“Too much noise!” said the woman, pointing an angry finger toward the house. “Somebody was just banging on the wall at me.”
“You banged first!” protested Alexa.
The woman ignored this. “The crying all the time, the screaming. It’s too loud!”
Alexa smiled her sweetest smile and said, “It’s under control. I’m so sorry we bothered you. Thanks for stopping by.”
“Who was that?” asked Katie when she returned to the cupcake wars.
“An angry old lady,” said Alexa.
“Miss Josephine,” said Katie, nodding sagely. “From next door.”
Alexa was about to ask Katie about the “crying all the time, the screaming,” but she decided to hold her tongue. There was something going on in this house. And she was going to find out what it was.
Cupcake Wars had become a real nail-biter, and she asked Katie if she could get her anything from the kitchen while they waited for the winner. She was going to start right now being the world’s best babysitter so that she got asked back again.
32.
Sherri
You are strong, said Sherri in her head at Derma-You once her training was complete. Katie is safe, and you are strong. This was her mantra for the evening. Her counselor in the program had taught her about mantras. Sometimes she recycled, because it was difficult to think of a new one every day. They were all variations on a calming and empowering theme: Your body is capable, your spirit is capable. Or, The rest of your life is the best of your life. (She’d been pretty proud of that one, with the rhyme.)
She reached for the file of a woman named Penelope Butler, who would be in at seven thirty for her fourth laser treatment to remove her underarm hair. Unwanted hair was just one of the things you could make disappear at Derma-You. You could also say good-bye to lax skin, liver spots, spider veins. Moles, cellulite. Skin discoloration. Scars. It was shocking, really, how many things could be removed from the human body.
The doctors were three smooth, ageless women—at once the advertisers for their goods as well as the dispensers—who flew in and out so quickly in their white coats that Sherri could hardly keep them straight.
The door opened and a woman walked in. Miranda Ramirez, who had a seven o’clock consultation for fillers. She smiled uncertainly, the way Sherri had learned all new patients smiled on their first visit. They wanted to change something about themselves, but they were ashamed to admit to that want. They looked around to see if anyone they knew was in the waiting room.
Sherri smiled back. She had noticed that some of the other women who worked at the front desk—there were usually three at a time, one checking patients in and one checking them out, while a third manned (womaned) the phones—were often hurried and graceless when they talked to the patients. They could have been dealing with oil changes or tax appointments, not the precious, vulnerable parts of these women’s bodies, the over-hairy or over-scarred or flabby bits that required special attention.
Sherri tried to make up for this deficit. She smiled her extra-wide, welcoming smile. She tried to let them know that she got it. She understood what it was like to take on a disguise.
The phone rang. She jumped. Alexa! Then she chided herself. Of course it wouldn’t be Alexa. Alexa didn’t even have this number; she had Sherri’s cell phone number.
“Thank you for calling Derma-You!” she said in her friendliest, most accepting voice. “How can I help you look your best?”
After work two of the girls asked Sherri if she wanted to go for a drink with them. Sherri texted Alexa to see if she minded staying later; she didn’t. The women were younger than Sherri; she was flattered to be asked. She would go and have a friendly drink. She would be a person without history.
They went to a giant, anonymous, air-condition-blasted Mexican restaurant around the corner from the office, where they sat at a tall round bar table and ordered three margaritas and a bowl of chips. One of the women was married without kids—this was Clara—and one was married with a three-year-old boy. This was Sandy. As they waited for their drinks to arrive, Sandy complained about her mother, who called her four times a day and said nothing. Sandy ended each of her sentences on an upswing. “She just keeps calling?” she said. “And I’m like, Mom, nothing’s changed since lunchtime?”
“That’s better than my mother,” said Clara. “She’s dating a man ten years younger than she is and she keeps texting me photos of her outfits to see if they’re ‘on fleek.’ I keep telling her nobody says ‘on fleek’ for real, but she’s not getting it.” They all had a good laugh about that, and the waitress delivered their drinks.
