Under My Skin
Under My Skin
Lisa Unger
‘Gripping suspense at its best’ Karin SlaughterHer husband’s killer may be closer than she thinks…It’s been a year since Poppy’s husband, Jack, was brutally murdered during his morning run. She’s trying to move on but what happened that morning is still haunting her. And now she’s sure she is being followed…Sleep deprived and secretly self-medicating, Poppy is unable to separate her dreams from reality. She feels like she’s losing her mind. But what if she’s not? What if she’s actually remembering what really happened? What if her husband wasn’t who he said he was? And what if his killer is still watching her…
From New York Times bestselling author and master of suspense Lisa Unger comes an addictive psychological thriller about a woman on the hunt for her husband’s killer
What if the nightmares are actually memories?
It’s been a year since Poppy’s husband, Jack, was brutally murdered during his morning run through Manhattan’s Riverside Park. In the immediate aftermath, Poppy spiraled into an oblivion of grief, disappearing for several days only to turn up ragged and confused wearing a tight red dress she didn’t recognize. What happened to Poppy during those lost days? And more importantly, what happened to Jack?
The case was never solved, and Poppy has finally begun to move on. But those lost days have never stopped haunting her. Poppy starts having nightmares and blackouts—there are periods of time she can’t remember, and she’s unable to tell the difference between what is real and what she’s imagining. When she begins to sense that someone is following her, Poppy is plunged into a game of cat and mouse, determined to unravel the mystery around her husband’s death. But can she handle the truth about what really happened?
LISA UNGER is the New York Times and internationally bestselling, award-winning author of 16 novels. Her books are published in 26 languages and have sold millions of copies worldwide. Lisa Unger lives in the Tampa Bay area of Florida with her husband, daughter and labradoodle.
Also by Lisa Unger (#u45bdf40c-25ae-5944-ab4b-583b931df908)
THE RED HUNTER
INK AND BONE
THE WHISPERING HOLLOWS (novella)
CRAZY LOVE YOU
IN THE BLOOD
HEARTBROKEN
DARKNESS MY OLD FRIEND
FRAGILE
DIE FOR YOU
BLACK OUT
SLIVER OF TRUTH
BEAUTIFUL LIES
SMOKE
TWICE
THE DARKNESS GATHERS
ANGEL FIRE
Copyright (#u45bdf40c-25ae-5944-ab4b-583b931df908)
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018
Copyright © Lisa Unger 2018
Lisa Unger asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © October 2018 ISBN: 9781474066754
Praise for Lisa Unger (#u45bdf40c-25ae-5944-ab4b-583b931df908)
‘Lisa Unger’s deliciously intense and addictive thriller got under my skin. I picked it up, was drawn into this dark, tangled tale, and couldn’t pull away until it was done. Gripping suspense at its best.’
Karin Slaughter
‘Under My Skin is a twisting labyrinth of a book where nothing is as it seems, dreams bleed into reality, and the past is the future. Lisa Unger is one of my favorite writers. And in this tilt-a-whirl of a psychological thriller, she’s at the top of her game.’
Lisa Gardner
‘This is a haunting, compulsive tale that will have you under its spell long after you’ve closed the book.’
Tess Gerritsen
‘Under My Skin is a perfectly dark and unsettling, spellbinding thriller. Told with both eloquence and urgency, Unger knows just how to hook her readers and reel them in. This book is not to be missed.’
Mary Kubica
‘Deeply plotted and complex and carries an undeniable momentum. Lisa Unger’s enthralling cast of characters pulled me right in and locked me down tight. This is one book that will have you racing to the last page, only to have you wishing the ride wasn’t over.’
Michael Connelly
‘Riveting psychological suspense of the first order. If you haven’t yet experienced Lisa Unger, what are you waiting for?’
Harlan Coben
‘Suspenseful, sensitive, sexy, subtle. The best nail-biter I have read for ages. Highly recommended.’
Lee Child
To Connie, Donna and Pat,
Faithful readers who have become friends.
Your support means more than you know.
Contents
Cover (#u1766ef66-b198-5e04-9c76-ee6a8ac7390f)
Back Cover Text (#u18f6aa83-1386-5730-b58b-10d699b4c27f)
About the Author (#u762492ba-43e6-5853-96ea-460c96f93466)
Booklist (#u639a354d-47d9-544f-b35b-6046169bd6d8)
Title Page (#u0e83caa2-b9ed-55ef-921d-a2e0bdc6a294)
Copyright (#ua93633af-28aa-55d2-bbdd-8cb3a781b085)
Praise (#u29e239b6-8193-5ffe-8951-32c308593e4f)
Dedication (#u10bda3eb-286d-5051-97a0-a118ee6f000b)
PROLOGUE (#udb4ad8ff-f414-5e7a-bb8a-1eebc0231112)
PART ONE (#u2e916e8c-1a11-581a-a287-996bea33fe19)
Chapter 1 (#ubf17562c-a64f-5f4f-bba2-e09db2aee4aa)
Chapter 2 (#u63ffbe2c-377d-5123-b155-322f6173ab29)
Chapter 3 (#ud0df2c16-5fa0-5736-beb3-a76742702566)
Chapter 4 (#udf800bc8-dec0-5a18-8212-d72fffba6a04)
Chapter 5 (#ub3a602fa-087e-5c01-b4b1-44655fdcca23)
Chapter 6 (#u083b0059-87b5-52a6-b3a6-380402c2588d)
Chapter 7 (#u3026b722-4ea3-5c39-915a-1ecc945e1435)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
PART TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
SIX MONTHS LATER (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#u45bdf40c-25ae-5944-ab4b-583b931df908)
I like him. I do.
But.
There’s always a but, isn’t there?
He’s talking and I should be listening. I’m not. Does he see it, that I’m scattered, distracted? Doubtful. He doesn’t seem especially observant, has that way about him that people do now. As if they are putting on a show of themselves, as if the moment is being watched rather than lived. He glances about as he talks. Up at the television screens over the bar, all on mute, all tuned in to different sporting events. Down at the phone that sits dark beside him. Back to me, off again to the rowdy table across from us—a postwork gathering I’m guessing from the rumpled suits and tired eyes.
I soak in the details of him: his shock of ink black hair, thick—any girl would kill for it; dark stubble on his jaw, just enough—sexy, not unkempt, style, not neglect; his gym-toned body. Beneath the folds of his lavender oxford, the dip of cut abs, the round of a well-worked shoulder.
If I had a camera in my hand—not a smartphone but a real camera—say a mirrorless Hasselblad X1D, ergonomic, light—old-school style with high-tech innards—I’d watch him through the lens and try to find the moment when he revealed himself, when the muscles in his face relaxed and the mask dropped, even for just a millisecond. Then I’d see him. The man he really is when he steps off the stage he imagines himself on.
I already knew he was handsome, stylish, in shape, before we agreed to meet. His profile told me as much. He works in finance. (Of course he does.) His favorite book is the Steve Jobs autobiography. (What else?) But what’s under his skin, that carefully manicured outer layer? Beneath the mask he puts on in the morning—what’s there? The camera always sees it.
He runs his fingertips along the varnished edge of the table between us, then steeples them. I read somewhere that this is the gesture of someone very sure of himself and his opinions. It tracks. He seems very sure of himself, as people who know very little often are.
He laughs, faux self-deprecating, at something he’s just said about himself. His words still hang in the air, something about his being a workaholic. What a relief that it’s just drinks, not dinner. No point in wasting time, if it’s not there, he wrote. Who could disagree? So adult. So reasonable.
I never thought it would be. It can’t be. Because it has nothing to do with the way he looks. It isn’t about his eyes, black, heavily lashed and half-lidded. Or the bow of his mouth, full, kissable. (Though I might kiss him anyway. Maybe more. Depends.) Attraction, desire is nothing to do with the physical; it’s chemical, a head trip. And my head—well, let’s just say it’s not on straight.
A woman laughs too loud—a cackle really, harsh and jarring. It startles me, sends a pulse of adrenaline through me. I scan the crowd. I really shouldn’t be here.
“Time for another?” he asks. His teeth. They’re so white. Perfectly aligned. Nothing in nature is so flawless. Braces. Whitening.
The rim of the glass is ice-cold beneath my fingertip. The drink went down fast, too fast. I promised myself I wouldn’t drink, not with everything that’s been going on. It’s been a long day, a long week. A long year. The weight of it all is tugging at me, pulling me under.
I take too long to answer and he frowns, just slightly, looks at his phone. I should just leave. This is crazy.
“Sure,” I say instead. “One more.”
He smiles again, thinks it’s a good sign.
Really, I just want to go home, pull up my hair, put on my sweats, get into bed. Even that’s not an option. Once we walk out of here, it’s back to the jigsaw puzzle of my life.
“Grey Goose and soda,” he tells the waitress when he’s flagged her down. He remembers what I’m drinking. A small thing, but so few people pay attention to the details these days. “And Blanton’s on the rocks.”
Straight bourbon, very manly.
“Am I talking too much?” he says. He looks sweetly sheepish. Is it put on? “I’ve heard that before. My last girlfriend, Kim—she said I ramble when I get nervous.”
It’s the second time he’s mentioned her, his “last girlfriend, Kim.” Why, I wonder? Carrying a torch? Or just trying to market himself as someone who’s been in a relationship? Also, “last girlfriend.” It begs the question: How many others? Maybe I’m reading too much into it. I do that.
“Not at all.”
I am a seeker. I want to explore the world. Don’t you? I love to learn, to cook, to travel. I get lost in a good book.
That’s what his profile said. In his picture, he smiled, nearly laughing, hair wind-tossed. It was a good photo, could have come from a magazine—which is always suspicious. Photographers know all the tricks to capturing beauty, the right angles, the proper lighting, the magic of filters. The truth is that most people aren’t that hot in person. Even beautiful people, real ones, are flawed in some way—not airbrushed, or prettily windblown, eyes glittering. Lines around the eyes and mouth, an almost imperceptibly crooked nose, a faint scar—chicken pox or a childhood fall from a bike. People, real people, have a little stain from lunch on their tie, maybe something hanging from their nose or in their teeth, patches of dry skin, shoes that need replacing. These imperfections make us who we are, tell the truth of our lives.
But to his credit, he is close to as good-looking as his profile picture. But something’s off. What is it?
There’s nothing special about my profile picture, nothing misleading, just a photo snapped by my friend Layla, who set the whole thing up. Of course, she’s a talented photographer, my oldest friend and knows how to shoot me. No filter, though, no Photoshop tricks. What you see is what you get. Sort of.
“What about you?” he says.
The waitress delivers the drinks to our high-top. Her ears are lined with silver hoops; another in her lip. She is fleshy but pretty with startling green eyes that give her an otherworldly look. I bet she reads a lot of teen fantasy novels. Twilight. Harry Potter. Hunger Games.
“Thank you, darlin’,” he says to her. He drops the g and inflects the word with a twang, though I know he was born and raised in New Jersey. She beams at him, flushes a little. He’s a charmer in a sea of snakes.
I notice that he has a way of looking at women, a warm gaze, a wide smile. It seems like a choice. A technique. He knows that women like to be gazed upon, attended to with male eyes. It makes them feel pretty, special in a world where we too rarely feel like either of those things. She smiles at him, does this quick bat of her eyelashes. She likes him. I can tell; she glances at him from time to time as she shuttles back and forth along the bar, between the other high-tops she’s also serving. Even if I walk out of here, I’m sure someone will go home with him. Good-looking, charming guys emanating the scent of money rarely go lonely.
“What do you want to know?” I ask when he turns back to me.
He takes a sip of his bourbon, gazes over his glass, mischievous. “In your profile, you said you were a runner.”
Did Layla put that in my profile? Layla—this dating thing? All her idea. Time to get back out there, girlfriend. I honestly don’t remember what we put in the profile.
“I run,” I say. The truth is that I used to run. “I don’t know if I’d call myself a runner.”
“What’s the difference?”
“I run—for exercise, because I like it, because it calms me. But it doesn’t define me. I don’t have a group, or register for races, travel to do marathons or whatever.”
Am I rambling?
Finally, “I run. I am not a runner. Anyway, I’m more indoors lately, at the gym.”
He nods slowly, a pantomime of the careful listener, looks down at his glass.
I almost tell him about Jack then; it’s always right on the tip of my tongue.
My husband was killed last year, I want to say. He was attacked while he was running in Riverside Park at 5:00 a.m. Whoever it was—they beat him to death. His murder is still unsolved. I should have been with him. Maybe if I had been... Anyway. I don’t find running as enjoyable as I used to.
But then he’s talking about how he started running in high school, ran in college, still runs, travels for marathons, is thinking about a triathlon in New Mexico next year, but his work in finance—the hours are so crazy.
Kim’s right, I think. He talks too much. And not just when he’s nervous. Because he’s not nervous, not at all.
It’s his nails. They’re perfect. They are, in fact, professionally manicured. Expertly shaped and buffed squares at the ends of thick fingers. He steeples them again on the table between us. That’s the but. Vanity. He’s vain, spends a lot of time on himself. The gym, his clothes, his skin, hair, nails. Which is fine for tonight. But in the long game, when it’s time to stop worrying about yourself and start thinking about someone else, he’s not going to be able to do it. The lens would have seen it right away.
Should I mention my nervous breakdown, the one I had after Jack died, how days of my life just—disappeared? Probably not, right?
The space grows more crowded, louder. It’s one of those Upper East Side sports bars with big screens mounted at every angle, games from all over the country, all over the world playing. It’s filling up with the after-work crowd, men who are really still babies with their first jobs, fresh out of school, girls—tight-bodied, hair dyed, waxed and threaded, tits high—who have no idea what the next ten years will hold, how many disappointments small and large.
It’s Thursday, tomorrow the end of the workweek, so the energy is high, exuberant voices booming. Our waitress drifts back and forth, deftly balancing trays of clinking highballs, frothy pilsners of beer, shot glasses of amber liquid. Shots? Really? Do people still do that?
There’s a buzz of anxiety in the back of my head as I scan the crowd, turn to look through the big windows to the street. Someone’s been following me, I almost say, but don’t. I’ve been suffering from some sleep disturbances, some unsettling dreams that might be memories, and to be truthful my life is a bit of a mess. But I don’t say those things. He’s still talking, this time about work, a boss he doesn’t like.
It’s closing in, all the laughter, cheering, bodies starting to press, ties loosening, hair coming down. I let him pick the meeting place. I’d have chosen a quiet spot downtown—in the West Village or Tribeca, someplace soothing and serene, dark, where you speak in low tones, lean in, get to know someone.
Note to self: don’t let them choose—even though the choice speaks volumes. In fact, this dating thing, maybe it’s not for me at all.
“I’ve got an early day tomorrow,” I say, in the next lull between things he’s saying about himself. He’s been practically yelling, to be heard above the din. I should get out of here. Huge mistake.
I see it then. A flinty look of angry disappointment. It’s gone in a millisecond, replaced by a practiced smile.
“Oh,” he says. He looks at his watch—a Fitbit, wouldn’t you know it. “Yeah, me, too.”
“This has been great,” I say. He picks up the check, which the bartender must have laid in front of him at some point.
I take my wallet out.
“Let’s split it,” I say. I prefer to pay or split in these circumstances; I like the feel of equal ground beneath my feet.
“No,” he says. His tone has gone a little flat. “I’ve got it.”
It’s not just the nails. There’s a sniff of arrogance, something cold beneath the flirting. I can see the glint of it, now that he knows he’s not going to get what he came for. Or maybe it’s not any of those things. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with him at all. Very likely it’s that something is wrong with me.
Or most likely of all, it’s just that he’s not Jack.
Until you let your husband go, no one else will measure up. That’s what my shrink said.
I’m trying. I’m dating.
Setting them up to knock them down isn’t dating.
Is that what I’m doing? Just killing time with men who can’t help but to ultimately reveal themselves as not-Jack. They won’t be as funny as he was, or know just where to rub my shoulders. They won’t run out at any hour for anything I need, without being asked. I’ll go grab it for you. They won’t have his laugh, or that serious set to his face when he’s concentrating. They won’t bite on the inside of their cheeks when annoyed. They won’t feel like him, or smell like him. Not-Jack.
Until one day, says Dr. Nash, there’s someone else who you love for all new reasons. You’ll build a new life. I don’t bother telling her that it’s not going to happen. In fact, there are a lot of things I don’t bother telling Dr. Nash.
On the street, though I reach out for his hand, he tries for a kiss. I let his lips touch mine, but then I pull back a little, something repelling me. He jerks back, too. It’s awkward. No heat. Nothing. I shouldn’t be disappointed, should have long ago lost the capacity for disappointment. I suspected (knew) that it wouldn’t be there. But I thought maybe if there was heat, some physical spark, I wouldn’t need the sleeping pills tonight. Maybe we’d go back to his place and I’d have a reprieve from putting back the pieces of my fractured life.
Now I must decide where I will go tonight—back to an apartment I was supposed to share with my husband but where I now live alone and no longer feel safe, back to Layla’s penthouse, maybe to a hotel.
A police car whips up Lexington. Whoop. Whoop.
“Maybe we could run this weekend?” He’s still working it, though I can’t imagine why. “Ever try the trails up in Van Cortlandt Park? Short but pretty—you feel miles away from the city.”
“Nice,” I say.
Unless there’s someone lurking in the shadows, and no one can hear you call for help.
“Should I text you?”
He’ll never text me, of course.
“That sounds great.”
Even if he does text me, I won’t answer him. Or I’ll put him off until he gets the hint. It’s easy like that, this dating thing in the age of technology. You can dangle someone off the edge of your life until they just float away, confused. Ghosting, I think the millennials call it.
“Can I see you home?” he asks.
“No,” I say. “I’m fine. Thanks.”
I feel wobbly, suddenly. It’s after nine, and those two vodka sodas are sloshing around in an empty stomach, not to mention the other chemicals floating in my bloodstream. I haven’t eaten anything since—when?
“You okay?” he asks. His concern seems exaggerated, his tone almost mocking. There are other people on the street, a couple laughing, intimate, close, a kid with his headphones on, a homeless guy sitting on the stoop.
“I’m fine,” I say again, feeling defensive. I didn’t have that much to drink.
But then he has his arm looped through mine, too tight, and I find myself tipping into him. I try to pull away from him. But he doesn’t allow it. He’s strong and I can’t free my arm.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey,” he says, a nasty little mimic. “You’re okay.”
Of course I’m okay, I want to snap. But the words won’t come. There’s just this bone-crushing fatigue, this wobbly, foggy, vague feeling. Something’s not right. The world starts to brown around the edges. Oh, no. Not now.
“She’s okay,” he says, laughing. His voice sounds distant and strange. “Just one too many I guess.”
Who’s he talking to?
“Let go of me,” I manage, my voice an angry hiss.
He laughs; it’s echoing and strange. “Take it easy, sweetie.”
He’s moving me too fast up the street, his grip too tight. I stumble and he roughly keeps me from falling.
“What the hell are you doing?” I ask.
Fear claws at the back of my throat. I can’t wait to get away from this guy. He pulls me onto a side street; there’s no one around.
“Hey.” A voice behind us. He spins, taking me with him. There’s someone standing there. He looks distantly familiar as the world tips. Somewhere inside me there’s a jangle of alarm. He has a dark hood on, his face not visible.
It’s him.
He’s big, bigger than—what’s his name? Reg, or something. Rex? The big man blocks our path up the sidewalk.
“Hey, seriously, dude,” says Rick. Yes, Rick, that was it. “Step aside. I’ve got this.”
But the world is fading fast, going soft and blurry, tilting. There’s a flash, quick-fire movement. Then a girlish scream, a river of blood. Black red on lavender.
Then arms on me.
Falling.
Nothing.
PART ONE (#u45bdf40c-25ae-5944-ab4b-583b931df908)
Hypnagogia
Between the dreams of night and day there is not so great a difference.
—Carl Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious
1 (#u45bdf40c-25ae-5944-ab4b-583b931df908)
“I think someone’s following me.”
I almost kept this to myself, but toward the end of our session it just tumbles out.
Dr. Nash wrinkles her brow with concern. “Oh?”
Her office is a cozy living room, all big furniture and fluffy throw pillows. There are shelves and shelves of books and pictures, and trinkets, small art objects from her travels. It’s exactly the kind of office you’d want your shrink to have. Warm, enveloping. I sink deeper into my usual corner on her plush couch, leaning heavily on the overstuffed armrest. I resist the urge to curl up in a ball and cover myself with the cashmere blanket that’s tossed artfully over the back. A grouping of those faux candles flicker on the coffee table; she made me some tea when I arrived. It sits in front of me, untouched.
“The other night when I left the gym, there was someone standing across the street. I think I saw him again this morning on a park bench near my office.”
Even thinking about it, there’s a flutter of unease.
The doctor shifts in her leather Eames chair; it’s too well made to creak beneath her weight. She’s a wisp of a woman. The leather just whispers against the fabric of her pants. Afternoon light washes in, touching her hair and the side of her face. There are these longish pauses in our conversation where she chooses her words, letting mine ring back to me. She takes one now, considering me.
“Are you certain it was the same man?” she asks finally.
A cool October breeze wafts in the open window, street noise carrying up from nine floors below. A horn, the rumble of a manhole cover wobbling beneath the weight of passing vehicles, the yipping of some small dog. I imagine a Yorkie in a little sweater, straining against a slender leash.
“No,” I admit.
“But certain enough that you’re uneasy about it.”
I’m already sorry I brought it up. I did see someone, a man in a black hoodie, sneakers, faded jeans. He stood in a dark doorway across the street when I left the gym last Tuesday. Then on Thursday as I headed to my office clutching my daily quadruple espresso, I saw him again. I felt his eyes on me, the details of his face hidden in the dark shadow of that hood.
I dismissed it. There are lots of staring men clad in jeans and hoodies in this city. Any girl will tell you, there are always eyes on you, unsolicited comments, unwanted noises, unwelcome approaches. But then maybe I saw him once more over the weekend, when I was coming home from the farmers’ market. Still, it’s hard to be certain.
“Well,” I backpedal. “Maybe it wasn’t the same man.”
I shouldn’t have said anything. I don’t want her to think I’m backsliding. Stumbling toward another breakdown. When something like that happens to you, there’s this energy to the people who care about you, like they’re always waiting for signs that it’s going to happen again. I get it; they don’t want to miss the tells a second time and run the risk of losing you again, maybe for good. Even I’m wary. I feel a little sick about that black spot in my memory where I took a vacation from reality, how fuzzy are the days surrounding Jack’s murder.
So. I try not to think about it. It’s one of the things from which I am trying to move on. That’s what you’re supposed to do, you know, when the worst thing happens and you’re still standing. Everyone’s very clear about it: you’re supposed to move on.
“It’s probably nothing,” I say, stealing a surreptitious glance at my watch. My smartphone, my tether as Jack liked to call it, is off and tucked into my bag, as per Dr. Nash’s office rules. Here we free ourselves of distractions and try to be present in a world that conspires against it, she has said more than once.
Dr. Nash watches me, prettily brushing away an errant strand of her lovely gray-blond bob. Behind her there’s a picture of her family—her chiseled-jaw, graying husband, her grown children both with her same delicate features, intelligent eyes. They all stand together on a terrace overlooking a beach sunset, smiling, faces pressed together. We’re perfect, it seems to say. Wealthy and gorgeous, without a single stain of darkness on our lives. I look away.
“I noticed you’re not wearing your rings,” she says.
I look down at my left hand. The finger is slightly indented from my wedding and engagement rings, but bare.
“When did you make that decision?”
My hands swelled the other night, and I took the rings off and put them in the dish beside my bed. I haven’t put them back on. I tell her as much. Jack has been dead almost a year. I’m not married anymore. Time to stop wearing the jewelry, right? Even though the sight of my bare hand puts a painful squeeze on my heart, it’s time.
“Was it before or after that you started seeing the hooded figure?”
Dr. Nash is the master of the pointed question.
“I see where you’re going with this.”
“I’m just asking.”
I smile a little. “You’re never just asking, Dr. Nash.”
We like each other. Sometimes, lately, our sessions devolve into chats—which she says is a sign I need her less. A good thing, according to her. Progress on the road to healing, the new normal as she likes to call it.
“How are you sleeping?” she asks, letting her other question rest.
I have the nearly empty pill bottle in my purse. Last time I asked for more, she wrote me a scrip but lowered the dosage. I’d like you to try to get off these. Honestly, it hasn’t been going well. My dreams are too vivid. I’m less rested, so edgier, jumpier during the day.
“I was going to ask for my refill.”
“How’s that lower dosage?”
I shrug, trying for nonchalance. I don’t want to appear fragile, not to her, not to anyone. Even though I am, terribly. “I’m dreaming more. Maybe I feel a little less rested.”
“You’re not taking more of them, though, are you?”
I am. I’m also doing other things I shouldn’t be doing. Like taking them with alcohol, for one.
“No,” I lie.
She nods carefully, watching me in her shrink way. “You’ve been taking them for eleven months. I’d like to go down to the minimum dosage with an eye toward your being off them altogether. Want to give it a try?”
I hesitate. That chemical slumber is the best place in my life right now. I don’t say that, though. It sounds too grim. Instead I find myself agreeing.
“Great,” she says. “If it’s an issue, we’ll go back up to the dosage you’re on now. And those dreams? Go back to the dream journal you were keeping when Jack first died. It’s an important part of our lives, our dream world. As we’ve discussed, we can learn a lot about ourselves there. Do you still keep it by your bed?”
“Yes.”
She hands me the white slip of paper.
“Well,” she says. I stare at the crisp sheet, her doctor’s scrawl. “I think our time is up for today.”
I’m always a little startled by the end of a session, the abrupt reminder that no matter how intimate, how I strip myself bare in these sessions, ours is a professional relationship. If I stopped paying, these chats with Dr. Nash would come to an unceremonious end.
“And, Poppy? If you see him again, call me.”
A siren from the street below drifts up, a distant and ghostly wail. This sound, so frequent in the cacophony of city noise, always makes me think of Jack. About an hour after he left that morning, emergency vehicles howled up the avenue beneath our window. There should have been some premonition, some dark dawning, but there wasn’t.
A lingering head cold had kept me in bed instead of going with him as I normally would have.
You could have died that morning, too, Layla says when we go over and over it.
Or maybe it wouldn’t have happened at all. Maybe we would have run in a different direction. Or maybe we could have fought off the attacker together.
Or maybe, or maybe, or maybe—on and on. Infinite possibilities, myriad ways Jack might still be with me. He overslept; a light caused him to cross another street; I was there and twisted my ankle, causing us to return home. I turn to those scenarios in blank moments, in dreams, when I should be paying attention in meetings. So many other paths he could have taken and didn’t.
“I’m not imagining him.” It seems to come out of nowhere.
Dr. Nash cocks her head at me. “I didn’t say you were.”
I bend down and grab my bag, come to standing as she does.
“And lock your doors. Be mindful,” she adds.
“You sound like my mother.”
She chuckles. “We can talk about that next session.”
“Very funny.”
* * *
I walk toward the subway, needing to get back downtown for a two o’clock meeting. I’m probably going to be late—again. The city is such a mess, a constant crush of traffic and delayed trains. I think about a cab or an Uber, but sometimes that’s even worse, snaking through jammed streets, trapped in a box, trying to decide if it would be faster to just get out and walk. The whole city seems to conspire against promptness.
I text my assistant, Ben. Running late, I tap in quickly and descend beneath the street. It’s Monday midday, so it’s not as crowded as it could be. Though the day is mild, the platform is hot as an oven and smells like piss. My stress level starts to tick up.
Jack wanted us to leave Manhattan; he’d grown to hate it. Everything that was cool about it is gone. It’s just an island for the rich. He dreamed of a historic property upstate, something with a lot of land, trees, trails to wander. Something we could renovate and make ours. He longed to disconnect from the rush of wanting, grasping, striving, at least on the weekends. He wanted time back behind the camera. He didn’t get any of those things.
We were packing when he died, boxing up the one-bedroom Upper West Side apartment we’d shared for five years. But instead of moving out of the city, we were moving to The Tate, a luxury high-rise in Chelsea—a gleaming tower of apartments with floor-to-ceiling windows, offering stunning vistas, high ceilings, wood floors, chic open-plan kitchens, pool and gym, a 24/7 building staff. It was me. I was the one who wanted it; he acquiesced.
He loved our dark, cozy place on Ninety-Seventh—with views of the other building across the street, with radiators that clanked, and mice in our ridiculously dated kitchen, and the old doorman Richie, who’d worked there forever and was sometimes asleep when we walked in. He loved our crazy, colorful cast of neighbors—Merlinda, the psychic who read clients in her apartment; Chuck—or Chica—accountant by day, drag queen by night, who had the most beautiful singing voice I’d ever heard; Bruce, Linda and Chloe, public school teachers and their adorable, gifted daughter, our next-door neighbors who never failed to invite us for Sunday dinner.
