Where I Lost Her (3 page)

We had him over for dinner one night right after he signed with Jake. He talked about Mexico, where he backpacked for a year after he graduated Harvard. He bragged about the prostitutes he slept with, the drugs he took. He was pompous. A real ass. And then, he drank too much and got sick in our bathroom. But rather than calling him a cab, Jake ushered Charlie into the guest bedroom, brought him water, aspirin. Covered him with a blanket. In the morning, Charlie sat at our table drinking coffee and scarfing down the bacon and eggs Jake had made like nothing had happened. He sent us a thank-you note two days later on creamy stationery embossed with his monogram. I don't care how good a writer he is; he's a real douche bag.

Charlie's first novel is going to go to auction on Monday, another reason why we need to get back to the city. Jake has been coddling him, as if he is an infant, or an orchid. He has held his hand from the messy first typed (yes,
typed
) draft to the finished copy, which went out on submission last week.

But as much as the kid irritates me, I must admit, I've read the book, and, if I were still in the industry, I would likely have jumped on it as well. I understand Jake's enthusiasm; he and I have always been able to see promise. But something about the way Jake babies him sickens me. It's as though Charlie is his son rather than his client, and a badly behaved son at that. And worst of all, he favors him over his other, better-mannered clients. At times, I wonder if this is the kind of father he would have been. Coddling, permissive.

Jake and I met when I was still working at Norton. I actually acquired his very first client's debut novel—a writer who has since gone on to write six more novels, two of which have been made into films. For a while, we were considered a sort of power couple in the publishing world, for whatever the hell that's worth. But I left publishing eight years ago, after we came back from Central America. When words on the page became just that.
Words
. As hollow and inconsequential as dust. Empty promises made of ink, so pathetically reliant on the paper beneath them.

I make my living now as a freelance copy editor, which requires that I look at each sentence as a mechanical structure, a mathematical equation. I hardly read anything for pleasure anymore besides menus and the occasional manuscript Jake asks me to peruse. I see only artifice now, and none of the art.

I reach for my wineglass when Jake is looking away and swallow. The wine is crisp and cold. It tastes like a bite from a ripe peach.

“He's brilliant, really,” Jake says, nodding, like he has something to prove.

“He's kind of a
douche,
” I say.

Plum looks up. “What's a
doosh?
”

“Excuse my French,” I say, reaching for her hand. Plum has separated the delicate fish bones from the meat and laid them across the tablecloth in one remarkable piece. Fragile, yet intact. The ghost of her dinner.

Jake sips from his glass, swishes the wine in his mouth before swallowing. I study the lines of his jaw, which is always set and hard lately, muscles working under the flesh. Unlike most men his age, he's still got a full head of hair, which he wears long enough that it falls in his eyes. Now he pushes it back, and gestures to me with his chin before looking at Devin.

“What is it our folks used to say,
Never trust anyone over thirty
?” he says, talking about me as if I'm not sitting right there. “Tess doesn't trust anyone
under
thirty.”

His words are sharp.

“He's just so
affected,
” I say, though I'm not talking about Charlie anymore, and he knows it.

I look to Effie. I need an ally.

“Everything about him. Seriously, who types on a manual typewriter? And you can hear it in his writing. The
affectation,
I mean.” This is not true at all, but I am feeling willful. Contrary. Emboldened by that cold, crisp wine.

Jake takes a deep breath, as if to calm himself before speaking.

“Tess hates everything I love,” he says.

Effie shoots me a look across the table.

Jake stretches his neck. This is what he does to keep from lashing out.

“Hey, you guys
still
need to introduce me to Sam Mason,” he says. “I just finished
Small Sorrows
. I don't know how I'd never read it before.”

Sam Mason is a writer, a National Book Award–winning writer who lives in California but owns a camp on Lake Gormlaith. Sam and his wife, Mena, are friends with Effie and Devin, but we've never met them. Every time we come, Jake brings it up. Angling. It embarrasses me.

“He just did a benefit reading at the library,” Effie says. “It was really fun.”

“How
is
the library?” I ask, grateful to change the subject.

“Broke, as always,” she says, smiling sadly. “The basement flooded this spring, so the children's room had to move up to the annex. A total nightmare. It's going to cost a fortune for the repairs. But we have a few generous donors, like Sam and Mena, who keep coming through just when we need them.”

