Shoe Addicts Anonymous (13 page)

They both dissolved into laughter.

Helene and Lorna spent a long evening talking and laughing, and burning through two bottles of wine and an entire twelve-cup pot of coffee. It wasn’t until almost 1
A.M.
that Helene finally left.

Judging from her own state of inebriation, Lorna guessed that she herself had probably consumed the lion’s share of the wine, since for at least the past hour Helene had been drinking water.

So when Lorna went to the kitchen and noticed a car sliding out of the parking lot after Helene’s BMW, at first she didn’t think anything of it.

Then, when it occurred to her that it might be the same car that was in the parking lot last week, she thought she had to be imagining things.

But the thought nagged her for hours, even keeping her from sleeping. Finally, just after 2
A.M.
, when her conscience told her it was better to make an ass of herself warning Helene of a threat that didn’t exist than to ignore what might be a
real
risk, she called Helene to tell her she thought she might be being followed.

H
elene woke with a start to the theme song from
Bewitched
.

It was her cell phone, the ring she had designated for social calls. Fun stuff. Political calls came in with the ominous opening to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

She opened the phone quickly to stop the noise, then looked at Jim, sleeping heavily next to her. His snores could have rattled the windowpanes. Thank goodness he normally slept in his own room. Tonight had just been a conjugal visit, the price she paid for her material comfort regardless of whether she and Jim were actually getting along.

When he’d confirmed, while undressing her, that she’d stopped taking the pill, she said of course she had. It was a lie. But she had, at least, remembered to remove them from the drawer and hide them in the lid of a shoe box in her closet instead. She was surprised Jim hadn’t gotten to them first, actually. Two entire days had passed between her arrest and her remembering what had instigated the whole thing in the first place.

She crept away from him now, feeling a mixture of emotional detachment from him and a lingering tingle from his sexual skills. It was at least one reward for fulfilling her duty.

“Hello?”

“Helene?” It was a woman. With just the one word, it was hard to figure out who it was, though the voice sounded familiar.

Of course, familiar wasn’t always good.

“Who is this?” Helene spoke in an urgent whisper, padding silently across the room in bare feet so as not to wake Jim.

God only knew what he would conclude about her getting middle-of-the-night calls.

Actually,
she
didn’t know what to make of this either. “Who’s calling?” she asked before the caller had the chance to respond to her the first time.

“It’s Lorna Rafferty,” the woman said quickly, and the mystery of whose voice it was fell into place. “I’m really sorry to be calling so late,” she went on.

Helene’s shoulders sank with relief. But what had she been afraid of? Who had she feared the call was from? Mom and Dad? Ormond’s? Maybe…

Gerald Parks?

Bingo!

She had tried not to obsess over him, but even the thought of his name sent a shiver of nausea through her.

“Lorna,” she said, relieved but unsettled by the thought of Gerald Parks. “Is everything okay?”

“I hope so. That is, I think so. God, you’ll probably think I’m the biggest idiot for calling.” She sounded flustered, stumbling over herv words. “I probably should have waited until morning. Or until next week—”

“What’s going on, Lorna?”

“Okay.” Lorna took a breath that hissed across the telephone line. “I’m just going to spit it out, even though I think it probably doesn’t mean anything.”

Helene was getting anxious now. “Lorna, what
is
it?”

“I think maybe…I think maybe someone’s following you. Do you have security or something?”

“No. Why?”

“Well, I thought maybe with your husband in the public eye, and being a politician and all, that maybe they gave you Secret Service—”

“I mean, why do you think someone’s following me?” Helene knew she sounded sharp, and she didn’t want to, but she’d had the same uncomfortable feeling, and it was nothing short of shocking to hear it from this person she’d only just met.

“Last week when you were here, there was this guy leaning against a beat-up old car in the parking lot, looking up in the direction of my apartment. That was why I was so nervous about who was coming.”

Helene remembered that. Lorna had looked out the window about twenty times. Helene had just figured she was waiting for a boyfriend or something after the meeting.

“Anyway,” Lorna went on. “I was sort of looking out there, keeping an eye on whether he was there or not—I don’t know why—and I noticed that when you drove away, he drove out, too. At first I thought it was Sandra—”

“And it wasn’t?”