Now I live in a starkly beautiful space that looks out onto lower Manhattan—alone. I don’t even know who lives in the apartment next to me. The hallways are gray tunnels, lined with doors that seem to rarely open. In my apartment, the furniture is placed appropriately—bed in the bedroom, couch in the living area—but most of the boxes are still unpacked. To say I miss my husband, our wacky neighbors, that dark old apartment, our life—well, why? There are no words to adequately describe that slick-walled gully of despair. Suffice it to say that I can’t seem to fully move into my new life without Jack.
I’m sorry, I tell him. I wish I had listened to you.
Dr. Nash says it’s okay to talk to him, if I understand he’s not talking back.
Time drags and I’m ever more fidgety, annoyed. More people file down the stairs. The platform grows dense with bodies, the air thickening with impatience. Still the train doesn’t come. I lean over the edge of the platform to see if I can spot the glow of an oncoming headlamp. No.
I glance at the clock. There is officially no way to be on time now. A bead of perspiration trails down my spine. A glance at my phone reveals that there’s no signal.
When the train finally screeches into the station, it’s already packed. I wait by the door, letting the flow of people exit. There’s no guarantee that the next train will be any less crowded, and that waiting meeting looms. I shoulder myself on, shimmying toward the door that connects one car to the other; find a space with a little breathing room. The cars fill.
Stand clear of the closing doors.
The doors close, open again, then finally shut for good. The train lurches forward, stops, jostling everyone, then onward again. I close my eyes, try to breathe. The crowded space is closing in already. I am not great in tight spaces, which is an uncomfortable condition for a city dweller. It’s worse since Jack died; the fingers of panic tugging at me more than they used to. I lean my head against the scratched, foggy glass. Breathe. Just breathe. Imagine you’re on a trail in the woods, plenty of space, the tall green trees giving oxygen and shade. There’s a bird singing, the sound of the wind in the leaves. It’s the meditation Dr. Nash gave me for dealing with anxiety in crowds or anywhere. Occasionally, it works.
But when I open my eyes again, he’s there. That hooded man, pressed in among the crowd in the other car, a statue amidst the clutter of shuffling, jostling passengers. His eyes are hidden by the shadow of the hood, but I can feel them. Is it the same man? My heart stutters, a suck of fear at the base of my throat.
Reality cracks, a fissure splits in my awareness. For a moment, quick and sharp, I’m back in my own bedroom. The space beside me on the king mattress is cold when it should be warm. The covers are tossed. Jack left for his run without me, letting me sleep.
“Jack?”
Then I’m back, the train still rattling, rumbling. I’m stunned, a little breathless; what was that? A kind of vivid remembering, a daydream? Okay. It’s not the first time it has happened; but it is the most vivid. The woman next to me gives me a sideways glance, shifts away.
Pull it together, Poppy. The stranger—he’s still there. Is he watching me?
Or is he just another blank commuter, lost in thought about home or work or whatever it is we ponder when we’re zoning out, traveling between the places in our lives. Maybe he’s not seeing me at all. For a moment, I just stare.
Then, unthinking, I push through the doors, stepping out onto the shaking metal platforms between the cars. This is a major subway no-no, I think as I balance and grope my way through the squeal of metal racing past concrete, metal on metal singing, sparking, then through the other door into the relative quiet of the next car.
He moves away, shoving his way through the throng. I follow.
“What the fuck?”
“Watch it.”
“Come on.”
Annoyed passengers shoot dirty looks, shift reluctantly out of my way as I push after him, the black of his hood cutting like a fin through the sea of others.
As we pull into the next station, he disappears through the door at the far end of the car. Trying to follow him, I find myself caught in the flow of people exiting, and get pushed out of the train onto the platform. I finally break free from the crowd, jog up the platform searching for the hooded figure among tall and short, young and old, backpacks, briefcases, suits, light jackets, baseball caps. Where is he?
I want to see his face, need to see it, even though I can’t say why. Distantly, I’m aware that this is not wise behavior. Not street-smart.
Don’t chase trouble, my mother always says. It will find you soon enough.
Then the doors close and I’m too late to get back on. Shit. My phone chimes, finding a rare spot of service underground.
A text from Ben: ETA? They’re going to wait a bit, then reschedule. Assume you’re stuck on the train.
It isn’t until the train pulls away that I see the stranger again, on board, standing in the door window. He’s still watching, or so it seems, his face obscured in the darkness of the hood. I walk, keeping pace with the slow-moving train for a minute, lift my phone and quickly take a couple of pictures. I can almost see his face. Then he’s gone.
2 (#u45bdf40c-25ae-5944-ab4b-583b931df908)
I arrive at the office frazzled, sweaty, full of nerves, late for the meeting. In the bathroom, running my wrists under cold water, pulling shaking fingers through my dark hair, I stare at my reflection in the mirror.
Pull. Yourself. Together.
My face is sickly gray under the ugly fluorescents, as I dab some makeup on the eternal dark circles under my eyes, refresh lipstick and blush. A little better, but the girl in the mirror is still a tired, wrung-out version of the person she used to be.
Rustling through my bag, I find the bottle of pills Layla gave me. It’s blank, the little amber vial, no label. For nerves, she said. I hesitate only a second before popping one in my mouth and swallowing it with water from the faucet, then try to take some centering breaths. Dr. Nash is not aware of my unauthorized pill-taking, one of multiple things I keep from her. I know. What’s the point of keeping things from the person who is supposed to be helping you?
As I walk past Ben’s desk, he rises and hands me a stack of messages.
“They’re waiting,” he says, dropping into step beside me. “You’re fine.”
“Great.” My smile feels as stiff and fake as it is. “The subway is a mess.”
“Everything okay?”
He inspects me through thick, dark-rimmed glasses, tugs at his hipster beard. He’s a stellar assistant; I keep trying to promote him but he doesn’t want to go. My clients love him—he’s on top of all their contracts, tracks down their payments, helps with grant and residency applications. Over the past year, he’s been more agent to them than I have. He could probably just take over and I could slip away. It’s tempting, that idea of slipping away, disappearing—another life, another self.
“Yeah,” I say unconvincingly. Ben watches after me with a frown as I push into the conference room.
“His work,” Maura is saying. “It’s stunning.”
“Whose work?” I ask, taking my seat at the head of the conference table. “Sorry I’m late.”
All eyes turn to me. When Jack was alive, I could come and go unnoticed. He ran the meetings and I was the number two—critical to the running of the office, but not the magnetic, energetic head of the meeting table. He brought a light and enthusiasm for the craft, for the business into every gathering. I am not the captain he was, I know, but I’m doing my best. They watch me now—respectful, kind, hopeful.
Jack picked out everything in this room, from the long sleek conference table to the white leather swivel chairs, the enormous flat screen on the wall. His photo from an Inca Trail trek, featured in Travel + Leisure, is blown up onto an enormous canvas. He took it from his campsite above the cloud line—orange tents blossom in white mist, as clouds fall away into a landscape of jade and royal blue, the dip of the valley dark and the sky bright.
“Alvaro’s,” Maura says. “He took that Nat Geo job to photograph the okapi living in the Ituri Rainforest, just got back yesterday.”
The photos come up on the screen—lush, jewel greens and deep black, a red mud road twists and disappears into a thick of forest; a girl, her eyes dark and staring, stands on a riverbank in a grass skirt, her expression innocently teasing. A blue-and-white truck travels precariously over a swaying wooden slat bridge.
Maura runs a manicured hand over her black hair, pulled tight into a ponytail at the base of her neck. She’s young, but her almond-shaped eyes reveal an old soul. Olive-skinned, almost birdlike in her delicacy, she’s a firebrand agent, fiercely protective of her clients. She worries over them like a mother hen.
“The colors, the movement, the energy,” I say. “They’re wonderful.”
The trunk of a tree, hollowed out and haunted, twisting, branches reaching up into deep green black. The shots of the okapi, an animal that is partially striped like a zebra, but related more closely to a giraffe, are stunning—a mother nursing her young, a young male hiding in tall grass, a small herd underneath a wide full moon.
“They are,” Maura agrees. Her smile is wide and proud. “He’s—amazing.”
I wonder, not for the first time, if something is going on between Maura and Alvaro. It’s not a good idea for an agent to fall in love with a photographer she represents. In fact, it’s not a good idea for anyone to fall in love with a photographer. The unfiltered world never quite measures up to whatever he sees through that lens. Alvaro Solare, Jack’s best friend and the firm’s first client, is the typical roving photographer, always in pursuit of the next perfect shot. Which means the rest of the world can go to hell. There are a string of heartbroken women in his wake. I’d prefer Maura not become one of them. But it’s not really my business.
The rest of my agents run down the status of their clients’ assignments. Our firm, Lang and Lang, mine and Jack’s, represents photographers. We are a boutique agency, small but successful, with some of the top names in fashion, feature and news photography on our roster.
What started as a small enterprise in our apartment, has grown into an agency with a suite of offices in the Flatiron Building. Jack, affable and mellow, was a natural mediator. When Alvaro was in a dispute with the New York Times travel section, Jack stepped in and resolved it over drinks with the photo editor, an old friend of his. Alvaro paid Jack 15 percent out of appreciation. One thing led to another, and after a year Jack was turning down photo assignments, and representing more of his friends, including me.
So, after years of hustling as travel photographers, scraping together a living, we traded in our life of adventure for a firm dedicated to protecting the rights of people who make a living with a camera in their hands. Alvaro thought it was a mistake, that we were wasting our talent and our lives. And he never lost an opportunity to tell us so. But we thought it was time to settle down, start a family. Except it didn’t work out that way.
I half listen as the other agents run down problems and successes. I comment, make suggestions, offer to make a call to a contact of mine at Departures. But mostly, I am still on that train, chasing after the man in the hood.
I wonder if anyone notices that I am a ghost in my life.
* * *
It’s another half hour before I am back in my office, scrolling through the blurry, useless photos I took on my smartphone. The light was poor, too much motion. That dark form is just a smudge, a black space between the grainy commuters all around him. I use my thumb and forefinger to enlarge the image on the screen, but it looks ever more amorphous as a low-quality image will.
I start to doubt myself, my grip on reality. What did I see really, after all? Just a man with a hood, who might or might not have been looking in my direction.
I don’t even notice Ben until he’s sitting across the desk from me. There’s a look I don’t like on his face, worry, something else.
“What?”
He leans back and crosses his legs. “When were you going to tell me?”
“Tell you?”
“That you’re dating again.”
I shake my head, not wanting to get into it. “I’m not.”
“So, who’s Rick, then?” He slides a message across my desk. There’s another one from him in the stack I’ve just barely started to sort through. I’m old-school; I still like paper messages to toss when calls are returned, write notes on, keep as reminders.
“He’s no one,” I say.
I wouldn’t say I’m exactly dating. There’s a snow globe on my desk, a little farmhouse surrounded by trees. Jack gave it to me one Christmas. This is what our house will look like, out in the country. Quiet. Away from all the chatter. I tip it and watch the snow swirl around the black branches.
“I saw your profile online,” says Ben. He peers over his glasses, a gesture he thinks makes him look wise, worldly. It really doesn’t. He’s far too young to be either of those things.
Putting the snow globe down, I lean back in my chair and frown at him.
“What are you doing on an online dating site, a young hottie like you? They must drop like flies.”
He shoots me a faux-smarmy eyebrow raise. “That’s what we do. The millennials? It’s how we roll. Tinder, OKCupid, Match.com. Love is just a swipe away.” He makes a wave motion with his hand.
“So, it’s not just for old people, then?” I sift through the tiny white sheets of paper. “The divorced, the forever single—the widowed.”
Widowed. I hate that word; it evokes black veils and wails of grief. It defines me by the loss of my husband, as though I’m less now that he’s gone. Of course—I am. I regret saying it as soon as it’s out of my mouth. The word hangs in the air between us. When I look up from my messages, Ben has me pinned in a thoughtful gaze. Another youngster with an old soul; it seems we have a type in our small firm.
“If you must know, it wasn’t my idea.”
“Let me guess.” He shifts forward, puts his elbows on his knees.
“Layla came over. Wine was consumed. The next thing I know, I’m back in the dating scene.”
I don’t think you can clinically call what I’m doing dating. In the olden days, we used to refer to it as sleeping around. A relationship? A boyfriend? No. I don’t want those things. Not yet. Maybe not ever. But, wow, does it ever feel good to be touched again. I don’t share this with Ben, who is studiously massaging that hipster beard he’s so proud of. I wish he’d cut it off. It’s borderline offensive, though I can’t say why precisely.
“It’s a good thing,” he says finally, rising. “And Rick sounds like kind of a nice guy. He’s hot, too. Looks like he could have money.”
“You checked him out?” I say, mock mortified.
“Uh,” he says, widening his eyes. “Yeah.”
I smile at my young friend, my assistant who has outgrown his position but still likes it. If he has a girlfriend, or a boyfriend—or whatever—he never says so. I open my email; an impossible number of messages await.
“Two calls in a day,” says Ben, moving toward the door. “I like his confidence. A man who knows what he wants.”
“Confidence or arrogance?” I ask. “Desperation?”
“Let’s call it—” Beard rubbing, word searching. “Assertiveness.”
“Send him an email, will you? Tell him drinks on Thursday?” I ask.
“From you or from me?”
“Would it be weird if it was from you?”
“Seriously weird,” he says, then rethinks. “Well—more like pretentious. Have your people call my people? Do you want to be that person?”
“Fine—from me.”
Ben frequently sends emails at my direction from my account. Never anything big, just setting meeting times, quick one-line answers to various questions.
“Where?”
I shrug. “I don’t care. He can choose.”
Ben hesitates in the door a minute, his lanky form in my peripheral vision. Then he leaves me and I am alone with that image staring back at me from my smartphone. I close the photo app and put the device down, shut my eyes and draw in a few deep breaths. That’s the other thing you’re supposed to do when you’re trying to move on, to smooth out the edges of the panic, sadness, anger or whatever overtakes you—focus on the breath. Breathe, they tell you.
Whatever that pill was, it has smoothed out the edges some, for sure. I’m lighter, less shaky.
But—honestly—I’m scared; fear tickles at the back of my throat. There’s a white noise of anxiety in the back of my head. It’s not just the man in the shadows, on the train. He is scary, sure. If there really is someone following me, then yes, it’s weird and frightening. What’s scarier, though, given my history, is if there isn’t.
* * *
I finish out the day, and work late, pushing everything else away. There are contracts to review, emails to answer, a dispute between a fashion photographer and a model she supposedly came on to, then ejected from a shoot when he refused her, another dispute between a feature photographer who’d submitted photos to a travel magazine, filed for payment via their Kafkaesque system, and ninety days later still hadn’t been paid. Work is easy, a cocoon that keeps the chaos of life away.
When I look up from my desk again it’s after seven and all the other offices are dark. The refrigerator in our break room hums, a familiar and weirdly comforting sound. Half of the hallway lights are off, leaving the space dim and shadowy. I know Ben was the last to leave and he locked me in on the way out, reminding me to set the alarm when I finally took off for the night.
As I’m packing my bag, a phone starts ringing in one of the offices. It bounces to the main line, and I reach over to pick it up. There’s no number on the caller ID, but I see that it came from Maura’s extension. Maybe it’s Alvaro; he used to call late for Jack. We’ve drifted since Jack’s death, not that he and I were ever really friends. In fact, despite his extraordinary talent, and his close friendship to Jack, I’ve always considered him a giant asshole. I really hope, for Maura’s sake, that she hasn’t fallen for him.
“Lang and Lang.”
There’s just a crackling on the line.
“Hello?” A strange sense of urgency pulls me forward in my seat.
There’s a voice but so much interference that I can barely make it out. I hang on awhile longer, listening. A strain of music. The blast of a horn. That voice, it’s throaty and deep, talking quickly, unintelligible through the static. Is it familiar?
Poppy. I think he says my name. Something about it sets my nerve endings tingling.
“Yes, this is Poppy. Sorry—I can’t hear you.”
I press my ear to the phone, cover the other to hear better. But the connection finally just goes dead, and a hard dip of disappointment settles into my stomach. I wait, thinking the phone will ring again. But it doesn’t.
With a niggling sense of unease, I move away from the phone. That voice. My name on the line. Or was it?
I pack up my bag and loop the office, making sure lights are down and doors are locked. It’s a small space; there are only five of us. Walls are made from glass, so there are few places in the office that can’t be seen from wherever you stand. Still, I feel uncomfortable, like I’m being watched. I lock the door behind me, head down in the elevator.
“Working late,” says Sam, the night security guard at the desk. He has a worn paperback novel in his hands. He and Jack used to talk about books, sharing a love of science and history. I glance at the title: The Future of the Mind by Michio Kaku.
“Light reading?”
“The brain,” he says, tapping his capped skull. He has dark circles under his eyes, a strange depth to his gaze. An insomniac who works nights, a veteran who did two tours in Iraq. “It’s the ultimate mystery. We know less about it than we do about space.”
Jack would know what to say; he’d probably have read whatever Sam was reading. They’d chat for ten minutes while I kept busy answering emails on my smartphone. But I just nod, aware of the sad way he looks at me. Most people look at me like this now, at least sometimes. The widow.
“Take care of yourself,” he says as I head toward the door. There is a gravity to his words, but when I turn back, he’s already gone back to his reading.
* * *
On the street, shadows fill doorways and pool around parked cars. But no hooded man, just a young couple walking, hands linked, leaning into each other, an old woman with a shopping cart, a lanky kid walking and texting. A yellow cab swiftly pulls to the curb. Safe inside, I turn to look behind me once more.
Maybe, maybe something moves in the shadows across the street. But it’s hard to be sure.
3 (#u45bdf40c-25ae-5944-ab4b-583b931df908)
Instead of going home, I head to Layla’s, dropping her a text so that she knows to expect me. Not even five seconds pass before her reply. She’s always half expecting me for dinner these days—which makes me feel some combination of grateful and guilty.
We’re having meatloaf. Gma’s recipe.
Whose grandma she is talking about, I’m not sure. Mine, hers or Mac’s? There certainly wasn’t any famous meatloaf recipe in my family. Layla’s brood wasn’t exactly the gather-around-the-Sunday-table type, and most of them are long gone. Mac comes from a long line of glittering one percenters; meatloaf is not on the menu. Maybe she was just being ironic.
Yay! I type. Uh—whose gma?
When the phone pings again, the text is not from Layla.
Hope you’re well, it reads. I’d love to see you again. No pressure. Just drinks?
The name on the phone gives me pause. Of all my recent assignations, he stays with me. I try not to think about the night we shared, but it comes back in gauzy scenes. His touch—gentle but urgent; his laugh—easy, deep. Sandy curls, like Jack’s. Something else just beneath the surface—what was it? There’s a little catch of excitement in my breath, but I quickly quash it. No. I’m not ready for anything more than we shared. I’ve told him as much. I briefly consider responding. It would be another easy night, an escape hatch from my life.
Layla’s text distracts me: I was just being ironic. I got the recipe from the internet—like everything else.
I hesitate another moment, remembering the feel of him, then delete his message without response.
Cold. I know.
* * *
Layla’s Central Park West address is gray and regal with a private motor court, multiple sparkling, marble lobbies manned by a small army of smartly uniformed doormen. It’s a fairy tale, a castle for the ultrawealthy. The towering lobby ceiling dwarfs me as I enter. The scent of fresh-cut flowers and the glitter of the chandelier above create a ballroom effect. Story-tall abstract oils, white leather sectionals, a twisting metal sculpture—there are museum lobbies with less grandeur.
Real people don’t live in buildings like this, Jack would say. He’d seen too much of the world in his lens—people living in poverty, children starving, cities ruined by war, nature decimated by corporate greed. Obscene wealth offended him. Me—not so much. I drift through worlds, as comfortable in a hostel as I am at the Ritz. Living in opulence or squalor, under the skin people are just the same. Everyone suffers. Everyone struggles. It just looks different from the outside.
My heels click on the marble, the staccato bouncing off the walls. Allegedly, Sting lives here. Robert DeNiro lives here. (Though I’ve never seen either of them.) Those mysterious Russian billionaires you always hear about live here. My dear friends Layla and Mac Van Santen live here with their teenagers, Izzy and Slade.
I still don’t completely understand what Mac does. Finance, of course. Hedge fund manager—but what does that really mean? I also don’t get how in the last ten years, he got so crazy-beyond-ridiculously rich. Something to do with “shorts” and the mortgage bond crisis of 2007. Suddenly there was a move from the perfectly spectacular Tribeca loft to the Central Park West penthouse. The monthlong summer trips overseas. The family driver, Carmelo. The private plane at an airport in Long Island.
Layla and I share a laugh over this now and then—mirthlessly—how much things have changed since we were kids together. How her mother worked two jobs. How my parents bought her prom dress when her family couldn’t afford it, how her parents fought in the kitchen over stacks of bills they couldn’t pay. How my dad and I would drive to her place and pick her up when she couldn’t stand the yelling and worse. Her parents are both dead now, having led, short, unhappy, unhealthy lives. But Layla still bears the scars they left on her, literally and figuratively.
The doorman, unsmiling but deferential, knows me and waves me through without bothering to call up.
“Have a good evening, Ms. Lang.”
The floral scent from the lobby follows me into the mirrored elevator. I drift up to the twenty-eighth floor as though on a cloud, silken and silent, emerging in the private foyer.
Pushing through the door into Layla’s penthouse apartment, I’m greeted by the sound of Izzy practicing her violin in the room down the hall. Whatever piece she’s struggling through is unrecognizable. The sheer size of their space, the thick walls, keep the sound from being unbearable as surely my early instrumental attempts were to my parents—the clarinet, later the flute. I remember their strained encouragement, their palpable relief, when I discovered that my passion was the totally silent artistic endeavor of photography.
Let’s just say that Izzy is no musical prodigy, either; I wonder when or if she’ll be told. She practices with gusto, though, attacking the same few musical phrases over and over. If it’s a matter of sheer will alone, she might improve. She’s a high achiever like her father, focused, unrelenting, a star student.
Slade, her younger brother, is at the kitchen island FaceTiming with a friend on his iPad while they play some weird world-building game on a laptop. Two screens are apparently required for this interaction. I plant a kiss on his head, am rewarded with a high five, and his megawatt smile. Slade’s more like Layla—or like Layla used to be. Easy, laid-back, distractible and artistic.
Layla’s at the stove; the table set with fresh flowers, cloth napkins, gleaming platinum silverware. There are only four places, which I take to mean that Mac is not going to be home for dinner. The usual state of affairs.
“Please put that away and tell your sister it’s time to eat,” Layla says to Slade as she comes over to give me a hug.
“Izzy!” Slade bellows, startling us both into laughter. “Dinner!”
“I could have done that,” says Layla, swatting him on the shoulder. “Tell Brock you have to go. Goodbye, Brock.”
“Goodbye, Mrs. Van Santen,” comes the disembodied voice from the iPad.
“Did you finish your homework?” she asks Slade when he’s closed his laptop.
He looks at her with Mac’s hazel eyes, an uncertain frown furrowing his brow. He’s a heartthrob, all big eyes and pouty lips, thick mop of white-blond curls. Fourteen years old and already towering over Layla and me.
“No more gaming until it’s done,” says Layla. “Now go get your sister. Clearly, she can’t hear us.”
More screeching from behind Izzy’s closed door as if to punctuate the point. Slade moves in that direction as slowly as a sloth, knocks, then disappears into Izzy’s room.
“That violin teacher keeps telling me that she has promise,” Layla says, moving back over to the stove. “Am I crazy? She sounds truly awful, right?”
“I heard that,” yells Izzy, emerging. No one ever says anything in the Van Santen house. “I am awful! Obviously. This was your idea, Mom!”
Layla rolls her eyes as Izzy tackles me from behind, kissing me on the cheek. Her hair is spun gold; she smells of lilacs. She’s lean and fit, but no skinny waif. I’ve seen her and her field hockey–playing girlfriends put away their body weight in pizza.
“Save me from all of this, Aunt Poppy,” she says. “Can I come live with you?”
“I know, darling,” I say, holding on to her tight. She used to sit in my lap, kick her chubby legs and laugh as I changed her diapers, and squeeze her tiny hand in mine as we crossed the street. Is there anyone dearer than the children of people you love, especially when you don’t have your own?
“How do you bear up under these conditions? It’s miserable.”
“Mom, please,” says Izzy. She walks over to her mother, picks a carrot out of the salad and starts to munch. “I’m just not musical.”
“It’s good for you, sweetie,” says Layla easily. She pushes a strand of stray hair from Izzy’s eyes. “To do something you’re not great at immediately. To work for something.”
“That’s—ridiculous.”
The teenager, so like her mother, blond with startling jewel-green eyes, casts me a pleading look. “Isn’t that ridiculous?”
Savory aromas waft from the oven and range top, making my stomach rumble. I used to cook, too. Jack and I both loved being in the kitchen. Lately, when I’m not here, I survive on a diet of salad bar offerings and maybe Chinese takeout when I’m feeling ambitious. I help Izzy get the water.
At the table, I let the chaos wash over me—Izzy going on about some mean-girl drama, Slade begging to add a robotics club to his already packed schedule. All the heaviness, the strangeness of my day lifts for a moment.
But my inner life is a roller coaster. I think: this is the life Jack and I could have had; maybe not the insane wealth—but the chattering kids and the food on the stove and the homework. The happy mess of it all; it could have been ours. And then the ugly rise of anger; we were robbed of this. I stare at the water in my glass. Followed then by the stomach-dropping plummet of despair: What is there when I leave here? A dark apartment, void of him and the life we were building.
Layla’s hand on mine. The kids are looking at me.
“Poppy?” she says softly. “Where did you go?”
“Nowhere,” I say. “Sorry.”
A ringing device causes Layla to rise from the table. I hear the electronic swoop as she answers.
“Wait, don’t tell me,” she says. “You’re going to be late. I shouldn’t wait up.”
Her tone is light, but there’s an edge to it, too.
“There’s just a lot going on right now.” Mac on speaker apparently. No—FaceTime. She comes to the table with her iPad, sits back down beside me. Even on the screen I can see the circles under his eyes. He rubs at his bald head, his tie loose and the top button on his shirt open. “You know that, honey.”
Layla softens, smiles at the screen. “I know. We just miss you.”
“Hi, Mac,” I say.
“Hi, Dad,” the kids chorus.
“Hey, guys.”
“Poppy’s my husband now,” says Layla. She tosses me a smile. “She’s in your place.”
“I hope you two will be very happy together,” says Mac with a light laugh. “Poppy, good luck.”
I blow him a kiss.
“Izzy, sweetie, how did you do on your calculus test?” he asks.
Layla passes her the iPad.
“I’m confident,” she says, covering her mouth, still chewing. These kids, all confidence, no worries. When did that happen? What happened to teen angst? I used to lie in bed at night worrying—about grades, about friend drama, about everything.
“Did you check your work?” he asks.
More chewing. “Uh-huh,” she says. “I got this, Dad.”
Izzy hands the iPad to Slade. “Dad, this is the last week to sign up for robotics.”
“What did your mother say?”
“She said not unless my grades come up.” Slade casts a sad-eyed look at his mom, which she ignores.
“Then that’s the decision.”
Is it fatigue that makes his voice sound that way, flat, distant? Or the crush of it all—work and family, marriage, pretty from the outside, exhausting from the inside.
Slade, still undeterred, launches in about how by the time he can prove he’ll get his grades up, it will be too late. They go back and forth for a few minutes.
“FaceTime parenting,” whispers Layla. I don’t like her flat tone, either, or the kind of sad distance I see on her face; it’s new. “It’s all the rage.”
“You okay?”
She puts on a smile, but looks down at her plate. “Yeah,” she says, false bright. “Yeah, of course. Just—tired.”
I catch Izzy watching us with a worried frown.
“Dad says what if I sign up for robotics and quit if my grades don’t come up?” Slade cuts in.
Layla looks to the screen, annoyed. But the iPad is dark; Mac is gone.
“Your father and I will discuss it later and give you a decision tomorrow.”
“Robotics is the future, Mom.”
Layla puts down her fork and locks Slade in a stare. “Ask me again and the answer is no.”
Everyone knows that tone; Slade falls silent and looks at his plate. The mom tone—which means you’ve reached the limit of her patience and you’re about to lose big. I take a bite of meatloaf. Wherever she got the recipe, it’s great. I’ve cleared my whole plate. I didn’t realize how hungry I was. Layla’s barely touched hers. Which I guess is why she’s a size zero.
“Okay,” he says, drawing out the word into sad defeat.
Izzy gets up, scraping the chair loudly, clearing her plate. “I promised to call Abbey.”
Somehow the mood has changed, the happy chatter died down, a stillness settling.
