“What in God's name did you do?”
So much for being supportive. So much for not poking. I was too angry to tap dance on eggshells as I'd been doing since I promised Emilie I'd be more understanding. Well, screw that. I was damned pissed and didn't see any reason to hide it. Besides I was positive my face had red blotches, a warning sign my daughter had seen far too often lately. Merry no longer looked like the child I'd bore.
Emilie shot Alex a sibling-only look. She grew pallid under her Peruvian tan and blinked away tears.
“Jeez, Mom, what happened?” Alex blurted. “You look awful.”
Merry must have misunderstood, because she said the bruising was temporary.
“That's not what I meant. You're a freak.” Alex shrugged his overstuffed backpack onto his shoulders and stomped to the baggage carousel.
“We wanted you back, Mom.” Tears slid down Emilie's face. “This isn't what we meant. Why'd you do it?” Emilie turned her back and followed her brother.
“We changed our minds because we thought a different eye would go better with the new cheekbones.” Merry's voice rose. Old habits die hard.
“What's with this ‘we’ shit? You and Dr. Hunter? You and Whip agreed to return you to you.” I, too, walked away.
“You leave him out of this. I like my face, and I don't care if you approve or not.” Merry's voice grew shrill when we challenged her happiness. We rained on her parade.
“Just wait ‘til Whip sees you. Boy, is he going to be pissed!” I couldn't help myself. Time to pound some sense into my daughter's addled brain.
“I don't care.” Merry pouted.
“Don't care about what, Merry?” Whip walked up behind her.
Merry whirled around. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Quite the welcome.” Whip kept his voice even. He didn't mention Merry's face, but he took her arm and steered her toward the baggage carousel.
“I meant, I'm surprised to see you. I thought you'd be gone for a while longer. That's all.”
The tightening of Whip's lips said he didn't believe her. He wasn't going to take Merry's transformation without comment, but baggage claim wasn't the place for war.
I put my arm around Emilie, and we shared another of those shut-out-Mom looks. Shutting out Merry was an engrained habit. I wanted to blame her for shutting us out, too, but that would have let me off the “I'm the grown-up” hook.
Whip drove home in silence. Merry went straight to her bedroom, where I suspected she washed down a pill with a stiff slug of vodka. Whip followed her upstairs after a few minutes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Alex ran down the street to show his friends the treasures he bought in Peru. Emilie and I raided the fridge for cold drinks and wandered out to the patio. I wanted Whip to have some privacy when he confronted Merry; Emilie said she wanted to listen to what he said.
“Eavesdropping, huh?”
“You got that right.” She didn't have to wait long before her dad's voice thundered through the open bedroom window.
“What the hell were you thinking? Huh? You went behind my back and changed everything. Not a word in advance? Did you think I wouldn't notice?”
“I didn't th-th-think” Merry stammered.
“You're damned right you didn't think. Was this your idea or his?”
“Dad's using his outdoor voice indoors,” Emilie whispered.
“Brat.” I put my finger to my lips.
“We talked it over. Dr. Hunter made so many good suggestions. I liked them.” Merry's voice trembled.
“Does he have a book?”
“A book? What do you mean, a book?”
“Like books of hairstyles in your beauty parlor. Does he have a similar one for faces? You can pick one from column A and two from column B?”
“Don't be stupid.”
“Oops, wrong thing to say.” I shut my eyes and wished I could be a fly on the wall in the bedroom instead of an ear on the patio.
“You're the one who's being stupid. Looks like you're picking someone else's body parts. Eyes like Lucy Liu. Cheekbones from Audrey Hepburn.”
“Katharine.”
“Katharine?”
“The cheekbones are like Katharine Hepburn's, not Audrey's.” Merry's voice quavered.
“What's next? Madonna's chin? JLo's lips? Lassie's nose?”
Emilie giggled. “Can you imagine Mom with Lassie's nose?”
