These Girls (32 page)

“She’s perfect,” Abby said. She wanted so badly to be able to touch Bob, to feel the weight of his arm slung across her shoulders, or to put her hand on his knee. She hated existing in this
netherworld, where their relationship meant everything to her but had to be invisible to the outside world.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw someone come into the room. Joanna.

Abby felt as though it was an apparition, brought on by her guilt—punishment for her fantasy. But no, it really was Joanna, her glossy black patent leather heels clicking on the linoleum floor as she moved closer to them. She gave Abby a tight smile and sat down on the other side of Bob. He turned to look at her and made a soft, surprised sound.

Abby couldn’t believe it: Joanna had driven all the way up from Capitol Hill to Silver Spring, in the middle of the workday, to attend a forty-five-minute-long dance recital. She’d never done anything like this before. She even skipped most pediatrician’s appointments—either Abby or Bob usually brought Annabelle to those. What had compelled her to come?

Abby couldn’t focus on the class. She wanted desperately to look over at Bob and Joanna, to see if their arms were touching, or if
she’d
put her hand on his knee, but she couldn’t risk it. She heard them murmuring and wondered what they were talking about.

The recital dragged on. One kid fell and bumped his head and had to be taken out of the room to be consoled. A song ended and another one began. Abby sat rigidly, staring straight ahead, feeling her left leg go numb. But she couldn’t uncross her right leg from atop it because the chairs were so close together: What if her leg brushed against Bob’s? She could feel Joanna’s awareness of her from two seats away—or maybe that was just Abby’s guilt linking them together with an invisible, heavy chain.

Finally the class ended and Abby got up, limping to keep her weight off her tingling left leg. Annabelle ran over to them, and Joanna bent down.

“Hi, sweetheart,” she said. “Are you happy Mommy came to your class?”

Annabelle smiled and spun around in a circle, still giddy.

“Where’d you get that tutu?” Joanna said to Bob as she stood up again. “It’s adorable.”

“Actually, I bought it for her this weekend.” Abby finally spoke up. “Just happened to see it and thought it would be perfect.” That was a fib; Abby had searched for stores on the Internet and driven twenty minutes away to find the tiny tutu.

Joanna considered her for a moment. “Sweet of you,” she finally said, but her voice contained no warmth. She turned back to Bob, and the way she positioned her body left Abby out of the conversation.

“I thought we could take our daughter out for ice cream to celebrate,” Joanna said. Her BlackBerry sounded just then, but she ignored it. “Do you have the time?”

“Ice cweam!” Annabelle shouted. It was her favorite treat.

Bob smiled. “Sure,” he said, picking Annabelle up and nuzzling her cheek with his nose.

“Great,” Joanna said. “Abby, you can take the rest of the day off. I’m sure you have lots of studying to do.”

Bob shot her a quick look, but Abby forced a smile. “I do, actually. Have fun.”

Abby turned and walked out of the room, quickly, so Annabelle wouldn’t notice she was leaving and cry. The little girl hated good-byes.

Joanna knows
, Abby thought as she walked to her car. Maybe she didn’t know everything, but she understood enough. Somehow, the idea filled her with relief. It meant she wouldn’t have to exist in this dangerous state of limbo much longer.

Twenty-three

RENEE RINSED A SPONGE
in warm water and began wiping down the refrigerator shelves. She was scrubbing a stubborn spot on the underside of the glass when her cell phone rang. She hurried into her bedroom and grabbed it out of its charger, cradling it between her ear and shoulder as she came back into the kitchen.

“Hey, it’s Becca.”

Something in her voice made Renee stop moving. “Is everything okay?”

“Not really.” Becca cleared her throat. “It’s your parents. They had this big fight and your mom is pretty upset. It’s . . . well, it’s my fault.”

“What happened?” Renee asked, feeling a flare of protectiveness. Had her instincts been right all along? Maybe Becca was as nutty as her mother. She was, after all, a complete stranger. “Becca, what did you do?”

“I . . . Well, it’s kind of complicated. I just drove your mom to a hotel. Do you have a pen to write down the number?”

A hotel?
Renee closed the refrigerator door with her hip and fumbled through a drawer. “Go ahead.”

Becca recited it, then said, “She’s in room 407.”

