by Kate Myles
He leaned back in his chair and squeezed the leather piping between his thumb and forefinger. “What, were you biding your time until you could sic a forensic accountant on me?”
“What if you end up dead?” I asked. “What’s going to happen to that money?”
He expelled a lungful of air and looked away. “You’re so entitled, Em.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “I bought all this furniture.”
“Could you afford that?”
“Could we afford that.”
“The couch was eighteen thousand dollars,” he said.
“That’s how much they cost.”
“You have three ten-thousand-dollar purses upstairs.”
“I can’t show up for work with a cheap purse!”
“You’re lucky I feed you.”
My lips caught fire. My face muscles twitched. Everything that he was, that he’d done. “If you’re not paying for shit,” I screamed, “what is the point of you?”
The baby monitor chirped to life. Grace started up her tinny wail.
“God dammit!” I said.
I went to the coffee table and picked up the video screen. Her eyes were glowing in the infrared. She’d freed one arm from her swaddle and was pawing the air with her fist. Doug came up behind me and put a hand on my shoulder.
“Should you go up?” he asked.
“No. She might go back to sleep.”
He put his hand on my back. He spoke softly. “We’ll take care of her. She’ll be fine.”
Grace’s cry shortened into a series of hard, staccato howls. We went to her. We sat on the floor and took turns feeding her until he got bored and went back downstairs. I gave her the last of the bottle and moved to the rocking chair, waiting for her eyelids to droop so I could put her down drowsy but awake, like all the baby books instructed. She didn’t close her eyes.
“Go back to sleep,” I whispered. She kicked at my thigh. I closed my palm over her foot, breathing in a sensation of contentment and peace, wondering how long the feeling would last.
Dr. Maryn had advanced and retreated. And now where was she? No matter how hard Doug tried to convince me or himself that things were fine, I pictured her waiting, patient, getting the timing just right. What is she doing right now?
I stopped rocking.
Dr. Maryn was editing. She was in postproduction, which takes months. She hadn’t called the cops, hadn’t begun legal proceedings, because she didn’t want to spoil the surprise. She was making a television show.
Grace grunted and wriggled her face. I almost dropped her. I almost ran to my computer in a panic, in an effort to rally the few people who might stick by me.
But we were done. Or Doug was. There was no stopping this.
I put Grace on my shoulder and patted her back. I did the math. I had some retirement. But not enough for Grace and me to live on for long, and certainly not enough to leave her any inheritance. Doug’s life insurance was worth a million. If he died, that money was mine whether or not Dr. Maryn sued, whether or not her app-store customers started a class action. If he could somehow die, a million would give me time. His offshore accounts held about four million. If I could get that money—I’d have to move the cash, hide it on other islands until everyone forgot about us.
Grace burped. “You just burped,” I said, narrating her experience back to her, following the directions from the baby books. She made a soft siren coo up and down an octave. I repeated the notes back to her, just as the baby books had taught me, laying the foundation for later language development. I stared into her face. She looked away.
The world was so different from the time when I’d grown up. And it was becoming more precarious day by day. I’d tried to buffer myself, expanding into tech, marrying someone set to revolutionize his field, but I’d failed.
I leaned my face next to her ear and whispered, “I wanted to give you the chance to be mediocre, but it looks like you’ll have to work just as hard as your mommy.”
I put her on the floor, on her stomach, her legs splaying out behind her like a tadpole. She rolled her face to the side and rested her cheek on the teddy bear–skinned rug.
“Come on, Grace,” I said.
The baby books called this tummy time. According to the development charts, in four weeks, Grace was supposed to be able to lift her head forty-five degrees from this position. But hitting benchmarks wasn’t enough. She had to be advanced.
“Pick your head up, sweetie,” I said.
Grace ground her face into the carpet. “Eeehhhh,” she mewled. “Eeeehhh.”
“You’re working so hard,” I said, praising her effort. That was what books said to do, focus on the effort, not the result. “I can see how hard you’re working.”
