A Dress to Die For

by Christine Demaio-Rice

  He was still staffing the office. The big players were hired, but they’d been sorting through resumes for weeks, and he had three days’ worth of interviews for a patternmaker, three development people, and a production manager. Then he was off to the New Sunny factories for corrections, directions, and—yes, Ruby’s favorite thing—bossiness. Just overall bossiness. She smiled into her pillow. So childish, and accurate, and necessary, somehow to her peace of mind. Because she knew it was one of the things that made her feel the safest with him, when the anxiety that dogged her for so many years stopped gripping her chest. It had been weighing on her as long as she could remember, possibly since the day her father had left, the real day, not the fake one. Possibly, she had been born into a state of constant anxiety. But not with Jeremy. Like the motor shutting off or the air conditioner winding down, the feeling stopped, leaving only peace with its sudden absence. She called the safe feeling into existence, quieting the pounding in her rib cage, and finally fell asleep.

  CHAPTER 7

  Laura couldn’t swim. Not a stroke. When she and Ruby were kids, Mom had taken them to Manhattan Beach, and the water terrified her. Ruby bodysurfed so hard she once lost her bikini bottoms in the sea, but Laura was content to play in the sand. Mom had bribed Laura with a candy apple once, saying she’d get it if she put her head under water. The feeling of impending doom touching every inch of her skin gave her a panic attack, and she had gotten out, eaten the candy apple, and vowed never to return. But she knew how to tread water. She hated it, but she could do it.

  That was the feeling she had in the office the next day. She kept her head above water, made decisions, and instructed her staff on what to do and in what order. She spent half the day at 40th Street, moving machines and sewers to make room for a line of Jeremy’s vests that had last-minute orders. She brought the design assistants over to teach them how to set up a line and had a panic attack over a closet that hadn’t been dusted of wool fibers.

  And then it was seven o’clock.

  She bolted out, barely saying good-bye, and ran back to 38th Street.

  **

  Jeremy was already on the video conference screen in their office, his hotel room behind him. As she ran in, huffing and puffing, he took a handful of pills. For him, it was 7:10 a.m., the next day.

  “Easy, tiger,” he said.

  “I was afraid I’d miss you. I was at 40th, and they hadn’t done the fifth floor storage—”

  “Breathe.”

  “Your head is huge.”

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  “I mean the screen is so big.”

  He moved his chair back. “Better?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ve got about four hundred emails, and it looks like you’ve been taking care of everything. What do you want to do with Heidi?”

  “If we get rid of her, they’re going to send her back to Romania.”

  “And?”

  “And. No.”

  “Put her at reception.”

  “Would you stop? She’s fine. It was a mistake.”

  “A series of mistakes. That wasn’t the only origin label at the sideseam.”

  She crossed her arms. He crossed his arms. They stood like that for a while, at an impasse, with a few thousand miles between them. Then she smiled. And he smiled.

  Jeremy broke the silence. “If you save someone’s life, you’re responsible for it.”

  “Deal.”

  “Have you been staying at my place?”

  “Yes. I’ve been thinking about going through all your things. Do you have any secrets you want to tell me about before I find them in the back of a drawer?”

  “I don’t keep them in the drawers.” His expression promised plenty for her to uncover. “The dress? Anything I should know about?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Really?”

  She shrugged. “It’s complicated. And I don’t really have much.”

  He leaned forward, put his elbow on the desk, and leaned his cheek on his palm. “I’m not due in the office until nine, so go ahead.”

  She sat on the table, so she’d be big in the screen for him, as well. “I went out with Stu, and—”

  “That didn’t take long.”

  She ignored his remark. “The guy Dad ran away with? His name was Samuel Inweigh. He was a singer from Brunico. He recorded an album the month they were here with the entourage. There’s not much on an Internet search, but Stu’s getting me the recording.”

  “And you’re giving him the story.”

  “How perceptive of you.”

  “Of all the things I love about you, that you think people are good-hearted… definitely up there.”

