Chapter 8
Idid the chemistry at the kitchen table after Spencer went to bed, with a legal pad and the box from the supply closet that I'd photographed front and back. For the first time since college I felt the specific clean pleasure of a problem that would hold still and let you solve it.
The whitening gel was peroxide, the same family of chemistry that opens up the enamel just slightly, that lifts the little surface pores so the bleaching can get in.
That was the whole mechanism, and it was also the whole opportunity, because anything that opens a pore to let white in can be made to let something else in instead.
I wasn't going to hurt anybody. I want that on the record next to everything else, because later people would try to make this part into something cruel, and it wasn't cruel. It was funny, it was a clown nose, it was temporary.
I needed a colorant that was inert, that would not damage tooth or gum, that a person could swallow a gallon of and be fine, and that would do exactly one thing: bond, for a few stubborn days, to enamel that had just been opened by peroxide.
A stain that the whitening itself would set, like a dye bath sets in fabric you've pretreated. The treatment wouldn't whiten the teeth. It would prime them, and then it would dye them, and the brighter the smile she'd been promised, the more total the coverage.
Green, because green is the color the eye refuses to forgive on a tooth. Yellow looks like coffee, gray looks like age, brown looks like a smoker, and any of those a person could explain away.
Green looks like rot. Green looks like something has gone wrong at the root of you. Green on a dental professional, on the practice's own walking billboard, on Cedar Hollow's Brightest Smile, under the lights of a charity gala with a news crew, is not a stain. It is a verdict.
I tested it, because I was not going to be sloppy, sloppiness being Spencer's department.
I bought a bag of those plastic practice teeth they sell for dental students, and a tube of drugstore whitening, and I worked it out over four nights in the garage with the door down and a fan going, getting the colorant right.
Getting the concentration right, getting it so the green didn't show in the syringe (it couldn't show in the syringe, the syringe had to look exactly like all the others), so it activated only on contact with the peroxide and the etch, so a hygienist loading a tray would see nothing.
She would suspect nothing, paint it across a smiling mouth and seal the verdict in with the very treatment that was supposed to make her shine.
The practice teeth in my garage came out the color of a swamp. I lined them up on the workbench, twelve little green grins, and I sat there in the fan-hum looking at them, and I laughed the underneath laugh again, except this time there was nothing crying about it. This time it was just clean.
I'd told Spencer I was refinishing a side table.
That was the cover, and it was a good one, because it was the kind of small homey project a nesting wife takes up, and because Spencer's interest in anything I did in the garage had a ceiling of about four seconds.
And a side table was well under the ceiling.
I'd even bought a side table, a genuinely ugly one, from the thrift store on Route 9, and I'd put it in the middle of the garage floor with a can of stain beside it as a set, the way you'd dress a stage, so that if he opened the door he'd see the table and the stain and the fan and his wife being wholesome.
Certainly not the row of green teeth or the legal pad covered in concentrations and reaction notes in my own cramped handwriting.
The handwriting I hadn't used since organic chemistry, which had come back to my hand the second I picked up the pen like a language you didn't know you still spoke.
He opened the door once. Wednesday night, around ten, while I had a tooth clamped in a little vise and a dropper in my hand and the green just coming up on the enamel like a bruise developing.
I heard the knob and I had the dropper capped and a sanding block in my hand and my body turned toward the ugly table before my brain had even finished the thought, which is a thing I learned about myself that week.
That under pressure I am fast and I do not spill the coffee and I do not knock the vise.
He stood in the doorway in his pajama pants, phone in hand, and said, "You're still out here?
It's ten." And I said the stain needed a second coat while it was warm enough in the garage, and he looked at the ugly table, and he looked at me in my safety glasses with a sanding block, and his face filled with the particular fondness a man feels for a wife doing something small and harmless and beneath him.
He yawned, and he told me not to stay up too late, and he closed the door, and he never once looked at the workbench, where twelve practice teeth grinned up at the fluorescent tube.
I waited until I heard the pipes settle.
Then I uncapped the dropper and finished the run, and I wrote the final concentration on the legal pad and underlined it twice, and I sat with the fan and my twelve green grins until I was sure.