Clara and Sandy turned to Sherri expectantly and said, “What about your mother?”
“My mother died when I was seventeen,” said Sherri.
“I’m sorry!” the women said in unison. A pall fell across the table, and Sherri reproached herself for bringing the festive mood down.
“Don’t be,” said Sherri. “It was a long time ago.” She almost said, “It had no bearing on the rest of my life,” but of course it had all the bearing on the rest of her life, because when she met Bobby she was so fragile and motherless that she succumbed fairly readily to his charms. She took a giant swig of her margarita to show that it was all right.
“Oh, you know what?” said Sandy. “I’m taking this mindfulness class? And this one thing they suggested? Writing the story of your life in fairy tale form!”
“Why would you want to do that?” asked Clara. She dipped a chip in the salsa.
“Apparently it results in big waves of self-acceptance washing over you?” said Sandy. “I haven’t tried it yet. Mine’s due next class?”
“I think it sounds like a lot of fun,” said Sherri. “I might give it a try myself.”
She could see Sandy and Clara looking at her sympathetically, as though they all knew that Sherri’s fairy tale would be pathetically boring but were too polite to say so.
Once upon a time, thought Sherri. There was a woman who lived in a house with a pool and had a maid who came three times a week and a husband named Bobby and a kitchen straight out of a magazine. And then one day, this woman learned something terrible.
It was always a dog walker, wasn’t it?
Madison Miller’s body had been buried in a semideserted stretch of woods one town over from where she went missing. Heavy rains had recently hit the area, washing away some of the soil. The dog happened to be a hound; the owner happened to let him off the leash at just the right place. Right place, right time, you could say.
Now her picture was in the paper again. Now there were more articles. No known motive, said the articles. Authorities were seeking information. Madison Miller had died from asphyxiation. There were marks around her neck that suggested a thin piece of wire.
Sherri left the paper open to the article. When Bobby came down for breakfast she said, “Look at this. They found that girl.”
“What girl?” Bobby asked. If he had anything to give away, he didn’t give it to her.
“The one who’s been missing. Remember?” She held the paper in front of him. “The one who was all over the news a couple of weeks ago. Madison Miller.”
“Poor kid,” he said. He met her eyes directly.
“What do you think happened?” Sherri asked. She felt like she was poking a bear but she couldn’t help herself.
He was fresh out of the shower; he smelled like aftershave and shampoo. He whistled when he opened the refrigerator. He whistled. “Must have been in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said. “Terrible.” He shook his head and sounded regretful, like a teacher delivering a disappointing grade to a student.
Sherri remembered those words from the night she’d stood outside the office with the cheese tray, and she knew that the thing she’d feared was true. Her own husband, the man she’d slept with and vacationed alongside and cooked eggs for so many mornings—the man she’d made a child with—could say words that were so nonchalant, so unconcern
ed, while Madison Miller lay in a coffin.
Bobby kissed Sherri on the mouth, hard, and for the first time his lips felt like icicles. Then he picked up his car keys and left.
The next day there was an obituary. Sherri read it through six times. Madison Miller was a member of the National Honor Society and the Environmental Sustainability Club. She was a straight-A student; she wanted to be a doctor. She had three brothers, and a dog she loved, a King Charles cavalier spaniel named Betty. In lieu of flowers mourners were asked to give in Madison’s honor to the Make-A-Wish foundation, Madison’s favorite charity.
Sherri went to the bathroom and threw up her breakfast. Then she anonymously donated five thousand dollars to the Make-A-Wish foundation in Madison’s name. She dared Bobby to notice.
He didn’t.
She went to Madison Miller’s funeral. She sat in the very back of the church. It was a Wednesday, midmorning, a dreary day. It was a Catholic mass. Sherri had never been to a Catholic funeral. She was unprepared for the fact that the coffin would be front and center the whole time, covered with a cloth, an open Bible, a crucifix. She was unprepared to be looking at the coffin during the service, imagining the lifeless body inside it.