Effie drives the bookmobile for the library. Devin teaches art at the college and is also a pretty successful artist himself. He makes assemblages, these gorgeous little shadow boxes. A little bit like Joseph Cornell. They met here, at the lake, where they were both spending the summer twenty years ago. They got married here as well, on the little island in the middle of the lake. Even though I've been to dozens of weddings, theirs is one I will always remember. We all had to take a boat out to the island. It was a blue-sky, brilliant-sun kind of day. Rows of white chairs were lined up underneath a canopy of leaves. Effie wore a chain of daisies in her hair. I was her maid of honor. I loaned her my grandmother's cameo (something old and something borrowed), and we painted our toenails blue. Zu-Zu was her something new, though nobody except for Devin and me knew it yet. She came six months later, followed by Plum. I drove up from New York both times, was with Effie and Devin when each of them was born. We promised each other as kids that we'd share this. Before we knew the world could be so inequitable, so unkind.

Yet every time I begin to feel that painful snag of envy, I need to remind myself that Effie has suffered too. That I hold no monopoly on sorrow. That she has earned this happiness. All of it.

“And Tess told me you're showing at Gagosian this winter?” I say, turning to Devin. “That is amazing. You must be so thrilled.”

“It's not a done deal yet. But we're talking,” he says. “Tessie, are you
cold?
”

I didn't realize I was shivering, my teeth chattering. It is alarming to me how lately I sometimes forget my body, about its needs. Its limits. This past winter I went out to the porch of our brownstone to get our mail and completely forgot that I wasn't wearing any socks or slippers. I stared at my numb feet, bewildered, before I realized what I'd forgotten.

I allow the wine to warm me and refuse the sweater Devin offers. “I have one in the car. I'm fine.”

“The long-suffering Tess,” Jake mutters.

“What?” I hiss.

“Nothing,” he says, and reaches for the wine.

“I'm going to bed,” Zu-Zu says, yawning. She stands up and comes around the table to stand behind me. She leans over my shoulders and hugs me. Her arms are so long and thin. I circle her wrists with my fingers. They feel fragile.

“Stay up a little longer?” I say. “We need to talk about all the fun things we'll do with you in New York this summer.”

She yawns again. “Tomorrow. I have ballet early in the morning.”

“On a weekday?” I ask.

“
Every
day,” she says, and kisses my cheek. Her lips are warm. I close my eyes.

“Come on, Plum,” she says, always the mother hen. And Plum kisses us all and then follows behind her sister, dragging her feet in the cold grass, dangling the transparent fish bones from her fingers before tossing them into the compost pile by the back door.

I watch them as they disappear into the camp. I lean back and study their silhouettes behind the curtains in the upstairs window. Jake and Devin laugh and chat. Effie reaches for my hand, and I reach for the wine, but it's empty. I reach for the second bottle, and it's empty too.

“I'll get another bottle,” I say. “Anybody want to share with me?” I avoid Jake's eyes.

“Why not,” Devin says.

Inside the camp, I search the refrigerator, the countertops. The cupboards. But the wine is gone. Upstairs I hear the girls' feet padding across the floor, the sound of their bedsprings as they crawl into bed. The tinkling sound of their voices. And I feel myself unraveling.

I open the refrigerator door again as if I could have possibly missed a bottle of wine the first time. And then I lean out the back door and say, “Hey! We're out. I'll run down to Hudson's.” Moths flutter around the porch light. A few fireflies spark in the hedges.

“You okay to drive?” Effie asks.

“I'm fine. I've just had a couple of glasses.”

This is not true. I am fairly sure I drank the last bottle almost entirely by myself. But the store is just five or six miles away. Six deserted, dirt-road miles away. And we need more wine. If I stay here, I may keep unraveling, a loose thread pulled from a sweater. The wine is the knot that will anchor me in place.

I grab Jake's keys from the pocket of his coat, feeling the same sinking quicksand feeling I got when I reached into his pocket three weeks ago. And so this time I ignore what I find inside. It is better not to read the string of texts on his phone. To try and decipher the cryptic narrative played out in gray and blue, to translate the emoticons and decode the messages tapped and then trapped inside their respective bubbles.

Standing in the narrow foyer of our brownstone, I'd scrolled backwards. Through weeks. Months. The conversation in reverse. The affair unfolding, Jake's lies unfolding. A delicate origami bird suddenly disassembled, exposed to be nothing more than a blank piece of paper. A fabrication.

And so tonight, I simply take the keys. Do not touch the phone he has, once again, left thoughtlessly behind for me to find. It is better not to see the name in white hovering over the conversation like a ghost:
Jess
. It is best not to call the number and hear the soft voice at the other end of the line.

I have known about her for three weeks, but I haven't said a word. For three weeks I have carried this secret, Jake's secret, around like a rock in my pocket, weighing me down. I imagine if I were to walk into the lake, I would sink. Powerless to the pull of gravity. Of this, and all the other impossibly heavy stones.

