These Girls

by Sarah Pekkanen

  “Vodka on the rocks. Dieting.” Renee sighed.

  “I keep telling you, girl,” David said. “You wear your curves well. You need to embrace your inner Marilyn Monroe.”

  “It’s my outer Marilyn I’m more worried about,” Renee said. “Cate, how about you?”

  Cate held up her half-full beer. “I’m good.”

  “So I saw the note from Naomi,” Renee said as David wandered away. “I can’t believe she’s leaving in two weeks.”

  Cate nodded. “But she paid rent through the end of the month. She can’t ask for that back.”

  The ice clinked in Renee’s glass as she drained her drink. Someone jostled her as they squeezed behind her to pass, and she spilled the last sip of vodka on her shirt.

  “Damn,” Renee said, swabbing at the mark with a napkin.

  “It’s just vodka, right? It won’t stain,” Cate said.

  Renee nodded. “God’s way of telling me to stay away from fattening sangria, clearly. Everyone’s a critic. So any ideas about who to ask to move in? I just hate the thought of getting someone we don’t know. What if she gets all single white female and tries to kill us with a stiletto?”

  Cate laughed. “We could put up an ad on the Listserv at work. It worked for us.”

  It was true—that was how Cate and Renee had connected.

  “Maybe even start spreading the word tonight,” Renee said. “There could be someone here looking, or someone who knows someone . . .”

  Cate nodded, then reflexively glanced back toward Trey and saw him moving quickly across the room. Renee’s words trailed off as she turned to stare, too.

  A thin woman with long dark hair, maybe in her late twenties, was standing in the doorway. She was wearing jeans and carrying a backpack, and her eyes were huge. She didn’t shut the door or step forward; she just froze, like she’d entered the wrong doorway and the ground behind her had disappeared and now she was trapped, unable to move forward or back.

  “Abby?”

  Cate could hear Trey’s voice cut through the crowd. It seemed like the whole room went silent—laughter abruptly falling away, conversations halting in midsentence—as everyone turned to watch.

  “Abby?” Trey repeated, as if he couldn’t really believe she was there. He practically ran toward her.

  The dark-haired woman said something too softly for Cate to hear, and Trey wrapped his arms around her and lifted her up off the ground. Cate sensed, rather than saw, Renee stiffen beside her.

  Something was off about the woman, Cate realized. She was so pale, and the expression on her face was identical to the one Cate had witnessed years earlier when she’d stopped to help a woman whose car had skidded off the road and crashed into a tree.

  “It’s okay,” Trey was saying. He gently slipped off Abby’s backpack and placed it on the floor just inside the door. He kept an arm around her shoulders, and she leaned against him as he practically carried her out into the hallway, shutting the door behind them.

  “Who was that?” David the photographer was back, holding out a fresh drink for Renee.

  Cate saw Renee’s shoulders slump as she blinked a few times, then took a long sip of her drink. When she finally answered, she said, “Whoever she was, she’s important enough to make Trey leave his own party.”

  Three

  SHE HAD TO RUN.

  Abby Watkins tossed a few shirts, a pair of jeans, and her cell phone into her backpack as she fumbled to unlock the basement door with trembling fingers. Upstairs, tomato sauce filled the house with a sweet-sharp aroma, and Abby could hear the murmur of muted voices. This cozy basement suite, tucked inside a house in Silver Spring, Maryland, had been her home for nearly two years. These were the rooms in which she’d been the happiest in her entire life.

  A sob welled up in Abby’s throat as she twisted the house key off her ring and left it on the nightstand. She didn’t belong here, not anymore. She didn’t belong anywhere. Who would ever want her, when they knew what she’d done?

  She ran on rain-slicked grass to the curb in front of the house and unlocked her blue Honda Civic. She threw her purse and backpack into the passenger’s seat as she climbed in the driver’s side, then clutched the steering wheel as she swallowed back a wave of nausea.

  She pressed her foot hard against the gas pedal while the passing miles blurred into one another. She stopped only for toll booths and once, somewhere a few miles north of Baltimore, for gasoline. The only thought in her mind, the sole purpose propelling her forward, was to put as much space as she could between herself and her hometown.

