doubt a plus for an ambitious litigator with a prestigious downtown law firm. Vicki was shorter than Barbara, taller than Chris, and at 105 pounds, the thinnest of the group. Her small-boned frame made her look deceptively fragile, but she had hidden strength and boundless energy. Even when sitting still, as she is here, she seemed to be moving, her body vibrating, like a tuning fork.
Her daughter, Kirsten, at only twenty-two months, was already her mother’s clone. She had the same delicate bone structure and clear hazel eyes, the same way of looking just past you when you spoke, as if there might be something more interesting, more engaging, more important, going on just behind you, that she couldn’t chance missing. The toddler was forever up and down, down and up, back and forth, clamoring for her mother’s attention and approval. Vicki gave her daughter an occasional, absent-minded pat on the head, but their eyes rarely connected. Maybe the child was blinded, as we all were initially, by the enormous diamond sparkler on the third finger of Vicki’s left hand. Watch how it temporarily obliterates all other images, turning the screen a ghostly white.
Vicki was married to a man some twenty-five years her senior, whom she’d known since childhood. In fact, she and his eldest son had been high school classmates and budding sweethearts. Until, of course, Vicki decided she preferred the father to the son, and the resulting scandal tore the family apart. “You can’t break up a happy marriage,” Vicki assured us that afternoon, stealing a quote from Elizabeth Taylor’s résumé, and the rest of the women nodded in unison, although they couldn’t quite hide their shock.
Vicki liked to shock, the women quickly learned, just as they learned to secretly enjoy being shocked. For whatever her faults, and they were many, Vicki was rarely less than totally entertaining. She was the spark that ignited the flame, the presence who signaled the party could officially begin, the mover, the shaker, the one whom everyone clucked over and fussed about. Even if she wasn’t the one who got the ball rolling—surprisingly, it was usually the more unassuming Susan who did that—Vicki was invariably the one who ran with it, who made sure her team scored the winning touchdown. And Vicki always played to win.
Next to Vicki’s coiled intensity, Susan seems almost stately, sitting there with her hands clasped easily in her lap, light brown hair folding neatly under at her chin, the quintessential Breck girl, except that she was still carrying around fifteen of the thirty-five pounds she’d gained when pregnant and hadn’t been able to shed since Ariel’s birth. The extra pounds made her noticeably self-conscious and camera-shy, although she’d always preferred the sidelines to center stage. The other women offered their encouragement and advice, shared their diet and exercise regimes, and Susan listened, not out of politeness, but because she’d always enjoyed listening more than speaking, her mind a sponge, absorbing each proffered tidbit. She’d make note of their suggestions later in the journal she’d been keeping since Ariel was born. She’d once had dreams of being a writer, she admitted when pressed, and Vicki told her that she should speak to her husband, who owned a string of trade magazines and was thinking of expanding his growing empire.
Susan smiled, her daughter tickling her feet as she played happily with Susan’s bare toes, and changed the subject, preferring to talk about her courses at the university. They were more tangible than dreams, and Susan was nothing if not practical. She’d quit school when she got married to help put her husband through medical school. Only now that his practice was established and going strong had she decided to return to school to finish her degree. Her husband was very supportive of her decision, she told the women, and her mother was helping out by looking after Ariel during the day.
“You’re lucky,” Chris told her. “My mother lives in California.”
“My mother died just after Tracey was born,” Barbara said, eyes instantly filling with tears.
“I haven’t seen my mother since I was four years old,” Vicki announced. “She ran off with my father’s business partner. Haven’t heard from the bitch since.”
And then the room fell silent, as was so often the case after one of Vicki’s calculated pronouncements.
Susan glanced at her watch. The others followed suit. Someone mentioned the lateness of the hour, that they should probably be getting home. We decided on a group picture to commemorate the afternoon, and together we managed to prop the camera on top of a stack of books at the far end of the room and arrange ourselves and our daughters so that we all fit inside the camera’s scope.
