Dead to Her

by Sarah Pinborough

  He saw this as a fairy tale. He’d just told her he spied on her and now he was trying to make it romantic? Did he really see himself as Prince Charming? A mockery of one maybe. She was tired and her mood was spiraling downward, dipping toward the darkness she feared one day falling into forever. Tears stung her eyes. This was so much harder than she’d thought it would be back at the start, way back at the beginning in London. A lifetime ago now. That snakelike voice in her ear. Marry him, then get rid of him.

  “Hey, don’t cry,” he said, suddenly tender, the tree of his moods swaying once more.

  “It’s so lovely.” She hiccuped a laugh. “No one’s ever called me their princess before. I’m so sorry I disappoint you.”

  “No, no you don’t.” He heaved himself out of his chair and came around to her side of the table, sitting down and taking her hand in his. “And I’ve got some good news myself.”

  What now?

  “I’m definitely retiring. I discussed it with Jason this weekend and he’s right. Life is too short. I mean, look what happened to Eleanor. I want to spend my time with you.”

  She threw her arms around his neck so he couldn’t see her disappointment. “When?” Not now, not yet, she thought. How would she cope with him breathing down her neck and on her neck all the time?

  “Jason’s going to buy me out. I need to speak to some people, put some actions in place, but I’m pretty much all yours from now on. If I want to work, I can always consult or do after-dinner speaking.” He pulled back to look at her. “We can travel—I can show you some of the States. Host some charity events. Relax at the club.”

  Every word was like a pillow pressed against her face, but he didn’t notice. He grinned, his teeth yellow against his purple lips. Each day that passed she found him harder to like. Especially after last night. After everything. “That’s great,” she managed. Too bright? Not bright enough?

  “It’s made me feel younger already.” His eyes glittered as they dipped to her cleavage. She smiled even as her skin crawled. There wasn’t even time to take a Valium.

  29.

  He’d fucked her over the dining table, huffing and puffing at her back, and even bracing herself, her hips had bruised against the edge. With each thrust she’d dutifully moaned as he grunted, her eyes stinging as she focused on the pushed-aside congealed leftovers on their dinner plates. It wasn’t painful and he wasn’t mean, but even as he strained to fill her up, she felt empty. Once he was finished, they’d gone to bed, and before long he wanted to do it again, but this time she got away with a blow job. Revolting as she found it, she couldn’t bear to have the weight of him on her again. She didn’t ask and he didn’t say, but she knew he’d taken a Viagra. Maybe even before he’d gotten home—snuck it in on the way from the airport, eager to impress her with his manliness. He’d fallen asleep fast after that, and, as full as her mind was, her exhaustion took over, and she’d sunk into the sleep of the dead.

  She woke abruptly, her survival instinct tearing her from dreams of black icy water filling her lungs, driving her to the surface. Her eyes opened, but any relief was lost as weight crushed her chest. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t . . .

  Billy. He must have rolled half onto her in his sleep, maybe the dregs of the pill working even as he snored, and now he was slumped, a beached whale, one leg and arm over her, his heavy head pressing on her breasts. His skin was corpse-pale in the gloom and she carefully rolled him away. He shuffled back to his side of the bed without even waking, no doubt a whole first marriage of practice, and his breathing fell silent again.

  She was still tired and could have fallen straight back to sleep, but despite the fear of ghosts huddled in the shadows watching her, she relished the peace of the night. For a little while the world was hers alone, and once she was awake enough to realize she was both thirsty and needed the bathroom, she got up, grabbed her phone, and went downstairs for orange juice.

  She ached in her bones. Was she getting too old for partying like that? The weekend felt like a dream now; the dancing, the sex, her mouth between Marcie’s legs, the ease with which they’d given themselves up to each other, both of them rebelling against their constraints. What would Jason make of it? she wondered. Would he smell Keisha in their bed? On his wife?

  She stared out the window to the shadows beyond. It was a tangled web she was weaving and she had to be careful. Keep it together. Be tougher. There was no room for her doubts and darkness and worries. Everything she wanted was in her grasp. Money, freedom, love—she just had to be patient. Patience. It had never been her thing. She wasn’t calculated like the rest of her family, but then she did wish Billy dead daily, so maybe it was in her blood after all.

