Lauren felt suddenly claustrophobic in her cramped office. She pictured Steve sitting in his luxurious corner office, secretaries treating him like King Trump. He was still flying away for weekends in his private plane, still hosting his soirées. Steve was making her grovel for money that was rightfully hers and Emily’s. And she didn’t know what the hell to do about it.
She looked at the time on her phone. She could see her therapist’s kind face telling her it was time for a little “self-care,” and that was exactly what she was going to do. She grabbed her gym bag and walked west, past expensive lofts, restaurants, and construction cranes that satisfied the never-ending thirst for Tribeca condos for the ultrarich. She breathed in cool air. Peggy’s call had put her on edge, but in the final analysis, she was just having a hard time believing that Brian could smoke a cigarette in bed the way he always did and that it killed him. Neither Steve nor anyone else had spoken about what case Brian had been working on, not even during the hours of waiting-room purgatory while the surgeons tried to save Brian’s life. She could surmise what that meant: a woman was involved.
Still, the question that bugged her was, if there had been a woman in the room and the fire occurred while Brian was sleeping, where was the woman at the time? She hadn’t died in the fire. That couldn’t have been kept secret. Of course, if Brian had been with a prostitute, she might not have slept over. But why would Brian go all the way to Miami for a prostitute? Lauren contemplated that. Maybe the Miami woman was married. She would have left early. There was plenty of room for paranoia to breed in that soil. A jealous husband set the fire?
Lauren pulled open the glass door to the gym and walked down a ramp past the check-in desk and an open area of StairMasters, treadmills, and bikes. After a stop in the locker room, she entered the mirrored free-weight room, wearing loose shorts and a racer-back T-shirt. She was old school about her workouts. She liked to do a simple free-weight routine with dumbbells and bench presses.
She saw a dark-haired man sitting on the end of a bench. His upper arm leaned against the inside of his thigh as he did slow bicep concentration curls. When his arm lowered, it created a diamond-shaped triceps indentation. When he curled, the vein stood out against his well-developed biceps. He wore a T-shirt and running shorts. Nice legs.
He watched his working bicep, focused on the exercise. Very attractive. She smiled, her mind looking for distractions anywhere today. It had been longer than she wanted to admit—even to herself—since she’d been with a guy. She hadn’t taken to the internet-dating scene, which usually ended up with her and the man boring each other to death in a Starbucks, since she didn’t drink alcohol. And then there were the guys who were shocked about that, who said stupid, deprecating things about her not drinking because it made them uncomfortable. Truthfully, it would be easier to meet a guy for the first time over drinks, but she’d had her lifetime ration of mind-altering substances before she’d reached drinking age. She’d never even had a legal drink, which was no doubt a good thing.
She placed twenty-five-pound weight plates onto each end of a bar, which hung between poles attached to a bench. She nodded hello to a gray-haired trainer who walked out of the room. That left the dark-haired man and a woman doing calf raises with a dumbbell in each hand in the far corner. Lauren lay down and bench-pressed ninety-five pounds of plate and bar, eight reps, no problem.
Resting a minute between sets, she sat up and looked around. With the idle curiosity of a single woman, she casually sought out the dark-haired guy. He was facing the mirror but staring into the distance as if in deep thought or memory. He looked pained by something; a slight grimace crossed his face, making him appear vulnerable as if his dark eyes belonged to a young boy, not a man in his late thirties. Then his eyes met Lauren’s in the mirror. He blinked and his head reared back as if struck. Lauren flinched in surprise at his sudden reaction.
He looked away momentarily. When he looked back at her, any expression of surprise was gone.
Lauren tried not to stare. The moment had been eerily intense—as if she were a mind reader who’d intercepted his deepest secret. She half wanted to apologize, to reassure him that his secret was safe, but he looked down, picked up a weight, and returned his attention to his exercise.
She got up and placed an additional ten-pound plate on each end of the bar. The guy looked vaguely familiar. Maybe she knew him, maybe that was why he reacted to her. Did she know him from her past life, his looks so transformed in twenty years that she didn’t recognize him? She tried to dismiss the thought, not liking the idea of running into anyone from those days. New York City was a big place and she didn’t go to places where she was likely to see the old people, if they were even still alive. She’d put time if not distance between herself and her old life, using Brian’s last name before the divorce and keeping a nonexistent social media presence.
The mystery was starting to irk her as she lay down on the bench. The guy’s failure to smile or say hello when their eyes met felt like a dis by some arrogant asshole who thought she was somehow interested in him. Nice-looking guys could be such jerks.
She lay down, breathing in deep. A 115-pound bench press was a lot for a 125-pound woman to lift. She’d done it before, but she usually used a spotter. It was because she was pissed, that was why she was lifting so heavy. And it wasn’t because of the hot dark-haired guy. No, she’d been on edge all day. It was Brian, always Brian—dead or alive—who could get her pissed off like that. If he’d been alive, she would have killed him for smoking in bed, leaving Emily with yet another lifelong scar, all because he was likely screwing around with some woman rather than staying home and learning how to be a father.