* * *
Layla and I settle into the white expanse of her living room—everything low and soft, the gas fireplace lit, photography books laid out on the reclaimed wood coffee table, a bottle of pinot opened between us. I want to tell her about the hooded man, but I don’t. She’ll panic, launch into fix-it mode, and I don’t need that right now.
We’ve been friends since eighth grade. But friend is such a tepid word, isn’t it? A throwaway word that can mean any level of acquaintance. What do you call someone who’s shared your whole life, who seems to know you better than you know yourself, accepts all your many flaws and weaknesses as just flubs in the fabric of who you are? The person you can call at any hour. The one who could show up at your house in the middle of the night with a body in the trunk of her car, and you’d help her bury it. Or vice versa. That’s Layla.
“Mac’s working late,” I say, tossing it out there.
She lifts her eyebrows. “That’s Mac. It’s what he does. He works.”
She seems to wear the opulence around us, slipping into it easily like a silk robe. The expensive fabrics on her body drape; her pedicured toes are pretty, white-pink squares. Her skin practically glows from regular treatments. It would be easy to think she came from wealth, that this was all she knew. But I remember how she grew up. The fingerprint bruises on the inside of her arm from one of her father’s “bad nights.” How my mother used to pack extra food in my lunch box in case Layla came to school without and with no money to buy anything. We don’t talk about it much anymore, the abuse, the neglect. Ancient history, Layla says.
“It’s easier I think,” she says, looking down into her glass. “For him. To be at work than here with us. It’s messy at home, you know. Lots of noise, emotions, ups and downs—family, life. Numbers sit in tidy columns. You add them up and it all makes sense.”
When Jack and I first started the agency, Mac helped figure out the finances.
One night, he came to our apartment after work, and sat at our kitchen table covered with a swath of spreadsheets and documents. Layla and I grew bored, drifted away from the table. But the boys stayed up late talking about pension plans and salaries, quarterly taxes, insurance costs.
Layla and I opened a bottle of wine, lay on the couch listening to their voices, low and serious.
“Are you sure this is what you guys want?” she asked that night.
“The agency?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Won’t you miss it? The assignments, the travel, you know—the excitement of it?”
There was something odd in her tone. “Do you miss it?” I asked.
She shrugged. “The kids keep me busy,” she says. “But, yeah, sometimes.”
I was surprised by this; it never occurred to me that Layla was less than happy.
Her Facebook posts and Instagram feeds were a cheerful tumble of beautiful pictures of the kids, family trips, idyllic Sunday breakfasts, strolls in the park. Layla and Mac in love, wealthy, with two gorgeous, gifted children. Fakebook, Jack liked to call it. A bulletin board of our pretty moments, all the rest of it hidden.
“I guess we all make our choices,” she said, flat and final. “I mean, we’re blessed. I’m—grateful.”
“Mac loves the kids,” she says now. “He’s always there for them. He’s never missed a performance or a party—they call, he answers.”
“He loves you.”
That much I know. Though Mac can be stiff and isn’t exactly a sparkling conversationalist, sometimes even a little blank, his face lights up when Layla talks. He watches her with love in his eyes. Personally, I think he’s on the spectrum, a genius with numbers but maybe struggling elsewhere. Not an unusual combination. But since Jack’s death, Mac has spent many an evening at the office with me, educating me on everything Jack used to handle. He’s patient, gentle, explaining and re-explaining as often as necessary without a trace of annoyance. He’s been there for me, just like Layla. These people—they’re my family.
Layla rubs at the back of her shoulder, seems about to say something but then it dies on her lips, replaced by a wan smile.
“I know,” she says. “Of course he does. Seventeen years.”
She takes a sip from her wineglass, the lights behind her twinkling in a sea of dark. In daylight, the room looks out onto Central Park—an expanse of green, or autumn colors, or white. “It’s okay. We can’t change each other. Most of us who stay married know that.”
Jack and I had just passed our eighth-year wedding anniversary before he died, so I don’t comment. But I don’t remember ever wanting to change him.
“I’m sorry,” she says, sitting forward and looking stricken. “The stupid things I say sometimes.”
I lift a hand. “Don’t walk on eggshells. Don’t do that.”
“So what’s going on with you, then?” she asks. “Something—so don’t lie.”
“Nothing,” I lie. She doesn’t buy it, doesn’t push, but keeps her gaze on me.
“I saw Dr. Nash today,” I say, just to put something out there. “She wants me to get off the sleeping pills.”
“Why?” says Layla, pouring us each another glass of wine. I don’t stop her, though I’ve had enough, and the pills earlier. This is our second bottle. “Fuck that. Take what you need to sleep. This year’s been hard enough. You tell her—”
I tune her out. She’s always had a mouth on her, always the fighter, the one standing up, speaking out. For some reason I flash on her arguing with one of her high school boyfriends. We were in the parking lot after a football game. She hit him on the head with her purse. You fucker! she’d screamed, as we all watched. I dragged her off; she kept yelling. The look on his face, like he’d never experienced anger before. Maybe he hadn’t. Layla wept in my car afterward. What had she been so mad about that night? I don’t even remember—or who the boy was, or who else was there. Just the bright spotlights from the field, some girls giggling, the smell of cut grass and Layla’s voice slicing the night.
“Poppy,” she says.
“What?”
I’m getting the mom look, the one she gives her kids when they’re not listening.
“I asked if she took you off the pills.”
“She lowered the dosage.”
“And.”
“My dreams.” My dream images of Jack from last night mingle with the shadow on the subway, the odd daydream I experienced on the train. “They’re more vivid. I don’t feel as rested.”
“Tell her to put the dose back up,” she says sharply. “You need your rest, Poppy.”
“I want to get off them.” The words sound weak even to my own ears. Do I really? “I don’t want to take pills to sleep for the rest of my life.”
“Why not? Better living through chemistry. Lots of people are medicated all their lives.” She lifts her glass like she’s proving a point.
I don’t know if she’s kidding or not. What’s certain is that I’m duller, mentally heavier. I haven’t had a camera in my hand since Jack died, haven’t taken one serious photograph. The truth is I don’t even feel the urge. Is it the grief? The drugs? Some combination of those things. I put the glass down on the table, where it glitters accusingly. How many have I had? Is it weird that I don’t even know?
She drops it. We chat awhile longer, just gossip about the firm, how I think Maura and Alvaro might be involved. I think I see something cross Layla’s face at the mention of Alvaro’s name, but then it’s gone. She tells me that she’s started shooting again. Layla has an eye for faces. They blossom before her lens, reveal all their secrets. Her favorite subjects in recent years, naturally, have been her children. She still maintains her website, has an Instagram feed with a decent following. She has real talent, more than I ever had.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “Not more beautiful shots of my gorgeous children. After Slade and Izzy go to school, I head out the way I used to. Just looking for it, you know, that perfect moment.”
“Show me,” I say, curious.
“I will.” She looks away. It’s not like her to be shy. “I’m rusty. I’ve spent so many years on the kids—maybe I’ve lost my eye. What small amount of talent I had, maybe it just withered up and died.”
“I doubt that,” I answer. “Be patient. Maybe you just have a new way of seeing things now.”
She shifts on the couch, folds her legs under her. Something about the way she’s sitting seems uncomfortable, as if she might be in pain. Too much kickboxing. She rubs at her shoulder again. “Life does that I guess.”
She looks at me too long, too sadly. I look away.
“I should get home.” This happens. I’m okay where I am and then suddenly I just need to be alone, like I can’t hold the pieces of myself together anymore.
“Stay here,” she offers. But I’ve spent too many nights in their guest room. Tonight, I need to think. Layla’s life is a cocoon. When I’m here, everything else disappears—the real world seems fuzzy and insubstantial.
I get up, and grab my stuff, get moving before she can talk me into it. She watches me a beat, seems like she wants to say something. But then she rises, too, and doesn’t stop me.
“Wait a second,” she says, then rushes off down the hallway. She’s back in a moment, as I’m pulling on my coat.
“Take these,” she says, pressing a bottle of pills in my hand. “They’re mine. I think that’s the dosage you were on originally.”
I look at the bottle. “Don’t you need them?”
“I can get more.”
“How?” I ask. “Dr. Nash watches me like a junkie.”
Layla smiles. “I have my ways.”
I shouldn’t take them. I should hand them back to her and ask her what the hell she’s talking about. Where is she getting all these pills? And why? But I don’t. I just gratefully shove them in my pocket, promising myself that I won’t take them. Unless. Unless I absolutely need to.
“Sure you don’t want to talk about it?” she asks. “Whatever is going on? I’m here when you’re not okay. Always. Don’t forget that.”
It’s tempting, to come back inside and tell Layla, let her take over in that way she always has. This is what we need to do...
“I’m okay,” I say instead.
4 (#u45bdf40c-25ae-5944-ab4b-583b931df908)
The Lincoln Town Car waits for me in the motor court. When he spies me, Layla’s towering, refrigerator-sized driver, Carmelo, climbs out quickly and rushes to reach the door before I do, smiles victoriously as he swings it open. He has long blond hair pulled back into a tight ponytail, faded denim eyes and a jaw like the side of a mountain.
“I got there first, Miss Poppy,” he says.
“This time,” I concede, slipping into the buttery leather interior, and he closes the door.
It’s a thing we have; how I find it ridiculous to wait by the door while he comes around to open it. And he considers door-opening a critical feature of his job, and a terrible dereliction of duty if I open it and get in before he sees me. He’s the rare person who cares about the minute details of his profession. I shouldn’t mess with him. But he’s sweet and funny and we enjoy our little game.
“Home?” he asks.
“Home,” I say, even though I don’t have a home. I have a place where I live, but not a home.
The city rushes past—lights and people, limos, beaters, taxis, bicyclists. I am light, the wine, the pills—I let my head rest against the seat, which seems to embrace me. The hooded man is a distant memory. The car is quiet, except for low jazz coming from the radio; I let my eyes close. Sometimes Carmelo and I chat about his aging mother, his young son, Leo. But he rarely speaks unless I talk to him first, unless he has a question. It’s another standard of his job, to disappear, to be only what you need him to be. When I open my eyes, I catch his in the rearview mirror, watching.
“Long day?” he asks.
“Yes,” I admit. “You?”
“The usual,” he says with a shrug. He takes the kids to school, Mac to work, shuttles Layla through her busy day, waits for Mac in the evenings, takes clients (and friends) around; his day ends when Mac’s does, often not until after midnight or later. Carmelo was always the driver for boys’ night out, when Jack, Alvaro and Mac got together. Shuttling them from bar to bar, maybe to some private card game at Mac’s club, who knows where else.
What could Carmelo tell us about our husbands? Layla mused.
Are you kidding? I’d quip. He’d never tell us anything.
“The city, though, lately. What a mess.”
“Ever think about getting out?”
“Nah,” he says. “Born and raised, you know.”
He pulls to the curb and I just stare for a second, my heart pulsing.
“Carmelo.”
He turns to look at me questioningly, then out at the street. His eyes widen as it dawns.
“Oh, no,” he says, then covers his mouth in a girlish gesture of embarrassment. “Miss Poppy. I’m so sorry.”
He’s taken me to my old apartment building, the one on the Upper West Side where I lived with Jack, not far from Layla’s. A couple I don’t recognize climbs the stairs, laughing, carrying sacks of groceries. She’s petite and wearing jeans, a light black jacket. He’s taller, broad, with an inky mop of hair—young, stylish. It could be us. It was us.
“It’s okay,” I say, biting back a brutal rush of grief, of anger—not at him, at everything.
He pulls away from the curb quickly, cutting off another car and earning the angry bleat of a horn.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” he says, voice heavy with apology. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I say again, trying to keep my voice steady. “Easy mistake.”
I look back at my old street, but then he turns the corner and heads downtown. It’s gone. I want to go back; I want to get as far away as possible. I wish that he would drive and drive and that we’d never reach our destination; that I’d just drift in the space between Layla’s life and what’s left of mine forever.
* * *
Back at my place, I open another bottle of wine, pour myself a glass and look around the space. The pain from the sucker punch of seeing my old block has subsided some. And I experience a brief flicker where I feel distantly inspired to decorate, to settle in, as Dr. Nash keeps encouraging. At least unpack the boxes that are still stacked everywhere.
But that moment of inspiration passes as quickly as it came and I find myself reclining instead on the couch. I turn on the television, close my eyes and listen to the local news—an armed robbery in the Bronx, the Second Avenue subway near completion, a missing child found. The measured, practiced voice of the newscaster soothes; my awareness drifts.
* * *
“Jack?”
The bed beside me is cold, the covers tossed back. The clock on the dresser reads 3:32 a.m. I push myself up, sleep clinging, lulling me back.
“Jack.”
I pad across the hardwood floor. I find him in the living room, laptop open.
“What are you doing?” I ask, sitting beside him on the couch.
He drops an arm around me, pulls me in. I love the smell of him, the mingle of soap and—what? Just him, just his skin. No cologne. He’d wear the same three shirts and pairs of jeans all week if I didn’t buy his clothes. He doesn’t always shave, wears his hear longish, a sandy-blond tangle of curls. Has a pair of black-framed glasses instead of bothering with contact lenses.
“Just catching up on email.”
His email is open, but so is the web browser, the window hidden.
“What is it?” I tease. “Porn?”
“Yeah,” he says. “I’m out here watching porn while my beautiful wife sleeps in the next room.”
I nudge in closer, wrap my arms around him.
“Porn’s easier, though, right?” I offer reasonably. “Isn’t that what they say? Porn’s never tired, doesn’t say no. You don’t have to satisfy porn.”
“Stop,” he says. I reach for the computer and open the web browser before he can stop me. The face of a beautiful dark-eyed woman stares back at me. But it isn’t porn; just a news article he’s been reading. A photojournalist was beaten to death in her East Village apartment, a suspected robbery gone wrong, all her equipment stolen.
“Who is she?” I ask.
He shakes his head, a beat passing before he answers. “Just someone I used to know.”
I scan the article. “She was murdered?”
He stays silent.
I feel a rush of urgency. “Jack, tell me who this is and why you’re reading about it in the middle of the night.”
He doesn’t answer, just stares straight ahead.
“Jack,” I say again. “Who is she?”
* * *
I wake up with a jolt on the stiff fabric of my couch, disoriented, reaching for him. The dream lingers, clings to my cells. Who is she? My own voice sounds back to me. I’m tangled in that strange weaving of the real, the remembered and the imagined. Jack’s scent, the feel of his arm, stays even as the shapes and shadows of the apartment he’s never seen assert themselves into my consciousness.
I reach for the dream—the woman’s face on the screen, the news article. Someone I used to know. But it’s jumbled, makes no sense. A dream? A memory? Some weird hybrid?
The couch beneath me is hard, not soft and saggy like the one in our old place. This one I bought online because I thought it looked sleek and stylish; when it arrived, it was as stiff and gray as a concrete slab. I didn’t have the energy to return it.
The television is on, the sound down so low it’s barely audible. Radar images of tomorrow’s weather swirl red and orange, a storm brewing, unseasonable heat.
Slowly, Jack, the dream begin to fade. I reach for him, but he’s sand through my fingers.
This is not new. Since his death, I vividly, urgently dream of my husband—embraces, lovemaking, his return from this place or that, maybe the store, or a business trip. The joy of his homecoming lifts my heart. These moments—though they are twisted and strange, places altered, patchworks of things that happened and didn’t—are so desperately real that I often awake thinking that my real life, the one in which Jack has been taken from me, is the nightmare.
And then, when I wake, there’s the hard, cold slap of reality: he’s gone. And that loss sinks in anew. Every single time. How I dread that crush when he’s taken from me again, when the heaviness of grief and loss settles on me once more, fresh and raw, its terrible weight pushing all the air from my chest.
I wipe away tears I didn’t even know I was crying. And I reach for the remote and let our stored pictures come up on the screen. Photos from our travels scroll—a canopy walk in Costa Rica, lava tubing in Iceland, a selfie that we took while kissing on the Cliffs of Moher. The images transfix, the girl I was, the man he was. Both of us gone. Many nights after work, this is what I do. Lie here and watch our hundreds of photos scroll silent across the screen.
It’s going to get better, Dr. Nash has told me. With time, the weight of this will lessen.
It isn’t, I want to say but don’t. How can it?
Outside my towering windows, the city glimmers.
I pull myself up, dig the new lower dosage prescription out of my bag, pour a big glass of water. Just about to drink the medication down, I pause. It sits in the palm of my hand, blue and seductive.
What if I just stopped taking them? What would happen? I should do some research. Jack wouldn’t approve of the amount of medication I’ve been taking, I know that. He wouldn’t even take Tylenol for a headache.
Or...
I remember the higher dosage Layla handed me; I grab them from the pocket of my coat, hearing her voice, always so certain: take what you need to sleep. I think about the other pills I took today. How many? What were they? How much wine did I drink?
To be truthful here, there’s not much of an internal battle. I need the utter blankness of dreamless sleep, the dream life Dr. Nash so values be damned. I need a break from grief, from my thoughts—from myself. I shake out one of the higher dosage pills. Then another. I drink them down. Just for tonight.
With images twirling around my sleepy brain, I enter the bedroom. On the bedside, the black dream journal rests by my bed. I haven’t written in it in a while, but Dr. Nash’s advice from today is still fresh in my mind. We can learn a lot about ourselves there. I flip it open, and scrawl down what I remember, but it’s faded to nearly nothing. I scribble: a dark-eyed girl on the screen. Who is she?
The pen feels so heavy in my hand.
There is no furniture in the bedroom except a low white platform bed, covered by the cloud of a down comforter, big soft pillows. I close my eyes, let the journal and pen drop to my side—pushing away thoughts of Jack, and the stranger shadowing my life, Layla, Dr. Nash. I wait for that blissful chemical slumber.
5 (#u45bdf40c-25ae-5944-ab4b-583b931df908)
The surface beneath me is cold and hard, my head a siren of pain. Nausea claws at my stomach and the back of my throat. My shoulder aches, twisted under me. A sharply unpleasant odor invades. I don’t want to open my eyes; I squeeze them shut instead.
Where am I? I should know this.
I open them just a sliver, peering through the fog of my lashes. Silver and white, a filthy tile floor, feet walking by, high heels, sneakers, flats. Scuffling, voices. Music throbbing outside, someone laughing too loud—drunk or high.
You must be kidding me! a voice shrieks.
I push myself up. I’m in a bathroom stall, curled around a toilet bowl. That odor—it’s urine. I’m on the floor in a bathroom, in a nightclub by the sound of it. My heart starts to race, my breath ragged. I look down at myself. I am wearing a dress I don’t recognize; tight and red, strappy high heels.
Okay, okay, okay, I tell myself. Just think. Just think. What’s the last thing you remember?
Jack’s funeral beneath a cruelly pretty sky, leaning heavily on Mac, his strong arm around my waist practically the only thing holding me up. Layla holding my other hand. Mac’s whisper in my ear: It’s okay, Poppy. We’re going to get through this. All of us together. Hold on. Be strong. He’d want that. Our old apartment filled with friends, damp eyes, whispering voices; Jack’s mother, her face ashen with a tray of sandwiches wobbling in her hand; Layla taking it from her, laying it down on the table. My mother chatting with Alvaro, flirting as if this wasn’t her son-in-law’s funeral. I can hear her throaty laugh, inappropriate enough to draw eyes. Me wishing for the millionth time that my father was still alive. Daddy, please. I need you. How silly. A grown woman still calling for her father. Those are the last things I can remember. Where am I now? How did I get here?
I pull myself unsteadily to standing, the walls spinning. Someone pounds on the stall door.
“One minute,” I say, voice croaky and strange. I don’t even sound like myself.
Whoever it is finds another stall, slams the door. The door outside swings open, voices and music pour in, filling the whole room. Then it goes quiet again.
There’s a bag lying beside me, a glittery black evening purse. Even though I don’t recognize it, I grab for it and open it. My cell phone, dead. Five hundred dollars in cash. A thick compact, which I pry open with shaking hands.
The woman in the mirror is a mess, long black hair wild, mascara running down her face in sad clown tears, pale, blue eyes wide with fright. I sit on the seat and use some toilet paper and my own spit to clean my face. I do a passable job, running my fingers through my hair, using the makeup in my bag to fix myself up. In the small shaking mirror, I’m almost normal again. Except for the fact that I have no idea where I am, or how I got here.
Okay. Deal with that later. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. I just need to get myself home. I can figure everything out once I’m safe. I’ll call Layla then. We’ll figure it out. She’ll know what to do.
I wobble through the stall door, tilting in heels too high. Two women—one black, one white—applying makeup at the mirror glance at me, then at each other. They both start to laugh.
“You okay, honey?” one of them asks, not really caring. She smears a garish red to her lips.
“You need to Uber your ass home, girl,” says the other, frowning in disapproval. Her hair is dyed platinum blond, her lips dazzling berry. I feel a lash of anger, but a wash of shame keeps me from answering back.
Their laughter follows me out the door, until it’s drowned out by the heavy techno beat. Bodies throb on the dance floor as I push my way through the crowd, wondering where the exit is. Instead, I find myself at the bar, taking a seat. I’ll rest here a minute, my legs so unsteady, head spinning.
The bartender comes over and leans in to me. She brings me a glass of ice water. Embossed in ornate script on the glass, a word in red: Morpheus.
“Your boyfriend’s been waiting for you all this time,” she says as I take a long swallow. “If you thought you lost him, you didn’t.”
I glance in the direction that her eyes drift—they are violet, eerie and strange. Color contacts. On her arms, tattoos—a dragon, a tower, a woman dancing. I stare, fixated by the lines and colors. I can’t focus on anything for very long.
“He sees you.”
Who is he? Long sandy hair, pulled back, a thick jaw and strange eyes that seem to defy colors—amber, green or steely blue. He gets up and comes over, leans in behind me.
“I thought you left.” His voice in my ear sends a shiver down my spine.
He spins me around, tugs me into him. The heat between us; it’s electric. He snakes one arm around my back, the other around my neck and leans in, as if we are not in a crowded club, but alone. His draw is magnetic, irresistible. And then we are alone, the world dropping away, music fading, as he kisses me long and deep. I am on fire with desire, a deep ache inside me. It’s embarrassing how badly I want him.
Jack. Jack.
But it’s not Jack.
“Who is Jack?” he wants to know. “Doesn’t matter. I’ll be Jack, whoever he is. I’ll be anyone you want me to be.”
Then, as if by magic, we are in his car—or at least he’s driving. I have no idea whose car it is. But it’s a nice one, leather, glowing blue lights, soft music playing on Bose speakers. Everything smells clean, new. The city skyline is in the rearview mirror, streamers of white and red lights around us.
“Where are we going?” I ask, barely even recognizing my own voice.
“Don’t you remember?” he asks gently.
“No,” I say with a rising panic. “I’m sorry. I don’t remember at all.”
He looks at me with a strange smile and just keeps driving.
6 (#u45bdf40c-25ae-5944-ab4b-583b931df908)
I’m sorry. I don’t remember at all.
The words burrow into my sleep, taking on urgency, growing louder, until the sound of my own frightened shout wakes me.
I bolt upright, breath labored, T-shirt soaked through with sweat. I’m in my own bed, the covers tossed to the floor. A weak Tuesday morning sun bleeds in through the blinds, shining on my clothes from last night in a messy tumble on the floor.
The details of the dream are already slippery. What kind of car? What club? It’s important to remember; I must dig into that place.
Coffee brews in the timed pot that’s set for six, its aroma wafting through the apartment. The city is awake with horns and distant sirens and the hum of traffic. Slowly, breath easing, these mundane details of wakefulness start to wipe away my urgency. The dream, the panic to remember, recede, slinking away with each passing second like a serpent into the tall grass of my wakefulness.
Sleep is the place where your mind organizes, where your subconscious resolves and expresses itself. In times of great stress, dreams can become like a whole other life, Dr. Nash said. A terrifying, disjointed life that I can’t understand.
I reach for my dream journal and start writing, trying to capture what I remember:
Morpheus, a nightclub?
Black-and-white-tile floors, kissing a faceless man?
He takes me somewhere in his car, a BMW maybe. Afraid. But relieved, too? Who was he? Where was he taking me? Why did I go with him?
Red dress?
Powerful desire. Jack. I thought he was Jack, but he wasn’t.
The impressions are disjointed, nonsense really in daylight. As I scribble, the sunlight brightens and begins to fill the room through the tall windows. Too bright. I must be late for work.
Finished writing, I flip back through to the earlier pages, looking to see if there’s any other dream like this one. Reading what I wrote late last night, before I took the pills, it’s the scrawl of a crazy person, loopy, jagged:
Jack, computer, looking at porn? Who is she?
Another sentence that I don’t even remember writing: Was he hiding something from me?
I stare at the black ink bleeding into the eggshell page. There’s a little stutter of fear, as if I discovered a stranger had been writing in my dream journal. But no, the handwriting is unmistakably mine.
I start flipping back through earlier entries. One page is filled with a twisting black spiral. It begins at a single point in the middle of the paper, spins wider and wider until it fills the whole sheet. It’s inked in manically, scribbled at so hard that it leaks through to the page beneath. There’s a tiny black figure that seems to be falling and falling deep into the abyss.
No one tells you about the rage, I’d written. I could fall into my anger and disappear forever. How could he do this to me? How could he leave me like this? Who did this to him? To us? Why can’t they find my husband’s killer?
Again, that feeling—a stranger writing in my dream journal.
But no.
That rage, what a sucking black hole it is, devouring the universe. I remember that there was a terrible, brilliantly real dream about finding the man who took Jack from me. I chased him through the streets, finally gaining on him and taking him down in a lunge. I beat him endlessly, violently, with all my strength. It was so vivid I felt his bones crush beneath my knuckles, tasted his splattering blood on my mouth. It went on and on, my satisfaction only deepening. I confessed this tearfully to Dr. Nash.
Anger, in doses, can be healthy, Poppy, she said. It’s healthy to direct your rage toward your husband’s murderer, to not hold it in. Rage suppressed becomes despair, depression.
How can it be healthy to dream of killing someone, to imagine it so clearly? To—enjoy it?
There’s darkness in all of us, she said serenely. It’s part of life.
I shut the dream journal hard; I don’t want to go back to that place. That rage inside me; it’s frightening. I don’t want to know who I dreamed about last night, where I was. Maybe it’s better to let these things fade. After all, if you’re supposed to remember your dreams, if they mean something—why do they race away? Why do they never make any real sense?
The hot shower washes what’s left of it all away. I can barely cling to even one detail. But there’s a song moving through my head, something twangy and hypnotic.
I’ve seen that face before.
* * *
Images resurface unbidden as I head to the office—I flash on the man at the bar, the blue lights of the car interior. It’s an annoying, unsettling intrusion, these dreams so vivid, so disturbing. And I’m not rested at all; I’m as jumpy and nauseated as if I’d pulled an all-nighter.
I ask myself a question I might be asking too often: How many pills did I take last night? And: How much wine did I have?
Not enough, apparently. Not enough to achieve blankness.
Nervously aware of my surroundings, I scan my environment for the hooded man. Though the day is bright, I see shadows all around me, keep glancing around like a paranoiac. There’s a group of construction workers, all denim-clad, with hoodies pulled over their hard hats. One of them stares, makes a vulgar kissing noise with his mouth. I stride past him, don’t look back.
Finally, in the office, at my desk, I feel the wash of relief. It’s early still, at least an hour before anyone else comes in. I pick up the phone.
“Hey, there,” answers Layla. “You didn’t call me back last night.”
Her voice. It’s a lifeline. She’s so solid. So real.
“Did you call?” I ask, confused.
“Yeah,” she says. “Just wanted to check on you. I didn’t like how you looked when you left.”
Scrolling through the messages on my phone, I see her call and a text, left after eleven.
“Oh—sorry.” How did I miss that?
“Seriously. What’s going on?”
Layla is the first one to start worrying about me. She was the first to think that maybe something wasn’t right a day or two before my “nervous breakdown” or “psychotic break” or whatever we’re calling it these days. Dr. Nash just refers to it as my “break.” Think of it as a little vacation your psyche takes when it has too much to handle. It’s like a brownout, an overloading of circuits. Grief is a neurological event. And Layla was the one to bring me home.
I tell her about the dream, anyway the snippets I can almost remember.
She’s quiet for a moment too long. I think I’ve lost her.
“Layla?”
“Poppy,” she says. “Maybe you should call Detective Grayson.”
I’m surprised that she would bring up the detective who has been in charge of Jack’s murder investigation. A murder investigation that has petered to almost nothing. It’s been almost a year since Jack was killed and every lead has gone cold. There are no suspects. No new information. But Grayson is still on the job, checking in regularly, always returning my calls to query about progress. I used to crave justice for Jack, for everything we lost. It used to gnaw at me, keep me up nights. But, with Dr. Nash’s help, I’ve let that idea go somewhat. What justice is there for this? No matter what price paid, the clock will not turn back. So this question sits like an undigested stone in my gut. Who killed Jack?