I sit in the car and turn the heater on high. The warm air blasts cold at first and then hot through the vents, and I feel the chill begin to thaw. I will go buy the wine. The guys will go to bed, and Effie and I will stay up talking. And I will reach into that secret pocket, hold out my palm, show her this sharp stone.

T
he dirt parking lot of Hudson's is illuminated by the neon beer signs. It is late now, nearing midnight, and the lot is empty save for a rusted-out Buick and a big white pickup truck with Massachusetts plates parked at the gas pumps. The bed of the truck is loaded down with piles of lawn bags, landscaping equipment. The passenger window of the truck is cracked open, and a block-headed black dog with crudely cropped ears presses its nose against the glass. I can hear it growling at me, and I quicken my steps to the entrance of the store.

The electronic bell announces me as I enter. Inside the shop, the fluorescent lights are bright and buzzing. It makes me squint my eyes. I wander the aisles, scan the dusty shelves, until I find the same wine we were drinking with dinner. The one that reminds me of late-summer peaches. I grab a bottle, just one, and go to the counter.

The man in front of me is buying a twelve-pack. He is wearing stained white coveralls and has greasy hair to his shoulders, a pair of paint-splattered sunglasses on top of his head. He smells of gasoline. He pays for his beer and asks the kid to put forty dollars on pump 2 before heading outside.

I set the wine bottle down, pluck a handful of miniature Reese's Cups from a plastic bucket on the counter, five cents each, and set them down next to the wine. I'll leave them on the girls' pillows while they sleep. When they were little I used to leave them gumdrops, and they were convinced there was a fairy named Star who came whenever I visited.

“That all for you?” the kid behind the counter asks. He's a teenager. His face is littered with whiteheads, his eyes shifty.

“Yeah,” I say, fishing through my purse for my wallet. I swipe my debit card. “Thanks.”

Outside, the guy in the coveralls is pumping gas into the white truck. He watches me as I go to my car; I can feel his eyes on my back. And the dog growls again, its throaty threat growing ominously. When the growls turn into manic barking, I rush to my car and slam the door shut, feel my heart pounding in my throat.

It isn't until I put the key in the ignition that I realize I probably should
not
be driving. This happens at home sometimes too. I'll have a few glasses of wine with dinner, and not feel anything until I lie down in bed and begin to spin. It's just six miles back to camp though, ten minutes on the road, I think, and turn the key.

 

There are no streetlights out here, but the moon is bright. I drive slowly, carefully, back to Effie and Devin's, the bottle of wine nestled in a brown paper bag in the seat I usually occupy. I can't get any radio stations here, so I turn the radio off and focus on the winding dirt road ahead of me. It's just a few miles.

When we were teenagers, I would come to stay with Effie's family at the camp, and we'd escape the adults by taking long walks or riding our bikes around the lake. We must have walked a thousand miles around and around the lake, up and down this road that leads away from the water and into town. I know its every turn. It is as familiar to me as the curve of Jake's spine, that geography I study each night when he turns away from me. That trench that begins between his shoulders and travels the length of him.

I know where the road bends, this place where it turns away from the lake, where the trees become as thick as a fairy tale's, as dark and terrifying as those in a dream. Strangely, I take comfort in this familiarity, in the way my whole body remembers this place.

And so I am startled when I hit a pothole and the car dips. I feel almost betrayed. By the road. By my own memory. The bottle of wine rolls off the passenger seat and onto the floor. I hear the glass crack, smell the tangy scent of it as it begins to spill.
Shit.
I slow the car and reach over, bending down to pick it up, or at least right it, with only my left hand on the wheel. But the bottle has broken. It's too late. And when I sit up again, there is something in my headlights.

I slam my foot on the brakes, the car squealing to a stop, dust from the road rising up in the headlights like smoke. The seat belt presses against my shoulder like someone telling me to stay back. My heart pounds in my throat and in my hands, which clutch the steering wheel.

In the middle of the road, just a few feet in front of me, is a child.

The headlights bathe her in a pool of light. She is ghostly, pale. Naked from the waist up, wearing a tattered tutu and plastic rain boots, red with black spots like a ladybug. She is maybe four years old. Her belly is round. She has curly brown hair. Wild eyes.

Catching my breath, I pull the car to the side of the road, turn it off but leave the headlights on and slowly open the door. The car
ding, ding, dings
to remind me that the lights are on. She looks startled by the noise and squints in the bright light, so I reach in and turn them off, leaving the door open so at least I have the dome light to see by.

She doesn't move.

Slowly, carefully, I walk toward her.

I can see now that she is bleeding, and I wonder if, somehow, I actually
hit
her. If I am responsible for the blood that is on her hands, dripping down her pale legs. But I know that is not possible. That the car stopped beforehand. That there was no collision. No impact.

