The One That Got Away (9 page)

The minute she and Sam strolled out the door, I ran back to my closet, slipped on a pair of size 27 waist (!) jeans and a sweater, and headed straight for the Nordstrom bags. I carried them into the kitchen and dropped them on the floor near the island. Out of the bigger bag, I pulled out a large white box big enough to hold a bedspread. I placed it on the counter and took off the lid. Swaddled in layers of white tissue were seemingly endless folds of thick, heavy satin. I tried to lift it out, but the fabric kept coming. Eventually, I had to stand up and take a step back before it escaped the confines of the box and unfurled.

It was an evening dress—no, an actual ball gown—with pretty cap sleeves, a deep rounded neckline, and a long flowing skirt, of
a color somewhere between black and navy, like a winter evening. It was lighter than it looked, and as I held it up, it sang a swishing song. The sleeves and neck were lined with more tissue, which I had to remove to see the tag. Embroidered in gold were four little words: “Oscar de la Renta.”

I carefully draped the dress over one of the kitchen stools and opened the second bag, which held even more tissue, a folded khaki raincoat, and two small boxes containing the shrapnel of my fall: cracked sunglasses, a dented golden bangle, an umbrella, and a wallet holding a license and a black American Express card. The other box held an iPhone, scratched but still holding a charge. Bingo.

After pushing it on, I saw a wallpaper photo of Gloria holding baby Sam, but that’s as far as I could go. It was locked. I tried my usual four digits, but they didn’t work. Nor did my birth date or the last four digits of my cell number. Then I centered my finger on the round button at the bottom of the phone and pushed hard. I held my breath as it thought for a moment, then blinked open. Abbey van Holt might have different hair, a better wardrobe, and perfect tits, but there was one thing she was stuck with—my fingerprint.

I immediately began scanning e-mail, staring eagerly as it downloaded 170 messages. I read through them carefully, hungry for details of how Abbey van Holt spent her days. Mostly it was spam from shops and online retailers, but there were some appointment reminders, event invites, and missives from Gloria’s school that helped fill in some blanks. The only e-mails that looked important (mostly because the subject line said just that) were from Alex’s campaign manager, a man named Frank Klein, who, despite being someone who refused to use punctuation, was at least very verbose and detail oriented (thank God!). He e-mailed a daily schedule of campaign events, complete with type of event, address, time, and who was to attend. I noticed only a few were marked “abbey optional.”

I closed the e-mail app and, on impulse, called my home number in Grange Hill. After fourteen rings, I admitted defeat and hung up. Then I tried Jimmy’s cell phone. It rang twice, but instead of the usual “Lahey Landscape” greeting, I heard a man’s gruff “Hello.”

“Jimmy?” I whispered.

“Who is this?” said the voice. My throat went dry.

“Is this Jimmy Lahey’s phone?” I asked.

“No, you’ve got the wrong number.”
Click.

Then I tried the only other number I knew by heart—Mom. I dialed and waited. After four rings, I heard her voice and was flooded with relief. “Mom, it’s Abbey,” I started to say, before realizing it was her voice-mail greeting: “Roberta here. I may be ignoring you, but I have good reason. I’m cruising the Mediterranean until November fourteenth. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you when I return.
If I return, that is
.”

Shit,
I thought, gone until the fourteenth. That was more than two weeks away. What in the world was she doing on a cruise? She hated cruises, called them “floating Ruby Tuesdays.” I left a message asking her to call me as soon as she could. I also sent her an e-mail with a simple subject line: “Call me.”

I opened up the phone’s browser and began to type but found it maddeningly slow. I stood up and began searching for a computer or an iPad, looking in all the cabinets again, the kitchen’s one wide drawer, and even the pantry. Finding nothing, I moved into the family room.

It was cozier and more lived in than the rest of the apartment, with a thick red-and-blue Oriental rug, floor-to-ceiling cherry shelves, a big leather sectional, and a huge flat-screen television. A few puzzles and children’s books littered the floor, and stacks of decorating magazines were piled on the coffee table. In one end table were some remotes, tissues, and a hairbrush, while the other stored more magazines. I was about to give up when I noticed an
inch of matte silver peeking out from beneath the coffee table. I pulled out an Apple laptop, opened the lid, and pressed it on.