“Why? What does Grayson have to do with this?”
Another moment where she draws in and releases a sharp breath. I can hear the street noise so she’s probably leaning out the bathroom window with her cigarette so that the kids don’t smell it when they get home from school. She’s supposed to have quit; obviously, the nicotine gum isn’t cutting it. I’m not going to hassle her about it. Who am I to get on her case, pill popper that I’ve become?
“I was just thinking,” she says finally, carefully. “The days you can’t remember. Maybe what you dreamed last night. I mean, maybe that wasn’t a dream at all. Maybe it was a memory.”
Her words strike an odd chord, cause an unpleasant tingle on my skin. “Why would you say that?”
“Honey,” she says. A sharp exhale. “When I found you, you were wearing a red dress.”
Ben comes in singing. He has his headphones on, clearly doesn’t see me. He’s belting out Katy Perry, singing about how this is the part of him you’ll never ever take away from him. He reaches into my office to flip on the lights I’ve neglected to turn on and his eyes fall on me. He blushes and gives me a wide smile, takes a bow. I’d laugh if my body didn’t feel like one big nerve ending, sizzling with tension.
“Maybe—you’re remembering things,” says Layla when I stay silent.
“Dr. Nash said I probably wouldn’t, that likely those days are gone forever.”
It was two days after the funeral that I disappeared. Four days after that I woke up in a hospital, remembering nothing. Even the days before Jack’s murder and through the funeral are foggy and disjointed. Part of me thinks that it might be a blessing to forget the worst days of your life; I’m not sure I want them back. Dr. Nash has suggested as much, that my memories haven’t come back because I don’t want them.
I remember the day he was killed in ugly, jagged fragments, sitting in the police station, reeling at Detective Grayson’s million, gently asked questions. Was he having trouble at work? Did he have any enemies? Were there money troubles? Affairs? Were either of you unfaithful? Hours and hours of questions that I struggled to answer, grief-stricken and stunned, trapped in a tilting unreality. There were these long stretchy moments where I pleaded with the Universe to just let me wake up. This had to be a nightmare. Grayson’s grim face, the gray walls, the flickering fluorescent lights, all the stuff of horror movies and crime shows. This wasn’t my life. It couldn’t be. Where was Jack? Why couldn’t he make it all go away?
Finally, my mother showed up with our family attorney and they took me home. I remember stumbling into my apartment—our apartment, falling into the bed we shared. I could still smell him on the sheets. I remember wailing with grief, facedown in my mattress.
Take this, honey. My mom forced me to sitting, handed me one of her Valium tablets and a glass of water. I didn’t even hesitate before drinking it down. After a while, the blissful black curtain of sleep fell.
For a while, I know Detective Grayson suspected me. After all, I would inherit everything—the life insurance payout, the business, all our assets—when Jack died. But I think at some point he realized that for me it was all ash without my husband. Then he became my ally. If you remember anything, no matter how small, call me.
The case, it bothered him. Always. Still. Stranger crime is an anomaly. A beating death of a jogger—it grabbed headlines. The city parks are Manhattan’s backyard; people wanted answers and so did he. Jack was a big, strong guy, fast and street-smart. He’d traveled the world as a photojournalist, dived the Great Barrier Reef to find great whites, trekked the Inca Trail, embedded with soldiers in Afghanistan, attempted to summit Everest. It never, ever felt right that he’d die, a random victim, during his morning run. He had a phone and five dollars on him. A year later, his case is still unsolved.
“But maybe Dr. Nash is wrong?” suggests Layla. “Maybe it means something.”
Now it’s my turn to go silent.
“Let’s do it tonight,” Layla continues. “Work out, eat, talk it all through. In the meantime, call Dr. Nash and Detective Grayson.”
Layla, queen of plans, of to-do lists, of “pro” and “con” columns, of ideas to turn wrong things right. She corrals chaos into order, and heaven help the person who tries to stop her.
“Okay.” I release a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. “That’s a plan.”
I flash on that moment at the bar, that man, again. Who was he? Someone real? Someone I know?
“You’re okay, right?” asks Layla. “You’re like—solid?”
“Yeah,” I lie (again). “I’m okay.”
* * *
Detective Grayson agrees to meet me in Washington Square Park for lunch. So around noon I head out. The coolish autumn morning has burned off into a balmy afternoon as I grab a cab to avoid even worrying about the hooded man.
The normalcy of the morning—emails and the ringing phone, conversations about understandable things like contracts and wire transfers—has washed over the chaos of yesterday and last night, my dreams where they belong, the grainy, disjointed images faded into the forgotten fog of sleep. I don’t have the urge to look over my shoulder every moment as I make my way under the triumphal Washington Square Arch and into the park. My chest loosens and breath comes easier. Grief and trauma, I remind myself, are not linear experiences. There are good days and bad ones, hard dips into despair, moments of light and hope. My new mantra: I’m okay. I’m okay.
Grayson sits on a shady bench near a hot dog vendor, by the old men playing chess. He already has a foot-long drowning in relish, onions, mustard, ketchup and who knows what else. It seems to defy gravity as he lifts it to his mouth. A can of Pepsi sits unapologetically beside him. No one else I know would even dream of drinking a soda, in public no less. It’s one of the things I like about him, his eating habits. It reminds me of Jack. Jack and I would be walking home from a client dinner that had consisted of tiny salads and ahi poke with some slim, fit photographer who turned in early so he could make a 6:00 a.m. yoga class, and Jack would make us stop at Two Guys Pizza, where he’d scarf down two slices.
God, when did people stop eating? he’d complain.
I grab a similarly gooey dog, and take my place beside Grayson. He grunts a greeting, his mouth full. He’s sporting his usual just-rolled-out-of-bed look, dark hair a mop, shadow of stubble. He’s wearing a suit but it needs a trip to the dry cleaners, his tie loose, a shirt that has seen better days. Still, there’s something virile about him, maybe it’s the shoulder holster visible when he raises his arm, the detective’s shield clipped to his belt.
The leaves above us are bold in orange, red, gold, but they’ve started to fall, turn brown. I dread the approaching winter, the holidays where I imagine I’ll drift between Layla’s place and my mother’s, a ghost—people giving me tragic looks and whispering sympathetically behind my back.
Jack and I used to have our whole ritual. We’d put the tree up by ourselves the weekend after Thanksgiving, have a big party for all our friends. On Christmas Eve, we’d go to my mother’s house, where she would show off whatever new man she was dating, drink too much, then try to pick a fight with me—honestly because I think it’s the only way she knows how to connect. We’d spend Christmas Day at our place with Jack’s mother, Sarah. We’d plan the meal for months, then hang around in our pajamas all day—cooking, watching movies, playing Scrabble. It was my favorite day of the year.
Last year, just months after losing him, I couldn’t even get out of bed. The holidays passed in a grief-stricken blur with the phone ringing and ringing. Layla, Mac, my mother coming by to try to coax me out of bed.
It was Mac who finally got me up, convinced me to come to join them for Christmas dinner. “We’re your family,” he said, pulling open the blinds. “You belong with us. I know it hurts but there’s no way out of this but through. Show the kids that you’re not going to let this crush you. Show them that they’re not going to lose you, too.”
Guilt. It works every time. He offered his hand, which I took and let him pull me from bed and push me toward the bathroom. As I ran the shower, I heard him call Layla, his voice heavy with relief. “I got our girl. She’s coming.”
It seems like yesterday and a hundred years ago.
“Funny you called,” says Grayson now. He’s prone to manspreading so I leave a lot of space between us.
“Oh?” I take a big messy bite of the hot dog, and try not to spill anything on my shirt. Yellow mustard and white silk are not friends. Actually, white silk is no one’s friend. Wearing it is like a dare to the universe: go ahead, bring it on—coffee, ketchup, ink—I can take you.
“I’ve got something maybe.” He does this thing, a kind of bobblehead nod. “Maybe. Might be nothing.”
There’s a file under his Pepsi can.
“They brought some punk in this weekend for armed robbery,” he says when I stay silent. I wait while he devours that dog in three big bites. It’s impressive. He wipes his mouth with gusto, maybe building suspense.
“Perp was caught in the act, more or less. A couple of uniforms brought him down as he exited the bodega in the East Village. I think he got like two hundred bucks if that. Anyway, he tells the arresting officers that he knows something about a murder in Riverside Park last year, so they call me in.”
My whole body goes stiff; my appetite withers. Putting the hot dog in its paper tub beside me, I try not to think about that dark day, not let the barrage of images come sweeping in. But it’s a flood, the uniformed officers in my lobby, the cold marble as I sank to the floor, the gray interrogation room. Weird details like a ringing phone that no one picked up, the scent of burned popcorn somewhere in the station.
“I’m sorry,” he says. He rubs at the stubble on his jaw. “I knew this was going to be hard.”
He’s watching me with a kind of curious squint. It’s warm, but it’s knowing. Dark brown eyes, soft at the edges, heavily lashed like a girl’s. He’s taking it all in, filing it away—the moments, the details, the gestures, things said and unsaid. There’s something sad in that gaze, and something steely. I wonder if I could get it. If I had a camera in my hand, could I capture everything his eyes say. Sometimes there’s not enough light; sometimes there’s too much. Some people you just can’t get. They won’t let you.
“I’m okay,” I lie (again). It’s the easiest lie to tell because it’s the one people want to hear the most. That you can take care of yourself, that they don’t have to worry. Because in a very real sense, they can’t help. Most of the time, we’re on our own.
He tosses the tub, the napkins, into the nearby trash can and lifts the file. It looks small in his thick hands. He picks at the edge with his thumbnail, opens it.
“Anyway, this mope says he knows a guy who claims to be a killer for hire. For a thousand bucks, he’ll kill anyone with his bare hands.”
The words sound so odd, so ridiculous. I nearly laugh, like people laugh at funerals, the tension too much.
“My guy, the armed robber, let’s call him Johnny for the sake of clarity, was on a bit of a bender, so his memory—it’s cloudy. Johnny says he met this killer for hire at a bar, and the guy got to bragging. I brought a healthy skepticism to the situation, naturally. But I gotta admit some of the details fit. Like, he knew Jack only had five bucks on him, that the assailant smashed Jack’s phone to a pulp. Little things that weren’t out there in the news.”
“So,” I say, feeling shaky and strange. Those few bites of hot dog are not agreeing with me. “You got a name? He’s in the system? Saw if the DNA matched?”
Detective Grayson shakes his head, leans forward.
“No name. Johnny didn’t know the guy’s name, street-smart enough not to ask. But he gave the sketch artist a description. It matches accounts of a man witnesses saw fleeing the park the morning Jack was killed.”
I appreciate how he often uses Jack’s name, doesn’t call him “your husband” or “the victim.” I feel like he knew Jack, that they might have been friends. The detective is exactly the kind of guy that Jack liked—smart, no bullshit, down-to-earth.
Grayson hands me the file and I open it. The black-and-white pencil drawing stares back at me, full of menace. Head shaved, wide deep-set eyes, thick nose, heavy brow. There’s something about it, something my brain reaches for, but then it slips away. It’s like when I try to force myself to remember those missing days. There’s trulynothing there, just a painful, sucking dark.
“Anything?”
I shake my head. “Nothing. I don’t know him.”
“Johnny says he was a big guy, maybe 6 feet, well over 200 pounds. Ripped, thick neck, big hands.”
There’s that familiar tightness in my chest, that feeling that my airways have shrunk when I think about him out there. I imagine Jack lying on the path. I see wet leaves and blood, the curl of his hand on the pavement. I’m sorry. I should have been with you.
“He’d have to be big, right?” My voice catches. “To overpower Jack.”
Detective Grayson puts a hand on my forearm, easy, stabilizing.
“It’s something,” he says softly. “The first something in a while.”
“A killer for hire.” The words don’t feel right in my mouth. “A thousand dollars. To kill someone.”
“The random mugging,” he says. “It never sat right.”
“But who would hire someone to kill Jack?”
He takes a swig of his Pepsi. “You tell me.”
“No one,” I say. It sticks in my throat and I cough a little. “Everyone loved Jack.”
Grayson pulls himself out of his constant slouch, twists a little like he’s trying to work out a kink. I notice he’s saved a bit of his hot dog bun, has it clutched in his hand. He tosses it, and a kit of pigeons clamor, their pink-green-gray feathers glinting in the sun.
“I’m going to go over all my files again tonight,” he says. “See if this new information sheds light on anything old. We’ll find this guy. And when we do, maybe he can answer that question.”
We’ll find this guy. “How are you going to find him?”
“I went to the place where Johnny says they met,” says Grayson. “They’ve got the sketch up behind the bar. Patrol in that area is on the lookout.”
It seems impossible that you could find someone that way, just hoping they come back to a place they’ve been. And anyway, there’s that part of me that thinks: What does it matter if we catch him? Jack is not coming back. Not even if the guy, whoever he is, gets caught and goes to the electric chair. What does it fix? Nothing changes.
I imagine a trial that drags on, a conviction, or not. Years and years of appeals, tied up in more rage, misery, grief. Jack wouldn’t like it. Let it go, he’d surely say. Everyone dies, somehow, someday. Don’t let this eat whatever’s left of your life.
“You called me, though,” says Grayson. He takes the file that sits open in my lap and closes it, tucks it under his leg. I’m glad that face is gone. “So...what’s up?”
I almost tell him about my dream, the one in the nightclub, that maybe—maybe—could be a memory. It’s why I called him, because of Layla’s suggestion that it might be a memory. But he’s so pragmatic and the images seem so strange and nonsensical now, especially in light of what he’s told me. And I don’t want to recount the part where I kiss some strange man. Even in a dream, it’s shameful, sordid, isn’t it? There’s shame, too, about those missing days. I imagined myself stronger than that, not the person who shatters in the face of tragedy.
But I am that person; I did shatter.
Instead, I just tell him about the hooded man, how I think I’m being followed.
He digs his hands into the pockets of his pants, listens as I tell him about the encounter on the train.
“Big guy?” he says, looking down to open the file again. “Six feet, heavy?”
“I think so.” Bigger than Grayson, taller, broader.
“You’re sure?” He pauses and looks up at the sky, which is a bright blue through the red, gold, orange, of the leaves above, the gray of the buildings. “Of what you saw.”
He knows my history.
“Not completely,” I admit. “No.”
“You couldn’t see his face?”
“The hood.”
“Yeah,” he says, drawing out the word. He dips his head from side to side, runs a hand through his hair, considering. “But his face was completely obscured by the hood? That doesn’t seem right. You can usually see something.”
I shake my head, pushing into my memory. “No.”
Then I remember the pictures on my phone, scroll through the shots and show him the clearest one, which isn’t clear at all. He takes the device and squints at it.
“Hard to see his face, you’re right. Email it to me,” he says. “I’ll have our guys work their magic. Maybe we’ll get something.”
He hands the phone back to me. I quickly forward the image to his email address. We sit a moment, both of us lost in thought.
“So, look,” he says, dropping a hand on my arm. “The next time you see him, call me right away. Linger if you can safely. I’ll get there fast or send someone.”
“Okay,” I agree.
We talk awhile longer. He promises that he’s following up this lead with everything he has. He must have other cases, other priorities, but when I’m with him he always makes me feel like Jack is the most important thing on his mind. He’s convinced his superiors not to close the case, won’t turn it over to cold cases, even though he’s hinted that there’s pressure on him to do that. It’s been nearly a year.
“This new information,” he says. “I have a feeling about it.”
I do, too. Why does that make me feel worse instead of better?
“I’m not letting this go,” he says. “I promise you that.”
* * *
Though I’m not really dressed for it in heels and a pencil skirt, I walk up Fifth Avenue. My head is vibrating, thoughts spinning—Detective Grayson, and killers for hire, how maybe for a thousand dollars someone ended my husband’s life. A thousand dollars. And if that’s true, is the man who killed Jack the same hooded man following me? I swallow hard, there’s a bulb of fear and anger stuck in my throat.
I let the current of the city take me. Its energy pumps and moves; it doesn’t stop for any reason, ever, not even the death of the most important person in your life. It just keeps pulsing, pushing, a flow that you have no choice but to follow.
At the light, I dig into my bag and find that amber vial Layla gave me—not the sleeping pills, but the pills she said were for nerves. I dry swallow a white one. No idea what it is. I really don’t care as long as it quiets the siren of anxiety in my head.
Then I put my headphones in, and listen to my go-to, a David Bowie playlist. I keep walking, heading toward the office. I’m just getting into it, feeling lighter, less mired down, when the music stops and the phone starts ringing. Dr. Nash returning my call.
“Poppy?” she says when I answer. “Everything okay?”
Still marching up the street, I tell her everything—the dreams, Layla’s ideas, Detective Grayson’s revelations. I always think it looks crazy, when someone has her headphones in, gesticulating, walking, talking to someone whom no one else can hear. The modern age has turned us all into ranting schizophrenics.
“That’s a lot,” Dr. Nash says when I’m done. “Why don’t you come in on Thursday? We can talk it through.”
I almost tell her. That I’ve been mucking with my dosage, taking mystery pills, drinking, that last night I took Layla’s stronger sleeping meds, two of them. That I just took something else without even knowing what it is. But what does that make me? I stay quiet.
“Okay,” I agree. “Why am I dreaming more?”
It feels disingenuous to ask this question when I know she only has part of the information she needs to answer it. Still I’m hoping for an answer that makes me feel better.
“You’re probably not dreaming more?” It sounds like a question. “Perhaps you’re just remembering more, which—could be a good thing.”
How? I wonder. How can it be a good thing to lose Jack again night after night? I know her answer about dreams being the gateway to our subconscious, how it’s a place where we work out the things our conscious mind presses away. That pain is a doorway we must pass through to get to the other side of grief and loss. She’s saying something to that effect as I flash on the filthy bathroom floor, the heat of that stranger’s kiss.
“I’d like you to stay on this lower dosage,” she says.
Here again I almost spill it, then don’t. I silently vow to give Layla back her pills, stay on the dosage Dr. Nash prescribed. I’ll tough out any hard nights ahead. Because I want to get off the pills, too. I don’t want her to know how badly I need them, how painful is the night. Daytime is easy; I can busy-addict myself into constant motion. It’s when dusk falls, and energy lags, that the demons start whispering in my ears. When the sun goes down, darkness creeps in, coloring my world gray.
“If you dream vividly again, don’t forget that journal,” Dr. Nash is saying. “Write everything down for our session. Poppy, I really do want us to think of this as good news.”
“Good news,” I repeat, not feeling it.
“If your memories of that lost time are coming back, it means that you’re stronger. And if Detective Grayson has a lead, you may be closer to closure on what happened to Jack. I know you don’t think it matters, but it could be so healing to finally understand.”
That sketched face swims before me, just a drawing of someone who may or may not be real. Was that the last face Jack saw? The thought gnaws at my stomach, cinches my shoulders tight. Why wasn’t I with him?
I want to argue with her. How would it be healing to think someone hired a man to kill Jack? Who would do that? Why? A thought, something dark, tugs at me, something from one of my dreams last night. When I chase after it, it disappears.
“Maybe,” I say instead.
“I’ll see you Thursday,” she says. “But call me if you need me. Day or night. You know that.”
Then, just as I end the call and stop to put my phone in my bag—there he is, following a half a block behind me. A hulking man in a black hoodie, head bent. He stops suddenly when I turn to him, disappears into a doorway.
I quickly dial Detective Grayson, but he doesn’t pick up. Most people would be running away. But instead, I start moving back downtown in his direction.
“He’s here,” I tell Grayson’s voice mail. “Following me up Fifth Avenue. I’m at Fifth and Eighteenth, moving south, back downtown. He ducked into a doorway and I’m following.”
Which is crazy. Maybe even—dare I say it—suicidal. But I keep walking, hugging closer to the buildings, waiting for him to pop back out of the shadows. It’s broad daylight, the avenue as ever a rush of professionals, artists, students, tourists, shoppers flitting between Sephora and Armani Exchange, H&M, Victoria’s Secret; traffic a stuttering wave of sound and motion. But it’s all distant white noise as I move toward where I’m sure I saw him disappear. I press myself against the building and then spring into the doorway that’s set back from the building wall.
There’s no one there. How can that be?
I reach and pull on the handle of the large black metal double door between Aldo and Zara. But it’s locked tight. Suddenly seized by anger, I find myself pounding on it.
“I saw you,” I yell. “I know you’re following me.”
The door stays locked, and no one comes. I get a few sideways glances, but what’s one more shouting crazy person on a city street?
I pound on the door again, the metal cool, the sound reverberating.
What is it? A delivery entrance? I stand back to look at it; it’s the armored entry to a keep, a demon hiding inside. Pure rage rises, a tidal wave. I don’t even try to hold it back, let it wash over me, take me away. I get to pounding again. Not just knocking, but channeling all my anger, all my frustration into that metal, barely even noticing that I’m hurting myself, that the door doesn’t budge, that no one comes.
And that’s how Detective Grayson finds me, violently banging on the door, yelling.
“Hey, hey,” he says, coming up from behind. I feel his hands on my shoulders, turn and shake him off hard. He steps back, hands up.
“Take it easy, Poppy.”
He’s illegally parked his unmarked Dodge Charger right beside us, traffic flowing around it, honking and annoyed at yet one more pointless obstacle to traffic flow.
“He disappeared through here,” I tell him. I’m breathless, sweating from the heat, the effort, the fear. I don’t like the way he’s looking at me, brow creased with concern.
“Okay,” he says putting strong hands on my shoulders. “Take a breath.”
I do that, feel some calm returning now that he’s here.
The door swings open then, and an impossibly young, svelte woman in a black shift dress and thigh-high boots stands before us. She looks back and forth between us, blankly annoyed.
Grayson flashes his shield.
“We’re pursuing a suspect,” he says. His tone is comfortingly official, validating. There was someone there. There was. “Did someone come in through this entrance in the last ten minutes?”
She shakes her head and her long black hair shimmers.
“No,” she says. “I’m the manager here and this is the service entrance. There’s a bell?” She points to it meaningfully. “You ring and someone comes to open it. But there haven’t been any deliveries this afternoon.”
“I saw someone come in here,” I say, more sharply than I mean to. She blinks glittery eyelids to express her displeasure. Her eyebrows are shaped into high arches; a hoop sparkles in her nose.
“No,” she says as though she’s never been more certain of anything in her life. “Not this door.”
“Mind if we have a look around?” asks Grayson easily. She regards him uncertainly, then steps aside. We both walk into the storage area—boxes, racks crushed with clothes, standing steam irons, gift-wrapping station, no menacing strange men in hoods. Adrenaline, the power of rage, abandons me, leaving me feeling foolish, hot with shame, shaky now. Did I really see him come in here?
Grayson’s standing by the door. “Where does this go?”
“Back to the shop,” she says. “There’s a fire exit through the break room on the other side of the store, but an alarm sounds if you push through it.”
“There’s no other exit from this storeroom?”
“Well, just out back, to the alley behind the buildings, where we dump the trash.”
Grayson follows her and I trail behind. The dim alley reeks of rotting garbage; fire escapes track up the surrounding buildings giving way to a stingy square of sky up above.
“The street gate is locked,” she says. “Only the super has the key. Want me to get him?”
Detective Grayson looks at me and I shake my head.
“I’m sorry.” My voice is a rasp. “I was sure I saw him come in here.”
There’s that look again from the detective. I know it well—worried confusion. What’s wrong with Poppy?
On the street: “Are you okay?” He rests a steadying hand again on my shoulder. “You seem—”
“What?” I ask. “Crazy, unstable, a wreck?”
“Let’s go with—unsettled.”
His comforting grin settles me a bit. For a second, I flash on my father, how good he was at talking me through spirals of emotion, bouts of worry. Oh, you’re too sensitive, my mother would sniff. You better get a thicker skin. But not my dad; he always knew what to say. Okay, just breathe. Let’s break this down. What’s really going on?
“Let me give you a lift home,” says Detective Grayson when I don’t say anything else. I can’t prove what I saw, so there’s no point in trying.
We climb into the Charger, plain and white on the outside but high-tech within, a buzzing radio, mounted laptop, all manner of blinking lights on panels. The button for the siren is a tantalizing shiny red, and I fight the urge to press it.
“Maybe he ducked into a different doorway,” he offers as we snake up Fifth.
“Maybe.”
I’d have sworn it was that doorway. But obviously not, and that’s the hard part. Because what we see, what we think we see, what we remember, isn’t always reliable. In fact, it rarely is. Like for months after Jack died, he was everywhere. I’d see a tall man with a lion’s mane of hair and my heart would lurch with joy and hope, crashing into despair milliseconds later. Or I’d imagine him so vividly walking into the room that I almost saw him. Or like those lost days of my “break.” I lived those days, went places, saw people, did things, but the more I press in, trying to remember, the deeper and darker that space becomes.
The eye, the memory—they’re the trickiest liars. Only the camera lens captures the truth, and just for a moment. Because that’s what the truth is: a ghost. Here and gone. As Grayson drives, I scroll through the pictures on my phone again and find that grainy image of my shadow stalker.
Who are you?
Who was I during those lost days?
Layla spent two days looking for me, visiting all the places we frequented together with a picture of me until finally I came stumbling into her lobby, apparently wearing the red dress from my dream. Did I know that detail? Had she told me at one point what I was wearing, what I looked like, and I just filed it away? Or was my dream, as she suggested, an actual memory?
“I’m going to hang around awhile,” Detective Grayson says as he pulls in front of my building. “Out here, in my car. I have some calls to make, emails to answer. I can do it here for a while, just, you know—in case. Why don’t you get some rest?”
Part of me wants to tell him that I’m grateful. Thankful that he hasn’t given up, doesn’t urge me to let it go and move on, that he still cares about what happened to Jack, what happens to me. But a bigger part of me is not grateful. How urgently I wish we’d never met, that I had no reason to know Detective Grayson. I leave the car without a word.
* * *
I tap over the limestone floors of my lobby, breezing past the day doorman, who is on the phone but offers a friendly wave. In the elevator I text Ben and tell him to cancel my appointments and calls for the afternoon, that I’ve come down with a stomach thing. It’s not ideal, but I’m addled and shaky, in no condition to talk to clients or anyone else. Inside the apartment, I close and lock the door.
Leaning against it, I slide down and sit on the floor, the long hallway that leads to the rest of the apartment dark, lined with photographs—his, mine, us together. The only thing I’ve managed to do since moving here is hang those photographs. Sitting on the hardwood, I think tears will come, but they don’t.
Instead I notice that one of the photographs lies on the floor, surrounded by broken glass.
I haul myself up and walk over to it, the apartment unnaturally quiet. The thick-paned windows on the twentieth floor keep most city noise at bay. The glass crackles beneath my feet as I retrieve the picture. Me and Jack, on our honeymoon in Paris. What a cliché! he’d complained. He’d wanted to go Thailand, lie around on some isolated beach, sleep in a thatch hut. But a Paris honeymoon was my only girlhood fantasy and he complied, because he always did. He always wanted me to have the things that I wanted. I can’t even tell where we were, a selfie so close that everything behind disappeared, our faces so goofy with love that it’s almost embarrassing to see.
I hold the shattered frame. The picture hanger is still on the wall. And the photo seems too far from its original space to just have fallen somehow.
My breath comes heavy. I should move back slowly toward the door and run downstairs to Detective Grayson. Instead, I turn and walk toward the living room.
It takes me a moment to notice it, but when I do my stomach bottoms out. Sitting on the low coffee table between the couches is an orchid in a pot. A fat, snow-white bloom drips heavily from a bowed stalk. There’s a single white card tucked into the thick green leaves at its base, a note in black scrawl.
I remember you.
Don’t you remember me?
7 (#u45bdf40c-25ae-5944-ab4b-583b931df908)
“Let’s go over this again,” says Grayson.
He sits on the couch across from me, leaning forward, his dark gaze pinning me to my seat. I know that look; he’s been watching me like that for a year. As though he might still suspect something dark just beneath the surface of what he sees.
Layla’s already here, ministering. She’s gotten me a blanket, which I’m not using, brewed coffee that I’m not drinking. Now she’s hovering, sitting on the couch beside me, leaning in so close that her thigh is fused with mine. Her foot is tapping in that way it does when she’s nervous or annoyed. She’s staring at that white blossom as it quivers in front of us, at Grayson, around the apartment, with a kind of narrow-eyed suspicion.
“You entered your apartment—” he leads.
This is another thing he does, asks me to repeat what I told him, once, twice, three times. Looking for the inconsistencies of lies, I suppose.
