Lost Along the Way (2 page)

Life was good.

December 2012

S
o let's discuss invitations, then. I would like to take care of them this year, because in each of the last two years my name was misspelled and I would like to make sure it's done correctly this time,” Christie said, more than a little annoyed by the accidental error.

“That's fine by me,” Jane replied politely. She adjusted the large princess-cut diamond on her finger and hoped the other women didn't notice that it needed to be steam cleaned. She'd have to add that to her list of things to do tomorrow, though she had no idea where she'd find the time. The holidays were creeping closer and she felt totally unprepared. She hadn't even picked out the wine for the cocktail party she and Doug were hosting on Christmas Eve, and she hadn't reminded her housekeeper to polish her good silver yet. The stress of it all was really starting to get to her. She realized that she probably should schedule a massage to help relieve some of the tension in her neck before it began to really hurt—yet another thing to add to the ever-growing to-do list. The holidays could be so stressful.

“Agreed,” Mindy said. “I felt so bad for you when I saw your name spelled with a
Y
on that invitation. You must have wanted to kill Gretchen. I mean, it's completely ridiculous that she didn't catch that.”

“There's a reason she's not on the board this year!” Christie laughed, knowing full well that getting kicked off the charity
board had basically ruined Gretchen's social standing for the holiday season, if not for the entire year. Jane made a mental note to never piss off Christie with an
i-e.
She had no interest in going to war with these women over a spelling error. They were ruthless.

“Well, it seems like everything is settled, then,” Jane said, pushing her espresso away from her. “This was a really lovely lunch, and I'm very happy with our decisions. I think we're going to have a wonderful benefit.”

“Thank you so much for organizing lunch, Jane,” Christie said, albeit insincerely. “You're a wonderful addition to our little team this year. Let's chat next week.” She removed her black quilted Chanel bag from the back of her chair and tied a bright-pink scarf snugly around her neck. “We're going to Saint Barts after Christmas and it can't come soon enough. This cold weather is driving me crazy.”

“It was really wonderful to see you all,” Jane added as she stood and waved good-bye. She checked her watch quickly and was surprised that the meeting had gone on so long. She still had a ton of things she needed to do before Doug got home from work, and while she didn't want to appear rude, it was really time for her to leave.

“You too, dear,” Mindy said as she puckered her plum-colored lips and kissed the air on the side of Jane's cheek. “Let's talk next week about the catering. Everyone is so over miniature crab cakes.”

“I totally agree,” Heather added, still seated with her back to the windows while she used a compact to touch up her blush. Heather reminded Jane so much of Cruella de Vil that she often found it hard to look at her. Over the years, Heather's hair got blonder and blonder, her lipstick got darker and darker, and the
skin on her face got tighter and tighter. Add to that the fact that the leopard coat she was fond of wearing was eerily reminiscent of Dalmatian and the resemblance was striking. All she needed was a pair of red gloves and a pack-a-day habit and children would probably run screaming when they saw her in the street. “If I see another one, I will lose my mind. Let's try to come up with something a little more exciting, shall we?”

“No problem,” Jane said. “I'll call you next week.” She pulled the belt on her cashmere coat tight around her waist and stepped outside onto the snow-covered sidewalk. It was cold and she was thankful that she'd planned ahead and called a car service to pick her up. She pushed through the crowd to her waiting town car and flung herself into the backseat. Christmas was barely two weeks away, which made walking in Midtown a contact sport. The hordes of tourists flocking to Fifth Avenue to see the store windows and the giant tree were intolerable, as far as she was concerned. All she wanted to do was go home to her warm apartment and finish writing out her Christmas cards.

As she rode home her mind wandered again to an upcoming date on the calendar, though for the life of her she couldn't understand why. Cara's birthday was next month, and Jane had come across a bright-blue ski jacket in a catalog that would look amazing on her. She'd spent the last two weeks debating whether she should send it to her, but she still couldn't decide. It's not like grown women need to celebrate turning thirty-seven, and Cara was never one to like attention anyway. Still, she'd no doubt be spending weekends this winter skiing at Reed's family house in Vermont, and Jane was pretty sure she'd love the coat. Then again, what did she know anymore?
I can't believe you are spending this much time thinking about her birthday,
she thought to herself.
You'd have to be crazy to reopen those wounds.
She decided that holiday nostalgia was a dangerous thing and vowed to throw the catalog away as soon as she got home. She'd moved on with her life, and there was absolutely no reason to revisit those ghosts.