A million questions flooded Renee’s mind, but she just hung up with a final, clipped “Bye.”

She sat down on a stool as she dialed and asked for her mother’s room. It rang once, twice, and then her mom answered.

“Mom? Are you okay?” Renee asked.

Her mother hesitated. “I needed to get away. I had to leave him.”

“What? Leave Dad?” Renee said as her windpipe seemed to close. None of this made sense; it felt as surreal and disjointed as a dream.

Renee stood up and began to pace, then sat down quickly again. Her legs were about to give out.

“I’m sorry, honey. I shouldn’t have blurted it out like that. I’m drinking a gin and tonic from the minibar.”

It was nine-thirty on a Saturday morning. Her mother never drank more than a bottle of Budweiser, which she always opened, along with one for Renee’s father, on Friday nights before they sat with their little cocker spaniel, Sadie, to watch their favorite programs. A year ago, her mother had begun to fret about her weight, so the two of them now took power walks every evening after dinner. They’d even bought his-and-her tracksuits, and they waved in unison to the neighbors they passed.

“He slept with another woman,” her mother said, her voice oddly robotic. “We were newlyweds.”

“Okay,” Renee said slowly. “Mom, please talk to me. You’re leaving Dad?”

“I thought I could get past it,” her mother said. Renee closed her eyes and thought about her mother’s face, how her skin had grown papery over the last decade, and her blue eyes had faded, as if she was being slowly erased. “But I can’t. I just can’t believe he did that.”

“Mom . . .” Renee’s voice trailed off as she realized she didn’t know what to say. She felt dizzy—she’d been feeling dizzy a lot lately, but this was much worse. “I thought . . . you just seemed to be handling it so well.”

“I can barely look at him. I couldn’t stand to be near him another moment.”

“But he loves you so much,” Renee said. Sharp tears pricked her eyes, but she blinked them away. “You know he does.”

“Becca came over this morning to drop off the hand weights she got me,” her mother continued, as if she hadn’t even heard Renee. “And she was wearing these pearl earrings. Just simple pearls, but very classic. I complimented her on them, and she told me they’d been her mother’s. Then I looked at your father, and I saw his face turn gray. I thought he was having a heart attack. But it wasn’t that at all. I knew something was up, and I kept asking him, and he finally told me. He gave them to her, Renee. He gave another woman earrings. He slept with her and he made a daughter with her and he gave her pearl earrings.”

“Oh, Mom,” Renee whispered.

“I was bringing a plate of bagels to the table to have with our coffee. And when I realized it, I threw them on the floor.”

Renee could see the plain white china her parents had used for years shattering against the kitchen tiles, the blueberry bagels—her father’s favorite—crumbling under her mother’s feet. The sudden transformation of the cluttered, cozy kitchen, where her parents split cans of tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch. It was as if the house where Renee had grown up had suddenly been thrown off-center by the force of an earthquake.

“Your father tried to calm me down. Becca, too. But I started packing. She didn’t want me to drive, so she took me to a hotel and got me settled.”

Her mother must have taken the same old blue Samsonite
suitcase she’d used for years and years out of the closet and upended drawers as she tossed in her clothes. It was all wrong; her father’s matching suitcase was still in the closet.

“Why did he have to give that woman a gift?” her mother said softly. “The thought of them sleeping together . . . Well, I can barely stand it. But him shopping for her? Him buying another woman jewelry?”

Hearing her mother cry was one of the worst things Renee had ever endured. “Mom,” she said, her voice pleading. “Remember when I didn’t get asked to the homecoming dance during my senior year and all my friends were going? Dad didn’t ever talk to me about it. But he bought me a gift certificate to Macy’s. A hundred dollars. It was one of the most expensive things he ever gave me.”

Her mother didn’t say anything, but her sobs softened.

“He wanted to make the problem go away, Mom. He didn’t want me to think about the fact that I wasn’t invited to the dance, so he tried to buy the problem away. Maybe that’s what he was doing.”

“It wasn’t because he cared about her?” She could hear in her mother’s voice that she wanted to believe it.

“Mom, he loves you. He made an awful mistake. The earrings could have been an apology, or his way of closing the door when she wanted more. Maybe he doesn’t even know why. But you’re the woman he has adored for thirty years. You’re the one he chose.”

