Her Perfect Life

by Rebecca Taylor

  The light drew her eye, the soft, pale blue of the clear early morning sky stretching out over the Pacific. Eileen forced a deep lungful of the salt air in and stood up. With the down comforter as her robe, she grabbed a pair of socks from the tumble of clothes spilling out of her open suitcase on the floor and her camera.

  Outside, the deck sent a cold chill up through the bottom of her feet. She placed her camera on the side table next to her empty wineglass from last night and Clare’s journal, then sat down to pull the socks over her feet. She had sat outside reading and drinking until her brain became too fuzzy from exhaustion, alcohol, and grief that she couldn’t keep her eyes open any longer. Clare’s journal had surprised her. She had no idea Clare and Adam had been engaged.

  She grabbed her camera off the table and stood up. The balcony was enclosed in a glass half-wall. Eileen remembered Clare showing her and Eric the room three years ago. “It’ll keep you from stumbling to your death while not impeding your view when you sit and have your morning coffee,” Clare had joked. In that moment, standing here, with Eric gazing around and adding it all up, and her children off in other rooms marveling at their aunt Clare’s unbelievable wealth, a jealousy unlike anything she had ever experienced had settled like a stone in her mind. Eileen had looked at her sister, her long auburn hair blowing away from her beautiful face in the ocean breeze, her slim, lithe body, long bones, tasteful clothes, perfect skin, her beautiful full smile—every aspect of her perfect older sister made Eileen feel small, painfully common by comparison. It always had.

  She had always been a little envious of Clare, but that moment, with the material evidence of Clare’s success, wealth, and fame surrounding her and sinking in for the first time, her simple jealousy had mushroomed into something larger, darker, a feeling much closer to hate. Eric and her children were so clearly impressed by Clare. No, not just impressed—awed. Because Clare hadn’t simply fallen ass-backward into money or married it; Clare had built this. All of it. Clare had harnessed her talents and constructed a life, a world for herself. All this was hers. And no one else, not Simon, not their mother, not even Eileen, could say they had any real part in what Clare had accomplished.

  “Do you like it?” Clare had asked her.

  Eileen had nodded. “It’s nice. A little sterile, and certainly not kid-friendly, but that’s not an issue for you and Simon.” She had smiled at Clare and pretended to not notice the hurt in her sister’s eyes. “Speaking of that—I better go find my three monsters before they drag their grubby hands all over your perfect walls.”

  Haunted by her own words that day, sickened by her capacity for cruelty, Eileen raised her camera’s viewfinder to her eye and snapped several photos of a lone gull picking over a tangle of seaweed on the rocks below. She had known full well Clare couldn’t have children.

  She lowered her camera and watched the pewter, shifting swells of ocean water rise and fall, the sound of it crashing against the rocks directly below her. Its rhythm connected with her own pulse, the beat of her heart. The wind picked up, cold and unforgiving, and blasted her flesh like ice. Clare had wanted her approval that day, had wanted Eileen to say how proud she was of her.

  She wished, now, that she’d been able to hug her sister. Marvel at her beautiful home, congratulate her on her success, tell her how amazing it all was, truly. Clare had dragged herself up and out of their broken, dysfunctional home in the middle of nowhere Wyoming and built her own American fucking dream, book by book, with her own two hands. The truth was, Eileen was proud of Clare and all she’d done. How could she not be? But Clare’s every success had cast Eileen’s every choice deeper into the shadow of so what. Everything Clare accomplished made Eileen wonder, what if, with regard to her own life, her own abandoned dreams. Armed with the only accomplishment she knew Clare could never have, Eileen had lobbed Clare’s most painful truth into her face.

  Her body, broken in the accident that had almost killed her, wasn’t capable of creating a child.