“No, she forgot something and came back up to my apartment right after you left.”

Dread settled in the pit of Helene’s stomach. “Is that it?” She had a bad feeling it wasn’t.

And she was right. “Well, it happened tonight, too,” Lorna said. “Same car and everything. Of course, it could totally be a coincidence. In fact, maybe someone else in the building has some sort of Tuesday-night thing going on, and I’m just overreacting. Or maybe it wasn’t even the same car.”

Helene doubted it. “What did the guy look like?”

“Blond. Blah. Nondescript, really. Medium weight, medium height, medium build.

Gerald Parks. “Did he have a camera, as far as you could tell?”

“No.” On this point, Lorna was firm. “He just stood there at the trunk of his car with his arms crossed in front of him. You don’t have to worry about pictures, I don’t think.” She hesitated, then added, “Not that you were doing anything incriminating.”

Not this time. “Thanks for letting me know,” she said, thinking this
had
to be a coincidence. Gerald Parks was not shy; if he was following her, he’d probably just as soon confront her. After all, he still wanted money.

Her own paranoia was probably just contagious, and Lorna had picked up on it. Helene would keep an eye out, certainly, but she didn’t want her new friendship to be shadowed by any discomfort. “Sometimes local photographers have absolutely no other stories, so they’ll follow me looking for something.” And sometimes they found it. “It’s irritating, but nothing to worry about.”

Lorna let out a breath across the line. “That’s a relief. Look, I’m really sorry for bothering you. You must think I’m such a ninny.”

Helene laughed. “Of course not! I think you’re a friend who was concerned, and I really appreciate it.”

After they hung up, Helene lay in bed for a long time looking at the glow of the driveway lights on her ceiling. She was in her own room, her sanctuary. The only place she even came close to feeling like herself.

But having Jim there changed the feeling entirely.

Another bad sign about their marriage.

She got out of bed and padded quietly across the cold wood floor to the front window. She wanted to unlock it and let in the summer night air, maybe smell the jasmine that she knew was blooming outside because she herself had planted it.

But she couldn’t open the window or the alarm would go off.

Instead she leaned on the narrow sill and looked outside at the deep purple sky, the scattering of stars overhead, and the faint glow of the city reaching upward.

At times like this she longed for the big sky of her childhood, so filled with stars at night that it looked like sugar spilled on a dark tablecloth. She could almost smell the deep green scent of West Virginia, and she was half-tempted to get in her car and drive north for an hour and see it.

Of course she couldn’t. Helene had no real business there, and if she went—and if the wrong people found out about it—it would raise questions she didn’t want to answer.

So she went back to her bed, opened the bedside table to take out the bottle of sleeping pills her doctor had prescribed her during Jim’s last political race, and took two of them.

That way, for a few hours at least, she could block out the present, the future,
and
the past.

The woman on the box had long, gleaming, dark blond hair, with subtle highlights that added dimension and made her blue eyes look bright like colored glass. The color was called Deep Palomino.

What Sandra had ended up with was dark grayish green, with frayed and fuzzy ends.

Her blue eyes
did
look bright, however. They always did after a good cry. And so far Sandra had cried her way through
Jeopardy!, Survivor,
and
Law & Order.
She was headed for the evening news, and if the entire jar of mayonnaise—well, Miracle Whip—she had applied and sealed on with a plastic grocery bag didn’t work, she would probably make it all the way through
The Tonight Show
.

Calling the number included with the instructions had been of no use.

“Unfortunately, you’re going to have to wait a month before you can do anything,” the woman had said after Sandra had waited on hold, listening to one instrumental Henry Mancini song after another, for about half an hour. No doubt there had been hundreds of other green-haired callers before her, because she had followed the directions
exactly
.

“A
month?
Why would I have to wait a
month
?”

“Because you opened the cuticle by using the product and, from the condition you described your hair as being in, if you put another product on, the developer might burn right through the hair.”

Sandra pictured herself with half her hair short and shaggy and the rest breaking off slowly.

She could definitely see why they’d recommend against that.

