Despite a looming deadline for I Think My Dad Is a Werewolf, my latest installment for Kidtastic, I didn’t get any work done that afternoon after I returned home from meeting with Marcia. Instead I sat in our home office, reading through the pages of texts Marcia had screen-capped and forwarded to me from her phone. It certainly looked like the texts she’d saved were from Kat, although I had no idea how hard it would be to fake that. If Marcia did make it up, she would’ve had to put an enormous amount of work into the forgery. There were hundreds of texts back and forth between them.
Most of them read like the usual exchanges between two friends. Texts like,
Kat: Free for lunch tomorrow?
And,
Marcia: R u coming to class tomorrow?
And,
Kat: What’s the name of that eye cream you were telling me about
They were as trivial as most texts, but I found them noteworthy—and a little chilling—when I realized that here, at last, was the absolute proof Kat had lied to me. She and Marcia had been friends—close friends, even. They had lunched together frequently, had inside jokes at the expense of a few regulars at the yoga school—one who took phone calls during class, another they’d nicknamed Stinky Girl—and had spent a lot of time discussing the various men Marcia dated. For example, after a particularly disastrous date, Marcia had texted,
Marcia: Ur lucky ur married.
Kat: Only because extracurricular activities are SO much more fun.
Marcia: Hahaha. You’re terrible. What if H finds out?
Kat: He never has before ;)
I read this exchange again. Was this Kat confessing to an affair or a series of affairs? She had never mentioned anything to me about having past affairs, but then again, she’d also told me that she’d barely known Marcia, who, Kat claimed, had gone on to stalk her. These texts, sent from Kat’s cell phone to Marcia’s, seemed to prove otherwise.
And then I remembered our trip to Key Biscayne, when Kat had spent the night with Hudson. She’d led me to believe it was the first time she had ever been unfaithful to Howard. She had even made a compelling case that Howard deserved to be cheated on. I had thought at the time that she was awfully relaxed about the infidelity. It had been me, not Kat, who had been uncomfortable breakfasting with Hudson the morning after. Was that because Hudson hadn’t been her first extramarital dalliance?
My stomach gave a sour twist of unease. Yet more evidence that I didn’t know Kat as well as I’d thought.
Kat and Marcia texted about Ashley frequently, and Kat’s growing irritation at her sister-in-law became evident.
Kat: Awful Ashley wants us to commission a portrait of all of us incl spouses and kids for my parents’ anniversary. Not a photograph, which would be bad enough, but a fucking painting.
And,
Kat: If Ashley suddenly disappeared off the face of the earth, would I be a suspect? Wait, don’t answer that. I’d be suspect numero uno.
And,
Kat: Ashley the Asshole. Wait. Ashhole? Assley? Anyway, AA just told me we need a color theme for the party. Like: MAROON. Or: HOT PINK. SMFH.
I was clearly behind on my texting acronyms and so had to look SMFH up. It meant Shaking My Fucking Head.
The texts after they’d returned from the disastrous Amelia Island trip, when Marcia failed to seduce Josh, seemed to signal the end of their friendship.
Kat: I don’t know why ur so upset. It was supposed to be a joke. I told you, Josh and I have a long history of playing practical jokes on one another.
Marcia: I was sexually assaulted when I was younger. This brought back a lot of bad memories. I’m not sleeping well.
Kat: Jesus, you said you didn’t sleep with Josh and now suddenly he raped you?
Marcia: No, of course not. But it’s dredged up some scary memories for me.
Kat: You’re being way too sensitive.
That was the last text Kat had sent Marcia. Marcia had fired off nearly a dozen more, along the lines of:
Marcia: I thought we had lunch plans today? Where R U?
Marcia: Did you get the messages I left you?
Marcia: Why aren’t you returning my calls?
Marcia: Kat? What’s going on?
Presumably it was sometime after her last text went unanswered that Marcia had appeared on Kat’s doorstep, pie in hand, and Kat had threatened to call the police on her. Assuming that part of Kat’s story was true. Who knew what strands of truth were woven in among all the lies?
I remembered a story I’d read in a magazine a while back about a phenomenon called ghosting. It apparently involved cutting off all contact with someone without explanation. The story had been about a famous actress ghosting her equally famous actor boyfriend, so I had assumed it was something that mainly happened among the romantically involved. But it seemed remarkably similar to Kat’s cutting off all contact with Marcia. Kat had ghosted her.