  Chapter 14

  Clare

  Twenty-two years before her death

  Bright light, like two shards of glass, sliced the darkness. Garbled voices filled her ears. Clare swallowed, and her throat burned. She opened her mouth, took a breath. Pain registered, a nauseating wave of signals firing throughout her system but with no specific source. It was simply everywhere. Her lids fought to open, erratic and hard to control. Her eyes were uncooperative. It would be easier to just close them again, pull back closed whatever heavy curtain was lifting and taking its protection away, letting in light and sound and pain.

  What was happening?

  The voices grew louder, and a dark image moved into her sight line, an eclipse breaking up the intensity of the white glare. A head, a person was in front of her and they were speaking, their voice impossible to make out. It was like when she and Adam were kids and on hot summer days, bored with cannonballs and searching the bottom of the city pool for pennies, they would try to speak to each other underwater. This person sounded exactly like that, but she knew it wasn’t Adam because…why? Why did she know that?

  Adam.

  Something was wrong. Something had happened. It was why she couldn’t see or hear right. It was also why she hurt so much.

  Adam.

  She was angry and hurt so much so that it felt like an enormous hole had opened up inside her. A large, empty vacant lot. She noticed this space, felt it now because of what it no longer contained. Like being untethered, drifting, terrifyingly free, as if nothing were holding her to the earth anymore.

  She had lost something. It was huge, it was everything, and it was gone. Forever it was gone. She knew that, and pain that had nothing to do with her physical body broke open in her heart and spread through her like liquid ice.

  Sorrow, a deep well of abandon, her own destruction—she felt it, trapped inside a body that wasn’t working. “What happened?” she tried to scream, but not even her voice functioned.

  Someone was holding her arms. She felt more hands on her shins. Then two hands, large and soft and familiar, cupped her face and tried to keep her from thrashing her head. Clare turned her lips against the woman’s palm. She knew these hands, the weight of them, the scent.

  “Mom?” she whispered against the fingers.

  Her mother’s face was next to hers, cheek to cheek. Her mother stroked her forehead, then her hair, trying in the ways she always had to comfort, hush, soothe.

  Where was she? What was happening?

  What had happened?

  All she could remember was the sound of her shoes in the gravel as she ran for Adam’s truck, the music from the party in the distance, the wind rushing through the tall cottonwoods lining the road leading to the Robertses’ ranch, and Adam calling after her.

  Three months after Heather Roberts’s graduation party, Clare opened her eyes in the Cheyenne Regional Medical Center to a life she now barely recognized. She had pressed and prodded and pushed her brain again and again through that night, the days and weeks that led up to it, and even the painful details of seeing…

  But no matter how many times she went over it, her memory ended with her running down that dirt road.

  It was a movie that faded to black before her eyes. Frustrating her over and over because the next images were there. She could feel them, skimming just beyond the grasp of her neural reach, devastating because they were the last moments of her old life, the minutes that changed everything forever.

  She ran down that dirt road, and Adam called after her to stop. Faster, stronger than she was—he was going to catch up to her.

  Then she opened her eyes.

  Eventually, her eyesight began to focus, her hearing cleared up, and her throat, sore from being on a ventilator for over twelve weeks, was able to scratch out the most rudimentary of sounds. Her mother and Eileen took turns at her bedside, shaking their heads to her notepad full
of the same scrawled questions. What happened? Where is Adam? Until finally, three days later, she was able to vocalize the questions she needed answered, and they could no longer avoid the facts. Her mother sat at the side of her bed, took hold of her hands, and whispered the horrible truth.

  “Clare, there was an accident.” Her mother stared into her eyes, waiting, watching Clare absorb this information before pressing on. “Do you remember anything?” Her gaze broke from Clare’s as Ella shifted her eyes to their hands clasped on the bed between them. “Do you remember anything about the accident?”

  Clare stared at her mother, scrutinizing her expression, her every facial muscle, looking for something she couldn’t put her finger on. “No,” she croaked. Clare cleared her throat and tried again. “No. We were at Heather’s party and… ” Clare stopped talking. She had seen them and had run. “I left,” she finished. “I don’t remember an accident.”

