The Queen of Hearts

by Kimmery Martin

  After my big kids—eight-year-old Rowan and six-year-old twins Eli and Finn—left for early care at school, I made my way to the car, Delaney hopping in sparky little circles around my feeble trudge. “Mom, is this a skipping?”

  I assessed her exaggerated lurch. “Um, not quite.”

  “Now is it a skipping?”

  “Well—”

  “HOW ABOUT NOW?”

  Sometimes you had to lie. “Yep. Looks like skipping to me.”

  It took forever to load Delaney into the SUV, since she pitched a full-blown fit if you didn’t allow her to buckle her own car seat, despite fat little fingers that could barely manipulate the belt. Sometimes I gritted my teeth and overpowered Delaney in the interest of expediency, but what the hell? Everyone knew I was always late. I fanned myself as Delaney worked at the buckle.

  We finally departed. “I’m all wet,” Delaney announced from the backseat.

  “What?” I asked, navigating around a slowing driver who apparently did not wish to tip his hand by using a turn signal. “Did you spill your drink?”

  “No!” hollered Delaney. “I’m pouring wet!”

  “Well, I mean . . . how did you get all wet, honey?”

  “I don’t know! Water is coming out of my head skin!”

  I glanced in the rearview mirror to see Delaney pointing in alarm to her sweaty forehead.

  After a brief discussion about perspiration, we arrived at Queens Road West, where Emma’s home was one in a line of magnificent old trophy houses. I turned into the curved driveway, outlined with confluent rows of dwarf Korean boxwoods interrupted every fifteen feet by blooming crape myrtles. The ten-foot-high whitewashed fences on either side of the house were draped in luscious espaliered pear trees, leading to a half-acre backyard of Edenic splendor: dozens of lime green hydrangeas, pruned camellias grown into perfect small trees, and sculpted beds of cutting flowers in great swaths of bright colors.

  Delaney and I traipsed down the driveway through a snowy cloud of floating crape myrtle petals, the oyster shells underfoot making a pleasant critch-critch noise that merged with the faint undertone of buzzing from bumblebees in the flower beds. Even though it was morning in September, it was hot as a waffle iron out here, but the trees in Myers Park—hundred-year-old oaks as tall as four-story buildings—reared up overhead to create a massive green tunnel over Queens Road West, which at least gave the illusion of cool.

  Jerrie, Emma’s Australian nanny, had agreed to watch Delaney this morning. She let us in and led me back to the massive kitchen, where Emma sat straight-backed at the breakfast table. She peered over a pair of tortoiseshell reading glasses and rose to greet us.

  “Okay, hit me,” I said, after Delaney had scampered off with Jerrie and Emma’s son, Henry. “Maybe this will help startle me awake.”

  Emma handed me coffee and a spoon, clearly reluctant to start talking. “Okay, but I don’t want you to get worked up. It . . . may be awkward, but we’ll handle it. It’s nothing to worry about.”

  “When people say it’s nothing to worry about, it’s generally the preamble to catastrophe,” I pointed out. “Spill it.”

  Emma nodded, but got up to make another cappuccino. Her kitchen was immaculate. Even though I’d been here at least once a week since we’d both moved from Kentucky to North Carolina more than a decade ago, I never failed to appreciate the pristine room, especially compared to my own house. I was not a particularly piggish person, but I seemed to have lapsed into a life where every surface in my home was coated with kid paraphernalia and metastasized mail. Drew was tidy, but his finance career required slavish devotion—the sacrificing of one’s firstborn, the swearing of blood oaths, and the total surrender of his balls. He was gone for sometimes as much as twenty hours a day even when he wasn’t traveling, so any mitigating influence he might have had on the domestic disarray produced by four kids was wiped out. Not only could he not help with anything related to the household, but it was pointless to complain about your own fatigue to someone being slaughtered himself.

