The Queen of Hearts

by Kimmery Martin

  She stopped, one hand drifting toward her mouth as if to stifle her words.

  “There’s no explanation, other than some horridness at the core of me. I tried to rationalize it by telling myself he’d tire of you eventually, and you deserved a better man than him anyway. You could have had anyone you wanted; and in his heart, he’s rotten. I thought he and I were meant for each other because we both seemed to be missing some elemental human piece. Our souls are broken.”

  I stared at her. “What about Graham?”

  Her face twisted.

  “Did you give Nick the picture?” I asked, remembering guiltily I’d seen the back of it when I’d snooped through Emma’s room.

  She shook her head. “Graham sent him a copy too. Nick got it the same day he tried to resuscitate him.”

  Now I pushed my plate away. “That’s sickening,” I said. “You both continued . . .”

  Emma met my eyes. “It’s worse than you think, actually,” she said. “First, I don’t believe Graham actually intended to kill himself. I think there was even a small bit of cruelty—or insanity—in what he planned: maybe he wanted to hurt himself so his girlfriend’s lover would have to try to save him, knowing all the while he was the one who drove him to it. Graham brooded about things. He obsessed about them—in that way, he was something like me. I think he didn’t plan to shoot himself in the heart until the very last moment.

  “Nick was devastated when he couldn’t save Graham. He could never bear to talk about it, and he was telling the truth when he said he carried that picture everywhere.”

  She paused.

  “He hated me. He didn’t want anything to do with me after that.”

  Confused, I said, “But you just said it was you in the apartment with Nick when I came over that day.”

  She laughed, a sharp, bitter sound. “I was there, yes. I’d show up from time to time.” She looked at me. “I tried to stop, but I didn’t succeed.”

  “But he let you in.”

  “I told him I’d tell you everything if he didn’t. By then he was sick of me. He only wanted you.”

  I jumped up, scraping my leg on the stupid log bench and nearly colliding with the effervescent waiter before I managed to stumble away. I glanced back in time to see Emma thrust a handful of bills at him. She followed me, her stride unhurried but determined.

  The bathroom—where was the bathroom? I concentrated on not howling. The woman at the hostess booth took one look at my intense expression and pointed wordlessly toward the hall outside the restaurant, probably figuring she had a couple of homicidal lesbians on her hands as Emma pounded by her too.

  She caught up to me at the door.

  “You have to hear the rest,” she said.

  I blanched. “You mean there’s more?”

  “Yes,” she said, resolute. “I’m afraid there is.”

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  THE LUNACY WARRANT

  Zadie, Present Day

  I leaned against the tiled wall of the bathroom, inert, listening to Emma without looking at her. I decided to disengage; I would hear and comprehend the words, but divorce them from their emotional content. Maybe if this worked well, I could create an alternate personality to handle all distressing future events. The idea had possibility.

  “. . . never stopped trying to contact you,” she was saying. “It was easy if he called and you weren’t there. If you were home, I just had to get to it first. I unplugged the phone in your room, and you never noticed, and when I was out, I unplugged the one in the living room too.”

  The white walls of the bathroom gleamed with antiseptic brilliance, like an OR. I shut my eyes.

  “Eventually he stopped calling. But by then we had e-mail accounts through the university, so I had to monitor that too. At home that wasn’t difficult, but what if you checked at the med school? It puzzled me for a while, but finally I hit on a solution: I created a new account in your name, and wrote him a short note instructing him not to try again. He ignored it, of course, and began sending e-mails to that account, sometimes multiple ones a day.”

  This jolted me. “What did they say?”

  “At first they were straightforward: he wanted to see you. He needed to talk to you. They were factual, to the point.” She leaned forward a little, concentrating on getting it right. “But then they began to change, becoming a little more . . . yearning, I guess. He wrote about loving you.”

  I made a small strangled noise.