“Hush.” I pinched her arm.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I'm talking about my wife. You, in case you forgot. I'm talking about you making changes because a stranger wants to transform your face into someone else's.”
“He's not a stranger.”
“He's not family!” Whip's roar would have done Thor proud. “You value his opinion over mine, don't you?”
“I wondered when Dad would come to that conclusion.”
“Me too.” I'd long ago decided Hunter wielded way too much control over my daughter.
“No…but Dr. Hunter knows what will look best. He's the professional.”
“I don't think so, my dear misguided wife. My gut tells me he knows what's best for him. Not for you. Or for me.”
“Dad's mad enough to hit Mom,” Emilie said, “but he won't.”
I walked to the edge of the patio and stared at the pool. “Don't you find it odd all of us but Alex want to hit Mom?”
“None of us will.” Emilie stretched and headed for the door. “Dad's done yelling.”
The front door banged when Whip left the house. Emilie and I went upstairs to unpack.
Hours later, Whip wandered into the kitchen where I washed the last of the pots and pans. I tossed him a towel and gestured at the stack in the dish drainer.
“Do you remember Moonstruck?” I put the last pan in the rack and turned on the dishwasher.
“That old Cher movie?” Whip wiped a skillet and handed it to me to put away.
“That's the one. Whenever Cher's family needed to talk, they went to the kitchen. Well, we're in the kitchen. We need to talk.”
We sat at the table.
“I'm worried shitless about the power Hunter has over Merry.” I'd been stewing over everything I heard Merry say about him since they met. “She said only he knows what's best for her. He'll make everything perfect.”
“You heard the fight.”
“Yes, but she's been unraveling for months. Wanting to be perfect is the last straw.”
Whip frowned. “I gotta put a stop to this shit.”
“High time. What are you going to do?”
“Confront Hunter. I'll make him listen to me.”
“Think it'll work?”
“Has to. If not, my marriage is over.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Whip called Hunter and told him to stop operating on his wife. He was done. “I warned him that if he touched her again, I'd take legal action.”
“What did he say?” I headed upstairs with an armload of clean clothes.
“He laughed.”
With nothing more to be gained in the Hunter department and after many more late-night kitchen-table conversations, Whip went back to Peru. The kids and I returned to living with the ghost of Merry past. Over the next two months, Whip came home three times. On each visit, he found more and more of a stranger in his house. Hunter completely ignored the warning. Not only did Merry look different, she no longer acted like the woman he married.
During Whip's latest time in Peru, Merry left early one morning. She returned after I'd gone to bed. When I saw her the next morning, her profile was different. Not her face. Her chest. Merry had gone up three cup sizes. She wasn't wearing a padded bra.
She bleached her hair as part of change-Merry-into-a-stranger too. Something about the blond hair bothered me, but I couldn't figure out what it was. Besides, I had too much to worry about without adding Merry going blond and Emilie going purple to the mix.
I didn't tell Whip about
the boob job. He'd see for himself soon enough.
I discovered more subtle changes in Merry's face. First it was the lack of lines in her forehead. Then no crow's-feet. Collagen and Botox treatments in addition to the surgical procedures? The smile commas around her mouth stayed, until they, too, disappeared when she came home with a new chin.
“Are you having this done in his office?” I confronted Merry after the chin entered the kitchen.
“It's outpatient.”
When she tilted her face, half a dozen stitches showed underneath.
“You have an incision.”
“Hey, don't make such a big deal out of it. Dr. Hunter shaved some bone to make my chin smaller.”
I turned my back and walked out to the patio.
Hours later, I made a phone call.
“Eleanor? It's Maxine. I need a favor.” I was back on the patio after dinner. It was dark, and the pool lighting cast its eerie blue glow across my legs.
“Anything.”
“I need the name of your private investigator.” I squeezed my eyes shut against the sudden burn of tears.