  Just as she entered the New Jersey Turnpike, her cell phone played the opening notes to the theme song from “Elmo’s World,” which she’d programmed to make Annabelle happy. Hearing it made a hoarse sob escape from her throat.

  “Abby?” Bob’s voice was worried. “Are you okay? Where are you?”

  Abby swallowed hard, but her voice was still a croak. “I’m leaving,” she said.

  “What? God, Abby, I—Look”—he lowered his voice and she could almost see him glancing furtively around to make sure no one was in earshot—“you know how I feel about you. Where are you going? What’s happening?”

  “I need to get away,” she said, avoiding answering him. A week ago she was fantasizing about a future with him; now she didn’t want him to be able to find her. Tears rolled down her cheeks, and her vision blurred. “I won’t be back.”

  A horn’s blast made her instinctively jerk the steering wheel to the right; she’d almost drifted into the adjacent lane.

  “Abby?” Now his voice was tinged with anger as well as worry. “What do you expect me to tell Annabelle?”

  She reflexively glanced at her rearview mirror and saw the car seat she’d brought to a fire station to have properly installed in her backseat. A crumpled juice box still resided in the cup holder, and a single Goldfish cracker rested on the seat. She and Annabelle had played a game last week in which Annabelle had directed a cracker into Abby’s mouth while Abby made fish movements with her lips. Annabelle’s soft, round little body had shaken as she erupted in laughter.

  Abby’s heart constricted as she said, “Tell her I love her.”

  I love both of you, she thought as she turned off her phone, cutting off Bob’s pleas.

  She couldn’t bear to imagine Annabelle waking up the next morning. Would she knock on the basement door, calling out “Bee-Bee”? Thinking about her made Abby feel as though a hand was reaching inside her chest and squeezing her heart into a pulp. But the little girl was better off without Abby.

  Bob needed to stay home from work this week; she should have told him that. His wife, Joanna—Abby wouldn’t call her Annabelle’s mother because there wasn’t anything motherly about her—wouldn’t know what to do. Sure, Joanna could pour juice and wash Annabelle’s hair, but she wouldn’t wrap her arms around Annabelle at night and read her If You Give a Pig a Pancake three times. She wouldn’t do all the things Abby did. Would she remember to turn on the closet light? Annabelle would be scared if she woke up in the dark.

  Abby couldn’t think about Annabelle any longer or she’d turn the car around and drive back and scoop her up and . . . then what? She spent more time with Annabelle than anyone, but she didn’t have any claim to her; she was the nanny, not a parent. And now she wasn’t even the nanny anymore. Abby tried to focus on keeping her speed at a steady sixty-five, too fast for the rain-slicked roads, but she was incapable of slowing down.

  She crossed into New York at almost exactly eleven o’clock and found her way to Trey’s street after only two wrong turns. By some miracle, there was an open parking spot fifty yards down from his apartment building. Abby didn’t bother to read the signs that would reveal whether it was legal. Let them tow away her car. She ran down the street, rain mingling with the tears on her cheeks, making her think of the old Temptations song. Raindrops will hide my teardrops and no one will ever know that I’m crying, crying . . .

  Bob loved Mot
own music. He’d put on “My Girl” once in the living room, and the three of them had danced to it, with Annabelle in the middle, spinning around in their arms while she laughed. Of course Joanna hadn’t been there—Bob never would have danced with Abby around Joanna.

  The doorman looked up as Abby yanked open the heavy glass door.

  “I’m here to see Trey,” she blurted. She expected him to call up, like he usually did, but he just waved her on. She hurried to the elevator, pressed 12, and watched the numbers on the console rise. She heard the loud voices and music from the hallway, and when she put her hand against Trey’s door to knock, it swung open.

  She stared into the sea of unfamiliar faces, searching for the one she knew almost as well as her own. Her breath came more quickly, and she felt light-headed. Had she come to the wrong apartment? She’d tried phoning Trey when she stopped for gas, but he hadn’t picked up. Maybe he hadn’t heard his phone ring over the noise of the party.

  Her eyes skittered around the room. Everyone was laughing and talking and smiling. Their faces were distorted and grotesque, like reflections in a fun-house mirror. Her eyes blurred, and she leaned against the doorframe as she felt her legs buckle.

