by Lisa Unger
“Poppy,” she says. “You’re not safe. I mean, you can see that, right?”
“It’s done,” says Mac. “Look, if there’s one thing I know, Jack would want us to take care of you, keep you safe. Tom Jager from Black Dog Security and Crisis Management will contact you tomorrow. You’ll like him—he’s the kind of guy who just gets things done. The two of you will come up with a plan together, and this will get handled.”
Honestly, it’s like standing in front of a freight train. Layla’s always been so sure of herself. And since she and Mac got crazy rich, there’s no stopping them. They’ll help you whether you want it or not. It’s annoying but kind of sweet, too. How can you be mad at people who want so badly to protect you, even as they’re trampling your boundaries?
“At least they can keep you safe until we know for sure what’s going on,” says Mac.
Layla seems satisfied. “And you’ll stay here until it is.”
Checked off, managed, sorted.
She’s as bossy as your mother, Jack always used to say. Kinder, more well-intentioned, but still domineering as hell.
It used to bother me that Jack never quite got Layla—and that she never quite got him. She grew up in chaos with a violent, alcoholic father, a mother who couldn’t stand up to him until the day he died, a brother who is currently in prison. She seeks control now over the lives of people she loves. It’s textbook: the adult child of an alcoholic. Jack on the other hand couldn’t stand to be controlled, railed against authority of any kind. He was a wanderer, a nomad with a camera in his hand. Free range. There was never the same ease between them that there is with Mac and me.
“Okay.” I don’t remember being such a wuss. I’m just so damn tired.
Layla comes over to my side of the counter and rewashes a pot I’d put on a dishcloth to dry. She dries it vigorously and puts it away, folds the towel into a perfect triangle that she tucks next to the faucet. She also whisks away the vodka bottle. Mac and I share an indulgent eye roll before he disappears down the long hall to their master suite.
“Black Dog?” She’s still talking about the security firm. “They’ve solved a lot of problems for people we know,” she says when he’s gone.
“What kind of problems?”
Though she’s cut Mac off, she pours herself another glass of wine. I’ve noticed that she starts at five and drinks continuously all evening, cutting the wine with splashes of club soda as it gets later. How much is she really drinking? It’s hard to say. Not that I’m in any position to judge.
“You know,” she says, with a kind of resigned sigh. “The kind of problems Mac’s clients have. Do you remember the Kings? Their young son was kidnapped during a vacation in Mexico. A nightmare, but Tom’s firm negotiated his safe release. Thank God.”
I’d heard about that kind of thing before, of course. The industry of kidnapping and ransom. But Jack—he’d tromped all over the world, trekking through Rwanda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest looking for mountain gorillas, partying in Rio, hurtling down the slim North Yungus Road, a fifteen-thousand-foot-high single lane in Bolivia, in a rickety pickup driven by a man Jack couldn’t understand. He laughed when he recalled that white-knuckled trip between La Paz and Coroico.
The world is safe mostly, he always said. Safer than you think if you keep a low profile.
But he was so wrong. It was arrogance to think that the world was safe.
Still, though I haven’t said as much, I have no intention of hiring that security firm. I’m also not sure I want to stay here for the rest of the week, hiding out in Layla’s world. The truth is, I was starting to get my feet under me again somewhat before this happened. I want that feeling back.
And now Mac’s questions are ringing in my ears. Were there things about Jack that I didn’t know? Another side of him? I think of that wall of sealed boxes in my apartment, all the parts of Jack collected there, sitting fallow for a year. Meanwhile, there are slices of me missing, too. Days just blank; memories I’ve lost and haven’t, if I’m honest, tried that hard to recover. What have I been afraid I’ll find?
Layla dangles a set of keys from her finger, breaking me from my thoughts. Her gigantic diamond—the cost of which could feed the average family for a year—glints in the LED lighting. “I had your locks changed. And I did not leave a set with the doormen.”
