Chapter 15
I get everything together for dinner—I’m making pulled pork and roasted vegetables, one of Roy’s favorites. I turn on the slow cooker, then go to meet Erin.
She’s already at the café when I get there.
She stands and smiles, like she’s happy to see me, and then she hugs me.
I’m not used to being touched by strangers so I don’t quite know what to do.
I mentally ask Deb. Just go with the flow, she would say.
So I hug Erin back, going with the flow, until I feel her disengaging herself from my embrace.
“Thank you for yesterday. You were so sweet,” she says, giving me an odd look. Or maybe I’m imagining it. “I feel much better about everything.”
“I’m glad,” I say, sitting down opposite. “But it’s me who should be thanking you.” I open my purse and slide a fifty across the table.
“There was no need, but I appreciate it,” she says, folding the note and putting it in her purse. You can tell Erin has money. She has that look about her. Her hair is nicely cut in a feathery bob, light brown with subtle highlights, and she sports an impeccable French manicure.
“So? Where do you live?” she asks after the waitress has brought my coffee.
“Beverly Hills. Camden Drive.”
“Nice,” she says.
“What about you?”
“Not far from here, on the other side of Mulholland Drive.”
“Nice,” I say.
She chatters on about everything and nothing. She tells me she grew up in these parts. Nice, I say. I tell her I grew up in Oklahoma, which is a lie, obviously.
I like Erin. I’ve never had coffee with a girlfriend before, and I find I like it very much.
I pepper her with questions. Where do you shop around here?
Do you prefer white chocolate or dark chocolate?
What kind of house do you have? What do you do for money?
She laughs, flicking her hair. I laugh too, mirroring her and flicking my own hair.
She tells me she’s a yoga instructor. I tell her that I love yoga.
She looks surprised, but pleased. I don’t love yoga, of course.
I don’t love anything except cooking and cleaning.
Then she tells me that she has her own studio and that she’s very busy.
“What about you? What do you do?”
I don’t know Erin well enough to tell her the truth, even though I find I’m dying to. I am on a quest to prove my husband killed my sister. Also, I hate him so much, some days all I want is to stab him in the throat.
But I don’t. Instead, I tell her that I do precisely nothing and it’s fine with me. “I’m very busy with the house,” I say. “And looking after my husband. It’s what I love doing, and he doesn’t mind that I don’t work.”
She laughs, but I think I detect a tiny edge to the laughter. Perhaps because she recently broke up with her fiancé.
“I’m sure he doesn’t mind,” she says. There it is. That edge again.
“What do you mean?”
She smiles. It’s tight. “If you spend all your time looking after him, he’s hardly going to complain.” She puts her coffee cup down. “Lucky him. You two must be very happy.”
I shrug. “It’s my life’s work, making my husband happy.”
“How wonderful for him. I’m sure he loves every minute of it.”
“Thank you. That’s sweet of you to say. And I certainly hope so.”
“After only a month, you two must be very much in the honeymoon phase.”
Is he still in the honeymoon phase? I wonder.
When we were first dating, Roy couldn’t get enough of me.
He’d pull me to his lap, touch my hair, kiss my face.
“My beautiful porcelain doll.” We’d make love at every opportunity, in every room of his house.
Now? Some days I feel him pull away, and I can’t help but wonder if I’m losing him.
So I bake more, and I cook more, and I put on extra-thick eyelashes and powder my face with Dior Luminous Light Deflecting Powder and spray La Verderie Orange Blossom Room Mist around the place and sit on his lap and play with his tie.
I love you, I whisper in his ear. I love you more than the moon and the stars.
He still smiles, but distractedly. I ask Amy and Nora and Abigail inside my head.
Do you think he’s tiring of me? And they’ll say, Don’t be silly!
All you need to do is try a little harder, that’s all.
And if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again!
And they’ll laugh, and then Abigail will chime in, And if you still don’t succeed, then all options are on the table.
Erin is waiting for an answer.
“How did you know we’ve been married a month?”
A beat. “You told me yesterday.”
“Oh! Right. Yes. Honeymoon phase.”
She tilts her head. “So?”
I nod. “We’re very happy. We can’t keep our hands off each other, put it that way.” I laugh, flicking my hair over my shoulder. And then I grow serious. “Although…”
“What?” she asks eagerly.
I lean forward. “What would you think if your husband rambled on about his ex-wife?”
She recoils. “His ex-wife?”
“She killed herself. Or so he says. He talks about her all the time. I don’t think that’s fair, do you?
It’s not like she’s the one folding his underwear.
He kept her wedding dress, can you believe it?
It’s in his closet.” I lean even closer.
“Sometimes—” I was going to say Roy, and while I feel comfortable with Erin, partly because she’s a lovely person, and partly because she lives miles away from me, it occurs to me that Roy being a famous psychologist with best-selling books and the occasional appearance on the Sophia Sanchez show, Erin might know who I’m talking about. So I opt for pronouns only.
