Lie Still (7 page)

I married a man professionally trained to rescue me. I love him more than anything on earth. I am afraid to tell him my whole story, although I feel that the time to do it is coming closer.

Every morning in the shower, I take my finger and draw good
luck symbols in the fog on the glass: a heart with my initials, a four-leaf clover, a peace sign, a cross.

I don’t think I’m an unlucky person. I just wouldn’t call myself lucky.

I
found myself back at the entrance to The Manses of Castlegate three days later. The twangy troll at the gatehouse was gone, replaced by a large-boned black woman named Shaunette, so identified by the Hobby Lobby name tag that she’d apparently forgotten to take off after her shift. Shaunette was working more than one job, and I mean
working
. Nothing was going to get past Shaunette.

While Shaunette grilled me about my business on “the property,” I wondered whether her mother had been counting on a boy and had tacked on the “ette” after an exhausting labor. I hoped Shaunette’s zeal for security would save me from spending the next hour or so at an impromptu tea with Caroline that would probably involve a stilted conversation about Impressionism and God knows what else. I debated saying no on the phone yesterday, but Caroline cast her spell of charm and guilt and suckered me in. It is tricky turning down a Southerner. I was going to need to get better at it.

No lucky break from Shaunette. She handed me a forty-percent-off coupon for Hobby Lobby, and waved me through. “We just got some good ceramic roosters in,” she imparted confidentially.

So now I stood under Caroline’s arch, studying its careful geometry, thinking how I would sketch it. I tugged up the front of my sundress, which was sliding down provocatively. I had let a relentless saleswoman in one of the local maternity boutiques convince me that cantaloupe-sized black, white, and yellow polka dots provided a pleasant optical illusion for a woman in
the second trimester. I paid $258.97 to look like a pregnant beetle emerging from the rain forest.

The door opened before I could knock, revealing a pretty Hispanic woman in traditional black and white maid garb. I remembered her moving silently through the background at the Bunko party.

“I’m Maria,” she said, all shyness and obedience. But as she led me a few feet down the hall, her swaying hips said something else entirely. She stopped abruptly in front of a lacquered black door marked by an intricate pen-and-ink drawing, which I had passed by without noticing the other night.

It was the first thing that set me slightly on edge.

A Chinese girl lounged on a couch like an exotic bird, provocatively offering a tiny foot to the man bowed and kneeling on the floor in front of her. A crown of pearls rested on her head. Her hands were bound behind her back by black string. The image was bluntly asking:
Who holds the power?

Maria twisted the doorknob and nudged me into a mahogany-paneled, windowless room. It was dimly lit by the red and yellow prisms of a Tiffany floor lamp and the orange glow from a gas log in the fireplace. A weak stream from the air-conditioning vent in the ceiling blew the idea of winter on my bare shoulders.

I was not the only guest. Three other women, two of whom I recognized from Caroline’s party, sat stiffly like posed mannequins in chairs placed in a careful semi-circle. Tiffany was closest to the fireplace, pressing a glass of iced tea to the sweaty sheen on her cheek. Three chairs stood empty. One for me. One for Caroline, who had risen and stepped toward me with a tight smile and an outstretched hand. One for someone else.

“Hello, dear.” Caroline’s grip was perfunctory. A purple silk shift draped her slender body like a Grecian statue. Her lipstick matched the brilliant square-cut ruby nestled on a gold chain
in the hollow of her delicate neck. The whole effect was bold, simple, and stunning. She gestured to the straight-back chair beside hers. “Please have a seat. You remember Tiffany and Holly, right? And this is Lucinda Beswetherick. I don’t believe you’ve met.”

Frozen smiles from the three women, like Best Actress nominees waiting for someone to rip open their fate. It reminded me of another room, a long time ago. A room I hadn’t escaped. I had wanted to run then, too.

“Super-cute dress.” Tiffany was staring at my polka-dotted wonder. She was mimicking the exact words of the woman who sold it to me. I was pretty sure neither of them meant it.

“Thanks. Nice to see all of you.” My eyes were pulled to the behemoth image rising behind Caroline: a floor-to-ceiling oil portrait of our hostess as a teenager. She sat English-style on a white horse that appeared to have sprung loose from a fairy tale. Either the artist painted a sycophantic lie, or Caroline was devastatingly beautiful in her youth. There was more raw sexuality in this painting than in the implied bondage in the hall.

“We’ll get started when our final guest shows up.” There was a tinge of irritation in Caroline’s tone. She waited for me to sit before sitting herself. Her skirt slipped up several inches above her knees, showing off legs that reminded me of a dancer’s, all sinewy muscle.

Holly, an interchangeable blonde with an interchangeable Birkin bag, sprang to life and bowed her head to her phone, in the middle of a frantic text conversation.

“What’s wrong?” Tiffany’s hyper-whisper easily carried.

Holly didn’t bother to whisper. “Alan Jr. just told me he needs to have a potato carved into a Russian dictator by tomorrow morning. I pay $15,000 a year to a private school and my reward is that I’ll be up at midnight cutting out felt clothes for a freaking potato.” The phone grunted twice and her thumbs angrily
tapped another response to the forgetful little person on the other end.

“Do Brezhnev,” Lucinda advised. She spoke with a slight lisp. “Raymond did him last year. We got five extra points for the eyebrows and another ten for all the thumbtacks we stuck in him for medals.”

“Brezhnev had a fetish for them, right?” I asked. The women turned and stared at me blankly. “Medals, I mean. Didn’t he award himself the Lenin Peace Prize?” Silence. “Black feathers would make great eyebrows,” I added weakly.

In New York, this was my skill. Carrying a room, using odd bits of information to insinuate myself and make everyone feel a little more comfortable. Here, I shifted in my seat, rebuffed.