So there we are, ladies and gentlemen.
In one corner, Susan, wearing blue jeans and a sloppy, loose-fitting shirt, balancing daughter Ariel on her lap, the child’s wiry little body in marked contrast to her mother’s quiet bulk.
In the other corner, Vicki, wearing white shorts and a polka-dot halter top, trying to extricate daughter Kirsten’s arms from around her neck, small eyes mischievously ablaze as she mouths a silent obscenity directly into the lens of the camera.
In between, Barbara and Chris, Chris wearing white pants and a red-and-white-striped T-shirt, straining to prevent her daughter, Montana, from abandoning her yet again, while Tracey sits obediently on her mother’s skirted lap, Barbara manipulating Tracey’s hand up and down, as both mother and daughter wave as one.
The Grand Dames.
Friends for life.
Of course, one of us turned out not to be a friend at all, but we didn’t know it then.
Nor could any of us have predicted that twenty-three years later, two of the women would be dead, one murdered in the cruelest of fashions.
Which, of course, leaves me.
I press another button, listen as the tape rewinds, shift expectantly on my chair, waiting for the film to start afresh. Perhaps, I think, as the women suddenly reappear, their babies in their laps, their futures in their faces, this will be the time it all makes sense. I will find the justice I seek, the peace I desire, the resolution I need.
I hear the women’s laughter. The story begins.
Part One
1982–1985
CHRIS
One
Chris lay in her queen-size brass bed with her eyes closed. Crisp white cotton sheets pulled tight against her toes and stretched up across her body, stopping under her chin. Her arms lay stiff at her sides, as if secured by shackles. She imagined herself an Egyptian mummy entombed inside an ancient pyramid, as hoards of curious tourists flopped about in worn and dirty sandals above her head. That would explain the headache, she thought, and might have laughed, but for the incessant pounding at her temples, a pounding that echoed the dull thud of her heartbeat. When was the last time she’d felt so lost, so afraid?
No, fear was much too strong a word, Chris immediately amended, censoring her thoughts even before they were fully formed. It wasn’t fear that was immobilizing her so much as dread, a vague disquiet trickling through her body like a poisoned stream. It was this ill-defined, perhaps indefinable, sensation that was keeping her eyes tightly closed, her arms pinned to her sides, her body rigid, as if she’d died in her sleep.
Did the dead feel this invasive, this pervasive, sense of unease? she wondered, growing impatient with such morbidity, allowing the sounds of morning to creep inside her head: her six-year-old daughter, Montana, singing down the hall; three-year-old Wyatt playing with the train set he got for Christmas; Tony opening and closing kitchen cupboards directly below. Within minutes, paralyzing fear had been reduced to mere unease, whi
ch was much more manageable, and ultimately much easier to dismiss. Another few minutes and Chris might actually be able to persuade herself that what had happened last night was all a bad dream, the product of her overheated—overwrought, as Tony might suggest—imagination.
“It’s a heartache!” Montana belted out from her room at the end of the hall.
“Choo-choo-choo-choo, choo-choo-choo-choo,” Wyatt whispered loudly, mimicking the whirring of the trains.
Somewhere beneath her, another cupboard door opened and closed. Dishes rattled.
“Nothing but a heartache!”
Chris opened her eyes.
I’ve got a secret, she thought.
Her eyes scanned the small master bedroom, although her head remained still in the center of the oversize, down-filled pillow. Sun was filtering through the heavy ivory curtains, bleaching the pale blue walls a ghostly white, throwing small spotlights on stray particles of dust dancing in the air above her head. The black turtleneck sweater Tony had worn to dinner last night was flung carelessly across the back of the small blue chair in the corner, one empty arm extended toward the worn blue broadloom, still sticky with long-ago-spilled apple juice. The door to their small en suite bathroom was open, as was the closet and the top drawer of the wicker dresser. The clock on the night table beside her said 9:04.