  Her mother, still not meeting her eyes, nodded her head. “Try for a second, please. Think. You were in Adam’s truck. What do you remember before the wreck?”

  Clare shook her head. “Running away from the party. I wanted to leave. That’s it. That’s all I remember.” Frustrated, Clare shook her head hard, and a desperate sob rose up and filled her chest. There was all this empty space inside her now. So much loss where she once felt complete and whole. She was afraid of what her mother would say next while also already knowing, somehow, exactly what this hole inside her meant.

  “Honey, I need you to really—”

  “Tell me now! I told you, I don’t remember. Please,” she sobbed. “Just tell me!”

  That was when her mother raised her eyes and squeezed her hand. She nodded. “That night, after you left Heather’s party, Adam wrecked his truck off Old Round Road. About a mile from Heather’s house, the truck was found at the bottom of the embankment just past where the road crosses the North Platte. It drops down…” Her mother paused, swallowing down her own emotion. “The truck rolled five or six times. They think he was driving pretty fast. His blood alcohol was over two… Yours was…higher.” Her mother stopped talking.

  Clare turned her head and looked at her sister sitting in the chair pushed into the far corner of the room, her head hung, hands folded in her lap.

  Clare turned back to her mother. “Where is he?”

  “Clare…”

  “No, where is Adam? Is he here?” She moved to get out of the bed, forgetting she was still hooked up to two IVs and strapped to a monitoring system that tracked her vitals.

  Her mother stood up and grasped her shoulders with firm but gentle hands. “No, he’s not here. He…died, Clare. I was the one to find you. He died in the wreck. But you were still alive,” she cried. “Like a miracle, I found you thirty feet from where the truck was, still breathing, barely, but you were. You were alive.”

  Clare stared at the white blanket covering her legs and tried to make sense of what her mother was saying.

  “Do you have any idea how lucky you are to be alive?”

  She felt numb, disconnected, surreal. None of this could really be happening. Adam wasn’t dead. He was going to Indiana to major in music and play basketball on TV. “There’s been some mistake,” she whispered.

  Her mother sat back down. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “But he’s gone.”

  It was a hot day in mid-September when they released her from Cheyenne Regional. The trees clung to their wilted leaves, and the earth seemed to beg for the relief of fall rains and winter snow. The temperature gauge on the cruiser’s dash said it was ninety-eight degrees out; the backs of Clare’s legs burned when she slid onto the old, cracked leather of her mother’s patrol car. Beads of sweat rolled down Ella’s temples as she loaded the small duffel bag with the few belongings Clare was taking home with her from the hospital: her toothbrush and paste, a few changes of underwear, the plastic, kidney-shaped barf tray that Clare had come to depend on, magazines from the gift shop, stuffed animals from a few get-well-wishers, a tattered copy of Catcher in the Rye, and five slim journals that Clare had nearly filled from cover to cover in the last four weeks since she had woken up. She stared out the window and waited as her mother closed the trunk with a bang and got behind the wheel. Clare didn’t care about anything in that bag except the journals and the barf tray; she still sometimes had a hard time keeping food down.

  “Ready?” Her mother looked over at her and gave her a weak smile as she turned the ignition key.

  Clare nodded once, fastened her seat belt, and tried not to think about everything that would be different from now on. Her mother had been reluctant to offer up details, but when Clare had found herself alone with her sister, she had been able to pry the essentials out of Eileen.

  “What are people saying about all this?”

  “Everyone was pretty shocked, what, with it being Adam and all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Eileen whispered like she was telling a dirty secret. “He was like the town hero. And he gets drunk at a party, crashes his truck, kills himself and almost kills his girlfriend. Some people have been weird about it. Almost like it affected them, somehow, personally. Saying things like, Adam was no good, and that they always thought something wasn’t right with him. Other mean things, like he wasn’t really all everyone thought he was. Mom says that some of them are taking it personally because it’s like they lost something special, even if it was just being close to someone else’s greatness. I think they should just get their own lives.”