It took her driver twenty-five minutes to cross over to the West Side thanks to the unforgivable traffic, and it was almost three o'clock when Jane turned the key in the lock and stepped inside her apartment, the smell of the balsam fir they'd bought and decorated a few days ago strong enough to be detected from the foyer. She inhaled deeply.
There's nothing better than that,
she thought as she pulled off her suede boots and made her way into the den off the kitchen. She had a busy afternoon ahead of her, what with the stack of cards to address and stamp, not to mention the now crucial mission of finding exciting hors d'oeuvres to replace crab cakes. She was definitely going to need that massage.

She headed for the stack of catalogs sitting on her velvet sofa so she could rid herself of the nagging ski jacket conundrum once and for all, but was sidetracked when she unexpectedly caught sight of Doug out of the corner of her eye.

“Jeez, you scared me!” Jane said when she looked up and found him pacing the floor in front of the Christmas tree. Pine needles had already fallen off the lower branches and lay haphazardly on the carpet. “This is a nice surprise,” she said as she walked over to give him a hug. They'd been married seven and a half years, but somehow Doug still managed to impress her. Some guys have the ability to fill up an entire room just by walking into it. Doug was one of those guys. She'd never stop thinking that she was the luckiest person in the world to be married to him. She inhaled the smell of his shampoo and aftershave as she clasped his hands and pulled back to look at him. “What brings you home in the
middle of the day?” She felt her heart pause for a minute when she released him from her grasp and noticed the expression on his face.

“Sit down,” he said quietly. Jane finally noticed that his hands were trembling slightly, and that they weren't just cool—they were clammy. Dusk was already setting over the city, and a soft gray light now filtered in through the west-facing windows of their apartment. A lamp on a timer in the corner clicked on, a small sound that seemed to echo forever. Everything else was so still.

“What's the matter?” Jane asked, prepared to hear that one of her parents had died, or that he had lost his job. She was not prepared for the bomb he was about to drop on her life.

“It's gone,” he said flatly. Sweat was running down the side of his face despite the fact that it was the dead of winter and Jane had turned down the heat a bit before she left, to prevent her tree from drying out too quickly.

“What are you talking about? What's gone? Did you lose something?” she asked.

“Our money. It's all gone.”

Jane stood frozen as he continued to pace back and forth in the same straight line, like he was following the pattern in the carpet. “What are you talking about?” she asked. “You're not making any sense.”

“I've done some things, Jane, and I don't have time to explain them all to you. I don't think I'm going to be able to get out of this.”

“What do you mean it's gone? How could it be gone? I saw our bank statement last month and there was plenty of money in our accounts. Doug, sit down and tell me what the hell is going on.”

“The feds are going to be here soon, and when they're done with me, the new boobs I gave you for your birthday will be the only things we have left. I'm not entirely sure they won't try to repossess them, too. They're going to take everything.”

Jane instinctively grabbed her chest. The implants had not been a present she'd wanted, but somehow she'd let Doug talk her into getting them, probably because they came with a trip to the Bahamas and a ton of new swimwear. Fine, it wasn't a traditional birthday present, but most of the women she socialized with had their boobs done, so she didn't feel like she needed to be ashamed of them.

“Are you understanding what I'm telling you? Jane, it was a scam. All of it. I'm a fraud.”

Jane's mind refused to absorb what Doug was saying because it was too busy soaking up her surroundings: Christmas cards embossed with gold foil awaiting their angel-wing stamps, tree branches bending under the weight of glittering ornaments and champagne-colored lights, Tiffany lamps artfully displayed on antique tables next to crystal candy dishes and sterling silver frames. She tried to memorize all of it, every relic of her privileged life, knowing that while they were sitting tangibly in front of her they were simultaneously disappearing into the mist.

“Call Gavin and ask him to loan you some money. I don't know how much longer you'll have access to anything,” Doug said softly. “You'll need it.”