“It's okay,” I say as I move toward her as I would a wounded animal.

Her eyes dart from me to the woods and back.

“I'm not going to hurt you,” I say.

I walk closer then and squat down so that I am at her level. I reach my hand out to her, tentatively, but still she shrinks back. Afraid.

“My name is Tess,” I say. “What's your name, sweetie?”

The cut is on her right hand. It looks new, deep. The blood on her legs is wet. I can see the blue rivers of her veins, which travel across the small expanse of her bare chest. It makes her seem even more vulnerable. Her skin is paper-thin. I feel my throat growing thick. The sensation is familiar. Ancient.

Her eyebrows furrow as she scowls. She doesn't trust me.

There is an orange plastic bunny barrette in her hair. It's come unfastened, and it holds precariously on to a curl. I resist the urge to snap it closed. I'm afraid to touch her.

“Are you cold?” I ask as softly as I can, but my voice sounds strange. Too loud. Too demanding. “I have a sweater,” I say. “In my car. I'll get it for you. Stay here.”

I stand up again and walk slowly, my knees shaking, backwards toward the car. I fumble with the keys in my hands, trying to find the button to pop the trunk, where I remember putting my soft gray sweater. But instead of hitting the trunk release, I accidentally hit the panic button and the sound pierces the air like a scream. I scramble to find the button to shut it off, to make the blaring sound stop. The car lights flash off and on.

And she runs.

She scurries down the small embankment at the edge of the road and back up the other side, slipping into the woods. There is no light. I can't see where she has gone. I look around, as though the answer is in the trees. But I am alone here.

Something surges in me, something primitive and insistent, and I follow her. I scramble down the embankment, feel the cold shock of water soaking through my sneakers, my socks, and then I am standing at the edge of the woods, which I know are thick and deep. It is impossibly dark. I listen for clues as to which direction she's gone, but there are too many sounds—the keening of frogs, the drone of crickets, the crush and crumble of twigs. I run, but I am aimless. What am I chasing? Which way do I go?

“Wait!” I holler. “Please!” I say, but my voice is swallowed by the night.

I feel the branches scratching every bit of exposed flesh on my body. I stop when a sharp branch stabs me in my ribs. I wince. I run deeper into the woods, but it is useless. I am dizzy with the scent of pine.

I stop and stand in the cold darkness, disoriented. The moon cannot reach me here. I turn in circles, looking for something. Some flash of her pale skin. Anything. But she is gone.

My shoulders feel hot, liquid adrenaline pooling in them in this odd aftermath. I am breathless, my heart pounding and my chest heaving. I turn toward the light of my car, which shines weakly through the trees behind me. I stumble through the brush back to the road. I leave the woods, leap across the trickling stream to the road. I go to my car, sit in the driver's seat, and reach for my phone.

Suddenly behind me, there are headlights. I get out of the car again, clutching the phone, and shield my eyes from the bright lights as the car comes toward me. I wave my hands, trying to flag it down, but it simply speeds past. And then I see; it's the white landscaping truck from Hudson's. And it leaves a giant cloud of dust in its wake.

Asshole,
I think.
Masshole,
I correct myself, watching the Massachusetts plates disappear into the darkness.

My fingers are cold, fumbling, but I am somehow able to conjure the illuminated keypad, press 911. I tap
Send
. But there is nothing. No signal. Still, I hold the useless phone to my ear. Try to think about how I will explain what I just saw to the operator.

And then I remember.
I've been drinking
. I am sitting here in a car, with a broken bottle of wine; the carpet drenched. The car reeks, tangy and alcoholic. What would a cop say? Could I get arrested?

My entire body is trembling now; I can barely get the keys in the ignition. I try to break down what needs to be done into manageable steps. Increments. Start the car. Drive back to Effie and Devin's. Use the landline. Call the police. Tell them what I saw. I catalog the details, recite them like a prayer. Pink tutu, ladybug rain boots.
I've been drinking.

Then, as I start to pull away, I realize I need to be able to find this spot again. There is nothing but my own memory of this road to rely on. I need to be able to recall where I am, where I found her, where I lost her.

I search the car frantically for something, anything, I can leave behind. Something more substantial than the scraps of paper in my purse. Something that won't just blow away. But there is nothing but the broken bottle of wine. Jake and Devin unloaded everything we had out of the car after we arrived.

This time I am able to find the button to pop the trunk without setting off any alarms, and I get out of the car and open the trunk. I find the sweater I'd wanted to give her. I pull it out and set it at the edge of the road. A marker. An offering.

And then I get in the car again, turn the key, and drive.