  Across the ocean of lawn, Zelda’s apartment was invisible, drowned, no lights on tonight. It wasn’t that late, just coming up on one, maybe. Had her family gone? Keisha hadn’t heard anything, but then the house was so big she never knew when cars were coming or going outside.

  The lack of light was unsettling her as much as if Zelda had been standing in the window again. Zelda unsettled her. Always watching. Maybe watching now in the dark, for all Keisha knew. A snake of concern rattled its tail in her belly. Could it have been Zelda she’d seen in the crowd the previous night? No, not her, but the posture of the woman’s back . . . it had been someone familiar, she was sure of it. But what if it had been Zelda? What would she want for her silence?

  Keisha turned away from the window. There was no point in what ifs. There was nothing she could do about it, except wait and see. Be tougher, she reminded herself as she crept back up the stairs, Billy’s snoring getting louder as she grew closer, as if the house itself were rumbling in the night. She paused, not wanting to slide back into that bed just yet. Ahead, the door to Eleanor’s rooms—her mausoleum—was open a crack, tempting Keisha to go and snoop around some more, and she couldn’t resist. She slid inside.

  It was only her imagination but the air felt cooler and unnaturally still in the vast room filled with elegant possessions that waited in vain, abandoned, for a time when their owner would need them again. Keisha found herself breathing shallowly, as if she might wake Eleanor’s ghost more readily than Billy’s snoring, sadly very much alive, body. She traced a finger across the dressing table. The hairbrush, comb, vanity mirror, carefully laid out. Why were the dead so fascinating? Why did they feel more present than the living sometimes? Maybe it was just her. Always surrounded by shadows, that’s what Auntie Ayo had said to her.

  You got yourself cursed blood, KeKe, it’s there in the cards, no good will come of you.

  She shivered slightly as she remembered her wish at the festival that weekend. Billy gone, gone, gone. There had been nothing good in that. She might not be cursed, but she knew she was wicked. His death was what she wanted, even more so now with her body aching from the weight of him and the echo of his sex present inside her.

  She flicked her phone open and idly googled “How many Viagra would it take to kill someone?” Billy was that very male combination of arrogant and insecure enough to maybe take too many one night. The results weren’t encouraging. Billy was vain but not stupid. He’d never take that many, not even if she pretended she wanted him to have sex with her twenty times in a row.

  She flopped down on Eleanor’s bed for a moment, imagining her predecessor and Billy fucking in it. Had Eleanor loved Billy? Or had their marriage been one of convenience, both pushed together by their parents wanting to keep the elite with the elite? Inbreeding. What was it Billy had said at dinner? Eleanor knew how to behave and what was expected of her. Had Eleanor sometimes screamed silent frustrated rage into her pillow at night? Not just this pillow, but all of them, from childhood. Dress this way, walk that way, speak this way, be a good girl. Is that how it had been for her entire life? Keisha had been left to run wild and then there had been Auntie Ayo and Uncle Yahuba and all the shittiness and fear and wrong education that entailed, but maybe Eleanor’s youth hadn’t
been that much better. More luxurious, yes, but just as imprisoned.

  For the first time she felt a nugget of sympathy for the dead woman. She turned the small table lamp on, checking the door was still pushed to, and got up to look at the photos on the dresser. The glass across the surfaces shone. Zelda must still come in and polish them. They were flashbacks through time. Did Eleanor look happy in them as she stood beside Billy at various stages of their marriage? Smiling yes, but happy? Keisha didn’t think so. Certainly not in the later ones. There was a coolness in her eyes and a stiffness in her back. Was this after Lyle’s death?

  Keisha looked closer, comparing two, taken at some kind of function but maybe ten years apart. Billy had his arm around Eleanor’s waist in both but in the more recent image there was definitely a wider gap between them as they stood, as if maybe Eleanor didn’t want her husband pawing at her, proprietorial. She looked elegant, yes, and was smiling politely, but something was missing. There was another—this time Jason was in it, looking much as he did now, with a woman who must have been Jacquie, dark and slender with a birdlike brittle beauty. Her hand was firmly gripping Jason’s, making the gap between Eleanor and Billy seem more pronounced. As if Eleanor was maybe trying to pull away and Jacquie was trying to cling on. Was Jason already seeing Marcie when this was taken? So many stories, so much history.