Lauren pushed and lifted the weighted bar off the metal lip that secured it above the bench. With arms locked, she balanced the bar over her, the weight pressing down against her palms. She allowed her elbows to bend and lowered the bar to tap her chest and up to straight arms. One rep, no problem. She lowered the weight again, her arms shaking as she controlled the speed of its descent until it reached her chest.
She exhaled sharply and pushed. The bar rose one inch, two. Then nowhere. Her triceps clenched, quivered. Nothing. She couldn’t budge it.
“Uhh,” she let out the weight lifter’s version of a karate kiai, a sound from deep in her belly to mobilize all her energy to push the weight up. But the bar didn’t budge. She used all her remaining energy to keep the bar from crashing into her with sternum-crushing force. The 105 pounds landed softly against her chest. She was stuck, at a stalemate with the weight, still pushing upward just to lighten the weight against her.
Hoping everyone hadn’t left the room, she called out, breathlessly, “A little help here.”
She sensed quick movement. A lightening of the weight against her chest. The bar lifted. One assisted shove upward and she hooked it onto the metal lips. She looked into dark eyes, a scar above his eyebrow.
He smiled down at her. “Are you all right?”
She caught her breath. “Yeah, thanks.”
“Hey, counselor.” A voice called from the room’s entrance. Gary, the bridge officer from Judge Quiñones’ courtroom, entered the room.
She looked over. “Hey, Gary, I didn’t know you belonged to this gym?”
“I usually come in the morning, took off early instead.”
“Me, too. I usually come at night.” She looked back at the dark-haired man, who was turning to leave. “Hey, thanks again.”
“No problem.” He walked to his bench and picked up a white towel, smiling back at her before he headed for the door. “Nice lift, but use a spotter next time.”
She got up and took a weight plate off each side of the bar. He had smiled at least, but there was something annoyingly patronizing about the way he said that. She turned to the court officer, who looked so different with his long skinny legs out of uniform. “Gary, can you spot me a set?”
&n
bsp; CHAPTER 11
Wednesday, October 30
Brian’s Red Bulls were still lined up in the fridge like gravestones. Emily took one and headed down the steps to her father’s basement office. As usual when Jessica was away, the dogs followed her. She felt furry pressure against the back of her legs, the dogs pushing past her on the stairs. She loved that. She opened the sliding glass door that led up a couple of cement steps to the side of the yard. Sunlight and a cold breeze poured in. As always, the dogs ran out for a piss-patrol of the property. They’d run around in the woods behind the house before they came back.
Emily pulled a flattened pack of Newports from her pants waistband and fell backward into a slouch on the hard sofa bed that Jessica had brought from her old apartment in California. Emily leaned forward and bent between her legs, probing under the sofa until she felt her father’s glass ashtray. She’d spent enough time in this room with her father to know how to smoke in the house without Jessica finding out, although this was the first time it was Emily and not her father with a cigarette down here.
She took a deep inhale. She didn’t have a habit, not yet, although she’d been smoking flavored e-cigarettes for a while with her friends. When her father died, she’d switched over to the real thing. She just couldn’t give a shit about a cigarette habit anymore. The hot smoke filling her lungs was the only thing that cauterized the open wound her father had left behind, for a couple of minutes at least.
She stared out the door, watching Nuke lift his leg to mark a tree and run off. She’d hated it here in Westchester when she first came. She had no friends, and her father was hardly around. But one day, he brought home a PlayStation 4 and asked her to show him how to play. After that, if they were both home, he’d ruffle her hair and say, “Come down and play Call of Duty,” which was like heaven for a kid like her. She wasn’t too old to blow a whole weekend playing Minecraft or Call of Duty, although only her father, not her mother, let her buy the violent games.
Her father got hooked on the games, too. She’d laughed a couple of times when she came downstairs to find him already playing. He would look at her, startled by the noise (she never came down a staircase quietly). “You caught me,” he’d say, and his face really did look like she’d caught him. He’d cover it up, joking, “Come down to my man-daughter cave.”
He started working from home a lot after Emily moved in full time. So, even when they weren’t playing, Emily would come downstairs and do homework while he worked. She had a little secret about that, though, which she would take to her grave. Her parents thought she was doing much better in school in Westchester, and she was. She had started having more fun once she got to know some of the kids, but half the reason she’d been doing better was because of Adderall. She never saw so many kids on Adderall before she moved to the suburbs. It seemed like everyone was doing it to keep up their grades and still have energy left for all the volunteer work and extracurricular activities they needed for their college applications.
It only took a couple of weeks going to her new high school before a gangly kid came up to her and said, “Well, we checked you out and you’re not a narc.”
Emily just smirked and said, “Really? Have the cops started hiring sixteen-year-olds?” Duh. The kids in her town could be really stupid about stuff all kids in the city knew, and they were super obsessed with going to the best colleges. That was true in Manhattan, too, but the kids in the city weren’t so obviously desperate. As for Emily, she was always, like, whatever. Maybe she’d go to one of those colleges. (Everyone said she was smart.) But worst case, she’d stay in New York and go to City University and save her parents a shitload of money.