  She’d known she needed to seek refuge here, not at her parents’ house. Parents were supposed to love their children unconditionally, but hers didn’t. Only her big brother, Trey, cared about her that much. Where was he?

  Suddenly he was rushing toward her, a reverse wake opening up in front of him as people moved aside to let him pass.

  “Trey,” she whispered again.

  He didn’t ask a single question. He said exactly the right thing, like she’d known he would. Like he always did. He said, “It’s okay.” He put his arms around her as he led her out of the apartment, which was a good thing, because her own legs could no longer hold her up.

  Four

  HIS SISTER? THAT SAD, bedraggled woman in the doorway was Trey’s sister, meaning the backstory Renee had created in her mind—that she was a missionary who’d said a tearful goodbye to Trey months earlier before heading off to save lepers, then realized she couldn’t live without him and hopped from rickshaw to bus to train to plane to rush back to his side—was blessedly inaccurate.

  And when her phone had rung at the office the Wednesday morning after the party, it was Trey. He was calling Renee for help.

  “It’s kind of a strange situation,” he began, then his voice faltered. Trey, who was always so smooth and assured, was deeply shaken, Renee realized. “Something happened to her. She won’t talk about it. She told me no one . . . hurt her,” he continued, his voice dipping so low on the word hurt that it was almost a growl, “but that’s pretty much all she’ll say, other than that she can’t go back to Maryland.”

  “Where did she work?” Renee asked, her mind racing. She reached for a pad of paper and pen on her desk. “Maybe if you called one of her colleagues they might be able to tell you what happened . . .”

  “She was a nanny,” Trey said. “I never met the family she worked for. She was in grad school at U Maryland, too, getting a master’s so she could teach elementary school, but I guess she’s dropping out. God, Renee, if you could see her . . . she’s barely gotten out of bed. She’s not eating much, either. I hear her crying at night, and I don’t know what to do. And I’ve got this damn trip to Thailand coming up. I thought about canceling it, but I’m supposed to be in New Zealand in a few weeks. If I blow off the trips, I’m not going to make the deadline on my book. . . . Then this morning I saw the ad you and Cate put up on the Listserv about needing a roommate, and I just thought . . .”

  The words escaped Renee as swiftly as a reflex: “We’ll take care of her. Don’t worry about a thing.”

  She could hear his sigh across the phone line. “You have no idea how much that means to me, Renee. If Abby could stay with you while I’m traveling, at least she won’t be alone. I’m worried she might . . . I don’t know.” His voice trailed off, then grew stronger again. “I’ll cover her share of the rent, that’s no problem. Can I call you in a couple days to figure out a good time to bring her by?”

  “Sounds perfect.”

  Renee hung up the phone as warmth flickered inside of her, then spread to fill her entire body. Renee would want to help Abby anyway—wouldn’t anyone, after seeing her sad, bewildered face? But a part of her rejoiced as she imagined meeting Trey after Abby’s visit, their heads bent low together at a coffee shop while she described how she’d coaxed Abby to eat, to reveal what was tormenting her. And then Trey would look at her again, with that smile tugging at the corners of his lips, like he had just before they’d kissed on their first date . . .

  That night had been incredible, the best one of Renee’s life. She leaned back in her chair, her fingertips still touching the phone like it was a link to Trey, as she allowed herself to relive it once again. When Trey came to pick her up, Naomi was in the middle of the living room in a sports bra and yoga pants that left her tanned, supple middle bare. She was stretching one foot toward the ceiling and the other toward the floor, like she was practicing a move out of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Kama Sutra.

  Naomi wasn’t beautiful—like those of most models, her face appeared far more compelling in photographs than in person—but her body was as sleek as a gazelle’s, and her ebony hair streamed down her back. Any other guy would’ve stopped and gaped, but Trey just tossed her a quick “Nice to meet you,” then turned back to Renee. Naomi was the one left gaping.

  They walked a few blocks to a casual Italian place with dripping candles on the waxy, red-and-white tablecloths, and, over plates of homemade tagliatelle, he regaled her with stories of his travels. He’d been embedded with a troop in Iraq and seen combat. He’d scaled Everest with a team of ten. The man had actually been nipped by a jackal—he showed her the crescent-shaped scar on his forearm—before he revealed with a grin that it had been a baby jackal. “I think it was teething on me,” Trey joked.