She groped the rug with her forearms and pushed at the air with her feet as a rush of images, all the terrible fates that could befall her, flickered through my mind: poor and scrounging, homeless. In every one she was lost and lonely.
“You can do this,” I said.
Her chest and face stuck to the floor. She wasn’t going to make it. “Heeeehhhh!” she cried. I resisted the impulse to comfort.
“Please, Grace,” I whispered, my desperation rising.
“Waaaaaah!” She cried and strained and swam and crawled and flailed like a turtle racing to nowhere.
Doug lowered the volume on the TV downstairs.
“Please, sweetie.”
Her wails turned guttural.
“You have to. It’s called a work ethic.”
Her face was red. She was sweating. She raised her head a fraction of an inch and pecked at the floor.
“Good!” I said.
“Wah! Wah! Wah!”
“Keep going!”
I heard Doug running up the stairs.
“Lift your head!”
“Pick her up.” Doug was standing in the doorway.
I held up a hand. “Hold on,” I said. “She’s almost got it.”
“Pick her up!”
She was so close. He barged past me and took her in his arms.
“Dammit!” I yelled. “I was working on something!”
“Shhh,” said Doug. He cradled Grace and swayed. “You need a time-out,” he said.
“You want her to end up like Chloe?”
He pointed past me. “Get out.”
“You ruined my life!” I lunged for Grace.
He held her above his head, away from my grasp. “Out!”
I ran downstairs and held on to the edge of the breakfast bar. I thought of marching back upstairs, snatching Grace. All I had to do was buckle her in her car seat and start driving.
But he’d never let me take her.
I had to calm down, come up with a plan. I took my phone from the end table and reread Chloe’s email. I scrolled through the half dozen other messages she’d sent. You’d think the emails would have grown in hostility, but aside from the most recent, she seemed intent on ingratiating.
I grabbed my purse and went to my car in the garage. I reached for the ignition but crumpled. I covered my face with my hands. If only he’d been competent, if he’d have let me in. I would have welcomed the job of fixer, of making his women, his problems, go away.
But he was the problem now. His blithe malignance, his negligence, his scandals. He didn’t even see it. That was the saddest part. He couldn’t see that he was evil.
He was destroying us. He would ruin Grace’s life. I looked at Chloe’s email again. She’d included her phone number at the bottom. I called her.
“Hello?” she answered.
“It’s Emily.”
She said nothing. I told her to meet me at Tom’s Diner in Brentwood.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
DOUG
Doug keeps a tight hold on Grace and listens, bracing himself for Emily’s reentry, for some and another thing to top off her litany of complaints. Her car starts.
“Keep going,” he whispers. The rumble of the garage gate drowns out the so
und of her motor. “Go, go, go.” The gate closes. Doug walks to the hallway with Grace nestled in the crook of his arm. Emily is gone.
He looks down at his daughter. Her skin is smooth and pudgy. “Cutie-pie,” he says and lifts her close. He sinks his lips into the baby fat on her cheek. Grace smiles and cocks her face to the side. A flirt already.
He turns to the empty space around him, expecting someone to take the baby now that he’s had a complete moment with her. All the women in his life. Emily. His mother. The nanny. They’re always taking over.
He brings Grace to the living room. He dims the lights and uses his free hand to set up the Portishead album from his vinyl collection. He holds her upright as the noir downbeat kicks and starts dancing. He sings along to the mournful soprano’s lyrics and kisses Grace’s forehead and wipes her spit-up from his shoulder.
It’s perfect. It’s exactly how he imagined fatherhood. Playful and hip. If you can call Portishead hip anymore. It doesn’t matter. What matters is they’re doing joy. And yet, he’s certain if Emily were here, she’d have some kind of problem with it.
What did she say to him? What is the point of you? What the hell.