Still, she couldn’t help but get happy when her parents nearly started dancing with joy when she brought home her first A on an exam once she moved here. After that, Emily studied and did homework for hours in this room with her father, breathing his nicotine and buzzing off the Adderall, though not so buzzed that he could tell. They got in a pretty good habit of hanging out together in the man-daughter cave.
Those were the best times she had with him since he moved out of the apartment with her mother. It seemed the rest of the time, all Emily ever did was fight with him, Jessica, and Lauren by phone. Emily’s mother had ruined her life, chasing away her father, then Emily, too. And Jessica had been there both times, waiting with open arms, pretending to want Emily.
Emily turned on the PlayStation, deciding to log in to her father’s profile and play as if she were him, just to feel closer to him, even if it was ridiculous. She clicked into messages. His messages with her, Distressed Damsel, were still there, things they’d said to each other when playing together online while she was in Manhattan on the weekends. He’d also been messaging with somebody named MacroRaptor. Unlocking 5 mm, 2 pm eta. CU @ Next Level. She frowned. There was no five-millimeter gun in Call of Duty. They didn’t even measure guns in Call of Duty. She scrolled up. Another text in October with MacroRaptor, two weeks ago: Unlocking 12 mm, 4:30 Roadtown. Leveling up.
Emily dropped the controller as if it were hot. Her chest squeezed tight, feeling as if she was about to lose something else important and didn’t even know what it was. For the first time in her entire life, there was something that she might not want to know.
Still, she swiveled the desk chair toward her dad’s PC and turned it on. Road Town was the capital of Tortola. Daddy had honeymooned with Jessica on that island. Emily had seen the videos: turquoise water, pastel houses, him and Jessica sailing. Why had he mentioned Road Town to MacroRaptor, and who was that?
The landline rang. The trill of the extension on the desk nearly knocked her off her chair. Her mother had called the landline the other day out of desperation when Jessica wouldn’t return her calls, but other than Emily’s mother and Jessica’s parents, robocalls and fund-raisers were the only calls that came on the landline. Emily picked up the phone, thinking maybe her mom was trying to reach Jessica again. “Hello.”
“Is this Jessica Silverman?”
“No. Who’s calling?”
“I’m a friend of Brian’s … are you his daughter?”
“Yes.” Emily doubted he was her father’s friend. She smelled a salesman or maybe someone trying to buy the house. Steve had warned Jessica and Emily about people who read the obituaries and figured they could get one over on the widow. Steve said people might even tell them they were from her father’s bank and ask for account information. “What’s your name?”
“Jordan Connors.”
Emily lit another cigarette. “Where did you know him from?”
“Look, I’m in a hurry. College.”
“Really?” He was hyper, his words staccato. Emily had good intuition about people, could tell right away when they were assholes. He wasn’t just impatient, he was arrogant, as if whatever had made him so stressed out was everyone else’s fault but his. And Emily was the convenient one to dump it on because she was unlucky enough to have picked up his call. Her father never talked about any friends from college. This guy was bogus. “Donations can be sent to Mothers Against Drunk Drivers.”
“Look, I’ve been calling for days. Your father and I had business together, and I need to talk to your mother.”
Emily grabbed a sticky pad from the desk and began to doodle. “She’s not my mother. And she’s not real into returning calls right now. She’s a little upset. You can call my father’s office number anyway. His partner is there.”
“Look, tell your stepmother to call me.” His voice had picked up a threatening edge. It gave Emily a jolt. He exhaled hard, pissed. “It’s important.”
Now she was sure he didn’t really know her father. Her father’s friends would never treat her like that. She wanted off the phone, now.
“You have a paper?” he asked, calming his voice down. She could hear the effort it took him.
She pulled out a pen and a hot-pink sticky. “Yeah.
”
She wrote down the number he rattled off and repeated it back to him. The she hung up without saying goodbye as the sound of tires on gravel grabbed her attention, startling her. The dogs ran out the sliding door. Emily quickly opened the glass doors wider to get a fresh burst of air and hid the ashtray under the desk.
“Emily? Are you home?” Jessica’s voice carried from the front hall.
“Down here.”
Jessica appeared on the staircase, wearing jeans and sneakers, her eyes deeply circled and red from crying in the car. At least she’d gotten up and dressed, but her cheeks were more hollow every day. “It’s cold in here.” She shivered. “I went by school to see if you wanted a ride.”
“I took the bus.”
“I saw Mr. Manley …”
Emily let out a long breath, feeling tears coming, holding them back. “I know, I know.”
“He said you didn’t go to school again.”
“So?” Hot tears filled Emily’s eyes, and her throat tightened. She jumped up. “I can’t go to school. My father’s dead,” she screamed. “My father’s dead. Why don’t you all leave me alone?”
Emily ran, pushing past Jessica. She might have accidentally knocked Jessica down if her stepmother hadn’t sidestepped out of the way. Emily felt a flash of regret, swiftly buried by rage. “At least I’m not starving myself to death,” she cried, her feet pounding on the stairs.
Emily pulled open the front door and ran across the lawn and into the road, ran until the cold air made her lungs ache. She stopped a couple of houses down the road and looked around. She had nowhere to go, and it was cold. She crossed the road and walked to a boulder next to the empty golf course. She sat and cried.
Widows-in-Law Page 7
