by Brandi Reeds
“You wanted to be a pilot?”
“No, I just wanted to know I could do it.” Back then, I had a million aspirations—like a mountain range: at the top of one peak, I could be a pediatric nurse; another, an artist or a fashion designer; another, a journalist.
I was without direction, for sure, but I always thought I’d reach a peak one way or another. When you’re young, you don’t realize time eventually ends.
Like for Margaux Stritch . . . suddenly opportunity just fizzled out. Suddenly, it was over.
We begin to cross the street.
I clear my throat. “Listen. I saw a report on the news this morning, and, full disclosure, it’s the reason I hightailed it out here for yoga. I want to talk to you about it.”
“I didn’t watch the news. I tell you, give me vodka by the boatload and I can handle it, but”—she massages her right temple—“I cannot handle red wine.”
“Yeah. You should try taking ibuprofen before you go to bed.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Listen. A girl died last night.”
Donna whips her head toward me, and for the first time since I walked into the yoga studio, I feel like I have her full attention.
“Or early this morning,” I say. “I don’t really know when. They’re not saying.”
Donna raises a brow. “Why’d you want to talk to me about it?”
“She worked at the Aquasphere Underground,” I continue. “And I also saw her at your wedding.”
“My wedding?” She shakes her head. “I didn’t invite anyone from the bar to my wedding, and I didn’t interact with many people in the Underground. It was a job, that’s all. I don’t want people to know Doug met me in a bar and get the wrong idea.”
“I understand.” But whether or not she was invited, she was there.
I imagine Margaux up against some wall at the Fordhams’ wedding venue, Ian between her thighs, with a hand beneath her dress, working that scrap of satin and lace over her supple ivory hips.
Why am I doing this to myself? I didn’t follow them; I can’t possibly know they disappeared that night to have sex. Rationally, I know it’s unlikely, actually. Why would Ian risk it with his wife and children nearby? But I can’t get the image out of my head.
And thinking of it, I slip back into an ugly, jealous place, where I realize things might be better at home now that she’s dead. Since I first saw her, I’ve wondered every time he leaves the house if he is sneaking away to be with her. Now that she’s gone, I can stop wondering.
But I hate feeling that way—relieved. She was just a girl, and despite her connection to Ian, her life is over now.
“Regardless, I was wondering if you knew her,” I say. “Margaux Stritch?”
For a second she just takes another sip of her coffee and stares up at the traffic light at the next intersection we’ve come to. Finally, she speaks. “If she worked the underground circuit . . . look, no one uses their real names down there. I doubt I knew her, but even if I did, I wouldn’t recognize her name.”
“How about a picture?” I’m already trying to juggle my coffee and my phone, trying to call up the picture that’s been pasted all over every news outlet in the city. I finally manage to scroll to the right image, and Donna barely glances at it before she shakes her head.
“Did you know this girl?” Donna asks. “I mean, why do you care?”
“I think Ian screwed around with her.”
“Shoot, I’m going to be late,” Donna says.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you feel—”
“No, I’m sorry, I really should—”
“Okay.”
I stand on the curb as she races in the opposite direction, calling over her shoulder, “I’m sorry. I just have somewhere to be.”
Well.
That was interesting.
THEN
MARGAUX
“Helen?” Margaux’s voice echoed in the marble-clad entryway of the large, Victorian-era house in the historic district of Chicago. The neighborhood was called the Gold Coast for a reason. The place reeked of old money.
She grew up here, which wasn’t to say she belonged here, but she had called the massive place home for nearly half her life, since the rest of her family perished in the car accident. Only she had been spared. She walked away with a sliver of glass lodged in her right cheek, just below her eye. People called her lucky. Two inches higher and she would have been blind in her right eye. If she’d been sitting anywhere else in the minivan, she’d be dead. She was lucky.
Lucky.
She touched the scar on her cheek. Although it was nothing more than a slightly raised line of flesh, a symbol of her survival, it was also a constant reminder of how she’d come to be here. There’s nothing lucky about losing one’s family.
She always thought of them when she walked through the door—Mom and Dad; her sisters, Kendall and Chelsey—and even though over a decade had passed, it still felt as if she were entering the place for the first time with a duffel bag stuffed with things that weren’t really hers. Things she’d acquired through the department of child and family services over the several weeks she’d spent in a group home.
The state social workers had taken her back to her house to gather her belongings to take to the Akerses’ place, but being the middle child, she realized that almost everything had been handed down from her older sister.
Nothing was hers anymore, if it ever was, least of all choice. If she had one, she wouldn’t have elected to live with two people old enough to be her grandparents. And that’s what they wanted to be called, too—Granddad and Grandma. It hadn’t felt right to call them that when Margaux was a child; it felt incredibly wrong now that she was older.
Still, Helen Akers was a philanthropist, willing to take in a skinny twelve-year-old with “a mouth on her,” and Helen’s husband, Richard, was highly respected in the city—a career councilman. He was, at times, jovial; his wife had the personality of a pinched nerve.