Probably she should get up, get dressed, see how Wyatt and Montana were making out. Tony had obviously fed them breakfast, which didn’t surprise her. It was Sunday, his day to get up with the kids. Besides, he was always extra nice to her after a big fight. She’d felt him quietly slip out of bed at Wyatt’s first audible rumblings, feigned sleep as he’d hurried into his clothes before bending over to kiss her forehead. “Sleep,” she’d heard him whisper, his breath reassuringly gentle against her skin.
She’d tried to drift off, but she couldn’t, and now, just when she felt sleep mercifully tugging at her eyelids, it was too late. Any minute, the kids would grow bored with their solitary pursuits and come charging through the bedroom door, demanding her attention. She had to get up, shower, prepare herself for the busy day ahead. Chris threw the covers off with a determined hand and slid her legs over the side of the bed, invisible cookie crumbs crunching beneath her bare toes as she padded toward the washroom. “Oh, God,” she said, confronting the swollen face of her reflection in the mirror over the sink. “I know you’re in there somewhere.” Her fingers prodded the puffy flesh around her eyes. Wasn’t she getting too old to cry herself to sleep?
Except she hadn’t slept. Not once all night. “Chris,” she’d heard Tony whisper in her ear at repeated intervals throughout the night, withdrawing to his side of the bed when she failed to respond. “Chris, are you awake?”
So, he hadn’t slept either, she thought with no small degree of satisfaction as she splashed cold water on her face, held a cold compress against her eyes, gradually feeling her tired skin shrink back to its normal size. “Who are you?” she asked wearily, not for the first time, pushing several strands of matted blond hair away from her cheeks. “Beats the shit out of me,” her reflection answered in Vicki’s voice, and Chris giggled, the sound scratching at her throat, like a cat at a screen door.
“It’s a heartache!” Montana sang out from behind the bathroom wall.
You can say that again, Chris thought, stepping into the shower, turning on the tap, welcoming the assault of hot water on her arms and legs, feeling it whip across her back like thousands of sharp, tiny lashes. What had happened last night had been her fault as much as Tony’s, she acknowledged, positioning herself directly under the shower’s spray, the water roughly parting her hair in the center before cascading down over her face.
Had the kids heard them fighting? she wondered, hearing the distant echo of her parents shouting at one another beneath the steady onslaught of hot water. Three decades later, and their voices were still as loud, as potent, as ever. Chris remembered lying in her bed, listening as her parents argued downstairs, their angry words knocking against the walls of her room, as if determined to include her, impatiently circling the hallway, eventually slithering through the vents on the floor, filtering into the very air she breathed. She’d pressed her small pillow over her face, so as not to inhale the poison, covered her ears with her trembling hands, tried to muffle the unpleasant sounds. Once she’d even climbed out of bed, buried herself at the back of her closet, but the voices only got louder, until it seemed as if someone were in the closet with her. She’d felt invisible fingers poking at her from the hems of the dresses hanging above her head, alien tongues licking at her cheeks, and she’d run crying back to her bed, pulled the covers tightly around her, lying rigid, arms at her sides, eyes squeezed tightly closed, staying that way till morning.
Hadn’t she done essentially the same thing last night?
Hadn’t she grown up at all?
Chris turned off the water, stepped out of the shower, bundled her head in one soft blue-and-white-striped towel, her body in another, grateful for the steam that rendered the mirror opaque. She opened the bathroom door, felt the cold embrace of the surrounding air immediately wrap itself around her. How had she ended up here? she wondered, shuffling back into the bedroom. In the middle of her parents’ nightmare.
“Hi, sweetheart,” Tony said softly from beside the window.
Chris nodded, said nothing, her gaze directed at the floor, her nose twitching at the scent of freshly made pancakes.
“I brought you breakfast in bed,” he said.
