The Perfect Stranger (2 page)

She has a feeling it isn’t.

All those needles—God, how she hated needles, even when they were lifelines—endlessly poking into her, delivering medication, drawing blood . . . all for what?

There are no more lifelines.

She’s been doing her best to prepare herself for what lies ahead—if not in the immediate future, then at some point down the road.

Sooner or later she’ll be told to call hospice and get her affairs in order.

Even then, she knows, many doctors aren’t able—or perhaps aren’t willing—to provide a time frame.

She’s seen it happen to her online friends time and again, and now it’s going to happen to her. Maybe not this year, maybe not even next, but eventually this damned disease is going to get her.

She’s privately told one or two of her online friends of her situation, but not everyone. Eventually she’ll have to write an official blog post about it. The moment it goes live, she’ll become
that
person—the doomed friend everyone rallies around.

I’m not ready. I don’t want to be
her.
Not yet. I want to be
me
for as long as I can.

There’s only one way to do that: pretend this isn’t really happening.

The lyrics to an old Styx song—one she and Hank used to listen to on vinyl back in their dating days—keep running through her head.

You’re fooling yourself . . . you don’t believe it . . .

She’ll get through her days staying busy so that she won’t have to dwell on the future—and get through her nights the best she can.

Right now she’ll have to settle for over-the-counter pain relievers without the courtesy of Bourbon to numb the pain in her back—or the disquieting, morbid thoughts that sometimes strike at night, especially when she’s here alone.

With a sigh, she leaves the lamplit bedroom and flicks on the hallway light. As she makes her way to the stairs, she hears a whisper of movement below.

“Hank?” she calls.

No answer.

Of course not. He’s in Cleveland. She spoke to him a half hour ago on the phone, although . . .

He could very well have just
said
he was in Cleveland. Maybe he was really on the road, headed home early to surprise her.

“Hank! Is that you?”

Absolutely still, poised mid-flight with her hand on the banister, Meredith is enveloped in complete silence.

“Is someone there?”

No.

And yet—she did hear something before. Or perhaps it’s more just a sensation of not being alone in the house . . .

Or did you just imagine it altogether?

For a long time she stands there, listening—one moment certain she can feel someone there, the next, certain she’s losing it.

Just last week she blogged about this very scenario. Not about things that go bump in the night, per se, but about getting older and potentially senile.

That entry stemmed from Hank’s report that his mother suspected her neighbor—a distinguished widowed professor—of sneaking into her condo in the wee hours, trying on her clothes and taking perfumed bubble baths in her tub.

Her blog entry was written entirely tongue in cheek, as so many of them are. Even during the darkest days of her cancer treatment, she’s always managed to find a humorous angle.

She’d started the blog at the suggestion of her therapist, who knew she’d dreamed of graduating college and becoming a writer before marriage and motherhood set her on a different path. Even the title of the blog page—
Pink Stinks
—is meant to be an irreverent poke at the breast cancer awareness movement.

Determined to keep her latest diagnosis to herself, she wrote a blog post last week about the inevitability of aging and the many signs—now that she’s past her sixtieth birthday—that the process is well under way.

That post was greeted by a barrage of positive, amusing comments from her regular followers and a couple of newcomers who have since stuck around. Someone—who was it?—said that she was wise and had a tough outer shell, like a turtle, and turtles are known for their longevity—
So I’m sure you’re going to live a good long time!

From your lips—rather, fingertips—to God’s ears,
Meredith wanted to respond to whoever wrote that, but of course, she didn’t.

Standing on the stairway, listening for movement below and wondering if she should go back to the bedroom for the baseball bat Hank keeps under his side of the bed, she mentally composes the opening of a new blog post she’ll write tomorrow.

So there I was, armed and dangerous in my granny nightgown . . .

Oh, geez. She really is losing it, isn’t she?

And her taut posture as she stands clenched from head to toe, clutching the railing, isn’t helping her back pain.

Either turn around and go to bed, or go downstairs, get what you need, and then go to bed.

Meredith opts for the latter. She flips a wall switch at the foot of the stairs, then another in the living room, and the one in the dining room, reassured as she makes her way through familiar rooms bathed in light. As always, she notices not just the threadbare area rug, the worn spots on the furniture, the chipped paint on the baseboards, but also the clay bowl Beck had made in Girl Scouts, the bookshelf lined with Hardy Boys titles Hank had handed down to his sons and newer picture books Meredith had collected for the grandchildren, the faint pencil marks on the doorjamb where they marked their growing kids’ height over the years . . .

It’s a good house. It’s been a good life here.

Whenever Hank talks about selling it now, she shakes her head. “This is home. I don’t ever want to leave.”

In the kitchen cabinet where she keeps her daily vitamins and the medications prescribed to keep cancer at bay for as long as possible, she finds a bottle of drugstore brand painkillers.