The church was packed, of course. Madison’s mother, unable even to hold herself up, was supported on one side by Madison’s father, and on the other by a man who looked enough like the mother—the same ginger hair and pale eyebrows—that he was probably Madison’s uncle. At one point in the service, as the priest was shaking the incense over the coffin, Madison’s mother let out the loudest, most unearthly wail that Sherri had ever heard.
Was Bobby aware of what happened after that? It got so Sherri couldn’t stand to be in the same room with him. He was out a lot. That helped. But when he was home, if they passed each other, in the kitchen, in the hallway, she found herself turning at a slight angle so that their arms wouldn’t brush up against each other. Did he notice her doing that? Did he notice how she threw all of her focus into Katie, into making sure she didn’t know anything was wrong? They baked a lot. Sherri encouraged Katie to invite friends to sleep over and in the mornings she made pancakes for all of the girls. But the specter of Madison was there, all the time.
Sherri joined a Facebook page devoted to Madison’s memory. She read every single post and every single comment. She drank up details about Madison like a cactus taking in water in the desert. Madison ran the thousand meters in indoor track and the mile outdoors. She was a counselor in training at a summer camp in New Hampshire, where she specialized in teaching swimming lessons to special needs children.
Sherri found out where Madison’s family lived. She took to driving by the house at all hours, hoping for a glimpse of someone in the Miller family, a small morsel to feed her hunger. The parents, the brothers, Betty the dog. Once she saw a minivan in the driveway. Two boys got out, both in baseball uniforms, with mitts. The younger one was punching his fist again and again into the mitt, to soften it, or out of anger.
What must it be like to be these boys, the brothers of a dead girl? Sherri wondered. To grow up alongside a ghost?
The mother got out several minutes later. She walked slowly to the front door of the house, and Sherri thought about all of the tasks she must have ahead of her: dinner to prepare, the third brother to be collected from wherever he was, Betty the dog to feed and walk, all with the unanswered question of her daughter’s death hanging over her.
How could anyone bear this? How could life go on? But it had to.
For Sherri, life went on, and on, and on. Meals. Katie’s schedule, her dance classes and dentist appointments. Sex. Bobby couldn’t have known how much she dreaded the sex by that point. He probably didn’t know that after every time she scrubbed herself extra hard, until her skin turned pink and raw.
Breakfasts, and dinners, the packing of Katie’s lunch box and the dropping off and picking up of the dry cleaning. On all of these tasks Madison Miller accompanied Sherri, like a pet parrot attached firmly to her shoulder.
To the dark Web she went, again and again, every time she was alone in the house. She found photos of Madison that weren’t on the news. Pictures of her body as it had been found. Her face was swollen, unrecognizable. Sherri only looked at that picture once, and she never let herself do it again, but she also never forgot it.
The charm necklace came up in some of the posts, because Madison had been wearing it when she disappeared, and she wasn’t wearing it when she was found. Sherri saw photos of the necklace online: the ruby, the sixteen, the MRM. Her parents had given it to her for her sixteenth birthday, four months before she disappeared.
When Sherri thought of Madison’s parents choosing that necklace and watching as Madison opened the box it came in, her heart broke in a thousand little pieces.
All this time, Sherri stayed aware of what was in Bobby’s hiding place under the register. The contents changed again and again. Once when it was money Sherri took some and left it in Madison Miller’s mailbox, in a plain white envelope. Would Bobby notice? Would Madison’s parents trace it to Sherri somehow? She hadn’t thought to wear gloves. But she’d never been fingerprinted, so a record of her prints wouldn’t exist. Sherri imagined the Millers using the money to treat the three brothers to something special: a meal out, maybe, or a day at the ballpark.
Did Bobby know that every time he left the house she pulled off the grate with trembling hands, moved the floor tiles, looked to see what was different?