It was time to find out what had had happened to me. “C’mon, Google, don’t fail me now,” I whispered aloud as I watched the screen load.

My first search term? “Head trauma.” Google offered a vast list of causes, symptoms, and case histories, but way too many to examine. I narrowed the search by trying “head trauma and confusion.” Again, Google produced pages and pages of Web links, but most pertained to memory loss, and I knew that wasn’t my problem. If anything, I had too many memories, not too few.

More clicking revealed additional diagnoses. One doctor argued that head trauma coupled with psychological trauma could result in “delusional psychoses.” But that didn’t seem right either. Returning a Marc Jacobs bag was disappointing, sure, but certainly not traumatic enough to make someone crazy. I kept typing.

One promising explanation was called dissociative fugue, where an individual is confused or unaware of his or her identity and will travel “in psychological journeys away from known surroundings.” But, again, that wasn’t me. I knew exactly who I really was.

An hour and a half later, most of the Internet-proposed theories dismissed, I turned my attention to the scientific community, more specifically to physicists. A June 2013 issue of
Physics Today
described a young MIT professor’s belief in the concept of a “multiverse.” The prize-winning Japanese physicist presented a new theory of existence: Our world is just one bubble in a giant foam of bubbles, with universes separated from others only by thin, fragile membranes. I stared at his photo, his face smiling from a podium, while I tried to grasp his words. Had I gotten mixed up in someone else’s bubble? Had my bubble burst? Or was this bubble running alongside my real one, with this Abbey and the real Abbey
separated by just a thin, glistening wall? Perhaps she was still out there somewhere, begging Gloria to eat, brushing her teeth in the car, and downing Nutella by the jarful.

With trembling hands, I typed in my name, my fingers zipping on the familiar ten letters. I held my breath as I waited for the results. But the only matches were for a college kid in Texas and a school board superintendent in Boise. I tried it again, this time using “Abigail.” But still, there was nothing relevant, nothing pertaining to me.

Next, I tried “Jimmy Lahey.” It returned a million hits, but none of them referred to
my
Jimmy. I tried “James Lahey,” but again the links led to other men with different jobs, different families, different faces. I paused and forced my mind to bring up Jimmy’s face, but the image that appeared was one of the last ones I’d seen: his angry scowl from our fight over the purse. I shut the computer, leaned back, and closed my eyes.

When I opened them again, my gaze landed on the shelves across from me. Mixed in with the books and burnished silver bowls were several silver-framed family snapshots. I looked closer and saw my own face staring back at me.

I walked over and examined them, one by one. Gloria covered in pink frosting on her first birthday. Aunt Aubyn on a horse. Me awkwardly holding Sam in a long, embroidered christening gown. Alex and me together in some tropical paradise, him shirtless and me with a flower behind my ear, both of us tanned and laughing. Alex on skis; Alex with his parents; Alex and me with Colin Powell at a charity function.

I looked at the few photos of me and saw my eyes, my smile, my slightly lazy left eye. I scrutinized my shoulders, my long arms, and, with toes sinking into soft sand, my size-nine-and-a-half feet. I was there at these parties, on these trips, a part of this picture-perfect family. But these were cherished memories I had no memory of.
They belonged to another Abbey, whose younger self had made a different choice and now lived in a very different world. One small word—
yes
, not
no
—had very big consequences.

Curiosity gnawed at me. Who was this woman?

I started pulling open drawers and cabinets. I found the usual evidence of family life—board books, diapers, Vaseline, markers, and Barbie limbs—along with some receipts, DVDs, instruction manuals, power cords, and some marked-up blueprints for a house with several balconies. The cottage, perhaps?

From the back of one cabinet, I pulled out some dusty yearbooks from Mercersburg Academy, which I took to be Alex’s prep school. I flipped through to find his teenage face grinning out from a variety of group photos—glee, debate, lacrosse. I put them back and kept searching.

In the last cabinet, I found an enormous black leather box embossed with a date: “June 19, 2004.” Inside was a silver-tipped album so heavy I needed two hands to lift it out. As I opened the heavy cover and gazed at the first photo, I swallowed hard. It was twenty-seven-year-old me. On the day I became Mrs. van Holt.