Having left her glasses upstairs on the nightstand, she can’t quite make out the label. It looks to her like they expired last year, but they’re probably fine. Fine, as in safe to swallow, if not as effective as they might have been.

She takes three, just in case they’re less potent. Washing them down with tap water, she wonders how long it will take before the pills ease the tension in her muscles.

It really is too bad she can’t take something stronger.

Not medicine. Just a nip of something that will warm her from the inside out, and let her sleep.

She glances longingly at the high cupboard above the fridge where they’ve kept the booze since their firstborn, Teddy, reached high school.

Ha. As if keeping the stash out of arm’s reach would deter him and his friends from getting into it. It didn’t work, they discovered belatedly, when Hank realized that one of their offspring—by then, all three were in college—had replaced the contents of a bottle of Woodford Reserve with iced tea.

Still, they were good kids, Meredith remembers as she sets the empty water glass into the sink. Spirited, but good. She’s blessed to have watched them grow up and give her grandchildren—three grandsons so far between Teddy and Neal and their wives, with another little stinkerdoodle on the way this fall.

That’s what Meredith calls her grandchildren, just as she always called her own children: a nice batch of stinkerdoodles.

Everyone is hoping for a girl this time.

Everyone but her. Secretly, she worries about passing the cancer gene to a new generation.

Men get breast cancer, too,
one of her blogger friends pointed out when she wrote about that concern.

True. But it’s not nearly as common.

She can’t help but worry about the health of her daughter and future granddaughters. She’s been warning Rebecca that she needs to do self-exams and start her yearly mammogram screening in another couple of years.

Beck, of course, waves her mother off. She’s too young and full of life to worry about illness.

So was I at her age. I never thought something like this could happen. No family history . . .

You just never know.

It’s been over a year now since Beck married Keith. They’ll probably be starting a family, too, soon.

Meredith has so much to live for. If only . . .

Shaking her head, she turns off the light and leaves the kitchen, never noticing the cut screen on the window facing the newly planted garden out back, or the shadow of a human figure lurking in the far corner.

Tragic News

This is Meredith’s daughter, Rebecca, writing. I don’t know how to say this. There’s no easy way. I’m still in shock. But you all meant a lot to my mom, and she would want our family to let you all know that she passed away this weekend.

—Excerpt from Meredith’s blog,
Pink Stinks

Chapter 2

The news reaches Landry Wells on the sort of picture-perfect summer morning when it feels as though nothing can possibly go wrong.

It’s warm—southern Alabama in June is always warm—but not yet too steamy for sipping hot coffee on the second-story porch swing. A gentle breeze stirs Spanish moss draped in the live oaks framing her view of Mobile Bay, and the world is hushed but for chirping birds and the staccato spritzing of the lawn sprinklers below.

Still unshowered, wearing the shorts and T-shirt she threw on to walk the dog after rolling out of bed, Landry sits with her bare feet propped on the rail, laptop open to the Web page that bears the shocking news.

News that struck out of nowhere on what promised to be another precious, precious ordinary day.

Years ago—after a routine mammogram gave way to the sonogram that led to the biopsy that resulted in a cancer diagnosis—she couldn’t imagine ever living another ordinary day. But the women to whom she turned for support—an online group of breast cancer patients and survivors she now counts among her closest friends—assured her that normality would return, sooner or later. They were right.

Every night, when she climbs into bed, she thanks God for the gift of a day in which she carted her teenagers around and did loads of laundry and sat sipping coffee with her husband; a day filled with reading and writing, weeding the garden, feeding a family, watching good television and decadently bad television, grumbling about crumbs and clutter and mosquito bites but never really minding any of it.

She watches a monarch butterfly alight on a pink rose blossom in her sunlit flower bed below and thinks of Meredith.

She had been doing so well. Yes, Meredith had reported a recurrence well over a year ago. Her oncologist found some suspicious cells in her breast, and after a radical mastectomy and radiation, pronounced her clear again.

That’s what she wrote, anyway, in one of her typically cheerful blog entries.

Was it a lie? Was she shielding them all from the grim fact that her cancer had spread; that she was dying? Was she trying to avoid the familiar shift in interaction they had all witnessed on other cancer blogs?

Landry considers the inevitable scenario that commences whenever a fellow blogger reports, in a post laced with incredulity, bravado, false cheer—or all of the above—that her doctors have run out of treatment options.

There’s always a prompt outpouring of support, prayers, hollow optimism, and talk of miracles. Eventually—too often overnight—the blogger’s posts will begin to detail alarming symptoms, hospital visits, hospice arrangements. Attempts at breezy humor fall flat; entries become increasingly graphic and sporadic, infused with sadness, weariness, fear.