“You want me to ask my little brother for money? Are you insane?” Gavin worked for an Internet company out in Silicon Valley and did very well for himself. Borrowing money from him wasn't the issue. The issue was that Doug had somehow man
aged to destroy himself, and apparently her because she'd blindly gone along for the ride.

“I'm sorry, Jane. I'm so sorry.” With that, he sank down on the floor and began to cry. Jane didn't go to him. She didn't offer comfort or sympathy or empathy. The loyal-wife part of her thought about it briefly, but the fantastically angry part of her told her to stay where she was. If what he was saying was true, he didn't deserve to be comforted by her or anyone else. If what he was saying was true, her entire life was a lie. The air felt like it was slowly being sucked from the room. Her lungs began to burn and threatened to explode.

“Start at the beginning,” she whispered. “What have you done to us?”

He refused to look at her.

Before he had a chance to explain anything, the FBI knocked on the door. In less than sixty seconds, Doug was cuffed and escorted out of the apartment, leaving her alone in her living room longing for the now distant time when her biggest problems were unpolished silver and crab cakes.

October 2013

S
top calling me! I told you for the last time, I have no comment!” Jane yelled into the phone before she slammed it on her marble kitchen counter so hard the screen splintered and cracked.
It doesn't matter,
she thought, staring at her damaged iPhone.
It's not like I need to talk to anyone.
She had stopped speaking to people months ago—or maybe more accurately, people had stopped speaking to her. It was crazy to think about how fast the people she'd thought were her friends had deserted her when Doug's crimes became public. But if she was honest with herself (something she hadn't been in a very long time), she probably would've done the same thing. Loyalty wasn't really something they cared about. Hell, half of them had husbands who were blatantly cheating on them, and they couldn't have cared less as long as their credit cards worked. She'd never heard from Mindy, Heather, or Christie with an
i-e
about the benefit, and none of them had returned her phone calls when she left messages. She hated herself for hoping that they'd still want to associate with her—that they wouldn't hold her accountable for her husband's sins. It was a completely ridiculous thought. They didn't care whether Jane was innocent or guilty. They'd disowned Gretchen because she couldn't spell.

Jane had dreamed of traveling in the higher circles of New York society her whole life, and once she'd gotten there, she'd learned that she was basically on her own. Just because people
invited her and Doug to dinner didn't mean they were her friends. Then again, just because Doug was her husband didn't mean he was her friend, either. Maybe she should stop being angry at the pod people she had chosen to surround herself with over the last few years and start being mad at the people who deserved it: Cara and Meg, for not being with her when she needed them most.

Jane had been trying to figure out for years when exactly they'd started to grow apart, and how much of it was actually her fault. There was never a big fight. As far as she was concerned, no one had done anything that could've been seen as unforgivable, though she wondered now if maybe they felt differently. Their separation had been gradual and graceful. It had probably started as early as their freshman year of college, toward the end of the first semester, when Cara had called Jane and told her she was thinking of transferring from Bowdoin to NYU.

November 1994

“What do you mean, you don't like it? You've been there for one semester; you can't know if you like it or not,” Jane said defensively, cringing a little at the sound of her own voice. She knew it wasn't what Cara wanted to hear, but she was unable to stop herself from saying it anyway.

“You sound like my mother. I don't care that it's only been one semester. I know enough to know that I don't like it. It's cold here.”

“New York is no warmer, I assure you.”

“You come to school up in Maine in the winter and tell me that. And why do I feel like you're trying to talk me out of this? I thought you'd be excited to hear that I was thinking of trans
ferring to NYU. Why do you sound like I just ruined your day?” Cara sounded offended, which was silly. Jane was merely trying to point out that expecting her to serve as Cara's de facto security blanket was a bit ridiculous. Jane loved Cara, but they needed to learn how to live their own lives. It was as simple as that.

“That's not true. Of course I'd be happy if you came here, it's just that you were so excited to go to school up there. I don't want you to give up before you really give it a chance.”

“If you don't want me to transfer there, why don't you just say so?” Cara insisted. It was clear that short of Jane's telling Cara she'd kick out her current roommate and let Cara move in, there was no way of getting out of this conversation without coming off as selfish. She wasn't selfish. She was just more concerned with her own happiness than with Cara's at the moment, which was perfectly within her rights as a newly independent eighteen-year-old girl. Why was that such a hard thing to understand?

