by Lea Geller
“Yes,” I said, a little too forcefully. “Why don’t you walk with me?” I knew Stacey didn’t walk and usually waited for the campus shuttle. Something about shin splints and low muscle tone.
“Sure,” she said, taken back by my request. I saw her weighing the inconvenience of walking against her piqued interest in my overture. “I can walk.” She zipped up her enormous silver coat and pulled its giant furry hood over her head. She looked like something out of a space fantasy. We started walking. I took large strides, moving as quickly I could.
“What’s up?” she huffed.
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe you should tell me. You seem to know everything that happens here.”
Stacey stopped walking and caught her breath. “What do you mean?”
I wanted to keep going—I needed the movement—but Stacey couldn’t walk and talk at the same time, so we stood in the middle of the path. “I wanted to think that you were a friend, Stacey, I really did.”
“What are you talking about?”
“How do you know the boys come to see me in the evenings?” I charged. “Have you been spying on me?”
“What? No,” she said, laughing nervously.
“You sure about that? Because Gavin played me a recording.”
“A recording?” she asked. There was a bench nearby. She looked at it longingly.
“Yes, Stacey. Gavin apparently likes to record conversations. I heard you telling him the boys come to my house . . . at night.”
Stacey reached out and put a mittened hand on me. “Honey, you have to know that I did it for you . . .”
“For me, really?” I pulled back so hard that her hand fell.
“Yes, for you. I didn’t want things to go too far, you know, for your sake. Agnes, people are talking . . .”
“Exactly which people are talking, Stacey? If you were so worried about me, why didn’t you come to me? Why go to Gavin?”
“Because Gavin relies on me. He needs me to let him know when these things are happening. I am his eyes and ears.” She shrugged and lifted her palms to the sky, as though she couldn’t help herself from being so incredibly useful.
“I don’t think that’s the reason, Stacey,” I said, taking a step closer to her, using my height advantage and staring her down. “I think you did this for you, not for Gavin, and definitely not for me. I’m such an idiot. All this time I thought you were a friend. But you’re not a friend. You’re a parasite. You sucked up all the information you could get about me and you used it to make yourself look indispensable.” All the anger I’d been pushing down, my anger at Gavin, at Don, hell, even my anger at Jack, it was spilling out, all over Stacey Figg and her giant silver coat.
I could feel the anger on my face, but Stacey was smiling. “A parasite?” she said. “I wasn’t such a parasite when I was pouring you wine. I wasn’t a parasite when I was cooking you dinner and watching your kid. Besides, do you really expect me to believe that you thought I was a friend? I know you tolerate me because I’m next door and I let you cry on my couch and eat my food. You talk about yourself the whole time; you never ask about me. Besides, I know what you say about me, how you ridicule me to your real friend.” She stopped and took a breath and then spoke more slowly, as if this part was really important. “I know that you call me the Figg, like I’m a thing, a thing that doesn’t even deserve a real name.” Her voice quivered.
I didn’t know anything about Stacey Figg. She spent hours trying to extract the details of my past, and I didn’t even know where she’d lived before she occupied the house next to mine. Still, I wasn’t sure I deserved this.
“So you sold me out,” I said.
“I did what I did because you have to watch your back here. If you don’t get on board with Gavin, you’re gone . . . and I don’t have a rich husband and a house on the beach. I need this job.”
I wasn’t sure if I still had a rich husband, and I knew I didn’t have a house on the beach anymore. But I thought it better to keep that to myself.
She was right. At best, I had simply tolerated Stacey Figg; at worst, I’d used her. While I hadn’t expected her to rat me out to Gavin, I had no right to expect her loyalty. I put my hands in my pockets, looked down at the ground, and walked away, watching my boots break through the layer of ice that had formed on top of the dirty snow. I was no match for the Stacey Figgs of the world. I was in way over my head, playing against people who were much better at this than I was. I just wanted to pick up Grace and go home. So I did, leaving Stacey and her silver jacket behind.
-14-
That night I lay in bed determined to make peace with the mess I’d made. The boys would all be here for the summer. Their parents would fork over money to Gavin, and they’d all get into high school. Maybe it wasn’t so bad. Maybe that was the way things were done here in New York, or at least in last-stop private schools.
I stared at the popcorn ceiling. As discouraged as I was, I couldn’t stop thinking about the boys. How eager to please yet how quick to screw up they were, and how badly they felt about themselves. It was one thing to be tricked into paying to get your kids into high school; it was another thing to let these kids be continually demoralized in the process, broken down slowly, day by day. I had no idea if or when things would get better for these boys, but I wished that I could have been the one to help them.
I rolled over on my side when my phone buzzed. An incoming call. Jack. He was finally reaching out to me again. As much as I wanted to hear his voice, I was scared, worried about what he’d say to me.
“Jack?”
“Yes. I’m sorry, Aggie. I’m sorry I lost it. I just couldn’t bear to see you with another man, not like that.”
“I told you, it was nothing.”
“You don’t know how hard it is for me to see you with anyone else, to even think about you with another man.”
“You don’t have to think about it. Nothing happened, and nothing’s going to happen. I’m yours. I never stopped being yours.”
