by Lea Geller
“WHAT?”
“Please, let me just meet with Don tomorrow. He’ll have more information for me, maybe even some answers.” My eyes stung and were suddenly full of a searing liquid that had started to spill down my cheeks. I shivered, and before I knew it, a sob had escaped.
“Aggie,” she said in her best attempt to be gentle, “just say when and I’ll be there. Brian’s whole family is visiting and we’re going to be spending the rest of the week arguing publicly about which brother his mother loves best and privately about which sister got the ugly genes. Please give me an excuse to get out of here. By then you’ll know more, and you’ll be doing me a favor.”
“Lindsey,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Lindsey got the ugly genes.”
Beeks laughed. “And that’s what I love most about you, Agnes. At the depths of despair, you can still take down an ugly sister-in-law.”
I wished she were next to me so I could put my head on her shoulder and cry in between jokes. The kitchen felt even more cavernous and hollow. The whole house, already too big for three people, felt vast and empty.
-5-
I must have dozed off for an hour or two on the living room couch. When I heard Grace calling out to be rescued from her crib, I looked down at my phone on the floor. Zero missed calls. Just a few texts from Beeks and one from one of Jack’s secretaries, whom I’d called earlier: Any word?
It never seemed unusual that Jack had no friends. He worked a lot, investing money for people, and he worked alone, except for the office “ladies.” There were no boys’ nights, no golf trips, and I therefore didn’t need the equivalent girls’ dinners and movie nights. We had each other and the people who worked for us. Speaking of which, as I got up, I calculated how long it would be before Sondra and Alma arrived.
I got Grace from her crib. She was crying, her wet face pressed against the railing. We had decorated this room months before she was born. I had taken such little interest in the rest of the house, and so much of it had been done before me, but this room bore my mark. Three walls were a pale mint, the fourth a deep turquoise. Although the furniture and bedding were shades of white, there were murals of flowers and birds on the walls. All of it, even though more muted than I would have liked, amounted to the only real color anywhere in the house.
I picked up Grace and buried my face in her neck. I breathed her in, hugging her tight. Her diaper was soaked, tugging at the crotch of her pajamas with its soggy weight. I suspected the diaper was what had woken her so early, but I couldn’t bear to put her down on the changing table just yet. I sat in the rocking chair and held her to me.
Grace had only recently started solid foods, so breakfast was apple and pear sauce mixed with some yogurt. She took a few bites and then proceeded to raspberry out the rest, sending it all over the front of my shirt. I thought about Sondra meticulously stewing and blending all those organic apples and pears from the farmers’ market, most of them never making it into Grace’s mouth. While I was wiping the sauce from the folds of Grace’s neck, I heard keys in the door. I froze and looked at Grace. I felt my heart beating faster and my breath quickening. Then I heard Sondra call out, “I’m here early. He home yet?” I exhaled loudly, the force of my breath taking my head down with it, my chin touching my chest.
Sondra walked into the kitchen and looked at me nervously.
“Nothing yet,” I said, looking up. “Nothing at all.”
She put down her purse and reached for Grace. “Why don’t I take Grace and you go into the office. Maybe you find something.”
Was there something Sondra knew about, something I would find if I looked?
I handed Grace to her, washed my hands, and reluctantly walked up a flight of stairs to the office.
A few months ago, I picked up a copy of Marie Claire while getting a pedicure and read an article called “The If-I-Die Folder: How to Make Sure You Are Never in the Dark.” The article detailed the folder spouses should make for each other, with all sorts of personal information a surviving spouse would need to carry on, alone. The folder included a copy of a will, maybe even a living will, passport numbers, mortgage and car information, documents about life insurance, and bank accounts. When I read the article, I realized I knew none of this. I didn’t know where checkbooks were kept, or if we had any accounts other than the one I used regularly. I didn’t know which bank our mortgage was with, if we even had a mortgage, and I wasn’t sure how to access any life insurance information or, again, if we even had it.
I came home after that pedicure and asked Jack if he had made me an If-I-Die folder. We were sitting on the deck off our bedroom, drinking wine, watching the sky turn. In Santa Monica, sunset was just a prelude. All the action happened once the sun dropped into the ocean and the sky turned a million shades of pink.
“A what?” he asked, grinning at me. “Is this the latest thing from baby group? Do you talk about this once you’re done with all that cosleeping nonsense?”
“Funny,” I said. “No. I read about it in a magazine. It’s a folder with all the information I’d need if anything ever happened to you.”
“I’m not even going to ask which magazine you read it in,” he said, swinging his legs around and sitting up in his lounge chair. “What I really want to know is how soon are you planning on something happening to me, or, better yet, what exactly are you planning on happening?”
“You guessed it,” I mocked him right back. “I am planning on killing you in your sleep, but before I do, I want to know where the money is hidden.”
“Good to know,” he said, lying back down in the chair and closing his eyes. Conversation over as far as he was concerned.
“Jack, pay attention,” I pleaded. “Make fun all you like. But when I read that article, I realized I wouldn’t know where to start if something happened to you, and I know what that feels like. I’ve already done that. I don’t want to do it again.”
