Chapter 5
In the morning, I stare at a yellowed patch of water damage on the ceiling, running through my speech.
I’m planning on sharing something about my family, a topic I generally avoid, and I have to be prepared for the outside chance that someone in attendance could tip off the media, that it will become a headline.
With each whip of the ceiling fan, I imagine what they might say.
Faye Heron recalls feeling unloved, or something that will piss off both my parents and the people in the comments who do not like to be reminded that famous people have feelings.
Your fans freak out about everything you say, my best friend said to me before I left, and this was her way of saying that I should share and if it gets out there, so be it.
My best friend also happens to be one of my agents, so her advice is always framed through the lens of my career.
My husband is always cautioning me about making friends with members of my team, but I find those relationships less fraught with competition and risk than those I’ve had with my fellow creatives.
I no longer speak to the woman who created my show, a woman who was once like a big sister to me and who now certainly has my number blocked.
I pat down the sheets, feeling for my phone, and when I find it, I see that my husband has responded to the story I told him about Emma, her dubious claim that she was the one who found PT’s body.
Weird, he said. Then, I think I have to extend this trip.
Jack is really unhappy with Susie’s work so far.
My husband does not have the appropriate reactions to things.
Either he is not that interested or he is neurologically incapable.
I used to wonder which it was, I used to try to express with nonjudgment how invisible it made me feel, until one day the single most explosive thought occurred to me.
Who cares? Who cares why he does it? What if what matters is that I don’t like it?
I heart the message and ask him to keep me posted. Then I get up and open the blinds, silence the alarm I’ve set to remind me to take my pills, the ones that stop my brain from sucking up all the serotonin I’ve got.
I button a pair of billowy linen pants, disappear into a cloud of cashmere a moment, and slip my feet into the unassuming pair of loafers that cost as much as a loose diamond. I made sure to pack things I already own. I did not shop. I knew Henry would be able to tell if I’d gone shopping for him.
I pack my purse and try one last time to convince my computer that I am me to no avail.
I remove the chair from underneath the door handle, fit the feet neurotically into the carpet grooves.
I would hate for the cleaning staff to come in here and think I don’t trust them with my life.
But last night, when I got home, I noticed some scuff marks along the baseboard of the door, like someone had been kicking at it from the outside.
Had that been there all along and I was only noticing now, at night, alone?
Between that and Henry treating me like we were settling an HR dispute, I slept like shit.
I park next to the lake, the current moving west in soft gray ribbons.
It’s like clouds outside the window on a plane, the way it tricks you into thinking they’re going slower than you are.
They say Sarah drowned quickly, that she suffered, though not for long.
She was only three or four years older than I am now when she did it, and I thought I would come closer to understanding as I approached her in age, but if anything, I feel more baffled by it all.
She lost a pregnancy during my junior year.
I remember being so stricken by this that I called my mother and told her about it, and I rarely go to my mother about things that devastate me.
My mother had four kids; I thought she would have some insight into the matter, wisdom to share.
I thought she might be able to articulate for me why I was so shaken up.
Even though I was only twenty years old, I could tell I would do my life differently than other girls my age, who cooed and melted at the sight of a tiny human in socks.
And while I cared about Sarah, my relationship with her was always secondary to the one I had with PT.
It happens all the time, my mother had said. She was not saying this in a dismissive way. Her voice was strained with a kind of emotion I rarely heard from her. It doesn’t mean she can’t try again. It’s part of the process, Faye.
I would later learn that my mother was not wrong.
It would indeed become a part of the process for others around me as I got older, but the difference was that the same emotion I heard in my mother’s voice was not limited to pat sentiments.
My generation was the generation that finally spoke about it, sobbed about it, went on medication for it, exorcised the anguish around fires in Arizona with a heaping dosage of psilocybin bound to the brain.
I had been right to suspect that losing a baby was a pernicious blow, and Sarah was walloped over and over again until she couldn’t take it anymore.
That was the part that was baffling to me—not that Sarah had done what she did, but why anyone was surprised.
I suppose it’s rage too that I feel about it. People should pay attention to the ones they love. They should feel shame, not surprise, when the inevitable happens.
The dock has expanded since I was a student, from a lone, unbarricaded strip into a mazey walkway with bucolic white fencing and a shingled boathouse.
Neat rows of Chiavari chairs flank the dock, the same chairs I bet Henry had at his wedding.
I’m early enough to grab a coffee at the campus café that opened when I was a sophomore.
I remember swanning to class with a skinny latte in hand, feeling like I was at long last a grown-up.
I slip between two parked cars and get a streak of grime on my cream-colored sweater.
I’m cursing, slapping at it, when a dusty SUV comes roaring up the hill.
I am not in the middle of the street, but I am in the street, and I am almost positive the driver presses harder on the gas pedal, whizzing past mere inches from my nose.
The SUV stops a few feet ahead of me. Henry climbs out of the driver’s seat, and his wife out of the passenger side. She is crying, I realize, and she calls out to me in a shaky voice. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I tell her. These are the only words we will ever speak to one another.
Henry drops the keys in her hand and leans down to kiss her.
Betrayal seizes my stomach. But she brushes past him, gets behind the wheel, and drives off without so much as saying goodbye.
Henry stands in the street, watching until the car disappears.
He’s wearing slim khakis and a sage-green blazer.
He is tan. He always liked being tan, and I’m surprised it hasn’t weathered him more.
Henry turns back to me, looks me over as I brush aggressively at the stains on my sweater. “You need dish soap for that,” he says. Henry has always liked clothes too, and he knows how to take care of his things.
We are close enough to speak without raising our voices but not close enough to spread disease. “Does your wife often apologize on your behalf?”
“You got an apology from me last night.”
I cannot believe we are joking like this. “She’s not coming today?”
“My youngest came down with something,” Henry explains, becoming Henry and not-Henry to me. The Henry who used to tell me he loved me with his hand around my throat, and the Henry whose vernacular has expanded to include my youngest.
“How will you get home?”
“My car is back at the hotel.”
“Which hotel?”
He says the name of the one I’m staying at, the inn the rich parents used to book years in advance for graduation.
This weekend is my first time inside, and it’s not as nice as I’d imagined all those years mine were staying at the Marriott “downtown.” The town where the colleges are located can only be described as incohesive.
It was a summer retreat for wealthy city families back in the forties and fifties, and the beautiful old Victorian homes bordering the lake are still occupied and mostly well maintained.
But there is little local business to speak of anymore, one good restaurant a mile outside of town, plenty of fast-food chains, and a Walmart the size of a small planet.
“That’s where I’m staying too,” I say.
Henry slips one hand in his pocket, thumb out.
Looks at me with an indiscernible squint.
His hair has been neatly combed back from his face, but a lock the shape of a Nike swoosh keeps slipping free, curtaining one eye in an absurdly dashing way.
It is making me crazy, thinking about how he is out in the world, looking like that, capable of what he is capable of, and he is no longer mine.
I might as well say it: I miss fucking Henry.
“Are you leaving right after the service?” he asks.
“Tomorrow.” I twist my finger in my long pendant necklace. Something to do with myself while I remember what it’s like to clench Henry’s cock from the inside. “You?”
“Same,” he says. “Then I’m headed to the lake. Some things to take care of there.”
It is still April, and despite the oppressive, out-of-office-for-the-month quality to the humidity, it’s too early to begin summerizing the cabin.
In the Adirondacks it will snow into May.
I stare at Henry, wondering what things he needs to take care of, and then I realize I’m staring and I need to stop.