CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
I always knew my life with Richard wouldn’t resemble my old one.
I imagined my changes would be external, though—additions to who I already was and what I already had. I’d become a wife. A mother. I’d create a home. I’d find new friends in our neighborhood.
But in the absence of the daily scramble that composed my existence in Manhattan, it was too easy to focus on what was missing. I should have been waking three times a night to breast-feed, and scheduling Mommy & Me classes. I should have been steaming carrots into mush and reading Goodnight Moon. I should have been washing onesies in Dreft and icing teething rings to soothe little swollen gums.
My life was on hold. I felt suspended between my past and my future.
I used to agonize over the balance in my checking account, the sound of footsteps behind me at night, and whether I would make it onto the subway car before the doors closed so I could get to Gibson’s on time. I worried about the little girl in my class who bit her nails even though she was only three, about whether the cute guy I’d given my number to would ever call, and if Sam had remembered to unplug her flatiron after straightening her hair.
I guess I thought marrying Richard would erase my concerns.
But my old anxieties simply yielded to new ones. The whirl and noise of the city were replaced by the incessant churning of my thoughts. My peaceful new surroundings didn’t soothe my interior world. If anything, the constant stillness, the empty hours, seemed to taunt me. My insomnia returned. I also found myself circling back home to make sure I’d locked the door when I went on an errand, even though I could see myself pulling it shut and turning the key. I left a dental appointment before I’d gotten my teeth cleaned, convinced I’d left on the oven. I double-checked closets to make sure the lights were off. Our weekly housekeeper left everything spotless, and Richard was incredibly tidy by nature, but I still wandered through the rooms, seeking a brown leaf to pinch off a potted plant, a book jutting out a bit farther than the others on our shelves to tuck back into alignment, towels to refold into perfect thirds in our linen closet.
I learned to stretch out a simple chore like taffy; I could orient my entire day around a meeting at the club for the junior volunteer committee. I was constantly checking the clock, counting down the hours until Richard would come home.
Shortly after my twenty-ninth birthday and the night at the club with Aunt Charlotte, I went to the grocery store to get chicken breasts for dinner.
It was almost Halloween, which had always been my favorite holiday when I’d taught the Cubs. I doubted we’d get many trick-or-treaters—we hadn’t the previous year since the houses in our neighborhood were so spread out. Still, at the market, I picked up a few bags of mini Kit Kats and M&M’s, hoping I wouldn’t eat more than I’d distribute. I also added a box of Tampax to my cart. When I accidentally turned down the aisle that held Pampers and baby food, I abruptly retreated, taking the longer route to the cash registers.
As I set the table for dinner, just two plates in a corner of the wide stretch of mahogany, loneliness pierced me. I poured myself a glass of wine and dialed Sam’s number. Richard still didn’t like it when I drank, but on a few days every month, I needed the consolation—so I made sure to brush my teeth and bury the empty bottle in the bottom of our recycling bin. Sam told me she was getting ready to go on a third date with a guy, and she actually seemed excited about him. I could picture her wiggling into her favorite jeans, the ones I no longer borrowed, and applying cherry-red lip stain.
I sipped my Chablis as I soaked in her happy chatter and suggested we get together in the city soon. Sam had only come out to see me once since the wedding. I didn’t blame her; Westchester was boring to a single woman. I made it to Manhattan more often, and I would try to meet Sam near the Learning Ladder for a late lunch.
But I’d had to postpone our last lunch because I’d caught a stomach bug, and Sam had canceled the dinner we’d scheduled before that because she’d forgotten her grandmother’s ninetieth birthday party was on the same evening.
We hadn’t seen each other in ages.
I’d vowed to stay in close contact with Sam after the wedding, but nights and weekends—Sam’s free times—were also my only chances to be with Richard.
Richard never put constraints on my schedule. Once, when he picked me up at the train station after I’d met Sam for Sunday brunch at Balthazar, he asked if I’d had fun.
“Sam is always fun,” I’d said, laughing as I told him how after we left the restaurant, we’d come across a movie scene being filmed a few blocks away, and Sam had grabbed my hand and pulled me into the crowd of extras. We’d been asked to leave, but not before she managed to grab a big bag of trail mix from the craft-services table.
Richard had laughed with me. But at dinner that night, he mentioned that he would be working late almost every evening that week.
Before we got off the phone, Sam told me to pick a time for us to get together. “Let’s drink tequila and go dancing like we used to.”
I hesitated. “Let me just check Richard’s calendar. It might be easier if I come in when he’s out of town.”
“You planning to bring a boy home?” Sam joked.
“Why only one?” I bantered, trying to change the focus, and she laughed.
I was in the kitchen a few minutes later, chopping tomatoes for a salad, when our burglar alarm began to shriek.
As promised, Richard had a sophisticated alarm system installed right before we moved into the Westchester home. It was a comfort during the days when he was at work, and especially on the nights when he traveled.