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Lisa Unger
‘Gripping suspense at its best’ Karin SlaughterHer husband’s killer may be closer than she thinks…It’s been a year since Poppy’s husband, Jack, was brutally murdered during his morning run. She’s trying to move on but what happened that morning is still haunting her. And now she’s sure she is being followed…Sleep deprived and secretly self-medicating, Poppy is unable to separate her dreams from reality. She feels like she’s losing her mind. But what if she’s not? What if she’s actually remembering what really happened? What if her husband wasn’t who he said he was? And what if his killer is still watching her…
From New York Times bestselling author and master of suspense Lisa Unger comes an addictive psychological thriller about a woman on the hunt for her husband’s killer
What if the nightmares are actually memories?
It’s been a year since Poppy’s husband, Jack, was brutally murdered during his morning run through Manhattan’s Riverside Park. In the immediate aftermath, Poppy spiraled into an oblivion of grief, disappearing for several days only to turn up ragged and confused wearing a tight red dress she didn’t recognize. What happened to Poppy during those lost days? And more importantly, what happened to Jack?
The case was never solved, and Poppy has finally begun to move on. But those lost days have never stopped haunting her. Poppy starts having nightmares and blackouts—there are periods of time she can’t remember, and she’s unable to tell the difference between what is real and what she’s imagining. When she begins to sense that someone is following her, Poppy is plunged into a game of cat and mouse, determined to unravel the mystery around her husband’s death. But can she handle the truth about what really happened?
LISA UNGER is the New York Times and internationally bestselling, award-winning author of 16 novels. Her books are published in 26 languages and have sold millions of copies worldwide. Lisa Unger lives in the Tampa Bay area of Florida with her husband, daughter and labradoodle.
Also by Lisa Unger (#u45bdf40c-25ae-5944-ab4b-583b931df908)
THE RED HUNTER
INK AND BONE
THE WHISPERING HOLLOWS (novella)
CRAZY LOVE YOU
IN THE BLOOD
HEARTBROKEN
DARKNESS MY OLD FRIEND
FRAGILE
DIE FOR YOU
BLACK OUT
SLIVER OF TRUTH
BEAUTIFUL LIES
SMOKE
TWICE
THE DARKNESS GATHERS
ANGEL FIRE
Copyright (#u45bdf40c-25ae-5944-ab4b-583b931df908)
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018
Copyright © Lisa Unger 2018
Lisa Unger asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © October 2018 ISBN: 9781474066754
Praise for Lisa Unger (#u45bdf40c-25ae-5944-ab4b-583b931df908)
‘Lisa Unger’s deliciously intense and addictive thriller got under my skin. I picked it up, was drawn into this dark, tangled tale, and couldn’t pull away until it was done. Gripping suspense at its best.’
Karin Slaughter
‘Under My Skin is a twisting labyrinth of a book where nothing is as it seems, dreams bleed into reality, and the past is the future. Lisa Unger is one of my favorite writers. And in this tilt-a-whirl of a psychological thriller, she’s at the top of her game.’
Lisa Gardner
‘This is a haunting, compulsive tale that will have you under its spell long after you’ve closed the book.’
Tess Gerritsen
‘Under My Skin is a perfectly dark and unsettling, spellbinding thriller. Told with both eloquence and urgency, Unger knows just how to hook her readers and reel them in. This book is not to be missed.’
Mary Kubica
‘Deeply plotted and complex and carries an undeniable momentum. Lisa Unger’s enthralling cast of characters pulled me right in and locked me down tight. This is one book that will have you racing to the last page, only to have you wishing the ride wasn’t over.’
Michael Connelly
‘Riveting psychological suspense of the first order. If you haven’t yet experienced Lisa Unger, what are you waiting for?’
Harlan Coben
‘Suspenseful, sensitive, sexy, subtle. The best nail-biter I have read for ages. Highly recommended.’
Lee Child
To Connie, Donna and Pat,
Faithful readers who have become friends.
Your support means more than you know.
Contents
Cover (#u1766ef66-b198-5e04-9c76-ee6a8ac7390f)
Back Cover Text (#u18f6aa83-1386-5730-b58b-10d699b4c27f)
About the Author (#u762492ba-43e6-5853-96ea-460c96f93466)
Booklist (#u639a354d-47d9-544f-b35b-6046169bd6d8)
Title Page (#u0e83caa2-b9ed-55ef-921d-a2e0bdc6a294)
Copyright (#ua93633af-28aa-55d2-bbdd-8cb3a781b085)
Praise (#u29e239b6-8193-5ffe-8951-32c308593e4f)
Dedication (#u10bda3eb-286d-5051-97a0-a118ee6f000b)
PROLOGUE (#udb4ad8ff-f414-5e7a-bb8a-1eebc0231112)
PART ONE (#u2e916e8c-1a11-581a-a287-996bea33fe19)
Chapter 1 (#ubf17562c-a64f-5f4f-bba2-e09db2aee4aa)
Chapter 2 (#u63ffbe2c-377d-5123-b155-322f6173ab29)
Chapter 3 (#ud0df2c16-5fa0-5736-beb3-a76742702566)
Chapter 4 (#udf800bc8-dec0-5a18-8212-d72fffba6a04)
Chapter 5 (#ub3a602fa-087e-5c01-b4b1-44655fdcca23)
Chapter 6 (#u083b0059-87b5-52a6-b3a6-380402c2588d)
Chapter 7 (#u3026b722-4ea3-5c39-915a-1ecc945e1435)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
PART TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
SIX MONTHS LATER (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#u45bdf40c-25ae-5944-ab4b-583b931df908)
I like him. I do.
But.
There’s always a but, isn’t there?
He’s talking and I should be listening. I’m not. Does he see it, that I’m scattered, distracted? Doubtful. He doesn’t seem especially observant, has that way about him that people do now. As if they are putting on a show of themselves, as if the moment is being watched rather than lived. He glances about as he talks. Up at the television screens over the bar, all on mute, all tuned in to different sporting events. Down at the phone that sits dark beside him. Back to me, off again to the rowdy table across from us—a postwork gathering I’m guessing from the rumpled suits and tired eyes.
I soak in the details of him: his shock of ink black hair, thick—any girl would kill for it; dark stubble on his jaw, just enough—sexy, not unkempt, style, not neglect; his gym-toned body. Beneath the folds of his lavender oxford, the dip of cut abs, the round of a well-worked shoulder.
If I had a camera in my hand—not a smartphone but a real camera—say a mirrorless Hasselblad X1D, ergonomic, light—old-school style with high-tech innards—I’d watch him through the lens and try to find the moment when he revealed himself, when the muscles in his face relaxed and the mask dropped, even for just a millisecond. Then I’d see him. The man he really is when he steps off the stage he imagines himself on.
I already knew he was handsome, stylish, in shape, before we agreed to meet. His profile told me as much. He works in finance. (Of course he does.) His favorite book is the Steve Jobs autobiography. (What else?) But what’s under his skin, that carefully manicured outer layer? Beneath the mask he puts on in the morning—what’s there? The camera always sees it.
He runs his fingertips along the varnished edge of the table between us, then steeples them. I read somewhere that this is the gesture of someone very sure of himself and his opinions. It tracks. He seems very sure of himself, as people who know very little often are.
He laughs, faux self-deprecating, at something he’s just said about himself. His words still hang in the air, something about his being a workaholic. What a relief that it’s just drinks, not dinner. No point in wasting time, if it’s not there, he wrote. Who could disagree? So adult. So reasonable.
I never thought it would be. It can’t be. Because it has nothing to do with the way he looks. It isn’t about his eyes, black, heavily lashed and half-lidded. Or the bow of his mouth, full, kissable. (Though I might kiss him anyway. Maybe more. Depends.) Attraction, desire is nothing to do with the physical; it’s chemical, a head trip. And my head—well, let’s just say it’s not on straight.
A woman laughs too loud—a cackle really, harsh and jarring. It startles me, sends a pulse of adrenaline through me. I scan the crowd. I really shouldn’t be here.
“Time for another?” he asks. His teeth. They’re so white. Perfectly aligned. Nothing in nature is so flawless. Braces. Whitening.
The rim of the glass is ice-cold beneath my fingertip. The drink went down fast, too fast. I promised myself I wouldn’t drink, not with everything that’s been going on. It’s been a long day, a long week. A long year. The weight of it all is tugging at me, pulling me under.
I take too long to answer and he frowns, just slightly, looks at his phone. I should just leave. This is crazy.
“Sure,” I say instead. “One more.”
He smiles again, thinks it’s a good sign.
Really, I just want to go home, pull up my hair, put on my sweats, get into bed. Even that’s not an option. Once we walk out of here, it’s back to the jigsaw puzzle of my life.
“Grey Goose and soda,” he tells the waitress when he’s flagged her down. He remembers what I’m drinking. A small thing, but so few people pay attention to the details these days. “And Blanton’s on the rocks.”
Straight bourbon, very manly.
“Am I talking too much?” he says. He looks sweetly sheepish. Is it put on? “I’ve heard that before. My last girlfriend, Kim—she said I ramble when I get nervous.”
It’s the second time he’s mentioned her, his “last girlfriend, Kim.” Why, I wonder? Carrying a torch? Or just trying to market himself as someone who’s been in a relationship? Also, “last girlfriend.” It begs the question: How many others? Maybe I’m reading too much into it. I do that.
“Not at all.”
I am a seeker. I want to explore the world. Don’t you? I love to learn, to cook, to travel. I get lost in a good book.
That’s what his profile said. In his picture, he smiled, nearly laughing, hair wind-tossed. It was a good photo, could have come from a magazine—which is always suspicious. Photographers know all the tricks to capturing beauty, the right angles, the proper lighting, the magic of filters. The truth is that most people aren’t that hot in person. Even beautiful people, real ones, are flawed in some way—not airbrushed, or prettily windblown, eyes glittering. Lines around the eyes and mouth, an almost imperceptibly crooked nose, a faint scar—chicken pox or a childhood fall from a bike. People, real people, have a little stain from lunch on their tie, maybe something hanging from their nose or in their teeth, patches of dry skin, shoes that need replacing. These imperfections make us who we are, tell the truth of our lives.
But to his credit, he is close to as good-looking as his profile picture. But something’s off. What is it?
There’s nothing special about my profile picture, nothing misleading, just a photo snapped by my friend Layla, who set the whole thing up. Of course, she’s a talented photographer, my oldest friend and knows how to shoot me. No filter, though, no Photoshop tricks. What you see is what you get. Sort of.
“What about you?” he says.
The waitress delivers the drinks to our high-top. Her ears are lined with silver hoops; another in her lip. She is fleshy but pretty with startling green eyes that give her an otherworldly look. I bet she reads a lot of teen fantasy novels. Twilight. Harry Potter. Hunger Games.
“Thank you, darlin’,” he says to her. He drops the g and inflects the word with a twang, though I know he was born and raised in New Jersey. She beams at him, flushes a little. He’s a charmer in a sea of snakes.
I notice that he has a way of looking at women, a warm gaze, a wide smile. It seems like a choice. A technique. He knows that women like to be gazed upon, attended to with male eyes. It makes them feel pretty, special in a world where we too rarely feel like either of those things. She smiles at him, does this quick bat of her eyelashes. She likes him. I can tell; she glances at him from time to time as she shuttles back and forth along the bar, between the other high-tops she’s also serving. Even if I walk out of here, I’m sure someone will go home with him. Good-looking, charming guys emanating the scent of money rarely go lonely.
“What do you want to know?” I ask when he turns back to me.
He takes a sip of his bourbon, gazes over his glass, mischievous. “In your profile, you said you were a runner.”
Did Layla put that in my profile? Layla—this dating thing? All her idea. Time to get back out there, girlfriend. I honestly don’t remember what we put in the profile.
“I run,” I say. The truth is that I used to run. “I don’t know if I’d call myself a runner.”
“What’s the difference?”
“I run—for exercise, because I like it, because it calms me. But it doesn’t define me. I don’t have a group, or register for races, travel to do marathons or whatever.”
Am I rambling?
Finally, “I run. I am not a runner. Anyway, I’m more indoors lately, at the gym.”
He nods slowly, a pantomime of the careful listener, looks down at his glass.
I almost tell him about Jack then; it’s always right on the tip of my tongue.
My husband was killed last year, I want to say. He was attacked while he was running in Riverside Park at 5:00 a.m. Whoever it was—they beat him to death. His murder is still unsolved. I should have been with him. Maybe if I had been... Anyway. I don’t find running as enjoyable as I used to.
But then he’s talking about how he started running in high school, ran in college, still runs, travels for marathons, is thinking about a triathlon in New Mexico next year, but his work in finance—the hours are so crazy.
Kim’s right, I think. He talks too much. And not just when he’s nervous. Because he’s not nervous, not at all.
It’s his nails. They’re perfect. They are, in fact, professionally manicured. Expertly shaped and buffed squares at the ends of thick fingers. He steeples them again on the table between us. That’s the but. Vanity. He’s vain, spends a lot of time on himself. The gym, his clothes, his skin, hair, nails. Which is fine for tonight. But in the long game, when it’s time to stop worrying about yourself and start thinking about someone else, he’s not going to be able to do it. The lens would have seen it right away.
Should I mention my nervous breakdown, the one I had after Jack died, how days of my life just—disappeared? Probably not, right?
The space grows more crowded, louder. It’s one of those Upper East Side sports bars with big screens mounted at every angle, games from all over the country, all over the world playing. It’s filling up with the after-work crowd, men who are really still babies with their first jobs, fresh out of school, girls—tight-bodied, hair dyed, waxed and threaded, tits high—who have no idea what the next ten years will hold, how many disappointments small and large.
It’s Thursday, tomorrow the end of the workweek, so the energy is high, exuberant voices booming. Our waitress drifts back and forth, deftly balancing trays of clinking highballs, frothy pilsners of beer, shot glasses of amber liquid. Shots? Really? Do people still do that?
There’s a buzz of anxiety in the back of my head as I scan the crowd, turn to look through the big windows to the street. Someone’s been following me, I almost say, but don’t. I’ve been suffering from some sleep disturbances, some unsettling dreams that might be memories, and to be truthful my life is a bit of a mess. But I don’t say those things. He’s still talking, this time about work, a boss he doesn’t like.
It’s closing in, all the laughter, cheering, bodies starting to press, ties loosening, hair coming down. I let him pick the meeting place. I’d have chosen a quiet spot downtown—in the West Village or Tribeca, someplace soothing and serene, dark, where you speak in low tones, lean in, get to know someone.
Note to self: don’t let them choose—even though the choice speaks volumes. In fact, this dating thing, maybe it’s not for me at all.
“I’ve got an early day tomorrow,” I say, in the next lull between things he’s saying about himself. He’s been practically yelling, to be heard above the din. I should get out of here. Huge mistake.
I see it then. A flinty look of angry disappointment. It’s gone in a millisecond, replaced by a practiced smile.
“Oh,” he says. He looks at his watch—a Fitbit, wouldn’t you know it. “Yeah, me, too.”
“This has been great,” I say. He picks up the check, which the bartender must have laid in front of him at some point.
I take my wallet out.
“Let’s split it,” I say. I prefer to pay or split in these circumstances; I like the feel of equal ground beneath my feet.
“No,” he says. His tone has gone a little flat. “I’ve got it.”
It’s not just the nails. There’s a sniff of arrogance, something cold beneath the flirting. I can see the glint of it, now that he knows he’s not going to get what he came for. Or maybe it’s not any of those things. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with him at all. Very likely it’s that something is wrong with me.
Or most likely of all, it’s just that he’s not Jack.
Until you let your husband go, no one else will measure up. That’s what my shrink said.
I’m trying. I’m dating.
Setting them up to knock them down isn’t dating.
Is that what I’m doing? Just killing time with men who can’t help but to ultimately reveal themselves as not-Jack. They won’t be as funny as he was, or know just where to rub my shoulders. They won’t run out at any hour for anything I need, without being asked. I’ll go grab it for you. They won’t have his laugh, or that serious set to his face when he’s concentrating. They won’t bite on the inside of their cheeks when annoyed. They won’t feel like him, or smell like him. Not-Jack.
Until one day, says Dr. Nash, there’s someone else who you love for all new reasons. You’ll build a new life. I don’t bother telling her that it’s not going to happen. In fact, there are a lot of things I don’t bother telling Dr. Nash.
On the street, though I reach out for his hand, he tries for a kiss. I let his lips touch mine, but then I pull back a little, something repelling me. He jerks back, too. It’s awkward. No heat. Nothing. I shouldn’t be disappointed, should have long ago lost the capacity for disappointment. I suspected (knew) that it wouldn’t be there. But I thought maybe if there was heat, some physical spark, I wouldn’t need the sleeping pills tonight. Maybe we’d go back to his place and I’d have a reprieve from putting back the pieces of my fractured life.
Now I must decide where I will go tonight—back to an apartment I was supposed to share with my husband but where I now live alone and no longer feel safe, back to Layla’s penthouse, maybe to a hotel.
A police car whips up Lexington. Whoop. Whoop.
“Maybe we could run this weekend?” He’s still working it, though I can’t imagine why. “Ever try the trails up in Van Cortlandt Park? Short but pretty—you feel miles away from the city.”
“Nice,” I say.
Unless there’s someone lurking in the shadows, and no one can hear you call for help.
“Should I text you?”
He’ll never text me, of course.
“That sounds great.”
Even if he does text me, I won’t answer him. Or I’ll put him off until he gets the hint. It’s easy like that, this dating thing in the age of technology. You can dangle someone off the edge of your life until they just float away, confused. Ghosting, I think the millennials call it.
“Can I see you home?” he asks.
“No,” I say. “I’m fine. Thanks.”
I feel wobbly, suddenly. It’s after nine, and those two vodka sodas are sloshing around in an empty stomach, not to mention the other chemicals floating in my bloodstream. I haven’t eaten anything since—when?
“You okay?” he asks. His concern seems exaggerated, his tone almost mocking. There are other people on the street, a couple laughing, intimate, close, a kid with his headphones on, a homeless guy sitting on the stoop.
“I’m fine,” I say again, feeling defensive. I didn’t have that much to drink.
But then he has his arm looped through mine, too tight, and I find myself tipping into him. I try to pull away from him. But he doesn’t allow it. He’s strong and I can’t free my arm.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey,” he says, a nasty little mimic. “You’re okay.”
Of course I’m okay, I want to snap. But the words won’t come. There’s just this bone-crushing fatigue, this wobbly, foggy, vague feeling. Something’s not right. The world starts to brown around the edges. Oh, no. Not now.
“She’s okay,” he says, laughing. His voice sounds distant and strange. “Just one too many I guess.”
Who’s he talking to?
“Let go of me,” I manage, my voice an angry hiss.
He laughs; it’s echoing and strange. “Take it easy, sweetie.”
He’s moving me too fast up the street, his grip too tight. I stumble and he roughly keeps me from falling.
“What the hell are you doing?” I ask.
Fear claws at the back of my throat. I can’t wait to get away from this guy. He pulls me onto a side street; there’s no one around.
“Hey.” A voice behind us. He spins, taking me with him. There’s someone standing there. He looks distantly familiar as the world tips. Somewhere inside me there’s a jangle of alarm. He has a dark hood on, his face not visible.
It’s him.
He’s big, bigger than—what’s his name? Reg, or something. Rex? The big man blocks our path up the sidewalk.
“Hey, seriously, dude,” says Rick. Yes, Rick, that was it. “Step aside. I’ve got this.”
But the world is fading fast, going soft and blurry, tilting. There’s a flash, quick-fire movement. Then a girlish scream, a river of blood. Black red on lavender.
Then arms on me.
Falling.
Nothing.
PART ONE (#u45bdf40c-25ae-5944-ab4b-583b931df908)
Hypnagogia
Between the dreams of night and day there is not so great a difference.
—Carl Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious
1 (#u45bdf40c-25ae-5944-ab4b-583b931df908)
“I think someone’s following me.”
I almost kept this to myself, but toward the end of our session it just tumbles out.
Dr. Nash wrinkles her brow with concern. “Oh?”
Her office is a cozy living room, all big furniture and fluffy throw pillows. There are shelves and shelves of books and pictures, and trinkets, small art objects from her travels. It’s exactly the kind of office you’d want your shrink to have. Warm, enveloping. I sink deeper into my usual corner on her plush couch, leaning heavily on the overstuffed armrest. I resist the urge to curl up in a ball and cover myself with the cashmere blanket that’s tossed artfully over the back. A grouping of those faux candles flicker on the coffee table; she made me some tea when I arrived. It sits in front of me, untouched.
“The other night when I left the gym, there was someone standing across the street. I think I saw him again this morning on a park bench near my office.”
Even thinking about it, there’s a flutter of unease.
The doctor shifts in her leather Eames chair; it’s too well made to creak beneath her weight. She’s a wisp of a woman. The leather just whispers against the fabric of her pants. Afternoon light washes in, touching her hair and the side of her face. There are these longish pauses in our conversation where she chooses her words, letting mine ring back to me. She takes one now, considering me.
“Are you certain it was the same man?” she asks finally.
A cool October breeze wafts in the open window, street noise carrying up from nine floors below. A horn, the rumble of a manhole cover wobbling beneath the weight of passing vehicles, the yipping of some small dog. I imagine a Yorkie in a little sweater, straining against a slender leash.
“No,” I admit.
“But certain enough that you’re uneasy about it.”
I’m already sorry I brought it up. I did see someone, a man in a black hoodie, sneakers, faded jeans. He stood in a dark doorway across the street when I left the gym last Tuesday. Then on Thursday as I headed to my office clutching my daily quadruple espresso, I saw him again. I felt his eyes on me, the details of his face hidden in the dark shadow of that hood.
I dismissed it. There are lots of staring men clad in jeans and hoodies in this city. Any girl will tell you, there are always eyes on you, unsolicited comments, unwanted noises, unwelcome approaches. But then maybe I saw him once more over the weekend, when I was coming home from the farmers’ market. Still, it’s hard to be certain.
“Well,” I backpedal. “Maybe it wasn’t the same man.”
I shouldn’t have said anything. I don’t want her to think I’m backsliding. Stumbling toward another breakdown. When something like that happens to you, there’s this energy to the people who care about you, like they’re always waiting for signs that it’s going to happen again. I get it; they don’t want to miss the tells a second time and run the risk of losing you again, maybe for good. Even I’m wary. I feel a little sick about that black spot in my memory where I took a vacation from reality, how fuzzy are the days surrounding Jack’s murder.
So. I try not to think about it. It’s one of the things from which I am trying to move on. That’s what you’re supposed to do, you know, when the worst thing happens and you’re still standing. Everyone’s very clear about it: you’re supposed to move on.
“It’s probably nothing,” I say, stealing a surreptitious glance at my watch. My smartphone, my tether as Jack liked to call it, is off and tucked into my bag, as per Dr. Nash’s office rules. Here we free ourselves of distractions and try to be present in a world that conspires against it, she has said more than once.
Dr. Nash watches me, prettily brushing away an errant strand of her lovely gray-blond bob. Behind her there’s a picture of her family—her chiseled-jaw, graying husband, her grown children both with her same delicate features, intelligent eyes. They all stand together on a terrace overlooking a beach sunset, smiling, faces pressed together. We’re perfect, it seems to say. Wealthy and gorgeous, without a single stain of darkness on our lives. I look away.
“I noticed you’re not wearing your rings,” she says.
I look down at my left hand. The finger is slightly indented from my wedding and engagement rings, but bare.
“When did you make that decision?”
My hands swelled the other night, and I took the rings off and put them in the dish beside my bed. I haven’t put them back on. I tell her as much. Jack has been dead almost a year. I’m not married anymore. Time to stop wearing the jewelry, right? Even though the sight of my bare hand puts a painful squeeze on my heart, it’s time.
“Was it before or after that you started seeing the hooded figure?”
Dr. Nash is the master of the pointed question.
“I see where you’re going with this.”
“I’m just asking.”
I smile a little. “You’re never just asking, Dr. Nash.”
We like each other. Sometimes, lately, our sessions devolve into chats—which she says is a sign I need her less. A good thing, according to her. Progress on the road to healing, the new normal as she likes to call it.
“How are you sleeping?” she asks, letting her other question rest.
I have the nearly empty pill bottle in my purse. Last time I asked for more, she wrote me a scrip but lowered the dosage. I’d like you to try to get off these. Honestly, it hasn’t been going well. My dreams are too vivid. I’m less rested, so edgier, jumpier during the day.
“I was going to ask for my refill.”
“How’s that lower dosage?”
I shrug, trying for nonchalance. I don’t want to appear fragile, not to her, not to anyone. Even though I am, terribly. “I’m dreaming more. Maybe I feel a little less rested.”
“You’re not taking more of them, though, are you?”
I am. I’m also doing other things I shouldn’t be doing. Like taking them with alcohol, for one.
“No,” I lie.
She nods carefully, watching me in her shrink way. “You’ve been taking them for eleven months. I’d like to go down to the minimum dosage with an eye toward your being off them altogether. Want to give it a try?”
I hesitate. That chemical slumber is the best place in my life right now. I don’t say that, though. It sounds too grim. Instead I find myself agreeing.
“Great,” she says. “If it’s an issue, we’ll go back up to the dosage you’re on now. And those dreams? Go back to the dream journal you were keeping when Jack first died. It’s an important part of our lives, our dream world. As we’ve discussed, we can learn a lot about ourselves there. Do you still keep it by your bed?”
“Yes.”
She hands me the white slip of paper.
“Well,” she says. I stare at the crisp sheet, her doctor’s scrawl. “I think our time is up for today.”
I’m always a little startled by the end of a session, the abrupt reminder that no matter how intimate, how I strip myself bare in these sessions, ours is a professional relationship. If I stopped paying, these chats with Dr. Nash would come to an unceremonious end.
“And, Poppy? If you see him again, call me.”
A siren from the street below drifts up, a distant and ghostly wail. This sound, so frequent in the cacophony of city noise, always makes me think of Jack. About an hour after he left that morning, emergency vehicles howled up the avenue beneath our window. There should have been some premonition, some dark dawning, but there wasn’t.
A lingering head cold had kept me in bed instead of going with him as I normally would have.
You could have died that morning, too, Layla says when we go over and over it.
Or maybe it wouldn’t have happened at all. Maybe we would have run in a different direction. Or maybe we could have fought off the attacker together.
Or maybe, or maybe, or maybe—on and on. Infinite possibilities, myriad ways Jack might still be with me. He overslept; a light caused him to cross another street; I was there and twisted my ankle, causing us to return home. I turn to those scenarios in blank moments, in dreams, when I should be paying attention in meetings. So many other paths he could have taken and didn’t.
“I’m not imagining him.” It seems to come out of nowhere.
Dr. Nash cocks her head at me. “I didn’t say you were.”
I bend down and grab my bag, come to standing as she does.
“And lock your doors. Be mindful,” she adds.
“You sound like my mother.”
She chuckles. “We can talk about that next session.”
“Very funny.”
* * *
I walk toward the subway, needing to get back downtown for a two o’clock meeting. I’m probably going to be late—again. The city is such a mess, a constant crush of traffic and delayed trains. I think about a cab or an Uber, but sometimes that’s even worse, snaking through jammed streets, trapped in a box, trying to decide if it would be faster to just get out and walk. The whole city seems to conspire against promptness.
I text my assistant, Ben. Running late, I tap in quickly and descend beneath the street. It’s Monday midday, so it’s not as crowded as it could be. Though the day is mild, the platform is hot as an oven and smells like piss. My stress level starts to tick up.
Jack wanted us to leave Manhattan; he’d grown to hate it. Everything that was cool about it is gone. It’s just an island for the rich. He dreamed of a historic property upstate, something with a lot of land, trees, trails to wander. Something we could renovate and make ours. He longed to disconnect from the rush of wanting, grasping, striving, at least on the weekends. He wanted time back behind the camera. He didn’t get any of those things.
We were packing when he died, boxing up the one-bedroom Upper West Side apartment we’d shared for five years. But instead of moving out of the city, we were moving to The Tate, a luxury high-rise in Chelsea—a gleaming tower of apartments with floor-to-ceiling windows, offering stunning vistas, high ceilings, wood floors, chic open-plan kitchens, pool and gym, a 24/7 building staff. It was me. I was the one who wanted it; he acquiesced.
He loved our dark, cozy place on Ninety-Seventh—with views of the other building across the street, with radiators that clanked, and mice in our ridiculously dated kitchen, and the old doorman Richie, who’d worked there forever and was sometimes asleep when we walked in. He loved our crazy, colorful cast of neighbors—Merlinda, the psychic who read clients in her apartment; Chuck—or Chica—accountant by day, drag queen by night, who had the most beautiful singing voice I’d ever heard; Bruce, Linda and Chloe, public school teachers and their adorable, gifted daughter, our next-door neighbors who never failed to invite us for Sunday dinner.