“Show me, then. Tomorrow night,” he breathed.
Tomorrow was Friday night. I didn’t have to worry about school the next morning.
“Your place or mine?”
“Mine,” he said. “Unless your place has room service?”
Room service? All my place had was a mouse and inconsistent heating. “Yours. Definitely yours. Let me see what I can do about Grace.”
I called Beeks and asked if Grace could spend the night with her.
“What, the Figg is busy?”
“Long story. Let’s just say the Figg isn’t available.”
“OK, but this time you can’t tell me you won’t be sexing it up.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
“And you have to promise you will come to me for Easter.”
“Beeks . . .”
“Actually, make that the Sunday after Easter. I have already promised Easter to Brian’s family, where we will all be eating his mother’s tasteless ham and listening to my father-in-law regale us with bird-watching stories.”
“It’s a deal,” I said.
“You know that I would have taken Grace anyway,” she said.
“I know. Thank you, Beeks. I mean it. I don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t here.”
“Me either,” she said. “But let’s not think about that.”
I’m not sure why I spent so much time riffling through my closet, looking for something both clean and sexy, with the added benefit of still fitting me. The hotel room door had barely closed behind me when Jack started to remove my clothes. As soon as I was over the threshold, he pushed me up against the wall, and while kissing the base of my throat, he started working on my blouse with one hand, running the other under my skirt. As he made his way down the buttons (Why? Why had I chosen so many buttons?) I pushed him away, not because I wanted him to stop—my God, I didn’t—but because I wanted to see him, to watch him. It was still so new to have him inches from me, to be able to look at his face,
to smell him, to feel his hands, that I wanted to make sure it was really happening.
“Let me see you,” I whispered.
“Fair enough,” he said and managed to take off all my clothes while fixing his eyes on mine the entire time.
He stared at my naked body for what felt like a week. I stood before him, my clothes in a pile on the floor, and he just stared, as if he could not believe he was seeing me.
“You’re here,” he said, as though I was the one who had gone missing.
He took a step closer to me, his hands still by his sides. His not touching me was dizzying. Finally, he leaned in, his mouth seconds from mine. Oh my God, just do it. Just put your hands on me.
“You know I nearly died without you,” he said, his breath on my neck.
“Jack . . .”
“I couldn’t think, couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t even breathe without you,” he said.
“Jack . . .”
“I need you, Aggie. Tell me you need me, too,” he said, his hands now on my hips, pulling me even closer to him. “Tell me.”
“I need you,” I breathed. “I need you, Jack.”
He took my lower lip between his teeth. He moved his hands slowly up my body.
“Say it again,” he murmured.
“I need you, Jack.”
A few hours later, while we were waiting for room service (room service!), Jack pulled me to him and ran his fingers up the length of my body. I looked down at my white, slightly less wobbly thighs. Still, I wondered when Jack was going to say something about the extra flesh I’d accumulated here in New York. He didn’t.
“You’re so beautiful,” he said, tracing the outline of the mass of flab where my flat stomach used to be. If I inhaled and held my breath, the small hill of stomach would disappear, but I couldn’t hold my breath for hours on end, so there I was, in all my convex glory.
When his hands were somewhere south of my belly button, he said, “Let’s talk about what happens next.”
“I think I know what happens next,” I said, rolling on top of him.
He laughed. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Wow,” I breathed. “That’s a first.”
He moved me off onto my side. We lay facing each other again. I looked at Jack, his hazel eyes softening at the edges, his cheekbones, his still-bronzed face inches from mine. I’d spent all these months away from him, and yet we could slip right back into each other this way, as though we hadn’t spent more than a day apart. Muscle memory is a funny thing.
“No, Aggie.” He smiled. “What I mean is what happens next for us. How we’re going to get it all back.”
“Does this mean we’re going home?” I asked.
“Not yet. I still need to raise a little more money,” he said.
“That’s fine,” I said. “It’s only March. I probably wouldn’t want to leave my boys in the middle of the year anyway.”
“You have boys?” he asked, pulling me closer. It was easy to make Jack jealous. Too easy. Within seconds he rolled back on top of me and pinned my arms by my sides.
“Oh yeah,” I whispered as his mouth worked its way down my body. “You should be really jealous. There’s nothing like the attention of a middle school boy to make a woman feel good about herself.”
“I’m hardly jealous of middle school boys,” he murmured. “But if anyone gets to be around you all day, it should be me.”
His lips were on my stomach when room service knocked on the door.
“They can leave the tray,” I panted.
He looked up at me. “Hold that thought,” he said, jumping up and wrapping the sheet around himself. Just last night I was sleeping in about eight layers of clothing, and now here I am, lying completely naked on a hotel bed. I pulled up the covers as the food was wheeled in, trying not to make eye contact with the guy doing the wheeling. I saw that he had a short ponytail and goatee, but then I quickly fixed my eyes elsewhere. Jack signed the bill and walked back over to the bed.
“Ruth Moore,” he said, climbing back in.
“Yeah, that’s someone I really want to picture right now,” I said, running my hands up his back. I kissed the base of his neck. “Let’s table her for later.”