“Hello?” I called. I went into the hallway, flinching as the high-pitched warning pulsed through the air. But our heavy oak door remained shut.
Our house had four vulnerable areas, the alarm-company contractor had said, holding up an equal number of fingers to emphasize his point. The front door. The basement entrance. The big bay window in the eat-in kitchen area. And especially the double glass doors off the living room that overlooked our garden.
All of those entrances were wired. I ran to the double glass doors and glanced out. I couldn’t see anything, but it didn’t mean no one was there, wasn’t hiding in the shadows. If someone was breaking in, I’d never hear the noise over the blaring alarm. Instinctively, I bolted upstairs, still holding the butcher knife I’d been using to cut the tomatoes.
I grabbed my cell phone from the nightstand, grateful I’d put it back in its charger. As I burrowed into the back of my closet, behind a row of slacks, I dialed Richard.
“Nellie? What’s wrong?”
I clutched the phone tightly as I huddled on the floor of my closet. “I think someone’s trying to break in,” I whispered.
“I can hear the alarm.” Richard’s voice was tense and urgent. “Where are you?”
“My closet,” I whispered.
“I’ll call the police. Hang on.”
I imagined him on the other line giving our address and insisting that they should hurry, that his wife was alone in the house. I knew the alarm company would alert the police, too.
Our home phone was ringing now, as well. My heart pounded, the frantic throbbing filling my ears. So many sounds—how could I know if someone stood on the other side of the closet door, twisting the knob?
“The police will be there any second,” Richard said. “And I’m already on the train, at Mount Kisco. I’ll be at the house in fifteen minutes.”
Those fifteen minutes lasted an eternity. I curled into a tighter ball and began to count, forcing myself to slowly mouth the numbers. Surely the police would come by the time I reached two hundred, I thought, remaining motionless and taking shallow breaths so that if someone came through the closet door, they might not detect my presence.
Time slowed down. I was acutely aware of every detail of my surroundings, my senses intensely heightened. I saw individual flecks of dust on the baseboards, the slight variation in the hue of the wood floor, and the tiny ripple my exhalations made in the fabric of the black slacks hanging an inch from my face.
“Hang on, baby,” Richard said as I reached 287. “I’m just getting off the train.”
That was when the police finally arrived.
The officers searched but found no sign of an intruder—nothing taken, no doors jimmied, no windows broken. I cuddled next to Richard on the sofa, sipping chamomile tea. False alarms weren’t uncommon, the police told us. Faulty wiring, animals triggering a sensor, a glitch in the system—it was probably one of those things, an officer said.
“I’m sure it was nothing,” Richard agreed. But then he hesitated and looked at the two officers. “This probably isn’t related, but when I left this morning, there was an unfamiliar truck parked at the end of our street. I figured it belonged to a landscaper or something.”
I felt my heart skip a beat.
“Did you get the license plate number?” the older officer, the one who did most of the talking, asked.
“I didn’t, but I’ll keep an eye out for it.” Richard drew me in closer. “Oh, sweetheart, you’re trembling. I promise I will never let anything happen to you, Nellie.”
“You’re sure you didn’t see anyone, though, right?” the officer asked me again.
Through the windows I watched the flashing blue and red lights revolve atop the cruisers. I closed my eyes but I could still visualize those frantic colors spinning through the darkness, pulling me back into that long-ago night when I was in senior in college.
“No. I didn’t see anyone.”
But that wasn’t completely true.
I had seen a face, but not in one of our windows. It was visible only in my memory. It belongs to someone I last encountered in Florida, someone who blames me—who wants me punished—for the cataclysmic events of that fall evening.
I had a new name. A new address. I’d even changed my phone number.
I’d always feared it wouldn’t be enough.
The tragedy began to unfold during a beautiful day, also in October. I was so young then. I’d just started my senior year in college. The blistering heat of the Florida summer had yielded to a mellow warmth; the girls in my sorority wore light sundresses or tank tops and shorts with CHI OMEGA stamped across the butt. Our house was filled with a happy energy; the new pledges would be initiated after sunset. As social director, I’d planned the Jell-O shots, the blindfolding, the candles, and the surprise plunge into the ocean.
But I woke up exhausted and feeling queasy. I nibbled on a granola bar as I dragged myself to my early-child-development seminar. When I pulled out my spiral-bound planner to write down the next week’s assignment, a realization stilled my pencil on the page: My period was late. I wasn’t ill. I was pregnant.
When I looked up again, all the other students had packed up and were leaving the classroom. Shock had stolen minutes from me.
I cut my next class and walked to a pharmacy on the edge of campus, buying a pack of gum, a People magazine, some pens, and an e.p.t test as if it were just another casual item on my shopping list. A McDonald’s was next door and I huddled in a stall, listening as two preteen girls brushed their hair in the mirror and talked about the Britney Spears concert they were dying to attend. The plus sign confirmed what I already suspected.