He paused, not looking at me. He took a breath and folded his hands on his chest.
“You just need to know, my darling, that I have taken care of everything. Should anything happen to me, you and Grace will be provided for.”
“That’s not what I—”
“I know exactly what you’re asking, and if you want one of those little folders, I’ll make you one. All right?” He dropped his head to the side and forced a smile at me.
“All right,” I answered. He reached for me, pulling me out of my chair and onto his.
I shook away the rest of the memory and returned to the task at hand. Now, months after that conversation, months after he’d promised to make sure I was never in this position, I had to scour his office for clues.
Jack’s laptop was with him, wherever he was. I sat in his chair, breathing in his smell again. I brought in my laptop and tried to log in to Jack’s email. I failed at every attempt to guess his password. I tried my name, Grace’s name, all sorts of combinations of the two, birthdates, names of our favorite restaurants, but came up empty each time. I closed the laptop and started opening desk drawers.
The desk was large and dark, one of the few accents in a room that was endlessly layered in cream. I opened the center drawer and found pens, pencils, paper clips, phone chargers, and some batteries—all separated into square Lucite cubes.
I opened the next drawers and found stacks of paper held together by shiny gold binder clips. I pulled out the stacks and flipped through them. They seemed to be client reports, full of bar charts and pie charts and sections detailing gains and losses. As I paged through them, my eyes glazed over. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, and frankly, if there was something in these reports, or in the pages of bank statements that were in a separate pile underneath, what made me think I’d be able to find it? Not only did I not have an If-I-Die folder, not only had I ceded control and was completely in the dark about the details of our financial life, but if there were any clues at all in these pages, I didn’t think I’d be able to find them
, and if I’m being perfectly honest, I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
-6-
That evening, Alma stayed late and I drove twenty minutes to Don’s office in the skyscrapers of Century City. I sat in the car for a moment before I went up. I pulled out my phone and called Jack.
“I am about to meet Don in his office. I do not want to meet Don in his office. Please, whatever is going on, don’t make me do this.”
I got out of the car and walked to the elevators. The secretaries had gone home for the night, and Don greeted me as I walked off the elevator onto the twenty-third floor. Like Jack, Don was in his midfifties, but unlike Jack, Don looked his age, his hair thinning on top, his body thickening in the middle. I often wondered if this was what Jack would look like if he didn’t have to keep up with a wife in her thirties. Don led me to his office in silence, and I stood facing his wall of diplomas and awards. There were so many, and they were hung in a large pattern, each side of the pattern mirroring the other. I suspected that each time he added a new distinction, throwing off the wall’s symmetry, he had to find another to even things out. Don waited for me to sit and then sat himself in the chair next to me, perhaps so he could also face his accolades. He moved his chair closer to mine but made sure to line his left armrest up with my right armrest so that neither was sticking out past the other.
“The good news is that Jack is fine. At least, he’s not in any serious physical danger.” He spoke as if he were ordering a coffee.
I leaned forward. “Have you spoken to him?”
“You have to trust me when I tell you that he’s fine,” Don said flatly, answering me without really answering me. “That’s the good news.” He paused. “The bad news is that he’s gotten himself into some trouble.”
“Ya think?” I said, then remembered that Don didn’t do sarcasm. I tried again. “What kind of trouble?”
“Jack lost a lot of his clients’ money. He’s trying to pay them back before it gets bad. He’s had to clear out your bank accounts and sell whatever assets you had. Agnes, you have no money.” Again, spoken as if he were simply ordering a skinny latte.
I was suddenly glad for Don’s lack of social skills. No amount of small talk could make that statement any less devastating. Don repeated it, this time in an even lower voice. “Agnes, your bank accounts are practically empty, you have no savings, no investment accounts, nothing.”
Sometimes I need to see words to really understand them. I closed my eyes and gripped the arms of my chair, picturing Don’s words in white letters on a black background: No Money.
I opened my eyes and stared back at Don’s baffled face. I was sure he had played this scene out in his mind, but he probably had not expected having to sit while I actually visualized the bad news.
“What about the house?” I asked. “We could sell the house.”
Don looked down at his large feet and lined them up with each other. He took a breath and looked back at me. “You’re underwater on it. You can sell some of the furniture, but I think some of your newer appliances are rented.”
Rented appliances? I paused, almost laughing at the idea of someone coming to repossess my enormous, almost empty fridge.
“OK,” I said. “No money. No money.” At this point I had taken to repeating the phrase as well as visualizing it, in the hope that at some point it would not only sink in but start to make sense.
“Actually,” he began, his voice dropping another octave so that now he had to move even closer to me for me to hear him, our legs touching, “actually, it’s worse than that.”
I took my head out of my hands and looked up at him. “What?”
“Jack is in debt. Serious credit card debt. There are several cards I know of, and there may be even more. And that’s only the beginning . . .”
“I looked in his office,” I started.
“What did you find?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said. Nothing I could understand. Nothing I wanted to understand.