  Taken apart, his features weren’t perfect, Renee realized as she studied him over the rim of her glass. They were kind of blunt—his nose was wide, his jawline pronounced, and his eyes were a shade too small. He had strong cheekbones and sandy blond hair that looked like he never did more than run an occasional comb through it. Combined with his size and deep voice, everything about him blended together to ooze masculinity.

  He ordered her a second martini just as she finished her first one, stood up when she returned from the restroom, held open the door and moved aside to let her pass. He was the most intoxicating man she’d ever met.

  She felt a little buzzed as they left the restaurant, and when he walked her to the front of her apartment building, she was the one to make the first move. She leaned toward him, saw his hint of a smile, and then kissed him. He wrapped his big arms around her and kissed her back. Renee was five foot six, but even with her heels, there was a good six inches of height separating them. She loved feeling so tiny and feminine next to him. They stayed entwined for a long moment.

  Then Renee pulled back. The words had been about to slip off her tongue—Want to come in?—but somehow, she managed to clutch them tight inside of her. She simply whispered, “Thanks for a wonderful night,” then walked away.

  Alone in the elevator, she tilted back her head and pumped her fist in the air and tried to keep from squealing. She hadn’t messed it up! Renee was always the one who talked too much, laughed too hard, ate too much, who finished off the pitcher of margaritas and signaled for another one, who stayed at the party until the host practically pushed her out the door. Every cell in her body had been begging her to climb all over Trey, to tear off his shirt and luxuriate in the feeling of his skin against hers. But she knew, sensed somehow, that Trey wouldn’t respond well to clinginess. He craved adventure.

  She poured herself a glass of water from the Brita filter Cate kept in the refrigerator and leaned up against the kitchen counter as she drank, feeling the cool wetness soothe her suddenly parched
throat.

  He called a week later. They went to a movie—two minutes after it ended, Renee couldn’t have summarized a single scene—and although her resolve came dangerously close to crumbling after she’d felt the warmth of his body next to hers during the show, she managed to end the night with an echo of that incredible kiss.

  Her memories came to a screeching halt; she wouldn’t allow herself to think about their third date. Not now, when they might have a fresh chance.

  She stood up and wandered over to Cate’s office. It was empty. She scrawled a note—Call me! We’re not going to be impaled by a stiletto after all!—and left it on Cate’s chair before floating back to her desk.

  This was shaping up to be one of the best weeks of her life. On Monday, she’d submitted her name to be Bonnie’s replacement as beauty editor. A few other associate editors had applied, too, the moment word got out, but Renee had beat them to it. It didn’t mean she’d get the job, but at least she was first in line.

  She sat back down at her desk and ran a hand through her hair as she mentally planned her day. First, she needed to weed through the e-mails that seemed to reproduce like rabbits in the springtime every time she left her desk. Then she had to call the woman who wrote Gloss’s astrology column and remind her it was due. Renee had been excited to nab the responsibility of editing the column until she realized she’d unwittingly grabbed the office hot potato. The astrologist was a winning trio of hypersensitive, emotional, and a clunky writer. She also seemed to have a half dozen little dogs that were equally high-strung, judging from the background noise whenever Renee phoned to go over her edits.

  Renee began skimming through her new e-mails, pausing at one that had just come in from the magazine’s West Coast editor with the subject line “Liam Neeson.”

  Liam will call you between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. today to give you a five-minute interview about his new movie.

  A few years ago, that e-mail would’ve made Renee squeal. But she’d conducted dozens of celebrity phone interviews by now, and they all followed the same pattern: A public relations person would be on the phone first and lay out the ground rules, including whether Renee was allowed to ask about romances or rehab stints. Then the bored-sounding celebrity would join the call—the PR person always stayed on the line, hovering like an overcaffeinated helicopter mom—and the star would give Renee a few well-rehearsed sound bites. Renee sometimes wondered why they couldn’t inject a little enthusiasm into their voices—they were actors, after all—even if the call was just one of dozens the celebrities were wedging in that day to promote a new film or album. If she was lucky, Renee would get to squeeze in a question or two before her time was up, and then she’d have to transform the interview into a one-or-two-paragraph “bright” for the front of the magazine. All that waiting and work for two column inches, and she wouldn’t even get a byline.