I take the keys from her. They’re cold and sharp in my hand. Strange keys to a place that is not home.
“Tell me,” I say. “About the day you found me.”
She sits in the chair at the bar, leans onto the counter. She holds me in her gaze, assessing. “Are you sure?”
She’d tried to talk to me about it before, but I’d always shut her down. Once I accepted Dr. Nash’s theory that the time wasn’t coming back, or that it probably wouldn’t, I decided to put those days behind me. It was part of my whole program of accepting unacceptable things. Or maybe I’ve just been running away, afraid of the truth.
“What happened—exactly?”
“Well,” she says, releasing a breath that seems to deflate her. It’s a tone I’ve heard her take with Izzy and Slade when answering the difficult questions. Why was Daddy sucking on your face last night? If Grandma is looking down on me from heaven, can she see when I’m using the bathroom? Why is that man sleeping in a cardboard box?
I’m surprised to see her eyes well up; she wipes at them quickly. I reach for her but she waves me away. “I’m sorry,” she says. “This is about you, not me.”
“It’s about us, okay? We both went through something.”
She takes another sip of wine.
“You called me late,” she says. “You didn’t sound like yourself. There was something so bright, so gleeful about your tone. It was weird.”
“What did I say?” How odd to have to ask that.
“You said that you had answers,” she says. “That you knew what happened to Jack. That it was the end of everything.”
“The end of everything?”
She takes a sip from her glass. “That’s how I felt, too, when I thought I’d lost you.”
After the funeral, that was the darkest moment. I remember that. That’s when it was finally real. The terrible shock had been absorbed, leaving me rattled and wobbly. The funeral, the gathering, the slew of flowers, cards, the phone ringing and ringing, a hundred emails from friends, acquaintances, strangers. A million arrangements to be made, the police and all their questions, my mother sleeping on my couch, her lawyer escorting me to the police station. And then it all went silent. Jack was gone, all leads went cold, everyone else went back to the day-to-day of their lives. Even I intended to go back to work, thinking—what else? What else would I do? Could I do?
“It was late when you called, so I went right over, leaving Mac with the kids. But when I got there, you were gone. I tried your phone but it was dead, or off, went straight to voice mail. That was the worst moment, knowing your phone was dead, that my lifeline to you had been cut.”
Layla puts her head in her hand, and I slide into the seat beside her, dropping an arm around her.
“I spent the next two days racing around the city—hitting the places I thought you might go. Just blindly. The park, the gym, restaurants you and Jack frequented, bars. Mac took time off work, we took turns looking or staying with the kids. I showed your photo around. Grayson did the same. I thought we’d lost you. There were no credit card charges, no way to track you.”
She pours herself another glass of wine, and one for me, too. I don’t even put up a fight. I take a deep swallow from the glittering glass, welcome the cool of it, the warmth that comes to my cheeks as more alcohol hits my bloodstream.
“Then when we were about to hire someone—Tom, in fact—you came walking into the lobby. I ran down to get you, but I barely recognized you. Poppy, in that dress, your makeup. You were someone else. When you saw me, you
just passed out, collapsed right there in the foyer. Then for the next few days, you were just—out of it.”
“Unconscious?” I remember nothing of those days in the hospital, either.
“No,” she said. “Just rambling, wild-eyed, glazed. It was—surreal. I kept saying: Come on, Poppy. Snap out of it. But you weren’t there. I don’t know how else to describe it. And then, just like that, you were back.”
I cringed at the thought of myself like that, what I’d put everyone through. I don’t even have the slightest recollection. There’s a black spot between the funeral and the day I woke up in the hospital with my mother reading a People magazine by the window.
Can I have a root beer? I asked her.
She looked at me, blinked a couple of times and issued a sigh of relief. Welcome back, sweetie. As if I’d been away on a long trip.
“Do you remember any of the things that I said?” I ask Layla, though part of me doesn’t want to know. “Exactly what I said.”
She shook her head. “It was just—nonsense.”
