Return to Me

by Katie Winters

  Janine had donned a pair of sunglasses and a vintage scarf, which she’d purchased at one of the market stalls in Paris on her recent trip with Maxine. When she glanced at her reflection in the mirror at the restaurant, she saw an old woman from an Alfred Hitchcock movie peering back at her.

  They ordered. Janine heard herself say something about a “Garden Omelet,” although, as she handed the menu back to the waitress, she had little recollection of what that actually was. Alyssa and Maggie eyed her as though she was on the verge of a meltdown. Janine thought about asking them if she’d actually thrown a vase at Jack’s head but then thought better of it. Forward-motion was key.

  “So. Maggie. How is Rex?”

  Maggie gave a slight shrug. “He’s fine. We’re all fine.”

  “Alyssa? Your internship?”

  “It’s good, Mom. I have the week off,” Alyssa said.

  “Oh. Why is that?”

  “It’s Memorial Day, Mom.” Alyssa explained it as though Janine was a bit slow in the head or a child.

  “Is it? That happened fast.” Janine’s eyes flicked toward the alcohol menu, which remained on the table between them. Perhaps she should have gone for a mimosa.

  Alyssa splayed her hand across her mother’s. The silence stretched between them. Maggie and Alyssa seemed to urge each other to be the next to speak. Maybe they’d rehearsed some kind of pep-talk.

  “Your father wrote me. We will be moving forward with the divorce.” Janine tried out the words just to see how they felt. They felt awful. They scraped against her tongue like hot knives.

  Alyssa’s shoulders quaked. She looked on the verge of tears again. “Oh, Mom. No.”

  “Someone mentioned that you maybe—” Maggie furrowed her brow as she struggled to speak.

  “That I did what?”

  “That maybe you signed a prenup?” Alyssa blurted.

  Janine’s eyes widened. A laugh ballooned from her stomach and erupted from her lips. She’d hardly even considered that!

  “Well. Of course, I did,” she said. Her voice remained light. “I was madly in love with Jack Potter. I thought he would never leave me. His family demanded a prenup be signed. I had no choice in the matter. It doesn’t matter.”

  Again, silence fell. Alyssa and Maggie seemed to have a quiet conversation over the table, while Janine returned her attention to the alcohol menu. Maybe a Bloody Mary was a better order? Or straight to wine again.

  That moment, a woman appeared over their table. Janine blinked up into the familiar eyes of Kennedy Hollingsworth, one of the Manhattan socialites who’d, of course, been at the engagement party. The women gazed down at Janine as though Janine was a prized cow. Janine’s heart actually dropped into the basement of her belly.

  “Janine Potter! My, my. I didn’t imagine I’d see the likes of you around the Village.”

  Had Janine ever liked Kennedy Hollingsworth? She couldn’t remember having a single conversation with the woman that had ever filled her with anything beyond disdain, hatred, and boredom.

  “Kennedy. Hello.”

  “And the girls!” Kennedy said brightly. “Alyssa and Maggie. Always such beauties.”

  Alyssa and Maggie muttered thanks as their eyes turned toward Janine in utter panic. This was precisely why Janine hadn’t wanted to leave the hotel; even her disguise hadn’t worked.

  “Janine, I am glad I caught you.” Kennedy’s eyes glittered with malice, even as her words seemed to attempt to “comfort.” “I just can’t believe what Maxine put you through. Sure, husbands cheat. But dear friends, like Maxine, was to you? I just don’t know how anyone could handle that. Really. If you ever need someone to chat with—”

  Oh, but Kennedy had done enough. The words sliced through Janine, body and soul, and she erupted with sorrow. Tears rolled down her cheeks, dragging along the dark makeup from her eyes, and she poured herself over the table. Her surroundings no longer mattered. Kennedy no longer mattered. All she could think was — yeah — exactly right, Kennedy. Maxine had been her greatest love. She’d thought of her above Jack in many ways.

  And now, she had nothing—no Maxine. No husband.

  She was pathetic.

  “I think my mother has been through enough, thank you. Now, if you’ll excuse us,” Maggie blurted angrily to the rude woman.