  Keisha looked at the pictures in the rows behind, some from when Eleanor had been a child. Most were posed family shots where she’d been taught how to sit prettily and tilt her head this way or that, her parents standing behind her, occasionally with a hand resting on her shoulder, presumably meant to look affectionate but somehow seeming as if she was being held in place.

  Only in one did she look like a normal joyful girl. The old black-and-white photo was crumpled in its frame and there was nothing staged about it. Eleanor, recognizable by her blond mid-length curls, was laughing on a swing at the bottom of a vast garden. A boy in knee-length shorts leaned against the frame, and a smaller girl was sitting cross-legged on the grass looking up at her. There were remnants of a picnic on the grass. Who’d taken the photo? Keisha wondered. Someone who didn’t mind kids being kids.

  She tracked Eleanor’s life through the pictures, each year older a little more contained and mannered as each year Billy got a little fatter and more red-faced. How ironic that it was Eleanor who was now gone, who’d rotted and died in this very room while her overindulgent husband got to marry again, a fresh young woman to mold. A wolf in sheep’s clothing, that’s what she’d married, and she’d been an idiot to fall for his puppy-dog routine. He revolted her. He scared her. He made her dislike herself. No matter how many cars or pieces of jewelry he bought her, she was always going to be impatient for him to be gone.

  She browsed through Eleanor’s drawers again, and this time her eyes lingered on the hidden needles and vial of morphine, wondering how it would feel, before she slid the drawer quietly closed and turned off the lamp, ready to go back to bed. Only when she got to the door did she pause and turn back. From within the dresser she took out a hidden framed picture of Eleanor with Lyle as a child, her eyes shining bright in this one, and placed it in front of the others, out in the open, angled toward the bed.

  “Good night, Eleanor,” she whispered into the empty gloom. “I hope that helps you sleep better.” Then she clicked the door shut behind her, leaving the dead and the dark to their own company.

  30.

  They’d had sex twice the previous night, once when Jason had joined Marcie in the decadently huge walk-in shower that took up most of her bathroom, and then again later, in bed. If there had been any lingering scent of Keisha on the sheets, Jason hadn’t noticed. His good mood had left her as breathless as the sex. He’d been grinning like a cream-filled cat when she’d gotten back from the Radfords’ house, holding a beautiful gold bracelet he’d picked up for her while he was away, and there was also Chinese takeout on the breakfast bar that ended up growing cold because he was hungrier for her than for any food.

  It had been strange, the contrast of his thick chest with the mat of tangled coarse hair that stretched out toward his shoulders with Keisha’s dark, soft, and smooth skin. The way Jason kissed was different. His tongue was rougher, filled with a need to prove himself, perhaps. The comparisons were exhilarating, she couldn’t deny it. Thinking about what she’d done with Keisha only the night before in their marital bed turned her on, and when she came she was so lost in her thoughts she wasn’t entirely sure who she was with, him or her. It was Keisha’s face she saw as she came on his mouth, even still when Jason clambered back up the bed to pump himself into her, pinning her down and panting expletives into her face as she gripped his sweaty back and moaned some more, pretending she still wanted his cock until he climaxed.

  She hadn’t had to do that with Keisha, she’d thought, afterward, when he brought the lukewarm noodles and ice-cold Chablis upstairs to bed. There was no pandering involved. No pretense for the sake of ego or machismo. Maybe her mother had been right all those years ago, trying to drunk-talk her way through some attempt at advice.

  Men are fucking babies their whole lives. You spend all your time trying to make them feel better about themselves. For what? For fucking nothing. Take take take, that’s all they do. They never fucking grow up. Even that pissy boy of yours you’re so sure you love. If you marry him, then you’re as stupid a bitch as me.