Now I live in a starkly beautiful space that looks out onto lower Manhattan—alone. I don’t even know who lives in the apartment next to me. The hallways are gray tunnels, lined with doors that seem to rarely open. In my apartment, the furniture is placed appropriately—bed in the bedroom, couch in the living area—but most of the boxes are still unpacked. To say I miss my husband, our wacky neighbors, that dark old apartment, our life—well, why? There are no words to adequately describe that slick-walled gully of despair. Suffice it to say that I can’t seem to fully move into my new life without Jack.
I’m sorry, I tell him. I wish I had listened to you.
Dr. Nash says it’s okay to talk to him, if I understand he’s not talking back.
Time drags and I’m ever more fidgety, annoyed. More people file down the stairs. The platform grows dense with bodies, the air thickening with impatience. Still the train doesn’t come. I lean over the edge of the platform to see if I can spot the glow of an oncoming headlamp. No.
I glance at the clock. There is officially no way to be on time now. A bead of perspiration trails down my spine. A glance at my phone reveals that there’s no signal.
When the train finally screeches into the station, it’s already packed. I wait by the door, letting the flow of people exit. There’s no guarantee that the next train will be any less crowded, and that waiting meeting looms. I shoulder myself on, shimmying toward the door that connects one car to the other; find a space with a little breathing room. The cars fill.
Stand clear of the closing doors.
The doors close, open again, then finally shut for good. The train lurches forward, stops, jostling everyone, then onward again. I close my eyes, try to breathe. The crowded space is closing in already. I am not great in tight spaces, which is an uncomfortable condition for a city dweller. It’s worse since Jack died; the fingers of panic tugging at me more than they used to. I lean my head against the scratched, foggy glass. Breathe. Just breathe. Imagine you’re on a trail in the woods, plenty of space, the tall green trees giving oxygen and shade. There’s a bird singing, the sound of the wind in the leaves. It’s the meditation Dr. Nash gave me for dealing with anxiety in crowds or anywhere. Occasionally, it works.
But when I open my eyes again, he’s there. That hooded man, pressed in among the crowd in the other car, a statue amidst the clutter of shuffling, jostling passengers. His eyes are hidden by the shadow of the hood, but I can feel them. Is it the same man? My heart stutters, a suck of fear at the base of my throat.
Reality cracks, a fissure splits in my awareness. For a moment, quick and sharp, I’m back in my own bedroom. The space beside me on the king mattress is cold when it should be warm. The covers are tossed. Jack left for his run without me, letting me sleep.
“Jack?”
Then I’m back, the train still rattling, rumbling. I’m stunned, a little breathless; what was that? A kind of vivid remembering, a daydream? Okay. It’s not the first time it has happened; but it is the most vivid. The woman next to me gives me a sideways glance, shifts away.
Pull it together, Poppy. The stranger—he’s still there. Is he watching me?
Or is he just another blank commuter, lost in thought about home or work or whatever it is we ponder when we’re zoning out, traveling between the places in our lives. Maybe he’s not seeing me at all. For a moment, I just stare.
Then, unthinking, I push through the doors, stepping out onto the shaking metal platforms between the cars. This is a major subway no-no, I think as I balance and grope my way through the squeal of metal racing past concrete, metal on metal singing, sparking, then through the other door into the relative quiet of the next car.
He moves away, shoving his way through the throng. I follow.
“What the fuck?”
“Watch it.”
“Come on.”
Annoyed passengers shoot dirty looks, shift reluctantly out of my way as I push after him, the black of his hood cutting like a fin through the sea of others.
As we pull into the next station, he disappears through the door at the far end of the car. Trying to follow him, I find myself caught in the flow of people exiting, and get pushed out of the train onto the platform. I finally break free from the crowd, jog up the platform searching for the hooded figure among tall and short, young and old, backpacks, briefcases, suits, light jackets, baseball caps. Where is he?
I want to see his face, need to see it, even though I can’t say why. Distantly, I’m aware that this is not wise behavior. Not street-smart.
Don’t chase trouble, my mother always says. It will find you soon enough.
Then the doors close and I’m too late to get back on. Shit. My phone chimes, finding a rare spot of service underground.
A text from Ben: ETA? They’re going to wait a bit, then reschedule. Assume you’re stuck on the train.
It isn’t until the train pulls away that I see the stranger again, on board, standing in the door window. He’s still watching, or so it seems, his face obscured in the darkness of the hood. I walk, keeping pace with the slow-moving train for a minute, lift my phone and quickly take a couple of pictures. I can almost see his face. Then he’s gone.
2 (#u45bdf40c-25ae-5944-ab4b-583b931df908)
I arrive at the office frazzled, sweaty, full of nerves, late for the meeting. In the bathroom, running my wrists under cold water, pulling shaking fingers through my dark hair, I stare at my reflection in the mirror.
Pull. Yourself. Together.
My face is sickly gray under the ugly fluorescents, as I dab some makeup on the eternal dark circles under my eyes, refresh lipstick and blush. A little better, but the girl in the mirror is still a tired, wrung-out version of the person she used to be.
Rustling through my bag, I find the bottle of pills Layla gave me. It’s blank, the little amber vial, no label. For nerves, she said. I hesitate only a second before popping one in my mouth and swallowing it with water from the faucet, then try to take some centering breaths. Dr. Nash is not aware of my unauthorized pill-taking, one of multiple things I keep from her. I know. What’s the point of keeping things from the person who is supposed to be helping you?
As I walk past Ben’s desk, he rises and hands me a stack of messages.
“They’re waiting,” he says, dropping into step beside me. “You’re fine.”
“Great.” My smile feels as stiff and fake as it is. “The subway is a mess.”
“Everything okay?”
He inspects me through thick, dark-rimmed glasses, tugs at his hipster beard. He’s a stellar assistant; I keep trying to promote him but he doesn’t want to go. My clients love him—he’s on top of all their contracts, tracks down their payments, helps with grant and residency applications. Over the past year, he’s been more agent to them than I have. He could probably just take over and I could slip away. It’s tempting, that idea of slipping away, disappearing—another life, another self.
“Yeah,” I say unconvincingly. Ben watches after me with a frown as I push into the conference room.
“His work,” Maura is saying. “It’s stunning.”
“Whose work?” I ask, taking my seat at the head of the conference table. “Sorry I’m late.”
All eyes turn to me. When Jack was alive, I could come and go unnoticed. He ran the meetings and I was the number two—critical to the running of the office, but not the magnetic, energetic head of the meeting table. He brought a light and enthusiasm for the craft, for the business into every gathering. I am not the captain he was, I know, but I’m doing my best. They watch me now—respectful, kind, hopeful.
Jack picked out everything in this room, from the long sleek conference table to the white leather swivel chairs, the enormous flat screen on the wall. His photo from an Inca Trail trek, featured in Travel + Leisure, is blown up onto an enormous canvas. He took it from his campsite above the cloud line—orange tents blossom in white mist, as clouds fall away into a landscape of jade and royal blue, the dip of the valley dark and the sky bright.
“Alvaro’s,” Maura says. “He took that Nat Geo job to photograph the okapi living in the Ituri Rainforest, just got back yesterday.”
The photos come up on the screen—lush, jewel greens and deep black, a red mud road twists and disappears into a thick of forest; a girl, her eyes dark and staring, stands on a riverbank in a grass skirt, her expression innocently teasing. A blue-and-white truck travels precariously over a swaying wooden slat bridge.
Maura runs a manicured hand over her black hair, pulled tight into a ponytail at the base of her neck. She’s young, but her almond-shaped eyes reveal an old soul. Olive-skinned, almost birdlike in her delicacy, she’s a firebrand agent, fiercely protective of her clients. She worries over them like a mother hen.
“The colors, the movement, the energy,” I say. “They’re wonderful.”
The trunk of a tree, hollowed out and haunted, twisting, branches reaching up into deep green black. The shots of the okapi, an animal that is partially striped like a zebra, but related more closely to a giraffe, are stunning—a mother nursing her young, a young male hiding in tall grass, a small herd underneath a wide full moon.
“They are,” Maura agrees. Her smile is wide and proud. “He’s—amazing.”
I wonder, not for the first time, if something is going on between Maura and Alvaro. It’s not a good idea for an agent to fall in love with a photographer she represents. In fact, it’s not a good idea for anyone to fall in love with a photographer. The unfiltered world never quite measures up to whatever he sees through that lens. Alvaro Solare, Jack’s best friend and the firm’s first client, is the typical roving photographer, always in pursuit of the next perfect shot. Which means the rest of the world can go to hell. There are a string of heartbroken women in his wake. I’d prefer Maura not become one of them. But it’s not really my business.
The rest of my agents run down the status of their clients’ assignments. Our firm, Lang and Lang, mine and Jack’s, represents photographers. We are a boutique agency, small but successful, with some of the top names in fashion, feature and news photography on our roster.
What started as a small enterprise in our apartment, has grown into an agency with a suite of offices in the Flatiron Building. Jack, affable and mellow, was a natural mediator. When Alvaro was in a dispute with the New York Times travel section, Jack stepped in and resolved it over drinks with the photo editor, an old friend of his. Alvaro paid Jack 15 percent out of appreciation. One thing led to another, and after a year Jack was turning down photo assignments, and representing more of his friends, including me.
So, after years of hustling as travel photographers, scraping together a living, we traded in our life of adventure for a firm dedicated to protecting the rights of people who make a living with a camera in their hands. Alvaro thought it was a mistake, that we were wasting our talent and our lives. And he never lost an opportunity to tell us so. But we thought it was time to settle down, start a family. Except it didn’t work out that way.
I half listen as the other agents run down problems and successes. I comment, make suggestions, offer to make a call to a contact of mine at Departures. But mostly, I am still on that train, chasing after the man in the hood.
I wonder if anyone notices that I am a ghost in my life.
* * *
It’s another half hour before I am back in my office, scrolling through the blurry, useless photos I took on my smartphone. The light was poor, too much motion. That dark form is just a smudge, a black space between the grainy commuters all around him. I use my thumb and forefinger to enlarge the image on the screen, but it looks ever more amorphous as a low-quality image will.
I start to doubt myself, my grip on reality. What did I see really, after all? Just a man with a hood, who might or might not have been looking in my direction.
I don’t even notice Ben until he’s sitting across the desk from me. There’s a look I don’t like on his face, worry, something else.
“What?”
He leans back and crosses his legs. “When were you going to tell me?”
“Tell you?”
“That you’re dating again.”
I shake my head, not wanting to get into it. “I’m not.”
“So, who’s Rick, then?” He slides a message across my desk. There’s another one from him in the stack I’ve just barely started to sort through. I’m old-school; I still like paper messages to toss when calls are returned, write notes on, keep as reminders.
“He’s no one,” I say.
I wouldn’t say I’m exactly dating. There’s a snow globe on my desk, a little farmhouse surrounded by trees. Jack gave it to me one Christmas. This is what our house will look like, out in the country. Quiet. Away from all the chatter. I tip it and watch the snow swirl around the black branches.
“I saw your profile online,” says Ben. He peers over his glasses, a gesture he thinks makes him look wise, worldly. It really doesn’t. He’s far too young to be either of those things.
Putting the snow globe down, I lean back in my chair and frown at him.
“What are you doing on an online dating site, a young hottie like you? They must drop like flies.”
He shoots me a faux-smarmy eyebrow raise. “That’s what we do. The millennials? It’s how we roll. Tinder, OKCupid, Match.com. Love is just a swipe away.” He makes a wave motion with his hand.
“So, it’s not just for old people, then?” I sift through the tiny white sheets of paper. “The divorced, the forever single—the widowed.”
Widowed. I hate that word; it evokes black veils and wails of grief. It defines me by the loss of my husband, as though I’m less now that he’s gone. Of course—I am. I regret saying it as soon as it’s out of my mouth. The word hangs in the air between us. When I look up from my messages, Ben has me pinned in a thoughtful gaze. Another youngster with an old soul; it seems we have a type in our small firm.
“If you must know, it wasn’t my idea.”
“Let me guess.” He shifts forward, puts his elbows on his knees.
“Layla came over. Wine was consumed. The next thing I know, I’m back in the dating scene.”
I don’t think you can clinically call what I’m doing dating. In the olden days, we used to refer to it as sleeping around. A relationship? A boyfriend? No. I don’t want those things. Not yet. Maybe not ever. But, wow, does it ever feel good to be touched again. I don’t share this with Ben, who is studiously massaging that hipster beard he’s so proud of. I wish he’d cut it off. It’s borderline offensive, though I can’t say why precisely.
“It’s a good thing,” he says finally, rising. “And Rick sounds like kind of a nice guy. He’s hot, too. Looks like he could have money.”
“You checked him out?” I say, mock mortified.
“Uh,” he says, widening his eyes. “Yeah.”
I smile at my young friend, my assistant who has outgrown his position but still likes it. If he has a girlfriend, or a boyfriend—or whatever—he never says so. I open my email; an impossible number of messages await.
“Two calls in a day,” says Ben, moving toward the door. “I like his confidence. A man who knows what he wants.”
“Confidence or arrogance?” I ask. “Desperation?”
“Let’s call it—” Beard rubbing, word searching. “Assertiveness.”
“Send him an email, will you? Tell him drinks on Thursday?” I ask.
“From you or from me?”
“Would it be weird if it was from you?”
“Seriously weird,” he says, then rethinks. “Well—more like pretentious. Have your people call my people? Do you want to be that person?”
“Fine—from me.”
Ben frequently sends emails at my direction from my account. Never anything big, just setting meeting times, quick one-line answers to various questions.
“Where?”
I shrug. “I don’t care. He can choose.”
Ben hesitates in the door a minute, his lanky form in my peripheral vision. Then he leaves me and I am alone with that image staring back at me from my smartphone. I close the photo app and put the device down, shut my eyes and draw in a few deep breaths. That’s the other thing you’re supposed to do when you’re trying to move on, to smooth out the edges of the panic, sadness, anger or whatever overtakes you—focus on the breath. Breathe, they tell you.
Whatever that pill was, it has smoothed out the edges some, for sure. I’m lighter, less shaky.
But—honestly—I’m scared; fear tickles at the back of my throat. There’s a white noise of anxiety in the back of my head. It’s not just the man in the shadows, on the train. He is scary, sure. If there really is someone following me, then yes, it’s weird and frightening. What’s scarier, though, given my history, is if there isn’t.
* * *
I finish out the day, and work late, pushing everything else away. There are contracts to review, emails to answer, a dispute between a fashion photographer and a model she supposedly came on to, then ejected from a shoot when he refused her, another dispute between a feature photographer who’d submitted photos to a travel magazine, filed for payment via their Kafkaesque system, and ninety days later still hadn’t been paid. Work is easy, a cocoon that keeps the chaos of life away.
When I look up from my desk again it’s after seven and all the other offices are dark. The refrigerator in our break room hums, a familiar and weirdly comforting sound. Half of the hallway lights are off, leaving the space dim and shadowy. I know Ben was the last to leave and he locked me in on the way out, reminding me to set the alarm when I finally took off for the night.
As I’m packing my bag, a phone starts ringing in one of the offices. It bounces to the main line, and I reach over to pick it up. There’s no number on the caller ID, but I see that it came from Maura’s extension. Maybe it’s Alvaro; he used to call late for Jack. We’ve drifted since Jack’s death, not that he and I were ever really friends. In fact, despite his extraordinary talent, and his close friendship to Jack, I’ve always considered him a giant asshole. I really hope, for Maura’s sake, that she hasn’t fallen for him.
“Lang and Lang.”
There’s just a crackling on the line.
“Hello?” A strange sense of urgency pulls me forward in my seat.
There’s a voice but so much interference that I can barely make it out. I hang on awhile longer, listening. A strain of music. The blast of a horn. That voice, it’s throaty and deep, talking quickly, unintelligible through the static. Is it familiar?
Poppy. I think he says my name. Something about it sets my nerve endings tingling.
“Yes, this is Poppy. Sorry—I can’t hear you.”
I press my ear to the phone, cover the other to hear better. But the connection finally just goes dead, and a hard dip of disappointment settles into my stomach. I wait, thinking the phone will ring again. But it doesn’t.
With a niggling sense of unease, I move away from the phone. That voice. My name on the line. Or was it?
I pack up my bag and loop the office, making sure lights are down and doors are locked. It’s a small space; there are only five of us. Walls are made from glass, so there are few places in the office that can’t be seen from wherever you stand. Still, I feel uncomfortable, like I’m being watched. I lock the door behind me, head down in the elevator.
“Working late,” says Sam, the night security guard at the desk. He has a worn paperback novel in his hands. He and Jack used to talk about books, sharing a love of science and history. I glance at the title: The Future of the Mind by Michio Kaku.
“Light reading?”
“The brain,” he says, tapping his capped skull. He has dark circles under his eyes, a strange depth to his gaze. An insomniac who works nights, a veteran who did two tours in Iraq. “It’s the ultimate mystery. We know less about it than we do about space.”
Jack would know what to say; he’d probably have read whatever Sam was reading. They’d chat for ten minutes while I kept busy answering emails on my smartphone. But I just nod, aware of the sad way he looks at me. Most people look at me like this now, at least sometimes. The widow.
“Take care of yourself,” he says as I head toward the door. There is a gravity to his words, but when I turn back, he’s already gone back to his reading.
* * *
On the street, shadows fill doorways and pool around parked cars. But no hooded man, just a young couple walking, hands linked, leaning into each other, an old woman with a shopping cart, a lanky kid walking and texting. A yellow cab swiftly pulls to the curb. Safe inside, I turn to look behind me once more.
Maybe, maybe something moves in the shadows across the street. But it’s hard to be sure.
3 (#u45bdf40c-25ae-5944-ab4b-583b931df908)
Instead of going home, I head to Layla’s, dropping her a text so that she knows to expect me. Not even five seconds pass before her reply. She’s always half expecting me for dinner these days—which makes me feel some combination of grateful and guilty.
We’re having meatloaf. Gma’s recipe.
Whose grandma she is talking about, I’m not sure. Mine, hers or Mac’s? There certainly wasn’t any famous meatloaf recipe in my family. Layla’s brood wasn’t exactly the gather-around-the-Sunday-table type, and most of them are long gone. Mac comes from a long line of glittering one percenters; meatloaf is not on the menu. Maybe she was just being ironic.
Yay! I type. Uh—whose gma?
When the phone pings again, the text is not from Layla.
Hope you’re well, it reads. I’d love to see you again. No pressure. Just drinks?
The name on the phone gives me pause. Of all my recent assignations, he stays with me. I try not to think about the night we shared, but it comes back in gauzy scenes. His touch—gentle but urgent; his laugh—easy, deep. Sandy curls, like Jack’s. Something else just beneath the surface—what was it? There’s a little catch of excitement in my breath, but I quickly quash it. No. I’m not ready for anything more than we shared. I’ve told him as much. I briefly consider responding. It would be another easy night, an escape hatch from my life.
Layla’s text distracts me: I was just being ironic. I got the recipe from the internet—like everything else.
I hesitate another moment, remembering the feel of him, then delete his message without response.
Cold. I know.
* * *
Layla’s Central Park West address is gray and regal with a private motor court, multiple sparkling, marble lobbies manned by a small army of smartly uniformed doormen. It’s a fairy tale, a castle for the ultrawealthy. The towering lobby ceiling dwarfs me as I enter. The scent of fresh-cut flowers and the glitter of the chandelier above create a ballroom effect. Story-tall abstract oils, white leather sectionals, a twisting metal sculpture—there are museum lobbies with less grandeur.
Real people don’t live in buildings like this, Jack would say. He’d seen too much of the world in his lens—people living in poverty, children starving, cities ruined by war, nature decimated by corporate greed. Obscene wealth offended him. Me—not so much. I drift through worlds, as comfortable in a hostel as I am at the Ritz. Living in opulence or squalor, under the skin people are just the same. Everyone suffers. Everyone struggles. It just looks different from the outside.
My heels click on the marble, the staccato bouncing off the walls. Allegedly, Sting lives here. Robert DeNiro lives here. (Though I’ve never seen either of them.) Those mysterious Russian billionaires you always hear about live here. My dear friends Layla and Mac Van Santen live here with their teenagers, Izzy and Slade.
I still don’t completely understand what Mac does. Finance, of course. Hedge fund manager—but what does that really mean? I also don’t get how in the last ten years, he got so crazy-beyond-ridiculously rich. Something to do with “shorts” and the mortgage bond crisis of 2007. Suddenly there was a move from the perfectly spectacular Tribeca loft to the Central Park West penthouse. The monthlong summer trips overseas. The family driver, Carmelo. The private plane at an airport in Long Island.
Layla and I share a laugh over this now and then—mirthlessly—how much things have changed since we were kids together. How her mother worked two jobs. How my parents bought her prom dress when her family couldn’t afford it, how her parents fought in the kitchen over stacks of bills they couldn’t pay. How my dad and I would drive to her place and pick her up when she couldn’t stand the yelling and worse. Her parents are both dead now, having led, short, unhappy, unhealthy lives. But Layla still bears the scars they left on her, literally and figuratively.
The doorman, unsmiling but deferential, knows me and waves me through without bothering to call up.
“Have a good evening, Ms. Lang.”
The floral scent from the lobby follows me into the mirrored elevator. I drift up to the twenty-eighth floor as though on a cloud, silken and silent, emerging in the private foyer.
Pushing through the door into Layla’s penthouse apartment, I’m greeted by the sound of Izzy practicing her violin in the room down the hall. Whatever piece she’s struggling through is unrecognizable. The sheer size of their space, the thick walls, keep the sound from being unbearable as surely my early instrumental attempts were to my parents—the clarinet, later the flute. I remember their strained encouragement, their palpable relief, when I discovered that my passion was the totally silent artistic endeavor of photography.
Let’s just say that Izzy is no musical prodigy, either; I wonder when or if she’ll be told. She practices with gusto, though, attacking the same few musical phrases over and over. If it’s a matter of sheer will alone, she might improve. She’s a high achiever like her father, focused, unrelenting, a star student.
Slade, her younger brother, is at the kitchen island FaceTiming with a friend on his iPad while they play some weird world-building game on a laptop. Two screens are apparently required for this interaction. I plant a kiss on his head, am rewarded with a high five, and his megawatt smile. Slade’s more like Layla—or like Layla used to be. Easy, laid-back, distractible and artistic.
Layla’s at the stove; the table set with fresh flowers, cloth napkins, gleaming platinum silverware. There are only four places, which I take to mean that Mac is not going to be home for dinner. The usual state of affairs.
“Please put that away and tell your sister it’s time to eat,” Layla says to Slade as she comes over to give me a hug.
“Izzy!” Slade bellows, startling us both into laughter. “Dinner!”
“I could have done that,” says Layla, swatting him on the shoulder. “Tell Brock you have to go. Goodbye, Brock.”
“Goodbye, Mrs. Van Santen,” comes the disembodied voice from the iPad.
“Did you finish your homework?” she asks Slade when he’s closed his laptop.
He looks at her with Mac’s hazel eyes, an uncertain frown furrowing his brow. He’s a heartthrob, all big eyes and pouty lips, thick mop of white-blond curls. Fourteen years old and already towering over Layla and me.
“No more gaming until it’s done,” says Layla. “Now go get your sister. Clearly, she can’t hear us.”
More screeching from behind Izzy’s closed door as if to punctuate the point. Slade moves in that direction as slowly as a sloth, knocks, then disappears into Izzy’s room.
“That violin teacher keeps telling me that she has promise,” Layla says, moving back over to the stove. “Am I crazy? She sounds truly awful, right?”
“I heard that,” yells Izzy, emerging. No one ever says anything in the Van Santen house. “I am awful! Obviously. This was your idea, Mom!”
Layla rolls her eyes as Izzy tackles me from behind, kissing me on the cheek. Her hair is spun gold; she smells of lilacs. She’s lean and fit, but no skinny waif. I’ve seen her and her field hockey–playing girlfriends put away their body weight in pizza.
“Save me from all of this, Aunt Poppy,” she says. “Can I come live with you?”
“I know, darling,” I say, holding on to her tight. She used to sit in my lap, kick her chubby legs and laugh as I changed her diapers, and squeeze her tiny hand in mine as we crossed the street. Is there anyone dearer than the children of people you love, especially when you don’t have your own?
“How do you bear up under these conditions? It’s miserable.”
“Mom, please,” says Izzy. She walks over to her mother, picks a carrot out of the salad and starts to munch. “I’m just not musical.”
“It’s good for you, sweetie,” says Layla easily. She pushes a strand of stray hair from Izzy’s eyes. “To do something you’re not great at immediately. To work for something.”
“That’s—ridiculous.”
The teenager, so like her mother, blond with startling jewel-green eyes, casts me a pleading look. “Isn’t that ridiculous?”
Savory aromas waft from the oven and range top, making my stomach rumble. I used to cook, too. Jack and I both loved being in the kitchen. Lately, when I’m not here, I survive on a diet of salad bar offerings and maybe Chinese takeout when I’m feeling ambitious. I help Izzy get the water.
At the table, I let the chaos wash over me—Izzy going on about some mean-girl drama, Slade begging to add a robotics club to his already packed schedule. All the heaviness, the strangeness of my day lifts for a moment.
But my inner life is a roller coaster. I think: this is the life Jack and I could have had; maybe not the insane wealth—but the chattering kids and the food on the stove and the homework. The happy mess of it all; it could have been ours. And then the ugly rise of anger; we were robbed of this. I stare at the water in my glass. Followed then by the stomach-dropping plummet of despair: What is there when I leave here? A dark apartment, void of him and the life we were building.
Layla’s hand on mine. The kids are looking at me.
“Poppy?” she says softly. “Where did you go?”
“Nowhere,” I say. “Sorry.”
A ringing device causes Layla to rise from the table. I hear the electronic swoop as she answers.
“Wait, don’t tell me,” she says. “You’re going to be late. I shouldn’t wait up.”
Her tone is light, but there’s an edge to it, too.
“There’s just a lot going on right now.” Mac on speaker apparently. No—FaceTime. She comes to the table with her iPad, sits back down beside me. Even on the screen I can see the circles under his eyes. He rubs at his bald head, his tie loose and the top button on his shirt open. “You know that, honey.”
Layla softens, smiles at the screen. “I know. We just miss you.”
“Hi, Mac,” I say.
“Hi, Dad,” the kids chorus.
“Hey, guys.”
“Poppy’s my husband now,” says Layla. She tosses me a smile. “She’s in your place.”
“I hope you two will be very happy together,” says Mac with a light laugh. “Poppy, good luck.”
I blow him a kiss.
“Izzy, sweetie, how did you do on your calculus test?” he asks.
Layla passes her the iPad.
“I’m confident,” she says, covering her mouth, still chewing. These kids, all confidence, no worries. When did that happen? What happened to teen angst? I used to lie in bed at night worrying—about grades, about friend drama, about everything.
“Did you check your work?” he asks.
More chewing. “Uh-huh,” she says. “I got this, Dad.”
Izzy hands the iPad to Slade. “Dad, this is the last week to sign up for robotics.”
“What did your mother say?”
“She said not unless my grades come up.” Slade casts a sad-eyed look at his mom, which she ignores.
“Then that’s the decision.”
Is it fatigue that makes his voice sound that way, flat, distant? Or the crush of it all—work and family, marriage, pretty from the outside, exhausting from the inside.
Slade, still undeterred, launches in about how by the time he can prove he’ll get his grades up, it will be too late. They go back and forth for a few minutes.
“FaceTime parenting,” whispers Layla. I don’t like her flat tone, either, or the kind of sad distance I see on her face; it’s new. “It’s all the rage.”
“You okay?”
She puts on a smile, but looks down at her plate. “Yeah,” she says, false bright. “Yeah, of course. Just—tired.”
I catch Izzy watching us with a worried frown.
“Dad says what if I sign up for robotics and quit if my grades don’t come up?” Slade cuts in.
Layla looks to the screen, annoyed. But the iPad is dark; Mac is gone.
“Your father and I will discuss it later and give you a decision tomorrow.”
“Robotics is the future, Mom.”
Layla puts down her fork and locks Slade in a stare. “Ask me again and the answer is no.”
Everyone knows that tone; Slade falls silent and looks at his plate. The mom tone—which means you’ve reached the limit of her patience and you’re about to lose big. I take a bite of meatloaf. Wherever she got the recipe, it’s great. I’ve cleared my whole plate. I didn’t realize how hungry I was. Layla’s barely touched hers. Which I guess is why she’s a size zero.
“Okay,” he says, drawing out the word into sad defeat.
Izzy gets up, scraping the chair loudly, clearing her plate. “I promised to call Abbey.”
Somehow the mood has changed, the happy chatter died down, a stillness settling.
* * *
Layla and I settle into the white expanse of her living room—everything low and soft, the gas fireplace lit, photography books laid out on the reclaimed wood coffee table, a bottle of pinot opened between us. I want to tell her about the hooded man, but I don’t. She’ll panic, launch into fix-it mode, and I don’t need that right now.