“Like what?” I pushed.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s hard to remember because it was all so disjointed. You didn’t say anything meaningful, if that’s what you’re getting it. Clues to what happened to Jack, you mean? No, nothing like that.”
Her mouth is pressed into a tight line, her gaze sliding off to the side. She’s holding something back. We’ve known each other too long. I’m about to press when Slade calls from down the hall and Layla quickly slips off.
I drift into the living room, stare out the window into the dark of Central Park. The black of it, run through by the red veins of streets and paths, the glitter of streetlamps scattered like stars, is a void. If you look at an aerial photo of New York at night, its parks are these dark patches in a landscape of lights. One of those patches swallowed Jack. It swallowed me.
“You can bring it all to Dr. Nash, right? On Thursday?” says Layla when she comes back. “She’ll help you sort it out.”
I wonder. Dr. Nash hasn’t been a big fan of pushing into that empty place in my life. Early on, I suggested hypnosis and she balked, said it wasn’t part of her practice. She believed that my memories would come back when and if I was strong enough to handle them. She said she could refer me if I was adamant. I wasn’t; to be honest, it scared me—scares me still. What will I find if I start to dig deeper into that dark void inside me? Where did I go? What did I do?
“Is there something you’re not saying?” I press. “About that time.”
She stands beside me at the window, laces her fingers through mine and looks out the window into the glittering dark. “I’d tell you if there was anything you needed to know. Anything about Jack. Of course I would.”
* * *
Back in the guest room, my nerves are rattling. All I want is to tumble into a dark, dreamless well of sleep. I draw myself a bath, hot as I can stand, light the vanilla-scented candles that Layla has everywhere. I take three pills. I’m not sure what. Distantly, I’m aware that this is stupid. Beyond. In fact, it’s self-harming. But it’s just for tonight, just to get through this.
Then I step into the bath, the water so hot, so soothing. All my muscles relax, thoughts and fears receding swift and silent. I breathe deeply the way Dr. Nash taught me. In for three counts, hold, out for four counts. The breath, she said, is always here for us. We can always soothe our nervous system with just some deep breathing.
And pills. And liquor.
I focus on my breath, the hot water easing my tight muscles. The candlelight makes dancers on the wall and ceiling. I watch them dip and turn, swirl, and disappear, as the world slowly fades away.
* * *
You’re a fucking liar!
I awake shivering in the water grown cold, the candles burned down to almost nothing, flames just tiny red dots on crinkled black wicks.
The sentence pried itself into my fitful, dream-riven sleep—where I endlessly trekked through the Fakahatchee Strand with Jack, that ghost orchid elusive. Where my phone rang and rang, Jack’s name blinking on the screen. But I couldn’t answer his call and couldn’t make my finger dial him back. Where the sheets were stained with blood, like they were after my first miscarriage. The man from the bar, he looped his arm tight around the small of my back, pulled me in tight to his body, filling me with desire and anger.
You’re a fucking liar!
I climb out of the tub, quaking with cold, quickly wrap myself in the robe that hangs on the back of the door. Was someone yelling in the house? Something from my own addled inner life?
Back in the bedroom, still shivering, I listen to the night. There’s only quiet, just the faintest faraway hint of city noise through the double-paned windows and thick concrete walls of Layla’s cocoon. My limbs icy and stiff, I dry and put on my pajamas.
I am not even going to acknowledge that I basically just passed out in the tub. How moronic, how dangerous. Candles burning. I could have started a fire in my best friends’ home. Or I easily might have drowned. I cannot stop shaking with cold, anger at myself, fear at what might have been the consequences of my carelessness.
I leave the guest room and walk down the hall. Izzy and Slade are both sound asleep in the chaos of their respective rooms, night-lights glowing. Slade has his headphones on.
Layla and Mac’s room is at the end of the long hallway, a suite separate from the rest of the enormous space. It’s practically its own wing. The door is firmly closed and all I hear now is the measured, peaceful breathing of the kids.
