I washed my face, then spent a few minutes rolling an ice pack back and forth across my swollen eyes. I also texted Mom, needing to know the girls were safe inside her building for the night. She texted back a pic of them in her tidy kitchen, mixing up a batch of oatmeal scotchies. They were laughing, Peyton’s cheek dusted with flour.
It looked like a window to another world, distant, impossible for me to reach. It was on the other side of a two- or three-minute window of time when I had looked away.
I went into my dressing room to rifle through my cocktail dresses with numb hands. I didn’t want my usual colors or cuts. I needed something closer to a costume. Bree Cabbat had fallen entirely apart, so I could not be her. I had to be some other woman, smiling and calm. I’d begun to be her earlier, but that character had shattered when the old woman hung up. I could not shatter again. Not if I wanted Robert back.
Just the thought of him and I felt tears threatening again. I didn’t understand how I had any left; I was desiccated, so wrung out that no water could possibly be left inside me. And yet I felt them welling.
I dashed them away, looking for the dress I wanted. It was shoved toward the back, the tags still on. I’d meant to return it. I favored springtime colors, floral prints in breezy fabrics, and this Erdem was jet-black, sleeveless, with pointed shoulder pads and a high collar. I’d bought it in a spasm of odd hormones, a day before I realized I was pregnant with Robert.
Now I found myself nodding stupidly and pulling it on. The stiff, shiny fabric felt like armor. It was a little tight, but not in a bad way. I had a pair of high-heeled black booties, dressy enough to read “cocktail party” and hide the aging pedicure I’d meant to fix this weekend.
“Your husband’s firm has a party tonight. At the Botanical Garden. Yes?”
“Yes. But I never RSVP’d.” I’d had secret plans to claim “cranky baby” and skip it in favor of microwave popcorn and streaming a movie with the girls, Robert sleeping in his pack-n-play nearby.
“Well, I need you there.”
“I can just show up.” I was Trey’s wife. They’d let me in. But her request felt nonsensical. She took my baby to make me go to a party?
I sat down at the vanity, trying not to think of Robert. If I let myself feel his absence, I’d start screaming again. If I started, I didn’t see how I could ever stop.
I turned on the mirror lights, flinching at my pinched, pale face. But the ice had helped. I looked like a woman who’d once been pretty. Maybe even myself, if I were ten hard years older.
The whites of my sunken eyes were crimson from crying. I tilted my head back to put in some Visine. I couldn’t show up at the party looking like this. I’d been ordered not to draw attention or questions.
“Get there soon as you can. Smile and chat. Be like regular, you understand?”
“Yes.” I didn’t. It sounded bizarre, impossible. In the pause I heard Robert mutter and shift, and she drew a ragged breath. Was this the sickness that was killing her? Something respiratory? Or did her chest feel closed and tight from stress, like mine? I was seeking clues to her in every word and sigh, trapped in our terrible intimacy.
When she spoke next, her voice dropped. We were to it. The thing she wanted from me. “Before ten o’clock, you need to get at least three of those pills down Spencer Shaw’s throat.”
She’d taken Robert because I was close with Spence. Well, Trey was. Or partnered with him anyway. I smoothed a caffeinated cream over my eyelids to take down the swelling, feeling an irrational surge of rage at my husband.
How many times had I watched Trey rub his forehead, rueful, over some mess of Spence’s? And yet he kept on working with him. Spence landed clients, but Trey did most of the work that kept them. Spence was better at cocktail parties than contracts, and he was also willing to break rules that Trey would not so much as bend. Spence stayed within the lines of the law, Trey had assured me, but I got the feeling it was sometimes only barely. And now this was happening. I set the cream back in the drawer, then turned to check on Robert.
In the space of half a breath, I’d forgotten he was gone. It almost undid me. I froze, fighting back a wave of tears and panic. I’d read about something like this happening to people who had lost a limb. They would reach out with a hand that wasn’t there or feel cramping in a foot they no longer owned.
I stood abruptly, turning to the built-in drawers behind me. I kept my jewelry in the top two. I opened the lower one, which held costume jewelry and some older pieces. The bracelet I wanted, a chunky gold thing meant to be worn above the elbow, was all the way in the back. It felt too young for me now, and ever since I’d had the girls, it was a little tight. I wanted that, though. The bite of that cold metal in my flesh.
I pushed it up my arm until it pinched, then nodded, calmer. I could not forget myself again. I could not keep reaching for him. It would break me down, and I would fail.
The bracelet would help. It was a trick I’d learned in a college acting class, what felt like a thousand years ago. If some real-life sorrow or anxiety was pulling me out of a role, I could use something physical to locate that distraction in my body. I’d pack my pain or worry inside the squeeze of a tight shoe or the tug of a ponytail holder. Then the rest of my body was free to become someone else.
I’d used a variation of the trick all three times I’d been in labor. I’d pinched the tender spot between my thumb and forefinger as each contraction hit, moving myself into the small pain while my body heaved and surged. The trick had worked in the early stages, until some animal inside me took over and I was nothing more than a will to push.
I was still a mother, but separated from all that made me so. I had to put Robert’s absence into the constriction of the bracelet. I put my fear there, too, the whole choking cloud of it. And my anger with my husband, which was quickly changing into a pure, wild rage at Spence, as cold and clear and biting as grain alcohol. I added my desperate longing for Trey to be here with me, my surges of desire to call the police, and most of all my paralyzing love for my child. I had to let some other woman ride my body.
Be Betsy, I thought then. She’d been bolder than me, always, and dead calm in a crisis. Betsy had owned any room she’d entered. I could almost feel her presence closing over me. My best friend, gone but still saving me.
“You want me to roofie Spencer Shaw?” I sounded as incredulous as I felt. “You want Spence to . . . what? To not remember tonight? Why?”
“Don’t you worry about that. Just you worry about your part.”
Her voice was still gentle. We spoke softly to keep Robert asleep, but the near whispers seemed to pull us closer. Her voice, breathy in my ear, was so intimate, and I desperately wanted to please her. I wanted her to like me. Hell, a small, crazy part of me wanted to like her, too, because she had me wholly in her power. I needed to believe there was sweetness in her. That she liked babies and would be kind to mine. That if I did exactly what she said, she’d give him back.
I said, “Help me understand why you’d do this. I know it’s not money. Can you please tell me what you really want?”
Her voice dropped even lower. “What I want, you can’t give me. Not direct.”