  “And my body?”

  “Neck and neck with the other thing. And by the way, I miss it.”

  “It speaks fondly of you.”

  “Is that it? That’s not enough to make me late.”

  “I saw Barry and Dean last night. They say hello. But Barry told me he didn’t see the dress get unloaded when he went to do the setup. You know, like he just turned around, and it was there. Said it came on a plain white truck. That’s it. So, anyway, also… I was going to tell you something, but I don’t want you to get mad.” She paused.

  He was still elbow-on-the-desk, early-morning Jeremy, as she’d seen him for five years in the first few hours of the day before he put on his bossy late-day face.

  She took a deep breath and spit it out. “He offered me a job.”

  “He’s always offering you a job. It’s his way of teasing me.”

  “He gave me a number.”

  He picked up his head. “What kind of number?”

  “Big number. Two-year contract.” Her hands had gone as cold as Jeremy’s expression. He had been relaxed and warm, and now he looked like he wanted to break something. “See?” she said. “You’re mad.”

  He hid his face behind his hands and rubbed his eyes. He didn’t have to say a word. Her revelation was tantamount to her telling him his best friend had put his hand up her skirt.

  “Jeremy?”

  “Tell me you’re joking.” His voice was muffled behind his hands.

  She figured she might as well tell him the whole thing, not just the hand up the skirt but the soft caresses and whispered promises. “He pitched it to me like I was done learning anything here, and you and I are redundant, which I don’t agree with. But he said I could manage the divas on his design team and set up production in all his overseas facilities. But it’s not like I’m a big world traveler, so I don’t know what he’s thinking.”

  Jeremy took his hands away. His eyes were reddened from his fingertips. “He’s right to poach you. You want to pull a creative with domestic floor experience, and there are about seventeen of us left.” He rubbed the scissor callus inside his second finger, a tell for when he was upset.

  “I can’t leave Sartorial and run all over the world setting up modular systems.”

  “Sweetheart, I really can’t talk. I’m too—”

  “I’m not taking it.”

  “That’s not the point. I have to go.”

  They said good-bye, with all the familiar affectionate phrases attached, but he was far away emotionally. His feelings were hurt, at the very least. At one point in the middle of the night before, she’d thought that she would take the job to see what it was like to work with someone else, but after his reaction, all she wanted to do was reassure him that she was his, body, soul, and career, so long as he wouldn’t have that hurt look on his face. His vulnerability made her very uncomfortable. She wanted to protect him, and herself, from it.

  **

  The call of the previous night wasn’t forgotten the next day but shoved to the back burner in the face of a series of fittings at 40th Street that seemed to go on and on. Heidi was a nervous wreck and kept calling out the wrong measurements.

  “Your job is safe, Heidi.” Laura leaned down to adjust the hem on a floor-length skirt. It was too curved in th
e back, yet too short. She would adjust the curve at the bottom first, then drop the curve back down from the waistline.

  The correction wasn’t new, but the sweat in her palms was, and the way the box of pins sat just so on the carpet, and the pins in her mouth, the way they pressed into her lips. The worry over losing a job. The tension of reassurance. She tried not to breathe too hard, or she would swallow a pin. It had all happened before… when she was small.

  The flashback floated in on the wave of remembered concerns. Mom kneeled at the model’s feet, pinning up a curve. Nothing in fitting is what it seems. A problem with the back is sometimes a problem with the front. Sometimes, you have to solve the problem at the waist to solve the problem at the hem. Mom’s big blue eyes stared her down, transmitting decades of knowledge, which Laura understood and assimilated in all its nuance and depth.