And now Kat was ghosting me.
I leaned back in my chair while I processed this new information. Though I didn’t want to believe it, though I looked for an alternate theory of what was going on, I kept coming back to the same conclusion.
Kat was not the person I thought she was.
Suddenly I was questioning everything she had told me. Had Howard been abusive? Was her marriage troubled? Had she truly been my friend?
I had a sudden, vivid flashback to a conversation Kat and I had the weekend we spent at Key Biscayne. It was the day of the uncomfortable breakfast with Hudson, but before Kat told me she wished Howard were dead. We were down at the beach, reclining in side-by-side lounge chairs, looking out at the ocean. The water was still, and there was a paddleboarder passing serenely by, making the exercise look far easier than it probably was.
“I wish I could do that,” Kat said, shading her eyes as she looked out at the paddleboarder.
“Why can’t you? You live on the water. You could launch right off your dock.”
“I know. But it wouldn’t be the same as here, would it? She looks so peaceful,” Kat said in a dreamy voice.
I nodded but said, “That’s because she’s all the way out there. Everything looks better from a distance. Close up, she’s probably a hot mess. In fact, she’s probably stopping every few strokes to shoot up heroin.”
Kat burst out laughing. “She is not! Where would she keep it? She’s wearing a bikini, for God’s sake.”
I shrugged. “I have no idea. Maybe her bikini has pockets. Junkies are resourceful.”
“I’m glad we came,” Kat said. She closed her eyes, drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Thank you, Alice.”
“What are you thanking me for?”
“For being my friend,” Kat said. “I don’t know how I ever managed without you.”
I shaded my eyes to look at her, sensing her mood had shifted.
“I’ll always be your friend,” I said. “You know that.”
Kat’s lips curved up into a sad smile. “You may be the first person in my life who truly loved me for me, and not just because you had to.”
“I’m sure that’s not true,” I protested.
“Isn’t it?” It was Kat’s turn to shrug. She dropped the magazine she’d been paging through to one side and impatiently pushed her sunglasses up on her head. “I think it’s the story of my life.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Do you remember I once told you that when I was young, my mother constantly warned me about whom I was friends with? That she told me over and over again anyone who wanted to get close to me was only doing so because of who our family was?”
I nodded. How could I forget something so creepy?
“I lied to you when I told you that,” Kat said.
“You did? So your mom was okay with your having friends?”
“No, that part was true. I lied when I said I already had a group of friends I could trust. I never did. I wanted to, but whenever I started feeling like I could be close with someone, I’d hear my mother’s voice in my ear,” Kat said. She imitated Eleanor Wyeth’s voice with chilling precision. “‘You can’t trust anyone, Katherine. You think they’re your friends, but they’re all users, looking for what they can get from you.’ I was ten. After she told me that, I had a hard time trusting anyone.”
“Jesus,” I said. Revulsion churned in my stomach, partly because of how ugly the word users was, but also because if I was here, at this beautiful hotel, on this dream of a weekend, all on Kat’s dime, what did that make me? Was I just another of the users Mrs. Wyeth had warned Kat about?
“Well, Eleanor will never win any awards for Mother of the Year, that’s for sure.” Kat picked up the sunscreen, squirted a blob of it onto her hand and began rubbing SPF 55 over her arms.
“Pass the sunscreen,” I said. Once Kat handed it over, I began slathering it over my limbs, which were already looking suspiciously pink. Like most redheads, I didn’t tan or even freckle. I burned. Whenever I was at the beach, I had to hide under large floppy hats and sun umbrellas, and constantly reapply my sunscreen. “What did your mother do?”
Kat laughed, but it was a cynical laugh without much humor. “What didn’t she do? She tried to control every single aspect of my life. What I ate, what I wore, whom I associated with. She picked my hairstyle, my extracurricular activities, even the boys I eventually dated.”
It was not hard to picture the Eleanor Wyeth I’d met as an iron-fisted control freak.
“When I was fifteen, my mother decided I needed to lose ten pounds,” Kat continued. “I wasn’t even overweight. I just wasn’t rail thin. So she put me on a diet, then harassed me and bullied me and berated me until I lost the weight. She used to force me to go out on runs in the middle of the day in the summer because she believed that I’d sweat out more fat. I passed out once and woke up on a neighbor’s lawn with the yard man standing over me with a rake in one hand.”
“Like in a creepy way?”