Then come the final posts written by someone else—a daughter, a husband, a friend—sometimes chronicling the blogger’s final days or hours, often reporting that the patient wants her Internet friends to know she’s thinking of them; that their comments are being shared with her in her lucid moments. Once in a while the blogger’s own last entry—sometimes intended as a farewell, but often not—is followed by just one other: a loved one’s terse report of the death and funeral arrangements.

With Meredith, there’s been none of that. Her daughter’s post had struck out of the blue.

Bewildered, Landry scrolls up to the previous blog entry. Bearing Saturday’s date, it was written by Meredith herself.

Having read it when it first appeared, Landry is already familiar with the buoyant account of Meredith’s weekend morning spent planting a vegetable garden in her Ohio backyard.

Her husband was still away, she wrote, so she had to dig and lug heavy bags of fertilizer herself. But it would all be worthwhile, she said in closing, a few months from now when she got to enjoy
my favorite treat in the whole wild world: home-grown tomatoes, heavy with sugar and juice, eaten straight off the vine, sprinkled with salt and still warm from the sun.

The woman who wrote those words seemed to be looking ahead to August without reservation. Was she deluding herself, or trying to fool everyone else, writing about arduous physical labor when she was in fact confined to a hospital bed in the final stages of her disease?

This is crazy. It can’t be real.

Maybe it’s some kind of practical joke, or . . .

Maybe Meredith’s blogger account was hacked, or . . .

Maybe it’s real and she just didn’t want us to know.

Feeling vaguely betrayed, Landry opens a search window, types in the name Meredith, and stops to think for a moment.

She knows her friend’s last name is Haywood—or is it Heywood? Heyworth? Something like that. And she lives in a Cincinnati suburb . . . but which one?

Funny how you can know someone intimately without having that basic information; without ever having come face-to-face in the real world.

She types Haywood into the Google box and presses Enter.

There are a number of hits for
Meredith Haywood
— none that fit.

But when she replaces
Haywood
with
Heywood,
she finds herself looking at a death notice from the
Cincinnati Enquirer,
accompanied by a familiar photo: the head shot Meredith uses on her blog.

It’s real.

A lump rises in Landry’s throat, but she pushes it back and reads on, dry-eyed.

There was a time when she cried over Hallmark Christmas commercials. She wrote about that on her blog last December. Turned out that a surprising number of her followers did the same sappy thing.

These days it takes a hell of a lot more than a sentimental advertisement to bring tears to her eyes. She got used to holding them back in the wake of her diagnosis, not wanting to frighten her children, or depress her husband, or feel sorry for herself. Perhaps, most of all, she was afraid that if she allowed herself to start crying, she’d never stop.

But this is no Hallmark ad. It’s a death notice—albeit a brief one, not a full-blown obituary. Details are sparse, funeral arrangements incomplete.

Shaken, Landry closes the laptop and stands. Resting her elbows on the wooden railing, chin cupped heavily in her hands, she gazes out over the water.

Just beyond the boardwalk, in the shallows close to shore, a pair of kayakers glide in parallel symmetry. Farther out: the usual array of fishing boats, plus a cluster of sailors taking advantage of the morning breeze. Not a cloud in the sky; the forecast calls for a beautiful day.

Again, Landry is struck by disbelief.

I need to talk to someone. I should call someone.

But not her husband.

Rob left for the office less than ten minutes ago, kissing her good-bye as she poured her coffee and reminding her that it’s Wednesday, golf day, and he’ll be home late. Right now he’s driving, somewhere on the road between here and his law office in Mobile.

Anyway, he doesn’t know Meredith—though he knows
about
her, of course, along with the other bloggers Landry counts among her closest confidantes. Bound by a common diagnosis, they found their way into each other’s virtual worlds by chance and settled in with the camaraderie of old pals. She shares things with her online friends that she would never dream of telling anyone she knows in real life, other than Rob.

Oh, who is she kidding? There are some things Landry can’t even bring herself to tell Rob, yet somehow she’s comfortable putting it all out there on the Internet—hiding behind a screen name, of course.

Some bloggers just go by their first names, but her own is much too distinctive to ensure anonymity. She devoted nearly as much time to choosing a screen name as she had to baby names when she was pregnant with her children, ultimately deciding to go by BamaBelle.

“BamaBelle?” Rob echoed when she first shared it with him. “Bama as in Alabama?”

“What else?”

“I don’t know . . . Obama?”

“No. B
aaaaa
ma. Not B
ahhh
ma.”

She wanted him to congratulate her on her cleverness, not critique it—but he was Rob. He wasn’t just nitpicking—he was protecting her, being cautious.

“I don’t think you should share anything specific online about where you are, Landry.”

“That’s not specific. This is a huge state, and it’s not like anyone’s going to figure out exactly where I am. Or care.”

