A Simple Favor

by Darcey Bell

  One evening, when Miles and I were alone at dinner, Miles said, “Last night, when I stayed over at Nicky’s, his dad was talking about you.”

  “What did he say?” I tried to keep my voice level.

  “He said I was lucky to have such a nice, generous mom.”

  “Was that all? Did Nicky’s dad say anything else?”

  “That was it,” said Miles.

  It wasn’t so much what he said—nice and generous were compliments, but maybe not what I wanted to hear—that made me happy. It was the fact that Sean wanted to talk about me, that he’d talked about me to my son. He was thinking about me when I wasn’t there.

  I feel as if I’m betraying everyone. Emily especially, but also myself.

  Sean and I haven’t even done anything yet! But I already feel guilty. If that’s not a sign that I have a conscience, what is? I’ve blogged about how women in general and moms in particular are always made to feel guilty, but now it’s occurring to me, as it has in the past, that there might be times when we should feel guilty. I should, anyway.

  Another thing I feel guilty about is that I never felt this same crazy, passionate, out-of-my-head yearning for my husband. Sex with Davis was good. It wasn’t great. It was just what I needed. Davis was what I needed: a truly nice guy. I’d been having a rocky time. A nice guy like Davis didn’t need to know about my problems in the past, and I never felt the need to tell him. Being with him was comfortable. I used to think, This is like going home. This is how going home is supposed to feel. And being with Davis answered a lot of unresolved questions for me—questions about my future. Or so I thought at the time.

  I got pregnant with Miles by accident. But so does everyone, right? I think it happened after a wedding that was much more romantic than ours.

  Davis and I got married at City Hall when his office was on lunch break. His assistants, Evan and Anita, were our witnesses, and afterward we went out for lunch to the best dumpling house in Chinatown. Davis knew about things like that—where to get the best dumplings.

  We’d been very pleased with ourselves, how hip and cool we’d been to get married in such an offhand, casual way, as if it was nothing. Just another day. But not long after that, Evan and Anita had a big, fancy wedding outdoors on an estate in Dutchess County. Under a bower of white roses, in a rolling meadow leading down to the Hudson River.

  It was so gorgeous, it made me feel as if I’d been tricked. As if we’d tricked ourselves into not caring about something we should have cared about. I wondered if Davis felt the same way. Even if he was having similar regrets, he’d make fun of me if I asked him. I couldn’t help looking enviously at the table loaded with wedding presents. All Davis and I got was a check for a thousand dollars from Davis’s mom. Though if we’d gotten all those gifts, Davis would have insisted on returning them so he could pick out things that were more to his taste.

  We both got drunk at the wedding and had the best sex we’d ever had. I’m pretty sure we conceived Miles that night, more to prove that we were still one step ahead of the newlywed young couple than because we wanted a baby.

  How wrong I was about not wanting a child with all my heart! I fell in love as soon as Miles was born. Davis fell in love with him too. It was as if the three of us were madly in love with each other.

  Not long afterward, Davis moved us to Connecticut and mostly worked from home except for meetings in the city or site visits around the country. He restored our house and designed the gorgeous light-filled addition. The house was almost completely finished, everything but the attic in the old part of the house, when Davis and my brother Chris were killed in the car wreck.

  Sean is nothing like Davis. Sean is dark and tall, rugged, and muscular. Davis was a fair-haired beanpole. But sometimes when I walk into the kitchen and Sean is standing by the window, I have a moment when I think it might be Davis. I’m always happy to see him. But then when I realize that it’s Sean, I’m happier. Like it or not, that’s a fact.

  But obviously there are . . . doubts. Doubts about Sean, doubts that I’d never confide in another human being. Doubts about who he is, what he knows about Emily’s disappearance—and whether he knows something that he’s not saying.