Chris sank down on the bed, leaned back against the pillows, watched as a stack of blueberry pancakes miraculously materialized on a tray in front of her, next to a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice and a pot of wonderful-smelling coffee. A stainless steel butter dish sat beside a small white ceramic pitcher of real maple syrup. A plastic, red daisy leaned against the side of a glass bud vase. “You didn’t have to do this,” Chris said, eyes still averted, voice low. She didn’t deserve this, she thought.
Tony sat at the foot of the bed. She felt him watching her as she buttered the pancakes, smothered them in the warm syrup, carefully lifting one forkful, then another, into her mouth. Paradoxically, she grew hungrier with each bite, thirstier with each sip. In minutes, the pancakes were gone, the juice glass empty, the coffee finished. “Good?” Tony asked expectantly. She could hear the smile in his voice.
“Wonderful,” she told him, determined not to look at him, knowing if she looked at him, it was game over.
“I’m so sorry, Chris.”
“Don’t.”
“You know I didn’t mean it.”
“Please …”
“You know how much I love you.”
Chris felt her eyes fill with tears. God, did she never stop crying? “Please, Tony …”
“Won’t you even look at me? Do you hate me so much you can’t even look at me?”
“I don’t hate you.” Chris lifted her gaze, swallowed her husband with one quick gulp of her eyes.
While Tony would never be described as gorgeous, like Barbara’s husband, or distinguished, like Vicki’s husband, or even kindly, the first word that came to mind when describing Susan’s husband, once he trapped you in his gaze, there was no turning back. A man of mystery, Barbara had pronounced. A formidable presence, Susan offered. Sexy, Vicki summed up succinctly. A diamond in the rough, they all agreed.
More rough than sparkle, Chris thought now, watching as her husband inched forward on the bed, his hand grazing the damp skin of her legs, sending a current, like a wayward electrical charge, racing toward her heart. Up close, Tony was smaller, more compact, than he first appeared, barely five feet eight inches tall, although he was more muscular than his narrow shoulders would indicate. He was wearing jeans and the moss green sweater she’d bought him for his last birthday, the soft color of the wool underlining the harsher green of his eyes. His hair was thick and brown, except for a small patch of white near his right temple. Tony told everyone the patch was the result
of a childhood trauma, although the precise trauma tended to shift with each telling, as did his explanation for the scar that scissored through his flesh from the base of his left ear to the curve of his jaw. Over the eleven years of their marriage, Chris had heard so many versions of how he got that scar that she was no longer able to recall whether it was the result of a near-fatal childhood fall, a death-defying car crash, or a barroom brawl. The answer, she was sure, was something infinitely more prosaic than any of these alternatives, although she would never think of questioning Tony’s story. Tony had a need for the dramatic. He exaggerated life’s mundane details, enlarged the ordinary, enhanced the everyday. It was part of his charm, part of what drove him, made him so creative. You couldn’t open a newspaper without seeing one of his ads; you couldn’t walk a city block without seeing a billboard he’d designed. The “Cat’s Meow” campaign for VIP Cat Food, the “Really Cheese Them Off” campaign for Dairyvale cheeses, both were his. Hadn’t he been promoted to senior art director faster than anyone else in the history of Warsh, Rubican? And wasn’t this natural flair for hyperbole at least part of what had attracted her to him in the first place? In those early years, Tony had made everything seem so exciting, so limitless, so possible.
Chris smiled, all the encouragement he needed. She watched him immediately move forward on the bed. Tony lifted the tray, laid it gently on the floor, took her hands in his.
“Tony …”
“It’ll never happen again, Chris. I promise.”
“It can’t.”
“It won’t.”
“You scared me.”
“I scared myself,” he agreed. “I heard this voice yelling. I couldn’t believe it was me. The awful things I was saying.…”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“I know. Please forgive me.”
Could she? Chris wondered. Could she forgive him? “Maybe we should go for counseling.” Chris held her breath, braced herself for the outrage she was sure would follow. Hadn’t Tony made his opinion of marriage counselors painfully clear? Hadn’t he told her that there was no way he would ever allow some overeducated quack to interfere in his private life?