“Cara, stop. That's not what I said.” Which was true. She might've been thinking it, but she never said it out loud.

“You didn't have to,” Cara said quietly. She hung up the phone before Jane had a chance to answer.

Jane put the cordless phone back on its base and stretched out on the duvet covering her bunk bed. Cara was right. She didn't want her to transfer, and she was angry that she felt like she needed to apologize for it. These years at college were supposed to be her time. All she had ever wanted was to get out of the suburbs and into the city and be able to experience life outside the stupid small town they'd grown up in. She wanted to do something else, she wanted to be someone else, and she couldn't possibly do that with her past sitting right next to her in art history class. Wasn't college supposed
to be about self-exploration and reinvention? Why didn't Cara want to do that for herself? Why didn't she get it?

Jane thought about that conversation often, wondering if she should've said something different. So what that she wanted to build her own life in college? While Meg went to school at Vanderbilt and Cara decided to brave the frigid winters in Maine, Jane had tried really hard to build her career as an actress. She'd wanted excitement and adrenaline and adventure. She'd wanted new experiences with new people.

Was that really a horrible thing for her to have thought? Did that really qualify as a friendship-altering event? Cara didn't end up transferring, and as far as Jane was concerned, things worked out for the best. Cara had met her husband (whom Jane hated with a passion) at college, and that never would've happened if she'd left and come to New York. After graduation, when Cara and Meg moved back home to look for jobs and save money, Jane decided to stay in the city so that she could continue to pursue her acting career. Plus, at that point, Meg and Cara both had serious boyfriends, and neither of them could have a conversation that didn't revolve around them. Once they got married, it only got worse.

Friendships shift and change and roll along as you move through life, and Jane was fine with all of that, but she always felt that really good friendships should be elastic—they should stretch at times but always snap back to a familiar shape and place.

She hadn't expected her friends' marriages to change anything between them, but somehow they had. All of a sudden Cara and Meg no longer had time for her or any of the things they all used
to do together. Jane felt like a little kid sitting at the adult table any time they had lunch, having to listen to Cara drone on and on about the wallpaper she'd chosen to hang in the powder room of her new house in the suburbs, or Meg talk about what great meal she'd whipped up for Steve the night before. They'd been through every milestone together until then—sweet sixteens, junior proms, drivers' licenses, college graduations—but now they'd left Jane behind. Without warning, when they hit their midtwenties, the two of them set off on their own little married ladies' adventure while she was stuck on the wait list. She felt like they found her life silly or selfish or unimportant on some level. Is there anything more infuriating than your closest friends taking pity on you and your life choices because you don't have a man yet? Being single and poor in your late twenties is hard enough without having to withstand that kind of judgment over breakfast. She really didn't need it, and eventually she got tired of feeling like the odd man out. People grow up and change, and the pressure to keep up with Cara and Meg got the better of her. So she gradually decided to back out of the race entirely.

Instead, she got a little apartment down in the grimy East Village. From the beginning, though, life in Manhattan was never as grand or as shiny as Jane had imagined it to be. She'd always had such big plans, for a big life that she knew she was meant to live, but it was harder to reach than she'd originally allowed herself to believe. She was one of a million girls trying to be an actress in New York City, and so she took the odd jobs that she needed to take while she passed around head shots to anyone who would take one and performed in small plays in tiny basements in the outer boroughs that she thought were beneath her. She couldn't imagine how she'd ever be able to make enough
money to live in one of the awesome apartments she saw on TV, which were somehow always occupied by characters who didn't really have proper jobs themselves. No matter how much she tried to save, she couldn't afford anything other than the tiny apartment downtown that she shared with three other girls she barely knew, despite the fact that there were only two bedrooms. Not the cool Tribeca lofts with floor-to-ceiling windows and views of the Hudson River. Not the luxurious Upper West Side condos with exposed brick walls and working fireplaces. Not the immaculately decorated East Side co-ops with thirty-foot-high ceilings and Waterford vases overflowing with calla lilies sitting on heavy mahogany tables in the foyer. There were no tasseled window treatments, no Sub-Zero refrigerators, no doormen, and no shiny parquet floors so polished they actually looked wet. None of that. Instead, she had furniture from tag sales that she tried to pass off as retro or quirky or effortlessly eclectic, but she never managed to get it right. She spent most of her twenties feeling that way about her entire life. It was exhausting.