  Emma, on the other hand, was one of those people who’ve achieved an aggressive level of organization. In the kitchen, the glass-fronted bisque cabinets revealed handmade pottery, lined up smirking at you like the valuable art it was. And if you opened a drawer, you were confronted by spice jars and oil dispensers of the same watercolor blues and greens, all facing the same direction, their labels in a complementary old-Americana font. The walls, painted a glowing pale gold, exploded in the daylight to look like an incandescent arm of the sun itself before an evening retreat into a gleaming fire-lit jewel.

  “This is difficult,” she called over the noise of the steamer. “I don’t really know how to start.”

  “Could you be a little more cryptic? I’m already doomed to have a bad day. Delaney bit Sumner Cooper yesterday and is on some kind of double-secret preschool probation. And I’m behind on paperwork, which is going to murder my afternoon.”

  Emma rolled her eyes, grasping at the chance to stall. “I don’t think you need to be concerned about the biting. It’s a perfectly normal developmental stage, as you yourself would be the first to assure everyone. Of course no one wants their child to be bitten, but—”

  “Oh, I’d love it if my child got bitten. I’d be able to comfort her and feel virtuous at the same time. It’s humiliating to be the parent of the biter, especially when you are the biter’s parent who is also trained in pediatrics,” I groused. “People think I’m professionally incompetent.”

  “Biting is a rational approach to a threat when you’re three,” said Emma. “She’ll learn. The real problem here is that Sumner’s mother is a stone-cold shrew who is vindictive about everything. Plus she never wears anything except yoga pants.”

  “Hey,” I said, since I was fond of yoga pants myself.

  Emma returned to the banquette, fortified with caffeine, and faced me. “About Nick,” she said, without preamble. “He might be moving to Charlotte.”

  For a moment her words hung in the air, scrambled and incomprehensible. Then they rearranged themselves into coherence and walloped me, stealing my breath.

  “What?” I managed. “Please, tell me that’s a sick joke.”

  Chapter Two

  BLISSFULLY UNCONCERNED WITH WRINKLES

  Emma, Present Day

  Zadie and I met two summers before college, when we were randomly assigned to be roommates at a camp for students interested in medicine. At the time, I had few female friends; in high school I associated with a loose confederacy of oddballs—a lank-haired D&D gamer, a pudgy fiddle player, and a sexually confused, eternally tormented Goth wannabe; all boys—so I was nervous about rooming with a strange girl. The camp had been designed by some crafty bureaucrat in hopes of stemming brain drain from the state of Kentucky, which needed more primary care doctors to practice in the eastern Appalachians. In theory, the plan held merit since they were offering combined scholarships to college and medical school. In actuality, it might have been a mistake to invite the prospective rural doctors to live for the summer in Louisville. I’d been in the city for thirty minutes, accompanied by Mrs. Varner, my science teacher, who’d volunteered to drive me, and already I was reeling from the urban, bohemian-flavored sights on display as we proceeded cautiously along the cacophonous Bardstown Road. I gaped at the juxtaposition of neon and hand-lettered signs, the warm, well-lit bars and shops, the dozens of restaurants of every ethnicity clustered along just this one road. It might as well have been a different planet.

  When I arrived at the dorm, Zadie was already in the room, unpacking. I noticed her face first: bright, animated, inquisitive; the kind of expression you’d expect on a person who enjoys everything. She wore a T-shirt with an EKG tracing that had two normal beats followed by a flat line and then a third normal beat.

  The caption read: FOR A MINUTE THERE, YOU BORED ME TO DEATH. This evidence of coo
lness, coupled with the tight jeans and the black eyeliner she also sported, rendered me silent with the pressing need not to say anything boring, like “Hello. I’m Emma.” I settled for a firm, speechless nod. My roommate regarded me with interest and said, “Hello. I’m Zadie.”

  “Hi,” I managed.

  “You have beautiful hair,” she said, eyeing its excessive length and uncut wispy ends. “Do you have a religious thing about not cutting it?”

  “What? No. No, I just like it long.”

  “Whew!” she said. “I thought maybe you were in one of those fundamentalist groups that makes their women eschew modern conveniences, like pants and education.”