  In her mind, Laura saw the Scaasi studio with its huge windows and exposed brick, and she smelled that smell of Dad, dusty leather and fabric softener. He and Mom spoke words she couldn’t remember because she was thinking about how top affects bottom and back affects front. Dad took her hand, and some other memory associated itself with the memory of the curved back hem, and like a dog on a leash, it came trailing after her. Walking on some street by the Lincoln Tunnel, they were on their way to the unemployment office. Dad was sad. Dad didn’t talk too much. She wondered if he was mad at her. He was walking too fast. They passed a big building with a loading dock in back, and out of the loading dock, a kid who might have been a third grader ticked something on a clipboard as a bolt of fabric was carried out of the truck. Laura thought, lucky kid, just as Dad mumbled, “Poor kid. I won’t have you in that stinking business, Lala. If it’s the last—”

  “I am so sorry about the labels.” Heidi’s voice cut through her reverie.

  But there was another dog on another leash that Laura was going to lose if she answered. “Shhh,” she whispered and pulled the dog to heel as she stared at the carpet and pulled at the hem of the skirt. A line of black limousines sat in front of that same building with the loading dock, and a young teen with an oxygen mask over the bottom of his face was getting out of one. Or in. The scene went blank as if the projector had run out of film.

  There had been a time after Dad had left when she and Ruby had been under the care of Marisa, a delinquent middle schooler who put on an innocent face for adults. Marisa had a boyfriend just the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel, maybe a quarter mile from Mom’s apartment and a short way from the 40th Street factory. Every day, between school dismissal and Mom’s return at six thirty, Marisa hung out on her stoop and smoked cigarettes while Laura and Ruby ran around the neighborhood with the rest of the kids. Some played. Some didn’t. Some just showed up in the candy store occasionally. Laura had forgotten most of the names, if she ever knew them, and wouldn’t have recognized any of them if she’d crashed into them on the subway.

  The kid with the mask had been one of the dozens of neighborhood kids. That kid, whose memory had been flushed with Dad’s, had been older. Sometimes he wore an oxygen mask. He didn’t play and didn’t have a name at the time because all the other kids were scared of him. They’d convinced themselves in the way of a mob that he was going to die soon, and if they touched him, they’d catch it.

  How on earth had she forgotten Jeremy?

  “Laura?” Heidi said. “Are you okay?”

  Laura snapped out of the memory. They’d been talking about the center back origin labels. “Honestly,” Laura said, standing, “I’m a little annoyed the factory didn’t say anything.”

  Her phone rang, and she checked the Caller ID. “Detective,” she said, “to what do I owe—”

  “Can you come and get your mother please? I’m trying really hard to not put her in a holding cell.”

  Laura was out the door before she even hung up. Her concern for Mom weighed on her as she cantered to Midtown South, so her attempts to jog more memories of Jeremy from her brain failed. By the time she got to the precinct, the clarity of even the memories she’d already loosened had faded into the collage of everything else in her half-remembered childhood.

  **

  Laura walked up to Cangemi’s desk, where Mom sat. “Mom? What did you do?”

  “She’s like you,” Cangemi said. “But in a nicer package. You’d be in front of a judge right now.” He glanced around the room, and Laura followed his gaze. She saw nothing more than a bunch of cop-looking guys hunched over computers and stacks of paper.

  “I need to know who had that dress,” Mom said, clutching her handbag. “And I wasn’t doing anything illegal, exactly. Or he’d have arrested me.”

  “Nothing illegal, exactly?” Laura asked. “What exactly does that mean?”

  “I was asking questions.”

  “Of whom?”

  “Stop talking to me like that, young lady.”

  Cangemi pushed his chair toward Laura.

  As she started to sit, she noticed his desk looked small and a few inches taller than a normal desk. And it didn’t have the right kinds of drawers. She peeked under it and saw a sewing machine hanging under there. “What the…?”

  A tittering noise came from the rest of the room. She looked around at the coppish guys with their heads buried in their work, and all she could see of them were sets of shoulders shaking with laughter.

  Mom chimed in, “They replaced his desk with a sewing machine.” She wrinkled her nose. “It’s a Singer.”

  Cangemi wore his more put-upon look. “Can we get this over with?”

  “They left a tampon in the drawer,” Mom said. “Not nice!” She called it out to the room, as if scolding recalcitrant children.