He has another instinct to hand Grace off. His legs take him in a circle around the room. He’s conscious of his changing mood. He thinks of going out, taking Grace for a drive. He’d have to put together her diaper bag, though. His muscles tighten in a quick surge of outrage at the fact that he can’t simply walk out the door.
He pulls her activity gym from the corner and lays her down under its cushioned arches and zoo animals. “Stay there,” he says. Grace pants and waves her hand near a stuffed giraffe. He opens the sliding glass door and peers over the edge of the balcony. Low tide. The beach is walkable.
Ten minutes. He’d be back before Grace even noticed. He glances at her. She’s found a way to flick her foot against the gym, shaking and jingling the whole contraption. He smooths his eyebrows with his thumb and forefinger and reaches into his pocket for his house keys. He moves to the kitchen. In the cabinet, behind the rice and dry pasta, is a can of baking soda. He unscrews its false bottom and digs half a key full of cocaine from the plastic bag hidden there. Just a maintenance bump.
Oh Jesus, he loves cocaine. His sinuses go numb as the drippings collect on the back of his tongue. The kitchen takes on an astringent quality, cold and blue and scrubbed completely clean.
Grace is on the other side of the counter, all fluffy and warm, batting away at her zoo animals. It’s not as if he’s unaware of what he’s doing. Where he’s choosing to be. He’s been through this before. He actually considered quitting completely, but he can’t afford a month of bad moods right now. He reaches his key back into the baggie but then stops.
This revolving carousel of compulsions. He’s always assumed they were confined to his periphery. But what if, he wonders. What if they’re the central facts of his existence?
He agreed to give Emily six weeks. He won’t even have to mention the drugs. He’ll tack the cocaine withdrawal on top of the sex-addict rehab. His own secret detox.
Coke is embarrassing anyway. Those two hookers who turned down the lines he cut for them. They shared this look, like he was some kind of middle-aged hairpieced dude they’d be laughing at if he weren’t paying them to be there. What do the kids do now? Molly? Oxy? Anyway, he’s cut down on the sex workers too. He’s getting tired.
His cell phone rings. It’s Emily. He declines the call. She tries the landline. He walks to the office and picks up the cordless phone.
“What now?”
“Did you give Chloe any payouts?” she asks.
Grace starts to cry. “Em, I can’t deal with this.” He presses the receiver between his ear and shoulder and steps to the living room. He picks Grace up and bounces her.
“Is she in her crib?” Emily asks.
“Where are you?”
“Did you make Chloe sign a nondisclosure agreement?”
He shakes his head. “I’m hanging up now.” Doug holds Grace to his chest as he presses the phone’s off button. He stares out the screen door. The ocean is choppy tonight. Emily knows something, obviously. But that’s not what bothers him. It’s the caginess. How calculating she’s become. He has to be able to trust his wife.
What is the point of you?
That’s what she said to him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
EMILY
I waited on PCH behind a line of cars turning left onto Sunset and startled at the sound of breaking news on the radio, a new development in some local scandal. I held my breath and listened for my name, for Doug’s name, even though the story had nothing to do with us.
I turned off the stereo. My phone lit up. There was a text from Chloe.
Traffic. B there in 20.
“Shit,” I said.
I deleted her text and covered the screen with my hand as the cells in my body gathered into a low simmer. I looked back at my recent calls. There it was, third from the top: evidence that I’d contacted her.
Of course, I’d done nothing wrong by calling her. It was a perfectly reasonable response to her email. That in itself wasn’t against the law.
I opened my browser and started typing burner phone into the search box. No. I stopped. That wouldn’t do. I thought about trying prepaid phone, but these web searches were recorded somewhere. Weren’t they?
I wasn’t planning anything then. I was only thinking. But I had enough sense not to do any of that thinking on the internet.
The car behind me gave a nudging beep. I turned and pulled into a gas station parking lot. Tourists were gathered on the corner, waiting to cross to the beach. I closed my eyes. Who used burner phones? Criminals. And where did they buy these phones?