Her mother blew her nose. “I think I need to lie down and rest a little bit,” she finally said. “Could you call me back later?”

Just then the apartment door opened and Cate stepped inside in her running clothes, the earbuds of her iPod dangling around her neck and her arms full of groceries.

“Of course. Mom, don’t have anything else to drink, okay? Just try to sleep a little bit.”

Cate looked at Renee, a question in her eyes.

“Do you know what it is, dear?” her mother said, her voice as faint as a whisper. “If he had told me when it first happened, we could have worked it out. His hiding it was the worst part. That’s the biggest betrayal—that he started our relationship this way. How do you recover from something like that?”

“I don’t know,” Renee said. “But, Mom, it’s going to be okay. Dad loves you so much.”

She hung up a moment later.

“What happened?” Cate asked.

“She left my dad,” Renee said. “She just . . . left.”

“You look so pale,” Cate said. She reached for a glass and filled it with water from the Brita. “Here.”

“Thanks.” Renee took a swallow, realizing her tongue felt as dry as a sheet of sandpaper. “I thought everything was fine between them. But it just hit her, that my dad started their relationship with a lie. I don’t know if she’ll be able to forgive him for that.”

She didn’t notice that Cate, who was walking over to sit beside her, suddenly flinched.

Twenty-four

CATE LOOKED DOWN AT
the pages of Sam’s article as she weighed them in her hand. She’d finally made a decision: She was cutting his story from her first issue. She needed to take a stand and set the tone for their relationship before things got any worse. She wouldn’t kill the piece completely, but she’d delay it for a month or two. She’d already sorted through the evergreen files and found an article that wasn’t half bad. It was a profile of a young, up-and-coming director who had candidly talked about being addicted to drugs as a teenager, before having a mystical experience on an Outward Bound trip. The director was eloquent and passionate, and his films had garnered respect in the indie community. It had been written just a few months ago and was already fact-checked. All it needed was a phone call or two for updates and they could slide it into the magazine.

Cate took her hand off her computer’s mouse and stood up. She walked down the corridor toward Nigel’s office and rapped her knuckles on the open door. “Got a second?” she asked.

He glanced up at her over his reading glasses and slid the
draft magazine pages he was holding onto his desk. “Come in,” he said.

Cate plunged in. “The polygamy story. I’m going to hold it another month. Sam came in way past deadline, and I’d like to take a little more time with the piece.”

Nigel took off his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose. “I thought you said the story was coming along.”

“It is,” Cate said. “But the issue is that I gave Sam a deadline and he didn’t make it. Several times, in fact.”

“What do you plan to replace it with?” Nigel asked.

“We’ve got a nice evergreen on an indie film director—” Cate began.

“The guy who climbed a mountain and felt like God pushed him to the top?” Nigel interrupted. “Let me see the polygamy piece.”

“It’s not that it’s not good,” Cate said carefully. “But Sam made things difficult. His writing is fine, but he ignored the deadlines I gave him and came up with silly excuses.”

“You think we’ve never had a writer miss a deadline before? Hell, I’d be more surprised if they all made it in on time. I’ve never met a more neurotic group.”

Something made Cate hold back from explaining that this was a power struggle between Sam and her. Nigel had already treated her like a kid at the staff meeting when she and Sam argued about the story.

Or maybe something else was going on, another complication she hadn’t anticipated. Nigel had been chilly to her after she left the bar with Trey the night of the National Magazine Awards. They’d sat on the train together coming back, but he’d read the paper and responded to e-mails the entire time, barely acknowledging her. At the time she’d been relieved. Now she wondered if she’d overreacted. He was a flirt, but he tried to blur the lines with a lot of women. Cate had been so careful
to set boundaries that maybe she’d overdone it—maybe she’d been the one who’d acted all wrong. Her own insecurities could actually be sabotaging her career.

“Send me the piece,” he instructed.

“Of course,” Cate said. Her stomach muscles clenched, but she forced her face to remain impassive. “We can talk about it when you’re done reading it.”

She walked slowly back to her desk, unable, for one of the few times in her life, to focus on work. She needed to talk to someone. She veered past Renee’s cubicle and was thankful to see her there, cradling the phone between her shoulder and ear while she typed rapidly.