All the way sure, because sloppiness was Spencer's department and I was not going to borrow from his department for this, of all things, the one piece of work I most needed to come out clean.
The hardest part wasn't the chemistry. It was the swap.
One syringe, the first one in the box, the one Brielle would get Tuesday morning.
It had to be that one and only that one.
I wasn't going to green the whole staff, the honest hygienists, Donna who'd shown me the audit report over a muffin, the new sterilization kid.
Just the one. Just her. A clean experiment, one variable, the way Dana taught me, except this time I knew exactly what I was testing for.
I did the swap on the Thursday before the gala week, useful as ever, restocking the supply closet because I'd noticed (so helpful) that the closet was a disaster and offered to organize it.
I had my decoy syringe in the pocket of my cardigan, identical, weighed to match, the colorant sealed inside looking exactly like true-white promise, and I labeled it the way Brielle labels everything, the way Spencer labels the trays, confident block capitals, the slot number, ready for Tuesday's first appointment, and I set it at the front of the box where her hand would reach.
I took the real one out and zipped it into my purse to go down a storm drain on the way home, and I had just slid the closet door shut when Spencer's voice said, right behind me, "There she is. My closet angel."
I did not jump. I will be proud of that until the day I die, right next to the coffee I didn't spill. I turned around with a soft cardigan smile and a syringe of fraud in my purse and said, "Somebody had to. This closet was a war crime."
He laughed. He put his soft hand on my shoulder.
He looked past me into the closet, my beautiful orderly closet, the box of whitening gleaming and aligned, and for one second his eyes went to it.
The new system, his pride, true white in one session, and I watched the man look directly at the thing that was going to end him and feel nothing but pleasure at how neat it all was.
“That line’s going to change this practice, Kel.
Brielle goes first thing Tuesday. By Saturday the whole team's going to be glowing for the cameras.
You should get it done too, you know. Before the gala.
My treat." He smiled. "Can't have my wife be the only one in the room without the brightest smile in Cedar Hollow. "
"Maybe I will," I said. "I want to match."
He kissed my forehead and went off to handle his eleven o'clock, and I stood in front of the closet with my heart going like a hammer. Not from fear, I want to be precise, not from guilt, but from the enormous physical effort of not laughing in his face.
Brielle came around the corner with a patient chart and saw the two of us, saw him kiss my forehead, and her whole-face smile slipped for that quarter second again. The half second before composure, and this time I understood it completely, because she wasn't worried I'd find out. She was jealous.
She'd watched her loyal man kiss the prop wife and it had cost her something.
I looked at her over Spencer's shoulder and I gave her the warmest, softest, most genuine smile of my entire marriage, because I knew something she didn't, which was that on Saturday night she was going to walk into the biggest room in Cedar Hollow in the green dress, and the only thing greener than the dress was going to be her smile.
I called Dana from the storm drain. Literally from the storm drain, parked on the shoulder of Route 9 not half a mile from the Residence Inn, the real syringe rattling down into the dark under the grate.
"It's set," I said. "Tuesday she gets it. The gala's Saturday. The green takes a day or two to come up full, so it'll be perfect for the cameras."
"And the books?"
"Uploaded. All of it. The reporter?"
"Meeting her Monday," Dana said. "Her name's Priya, she's been chasing dental upcoding for the whole county for a year, the insurance carriers tipped her off there was a pattern and she couldn't crack which practice.
Kel. When I hand her this." Dana exhaled, the good kind, the impressed kind.
"You built her a finished story. Charts, codes, X-rays, the audit logs with Brielle's name on every keystroke and Spencer's signature on every claim.
She's not going to be able to write it fast enough. "
I sat on the shoulder with the hazards ticking and looked through the windshield at the Route 9 sign, the one I'd been driving past my whole marriage, the one Marsha cased, the one I'd called blindness.
"Time it for Sunday morning," I said. "Let them have their gala.
Let them have the cameras and the green dress and the check and the whole brightest-smile night.
Let the picture of her smiling go everywhere first." I started the car.
"Then on Sunday, while every person in Cedar Hollow is looking at that smile, you let Priya tell them what's behind it. "