I touched the air with my fingers, anchorless without the aid of a search engine. I drove up Sunset, scanning every minimall and storefront. I saw a sign for an office-supply store and parked in the underground lot. The woman at the entrance told me they were closing in ten minutes.
“Where are your cell phones?” I asked.
She walked me to a long, low aisle of smartphones with indecipherable deals stickered on the shelf below them. I thanked her. She started back to the front door.
“And, um . . . ,” I started. I froze as she turned to me.
“Yes?” she said.
Do you have any prepaid phones?
It was a simple question, an easy one, but my throat was stiff, my vocal cords refusing to cooperate. It was as if my voice had developed its own conscience. And it knew, no matter how I tried to convince myself differently, it knew I was planning a murder.
Nothing about it would come naturally, I realized. If I was going to make myself capable of this, I’d have to work at it, like I worked at everything else. I flexed my fingers and conjured up a swirl of enticements, motivations to kill, in a word cloud of demented self-help aphorisms: I had to get out of my comfort zone. I had to lean into it. I could feel my blood thickening, stopping up access to anything but pure resolve.
The saleslady was still looking at me. The question grew, inflated behind my lips. I let it burst.
“Burner phones,” I said. “Where are they?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHLOE
The diner is bright. The windows are enormous. Chloe watches from the parking lot as Emily slides into a vinyl booth and pulls her phone from an expensive tote bag, plastered all over with some idiot’s initials.
Emily Webb. She looks different. Still skinny, but her jawline is broader, and there’s a ruddiness peeking through her tinted moisturizer. The woman’s ponytail is immaculate, though, and her nails, Chloe can see from here, her frigging nails are perfectly shaped and shiny. It’s like a costume Emily’s wearing, a low-maintenance new-mom costume.
Chloe bites a piece of ragged cuticle from her thumb. She flings open the restaurant door and plops her yellow purse, the one from their first meeting, on the table. The plan is to open with the bag and deman
d an apology, but Emily doesn’t even look at it. Chloe picks it up and sets it down again.
“I didn’t think you’d show up,” says Chloe.
Emily lifts her menu with a puncturing sigh. “I was the one who asked you here. Sit.”
The waiter comes to their table. He’s young but has the belly of a middle-aged man. He calls them “ladies.” Emily orders an iced decaf. Chloe asks for pomegranate juice.
“Anything else?” asks the waiter. Chloe glances at Emily. She wants food. She wants someone to eat with.
Emily says, “That’s all.”
“No food?”
“That’s all,” Emily repeats a little more forcefully. The waiter catches Chloe’s eye. He winks at her and brushes his hip against her shoulder as he leaves. This sets off a minor flurry of panic in Chloe. The waiter is just like Dylan. Just like Doug. There’s no salve, no kindness, in Chloe’s world anymore. There’s only sexual tension.
Emily leans forward. Chloe crosses her arms. These people. They’re pigs, rooting around in everyone else’s vulnerability.
“Why did you send me that email?” asks Emily.
“I’m sorry.” Chloe tries to control her stammer. She didn’t come here to apologize. “I just thought you needed to know.”
“You were mad I didn’t get back to you, right? About the commercials?”
“No, I—”
“I’m on maternity leave. You don’t think to give me a few weeks before you try to wreck my life?”
Chloe wasn’t expecting this. She doesn’t know what she was expecting, but definitely not Emily saying something so reasonable. Emily is the bad guy. Emily’s the one married to Doug. She’s the one who’s friends with Dr. Maryn. Emily made fun of her purse.
“I wasn’t trying to wreck your life.”
Emily pushes on. “You need money? Is that it?”
Chloe can feel her face getting smaller, sharper. “I’m not a whore,” she says. Emily jerks her hands off the table. It helps, seeing this move, seeing that her anger still has an effect. Fury is the only power Chloe has left. Emily lowers her head and looks at her lap. The waiter comes back with their drinks.