“Sometimes, when I’m not there, he takes out her dress and looks at it.” I’ve never told anyone this. I study her face. She looks shocked.
“How do you know?”
“I know this because he never puts it back exactly the same way. The first time I noticed the sheath was facing in the other direction. So I made a tiny mark on it, and sure enough, a few days later, it was positioned differently.”
She fingers the chain on her neck. Thin gold, with a moon-and-sun-shaped pendant. “So what does he do with it?”
“That’s an excellent question, and I don’t have the answer. Dance with it, maybe? Lie with it on the bed, the top of her dress in the crook of his arm?” I pick up my cup. “Anyway, apart from that, we are deliriously happy. What about you, Erin? Would you like to get married someday?”
A shadow crosses her face. “Maybe. We’ll see. When I meet the right man.”
“That’s an excellent idea,” I say. “To wait until you meet the right man.”
“What about your family?” she says, changing the subject. “Are you close?”
“God no!” I laugh. “They’re dead. Thank God.”
“I’m sorry?”
“My whole family is dead.”
“Oh my God. How awful, I’m so sorry.”
I wave her apology away. “Don’t be. It’s not your fault. And trust me when I say they are not missed. My mother was the most horrible person ever to walk this earth.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
She waits, eyebrows raised, eager to hear the rest. It occurs to me that maybe I won’t need Amy and Nora and Abigail so much. Maybe I can have a real friend. A real, flesh-made one.
I lean forward. This time our foreheads are almost touching.
“When I was six years old, I found a woman’s magazine in the kitchen trash can.
I have no idea why my mother would possess such a thing since she hated anything remotely to do with caring for her home or her family.
Maybe someone had given it to her. Anyway, I took it out and pored over it.
Interestingly, it was the beginning of what would become my obsession with home interiors and homemaking.
I cut out pictures of blue and white shutters and potted rosebushes and flower arrangements, and I hid them in my box under my bed so I could look at them whenever I wanted. ”
“And?” Erin prompts.
“My mother found bits of cut paper in the trash, on top of the magazine, and saw what I’d done. She called out to me.
“I was in my bedroom, actually admiring those very pictures as it happens, but I could tell from her tone that it wouldn’t be good.
I went to see her as requested. She held up the magazine by a corner so the pages were flapping around and you could see the holes where I’d cut them.
She bent down over me, her face all scrunched up. ‘Did you do this?’
“I said that I had.
“‘Fine.’ She stood up straight, took my hand, and walked me to the cellar door. It wasn’t even a proper cellar, more like a storeroom under the house.
I’d noticed she’d had a padlock put on the door recently, and I’d asked my sister what it was for, and she said, ‘It’s so we don’t go down there.
’ And honestly, Erin, there was no need for a padlock because I was never going down there.
You see, my mother had told me that spiders lived down there.
Hundreds of them, she’d said. Big and black and hairy.
“Anyway, my mother pushed me inside and closed the door. It was the first time I’d been on the other side of that door, and let me tell you, Erin, you don’t know what dark is until you find yourself locked in a cellar.
There was no light switch, and it smelled of damp and mold and dust and dead mice.
I thought I could hear the spiders moving around, millions of little legs tapping the floor, climbing the walls.
When I heard the padlock click in place, I started screaming.
She opened the door and I thought she was going to let me out now, but instead she said, ‘If I hear one more peep out of you, as God is my witness, I’m leaving you in there all night. ’
“She shut the door, so obviously I started screaming again. I mean, I was six. What did I know about keeping my mouth shut? And you know what terrified me the most? That my family would die and no one would ever open the door again. Or more likely, that my mother would just forget about me. Either way, I’d die in there, eaten alive by hairy spiders.
“After my parents went to sleep, my sister came down and sat on the other side of the door and told me there were no spiders down there; that had been a lie. She stayed with me all night, talking to me through the door about the kind of house I’d live in one day, asking about the pictures I cut out.
We ended up talking about our favorite colors for the walls—light pink for me, yellow for her—and whether we’d want wall-to-wall carpets and if drapes were better than shutters, so it wasn’t so bad. ”
Erin says nothing at all. Her face looks pale, white almost.
I sit back. “That’s it,” I say. “That’s the story.” I tear open a small packet of real sugar instead of Sweet’N Low and I’ve already poured it into my coffee before I realize my mistake.
I hesitate, staring at the coffee.
“My God, Jodie. That’s horrible!”
“I know.” I crumple the empty packet.
“So…how did they die? Can I ask?”
I take a sip of my coffee and wipe my mouth delicately. “House fire while they were asleep. Terrible tragedy. Everyone said so.”
“Oh God.” After a moment or two, she asks, “So where were you?”
“Away.”
“Right… God. I’m so sorry.”
“Well. It’s in the past now, Erin. And I don’t like to dwell in the past.” I smile. “Let’s talk about something else.”
She looks at me oddly, her head slightly tilted, like she’s trying to figure something out.
“You want some cake?” I say, turning around to catch the waitress’s attention. “Because I could kill for a piece of cake.”