  “Those were the hardest to read, initially, so I . . . I pretended they were written to me,” she said. “I began to . . . disintegrate a little, replacing every broken piece of me that splintered off with a new, manufactured piece, so I could function. I built a new Emma. And I convinced myself I was saving you from him—I knew he didn’t deserve you.

  “After a while I began to enjoy reading the e-mails, because even though Nick didn’t know it was me in the correspondence, we developed this virtual relationship that was infinitely better than the real thing had been.” She’d stopped looking at me, her eyes pinpointed on some unfathomable wrinkle in time. “We never really talked before, but now he was sharing a part of himself with me I’d never seen—that he said no one had ever seen.”

  I held up a hand. “You were writing him back,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “And he thought this was me.”

  “Yes,” she said again. “He did.”

  “Why didn’t he look for me in person?”

  “Because I told him I’d cut him off altogether if he ever contacted me—you—in any other way besides the e-mails,” she said. “He agreed, because what choice did he have? By then, the fact that we weren’t seeing each other in person gave us this feeling of freedom, the sense we could say anything, no matter how embarrassing, and there would be acceptance from the other person. Or maybe not acceptance exactly—I had to maintain some believable outrage, so he wouldn’t press to meet in person—but we reached a point where the e-mails took on a life of their own.”

  The detached part of me kicked back in. “But you—I—must have known by that point he wasn’t really married. Why was I still mad?”

  “Because he continued to let you believe he was married.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “To spare you, I think,” she said. “He didn’t want you to endure the additional trauma of knowing we’d both betrayed you. Either way, he couldn’t win. And then I finally—you finally—told him never to contact you again.”

  Emma’s face held the singular pull of some entirely new human emotion, her features curdled in a molecular rearrangement born of stress. The constant beatdown of her role in Eleanor’s death. Years of guilt from this monstrous deception.

  “Why?” I squeaked finally. “Why go to those lengths?”

  She directed a level gaze at me. “To me, you epitomized the thing I wanted most for myself: social acceptance. And I wanted Nick, or at least I wanted him to want me. But Nick wanted you. It devastated me.”

  “I still can’t believe—”

  “And,” she went on, as if I hadn’t spoken, “I guess I was resentful. Or at least uneasy. You knew about me. You’d seen where I grew up.”

  “So?” I asked, indignant. “Are you suggesting I thought less of you because of where you were born? Because that’s crap. I’d never care about that. Are you saying you hated me?”

  Emma gave me a strange look, almost resigned. She shook her head.

  “I don’t think I can explain it.”

  “Try.”

  “No,” she said. “I could never hate you. It’s more like . . .” She trailed off. I waited, focusing on the blue of her irises: so pale and clear they inevitably summoned to mind a host of metaphors related to glaciers and ice and fathomless depths. She blinked, releasing me from the deep, and acknowledged what we were both th
inking.

  “I wanted to be like you.”

  For a moment I marveled at the capacity of the human brain—the capacity of my brain, in particular—to register a bunch of conflicting emotions at once. A sting of remorse, accompanied by a surge of insight. The shock of the revelations Emma was laying on me. And even a geyser of irritation bubbling up alongside my hurt: how had I become mired in this sea of melodrama? Normally, if anybody found themselves embroiled in a fit of emotional dysfunction, it was me. Emma was supposed to be the stable one. Instead, she’d carried on a tawdry affair with my boyfriend and impersonated me in the process. What kind of psychopathology was required to bring all this about, and how had I failed to notice it?

  “Please say something,” Emma said.

  I said nothing.

  “Zadie,” she said, so plaintively I was almost disarmed. “I want you to know how ashamed I am. I am so sorry.”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me? How did you keep this secret all these years?”

  She shifted her teary gaze upward, as if the answer were written on the ceiling. “I did try to tell you.”

  “When?”

  “Do you remember our psychiatry rotation?”

  Immediately I knew what she was referencing: a bizarre morning in schizophrenic group, a month or two after Nick and I had broken up.