I was only twenty-one, I thought wildly. I hadn’t even finished school. My boyfriend, Daniel, and I had been together for just a few months.
I stepped out of the stall and went to the row of sinks, running cold water over my wrists. I glanced up and the two girls fell silent when they caught sight of my face.
Daniel was in a sociology class that let out at twelve-thirty; I’d memorized his schedule. I hurried to his building and paced the stretch of sidewalk in front of it. Some students sat on the steps, smoking, while others sprawled on the green—a few eating lunch, others forming a triangle and throwing a Frisbee. A girl rested with her head on a guy’s lap, her long hair draped over his thigh like a blanket. The Grateful Dead blared from a boom box.
Two hours earlier, I would’ve been one of them.
Students began to trickle out the door and I scanned their faces, frantically searching for Daniel. He wouldn’t be the guy wearing flip-flops and a Grant University T-shirt, or the one burdened by a cumbersome saxophone case, or even the one with a backpack shrugged onto a shoulder.
He didn’t look like any of them.
After the crowd had thinned, he appeared at the top of the stairs, folding his glasses into the pocket of his oxford shirt, a messenger bag slung crosswise over his chest. I lifted my hand and waved. When he saw me, he faltered, then continued down the steps to where I stood.
“Professor Barton!” A girl intercepted him, probably with a question about his class. Or maybe she was flirting.
Daniel Barton was in his mid-thirties, and he made the Frisbee-throwing jocks, with their leaps and hoots when they caught the disk, look like puppies. He kept glancing at me while he talked to the other girl. His anxiety was palpable. I’d violated our rule: Don’t acknowledge each other on campus.
He could be fired, after all. He’d given me an A during my junior year, a few weeks before our affair began. I’d earned it—we’d never shared a personal conversation, let alone a kiss, until I bumped into him after being separated from my friends at a Dave Matthews beach concert—but who would believe us?
When at long last he drew close to me, he whispered, “Not now. I’ll call you later.”
“Pick me up at the usual spot in fifteen.”
He shook his head. “Today won’t work. Tomorrow.” His brusque tone stung me.
“It’s really important.”
But he was already moving past me, hands in his jeans pockets, toward the old Alfa Romeo that had taken us to the beach on so many moonlit nights. I watched him go, feeling stunned and deeply betrayed. I’d stuck to our agreement; he should have realized this was urgent. He tossed his bag onto the passenger’s seat—my seat—and sped off.
I clutched my arms around my stomach and watched as his car turned a corner and disappeared. Then I slowly made my way back to the sorority house, where everybody was busy preparing.
I just had to get through the rest of the day, I told myself, blinking hard at the tears that filled my eyes. Then I could talk to Daniel. We’d come up with a plan together.
“Where were you?” asked our chapter’s president as I walked through the door, but she didn’t wait for an answer. Twenty new pledges would officially join our house tonight. The evening would start out with a dinner and rituals: the house song and a sorority trivia game about our founders and important dates. Each girl would then take a candle and repeat sacred vows. I’d stand behind my “little sister,” Maggie, whom I’d been paired with for the year. The hazing would begin around ten P.M. Although it would last several hours, nothing bad would be done to the girls. Nothing dangerous. Certainly no one would be hurt.
I knew this because I was the one to plan it.
Bottles of vodka for the Jell-O shots lined the dining room table, along with grain alcohol for the Dirty Hunch Punch. Did we need so much liquor? I wondered. I remember because of everything that happened afterward. Those flashing blue and red police lights. The high-pitched screaming that sounded like an alarm.
But as I climbed the steps to my room, it was just a fleeting thought, winging past like a moth, quickly replaced by my worry over the pregnancy. The feeling of sickness radiated out from my core, encompassing my entire being.
Daniel hadn’t even glanced back at me as he’d driven off. I kept remembering the way he’d walked right past me, whispering, “Not now.” He’d treated me with less respect than the student who’d intercepted him before he reached me.
I slipped into my room and quietly shut the door, then pulled out my cell phone. I lay down on my bed, hugging my knees to my chest, and called him. After four rings, I heard his outgoing message. The second time I dialed, it went directly to voice mail.
I could see Daniel glancing down at his phone as the code name he’d given me—Victor—flashed. His long, tapered fingers, the ones that caressed my leg whenever I sat beside him, picking up the phone and pressing Decline.
I’d seen him do the exact same thing to other callers when we were together, never thinking he’d do it to me.
I dialed his number again, hoping he’d see it and realize how desperately I needed to talk to him. But he ignored me.
My pain was being overtaken by anger. He must have known something was wrong. He’d said he cared about me, but if you truly cared for someone, wouldn’t you at least answer her fucking call? I’d thought.
I’d never been to his place because he lived with two other professors in faculty housing. I knew his address, though.
I’d thought, Tomorrow isn’t good enough.