“You want Anthony Ferraiolli. He is the best. He always gets results.” When Eleanor's youngest son got into trouble with drugs years earlier, she found Anthony through a mutual friend. He gave her the evidence she needed to confront her son. “It is never too late to call. The man does not sleep.”
I wrote down the number and hung up. Then I breathed deeply and dialed.
When time for Whip's monthly return arrived, I drove Emilie and Alex to the airport to pick him up. He'd been able to catch an earlier connector from Dulles, so we had to scurry to be on time. I sent a text to Merry with the new information. No response.
“Shouldn't we have warned Dad about Mom?” Emilie asked while we waited for her father.
“He's not blind. He'll see soon enough.”
We collected Whip and walked to the car, where Alex sat in front with me and dominated the conversation. Emilie snuggled close in the backseat and leaned her purple hair against her dad's shoulder. She spoke only when asked a direct question. I played Sphinx, my face neutral. Merry's car wasn't in the garage when we got home.
“It's Wednesday. She has appointments on Wednesdays,” was all I said.
“She'll be home for dinner?” Whip sounded pissed.
“Maybe, maybe not. Most times she has dinner with ‘friends’ after her ‘appointment.’” Only parents of a teenage girl could understand how much sarcasm one could put into a single sentence. Imaginary quotation marks hung in midair.
Alex ran out of news and was off IMing and texting his buddies. Emilie vanished. I raised an eyebrow and headed toward the kitchen.
Whip followed but not before sidetracking to the bar to pour four fingers of Scotch. He slumped into a kitchen chair. “What the hell's going on?”
Whip rubbed tired eyes. He'd dozed on the plane, but he didn't look ready to cope with the pile of shit I was about to lay on him.
I told him I'd hired Eleanor's private investigator, who had sent a guy out to follow Merry. He started from the house, tailed her to the Heritage Hotel in downtown Richmond, and took cell phone pictures of Merry with a man in the dining room. He followed them upstairs where they entered a hotel room. The desk clerk said they were Wednesday night regulars. You could plan your retirement on them.
“I had to be sure the report was true, but I couldn't go to the Heritage alone. I don't know many people here anymore. I called Johnny and asked him to go with me.”
“Johnny? As in Johnny Medina?” Whip must have thought I'd segued into a different story.
“Focus, Whip. Johnny and I sat around a corner from Merry, ate dinner and watched.”
“She's seeing Hunter.” Whip guessed what was obvious to the kids and me.
“Who else?”
Hunter's name fit; he was a predator who exploited my daughter's fears to control her. I remembered Emilie's initial impression of the doctor's creepiness. I could add manipulative and unethical and lots of other adjectives if I thought about it hard enough.
“I'm not looking for approval or forgiveness.” I pulled a large manila envelope from the desk drawer and set it on the table. “I have a written report and photos. The PI threw in a little something extra. Eleanor said it's the way they work. Get the goods and issue a gentle warning.”
“He didn't rough the guy up, did he?” Whip rubbed his stubbly chin.
“No way. Two paragraphs in the paper reported a doctor came out of work one afternoon and found someone had shot up the engine of his BMW. The cops said it looked like a random crime. Probably kids out for a cheap thrill.”
“Good one.” Whip laughed. “Kill his car.”
“I hoped I was imagining things, but I'm not.” I wiped a tear away. “I'm sorry.”
“It's not your fault. Merry's been weird since the accident.” Whip clenched his fists; the muscles in his neck bulged. There it was again: “since the accident.” “I'll handle it.”
“I can help, Dad.” Neither of us had heard Emilie come downstairs.
I poured iced tea and waved her to the table. Family council. Only Alex was missing.
“Mom and Mrs. Livingston had a big fight. Mom told her she was having an affair.” Emilie stirred sugar into the tea. “Mrs. Livingston won't talk to Mom until she stops seeing Dracula.”
“Dracula?” Whip frowned.
“Why Dracula?”