Don moved even closer to me so that the sides of our bodies were almost touching. He lowered his voice. “You need to forget everything you saw. Do not go digging any further. Do you understand me, Agnes? You have to forget all of it.”
“Why? What’s going on? What has Jack done? And why isn’t he calling me? Why are you telling me all this?”
“What exactly Jack has done is the least of your problems,” he said. “As of now, you have no money, and once the bank repossesses the house, you’ll have no place to live. You need to focus.”
Suddenly, the office, Don’s detached yet threatening tone, the fact that he felt the need to practically sit in my lap to deliver the news, was suffocating. I gasped for breath and scraped my chair back, pulling away, its legs tugging at the rug in his office. We sat almost five feet apart. I didn’t want him breathing on me, lining himself up with me, or even consoling me. I also didn’t want to stick around for the part of the conversation where he offered to help me. I stood up and gasped again, as if more air awaited me the higher up I got.
I backed up toward the door. Don stood up, lining up the empty chairs, and then reached out for my arm, as if to hold me in place. “Wait. There’s more,” he said. I was beginning to understand that there would always be more. Maybe I should have stayed and let Don rain more bad news down on me, but I was desperate to process his first news dump.
“I’m sure there is, but this is all I can take right now,” I said and then stumbled away from Don and his office, took the elevator down, and climbed into my car. I got off the freeway in Santa Monica but didn’t remember driving home.
-7-
Later that night I walked out onto the porch off our bedroom. We always ended the day here, and sometimes started it, having breakfast while Alma fed Grace, passing sections of the newspaper back and forth. At night, we’d sit in our midcentury lounge chairs, drinking whatever wine Jack had brought home that day. I’d listen to Jack’s stories about his secretaries, and he’d ask me questions about my day—whom I’d met for lunch, which yoga teacher I’d had, if Grace had napped on schedule. I slid open the door and stood at the doorway.
I replayed the scene in Don’s office in my mind. As was so often the case, I thought of a million things I should have said, questions I could have asked. Why would Jack disappear just because he lost money for his clients? How much money did he lose? Where did he go? Mostly, though, I couldn’t believe I’d left Don’s office without an answer to the one question that hung over everything else: Why wasn’t Jack telling me all this himself? How could he let me wonder what had happened when he knew that I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop, for something to happen to him to take him away from me?
Looking out at the water, I called Jack again.
“Please,” I begged. “This isn’t right. Come home and let me help you, but don’t leave me in the dark like this. Don’t make me depend on Don for information. Don’t make me sleep alone, wondering where you are. It’s just not right.” I wiped my soggy face, hung up, and walked inside, into the closet we shared. My chore-wheel apartment might have been smaller than this closet. When I moved in, a woman arrived with a clipboard in hand and asked how I organized my clothes. I had to laugh when she asked how I liked my shoes arranged—did I store them in their boxes with a photograph of each pair on the outside, or did I prefer clear plastic boxes so I could see the actual shoes? I didn’t tell the woman with the clipboard that at the time I only owned five pairs of shoes and that two of the pairs were flip-flops. I didn’t see myself taking pictures of shoes and pasting them onto boxes, so I told her plastic would be better and then left the rest up to her.
I walked to the back of the closet to the shelves of shoes and opened a plastic box on the top right. Inside was a pair of flats I hadn’t worn since I moved in. I stuck my hand in the right, then the left shoe and pulled out two plastic bags full of cash. I was pretty impressed with myself for hiding what I called the “shoe-drop fund” in an actual pair of shoes. This
was the cash I had slowly siphoned off—twenty, thirty, sometimes fifty dollars a week (depending on my anxiety level)—just in case something happened. I always knew the other shoe would drop. I just didn’t think Jack would be the one to drop it.
I shuffled through the next day in a fog. Sometime after Grace’s morning nap, I buckled her into her stroller and left the house just to get some air. I passed the yoga studio and waved to the girl behind the desk. Her name was Shanti, and I often wondered whether, like Misha, Shanti was really Shelly. I walked past the restaurants I lunched at with my baby-group friends and realized that I hadn’t told any of them Jack was missing. But this was LA, and I knew that nobody would just pop in to check on me. Nobody wanted to invade my personal space or fold impromptu house calls into their scheduled but unproductive day. I walked past the juice bars and cafés, and I realized that if I didn’t want to be seen, I had to stay away from these places. I yanked my hood up over my head. I needed to see the ocean, so I walked three blocks to the beach as quickly as I could and sat down on the first bench I saw. I called Don, but he didn’t answer, so I hung up without leaving a message. I pulled the stroller so Grace was facing me. My eyes were closed and I was breathing deeply when Don called back.
“Where are you, Agnes?”
“On the beach,” I said, gazing out at the vast blue, watching some birds dive down and then rise up again.
“Are you alone?” he asked.
“Grace is with me, but otherwise I’m alone.” Those last words stuck in my throat. I coughed them out.
“You left my office without the full story,” he said.
“OK,” I said, inhaling sharply, preparing myself for the full story. Whatever the full story was, I was pretty sure I didn’t want to hear it.