  Did she just say “eschew”? A dorky hope flared in me. “No, it’s . . . more of a counterculture thing,” I said, even though I was about as counterculture as Andy Griffith. “I am in favor of pants. And education.”

  “Oh good,” she said. “I was worried about having to spend all summer with someone weird and unlikable.”

  Okay, I could do this. “Like a . . . kleptomaniac rich girl,” I offered. “Or a bulimic hoarder.”

  “Or somebody with abhorrent musical taste.”

  “Or a boy-crazy flake.”

  Uh-oh. Wrong thing to say.

  “Or how about one of those people who hisses ‘Shhhh!’ if you make a phone call while she’s meditating?” she blurted.

  “Um,” I said, relieved that she’d overlooked my boy-crazy comment. “That last one sounds a little personal.”

  She giggled. “Yeah, that was my roommate at band camp one year. Oops. I think I revealed I went to band camp. Please don’t move out.”

  “I’m a band geek too,” I said. I realized I’d twirled a lock of hair around my finger into an irredeemable knot and began to try to extricate my finger without being too obvious. “Do you still play anything?”

  “I was encouraged to find another interest. Turns out, I’m sort of tone-deaf.”

  “Sorry,” I said. I felt a hard edge in my chest give way. I could tell she liked me.

  The more I got to know Zadie, the more we connected: she was the first girlfriend I’d made because of—not despite—my intellect. More often than not, we stayed up all night, talking about books, current events, philosophy. As the summer wound on, I began to relax into a comfortable camaraderie around her, reveling in the opportunity to unleash my thoughts without watching the other person recoil. This sensation was so novel and so enjoyable, I became nostalgic for it before it even ended, hyperaware of the fleeting nature of happiness even as I was happy. I knew it couldn’t last.

  But somehow, it did. Zadie and I called each other often throughout the school year, and then we were roommates in college, and later, in med school. I knew her as well as I knew any human being.

  And I’m sure she thought the same of me.

  —

  For a beat, Zadie didn’t react to my statement about Nick. Then her eyes went wide as her hands fluttered up near her face, apparently trying to fan air into her flash-frozen lungs. “What?” she squeaked. “Please tell me that’s a sick joke.”

  I regarded her carefully. “Are you going to faint?”

  “No!” She yanked her hands down and sat on them. “How do you know he might be moving to Charlotte?” One of her arms escaped, flailing around and landing on her coffee mug. She took a giant slurp and then almost snorted it out her nose as my husband, Wyatt, came skidding around the counter in his underwear.

  “Late!” he yelped, waving his coffee cup.

  I’m aware of the uncharitable comparisons people make when they first meet me and Wyatt. They think we’re Beauty and the Beast, evocative of those billionaire-supermodel combos you see in the tabloids. Or the racial aspect briefly trips them up: Wyatt’s black. I’m white. One glance at Wyatt, a squatty endomorph, and me—all angular cheekbones and elbows—and people assume that Wyatt’s loaded. He is loaded, but he’s also both brilliant and mesmerizing. He can talk a herd of cats into a hot tub, and he’s relentless when he wants something.

  While us being an interracial couple rarely garners a second glance, the difference in our physical attractiveness sometimes does. My interior and exterior are an incongruous mismatch, seemingly designed to confuse. I’ve learned the hard way that people expect dull vapidity when they meet me: the pouty cast of my lips, my heavy-lidded blue eyes, my blond hair and emaciated height invoke a dim vibe no matter how I slouch or how I dress. People assume that Wyatt could not love me for my mind, or that I could not love him for his looks. Marrying each other might have seemed like an odd choice from a distance, but we complement each other well. He balances out my awkwardness, and I keep him reasonably reined in when his zest begins to overflow into the realm of mania. Once they get to know us, no one wonders why I love Wyatt.

  “Tarnation!” he bellowed, having just spilled hot coffee on his feet. He began high-stepping around the room, trying to shake off the sizzling liquid from his bare toes, forgetting that he was still holding the sloshing cup. “Aah! Lord almighty. A little help here! Emma! This coffee is attacking me. And someone has stolen all my pants. Hey there, Zadie.”