“How about just ‘Southern Belle’?”

“Too cliché. Rob, it’s BamaBelle. Too late to change it. It’s already out there.”

He scowled, unaccustomed—back then, anyway—to her being short with him.

These days, thanks to the residual pressures of her illness, along with his job stress, and raising temperamental teenagers, they’re much more prone to snapping at each other, or bickering—usually about little things.

For the most part, though, they get along. He’s Landry’s best friend and soul mate. He loves her and has her best interests at heart.

But he’s not the person she needs for comfort right now, when she’s reeling from the news of Meredith’s death.

No. I need . . .

She gazes at the monarch butterfly below, still perched on the rose petals. It flutters its wings as if contemplating liftoff.

I need to talk to someone else who knew Meredith. Someone who will share my grief; someone who might know what happened.

Unfortunately, she can’t just pick up the phone and call one of her blogger friends. Nor can she even text. She doesn’t have their phone numbers. The only way to get in touch with them is online.

Returning to her laptop, she opens an instant message window, then sits with her fingers resting over the keyboard, once again staring into space, wondering whose screen name she should type.

Ordinarily she’d reach out first to Meredith, the unofficial matriarch of the group, but . . .

Something flutters in the air just beyond the balcony rail. The monarch butterfly. She watches it flit away, backlit by the sun against a brilliant blue morning sky.

Landry swallows hard, shaking her head, and types the first name to come to mind.

Awakened by the tone indicating that an instant message just popped up on her laptop across the hotel room, Jaycee opens her eyes to darkness.

Certain it’s the middle of the night, she glances at the digital clock on the bedside table and sees that it’s a little after 5:00
A.M
.—an hour that may not technically be the middle of the night, but doesn’t necessarily qualify as morning when you crawled into bed at three after a long flight, a late dinner, and too much champagne in a suite down the road at Chateau Marmont. It was almost like the good old days for a little while there, before her life derailed. She could almost forget . . .

Almost. But not entirely. She’ll never forget. They won’t let her.

Whoever is trying to reach her—probably Cory, oblivious to the time difference—will just have to wait until a decent hour.

With a groan, Jaycee rolls onto her other side—and gasps, seeing the silhouette of a woman across the room.

Dear God, she’s back!

Terror sweeps through her even as common sense attempts to remind her that it’s impossible. She can’t come back, because—

With a burst of clarity, Jaycee realizes it’s just the silhouette of her long blond wig sitting atop the tall bureau across the room, draped over its wig form.

Of course it is.

And of course she can’t come back, because she’s dead, because . . .

Because I killed her.

With a shudder, Jaycee pulls the pillow over her head, desperate to escape into a deep, blessed sleep, where the nightmare—the one that continues to haunt her waking hours—can’t reach her.

Standing in front of her classroom filled with first graders, Elena writes the name of today’s dinosaur on the board, sounding out the syllables as she goes.

“Steg . . .”

“Steg,” her students echo.

“O . . .”

“O.”

“Saur . . .”

“Saur,” they say—well, eighteen of them do.

The nineteenth, Michael Patterson, shouts, “Ms. Ferreira! Ms. Ferreira! Your computer just dinged!”

“Thank you, Michael. Come on, people. Saur . . .”

“Saur . . .”

“We already said that one!” Michael protests.

Elena clenches the whiteboard marker in her hand. “
You
didn’t say it. Join us, Michael. Saur . . .”

“Saur . . .”

“Us.”

“Us.”

“Stegosaurus! That is our dinosaur of the day, boys and girls. Can anyone tell me—”

“Ms. Ferreira! Your computer! It’s dinging again!”

God, give me strength,
she prays silently,
to deal with this kid for another . . .

She glances at the big black and white wall clock. It’s only a quarter after eight. The school day has barely begun.

Okay, God. I need strength for another six hours and forty-five minutes.

Wait a minute—today isn’t an ordinary day. There’s a staff meeting after school, followed by Activities night, when her first graders return with their parents to tour the classroom display of their culminating projects and present a musical skit. She won’t be free to make the half-hour drive home until well after nine o’clock.

And after that she’ll still have to get through seven more days before summer vacation begins.

Well—two more full ones after this. Beginning on Monday, they have a week of half days before the school year trudges to an end at last.

It’s not that her current students are such a bad bunch of kids. For the most part they’ve been spirited, avid learners. Over her decade of teaching in this small Massachusetts town, Elena has only had one—maybe two—groups where the challenging kids outnumbered the pleasures. But the long Memorial Day weekend—a cruel teaser of a break, she has often thought—always marks the beginning of the end. Everyone is fidgety and no one feels like being in school for almost another month. Especially when the gray chill of New England spring gives way to warm, sunny days that create restlessness in the kids and a greenhouse effect in the un-air-conditioned classroom.