  “You’re avoiding telling me what happened,” Laura said before she addressed Cangemi. “You tell me, and we’ll be gone.”

  He leaned against a filing cabinet that had been decorated with a pink bow. “We get a call from the doorman at the Iroquois telling me there’s a lady hanging around asking questions of tenants and employees. Specific questions about an orange dress. Which is why the call came to me.”

  A murmur from across the room, “Detective Dress-up,” elicited cackles and outright hilarity across the board.

  “This is why you don’t laugh at my jokes, isn’t it?” Laura asked. “You’re surrounded by comedians.”

  “One lady saw a truck being loaded the morning of the opening,” Mom said.

  “White truck?”

  “White with a green stripe. And the guy working the back door said they have a new tenant on seven who had someone moving a crate.”

  “In or out?” Laura asked.

  “Out, of course.”

  “You said they were new. They could have been moving it in.”

  “It’s the Iroquois, honey. Six months is new.”

  “You know who the dress’s donor was, right?” Laura asked Cangemi.

  “It was an anonymous loan.”

  A cop with shoulders like a circa 1983 Armani padded jacket rolled his chair up to Cangemi’s sewing machine/desk and held up a naked Barbie doll. “She just walked in and needs to fill out a report. Underpants missing.”

  “Sir,” Mom said, “don’t you have something useful to do? Like maybe research a diet that will take the fat out of your head?”

  Armani Shoulders rolled back, but he was laughing.

  “Okay, Mom, let’s try not to make any enemies at the police department, okay?”

  Cangemi held out his hand. “Let’s step outside the comedy club for one minute.”

  He walked them into the waiting area, which had been festooned with cheap lights and a fake tree, making it look more institutional and old than if they had just left it alone. He addressed Laura while Mom stood by, tapping her foot and looking annoyed.

  “Bernard Nestor called to let me know your mother was over asking him the exact same questions I did,” he said. “She seems like a nice lady.”

  “You’re talking about me like I’m not even here,” Mom
interjected.

  Cangemi ignored the remark. “But she has the exact same habits as another person I know.”

  “He wouldn’t answer me about whether or not the dress was ever left unsupervised,” Mom said.

  Laura put her arm around Mom. “You know, as I do represent a company that’s a bondholder for the show, it’s within my rights to ask how the investigation is going.”

  “It’s going fine,” he said. “Thanks for asking.” With that, he strode out of the waiting room and back up to his sewing machine.

  Laura turned to her mother. “Stop. Just stop. My brain is fried with the whole Dad thing. I’m trying to keep three businesses from falling through the cracks. I have people asking me questions I can barely process most of the day, and I have to look like I’m not overwhelmed, which I am. Jeremy’s away, and I miss him, but I can’t get all gushy, or he’s going to think I’m losing it at work. So the last thing I need is to run over here to keep you out of jail. Okay, Mom? Can we agree to keep the shit in the bag for a week? Then I’ll have the time to chase you all over Manhattan.”

  “Oh, well, I didn’t mean to inconvenience you, Miss Important Boots.” She stormed off, out the door, onto 35th Street like a whipping dervish.

  Laura followed just as quickly, but with a full load of guilt. She was a selfish, selfish girl to worry about herself when Mom was trying to unload the twenty years’ worth of baggage she’d hidden from her children. She caught up half a block later. “I’m sorry.”

  “No, I’m dragging you into this.”

  “I tend to get involved where I don’t belong.”

  “And I have to talk to the owner of the dress.”

  Laura shook her head, realizing they’d been having two separate conversations. “I’m sorry? What did you say?”

  Mom put out her hands. Her nose was wet and red from the cold, and the damp air matted her hair. Laura noted she’d need a winter accessory set for Christmas. It was just ridiculous that she could never remember the basics.

  “Let them arrest me. So what? They’re going to put a sixty-one-year-old woman in the clink without giving her a chance to look contrite? I don’t think so. And hell, I can easily plead onset dementia. Right?”