More vigorous thumb action from Holly.

What in the hell are we waiting for?

It was boiling in this room, a hell entirely of my own making. I wasn’t here just because of Mike. Part of me was still that nineteen-year-old girl wanting to be accepted.
Will she ever go away? Stop seeking assurance?

“That’s a lovely portrait, Caroline,” I tried. “Very skilled. Who is the artist? Did you sit for it?”

“No one you would know, dear. It’s actually a copy of a photograph taken when I was fifteen. My father sent the photo to an elderly portrait artist in Paris. He is long dead and forgotten, I’m sure. He painted it and shipped it over the ocean. I still remember the day they unbundled it from the truck and hung it in the parlor. My sister was so jealous.”

“And the horse?”

“One of many.” She spoke a little more curtly. The other women in the room tilted our way, like someone had pulled a string through their bodies.

“Are you able to see your sister often these days?”

“My sister is deceased,” she said coldly.

“I’m so sorry,” I stammered. “I had heard about your husband and … son, but I didn’t know …”

There was a sound at the door. Caroline’s head whipped toward it.

Misty stood in the open frame, a living, breathing curse word. A rhinestone-studded T-shirt clung tautly to her chest. A white leather miniskirt hugged her butt, stopping one inch from obscenity. Bare white legs descended into short yellow cowboy boots. She could have passed for seventeen, Caroline’s naughty child who spent the night out without calling. It occurred to me that she might have a personality disorder.

“My apologies for being late, Caroline.” She touched her hostess’s cheek briefly with her lips, leaving a light lavender smear. “Todd and I kept getting cut off. A bad overseas connection.” She plopped into the empty place next to me and made a face. “We’re having a few issues.”

Caroline’s expression said she didn’t believe Misty, not for a second, while I wondered about openly using a fight with her spouse as an excuse and showing up for tea dressed like a Skype hooker. After Misty’s biting attack on these women at our lunch, I wondered about her showing up at all.

But, thank God.

Caroline didn’t say a word. She reached for a small wooden box on the Louis XV end table beside her. The signal, apparently, that we were beginning. Every eye in the room was now glued to that box.

“As most of you know, there is one opening in my club this year because of Helen’s unfortunate death. I thought this would be a good way for me to get to know the prospective candidates a little better.”

Who was Helen?

I stared at the box.
Human ashes?
Misty stared at her bitten nails. Tiffany eagerly propped herself forward. Holly appeared
to want to power through this as quickly as possible and get after that potato. Lucinda of the multisyllabic last name tossed back two pills from a prescription bottle, a little too late.

“Your husband’s resume is obviously going to be a huge asset to our little community, Emily.” Before I could respond, Caroline nodded at Misty. “I’m sure not everyone will cotton to you two being on the fast track. The other girls here have been applying for years.”

Tiffany shot me a death stare, while I made a vague mental note to Google the etymology of
cotton
as a verb, during the part of my pregnant day when I sprawled on the bed with orange Doritos and Googled random things. During the part of my day where I pretended there was only one of me, not two or three or four.

“In this box, there are five slips of paper,” Caroline continued serenely. “Each one is a secret that belongs to someone in this room. We’ll pass the box, and each of you will randomly pull one out and read it aloud to the group.”

Not the boxed remains of a dead person. But this—what
was
this? I waited for the burst of laughter. For rebellion. For people to jump up and say they’d left these kinds of silly games behind a long time ago, at around fifteen, with séances and slutty bathroom graffiti. But no one flinched.

Caroline passed the box to me. I took it. I had a decision to make. It was a lovely box. Dark mahogany. Old. An intricate ivory rose was inlaid in the lid. My hand shook a little as I fiddled with the brass catch.

When I raised the lid, I smelled the sea. Salt. Decomposition.

Guilt.

The box held a jumble of white slips of paper that appeared to have escaped from fortune cookies. I tried to buy time by running one of my fingers over the words etched into the inside of the lid.
The rose remembers the dust from which it came
.

Caroline leaned over and moved my fingers into the nest of paper.

“Pull one out and read it aloud.” Insistent.

What did she know about me?
I fumbled to separate one piece of paper from the others and smoothed it out between my fingers. I heard a voice, surely not mine, because the smart me would already be in her car, turning the key.

“I killed Alex.”

I
wanted to take the words back as soon as they floated from my mouth. Words like insidious dandelion seeds, blown from a slight puff of breath. Poisonous words that would thrive in a room like this, where the soil was already disturbed. But that must be the point.

One of the women in the room drew in an audible breath, either of shock or guilt. I didn’t care who.

This was not my secret.

I stared at the other slips of paper, wondering which one was.

“Pass the box,” Caroline ordered.

Reluctantly, I handed the box to Misty.

Misty glanced at her slip and then over at me, hesitating. Then she read in a clear, calm voice:
“This baby is not my husband’s.”

“Are you kidding me?” The words flew out of my mouth. “How could you read that? Of course this baby is my husband’s!”

Caroline’s hand landed lightly on my knee. “Emily, this is a
bonding exercise. We hold our thoughts until the end. You do not know if other women in this room are carrying a child.” I sucked in a breath. Every other belly in this room was a washboard. Actually, Tiffany’s and Holly’s sank in, like small moon craters.

Tiffany eagerly grabbed the box out of Misty’s hands. “This is fun. It reminds me of the old days at Alpha Chi. We told each other everything.” She giggled nervously, smoothing out her piece of paper. “This one is
bad
. It says:
I do not believe in God
. Well, I can tell you this is not my secret. Just ask the woman I witnessed to in the Kroger express lane yesterday.”

She thrust the box at Holly, whose hands were tightly clenched in her lap, a one-inch red nail digging into her wrist like an implement of suicide. It also looked sharp enough to mutilate a potato.