Sometimes there were zip drives. Often there was money in different denominations and currencies. Passports for people she didn’t recognize. And then one day there was a new box, and in that box was a charm necklace with a ruby, a number sixteen, the initials MRM.
Some women complain about their husbands being messy, the socks they leave around, the toothpaste with the cap off, the toilet seat up. Sherri had nothing like that to say about Bobby. He was always fastidious, about his clothes, his things, his business. He never left things lying around. He was so careful. When the housekeeper came, sometimes she’d joke about how there was nothing for her to do. Every now and then Sherri would leave a few dishes in the sink, a wineglass in the living room, so they would look like a normal, careless family, a family with clutter, a family with nothing to hide because it was all laid out in little piles on the kitchen island, on the end tables.
In the end, though, he wasn’t careful enough.
33.
Rebecca
Rebecca was in the kitchen, looking through her favorite food blog, Dinner by Dad, to find something to make that night. It would be fun if Daniel could come over for dinner, she’d enjoy cooking for him, watching him interact with her daughters. Daughter. Alexa was never home for dinner. They were in the kitchen, Morgan sitting at the island and Rebecca leaning against it, eyes on her laptop.
“What should I make, Morgs?” she asked, glancing up from the screen. “Are you feeling tacos?”
“No,” said Morgan.
“Hmm. Salad? With grilled vegetables and a tahini dressing?”
“Definitely not. I hate grilled vegetables.” Morgan did actually hate grilled vegetables. Why were Dinner by Dad’s children, two young boys, so willing to eat everything put before them?
Maybe they weren’t. Maybe it was all a front, a ruse. Maybe Dinner by Dad didn’t even have children. Real little boys didn’t eat eggplant without complaint. She closed the laptop and looked more carefully at Morgan.
“What’s wrong, Morgs?” she asked. “You look positively downtrodden.”
“I don’t know what that means,” said Morgan combatively. She kicked her feet against the island in exactly the way she knew she wasn’t supposed to because it left marks.
“It means you look really sad. What’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on, sweetie, you can tell me.” She wondered if she should take Morgan back to the grief counselor, get her on a regular schedule again. Her own therapist had told her that mourning
was full of peaks and valleys, and that the up and down motion could last a long time. Perhaps Morgan had slipped into a valley and needed help getting out of it.
“It’s just—” Morgan kicked at the island again, and Rebecca tried really hard not to tell her to stop. “It’s just, why is Alexa always babysitting for Katie now? And never home with us.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say she’s always babysitting for Katie. This is only her second time!”
“But when I want to do something with her, she’s always busy. When Sherri needs her, she’s not busy.”
Rebecca chewed her lip. This was a fair point. “Do you want me to talk to her about it?”
“No,” said Morgan. “I don’t want her to feel sorry for me. I just want her to be like she was.”
34.
Alexa
In her room, before she left to babysit Katie for the second time, Alexa checked Tyler’s Instagram feed. No new posts. Then she logged out and logged back in as Tyler—his password for literally everything was laxattackertyler—and checked to see if he’d been tagged in any recent posts or had any DMs. And here was Tyler with his two brothers—one two years older, one a year younger—and some random Silver Lake hottie, a girl in short shorts and a completely unimaginative tank top from, like, Target or something, and she was completely ratchet. Cleavage all over the place, an arm around Tyler and another around his younger brother, Conor. Hanging with the boyz from back east, said the caption.
Oh please, thought Alexa. She looked more closely, and she saw that Tyler’s arm was around this girl’s waist. She looked for Conor’s hand. It was by his side, just as it should have been. She checked the time on the post. Twenty-three hours ago. So this was what Tyler had been doing when he wasn’t calling or texting Alexa. She considered making a snarky comment on the post in the guise of Tyler, but forget it. This girl (@silvergurl) wasn’t worthy of a comment. Alexa checked @silvergurl’s feed. Lots of selfies, lots of thirst traps. Typical.
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