It could’ve been worse, as the caseworker pointed out. At least she was going somewhere with substance. And her parents’ life insurance would be put into a trust, which would take care of her for the rest of her life. With someone so wealthy to adopt her, she wouldn’t have to worry about the funds being mismanaged. Most kids in her position would be lucky to have any funds at all.
The always-dim house, cold and museum-like, was looming and foreboding, and she was still afraid to touch the soapstone chess set always displayed, but never played, in the front parlor. After the scolding she’d received after daring to feel the smooth contours of the bishop’s hat one day, she wouldn’t dare lay another finger on it even as an adult.
Technically, this was home, but it was far from comfortable—and never had been.
“Helen?” With fat envelopes in her grasp, she meandered farther down the hall, toward the first-floor study, where a lamp burned in the eerily quiet space. “Richard?”
Margaux peeked inside to see Richard seated in his usual leather club chair, his head in his hands. A cocktail glass stood sweating on the old, embossed table to his left. She inhaled the scent of aged scotch.
For a second or two, she flashed on the first time Richard put his hand on her knee. She’d been with them for a few months, and it was Kendall’s birthday. She was sad—bawling—and Richard helped her through it.
Only years later had she realized he’d gained pleasure from those touches. Only years later had she recognized the insidious purpose with which he had made himself intrinsic to her survival.
“Where’s Helen?” she asked.
He looked up at long last. Instantly, she knew he wasn’t only drinking, but drunk. Which meant that Helen had either locked herself in a room upstairs, or she was out.
His smile was wide but tired. “There’s my girl.” And he patted his lap, as if he actually expected her to sit there, to pretend she’d always been his real granddaughter, to pretend he could possibly love her the same w
ay other grandfathers loved their offspring’s offspring.
“I got in.” She lingered cautiously in the doorway and displayed the envelopes one by one. “John Marshall. Loyola. UIC . . . they all accepted me.”
His expression morphed from absolute elation to regret to sorrow in the space of four or five seconds. He emitted a loud, dramatic sob and again patted his lap.
“Your granddad is proud of you.” Pat, pat. “Come here.”
“What’s wrong? Where’s Helen?”
“She’s going to leave me,” Richard said.
“Why? What happened?”
“It was a sure thing, babydoll.” He swept his scotch up in his hand. It sloshed out of the glass when he brought it to his lips. “I had a line on a horse, and the damn horse lost.”
Oh.
“It lost!” He threw the glass at the walnut-paneled wall upon which she was leaning.
Shards of glass and ice and splashes of scotch ricocheted. One shard embedded in her wrist. “Ouch! Richard, stop!”
Pillows hit next.
And when he rose and attempted to pick up the chair he’d been sitting on, she screamed again—“Stop!”—and took a step back out the doorway.
He let out another whale of a sob and put the chair back down. He stumbled back and collapsed into it. “Come here. Your granddad needs you.”
Margaux plucked the glass sliver from her arm and, pressing an acceptance letter to the puncture, took another step toward the front door.
Soon she was running and wiping the tears streaming down her face.
When she reached the door, she heard the weight of steps on the grand staircase. “Margaux.”
She looked over her shoulder and met Helen’s gaze.
The older woman wore a navy pantsuit, devoid of even a single speck of lint. Her graying hair, cropped in a feathered bob à la Laura Bush, bounced as she descended, and her lips were pressed so tightly into a thin line that they took on a colorless tone. “Leaving so soon?” Helen said, even as she lugged a suitcase behind her.
Margaux sniffled. “I just came to tell you . . . I got in. Everywhere. I’m going to law school.”
Helen shook her head. “He lost your tuition.”
She said it as if Richard had simply misplaced the funds, as if she expected the money to turn up any day now.
“He lost everything,” Helen said. “There will be no law school for you.”
“But my parents’ insurance—”
“Gone.”
“My trust is supposed to be—”
“Don’t be naive. He had to pay back the funds, don’t you see?”
“Funds?”
“Do you think it was his money he lost?”
“It was mine?”
“It was everyone’s. The whole city’s.”
Margaux took the suitcase from Helen and set it closer to the door. “Where will you go?”
“Go?” Helen shook her head. “I’m not going anywhere. But your granddad is heading to the streets for all I care. He’s bottomed out for the very last time.”
“But if my money’s gone . . . What about my expenses?”
“You’ll continue to live rent-free in our building, but as for the rest of it . . . You’ll be on your own for a while, but nothing to worry about. You’ll be no more on your own now than you were at age twelve.”
“But it was my money,” Margaux says. “It wasn’t yours to use.”
Helen turned her back on her. “You’d better go. You know how he gets when he’s drinking.”
“I need that money. I’ll tell the authorities what he did if you don’t give it back.”
“Do that and you’ll destroy him. What kind of selfish daughter—”
“He’s done plenty to destroy me,” Margaux said.
Smack!
Helen’s open palm landed square on Margaux’s cheek. “That’s the thanks I get? For taking you in? For giving you a good home? That’s the problem with your generation. You don’t think you have to work for anything. You don’t think you have to wait.”
Margaux took another step toward the door, her hand to her reddening cheek. “But this is wrong. That money was for my education, my future.”
