“If I could give you some advice, Mr. Campbell?”
“Please do.”
“Don’t get tampons, sir. Just pads. Tampons lead to sex.”
Jackie felt the room spin around him as he thanked her and hung up. He repeated her warning again in his head, replacing his housekeeper’s voice with the voice of God: Tampons lead to sex.
When his meeting was over, he went down to the drugstore, where he purchased every kind of pad on the open market: maxis with wings, ultra-thin scented minis, super-absorbent overnights, and various-sized liners with names like Always and Ultra and Stayfree and Poise. If his mother were still alive he would have delegated this entire situation to her. Today he missed her even more than usual.
He arrived home that night with his triple-bagged purchases and stood at his daughter’s door. He paused before knocking, reminding himself that he was a grown man: accomplished, formidable, and possibly even brave. Though he didn’t feel very brave at that moment. He knocked gingerly.
“Come in, Daddy,” she said.
So far, so good.
“Hi, baby girl.” He sat down on the bed. “I’m very sorry your mom or Grammy is not here to talk to you about this, but we always get along pretty well, don’t we?”
She shook her head yes.
“So, I bought you some things that I think you may find helpful.”
He nervously opened the treasure trove of sanitary napkins. As he did, he wished he hadn’t gone so overboard. Lucky for him, she laughed.
“I don’t need all that, Daddy. I went with Ivy after school and bought a box of tampons. I’m good now.”
“You can’t use tampons!” he shouted with an urgency one usually reserves for reporting a fire in a theater or, more likely for Jackie, a catastrophic drop in the Dow Jones. Her face immediately morphed into her “you don’t know anything, and I hate you” look. Jackie tried to backpedal, but he knew from experience that once her ship of adolescent contentiousness sailed, it didn’t return for days. He took a breath.
“I’m sorry I yelled. I hoped you could start with these.”
He opened the bag.
“Any of these.” He pulled out the ones with wings. There had been nearly a year somewhere between three and four where she had insisted on wearing her sparkly fairy wings every day, even over her pajamas. He pictured her sleeping on her belly with her little tush in the air and those wings sprouting from her back like a butterfly.
“These have wings,” he said, hopefully.
It was clear that she got the reference but didn’t find it funny.
“Ugh, Dad, you’re being so extra! I’m not a child. I know what I’m doing.”
But you are a child, he thought, and what the hell does being “extra” mean?
She retreated into her phone as if the conversation was over, a tactic that always infuriated Jackie. He retreated into his overwhelming need to control everything that he could, ever since the uncontrollable had happened to them.
The box of tampons sat right out on her desk. He knew he had two choices: to leave and let her have her way, or to take them and insist on his. The voice of God came back: Tampons lead to sex.
He grabbed the box of tampons and placed the bag of pads on her bed.
“You can use these until you’re older,” he said without once pausing for breath. And got out of her room as quickly as his feet allowed.
CHAPTER 5
Eliza
It took nearly an hour before Eliza peeled herself off the kitchen floor and dragged herself upstairs. If it wasn’t for the thought of Luke and the kids finding her there, she might not have had the will to get up. She took her now-sacred bottle of Valium that they had bought for kicks on a trip to Mexico years before from the medicine cabinet, and emptied its contents into her hand. There were only four left. Over the past months those pills had felt like little life rafts to Eliza. She bit off half of one and washed it down with water from the faucet. When I get down to one, she swore, I will reach out for professional help.
In the shower, she pictured the water washing off the ugly remnants of the outside world. She stayed in there until the Valium kicked in. The hot shower and the drugs left her feeling duly calm and collected. As she dried off, she made a bargain with herself in the bathroom mirror: “You don’t have to leave the house again all weekend. Put on your happy face. Your kids are coming home.”
She was thrilled to have her babies home for a few days. It was the perfect amount of time, long enough to make sure they really were as happy and settled in as they claimed, not too long to raise suspicion. Kevin would never notice, but Kayla was very attuned to her mother.
The thought of a full house lifted Eliza’s spirits and gave her something entirely separate to focus on. Then she remembered there was another thing that needed her attention. She grabbed a snack and dashed to her desk.
When things first got popping with the bulletin board, Luke constructed an office area for her, a cozy spot at the end of her upstairs hallway big enough for a desk and some bookshelves on either side of a bay window. It wasn’t a real office, but running the bulletin board wasn’t a real job either. Still, Eliza had painstakingly set it up, choosing just the right books and photographs to fill her shelves. She surrounded herself only with things that made her smile: a first edition of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn that had been a gift from her treasured grandmother for her sixteenth birthday; two glitter-covered, tiny handprints pressed into clay made by the twins in preschool; a Hollywood snow globe she had bought as a souvenir the one time she had visited her best friend, Mandy, who had moved out to Cali after high school.
A treasured, awkward school photo of her twins and the “first look” shot from her wedding sat front and center. The photo of Luke, smiling from ear to ear under their wedding canopy, was probably the first thing she would grab if her house was on fire. Their wedding photographer had been so entranced by his joyous expression that she forgot to turn her lens toward the bride as she was escorted down the aisle by her parents. When the proofs came back without the classic shot, her mother was furious. “How could she miss such a thing?” The photographer explained that she had honestly never seen a guy so excited to marry a girl before and got caught up in that. Occasionally she would still catch Luke looking at her that way. It should have made her feel loved, but it left her feeling guilty.
She turned on the computer and tapped her fingers impatiently as it booted up. Thinking about Luke and all she had kept from him sometimes stressed her out more than the issues at hand. As usual, she put it all out of her head and embraced the diversion. She was beyond curious to see the site that the women at the Stop & Shop were talking about: her competition.
Good thing you left the house, Eliza, she praised herself silently. It could have been months until you got wind of Valley Girls. For obvious reasons, running the Hudson Valley Ladies’ Bulletin Board had meant more to her in these past few months than it had in years. Before her agoraphobia kicked back in, she had even toyed with the idea of passing the torch to a younger mother, one who was more qualified to moderate a debate on the virtues of the Citi Mini stroller versus the Bugaboo Cameleon versus the Peg Perego versus the ultra-luxurious Mima Xari. After all, they were possibly forking up as much money to perambulate their babies as she had for her first car. But now it felt like her only safe window to the outside world. There was no way she was giving up the one environment she had control over.