  Somehow, Maggie and Alyssa gathered Janine up and led her out into the drenching sunlight. Maggie hailed a cab as Alyssa muttered words of comfort. All the while, Janine dropped further into a daze.

  Janine awoke several hours later. She was on her back in what seemed to be Maggie’s apartment’s guest room. She recognized the wallpaper, which she and Maggie had agonized over the previous summer (the choice of it, not the putting-on, as they’d naturally hired someone else to do that). She wondered why the girls hadn’t taken her back to the hotel.

  Then she thought, with a jolt, that perhaps because she and Jack were getting divorced, and she’d signed that stupid prenup — perhaps Jack had asked the girls to get her out of the hotel so that he could stop paying for it.

  Were Alyssa and Maggie in on all of this?

  Disgruntled, Janine reached for her phone on the bedside table. After only a few now-familiar clicks, she made her way to several gossip columns. One of them had already featured her apparent “meltdown” in the Village. Janine splayed her hand over her forehead in shock. She had known better than to leave the hotel—her emotional state was at its last straw, at-best.

  There was a knock at the door. Before Janine had a chance to answer, Maggie opened it. She wore an apron, and her hair was in an up-do, and she peered in at Janine, as though she were the mother, and Janine, the daughter.

  “Hi.” Janine wasn’t sure what else to say. She flicked her phone to the side so as not to be caught looking over such trash.

  “Hi.” Maggie didn’t sound pleased. “You passed out in the cab.”

  Janine heaved a sigh. “That must have been really scary, Maggie. I’m so sorry.”

  “Scary, yes. But mostly, I’m terrified that you aren’t taking care of yourself,” Maggie said slowly. She stepped into the shadowed room and pushed the door closed.

  Janine felt like an animal at the zoo.

  “You’re going to run into people like Kennedy all the time, Mom,” Maggie continued. “You have to find a way to deal with this. I know it’s not fair, but you have to.”

  Janine was reminded of a long-ago afternoon, when Maggie had arrived home crying, after a boy she’d liked had told her he didn’t like her back. Janine and Maxine had comforted Maggie in every way they’d known how in ways they’d previously comforted one another when teenage boys had done them wrong. They’d eaten Oreos with peanut butter; they’d watched rom-coms. Janine imagined Maxine coming in after Maggie and saying, “All right. Enough of this. Let’s get you out of bed.”

  But of course, Maxine would do no such thing. She hadn’t even bothered to call.

  Not that there was anything to say.

  Maggie grumbled, then lifted her phone from her pocket. Behind her, the door rattled with another knock, as her fiancé, Rex, called out, “Mags? I’m gonna head down to the Ritters for that barbecue. You still want to come?”

  Maggie’s eyes were difficult to read. She shifted her weight as Janine muttered, “Maggie, please. Don’t stay home on my account. Besides, I should really get back to the hotel.”

  Rex remained outside the door. After a pause, Maggie hollered, “I don’t think so, Rex.”

  “Maybe just for a beer or something?”

  Maggie sounded doubtful. “Maybe.”

  The newly engaged couple said their love you's as Janine dropped her chin toward her chest with shame. There was a heaviness to her current sadness, something that told her it would be very, very difficult to walk herself even from this bed to the bathroom in the hall.

  “I just got a message from someone,” Maggie said suddenly.

  “Oh?” Janine struggled to sound interested.

  �
�It’s um. Well. I don’t know how to tell you, so I’m just going to say it,” Maggie continued. She looked on the verge of tears. “It was Grandma Nancy.”

  Janine’s eyes flashed toward Maggie’s. She felt her facial features harden. Sure, Maggie was twenty-four now and could certainly handle herself. Still, Janine hadn’t spoken with Nancy in over a decade, and she knew very little about her current life — only that at some point, she’d married someone. She had no way to know if that marriage had lasted or how her mother was, physically or mentally. Knowing what she knew about Nancy, Janine didn’t want to think about her mother’s current mental status.

  “Say something, Mom,” Maggie breathed.