  “Hey, Wyatt,” Zadie said, trying not to smile.

  “Your pants are hanging in your closet, Wy,” I reminded him.

  “No, they’re not. It’s like the world is clamoring for me to go out in my unders.”

  “I’ll go look.”

  “No, no, no, no.” Wyatt switched gears. “You ladies stay right here. I’ll reassess.”

  I touched a drawer on the kitchen island, which sprang open, proffering baby wipes. I grabbed one, and after mopping up the coffee tsunami, I turned my attention back to Zadie. “I’m sorry. I should have figured out a better way to tell you. I just found out myself. I—”

  From the adjacent first-floor master: “Muffin! Are we out of Product?”

  Zadie and I glanced at each other, mutually agreeing not to continue in earshot of Wyatt.

  “What’s Product?” she whispered.

  “His hairdresser suggested he try to manhandle the ’fro a little,” I whispered back. “It’s in your vanity shelf,” I called.

  “Thanks, beloved. By the way, I’ve located the pants. They were hidden in plastic stuff.”

  “That’s how they come back from the dry cleaner’s, Wy. How have you never noticed that before?”

  “I’m sure I have, but in general I’m blissfully unconcerned with wrinkles,” said Wyatt, emerging fully dressed from the bedroom, his hair now sporting an unnatural shine. “They’re going to bunch up as soon as you put them on, so why bother? When you’ve got all this going on”—he motioned in an up-and-down gesture to himself—“people will let a few wrinkles slide—you know what I’m sayin’?”

  “I think what you’re saying is that before Emma, you always wore wrinkled pants?” Zadie asked. Wyatt and I had been married for three years, but he persisted in plenty of ingrained bachelor habits, which often required me to repress my reactions for the sake of our marriage.

  “Wellll, I did have a little help from time to time. With laundry and such.”

  “Who helped you?” I asked.

  “Really, that’s irrelevant,” Wyatt protested feebly.

  “Who?”

  “You’re not going to let this drop, are you?”

  Deadpan: “No.”

  “Fine. Sometimes Mama gave me a little hand with things,” Wyatt muttered.

  “I knew it!” I said. “Your mom did all your laundry. That explains a lot.”

  “Let’s not go there, pumpkin. I’m late enough.”

  Zadie leapt to her feet. “Oh, shoot!” she yowled. “I’m going to be late for work.”

  I stood and kissed her on the cheek, thankful for this unexpected reprieve. “I’m off Friday. Let’s get together then.” I flicked a quick glance at Wyatt, who was incautiously po
uring himself another coffee, and lowered my voice. “Listen. Zadie.”

  “Yeah?”

  I felt my body language shift: a signaling of emotion I couldn’t quite conceal. Over the years, Zadie’d learned to read the subtle telegraphs of my face: a raised eyebrow, a half smile, a quick blink were all you might get from me, whereas another person’s visage would reflect open disgust or wild joy. But now I struggled to keep my expression impassive.

  “I don’t . . .” I began, but then stopped. I waited, but nothing happened. I was frozen.

  “Em?” Zadie tried.

  I blinked, feeling the corners of my mouth elevate in a parody of a smile.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “See you Friday.”

  I could tell Zadie wanted to shake the details out of me, but she acquiesced with good grace, bounding out of the house and down the driveway in a tear. Although I couldn’t prove it, I suspected Zadie’s office staff actually scheduled her first patient fifteen minutes later than they told her they did, since she was late nearly one hundred percent of the time. I watched her peel out of the driveway, my mind churning. I had more than a decade of repression when it came to the subject of all the things that had gone wrong during our third year of medical school. There’s an indescribable comfort in the telepathy that develops over many years of friendship; I knew exactly why Nick’s reemergence would trigger embarrassment and anger for Zadie, and I could almost read her mind about how she’d approach him when she saw him again. Thinking of it, I lowered my face to my hands, squeezing my eyes shut, and settled into a familiar slumped-shoulder posture of defeat.