9
I slip out with the dawn, leaving a note for Layla that I’ll be back for dinner. I know she’ll be worried, but I need to think. Rather than head to the office right away, I walk to the downtown train. The sky is a flat hard gray, clouds moving fast as a river, run through with fingers of the golden rising sun. Underground, the platform is oddly empty. The train when it comes, impossibly swift.
Why do the streets seem deserted, my heels clacking loudly on the concrete? I don’t recognize the slim blond doorman sitting at the desk in the lobby: but he knows me.
“Good morning, Mrs. Lang.” He waves at me and I do the same, breezing past him. My building lobby is cool, quiet in the pre–rush hour hush.
If there was any drama related to last night’s episode, there’s no evidence of it now.
The elevator is empty, and when I emerge on my floor, the long gray hallway stretches out silent and empty. A hair dryer hums. The sound of a television chatters. Wafting flute music is tinny and strange on the air. I’ve only seen one or two people since I’ve moved here. A thin bespectacled girl who the doorman told me was a famous writer. There’s a couple—an architect and his husband, lovely and smiley, always in a rush. They have two manic mini poodles who I occasionally, distantly, hear yapping. A building of strangers, myself included.
I pause at my door, fish the new keys from my bag, then move inside. I wait, listening, reminding myself that the locks have been changed. No one could have entered without the key I hold in my hand. Still, I walk from room to room, checking to make sure there’s no one there. The orchid and the note are gone. The photo, too. Detective Grayson must have entered everything into evidence. He hasn’t returned my call from last night. It’s a niggle in the back of my brain. Why hasn’t he checked in?
The box cutter is light in my hand as I head over to the pile of boxes stacked between the couch and the windows. They all have one word scrawled across their sides: Jack.
I’ve let them sit untouched for a year. It’s been a topic of conversation with Dr. Nash, when to unpack those boxes.
“Many people find it cathartic,” she nudges. “To sort through the belongings of a deceased love one, to keep what’s meaningful, and to discard the rest.”
But I haven’t wanted to let go of any piece of him. Jack’s mom and I went through his things when I wa
s packing up our old apartment. Sarah only took a watch that had belonged to Jack’s father, and a picture of Jack as a child, fishing with his dad.
“It’s only when you lose someone that you realize how little everything else matters,” she said. “All the stuff. It’s just garbage. Hold on to it, Poppy, until you’re ready. Then let it go.”
I put my head in her lap and cried that day—a thing I’d never done with my own mother. I carried everything I had left of him down to the new place in Chelsea. And here it sat, waiting.
I slice one open, and find a stack of his portfolios. Flip open the leather cover, and see an image of myself. She’s almost a stranger, the girl there, her expression half amused, half annoyed. There are a hundred things she doesn’t know. Behind her, palm trees bend in a strong wind; a fuchsia-tangerine sun sets over the ocean. Mexico, the night we met. He took a picture of me with my own camera.
And then I’m back there.
He was on assignment for National Geographic; I was on a press trip for a trade magazine, taking pictures of a new luxury beachfront hotel and spa. My assignment was a cushy one—all expenses paid, luxury accommodations, coaxing beautiful images from the lush landscaping, glittering pools, lavish meals. It was a shoot for a story designed to please a major advertiser for the magazine. Jack was following a team charged with releasing a pack of Mexican gray wolves raised in captivity back into the wild, part of a program to save the nearly extinct species. These two very different paths nevertheless led us to converge at an ocean-view bar at sunset.
He was with his team—journalists, naturalists, some local guides. They were dirty and scruffy and I’d barely noticed them as I breezed through the glittery space to the balcony to capture a few final shots of the sunset. It was a beauty—coral, violet, blazing orange lazing like a tiger against the black ocean.
“That’s a serious piece of equipment for a tourist,” he said, coming up from behind.
I spun around, startled, annoyed. “I’m not a tourist. I’m a photographer.”