I stood in a long, lacy veil and 1930s-style white gown, its train artfully pooling around my feet and spilling onto the lawn at Bloemveld. My dress was elegant and demure, and I looked pretty and poised, if perhaps a bit too thin, the diamond bracelets slipping down from my wrists to circle my palms. My cheeks flushed gently pink and my hair shone in its tight, flaxen chignon. I held a bouquet of white tulips, their stems encased by a tight white ribbon. With Alex beside me in his black morning coat and striped tie, both of us leaning languidly against the side of an antique car, we looked like a duke and duchess from another era, only with better teeth.

Each page of the album was more achingly beautiful than the next: Alex and me next to a rose-and-ivy-covered pillar; flower girls
(eight in all) in their cream-on-cream silk; me with Jules, her auburn hair so pretty against her sage green bridesmaid dress; and then the entire well-heeled wedding party, all walking toward the camera on a lawn so thick it looked like a rug. One photo showed Alex and me with our mothers, and I couldn’t help but cringe at how different the two women looked, one in an oyster-colored skirt suit and the other in low-cut electric blue satin with matching shoes. What had Mirabelle thought of Roberta? And what had she thought about me, for that matter? Surely she would have preferred a daughter-in-law with a more patrician lineage. But if she had, she certainly didn’t show it. Of all of us, her smile was the widest.

I flipped back to the first photo, the official wedding portrait. I stared at the bland white flowers again, so different from the mixed bouquet I’d held on my wedding day to Jimmy. And at my hair, which was so sleek and tidy compared to the wisps that blew around my face as I said my vows to Jimmy in the warm September sand of Rehoboth Beach. I understood how different choices lead you down different paths, and how on those different paths you find even more choices.

But still I was baffled. I’d always hated tulips.

I was still sitting on the floor of the family room when the petite nanny returned with Sam. I had been so deep in thought, she startled me, and I returned the album to its shelf and hurried to the kitchen. The baby greeted me with rosy cheeks still flushed from the autumn cold.

“Do you want a snack,
nuu jaa
?” the nanny asked him.

I started toward the refrigerator to get it for him, then realized she was already on it. I watched her pick him up, wash his hands, and plop him in his high chair. I walked over and tickled his belly. He squealed and blew saliva bubbles.

She gave him some blueberries and sliced mango and instructed him to say “thank you.”

“Tank yoo,” he answered cheerfully, then dug his tiny hands into the bowl. I watched in disbelief as my carb-addicted son scarfed down the colorful fruit. And I mean real fruit, not the kind squeezed from pouches or molded into the shapes of Disney characters.

“No gym today?” It took me a minute to realize she was talking to me.

I shook my head. “Moving a bit slow today.”

“Mr. van Holt will be here soon,” she said, eyeing my jeans and unbrushed hair. “Saw his car pulling in.”

“Oh.” I smoothed my hair, and wished desperately that I’d brushed my teeth, when in walked Alex, looking like the movie version of an airline pilot in a navy suit and white shirt that set off his blue eyes and dark hair handsomely. Following him were two other men: a balding, bearded guy in a worn sports coat and olive corduroys and a young African American man in pressed jeans and a techy zip-up sweatshirt. All three were intently engaged in their phones; then, as if on cue, they thumbed them off, slipped them into their pockets, looked up, and smiled.

At the sight of his father, Sam started hopping in his chair, gurgling with glee. I understood how he felt, the room suddenly brighter and the air more electrified as Alex entered. My eyes couldn’t help but follow him, and I felt a little tingle of excitement down deep. I recognized the feeling, one I hadn’t felt in years—the giddy exhilaration of a new relationship. My cheeks reddened and my stomach fluttered.

I looked down, trying to hide it, knowing Abbey van Holt would have reacted more indifferently. Ten years of marriage would have muted the thrill, even with a ball and chain as gorgeous as Alex.

The older man, whom I took to be punctuation-challenged Frank Klein, turned my attention by shouting my name: “Abigail!” He
walked over and grabbed my hand, then kissed it with mock chivalry. “Thanks to your little spill, our poll numbers are up for the first time in weeks. I know it wasn’t fun, but your accident has captured the media’s attention. And the public’s sympathy.”

“Glad I could help,” I said, laughing. “I guess being a natural-born klutz finally came in handy.”