  “What about Kaylee?”

  “After the funeral, she and her parents left town.”

  There had been a funeral for Adam, and Clare had not been at it—that in and of itself was hard to comprehend. Adam’s body was in a box in the ground. “Left town for where? Did they take Kaylee to school?”

  Eileen shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe, but I think they were also getting some phone calls, people saying things about Adam and hanging up. Someone…” Eileen started but snapped her mouth shut.

  “What?”

  Eileen sighed, obviously wishing she hadn’t said so much. “Someone, in the middle of the night, threw a brick through their living room window and then a basketball. At least that’s what I heard.”

  The cruelty of people was astounding. The Collinses were good people, people who had lost their only son.

  “Who would do that?”

  “Assholes.”

  “It was an accident,” Clare said. “It’s not like Adam meant to hurt anyone.”

  “Yes,” Eileen said. “But he was really drunk, Clare…you could have died.”

  Clare could have died, and on the ride home from the hospital, she wished she had. As soon as she was more stable on her own two feet, Clare would walk the mile from her house to Saint Joseph’s Cemetery to see Adam’s grave for herself. She didn’t think she would be able to believe he was gone until she had seen his headstone with her own two eyes.

  “When we get home, I want you to head straight to your own bed and get some rest,” her mother instructed.

  “I’ve done nothing but rest for the last four months.”

  “Your body was busy healing, not resting. Plus, a hospital bed is not like your own. I imagine your first night back at home you’ll sleep like the de—”

  They both let the poor word choice slide away without comment or apology. “When is Roland expecting me back at work?”

  Her mother shook her head. “He’s not. He needed to get someone in there answering the phones and running the office. Since we didn’t have any idea how long you might be in the hospital…” Her mother shrugged. “I told him it was probably best for him to get someone else hired as soon as possible, so he did.”

  The news didn’t upset Clare, only unsettled her even more. It was yet another tether come undone, disconnecting her from her places in this world. “So I don’t hav
e a job.”

  “Not right now. You should give it at least another month of healing anyway. Something else will come along. Maybe something down at the library. You always liked it there.” Clare watched out the windshield and wondered if she would ever like anywhere, anyone, or anything again in her life while pretending to not notice her mother driving two blocks out of their way to avoid passing the Collinses’ house on the way to their own.

  Chapter 15

  Eileen

  Eileen found Simon in the kitchen, standing in front of the sink, staring out the window at the palm tree–lined driveway in front of the house. Barefoot, he wore a limp flannel robe; his dark hair was disheveled and slept on.

  “Simon?” Afraid of startling him, she kept her voice soft.

  When he turned to face her, his bloodshot eyes and sallow complexion told of a sleepless, tear-filled night. He looked down at the cup he held in both his hands and then back up at Eileen with some confusion, as if he had forgotten she was even in the house. Seconds passed. He nodded once, confirming some unspoken logic to himself, then turned back to the sink and dumped his coffee into it. “Would you like some coffee? Mine’s cold.”

  “Yes…please.”

  Simon walked around the large center island to a complicated contraption of levers and dials on the opposite side of the kitchen. He flipped a switch, and a loud whir of electric blades followed by the crush and grind of whole coffee beans filled the kitchen. The aroma, rich and robust, floated into the air and pulled Eileen’s senses beyond the semistupor she’d been hiding in. With the sound and the smell, the desolate white kitchen seemed more alive, and she could remember a time when this pristine space with its polished surfaces had been filled with family, food, sounds, voices, stacks of dishes, and a concoction of delicious aromas—the chaos of a Christmas shared.

  Simon shut off the machine, and the silence swept in again.

  “Here you go.” He carried a cup for her around to her side of the island and placed it with a clink onto the white marble in front of her. “Do you take anything in it?”