  As maternal pep talks went, on reflection, it had probably been one of Mama’s best, but then her mama had been flipped between men like a worn-out pinball all her miserable life and probably still was, for all Marcie knew. Mama had been right in that moment, but even a stopped clock told the time correctly twice a day, and Marcie had only made one mistake in her choice of men, which given that she was Mama’s daughter was no mean feat.

  Jason had been a good choice. A great choice. So what if she had to fake it sometimes to keep him sweet? She had a beautiful house, a charmed life, and she lived in luxury with a handsome man easily stolen from his wife. Admittedly, that last didn’t make her sound so good, she’d decided as she let Jason feed her a forkful of greasy chow mein. Maybe the apple didn’t fall so far from the tree after all.

  But when the lights were out and he was sleeping beside her, the Chinese food sat uncomfortably in her belly as guilt took hold. She’d cheated on her husband. And what had Jason done that was so terrible? Nothing. All she really knew he’d done was lie about a phone call—yes, he’d been moody, and yes, he’d been slightly dazzled by Keisha, but she didn’t have any evidence that he’d betrayed her. But she had definitely betrayed him. She was the cheat. She was the one putting all her security at risk.

  Once a cheat, always a cheat.

  Looking over at Jason now, while he drove, the top of the car down, tanned hands on the steering wheel, his hair mussed up from a day at the beach, it felt for a moment like time had looped back to when they’d been courting. Courting, such a sweet Southern word. Courting was probably what Iris and Noah, or William and Eleanor, had done all those years ago. Now it was the word Jason used to politely refer to their affair, as if somehow that would make people forget the whole drama of his divorce.

  She didn’t want to think about that right now. They’d had a great day, she couldn’t deny that, and even though her phone had buzzed quietly in her purse several times, she’d almost managed to put Keisha out of her head. Jason had driven them out to Tybee Island, where they’d wandered on the beach, enjoying the sea breeze and collecting shells, before stopping for a seafood lunch at a cheap crab place. So very different from the crisp, white-tablecloth restaurants of their marriage. It had all made her feel young again. She hadn’t spoken much, letting him bubble over with his obvious excitement at the reality of buying William out and becoming senior partner.

  “We’ll be on the map, baby,” he’d said more than once. “Not in anyone’s shadow anymore.”

  “Are we going to be the new Eleanor and William?” she had asked, avoiding ment
ioning Keisha. It was a tongue-in-cheek question. They could never be like Noah and Iris or William—they weren’t bred in enough.

  “Younger and better looking,” he’d answered. He’d been laughing about how William had behaved in Atlanta. Getting up early and going to the hotel gym regardless of how much they’d drunk the night before, cleansing with his coconut water, glugging it down, even as he ordered eggs and bacon and biscuits and gravy. All to impress some English girl he’d bought and paid for already and who was only after him for his money. He’d laughed and Marcie had joined in. As they snickered, smug, she’d wondered if maybe terrible people were drawn to terrible people. She was pretty sure neither she nor the man she’d married was very nice.

  “Why don’t we grab a cocktail at Sacchi’s before home?” Jason asked.

  Marcie flipped down the visor to check the mirror. “I look awful,” she said. It wasn’t true. She was wind-swept and decidedly dressed down, but awful? No. If anything she looked fresh and young.

  “You look beautiful,” Jason said. She looked at herself again. There was something about her today. Is this what a woman’s touch could give you? This glow? Maybe it was the heat of having a delicious secret. A slight revenge on her husband for his middle-of-the-night lies and outrageous flirting.

  The occasional buzzes from her purse had unsettled her though, and as soon as they handed the car to the valet, she excused herself to the restrooms and checked her texts. All from Keisha. While there was nothing particularly incriminating about them, which was a relief, there was definitely a sense of neediness in her bitching about William’s retirement. I won’t be able to breathe. How am I going to get time for doing my own thing? How will I be able to hang out with you so much?;-) The smiley face emoji was loaded with subtext and it made Marcie cringe slightly. Yes, there was that draw that Keisha had, the magic pull on her she found so hard to resist, but she was also a childlike liability. She read farther down the messages. Please tell me you guys haven’t been in bed all day! That was followed by a puking emoji. Answer my texts and save me from boredom! Up for some party planning stuff next week? I need you!!!