  I wonder if every woman in love has doubts. I never had doubts about Davis, and I was in love with him, or so I told myself. I know some women fall in love with convicted killers, but I’m not that type of person. I have a son to protect. I’m not stupid. It’s only reasonable to ask myself if there is the slightest chance that Sean could be involved in Emily’s disappearance.

  I keep up a solid front for the blog, and for the police, and the world, but I take pride in not being such a “woman in love” that I don’t watch Sean closely and allow myself to ask if some tiny unconscious thing he does seems . . . not right. When we talk about Emily, I search his face for a sign of irritation, resentment, or guilt, anything to indicate trouble. But even when he’s told me about her problems—the drinking, the pill addiction, the estrangement from her parents—there’s never anything in his face or voice but love and sorrow that she’s gone.

  It’s simple common sense that my watchfulness should shoot up to the code-red (well, maybe code-orange) level after I heard about the life insurance policy that would pay Sean two million dollars if Emily died. But the second Sean got off the phone with the insurance company, he answered all my questions. It wasn’t as if he was playing for time to concoct a plausible story. The naturalness and simplicity with which he explained the situation was reassuring. His company had offered the option of life insurance for employees and their spouses for an extra few dollars a month to be deducted from Sean’s (sizable) paycheck. It was too small a deduction to make the tiniest difference. So he’d checked the box that said maximum and promptly forgot the whole thing.

  I don’t believe he did anything wrong. I keep looking for something that doesn’t add up, some detail that doesn’t make sense. But I never get the slightest clue that he’s hiding something or lying. And as someone who has hidden things and lied in her life, I like to flatter myself into thinking I’m pretty good at detecting the signs and symptoms.

  Anyway, it’s not a matter of clues. You can’t say exactly how you know this kind of thing. You can’t explain why you’re sure. But you are. You know it in your bones. I know that Sean is innocent as much as I have ever known anything. Ever.

  12

  Stephanie's Blog

  A Holding Pattern

  Hi, moms!

  Looking at my life from the outside, you might think it looks a lot like my life before Emily disappeared. Minus our friendship, obviously, but with a lot of other elements back in place. Me and Miles, our house, his school, this blog. You might have picked up the hints that Nicky and his dad have become more a part of our lives. But that is only natural, given what they’re going through. What we’re going through.

  Again I want to thank you for all the love and support. It means a great deal to me. Judging from your messages and knowing how intuitive moms tend to be, I can tell you know that all this appearance of normalcy is just a Band-Aid over a gaping wound. Our lives have been torn apart and will never be glued back together. They have been shredded by the disappearance of a mother, a wife, a friend. We continue to miss her and to live in the hope that she is alive.

  So you could say that we are in a holding pattern, stalled in midair, waiting for something to decide our destination and promise a safe, if turbulent, landing.

  Nicky is beginning to show the strain. He’s been refusing to eat anything but guacamole and chips, which Emily used to make for him, though never when I was there. At times he seems angry at me. He says that I’m not his mother, that he wants his mother. And even though I understand, it’s stressful. The poor child.

  All I can do is be there for him and help him and his dad whenever I can. I can only cherish the time I have with Miles and be grateful for this precious gift of life, which can be taken at any moment.

  Continue to w
ish us well. Beam all your love to Nicky. And hope and pray for Emily, wherever she may be.

  In the immortal words of Tiny Tim, God bless you, one and all.

  Love,

  Stephanie

  13

  Stephanie

  One afternoon Sean phoned me from home.

  He said, “Oh, thank God you’re there, Stephanie. I’m driving over. Now.”

  Something about the way he said now made my heart pound. Okay, this was it. He wants me as much as I want him. I haven’t been imagining it. He’s coming to tell me that he wants us to be together.

  “I have news,” he said.

  I could tell from the sound of his voice that it wasn’t good news, and I was ashamed of the hasty conclusion I’d jumped to.

  “What kind of news?”

  “Terrible news,” he said.