“What if I put on some of that gray coverage color, like maybe in dark brown or something. Wouldn’t that cover it?”

“No, because your hair was highlighted, some of it will grab the color more than the rest, and you could end up with a calico pattern.”

Sandra mentally weighed that image against the long green she had now and wasn’t immediately sure which was worse.

“What if I go to a salon?” she asked, though the whole point of buying the box and doing it at home was that she hadn’t had to go to a salon. “Could they fix it?”

“They might say they can, honey, but their products are just as capable of burning your hair off as something you might buy yourself. I wouldn’t chance it. If you wait a month for the cuticle to lie flat again and the condition of your hair to improve, then you can go to a salon for color correction.”

“That’s it? That’s all you can suggest?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am.”

“I bought your product in good faith. How can you get away with turning people’s hair green and telling them they have to live with it?”

“The directions do say not to use it on highlighted hair.”

“Where? Where does it say that?” Sandra had read instructions one through four word for word.

“Check the small print at the bottom.”

Sandra was exasperated. “No one reads that!”

“Unfortunately, lawyers do,” the woman said, sounding sympathetic for a moment.

This was devastating. She was finally starting to get out again, and this happened. “Well, thanks anyway. I guess.”

“Certainly, ma’am. And as a gesture of goodwill, we’d be glad to send you a coupon for a new box if you could give me your address.”

Were they kidding? A coupon for a new box? Sandra supposed she’d need it in the unlikely event that she was able to get her hair to return to a normal color and found herself with the urge to go Grinch again.

She’d hung up in disgust and trolled the Internet for home remedies. One of the most popular was to apply a strong dandruff shampoo and let it sit for an hour to lift the color. But that would require not only going out to the store, but doing it with hair that looked like something that had been plucked out of sewage and placed atop her head.

Mayonnaise seemed like the better option tonight. Something about the vinegar lifting the color and the egg conditioning her hair. Hopefully Miracle Whip Light had the same magical hair-mending properties. She’d used the last carefully measured tablespoon of her mayonnaise on a turkey breast sandwich for lunch.

It was so stupid, really. She could have afforded to go to a salon; it was just her damn phobia getting in her way again. After a really good week—kicked off by her meeting with the Shoe Addicts—she’d suddenly, out of the blue, had a panic attack this afternoon as she was getting ready to go to Lorna’s.

It was weird because up until then she had thought the auricular therapy was going so well. The panic had felt like a major setback. Instead of going out to Lorna’s, she’d stayed in her apartment twisting her hands, trying to catch her breath, and wishing to God she were someone else.

That’s where the hair coloring had come in. She’d bought it a few months back when she was in a similar mood, but the mood had passed—a fortunate thing, she realized now—and she’d never used the color. But tonight, as she watched
Wheel of Fortune
and admired Vanna White’s hair, she remembered the two boxes of Deep Palomino in her linen closet (she’d bought them previously in a bad mood) and decided to change her look, and therefore her life, for the better.

It never occurred to her to examine the bottles inside to make sure they both said “Palomino” and not “Dark Ash Blond,” and even if it had, she wouldn’t have realized that dark ash blond would grab her previously highlighted hair and turn it the color of rotten asparagus.

It was perfectly fitting for her to top it with salad dressing.

The question was, what was she going to do next? Giving green hair to a person who didn’t want to leave the house on a
good
day seemed unusually cruel. But Sandra was one who was always looking for signs, and she had to wonder if this was one.

Maybe she needed to do the very thing she didn’t want to—maybe she needed to go out and just…submerge herself in the embarrassment.

In psychology they called it
flooding
.

She thought about it for a moment. It was Thursday night, a little after eleven. The streets would be crowded—they always were in the Adams Morgan area—but not quite so crowded as they’d be tomorrow night. Not that that mattered, because if she told herself she’d wait and do it
tomorrow,
then
tomorrow
would always be a day away.

She was going to do it.

It was impossible to say just what possessed her, or where she got the nerve to go out—hatless—and be seen, but twenty minutes later, she was glad she had.

“Sandra?”

For a moment, it seemed like this was going to be the realization of a nightmare.