She'd continued to try to act, but as she approached thirty, she'd accepted that she was never going to be good enough to make a living at it. As much as she hated to admit it, she wasn't talented enough. Slowly, her dreams of telling James Lipton on
Inside the Actors Studio
about how she'd struggled downtown with all the other artists until someone plucked her from obscurity and made her a millionaire began to fade away. Jane felt that life owed her more than what she was born with, but she didn't really want to work the way girls had to work to break into the business. She didn't like being a waitress and she still refused to take naked pictures, and after a certain point what else was she supposed to do? At what point would it have been okay to give up?

Then she met Doug.

She hadn't been looking to meet anyone that afternoon, which was funny because most of the time, all she was doing was looking to meet a guy who could rescue her. She was sitting in a dive bar down by the South Street Seaport, lamenting the loss of another low-paying, bullshit job (walking dogs for a spoiled bitch of a woman who didn't work but for some reason found it impossible to make time to take care of her own pets), when Doug entered. He took the stool next to her and removed a file from the leather briefcase he'd set at his feet. He glanced over at the glass of liquor in front of her and whistled.

December 2004

“What is that? Scotch?” he asked, revealing a thick British accent.

“Bourbon, actually.”

“Wow. You must have had one hell of a morning to be hitting the hard stuff this early.” He should've been turned off by the concept of a girl slugging hard alcohol in the middle of the day, but it seemed as if it actually intrigued him. That should've been her first clue that something was seriously wrong with him.

The truth was, she didn't even like the taste of bourbon, but she didn't have the money to buy multiple drinks, and beer wasn't strong enough. She thought one glass of the hard stuff would provide the most bang for her buck.

“Or maybe I'm just a raging alcoholic,” she joked, though even then she had her concerns that if she didn't start making some changes, and soon, she might actually become just that.

“Are you?” he asked.

“No,” she admitted.

“So what are you then?”

“An actress,” she said. “Which means I'll probably wind up being a raging alcoholic. Just not today.”

“Ah, the life of an aspiring actress in this city can't be easy. I don't blame you for drinking during the day,” he said. He seemed sympathetic, which Jane liked. Usually people just rolled their eyes at her when she told them what she wanted to do with her life, but not him. Of course, there was the chance that he was humoring her, but she didn't think so. You don't have to be an aspiring actress in New York City for long before you start developing a keen sense for when people are lying through their teeth.

“That's very kind of you. I try not to make it a habit, but the truth is, it's been a really shitty day,” she said, which wasn't exactly true. Lately she found herself having a few cocktails during the day on a regular basis. It was hard to find reasons not to when she had nothing else to do with her time, and since drinking wasn't keeping her from anything important, she didn't think it was that big of a deal. It didn't help that the odds of breaking into show business at twenty-nine weren't good, and the thought of being thirty, single, and a failure was more than she could handle. When she'd moved to Manhattan she had had such big plans, and none of them involved her walking dogs or going to sleep alone at nearly thirty years old. And yet somehow that was exactly what was happening. She took another sip of her drink and felt her insides warm. Maybe it was the booze, or maybe it was the man. It was hard to say.

“Not a problem. Have you done anything I might have seen you in?”

“I doubt it. You don't strike me as the type of guy who would've seen any of my stuff.”

“Why do you say that?”

“We don't see a lot of Hermès ties in my audiences,” Jane said, gesturing toward the bright orange tie dangling from his starched shirt collar.

“How do you know guys don't take them off and shove them in their backpacks before they enter?”

“I guess I don't,” she answered. He wasn't her type. He was British, for starters, and Jane had never really been all that into foreigners, mostly because she had heard that circumcision wasn't common practice overseas. She barely knew what to do with the American dicks she was familiar with, so going international seemed unnecessary. He also had an insane amount of gel in his hair. It was slicked straight back and shellacked to the point where it almost looked like a toupee. His build was slight. He looked fit but not necessarily strong. And, like most Europeans, he wore clothes cut just a little too slim for her taste. But he was perfectly attentive and he was perfectly nice and he was perfectly interested in talking to her and, well, that made him the most perfect man she'd met since she'd moved to this crummy island.