  I watched from the window as he got out of the car, walking slowly, like someone weighed down by a burden. He seemed to have aged years in the hours since I saw him last. When I opened the door, I saw that his eyes were red rimmed and his face was ashen. I threw my arms around him and hugged him, but it wasn’t one of the freighted, lingering, lust-infused embraces with which we had been saying goodbye lately after our evenings together. It was a hug of consolation, of friendship, and—already—sorrow. Somehow I knew what I was about to hear.

  “Don’t talk,” I said. “Come in. Sit down. Let me make you some tea.”

  He sat on the sofa, and I went into the kitchen. I was shaking, and I splashed boiling water on my wrist, but I was so preoccupied that it didn’t hurt—until later.

  Sean took a sip of tea, then shook his head and put down the cup.

  He said, “The police called today. Some fishermen in northern Michigan found a badly decomposed body. It had washed up on the shore not far from Emily’s family’s cabin. Apparently the body is in such bad shape they’re not even asking me to come out there and identify it. They say there would be no point. They’ve asked me to FedEx Emily’s toothbrush and hairbrush because they’re going to have to rely on the DNA tests to—”

  He broke down sobbing. His voice was thick with tears when he said, “It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. I was sure she was still alive. I was positive that she was going to come home.”

  What did he mean? How was it supposed to have happened? What did he know that he wasn’t saying? Or did he just mean that Emily wasn’t supposed to die so tragically, so young?

  The police estimated that she’d drowned not long after she went missing, though it was hard to determine the precise date. Oh, and some hikers found the rental car a mile away in the woods. There were no signs of a struggle. She’d been alive when she drowned. There were only two sets of fingerprints in the cabin. One of them, they assumed, was Emily’s. The other was Sean’s, which made sense; he’d been there for his birthday. (The cops had taken his fingerprints soon after Emily disappeared, the first time they brought him in for questioning.)

  Neither Sean nor I could find words for what we were feeling. I could still hear Emily asking me to take care of Nicky so she and Sean could get away. Asking me to do her a simple favor. I had no idea what Sean was thinking. Perhaps he was remembering their hot stolen weekend.

  I said, “Maybe it’s not her . . . Maybe there’s been some horrible mistake.”

  “The ring,” he said. “They found the ring. My mother’s diamond and sapphire ring. It was still on her finger. It had somehow gotten wedged . . .”

  And then we both began to cry. We held each other and sobbed. Separately and together.

  14

  Stephanie's Blog

  Very Sad News

  Hi, moms!

  I have sad news to report. The police in Squaw Lake, Michigan, the site of Emily’s family’s cabin, have found a body that they believe to be hers. Because of the absence of any evidence of injury, or any signs of a struggle or violence, and because the cause of death is drowning, they are ruling the death either a suicide or an accident. There is no way to know what was in Emily’s mind when she walked into that lake. Maybe she swam out too far, maybe . . .

  Emily’s husband, Sean, has gone out to meet with the authorities and bring Emily home. Apparently the police called Emily’s mother in Detroit, but her caretaker said it would be better to wait until she was having one of her “good days” to give her the bad news.

  Like the pain of childbirth, the pain of grief and the sheer amount of work that death involves are things we forget. But I went through it with my mother and later with Davis and Chris. Chris helped me with my mother’s death. He’d been there to give me support. But mostly I did it alone.

  Now I’ve been trying to remember who that person was, the young woman and then the young mom who was strong and resourceful enough to do what had to be done: the calls to make, the notice to place in the paper, the decisions about the mountains of possessions a person accumulates during a lifetime, even a short one. I still have all of Davis’s things, some of Chris’s, and even a lot of my mom’s stuff in the barn here in Connecticut.

  What to do with Emily’s things? It’s too soon to decide. And how are we going to tell Nicky? Sean and I agree that Sean should tell him right after breakfast on a Sunday when he’ll be coming over to play with Miles later in the day.