  “You know how I feel about Grandma,” Janine returned.

  “You two have a lot of bad blood between you. I know that.” Maggie swung a dark strand around her ear. “But you mentioned a few years ago that maybe Grandma changed, since she married someone? And she wasn’t very old when everything happened between the two of you. She had you, at what? Age sixteen?”

  “I ran out of sympathy for Nancy a long, long time ago,” Janine said somberly.

  “Don’t you at least want to know what the message said?”

  Janine crossed and uncrossed her hands on her thighs. “Probably something about the divorce, I guess. The very public, very famous divorce. And about Maxine. She used to call Maxine one of her daughters.”

  Maggie sucked in her cheeks. “She knows about it, yeah. But she also said, well, that if you want to get out of the city sometime — she has a place for you to stay. She knows how much you love the city. But she also thinks it’s poison and this could do you some good. I think she might be right.”

  “Poison, huh?” Janine held her daughter’s eyes, even as she wanted to roll her own all the way back into her skull. “She really has a flair for the dramatic, doesn’t she?”

  Almost immediately, Janine regretted her words. After all, wasn’t she the one who’d holed up in a hotel for two weeks, avoiding her daughters, hiding from the world? Hadn’t she been the one to have a breakdown at a Greenwich Village brunch spot? And now, wasn’t she back in bed?

  “Right.” Maggie looked at a complete loss. “Well. Anyway. I just wanted to let you know because we don’t keep things from each other.”

  Janine dropped her eyes to her hands. This was a call-out, proof that her daughters were angry that she’d hidden herself away for so long.

  “Let me know if you need anything,” Maggie said softly. “I’ll just be in the living room.”

  “You should go to that barbecue, Mags.”

  “No. I don’t feel up to it,” Maggie returned. She then bit her lower lip and added, “I’m so angry at Dad, Mom. I don’t know how I’ll be able to look at him the same ever again—let alone Maxine.”

  Janine’s lower lip quivered as she pulled her daughter in for a much-needed embrace. They stayed like that for a moment until they collected themselves. She resented Jack all the more for what he’d done to their daughters. Always, they had pledged that the girls came first in everything. Yes, they were twenty-four and twenty-two and old enough to handle it; still, as Janine knew, you never really got over the fact that your family was a busted-up mess.

  When Maggie left the bedroom, Janine tidied herself as best as she could in the mirror, gathered her things, and appeared in the foyer a little while later. Maggie blinked up from her book, her face marred with confusion.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t want to be a burden on you, Maggie. I never want that.”

  Maggie dropped her book to the side and rushed to her feet. “You’re not, Mom.”

  “Well, I feel like I am. I’ll see you soon, honey. Just — please. Remember. You didn’t do anything wrong in this. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s just what life is.”

  Chapter Six

  The following morning, the hotel concierge rang Janine’s suite to inform her that the credit card she’d given them had recently been declined. Janine, who was privy to the multiple, multiple zeroes in Jack Potter’s expansive piggy bank, expressed shock at this news.

  “There must be some kind of mistake,” she told him. “That card is nowhere close to being expired.”

  “I’m afraid it no longer works, Madam. We will need you to arrange another payment option with us. As soon as you can,” the man returned promptly. There was no haughtiness to his words, for, in his mind, he thought the likes of Janine Potter could arrange for another payment with the wave of her hand.

  Janine took an overly long shower. In there, she screamed into her palms and felt the scalding water tear through her skin. She felt like she was losing every ounce of sanity she had left in her.

  For the first time since Maggie had mentioned it, her mother’s offer hovered in the back of Janine’s mind. It felt like a safety raft, something to cling to until the waves calmed down. Still, after all the trauma and horror that she and her mother had been through, Janine felt it was against her mental and physical well-being to return to her. Their lives together had been borderline hell. When Nancy left the city, Janine had pledged to never, ever wind up like Nancy. And she hadn’t.

  At least, she thought she’d avoided it. Yet here she was. Screaming in a shower, just as her mother had sometimes, when the money had run dry all over again, and there was nothing to do but hover in the still-hot water, as it kept the mind off of things like hunger.