Emilie hadn't referred to the doctor as anything but creepy before. Now he had a nickname. Perfect, since Hunter's sucking the lifeblood out of our family.
“It's his teeth. He needs braces. The eyeteeth are crooked and snaggly. I have a bad feeling about him.”
I leaned closer to Emilie.
“You can feel Mom when she's with Dracula?”
“Du-uh.” Emilie sipped her tea. She got up and fetched an apple.
“Dracula totally scares me.” Emilie polished the Gala on her T-shirt and bit into it. The apple responded with a satisfying crunch.
“Can you feel him too?”
“Of course.”
“You think he's bad.” Why I thought of Hunter like that, I didn't know, except he was responsible for what Merry had become.
“He's ice cold. All dark. Even when he and Mom are together, he's not warm or light. He makes her do things she doesn't want to. He, like, creeps me out.”
Emilie knew a lot more about evil than she should.
Whip picked up the PI's report. “I'll take care of this, Em. You go back to being my daughter. Leave this mess to me.”
After he left, Emilie turned to me. “Yeah, like I wish,” and went upstairs.
I sat for a long time thinking about what to do next. I had no freaking clue.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Whip went to his den to read the report I'd already memorized. I hadn't wrapped my head around anything beyond the affair itself. The implications of Merry's actions were more than I could accept.
Pizza would have to do for dinner, because I didn't feel like cooking. Even if Emilie, Whip, and I weren't hungry, Alex, the human locust, would scarf down every last piece.
We chewed and swallowed in silence, while Merry's empty place screamed at us. Whip fled back to his den as soon as the pizza was gone. Alex volunteered to eat all of the pizza crusts, and Emilie volunteered to toss the box. I tapped on the den door. Whip had made a huge mess of his normally neat desk.
“She's totally fucked up my credit,” Whip said even before I curled into a chair.
“Damn.”
Whip waved at two stacks of envelopes. “Cleaned out two bank accounts. Checking account's all right, but my year-end bonus is missing. The kids' college funds are empty.”
“How much?”
“Two hundred thousand, more or less.”
“Shit.”
“Maxed out three credit cards too.”
“Double shit.” I spoke more to myself than to Whip. “Will the bad news ever end?”
“Where the hell is she?”
“Probably out with Hunter.”
Whip slammed his fist on the desk and shot out of his chair. He bounced from wall to wall, too upset to sit. Finally, he unlocked his gun safe and pulled out his cleaning supplies, along with a squeaky clean Sig Sauer pistol.
Shortly after ten, the garage door opened.
“She's home.” I got ready to go up to my room.
“Stay.”
“Need moral support?”
“More like someone to control me. Don't want to lose my temper. Might shoot her.”
Merry rushed down the hall to the kitchen. I stayed in the den with Whip. Most of the time when Merry came in late, I didn't wait up to see what state she was in.
Whip didn't look up when his wife appeared in the doorway, a glass of wine held in front of her face. I kept my expression as bland as I could, but even I couldn't believe what she looked like. Her lips were bitten and swollen, and she had hickeys on her neck and partially exposed breast.
Who the hell does she think she's kidding?
Merry stared at the open gun safe. Then she spotted the gun in Whip's left hand, and the color left her face. The stink of gun oil permeated the small room. Whip picked up the Sig and popped the clip out. He looked down the barrel and pointed it at Merry. “So, you're home.”
Merry slopped wine down her blouse, the red stain a stark contrast to her pale skin and purplish love bites. She fled up the stairs. The bedroom door clicked shut and locked.
“Has she no shame?” I was close to tears.
Whip pointed the unloaded gun at the empty doorway. “She looks like a burned-out crack whore.”
The next morning, Whip wheedled and pestered me into agreeing to open joint accounts with him. We went to his bank and froze the current accounts.
“Want me introduce you to my management company?” I asked. “They handle all my checks and bill paying. I get a statement at the end of the month.”
Mad Max: Unintended Consequences Page 11