We’ve been friends since eighth grade. But friend is such a tepid word, isn’t it? A throwaway word that can mean any level of acquaintance. What do you call someone who’s shared your whole life, who seems to know you better than you know yourself, accepts all your many flaws and weaknesses as just flubs in the fabric of who you are? The person you can call at any hour. The one who could show up at your house in the middle of the night with a body in the trunk of her car, and you’d help her bury it. Or vice versa. That’s Layla.
“Mac’s working late,” I say, tossing it out there.
She lifts her eyebrows. “That’s Mac. It’s what he does. He works.”
She seems to wear the opulence around us, slipping into it easily like a silk robe. The expensive fabrics on her body drape; her pedicured toes are pretty, white-pink squares. Her skin practically glows from regular treatments. It would be easy to think she came from wealth, that this was all she knew. But I remember how she grew up. The fingerprint bruises on the inside of her arm from one of her father’s “bad nights.” How my mother used to pack extra food in my lunch box in case Layla came to school without and with no money to buy anything. We don’t talk about it much anymore, the abuse, the neglect. Ancient history, Layla says.
“It’s easier I think,” she says, looking down into her glass. “For him. To be at work than here with us. It’s messy at home, you know. Lots of noise, emotions, ups and downs—family, life. Numbers sit in tidy columns. You add them up and it all makes sense.”
When Jack and I first started the agency, Mac helped figure out the finances.
One night, he came to our apartment after work, and sat at our kitchen table covered with a swath of spreadsheets and documents. Layla and I grew bored, drifted away from the table. But the boys stayed up late talking about pension plans and salaries, quarterly taxes, insurance costs.
Layla and I opened a bottle of wine, lay on the couch listening to their voices, low and serious.
“Are you sure this is what you guys want?” she asked that night.
“The agency?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Won’t you miss it? The assignments, the travel, you know—the excitement of it?”
There was something odd in her tone. “Do you miss it?” I asked.
She shrugged. “The kids keep me busy,” she says. “But, yeah, sometimes.”
I was surprised by this; it never occurred to me that Layla was less than happy.
Her Facebook posts and Instagram feeds were a cheerful tumble of beautiful pictures of the kids, family trips, idyllic Sunday breakfasts, strolls in the park. Layla and Mac in love, wealthy, with two gorgeous, gifted children. Fakebook, Jack liked to call it. A bulletin board of our pretty moments, all the rest of it hidden.
“I guess we all make our choices,” she said, flat and final. “I mean, we’re blessed. I’m—grateful.”
“Mac loves the kids,” she says now. “He’s always there for them. He’s never missed a performance or a party—they call, he answers.”
“He loves you.”
That much I know. Though Mac can be stiff and isn’t exactly a sparkling conversationalist, sometimes even a little blank, his face lights up when Layla talks. He watches her with love in his eyes. Personally, I think he’s on the spectrum, a genius with numbers but maybe struggling elsewhere. Not an unusual combination. But since Jack’s death, Mac has spent many an evening at the office with me, educating me on everything Jack used to handle. He’s patient, gentle, explaining and re-explaining as often as necessary without a trace of annoyance. He’s been there for me, just like Layla. These people—they’re my family.
Layla rubs at the back of her shoulder, seems about to say something but then it dies on her lips, replaced by a wan smile.
“I know,” she says. “Of course he does. Seventeen years.”
She takes a sip from her wineglass, the lights behind her twinkling in a sea of dark. In daylight, the room looks out onto Central Park—an expanse of green, or autumn colors, or white. “It’s okay. We can’t change each other. Most of us who stay married know that.”
Jack and I had just passed our eighth-year wedding anniversary before he died, so I don’t comment. But I don’t remember ever wanting to change him.
“I’m sorry,” she says, sitting forward and looking stricken. “The stupid things I say sometimes.”
I lift a hand. “Don’t walk on eggshells. Don’t do that.”
“So what’s going on with you, then?” she asks. “Something—so don’t lie.”
“Nothing,” I lie. She doesn’t buy it, doesn’t push, but keeps her gaze on me.
“I saw Dr. Nash today,” I say, just to put something out there. “She wants me to get off the sleeping pills.”
“Why?” says Layla, pouring us each another glass of wine. I don’t stop her, though I’ve had enough, and the pills earlier. This is our second bottle. “Fuck that. Take what you need to sleep. This year’s been hard enough. You tell her—”
I tune her out. She’s always had a mouth on her, always the fighter, the one standing up, speaking out. For some reason I flash on her arguing with one of her high school boyfriends. We were in the parking lot after a football game. She hit him on the head with her purse. You fucker! she’d screamed, as we all watched. I dragged her off; she kept yelling. The look on his face, like he’d never experienced anger before. Maybe he hadn’t. Layla wept in my car afterward. What had she been so mad about that night? I don’t even remember—or who the boy was, or who else was there. Just the bright spotlights from the field, some girls giggling, the smell of cut grass and Layla’s voice slicing the night.
“Poppy,” she says.
“What?”
I’m getting the mom look, the one she gives her kids when they’re not listening.
“I asked if she took you off the pills.”
“She lowered the dosage.”
“And.”
“My dreams.” My dream images of Jack from last night mingle with the shadow on the subway, the odd daydream I experienced on the train. “They’re more vivid. I don’t feel as rested.”
“Tell her to put the dose back up,” she says sharply. “You need your rest, Poppy.”
“I want to get off them.” The words sound weak even to my own ears. Do I really? “I don’t want to take pills to sleep for the rest of my life.”
“Why not? Better living through chemistry. Lots of people are medicated all their lives.” She lifts her glass like she’s proving a point.
I don’t know if she’s kidding or not. What’s certain is that I’m duller, mentally heavier. I haven’t had a camera in my hand since Jack died, haven’t taken one serious photograph. The truth is I don’t even feel the urge. Is it the grief? The drugs? Some combination of those things. I put the glass down on the table, where it glitters accusingly. How many have I had? Is it weird that I don’t even know?
She drops it. We chat awhile longer, just gossip about the firm, how I think Maura and Alvaro might be involved. I think I see something cross Layla’s face at the mention of Alvaro’s name, but then it’s gone. She tells me that she’s started shooting again. Layla has an eye for faces. They blossom before her lens, reveal all their secrets. Her favorite subjects in recent years, naturally, have been her children. She still maintains her website, has an Instagram feed with a decent following. She has real talent, more than I ever had.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “Not more beautiful shots of my gorgeous children. After Slade and Izzy go to school, I head out the way I used to. Just looking for it, you know, that perfect moment.”
“Show me,” I say, curious.
“I will.” She looks away. It’s not like her to be shy. “I’m rusty. I’ve spent so many years on the kids—maybe I’ve lost my eye. What small amount of talent I had, maybe it just withered up and died.”
“I doubt that,” I answer. “Be patient. Maybe you just have a new way of seeing things now.”
She shifts on the couch, folds her legs under her. Something about the way she’s sitting seems uncomfortable, as if she might be in pain. Too much kickboxing. She rubs at her shoulder again. “Life does that I guess.”
She looks at me too long, too sadly. I look away.
“I should get home.” This happens. I’m okay where I am and then suddenly I just need to be alone, like I can’t hold the pieces of myself together anymore.
“Stay here,” she offers. But I’ve spent too many nights in their guest room. Tonight, I need to think. Layla’s life is a cocoon. When I’m here, everything else disappears—the real world seems fuzzy and insubstantial.
I get up, and grab my stuff, get moving before she can talk me into it. She watches me a beat, seems like she wants to say something. But then she rises, too, and doesn’t stop me.
“Wait a second,” she says, then rushes off down the hallway. She’s back in a moment, as I’m pulling on my coat.
“Take these,” she says, pressing a bottle of pills in my hand. “They’re mine. I think that’s the dosage you were on originally.”
I look at the bottle. “Don’t you need them?”
“I can get more.”
“How?” I ask. “Dr. Nash watches me like a junkie.”
Layla smiles. “I have my ways.”
I shouldn’t take them. I should hand them back to her and ask her what the hell she’s talking about. Where is she getting all these pills? And why? But I don’t. I just gratefully shove them in my pocket, promising myself that I won’t take them. Unless. Unless I absolutely need to.
“Sure you don’t want to talk about it?” she asks. “Whatever is going on? I’m here when you’re not okay. Always. Don’t forget that.”
It’s tempting, to come back inside and tell Layla, let her take over in that way she always has. This is what we need to do...
“I’m okay,” I say instead.
4 (#u45bdf40c-25ae-5944-ab4b-583b931df908)
The Lincoln Town Car waits for me in the motor court. When he spies me, Layla’s towering, refrigerator-sized driver, Carmelo, climbs out quickly and rushes to reach the door before I do, smiles victoriously as he swings it open. He has long blond hair pulled back into a tight ponytail, faded denim eyes and a jaw like the side of a mountain.
“I got there first, Miss Poppy,” he says.
“This time,” I concede, slipping into the buttery leather interior, and he closes the door.
It’s a thing we have; how I find it ridiculous to wait by the door while he comes around to open it. And he considers door-opening a critical feature of his job, and a terrible dereliction of duty if I open it and get in before he sees me. He’s the rare person who cares about the minute details of his profession. I shouldn’t mess with him. But he’s sweet and funny and we enjoy our little game.
“Home?” he asks.
“Home,” I say, even though I don’t have a home. I have a place where I live, but not a home.
The city rushes past—lights and people, limos, beaters, taxis, bicyclists. I am light, the wine, the pills—I let my head rest against the seat, which seems to embrace me. The hooded man is a distant memory. The car is quiet, except for low jazz coming from the radio; I let my eyes close. Sometimes Carmelo and I chat about his aging mother, his young son, Leo. But he rarely speaks unless I talk to him first, unless he has a question. It’s another standard of his job, to disappear, to be only what you need him to be. When I open my eyes, I catch his in the rearview mirror, watching.
“Long day?” he asks.
“Yes,” I admit. “You?”
“The usual,” he says with a shrug. He takes the kids to school, Mac to work, shuttles Layla through her busy day, waits for Mac in the evenings, takes clients (and friends) around; his day ends when Mac’s does, often not until after midnight or later. Carmelo was always the driver for boys’ night out, when Jack, Alvaro and Mac got together. Shuttling them from bar to bar, maybe to some private card game at Mac’s club, who knows where else.
What could Carmelo tell us about our husbands? Layla mused.
Are you kidding? I’d quip. He’d never tell us anything.
“The city, though, lately. What a mess.”
“Ever think about getting out?”
“Nah,” he says. “Born and raised, you know.”
He pulls to the curb and I just stare for a second, my heart pulsing.
“Carmelo.”
He turns to look at me questioningly, then out at the street. His eyes widen as it dawns.
“Oh, no,” he says, then covers his mouth in a girlish gesture of embarrassment. “Miss Poppy. I’m so sorry.”
He’s taken me to my old apartment building, the one on the Upper West Side where I lived with Jack, not far from Layla’s. A couple I don’t recognize climbs the stairs, laughing, carrying sacks of groceries. She’s petite and wearing jeans, a light black jacket. He’s taller, broad, with an inky mop of hair—young, stylish. It could be us. It was us.
“It’s okay,” I say, biting back a brutal rush of grief, of anger—not at him, at everything.
He pulls away from the curb quickly, cutting off another car and earning the angry bleat of a horn.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” he says, voice heavy with apology. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I say again, trying to keep my voice steady. “Easy mistake.”
I look back at my old street, but then he turns the corner and heads downtown. It’s gone. I want to go back; I want to get as far away as possible. I wish that he would drive and drive and that we’d never reach our destination; that I’d just drift in the space between Layla’s life and what’s left of mine forever.
* * *
Back at my place, I open another bottle of wine, pour myself a glass and look around the space. The pain from the sucker punch of seeing my old block has subsided some. And I experience a brief flicker where I feel distantly inspired to decorate, to settle in, as Dr. Nash keeps encouraging. At least unpack the boxes that are still stacked everywhere.
But that moment of inspiration passes as quickly as it came and I find myself reclining instead on the couch. I turn on the television, close my eyes and listen to the local news—an armed robbery in the Bronx, the Second Avenue subway near completion, a missing child found. The measured, practiced voice of the newscaster soothes; my awareness drifts.
* * *
“Jack?”
The bed beside me is cold, the covers tossed back. The clock on the dresser reads 3:32 a.m. I push myself up, sleep clinging, lulling me back.
“Jack.”
I pad across the hardwood floor. I find him in the living room, laptop open.
“What are you doing?” I ask, sitting beside him on the couch.
He drops an arm around me, pulls me in. I love the smell of him, the mingle of soap and—what? Just him, just his skin. No cologne. He’d wear the same three shirts and pairs of jeans all week if I didn’t buy his clothes. He doesn’t always shave, wears his hear longish, a sandy-blond tangle of curls. Has a pair of black-framed glasses instead of bothering with contact lenses.
“Just catching up on email.”
His email is open, but so is the web browser, the window hidden.
“What is it?” I tease. “Porn?”
“Yeah,” he says. “I’m out here watching porn while my beautiful wife sleeps in the next room.”
I nudge in closer, wrap my arms around him.
“Porn’s easier, though, right?” I offer reasonably. “Isn’t that what they say? Porn’s never tired, doesn’t say no. You don’t have to satisfy porn.”
“Stop,” he says. I reach for the computer and open the web browser before he can stop me. The face of a beautiful dark-eyed woman stares back at me. But it isn’t porn; just a news article he’s been reading. A photojournalist was beaten to death in her East Village apartment, a suspected robbery gone wrong, all her equipment stolen.
“Who is she?” I ask.
He shakes his head, a beat passing before he answers. “Just someone I used to know.”
I scan the article. “She was murdered?”
He stays silent.
I feel a rush of urgency. “Jack, tell me who this is and why you’re reading about it in the middle of the night.”
He doesn’t answer, just stares straight ahead.
“Jack,” I say again. “Who is she?”
* * *
I wake up with a jolt on the stiff fabric of my couch, disoriented, reaching for him. The dream lingers, clings to my cells. Who is she? My own voice sounds back to me. I’m tangled in that strange weaving of the real, the remembered and the imagined. Jack’s scent, the feel of his arm, stays even as the shapes and shadows of the apartment he’s never seen assert themselves into my consciousness.
I reach for the dream—the woman’s face on the screen, the news article. Someone I used to know. But it’s jumbled, makes no sense. A dream? A memory? Some weird hybrid?
The couch beneath me is hard, not soft and saggy like the one in our old place. This one I bought online because I thought it looked sleek and stylish; when it arrived, it was as stiff and gray as a concrete slab. I didn’t have the energy to return it.
The television is on, the sound down so low it’s barely audible. Radar images of tomorrow’s weather swirl red and orange, a storm brewing, unseasonable heat.
Slowly, Jack, the dream begin to fade. I reach for him, but he’s sand through my fingers.
This is not new. Since his death, I vividly, urgently dream of my husband—embraces, lovemaking, his return from this place or that, maybe the store, or a business trip. The joy of his homecoming lifts my heart. These moments—though they are twisted and strange, places altered, patchworks of things that happened and didn’t—are so desperately real that I often awake thinking that my real life, the one in which Jack has been taken from me, is the nightmare.
And then, when I wake, there’s the hard, cold slap of reality: he’s gone. And that loss sinks in anew. Every single time. How I dread that crush when he’s taken from me again, when the heaviness of grief and loss settles on me once more, fresh and raw, its terrible weight pushing all the air from my chest.
I wipe away tears I didn’t even know I was crying. And I reach for the remote and let our stored pictures come up on the screen. Photos from our travels scroll—a canopy walk in Costa Rica, lava tubing in Iceland, a selfie that we took while kissing on the Cliffs of Moher. The images transfix, the girl I was, the man he was. Both of us gone. Many nights after work, this is what I do. Lie here and watch our hundreds of photos scroll silent across the screen.
It’s going to get better, Dr. Nash has told me. With time, the weight of this will lessen.
It isn’t, I want to say but don’t. How can it?
Outside my towering windows, the city glimmers.
I pull myself up, dig the new lower dosage prescription out of my bag, pour a big glass of water. Just about to drink the medication down, I pause. It sits in the palm of my hand, blue and seductive.
What if I just stopped taking them? What would happen? I should do some research. Jack wouldn’t approve of the amount of medication I’ve been taking, I know that. He wouldn’t even take Tylenol for a headache.
Or...
I remember the higher dosage Layla handed me; I grab them from the pocket of my coat, hearing her voice, always so certain: take what you need to sleep. I think about the other pills I took today. How many? What were they? How much wine did I drink?
To be truthful here, there’s not much of an internal battle. I need the utter blankness of dreamless sleep, the dream life Dr. Nash so values be damned. I need a break from grief, from my thoughts—from myself. I shake out one of the higher dosage pills. Then another. I drink them down. Just for tonight.
With images twirling around my sleepy brain, I enter the bedroom. On the bedside, the black dream journal rests by my bed. I haven’t written in it in a while, but Dr. Nash’s advice from today is still fresh in my mind. We can learn a lot about ourselves there. I flip it open, and scrawl down what I remember, but it’s faded to nearly nothing. I scribble: a dark-eyed girl on the screen. Who is she?
The pen feels so heavy in my hand.
There is no furniture in the bedroom except a low white platform bed, covered by the cloud of a down comforter, big soft pillows. I close my eyes, let the journal and pen drop to my side—pushing away thoughts of Jack, and the stranger shadowing my life, Layla, Dr. Nash. I wait for that blissful chemical slumber.
5 (#u45bdf40c-25ae-5944-ab4b-583b931df908)
The surface beneath me is cold and hard, my head a siren of pain. Nausea claws at my stomach and the back of my throat. My shoulder aches, twisted under me. A sharply unpleasant odor invades. I don’t want to open my eyes; I squeeze them shut instead.
Where am I? I should know this.
I open them just a sliver, peering through the fog of my lashes. Silver and white, a filthy tile floor, feet walking by, high heels, sneakers, flats. Scuffling, voices. Music throbbing outside, someone laughing too loud—drunk or high.
You must be kidding me! a voice shrieks.
I push myself up. I’m in a bathroom stall, curled around a toilet bowl. That odor—it’s urine. I’m on the floor in a bathroom, in a nightclub by the sound of it. My heart starts to race, my breath ragged. I look down at myself. I am wearing a dress I don’t recognize; tight and red, strappy high heels.
Okay, okay, okay, I tell myself. Just think. Just think. What’s the last thing you remember?
Jack’s funeral beneath a cruelly pretty sky, leaning heavily on Mac, his strong arm around my waist practically the only thing holding me up. Layla holding my other hand. Mac’s whisper in my ear: It’s okay, Poppy. We’re going to get through this. All of us together. Hold on. Be strong. He’d want that. Our old apartment filled with friends, damp eyes, whispering voices; Jack’s mother, her face ashen with a tray of sandwiches wobbling in her hand; Layla taking it from her, laying it down on the table. My mother chatting with Alvaro, flirting as if this wasn’t her son-in-law’s funeral. I can hear her throaty laugh, inappropriate enough to draw eyes. Me wishing for the millionth time that my father was still alive. Daddy, please. I need you. How silly. A grown woman still calling for her father. Those are the last things I can remember. Where am I now? How did I get here?
I pull myself unsteadily to standing, the walls spinning. Someone pounds on the stall door.
“One minute,” I say, voice croaky and strange. I don’t even sound like myself.
Whoever it is finds another stall, slams the door. The door outside swings open, voices and music pour in, filling the whole room. Then it goes quiet again.
There’s a bag lying beside me, a glittery black evening purse. Even though I don’t recognize it, I grab for it and open it. My cell phone, dead. Five hundred dollars in cash. A thick compact, which I pry open with shaking hands.
The woman in the mirror is a mess, long black hair wild, mascara running down her face in sad clown tears, pale, blue eyes wide with fright. I sit on the seat and use some toilet paper and my own spit to clean my face. I do a passable job, running my fingers through my hair, using the makeup in my bag to fix myself up. In the small shaking mirror, I’m almost normal again. Except for the fact that I have no idea where I am, or how I got here.
Okay. Deal with that later. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. I just need to get myself home. I can figure everything out once I’m safe. I’ll call Layla then. We’ll figure it out. She’ll know what to do.
I wobble through the stall door, tilting in heels too high. Two women—one black, one white—applying makeup at the mirror glance at me, then at each other. They both start to laugh.
“You okay, honey?” one of them asks, not really caring. She smears a garish red to her lips.
“You need to Uber your ass home, girl,” says the other, frowning in disapproval. Her hair is dyed platinum blond, her lips dazzling berry. I feel a lash of anger, but a wash of shame keeps me from answering back.
Their laughter follows me out the door, until it’s drowned out by the heavy techno beat. Bodies throb on the dance floor as I push my way through the crowd, wondering where the exit is. Instead, I find myself at the bar, taking a seat. I’ll rest here a minute, my legs so unsteady, head spinning.
The bartender comes over and leans in to me. She brings me a glass of ice water. Embossed in ornate script on the glass, a word in red: Morpheus.
“Your boyfriend’s been waiting for you all this time,” she says as I take a long swallow. “If you thought you lost him, you didn’t.”
I glance in the direction that her eyes drift—they are violet, eerie and strange. Color contacts. On her arms, tattoos—a dragon, a tower, a woman dancing. I stare, fixated by the lines and colors. I can’t focus on anything for very long.
“He sees you.”
Who is he? Long sandy hair, pulled back, a thick jaw and strange eyes that seem to defy colors—amber, green or steely blue. He gets up and comes over, leans in behind me.
“I thought you left.” His voice in my ear sends a shiver down my spine.
He spins me around, tugs me into him. The heat between us; it’s electric. He snakes one arm around my back, the other around my neck and leans in, as if we are not in a crowded club, but alone. His draw is magnetic, irresistible. And then we are alone, the world dropping away, music fading, as he kisses me long and deep. I am on fire with desire, a deep ache inside me. It’s embarrassing how badly I want him.
Jack. Jack.
But it’s not Jack.
“Who is Jack?” he wants to know. “Doesn’t matter. I’ll be Jack, whoever he is. I’ll be anyone you want me to be.”
Then, as if by magic, we are in his car—or at least he’s driving. I have no idea whose car it is. But it’s a nice one, leather, glowing blue lights, soft music playing on Bose speakers. Everything smells clean, new. The city skyline is in the rearview mirror, streamers of white and red lights around us.
“Where are we going?” I ask, barely even recognizing my own voice.
“Don’t you remember?” he asks gently.
“No,” I say with a rising panic. “I’m sorry. I don’t remember at all.”
He looks at me with a strange smile and just keeps driving.
6 (#u45bdf40c-25ae-5944-ab4b-583b931df908)
I’m sorry. I don’t remember at all.
The words burrow into my sleep, taking on urgency, growing louder, until the sound of my own frightened shout wakes me.
I bolt upright, breath labored, T-shirt soaked through with sweat. I’m in my own bed, the covers tossed to the floor. A weak Tuesday morning sun bleeds in through the blinds, shining on my clothes from last night in a messy tumble on the floor.
The details of the dream are already slippery. What kind of car? What club? It’s important to remember; I must dig into that place.
Coffee brews in the timed pot that’s set for six, its aroma wafting through the apartment. The city is awake with horns and distant sirens and the hum of traffic. Slowly, breath easing, these mundane details of wakefulness start to wipe away my urgency. The dream, the panic to remember, recede, slinking away with each passing second like a serpent into the tall grass of my wakefulness.
Sleep is the place where your mind organizes, where your subconscious resolves and expresses itself. In times of great stress, dreams can become like a whole other life, Dr. Nash said. A terrifying, disjointed life that I can’t understand.
I reach for my dream journal and start writing, trying to capture what I remember:
Morpheus, a nightclub?
Black-and-white-tile floors, kissing a faceless man?
He takes me somewhere in his car, a BMW maybe. Afraid. But relieved, too? Who was he? Where was he taking me? Why did I go with him?
Red dress?
Powerful desire. Jack. I thought he was Jack, but he wasn’t.
The impressions are disjointed, nonsense really in daylight. As I scribble, the sunlight brightens and begins to fill the room through the tall windows. Too bright. I must be late for work.
Finished writing, I flip back through to the earlier pages, looking to see if there’s any other dream like this one. Reading what I wrote late last night, before I took the pills, it’s the scrawl of a crazy person, loopy, jagged:
Jack, computer, looking at porn? Who is she?
Another sentence that I don’t even remember writing: Was he hiding something from me?
I stare at the black ink bleeding into the eggshell page. There’s a little stutter of fear, as if I discovered a stranger had been writing in my dream journal. But no, the handwriting is unmistakably mine.
I start flipping back through earlier entries. One page is filled with a twisting black spiral. It begins at a single point in the middle of the paper, spins wider and wider until it fills the whole sheet. It’s inked in manically, scribbled at so hard that it leaks through to the page beneath. There’s a tiny black figure that seems to be falling and falling deep into the abyss.
No one tells you about the rage, I’d written. I could fall into my anger and disappear forever. How could he do this to me? How could he leave me like this? Who did this to him? To us? Why can’t they find my husband’s killer?
Again, that feeling—a stranger writing in my dream journal.
But no.
That rage, what a sucking black hole it is, devouring the universe. I remember that there was a terrible, brilliantly real dream about finding the man who took Jack from me. I chased him through the streets, finally gaining on him and taking him down in a lunge. I beat him endlessly, violently, with all my strength. It was so vivid I felt his bones crush beneath my knuckles, tasted his splattering blood on my mouth. It went on and on, my satisfaction only deepening. I confessed this tearfully to Dr. Nash.
Anger, in doses, can be healthy, Poppy, she said. It’s healthy to direct your rage toward your husband’s murderer, to not hold it in. Rage suppressed becomes despair, depression.
How can it be healthy to dream of killing someone, to imagine it so clearly? To—enjoy it?
There’s darkness in all of us, she said serenely. It’s part of life.
I shut the dream journal hard; I don’t want to go back to that place. That rage inside me; it’s frightening. I don’t want to know who I dreamed about last night, where I was. Maybe it’s better to let these things fade. After all, if you’re supposed to remember your dreams, if they mean something—why do they race away? Why do they never make any real sense?
The hot shower washes what’s left of it all away. I can barely cling to even one detail. But there’s a song moving through my head, something twangy and hypnotic.
I’ve seen that face before.
* * *
Images resurface unbidden as I head to the office—I flash on the man at the bar, the blue lights of the car interior. It’s an annoying, unsettling intrusion, these dreams so vivid, so disturbing. And I’m not rested at all; I’m as jumpy and nauseated as if I’d pulled an all-nighter.
I ask myself a question I might be asking too often: How many pills did I take last night? And: How much wine did I have?
Not enough, apparently. Not enough to achieve blankness.
Nervously aware of my surroundings, I scan my environment for the hooded man. Though the day is bright, I see shadows all around me, keep glancing around like a paranoiac. There’s a group of construction workers, all denim-clad, with hoodies pulled over their hard hats. One of them stares, makes a vulgar kissing noise with his mouth. I stride past him, don’t look back.
Finally, in the office, at my desk, I feel the wash of relief. It’s early still, at least an hour before anyone else comes in. I pick up the phone.
“Hey, there,” answers Layla. “You didn’t call me back last night.”
Her voice. It’s a lifeline. She’s so solid. So real.
“Did you call?” I ask, confused.
“Yeah,” she says. “Just wanted to check on you. I didn’t like how you looked when you left.”
Scrolling through the messages on my phone, I see her call and a text, left after eleven.
“Oh—sorry.” How did I miss that?
“Seriously. What’s going on?”
Layla is the first one to start worrying about me. She was the first to think that maybe something wasn’t right a day or two before my “nervous breakdown” or “psychotic break” or whatever we’re calling it these days. Dr. Nash just refers to it as my “break.” Think of it as a little vacation your psyche takes when it has too much to handle. It’s like a brownout, an overloading of circuits. Grief is a neurological event. And Layla was the one to bring me home.
I tell her about the dream, anyway the snippets I can almost remember.
She’s quiet for a moment too long. I think I’ve lost her.
“Layla?”
“Poppy,” she says. “Maybe you should call Detective Grayson.”
I’m surprised that she would bring up the detective who has been in charge of Jack’s murder investigation. A murder investigation that has petered to almost nothing. It’s been almost a year since Jack was killed and every lead has gone cold. There are no suspects. No new information. But Grayson is still on the job, checking in regularly, always returning my calls to query about progress. I used to crave justice for Jack, for everything we lost. It used to gnaw at me, keep me up nights. But, with Dr. Nash’s help, I’ve let that idea go somewhat. What justice is there for this? No matter what price paid, the clock will not turn back. So this question sits like an undigested stone in my gut. Who killed Jack?
“Why? What does Grayson have to do with this?”
Another moment where she draws in and releases a sharp breath. I can hear the street noise so she’s probably leaning out the bathroom window with her cigarette so that the kids don’t smell it when they get home from school. She’s supposed to have quit; obviously, the nicotine gum isn’t cutting it. I’m not going to hassle her about it. Who am I to get on her case, pill popper that I’ve become?