  If Nicky wants to stay home with his dad all day, that will be fine. And if he chooses to be distracted . . . he can play with my son, who will feel genuinely sad for what Nicky is going through. After all, Miles’s dad died, even if Miles was too young to remember. Sean and I trust Miles to make Nicky feel better. Even though he’s only five, that’s who he is. A good little person.

  Not long after we got the news about Emily’s death, Sean and I found Nicky, after a long and frightening search, hiding in her closet among her clothes. When Sean brought this up with Nicky’s therapist, he suggested that we begin to move some of her stuff out of the house. (I hope you moms will forgive me if this is oversharing.) If that was what had to be done, I suggested a storage space.

  Sean was adamant. He refused to get rid of a single one of her things. Once when we were discussing it, he became overwrought and said, “When she comes back—” and then caught himself. That was how I knew that he still refused to accept the fact that she was dead.

  I was just as glad not to have to undertake the awful job of going through the possessions of the dead. And it seemed wrong to give a closetful of Dennis Nylon clothes to the Salvation Army. I certainly couldn’t wear them. Aside from the facts that I’m probably fifteen pounds heavier than Emily and a little shorter, her clothes are not my style. I’d feel like I was playing dress-up, a crunchy stay-at-home mom pretending to be a fashionista career woman. Besides, there’s that part of you that always thinks, What if the person isn’t dead? What if she returns and is mad at us for giving away her beautiful clothes? Such feelings are especially common in cases like this, when there is no real closure. No loving deathbed farewell, no proper funeral.

  It’s all so terribly sad. Every time I think about my friend, I cry inconsolably, and I can tell how hard and how bravely Sean has been trying not to break down. Especially in front of Nicky.

  No matter what the authorities conclude or don’t conclude, it is our deeply held conviction that Emily’s death was an accident. Sean and I do not believe that she meant to kill herself. We knew her. She loved life. She loved her husband and son. She loved me. She would never have chosen to leave us.

  We assume she needed a break, that the pressures of work and marriage and motherhood had gotten to her so badly that, despite the hard-won years (decades!) of sobriety, her old demons—the substance issues she’d so valiantly overcome—resurfaced. She saved up some pills, bought some booze, went to her family cabin to unwind and spend a couple of days by herself. It’s not what I would have expected of her, but it’s possible all the same.

  She went swimming. She swam out too far. She miscalculated. She drowned.

  According to Sean, she was an okay s
wimmer, but no more. And the toxicology reports showed evidence of alcohol and prescription pain and antianxiety medication. Enough to impair her judgment and cognition. To seriously affect the common sense that was one of the things I’d loved about her.

  I am praying that you all will understand and not judge. Not everyone is strong. We can go a little crazy and do things we shouldn’t do. It could happen to any of us.

  And this is one of those tragic cases in which the person didn’t hurt anyone but herself.

  And us. Her husband, her son, her best friend.

  So please be forgiving. Let me mourn my friend. I know that your love and prayers are with us. Thank you in advance for your heartfelt words of comfort and condolence.

  Love,

  Stephanie

  15

  Stephanie

  I can’t remember which of us—Sean or I—was the first to say that, despite what the police report said, we didn’t think Emily killed herself. I honestly believed that her death had been an accident, and I’m pretty sure Sean did too. Having her death ruled an accident rather than a suicide would be much better for Nicky when he got old enough to understand.

  And if it was an accident, as we believed it was, the insurance company owed Sean and Nicky the two million dollars that they wouldn’t have had to pay if it was a suicide committed less than two years after the policy was taken out. I looked this up online and mentioned it to Sean, but I sensed that he already knew.

  I had to wonder about Emily. Anyone would have had questions. And one of those questions had to do with the Patricia Highsmith novel that she was reading, in which the beautiful young woman kills herself for no reason that anyone ever finds out.

  For Sean and I and Nicky and Miles, the reason and the way that Emily died was important. But it was only a detail. The main thing was that Emily was gone. She wasn’t coming back.