  I had found Emma hunched over a sink in the hideous schizophrenic ward bathroom, the olive-tiled walls echoing with her attempts to control her breathing. Without knowing I was going to do it, I flung my arms around her. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay,” I murmured, holding my friend’s shaking thin shoulders. And then, bewildered by the intensity of her grief: “Is it Graham?”

  She looked at me and shook her head. “It’s you,” she said.

  By then I was even more confused, but I rallied enough to point out the obvious. “I’m not dead, Emma.”

  “I’m lost,” she said, her body racked by a fresh wave of sobs as she twisted away from me.

  “You’re not lost. You’re right here,” I said idiotically, adding, “Do you want me to get Dr. Young?”

  Emma stopped crying long enough to manage a side-eyed “No.”

  “Well, uh . . .” I fluttered my hands until I couldn’t take it anymore. I’d never seen her cry, not even when Graham died. “Emma, please tell me what’s wrong. This has to be about Graham.”

  Emma seized my words, gobbling them greedily from the air. “Graham,” she said. “He died because of me. We were breaking up. We—” She began pacing around, her eyes alight with a weird, quick intensity. “We . . . I mean, I . . . I—”

  A flash of insight struck me. “Emma,” I interrupted, “I am not just saying this because we’re on a psychiatry rotation surrounded by a bunch of bipolar people. But is it possible you’re having some kind of manic-depressive episode?”

  She stared at me and then began to laugh, a sound that could only be described as a humorless cackle. “Yes, I probably am. But what does that change?”

  “It changes a lot,” I shouted, energized and relieved to have an explanation of sorts. “We’re surrounded by mental health professionals. We’re standing in a psychiatric hospital. This is the ideal place to lose your mind!”

  Her wild breathing calmed, and this time her laugh had a tinge of the genuine. She unbuttoned the top button of her shirt, fanning air toward her face and throat. When distressed, Emma was unable to thermoregulate: her tomato-hued skin always gave her away. She undid another button. “Ah, Zadie,” she said. “If only—” She stopped, sucking her words back into her throat at the look on my face. “What is it?”

  “Where did you get that shirt?” I asked, moving closer to inspect it. I could see the upper edge of its design beneath her button-down: the arcing curve of a hostile cartoon bird. The Baltimore Ravens.

  She looked down, her lower lip falling open almost comically.

  “It was in the laundry,” she said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have grabbed it.”

  I blinked, embarrassed at my reaction to a stupid T-shirt. Nick loved that shirt and wore it often. I didn’t remember him leaving it at my house—we usually met at his place—but he must have.

  “Keep it,” I said.

  She buttoned her shirt back up, the flames at her throat extending to her face. “There’s something I should tell you about Nick,” she said. “And me.”

  “I don’t want to hear anything else about Nick,” I said. “He sucks, and I shouldn’t think about him.”

  “Are you sure? Because he—”

  “I’m sure!” If Nick had hit on Emma, too, I didn’t want to hear about it.

  “Okay,” she said quickly—too quickly—adding: “But if you ever do want to hear about it, just tell me.”

  “I won’t,” I said. “I’m never thinking about him again.”

  —

  “That doesn’t count!” I said now. “I didn’t know what you were going to tell me.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “But that was my lame excuse to myself—you didn’t want to know, and I didn’t want to hurt you more than I already had.”

  “You took stuff of his,” I said. “From his house.”

  Emma nodded: a terse, efficient jerk of her chin. “A few things he wore,” she said. “I left things of mine at his house too, usually in his drawers, under other clothes, so he wouldn’t find them right away. I guess I hoped you’d see them.”

  I groaned.

  “He had a drawer . . . where he stashed Zadie stuff,” Emma said. “Notes you’d written him. A couple candles. The page from the residency directory with your picture on it.”