  When Janine had first met Jack, and he’d begun to spoil her with so many things, including taking her out to the fanciest restaurants, she’d started to put on weight in a way that pleased her. She’d loved her round hips and her supple thighs; she’d loved the soft curve of her cheeks. Rather soon after that, her belly extended too far out and she’d learned she was pregnant with Maggie. An accident. A beautiful accident— one that had changed her entire life.

  Janine crammed various items into her suitcase. Throughout the past two weeks, she had hardly worn a thing she’d brought from home, and now, she acknowledged just how silly some of the items were. A dress she’d purchased in Rome to go out to dinner with her husband. A pair of stilettos, just in case she wanted to party alone in her room and tower over absolutely nobody. Then, the makeup and perfume she’d brought — which she had barely used at all.

  It wasn’t completely necessary that she depart. Due to her naturopathic medicine practice, she had some funds in the bank – enough to linger on at the hotel a little while longer. Still, it felt pathetic. And in truth, if she was about to build a life of her own, she needed those funds. The likes of the Lotte weren’t exactly kosher for her any longer.

  WHEN JANINE APPEARED on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, she blinked out at the now June late-morning, a marvelous day in a city she loved, a city that, in almost every way, reflected her body and soul. She’d seen the worst and the very best of it.

  And now, she felt she had nowhere to turn. The city had somehow rejected her. She was a crumpled, used-up wife of a very wealthy man and a mother whose children no longer needed her, so she thought. And, as ever, a girl who felt she didn’t have a mother to call her own.

  Janine still had cash to pay a taxi to make her way back to her apartment. A funny itch in the back of her mind thought it would be a funny thing to just march in and return to her life, as though nothing had happened. She imagined Jack coming in from work, removing his suit jacket, and asking her how her day had gone. They would side-step the issue. No, Maxine would never return to their lives, but that was all right. Maxine could go to Paris, for all Janine cared. She could take over Europe if only she’d leave New York in Janine’s capable hands.

  The doorman did, in fact, ogle Janine as she entered, so much so that she actually gave him a cutting look and said, “Take a picture. Everyone else seems to want to.” She then ducked onto the elevator and pushed a button to rocket herself into the sky.

  Her apartment was spick and span and utterly empty. It looked like nobody had been inside its walls for seve
ral days, which wasn’t a crazy thought, as Jack did travel for business quite a lot (at least, she’d thought that — but maybe he was just headed to Maxine’s every time?).

  She walked the familiar path toward her bedroom. The bed was made, and sunlight streamed in beautifully through the windows. Fresh flowers had been cut and placed in a vase near the window, which was something Janine had requested the maids do daily. She remembered having that request, yes, but also felt it was one of the strangest things she’d ever done. How could she go from those awful childhood days where they scrambled just to put food on the table to demanding fresh flowers every day?

  Perspective was a strange thing. She felt she had gotten more than enough of it the previous few weeks.

  Janine sat at the edge of her bed for a long time and pondered what to do. She could check herself into another hotel? Something cheaper? Somewhere she could draw the curtains and just sleep?

  As if on cue, she received a text message from Jack.

  JACK: When you get over your nervous breakdown, we need to discuss logistics.

  Wow! So he’d canceled the card as a way to bring her close to him again if only so he could nail down the final details of their separation and divorce. He had more money than God — a statement he’d made once, in fact, which meant that it was no skin off his back to help Janine out with a hotel.

  He just wanted her good and gone, and not lurking somewhere in the distance, latched to his credit card. He didn’t want to “deal” with her.

  Janine stood from the edge of the bed and walked like a zombie toward her bathroom. Once in there, she splashed cold water on her cheeks and blinked at her reflection. She looked tired, worn, and her cheeks were hollowed out. Back in the old days, she and Maxine had practiced sucking their cheeks in as a way to keep up with some of the high-rolling, beautiful wives of the rich men who were friends with their husbands. Maxine and Janine had always known that every night out with them was a night of competition — who had the best wife? Who had the best life?