Chapter 2 – Emily
Emily
The doorbell chimes at four minutes past three, and I know it's her before Ben's footsteps even reach the foyer, because no one else in the world announces themselves quite like Tara Adamson.
I've spent the morning doing what a good wife does.
I walked the guest suite twice with Marta, checking that the linens were the Egyptian cotton and not the ordinary set, that the orchids on the dresser were fresh and not the ones going brown at the edges, that the little dish of French soaps sat exactly where a magazine would place them. I told myself I was being generous.
I told myself this was kindness, that a woman abandoned two weeks before her wedding deserves softness wherever she can find it. I even believed it, standing there with my hand smoothing the duvet, until I caught my own reflection in the window and saw the tightness around my mouth.
Now she's here, and Ben is already laughing that laugh again, the warm one, the one I used to think belonged to me.
"There she is," he says, and I round the corner into the entryway to find Tara framed in the open door with the afternoon light pouring gold around her, three suitcases behind her like a small retinue, and her arms already spreading wide as if the whole house has been holding its breath for her.
"Emily." She says my name like a discovery. "God, look at you. You've hardly changed at all."
I don't know what to do with a sentence like that, so I let her fold me into an embrace that isn't really an embrace.
Her cheek grazes mine, once, twice, a whisper of air kissed to either side of my face, her perfume something expensive and floral that will linger in my sinuses for an hour.
Her hands rest on my shoulders and she holds me at arm's length to look at me, and her smile is warm and her eyes are not.
"It's good to see you, Tara," I say, and I mean to sound gracious but it comes out quiet, the way everything I say comes out quiet lately, small enough that people lean past it.
"You poor thing, you must have been so bored out here.
" She turns, taking in the vaulted ceiling, the sweep of the staircase, the chandelier that Ben chose because it reminded him of the ones in hotels he could never afford as a boy.
Her gaze travels across all of it and lands somewhere I can't follow.
"All this space. I'd go absolutely stir crazy rattling around in a place this big with nothing to do. "
Nothing to do. I feel the words settle over me like a fine dust.
"Emily keeps plenty busy," Ben says, and for one bright, foolish second I think he's defending me, until he adds, "she's got her music," in the tone people use for a child's hobby, and I understand that even the defense is a diminishment.
Tara laughs. "Of course. The cello. You always were so artistic." She lets the word hang there, weightless and cruel, and I busy myself reaching for one of her bags so I don't have to arrange my face into anything.
"Marta can get those," Ben says.
"No, I've got it." I don't know why I say it. Some part of me needs my hands full, needs to be useful in a way that can't be reframed.
Ben checks his watch, that familiar flick of the wrist that means the world outside these walls is calling him back. "I've got a call at half three that I can't push," he says. "Em, why don't you show Tara up? Get her settled in. I'll be up when I'm done."
He's already turning, already gone in the way he's been gone for years now, present in the body and absent everywhere it matters. I watch the back of him disappear down the hall toward his study and I feel the door of my own house close somewhere inside my chest.
"Lead the way," Tara says.
So I do.
We climb the stairs together, her heels clicking against the marble, mine silent in my running flats because I never changed after this morning, and it occurs to me only now, halfway up, that I'm still in leggings and an old sweatshirt while she's stepped off her journey looking like she's arriving somewhere that matters.
She trails one manicured hand along the banister as we go, slow, appraising, the way you might run a finger along a shelf to check for dust.
"You know," she says, "when Ben told me how well he'd done for himself, I pictured something nice, but this." She whistles low. "This is really something, Emily. You must feel like a queen."
"It's just a house," I say.
"It's just a house," she repeats, delighted, as though I've said something wonderfully naive.
"Listen to you. Do you even know how you sound?
Half the world would kill to say that. Just a house.
" She shakes her head, still smiling. "I suppose that's what happens when you've never had to want for anything. You forget how to see it."
I want to tell her that I have wanted for something, that I have wanted my husband's laughter to be for me again, that I have wanted so hard and so quietly that the wanting has worn a groove in me.
But I don't, because these are not things you say to Tara Adamson, and because saying them would only hand her something to hold.
We reach the landing and I turn down the east corridor toward the guest suite. The evening light comes soft through the tall windows here, laying long gold rectangles across the runner, and for a moment neither of us speaks and I let myself pretend it's peaceful.
"This is you," I say, pushing open the door.
The room is beautiful. I made sure of it.
The orchids are perfect, the bed is turned down just so, the last of the daylight falls across the pale linens like something out of the magazines Tara used to leave dog-eared on my parents' coffee table, back when we were girls and she would visit and rearrange everything in my bedroom to her own liking and call it helping.
She steps inside and turns a slow circle, and I watch her decide how to feel about it.
"Well," she says finally, running a hand over the dresser, over the fresh orchids, "isn't this something.
" She glances back at me over her shoulder, and her smile softens into something almost fond, almost sisterly, which is how I know the worst of it is coming.
"It really must be a dream, mustn't it. This whole life.
Someone to make your bed, someone to cook your meals, someone to bring your bags up so you never have to lift a finger.
" She sighs, wistful, and lowers herself onto the edge of the mattress, testing it.
"Servants to do your bidding. I can't imagine.
Some of us have to actually build something, you know.
Some of us don't get handed the fairy tale. "
There it is. Laid out gentle and smiling and impossible to answer without sounding like exactly the person she's painted me to be.
I stand in the doorway and I feel all the things I could say gathering behind my teeth.
That I grew up in a good family, yes, but that I earned every hour at the cello with bleeding fingertips and a stubbornness no one gave me.
That the staff are people, not servants, and that they have names, and that I know their children's names too.
That the fairy tale she keeps describing is a house I walk through like a ghost, listening for a laugh that isn't for me anymore.
That she has been in my home for eleven minutes and has already found every soft place to press.
I say none of it. I never do. The words rise and then they sink again, the way they always sink, down into the quiet place where I keep everything I can't afford to feel out loud.
"There are extra towels in the closet," I say instead. "And Marta does breakfast at eight, but she'll make you something whenever you're ready."
Tara tilts her head, watching me, and I have the sudden unbearable sense that she can see all of it, the whole swallowed speech, and that my silence pleases her more than anything I could have thrown back.
"You're sweet, Emily," she says. "You always were. Ben's lucky."
I don't answer that either.
"Goodnight, Tara," I say. "I hope you sleep well."
And I pull the door closed behind me before she can reply, and I stand alone in the gold-drenched corridor with my own heartbeat loud in my ears, and I think: it's only the first night.
I think: God help me, it's only the first night.