“No, I think he was actually trying to be helpful. He pulled me up and got me a glass of water. When I recounted it to Eleanor later, she told me to stop being so dramatic. I just needed to be more disciplined. Then, to draw a line under this point, she gave me a salad for dinner with one slice of tomato and no dressing.”
“That’s abusive.”
“It definitely was,” Kat said. “The worst, though, were the put-downs. I have never been pretty enough, thin enough, smart enough to please her. Not by the standards my mother set. And she let me know it every single day of my life.”
“Have you ever talked to anyone about this?”
“Like who?”
“A therapist or your father—anyone?”
“My father.” Kat shook her head. “I asked him once why he didn’t take my side in the endless battles with my mother. He told me, ‘You’ll leave in a few years, and then it will be just your mother and me left here at home. That’s why I have to take her side.’” Kat laughed her mirthless laugh again. “Typical of my father. Brave when facing anyone and everyone except my mother. Then he turns into a spineless shit.”
I turned to look at my friend, who suddenly appeared small and hunched up on her lounge chair.
“Are you okay?” I asked, extending an arm in her direction.
“You know me. I’m always okay,” Kat said. She arched her back to roll her shoulders and then reached out to raise the flag behind her chair. “But I do need a drink.”
The beach attendant raced over. “What can I get you?”
“I’ll have a vodka and soda with a splash of grapefruit juice,” Kat said. She looked over at me, her eyebrows raised.
My plans to teetotal that day evaporated. “I’ll have the same,” I said, trying not to think about what a beachside drink here would cost.
“I love this flag,” Kat said. “Do you think I can get one for my house?”
“Of course. But to recreate this, you’ll also have to hire someone who runs over to take your order when you raise the flag.”
Kat snapped her fingers. “Foiled at every turn.” She shifted on the chaise. “Will you toss me back the sunscreen? I’m going to look like a tomato if I get any more color. You were smart to bring a hat. I should go in and buy one in the gift shop.”
I handed her the bottle. She squirted the lotion into her hand, and the chemical scent of fake coconuts filled the air.
“Why do you think your mom did that to you?” I asked.
“Who knows? Maybe she was threatened by the fact that she was getting older, and suddenly had a young, pretty daughter to compete with,” Kat said, carelessly dropping the sunscreen down onto the hot sand. “Or maybe she’s just always been bug-fucking nuts. That gets my vote.”
I thought about my relationship with my daughter. Any fears I had about Bridget growing older, entering puberty, becoming a sexual being were focused on her being victimized by the predators of the world. Everyone loved a pretty girl, especially the freaks and deviants. I had certainly never been threatened by her youth, or viewed her as my competition.
“How did you cope?” I asked.
“I don’t know. How do kids ever cope? Aren’t we all, in the end, a product of our parents’ bad parenting?” Kat asked flatly. “I’m the person my mother created. It’s all her fault.”
I considered this. I knew my own family dynamics—my parents’ divorce, my father’s remarriage, my mother’s haphazard parenting—had formed me, molding me into the remote, analytical adult I now was. It wasn’t hard to see that as a result of the chaos, I had craved order, had even made it my career.
Our drinks arrived then, this time hand-delivered by the dimpled Hudson. At his appearance, a light switched on inside Kat. I could almost see her mentally cast aside her sad reminisces and revert back to her usual effervescent self. Even after Hudson left, returning to the tiki bar, I didn’t have the heart to bring up her childhood again, or to ask Kat what she meant when she said it was her mother’s fault she had turned into the person she was today.
Maybe I should have.
* * *
My doorbell rang, and I started. I’d lost track of the fact that I was sitting at my desk, staring into space. I closed my laptop, stood and arched my back to alleviate the tightness caused by hunching over my computer for so long. I headed to the front door, expecting to find a Girl Scout hawking Thin Mints or a neighbor asking me to sign a petition against the pollution of our local waterways.
But as it turned out, it was neither.
Instead, for the second time in a little over a week, Detective Demer and Sergeant Oliver were standing on my front step. Oliver looked smug, which should have tipped me off that something unpleasant was about to occur. But I was distracted by the sky, which had turned gray and ominously dark. I’d been so immersed in reading the texts between Kat and Marcia, I hadn’t noticed a storm was rolling in.
“Mrs. Campbell,” Detective Demer said in his calm, deep voice, “can you please step outside?”
“Why?” I asked.
“You’re under arrest for the murder of Howard Grant.”