“Goodbye,” Helen said.
Margaux didn’t look back, just ran.
She boarded the L and cried softly while staring out the train window at the city lights zipping by. An hour ago, she had the world at her fingertips with a choice of three graduate schools. Now, it seemed she’d have to turn them all down.
A group of girls in short dresses and strappy heels boarded a few stops later and chatted nonstop about the fabulous dinner they’d just shared, about the hip bar in Lincoln Park they were en route to now.
That’s what I’d be, she thought, if my life hadn’t happened to me.
She exited when they got off the train car, a few stops earlier than where she usually did, and hung back about twenty or so feet behind.
One of them pointed to a bar and said, “That’s it!”
“We came all the way out here for that place?” another said. “I ain’t drinking in a church.”
Margaux’s gaze trailed to the old Gothic church across the way. A turquoise neon sign glared from the shingle—AQUASPHERE—and on the opposite end, an arrow pointed down a flight of stairs and blinked: UNDERGROUND.
Margaux knew the bar. She’d never been there herself, but she’d heard classmates talking about it. She looked down at her clothing. The jeans and Rolling Stones T-shirt weren’t quite suitable for a club, but after what she’d just learned, she didn’t care.
Richard had lost her tuition money.
Lost it.
Screw it. She was going to drink alone tonight.
She climbed the steps and entered what must have been the original vestibule of the building. For as large as the church was, this bar was positively tiny.
Three sets of doors behind the bar, those she’d assumed would have led to the open space where parishioners heard services, were barred. Signs warned off drinkers: NO ADMITTANCE. She walked to the far corner and tucked herself into a hole where she could sip a cocktail out of the way of everyone else.
But getting a drink proved difficult in a place that could double as a sardine tin packed to the hilt. Catching the bartender’s attention would be a feat within itself.
A flyer posted to the wall caught her eye: Dancers needed. Apply underground.
“What are you doing here?”
She flinched when he touched her knee but soon found herself face-to-face with a man who obviously thought she was someone else. “I’m sorry. I thought you were . . .” He threw his head back and chuckled. “Forgive me. You look like someone I know.”
She narrowed her gaze at him. He was good-looking.
He held out a hand. “Arlon Judson.”
“Margaux.”
“Classy name for a classy dame. Can I buy you a drink?”
After the whole ordeal with one of her prelaw professors last semester, Mr. I Swear I’m Nearly Divorced, she couldn’t be too careful. She glanced at Arlon Judson’s left hand and saw no signs of a wedding band—no tan line, no dent at the base of his knuckle. “If you promise not to shell me with cheesy lines . . . sure.”
“So, Margaux. Has anyone ever told you that you look like Marilyn Monroe?”
She rolled her eyes. “Really? That’s the best you can do?”
“Blonde. Bombshell. No-brainer. It’s not a line, it’s just the truth.”
When she didn’t respond, he tried again: “And let’s be honest. Deep down, you’re more of a Maggie than a Margaux, aren’t you?”
“Always been Margaux. Never Maggie.”
“Do you believe in love at first sight, Maggie?”
“That’s actually why I came here underdressed tonight. To fall in love at first sight.”
“What do you drink?”
“Finally, a question I don’t mind answering: gin and tonic with two limes.”
“That�
��s my favorite drink. You’re quickly becoming my favorite person.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
The bartender leaned toward them. “Everything all right here?”
“Two gin and tonics. And I’ll be right back. Left my jacket over . . . one second.”
The bartender buffed the bar with a turquoise rag. “You okay?” she asked.
Margaux quickly checked the perimeter before realizing the question was directed at her. “Me?”
The bartender nodded toward the man, who was on his way back to the bar with his jacket. “Be careful. Seems like a nice enough guy, but . . . be careful.”
Margaux nodded.
Arlon Judson returned. “In all seriousness, what brings you out tonight?”
“To be honest, I had a rough day with my family.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Thank you.”
“Anything I can do to help?”
Arlon Judson was being polite. Or he obviously wanted to get into her pants. No one offered to help a stranger, especially without knowing what type of help she needed. And while she knew Mr. Judson likely had one underlying motive in mind, his smile was so genuine that she softened.
“At the risk of sounding like a line,” she began, then shut up. “I was going to ask if you came here often.”
“Often enough,” he admitted.
“Have you ever been downstairs?”
For a second he didn’t answer, but his grin told her everything she wanted to know. He knew the place well, if she had to guess. She looked again to the flyer on the wall. “What happens downstairs?”
“Sweetheart, what doesn’t?”
“Anything goes?”
“Anything and everything. Ironic that this place is a church, isn’t it?”
“On the contrary, I think it’s honest. I was raised by two of the most outwardly Christian people you’ll ever meet. They’re not good people.”
“It’s loud in here. Do you live nearby?”
“I do.”
“That’ll be convenient then. At closing time.”
“Fine line between confident and cocky. I’ll drink with you, but I’m not going to sleep with you.”
“Maybe not tonight.” Arlon raised his glass. “But here’s to someday.”