  I yelped and waved my hands to shut her up. Despite the circumstances, I was beset by a brief flash of wonder. It’s one thing to contemplate the infinite possibilities you didn’t choose, but quite another to have had the choice wrested away without your knowledge. Nick and I had never had a chance. For a moment I drifted in an alternate universe: another husband; different children; shadowy cities and homes and friends I’d never experience. It was too mind-boggling to take in. I stared at Emma.

  “Who are you?” I said. I slid down the wall to the floor, landing on my bottom with a little clunk. “Who are you?”

  Chapter Forty

  SOME THINGS ARE UNAVOIDABLE

  Emma, Present Day

  I see them in my sleep: a parade of ghostly accusers. Graham, dark-eyed and prescient, fixed in some posture of eternal yearning; the little girl, Eleanor, her bright baby face and her rosebud mouth, all her shiny newness crumbling into dust. I see the realization of betrayal cross my best friend’s face in a swift, irreparable flash.

  There is no more debilitating emotion than shame. Even grief has a redeeming clarity and purity to it: you know there is a terrible beauty in loving something so much that its loss nearly ends you. But there is no redeeming quality to shame. It’s ugly.

  I think of myself as a good person. But maybe everyone does? Regardless of what I think of myself, the undeniable truth is that I’ve done some very shameful things.

  —

  Saturday evening, the day of my meeting with the Packards, closed with lingering stickiness, the crackly leaves blowing off the oaks in my front yard on a gust of humid wind. Thanksgiving still lurked two weeks in the future, but already my next-door neighbors had erected a giant blow-up Santa Claus, leering like a deranged Peeping Tom at the level of my second-story windows.

  I stepped briskly into my detached garage, practicing the correct facial expressions: empathy and concern and honesty. Contrition, but not at a level suggesting culpability. Human warmth, as my lawyer would say: You want them to like you. People are much less likely to sue if they have a relationship with you.

  The problem was my face: it doesn’t reflect my feelings. My face was as enigmatic and inscrutable as the moon, even when inside all I could h
ear was whimpering. Somehow I’d have to cast off my outer awkwardness and connect with these people.

  It was a task made infinitely harder by Zadie’s absence. Not only would she have been a buffer between me and the child’s parents, able to leap into the fray without any of my hesitation, but she’d also have served as my emotional proxy. In her case, I’d say it’s largely unthinking, but people respond to all her wild emotions as if she’s got a control button lodged in their prefrontal cortexes. They love her.

  I would have to rely on my own strengths. Zadie and I hadn’t spoken in the days since the restaurant when I’d confessed. I missed her even more than if she’d died. At least the dead cannot hate you.

  —

  Before I could back out of the garage, the door opened and a pajama-clad Wyatt hustled through. If we weren’t going out, Wyatt conducted a cherished Saturday night routine of ordering takeout, cracking a giant bottle of wine, and watching movies under a blanket on our most comfortable sofa once we’d put Henry down for the night, generally providing an unsought stream of commentary on the movie’s plot as it unfolded. I’d never been able to break him of the habit of talking back to the actors, but I’d acclimated to his interruptions. Now it would seem sterile to view a film without Wyatt’s murmured commendations and belches of outrage.

  The sight of his bare feet poking out of the rolled-up gray pajamas I’d bought for him in London nearly undid me. He held up a decorative carrier bag, the fancy kind you’d use for liquor or a bottle of wine, and thrust it through my car window. I tried to wave him off.

  “I’m not taking the Packards a bottle of bourbon,” I said. “This isn’t a hostess-gift situation.”

  “Not for the Packards,” puffed Wyatt. “For Zadie.”

  “Zadie?” I said, surprised. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to tell Wyatt about what had happened with Zadie, although until the other day, he alone, of all the people on earth, had known the truth about what I’d done to her in medical school. The day after the Arts Ball I’d spent the day in bed, not speaking, but the next day I’d done what I always did: I soldiered on. I went to work. I came home.