Jack propped himself up on his elbows. “I need your help, Aggie.”
“My help?” I asked, playing dumb.
“Yes, your help. I don’t just need Ruth’s money back. I need more.”
“More?” I looked past his face at the enormous TV mounted on the wall. “Why do you need more?” I asked.
Jack took my face in his hands. “Because I lost more than I thought, Aggie. To pay everyone back, I need Ruth to help bring in new investors. She’s connected to everyone here.”
“New investors?”
“Yes,” he said, leaning closer. “To replace the ones that pulled out, and to pay people back.”
“To pay people back,” I repeated, staring right into his eyes.
“Exactly.” He stared right back. “And I’ve explained that we need some . . . information on her. We can’t just ask her. We need her to have no choice but to help.”
I suddenly got very cold. I rolled over, out from under Jack, and stood up. I pulled the comforter off the floor, wrapping it around myself. Thoughts of Ruth, Gavin, and the summer program ran through my mind. If Ruth did know Gavin was faking reports to get kids to sign up for the program, that was the kind of information that could really help Jack.
“I have nothing,” I said, not looking at him. “I barely know anything about her.” I started to get a little dizzy. “Besides, I don’t want to get into trouble.”
“What?” he asked. He pulled me down so we sat facing each other. “Aggie, why do you think you’re here? Why do you think I sent you to that school?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “For my safety? For your daughter’s safety? Because we had no place to live while you’re sleeping in a five-star hotel?” Damn, it was freezing in here. Why wasn’t this blanket warming me up?
He softened and ran his hands up along my thighs under the blanket. “Darling, you knew you were also sent here to be a listener. I could have moved you to a number of places to keep you safe. St. Norbert’s is where you send your kids if you’re rich and desperately want them in private school because certain families do not send their children to public school. All ‘your boys’ come from very well-off families that give generously to the school and to its endowment, just to get their boys in. They are all beholden to Ruth. With one word, she can bring in more people and more money. That is why you went.”
“So, what? We threaten her and she tells them to invest with you? And they do it because they want their kids in school?”
“That’s not exactly how it works,” he said. “She can mention me in passing, enough to make it seem like she may be looking for people to invest. The trick is to make me sound exclusive, as though they’d be lucky to invest with me, with the added perk of being in Ruth’s good graces.”
I shuffled back in the bed and rested against the headboard. I looked down at the sheets, with their ridiculous thread counts, and thought about the sheet on the massage table. I thought about the moment I realized something bad had happened to Jack, that feeling I first got when I was lying on that table with my face wedged in the doughnut pillow. It had been over seven months since then. All I wanted, each and every moment of these seven months, was to go back to things being the way they were before, before all this happened. In all that time, I would have given anything to be alone in a hotel bed with Jack. But now that I realized how orchestrated these months had been, I couldn’t process it all. I needed to clear my head. I could do a lot of things in bed with Jack, but thinking was not one of them.
“I need to go,” I said, getting up. “I have to think about this.”
Jack walked over to me. He pulled me close.
“Don’t you want to help me, Aggie?” he whispered.
“Of course I do. I just need to think.”
“Do you understand what I’m saying? I’m in trouble, real trouble. If you don’t help me, if I can’t get the money, then I’m going to jail. Is that what you want?” His shoulders crumpled and he looked small and desperate.
“What? How can you say that?” I asked. “Of course I don’t want you to go to jail.”
“Really?” he asked, an eyebrow raised. “You don’t want to move on?”
Without thinking, I threw his hands off me. “What kind of question is that? You were the one who disappeared, remember? I didn’t move on. I waited. I waited for you, Jack.”
“No, Aggie,” he said, stepping away from me now, his voice cracking. “I waited for you.”
“What?”
“I waited for you, Aggie. All those years. I was waiting for you. I could have gotten married, settled down, so many times, but I never did. I was waiting for you,” he said. “That day in the sushi restaurant, I knew it. I knew it as soon as you sat down next to me. She’s here, I thought. She’s finally here.”
“What you’re asking me to do,” I said, “it’s a lot, Jack. It’s a lot to ask.”
“Do you know what the worst part of jail would be? Losing you. I can’t do that, Aggie. I can’t lose you.” His eyes filled.
“You won’t,” I whispered, moving closer, putting my mouth on his tears.
“Take some time to think, then,” he said. He looked away for a moment, then added, “Just remember, Aggie, this isn’t just for me. You’re also doing this for us, for our family. You’re doing this so Grace can have both her parents around, so that she can have all the things you didn’t.”
He looked back at me and took my face in his hands. We stood there for a while, just looking at each other, and then I retrieved my clothes from the chair Jack had placed them on after he’d folded them neatly. I ran my hands through my new hair and checked myself in the mirror. Jack had saved me—why couldn’t I do the same for him? Besides, all the things I wanted were at my fingertips. Jack had given me a job, and if I did it, if I did that one job, I could have it all back. I didn’t owe St. Norbert’s a thing. I could blackmail Ruth Moore and then close my eyes, click my heels, and be back in Santa Monica by the beginning of summer, as if none of this had ever happened. That would show Gavin, Stacey, even Ruth how much they’d underestimated me.