“I was just thinking,” she says finally, carefully. “The days you can’t remember. Maybe what you dreamed last night. I mean, maybe that wasn’t a dream at all. Maybe it was a memory.”
Her words strike an odd chord, cause an unpleasant tingle on my skin. “Why would you say that?”
“Honey,” she says. A sharp exhale. “When I found you, you were wearing a red dress.”
Ben comes in singing. He has his headphones on, clearly doesn’t see me. He’s belting out Katy Perry, singing about how this is the part of him you’ll never ever take away from him. He reaches into my office to flip on the lights I’ve neglected to turn on and his eyes fall on me. He blushes and gives me a wide smile, takes a bow. I’d laugh if my body didn’t feel like one big nerve ending, sizzling with tension.
“Maybe—you’re remembering things,” says Layla when I stay silent.
“Dr. Nash said I probably wouldn’t, that likely those days are gone forever.”
It was two days after the funeral that I disappeared. Four days after that I woke up in a hospital, remembering nothing. Even the days before Jack’s murder and through the funeral are foggy and disjointed. Part of me thinks that it might be a blessing to forget the worst days of your life; I’m not sure I want them back. Dr. Nash has suggested as much, that my memories haven’t come back because I don’t want them.
I remember the day he was killed in ugly, jagged fragments, sitting in the police station, reeling at Detective Grayson’s million, gently asked questions. Was he having trouble at work? Did he have any enemies? Were there money troubles? Affairs? Were either of you unfaithful? Hours and hours of questions that I struggled to answer, grief-stricken and stunned, trapped in a tilting unreality. There were these long stretchy moments where I pleaded with the Universe to just let me wake up. This had to be a nightmare. Grayson’s grim face, the gray walls, the flickering fluorescent lights, all the stuff of horror movies and crime shows. This wasn’t my life. It couldn’t be. Where was Jack? Why couldn’t he make it all go away?
Finally, my mother showed up with our family attorney and they took me home. I remember stumbling into my apartment—our apartment, falling into the bed we shared. I could still smell him on the sheets. I remember wailing with grief, facedown in my mattress.
Take this, honey. My mom forced me to sitting, handed me one of her Valium tablets and a glass of water. I didn’t even hesitate before drinking it down. After a while, the blissful black curtain of sleep fell.
For a while, I know Detective Grayson suspected me. After all, I would inherit everything—the life insurance payout, the business, all our assets—when Jack died. But I think at some point he realized that for me it was all ash without my husband. Then he became my ally. If you remember anything, no matter how small, call me.
The case, it bothered him. Always. Still. Stranger crime is an anomaly. A beating death of a jogger—it grabbed headlines. The city parks are Manhattan’s backyard; people wanted answers and so did he. Jack was a big, strong guy, fast and street-smart. He’d traveled the world as a photojournalist, dived the Great Barrier Reef to find great whites, trekked the Inca Trail, embedded with soldiers in Afghanistan, attempted to summit Everest. It never, ever felt right that he’d die, a random victim, during his morning run. He had a phone and five dollars on him. A year later, his case is still unsolved.
“But maybe Dr. Nash is wrong?” suggests Layla. “Maybe it means something.”
Now it’s my turn to go silent.
“Let’s do it tonight,” Layla continues. “Work out, eat, talk it all through. In the meantime, call Dr. Nash and Detective Grayson.”
Layla, queen of plans, of to-do lists, of “pro” and “con” columns, of ideas to turn wrong things right. She corrals chaos into order, and heaven help the person who tries to stop her.
“Okay.” I release a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. “That’s a plan.”
I flash on that moment at the bar, that man, again. Who was he? Someone real? Someone I know?
“You’re okay, right?” asks Layla. “You’re like—solid?”
“Yeah,” I lie (again). “I’m okay.”
* * *
Detective Grayson agrees to meet me in Washington Square Park for lunch. So around noon I head out. The coolish autumn morning has burned off into a balmy afternoon as I grab a cab to avoid even worrying about the hooded man.
The normalcy of the morning—emails and the ringing phone, conversations about understandable things like contracts and wire transfers—has washed over the chaos of yesterday and last night, my dreams where they belong, the grainy, disjointed images faded into the forgotten fog of sleep. I don’t have the urge to look over my shoulder every moment as I make my way under the triumphal Washington Square Arch and into the park. My chest loosens and breath comes easier. Grief and trauma, I remind myself, are not linear experiences. There are good days and bad ones, hard dips into despair, moments of light and hope. My new mantra: I’m okay. I’m okay.
Grayson sits on a shady bench near a hot dog vendor, by the old men playing chess. He already has a foot-long drowning in relish, onions, mustard, ketchup and who knows what else. It seems to defy gravity as he lifts it to his mouth. A can of Pepsi sits unapologetically beside him. No one else I know would even dream of drinking a soda, in public no less. It’s one of the things I like about him, his eating habits. It reminds me of Jack. Jack and I would be walking home from a client dinner that had consisted of tiny salads and ahi poke with some slim, fit photographer who turned in early so he could make a 6:00 a.m. yoga class, and Jack would make us stop at Two Guys Pizza, where he’d scarf down two slices.
God, when did people stop eating? he’d complain.
I grab a similarly gooey dog, and take my place beside Grayson. He grunts a greeting, his mouth full. He’s sporting his usual just-rolled-out-of-bed look, dark hair a mop, shadow of stubble. He’s wearing a suit but it needs a trip to the dry cleaners, his tie loose, a shirt that has seen better days. Still, there’s something virile about him, maybe it’s the shoulder holster visible when he raises his arm, the detective’s shield clipped to his belt.
The leaves above us are bold in orange, red, gold, but they’ve started to fall, turn brown. I dread the approaching winter, the holidays where I imagine I’ll drift between Layla’s place and my mother’s, a ghost—people giving me tragic looks and whispering sympathetically behind my back.
Jack and I used to have our whole ritual. We’d put the tree up by ourselves the weekend after Thanksgiving, have a big party for all our friends. On Christmas Eve, we’d go to my mother’s house, where she would show off whatever new man she was dating, drink too much, then try to pick a fight with me—honestly because I think it’s the only way she knows how to connect. We’d spend Christmas Day at our place with Jack’s mother, Sarah. We’d plan the meal for months, then hang around in our pajamas all day—cooking, watching movies, playing Scrabble. It was my favorite day of the year.
Last year, just months after losing him, I couldn’t even get out of bed. The holidays passed in a grief-stricken blur with the phone ringing and ringing. Layla, Mac, my mother coming by to try to coax me out of bed.
It was Mac who finally got me up, convinced me to come to join them for Christmas dinner. “We’re your family,” he said, pulling open the blinds. “You belong with us. I know it hurts but there’s no way out of this but through. Show the kids that you’re not going to let this crush you. Show them that they’re not going to lose you, too.”
Guilt. It works every time. He offered his hand, which I took and let him pull me from bed and push me toward the bathroom. As I ran the shower, I heard him call Layla, his voice heavy with relief. “I got our girl. She’s coming.”
It seems like yesterday and a hundred years ago.
“Funny you called,” says Grayson now. He’s prone to manspreading so I leave a lot of space between us.
“Oh?” I take a big messy bite of the hot dog, and try not to spill anything on my shirt. Yellow mustard and white silk are not friends. Actually, white silk is no one’s friend. Wearing it is like a dare to the universe: go ahead, bring it on—coffee, ketchup, ink—I can take you.
“I’ve got something maybe.” He does this thing, a kind of bobblehead nod. “Maybe. Might be nothing.”
There’s a file under his Pepsi can.
“They brought some punk in this weekend for armed robbery,” he says when I stay silent. I wait while he devours that dog in three big bites. It’s impressive. He wipes his mouth with gusto, maybe building suspense.
“Perp was caught in the act, more or less. A couple of uniforms brought him down as he exited the bodega in the East Village. I think he got like two hundred bucks if that. Anyway, he tells the arresting officers that he knows something about a murder in Riverside Park last year, so they call me in.”
My whole body goes stiff; my appetite withers. Putting the hot dog in its paper tub beside me, I try not to think about that dark day, not let the barrage of images come sweeping in. But it’s a flood, the uniformed officers in my lobby, the cold marble as I sank to the floor, the gray interrogation room. Weird details like a ringing phone that no one picked up, the scent of burned popcorn somewhere in the station.
“I’m sorry,” he says. He rubs at the stubble on his jaw. “I knew this was going to be hard.”
He’s watching me with a kind of curious squint. It’s warm, but it’s knowing. Dark brown eyes, soft at the edges, heavily lashed like a girl’s. He’s taking it all in, filing it away—the moments, the details, the gestures, things said and unsaid. There’s something sad in that gaze, and something steely. I wonder if I could get it. If I had a camera in my hand, could I capture everything his eyes say. Sometimes there’s not enough light; sometimes there’s too much. Some people you just can’t get. They won’t let you.
“I’m okay,” I lie (again). It’s the easiest lie to tell because it’s the one people want to hear the most. That you can take care of yourself, that they don’t have to worry. Because in a very real sense, they can’t help. Most of the time, we’re on our own.
He tosses the tub, the napkins, into the nearby trash can and lifts the file. It looks small in his thick hands. He picks at the edge with his thumbnail, opens it.
“Anyway, this mope says he knows a guy who claims to be a killer for hire. For a thousand bucks, he’ll kill anyone with his bare hands.”
The words sound so odd, so ridiculous. I nearly laugh, like people laugh at funerals, the tension too much.
“My guy, the armed robber, let’s call him Johnny for the sake of clarity, was on a bit of a bender, so his memory—it’s cloudy. Johnny says he met this killer for hire at a bar, and the guy got to bragging. I brought a healthy skepticism to the situation, naturally. But I gotta admit some of the details fit. Like, he knew Jack only had five bucks on him, that the assailant smashed Jack’s phone to a pulp. Little things that weren’t out there in the news.”
“So,” I say, feeling shaky and strange. Those few bites of hot dog are not agreeing with me. “You got a name? He’s in the system? Saw if the DNA matched?”
Detective Grayson shakes his head, leans forward.
“No name. Johnny didn’t know the guy’s name, street-smart enough not to ask. But he gave the sketch artist a description. It matches accounts of a man witnesses saw fleeing the park the morning Jack was killed.”
I appreciate how he often uses Jack’s name, doesn’t call him “your husband” or “the victim.” I feel like he knew Jack, that they might have been friends. The detective is exactly the kind of guy that Jack liked—smart, no bullshit, down-to-earth.
Grayson hands me the file and I open it. The black-and-white pencil drawing stares back at me, full of menace. Head shaved, wide deep-set eyes, thick nose, heavy brow. There’s something about it, something my brain reaches for, but then it slips away. It’s like when I try to force myself to remember those missing days. There’s trulynothing there, just a painful, sucking dark.
“Anything?”
I shake my head. “Nothing. I don’t know him.”
“Johnny says he was a big guy, maybe 6 feet, well over 200 pounds. Ripped, thick neck, big hands.”
There’s that familiar tightness in my chest, that feeling that my airways have shrunk when I think about him out there. I imagine Jack lying on the path. I see wet leaves and blood, the curl of his hand on the pavement. I’m sorry. I should have been with you.
“He’d have to be big, right?” My voice catches. “To overpower Jack.”
Detective Grayson puts a hand on my forearm, easy, stabilizing.
“It’s something,” he says softly. “The first something in a while.”
“A killer for hire.” The words don’t feel right in my mouth. “A thousand dollars. To kill someone.”
“The random mugging,” he says. “It never sat right.”
“But who would hire someone to kill Jack?”
He takes a swig of his Pepsi. “You tell me.”
“No one,” I say. It sticks in my throat and I cough a little. “Everyone loved Jack.”
Grayson pulls himself out of his constant slouch, twists a little like he’s trying to work out a kink. I notice he’s saved a bit of his hot dog bun, has it clutched in his hand. He tosses it, and a kit of pigeons clamor, their pink-green-gray feathers glinting in the sun.
“I’m going to go over all my files again tonight,” he says. “See if this new information sheds light on anything old. We’ll find this guy. And when we do, maybe he can answer that question.”
We’ll find this guy. “How are you going to find him?”
“I went to the place where Johnny says they met,” says Grayson. “They’ve got the sketch up behind the bar. Patrol in that area is on the lookout.”
It seems impossible that you could find someone that way, just hoping they come back to a place they’ve been. And anyway, there’s that part of me that thinks: What does it matter if we catch him? Jack is not coming back. Not even if the guy, whoever he is, gets caught and goes to the electric chair. What does it fix? Nothing changes.
I imagine a trial that drags on, a conviction, or not. Years and years of appeals, tied up in more rage, misery, grief. Jack wouldn’t like it. Let it go, he’d surely say. Everyone dies, somehow, someday. Don’t let this eat whatever’s left of your life.
“You called me, though,” says Grayson. He takes the file that sits open in my lap and closes it, tucks it under his leg. I’m glad that face is gone. “So...what’s up?”
I almost tell him about my dream, the one in the nightclub, that maybe—maybe—could be a memory. It’s why I called him, because of Layla’s suggestion that it might be a memory. But he’s so pragmatic and the images seem so strange and nonsensical now, especially in light of what he’s told me. And I don’t want to recount the part where I kiss some strange man. Even in a dream, it’s shameful, sordid, isn’t it? There’s shame, too, about those missing days. I imagined myself stronger than that, not the person who shatters in the face of tragedy.
But I am that person; I did shatter.
Instead, I just tell him about the hooded man, how I think I’m being followed.
He digs his hands into the pockets of his pants, listens as I tell him about the encounter on the train.
“Big guy?” he says, looking down to open the file again. “Six feet, heavy?”
“I think so.” Bigger than Grayson, taller, broader.
“You’re sure?” He pauses and looks up at the sky, which is a bright blue through the red, gold, orange, of the leaves above, the gray of the buildings. “Of what you saw.”
He knows my history.
“Not completely,” I admit. “No.”
“You couldn’t see his face?”
“The hood.”
“Yeah,” he says, drawing out the word. He dips his head from side to side, runs a hand through his hair, considering. “But his face was completely obscured by the hood? That doesn’t seem right. You can usually see something.”
I shake my head, pushing into my memory. “No.”
Then I remember the pictures on my phone, scroll through the shots and show him the clearest one, which isn’t clear at all. He takes the device and squints at it.
“Hard to see his face, you’re right. Email it to me,” he says. “I’ll have our guys work their magic. Maybe we’ll get something.”
He hands the phone back to me. I quickly forward the image to his email address. We sit a moment, both of us lost in thought.
“So, look,” he says, dropping a hand on my arm. “The next time you see him, call me right away. Linger if you can safely. I’ll get there fast or send someone.”
“Okay,” I agree.
We talk awhile longer. He promises that he’s following up this lead with everything he has. He must have other cases, other priorities, but when I’m with him he always makes me feel like Jack is the most important thing on his mind. He’s convinced his superiors not to close the case, won’t turn it over to cold cases, even though he’s hinted that there’s pressure on him to do that. It’s been nearly a year.
“This new information,” he says. “I have a feeling about it.”
I do, too. Why does that make me feel worse instead of better?
“I’m not letting this go,” he says. “I promise you that.”
* * *
Though I’m not really dressed for it in heels and a pencil skirt, I walk up Fifth Avenue. My head is vibrating, thoughts spinning—Detective Grayson, and killers for hire, how maybe for a thousand dollars someone ended my husband’s life. A thousand dollars. And if that’s true, is the man who killed Jack the same hooded man following me? I swallow hard, there’s a bulb of fear and anger stuck in my throat.
I let the current of the city take me. Its energy pumps and moves; it doesn’t stop for any reason, ever, not even the death of the most important person in your life. It just keeps pulsing, pushing, a flow that you have no choice but to follow.
At the light, I dig into my bag and find that amber vial Layla gave me—not the sleeping pills, but the pills she said were for nerves. I dry swallow a white one. No idea what it is. I really don’t care as long as it quiets the siren of anxiety in my head.
Then I put my headphones in, and listen to my go-to, a David Bowie playlist. I keep walking, heading toward the office. I’m just getting into it, feeling lighter, less mired down, when the music stops and the phone starts ringing. Dr. Nash returning my call.
“Poppy?” she says when I answer. “Everything okay?”
Still marching up the street, I tell her everything—the dreams, Layla’s ideas, Detective Grayson’s revelations. I always think it looks crazy, when someone has her headphones in, gesticulating, walking, talking to someone whom no one else can hear. The modern age has turned us all into ranting schizophrenics.
“That’s a lot,” Dr. Nash says when I’m done. “Why don’t you come in on Thursday? We can talk it through.”
I almost tell her. That I’ve been mucking with my dosage, taking mystery pills, drinking, that last night I took Layla’s stronger sleeping meds, two of them. That I just took something else without even knowing what it is. But what does that make me? I stay quiet.
“Okay,” I agree. “Why am I dreaming more?”
It feels disingenuous to ask this question when I know she only has part of the information she needs to answer it. Still I’m hoping for an answer that makes me feel better.
“You’re probably not dreaming more?” It sounds like a question. “Perhaps you’re just remembering more, which—could be a good thing.”
How? I wonder. How can it be a good thing to lose Jack again night after night? I know her answer about dreams being the gateway to our subconscious, how it’s a place where we work out the things our conscious mind presses away. That pain is a doorway we must pass through to get to the other side of grief and loss. She’s saying something to that effect as I flash on the filthy bathroom floor, the heat of that stranger’s kiss.
“I’d like you to stay on this lower dosage,” she says.
Here again I almost spill it, then don’t. I silently vow to give Layla back her pills, stay on the dosage Dr. Nash prescribed. I’ll tough out any hard nights ahead. Because I want to get off the pills, too. I don’t want her to know how badly I need them, how painful is the night. Daytime is easy; I can busy-addict myself into constant motion. It’s when dusk falls, and energy lags, that the demons start whispering in my ears. When the sun goes down, darkness creeps in, coloring my world gray.
“If you dream vividly again, don’t forget that journal,” Dr. Nash is saying. “Write everything down for our session. Poppy, I really do want us to think of this as good news.”
“Good news,” I repeat, not feeling it.
“If your memories of that lost time are coming back, it means that you’re stronger. And if Detective Grayson has a lead, you may be closer to closure on what happened to Jack. I know you don’t think it matters, but it could be so healing to finally understand.”
That sketched face swims before me, just a drawing of someone who may or may not be real. Was that the last face Jack saw? The thought gnaws at my stomach, cinches my shoulders tight. Why wasn’t I with him?
I want to argue with her. How would it be healing to think someone hired a man to kill Jack? Who would do that? Why? A thought, something dark, tugs at me, something from one of my dreams last night. When I chase after it, it disappears.
“Maybe,” I say instead.
“I’ll see you Thursday,” she says. “But call me if you need me. Day or night. You know that.”
Then, just as I end the call and stop to put my phone in my bag—there he is, following a half a block behind me. A hulking man in a black hoodie, head bent. He stops suddenly when I turn to him, disappears into a doorway.
I quickly dial Detective Grayson, but he doesn’t pick up. Most people would be running away. But instead, I start moving back downtown in his direction.
“He’s here,” I tell Grayson’s voice mail. “Following me up Fifth Avenue. I’m at Fifth and Eighteenth, moving south, back downtown. He ducked into a doorway and I’m following.”
Which is crazy. Maybe even—dare I say it—suicidal. But I keep walking, hugging closer to the buildings, waiting for him to pop back out of the shadows. It’s broad daylight, the avenue as ever a rush of professionals, artists, students, tourists, shoppers flitting between Sephora and Armani Exchange, H&M, Victoria’s Secret; traffic a stuttering wave of sound and motion. But it’s all distant white noise as I move toward where I’m sure I saw him disappear. I press myself against the building and then spring into the doorway that’s set back from the building wall.
There’s no one there. How can that be?
I reach and pull on the handle of the large black metal double door between Aldo and Zara. But it’s locked tight. Suddenly seized by anger, I find myself pounding on it.
“I saw you,” I yell. “I know you’re following me.”
The door stays locked, and no one comes. I get a few sideways glances, but what’s one more shouting crazy person on a city street?
I pound on the door again, the metal cool, the sound reverberating.
What is it? A delivery entrance? I stand back to look at it; it’s the armored entry to a keep, a demon hiding inside. Pure rage rises, a tidal wave. I don’t even try to hold it back, let it wash over me, take me away. I get to pounding again. Not just knocking, but channeling all my anger, all my frustration into that metal, barely even noticing that I’m hurting myself, that the door doesn’t budge, that no one comes.
And that’s how Detective Grayson finds me, violently banging on the door, yelling.
“Hey, hey,” he says, coming up from behind. I feel his hands on my shoulders, turn and shake him off hard. He steps back, hands up.
“Take it easy, Poppy.”
He’s illegally parked his unmarked Dodge Charger right beside us, traffic flowing around it, honking and annoyed at yet one more pointless obstacle to traffic flow.
“He disappeared through here,” I tell him. I’m breathless, sweating from the heat, the effort, the fear. I don’t like the way he’s looking at me, brow creased with concern.
“Okay,” he says putting strong hands on my shoulders. “Take a breath.”
I do that, feel some calm returning now that he’s here.
The door swings open then, and an impossibly young, svelte woman in a black shift dress and thigh-high boots stands before us. She looks back and forth between us, blankly annoyed.
Grayson flashes his shield.
“We’re pursuing a suspect,” he says. His tone is comfortingly official, validating. There was someone there. There was. “Did someone come in through this entrance in the last ten minutes?”
She shakes her head and her long black hair shimmers.
“No,” she says. “I’m the manager here and this is the service entrance. There’s a bell?” She points to it meaningfully. “You ring and someone comes to open it. But there haven’t been any deliveries this afternoon.”
“I saw someone come in here,” I say, more sharply than I mean to. She blinks glittery eyelids to express her displeasure. Her eyebrows are shaped into high arches; a hoop sparkles in her nose.
“No,” she says as though she’s never been more certain of anything in her life. “Not this door.”
“Mind if we have a look around?” asks Grayson easily. She regards him uncertainly, then steps aside. We both walk into the storage area—boxes, racks crushed with clothes, standing steam irons, gift-wrapping station, no menacing strange men in hoods. Adrenaline, the power of rage, abandons me, leaving me feeling foolish, hot with shame, shaky now. Did I really see him come in here?
Grayson’s standing by the door. “Where does this go?”
“Back to the shop,” she says. “There’s a fire exit through the break room on the other side of the store, but an alarm sounds if you push through it.”
“There’s no other exit from this storeroom?”
“Well, just out back, to the alley behind the buildings, where we dump the trash.”
Grayson follows her and I trail behind. The dim alley reeks of rotting garbage; fire escapes track up the surrounding buildings giving way to a stingy square of sky up above.
“The street gate is locked,” she says. “Only the super has the key. Want me to get him?”
Detective Grayson looks at me and I shake my head.
“I’m sorry.” My voice is a rasp. “I was sure I saw him come in here.”
There’s that look again from the detective. I know it well—worried confusion. What’s wrong with Poppy?
On the street: “Are you okay?” He rests a steadying hand again on my shoulder. “You seem—”
“What?” I ask. “Crazy, unstable, a wreck?”
“Let’s go with—unsettled.”
His comforting grin settles me a bit. For a second, I flash on my father, how good he was at talking me through spirals of emotion, bouts of worry. Oh, you’re too sensitive, my mother would sniff. You better get a thicker skin. But not my dad; he always knew what to say. Okay, just breathe. Let’s break this down. What’s really going on?
“Let me give you a lift home,” says Detective Grayson when I don’t say anything else. I can’t prove what I saw, so there’s no point in trying.
We climb into the Charger, plain and white on the outside but high-tech within, a buzzing radio, mounted laptop, all manner of blinking lights on panels. The button for the siren is a tantalizing shiny red, and I fight the urge to press it.
“Maybe he ducked into a different doorway,” he offers as we snake up Fifth.
“Maybe.”
I’d have sworn it was that doorway. But obviously not, and that’s the hard part. Because what we see, what we think we see, what we remember, isn’t always reliable. In fact, it rarely is. Like for months after Jack died, he was everywhere. I’d see a tall man with a lion’s mane of hair and my heart would lurch with joy and hope, crashing into despair milliseconds later. Or I’d imagine him so vividly walking into the room that I almost saw him. Or like those lost days of my “break.” I lived those days, went places, saw people, did things, but the more I press in, trying to remember, the deeper and darker that space becomes.
The eye, the memory—they’re the trickiest liars. Only the camera lens captures the truth, and just for a moment. Because that’s what the truth is: a ghost. Here and gone. As Grayson drives, I scroll through the pictures on my phone again and find that grainy image of my shadow stalker.
Who are you?
Who was I during those lost days?
Layla spent two days looking for me, visiting all the places we frequented together with a picture of me until finally I came stumbling into her lobby, apparently wearing the red dress from my dream. Did I know that detail? Had she told me at one point what I was wearing, what I looked like, and I just filed it away? Or was my dream, as she suggested, an actual memory?
“I’m going to hang around awhile,” Detective Grayson says as he pulls in front of my building. “Out here, in my car. I have some calls to make, emails to answer. I can do it here for a while, just, you know—in case. Why don’t you get some rest?”
Part of me wants to tell him that I’m grateful. Thankful that he hasn’t given up, doesn’t urge me to let it go and move on, that he still cares about what happened to Jack, what happens to me. But a bigger part of me is not grateful. How urgently I wish we’d never met, that I had no reason to know Detective Grayson. I leave the car without a word.
* * *
I tap over the limestone floors of my lobby, breezing past the day doorman, who is on the phone but offers a friendly wave. In the elevator I text Ben and tell him to cancel my appointments and calls for the afternoon, that I’ve come down with a stomach thing. It’s not ideal, but I’m addled and shaky, in no condition to talk to clients or anyone else. Inside the apartment, I close and lock the door.
Leaning against it, I slide down and sit on the floor, the long hallway that leads to the rest of the apartment dark, lined with photographs—his, mine, us together. The only thing I’ve managed to do since moving here is hang those photographs. Sitting on the hardwood, I think tears will come, but they don’t.
Instead I notice that one of the photographs lies on the floor, surrounded by broken glass.
I haul myself up and walk over to it, the apartment unnaturally quiet. The thick-paned windows on the twentieth floor keep most city noise at bay. The glass crackles beneath my feet as I retrieve the picture. Me and Jack, on our honeymoon in Paris. What a cliché! he’d complained. He’d wanted to go Thailand, lie around on some isolated beach, sleep in a thatch hut. But a Paris honeymoon was my only girlhood fantasy and he complied, because he always did. He always wanted me to have the things that I wanted. I can’t even tell where we were, a selfie so close that everything behind disappeared, our faces so goofy with love that it’s almost embarrassing to see.
I hold the shattered frame. The picture hanger is still on the wall. And the photo seems too far from its original space to just have fallen somehow.
My breath comes heavy. I should move back slowly toward the door and run downstairs to Detective Grayson. Instead, I turn and walk toward the living room.
It takes me a moment to notice it, but when I do my stomach bottoms out. Sitting on the low coffee table between the couches is an orchid in a pot. A fat, snow-white bloom drips heavily from a bowed stalk. There’s a single white card tucked into the thick green leaves at its base, a note in black scrawl.
I remember you.
Don’t you remember me?
7 (#u45bdf40c-25ae-5944-ab4b-583b931df908)
“Let’s go over this again,” says Grayson.
He sits on the couch across from me, leaning forward, his dark gaze pinning me to my seat. I know that look; he’s been watching me like that for a year. As though he might still suspect something dark just beneath the surface of what he sees.
Layla’s already here, ministering. She’s gotten me a blanket, which I’m not using, brewed coffee that I’m not drinking. Now she’s hovering, sitting on the couch beside me, leaning in so close that her thigh is fused with mine. Her foot is tapping in that way it does when she’s nervous or annoyed. She’s staring at that white blossom as it quivers in front of us, at Grayson, around the apartment, with a kind of narrow-eyed suspicion.
“You entered your apartment—” he leads.
This is another thing he does, asks me to repeat what I told him, once, twice, three times. Looking for the inconsistencies of lies, I suppose.
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Lisa Unger
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
Отзывы: Пока нет Добавить отзыв
О книге: ‘Gripping suspense at its best’ Karin SlaughterHer husband’s killer may be closer than she thinks…It’s been a year since Poppy’s husband, Jack, was brutally murdered during his morning run. She’s trying to move on but what happened that morning is still haunting her. And now she’s sure she is being followed…Sleep deprived and secretly self-medicating, Poppy is unable to separate her dreams from reality. She feels like she’s losing her mind. But what if she’s not? What if she’s actually remembering what really happened? What if her husband wasn’t who he said he was? And what if his killer is still watching her…