One Less Problem Without You

by Beth Harbison

  The phone trembled in my hand as I clicked his in-box. I was in it now; there was no turning back. Whatever I wanted to know was at the touch of my fingertips. And I needed to know it, no matter what. That I was clear on. I’d been living in nervous apprehension for too long, never quite trusting anything he said, whether it was that he loved me or that we were running low on toilet paper. I’d heard lies that mattered and that didn’t, and that sent me into a tailspin of doubt.

  I certainly never believed him when he said he was working late.

  For perhaps ten minutes I scrolled through his e-mail, and apart from a few seemingly innocuous messages to his friends, there was nothing. I actually began to feel a little bit better. Not okay, by any means—the texts with “Red” remained inexcusable—but something inside of me just hoped to God I hadn’t been duped time and again.

  That hope died fast when suddenly I got to a date, about two months prior, with a collection of Craigslist answers. He’d been on a business trip to Las Vegas. A long one that included weekends, which struck me as odd at the time. But still, he did have business out of town a lot, did a lot of consulting on legal cases and whatnot, and I never wanted to be the kind of wife that did inordinate investigating of something presented as truth.

  In other words, I never wanted to be the kind of wife I was being at this moment.

  But I was in for a penny, so I might as well go in for the whole pound. Even while I clicked, during that fraction of a second between clicking and opening, I hoped he’d been trying to sell or buy some car part or something. But it wasn’t the case.

  Come play with me? 100 gifts an hour, you come to me. 200 gifts an hour I go to you. The link was too old for me to see anything beyond that which was in the e-mail, but there was plenty in there. Leif described his physique, in painful (and possibly inaccurate; to my memory we never measured) detail, and asked where she—assuming it was a she—could be found. What room?

  There had to be missing e-mails—though I couldn’t tell why he would have deleted some but not all, or why they weren’t all in the history of the one I was looking at. Still, even though there were enough gaps for Old Me to have slipped through the cracks, this me was seriously disgusted.

  I mean, what were “gifts”? That could only mean payment, right? My husband, who declared every small new thing I timidly suggested we try in bed for freshness to be “weird,” was willing to go to Vegas—where, by the way, clean, tested prostitution was legal—and pay some Craigslist person for anonymous sex?

  I cut-and-pasted her ad headline into the current Las Vegas search bar and came up with a new ad with the same wording. This time there were pictures. A woman, her face obscured by long dark hair but revealing enough to show she wasn’t … conventionally attractive, was posing with her foot up on a dirty avocado-colored bathtub, bending over, with a soap scum–covered shower stall behind her.

  This? This he was willing to pay for?

  It’s hard to describe just what this did to my heart. And I don’t even mean my metaphorical “broken heart” (which surely existed and was damned to get worse) but just literally my heart. It clenched, felt so tight I could barely breathe. I thought I was going to throw up.

  There was no forgetting this. There was no ignoring it.

  There were more Craigslist correspondences there, but I couldn’t even bear to look at them. None would say, “Just kidding, can’t believe you fell for that, Di!,” so all they could possibly do was exponentially increase the horror and betrayal I was feeling now.

  I had to stop. For my own good, I had to stop.

  But before I did, I clicked each one to forward it to myself—then noticed the faint arrow indicating that the e-mail had been forwarded.

  Shit!

  I fiddled around, trying to find a way to undo the indicator, and finally ended up just deleting the e-mails from his list completely, and then emptying the trash.

  He’d probably never miss them. Surely he hadn’t kept them for any purposeful reason. He’d probably just forgotten to delete them—raising the disturbing question of how many other e-mails there had been that he had deleted.

  It was too much to comprehend.

  In fact, really, all of it was too much to take. And it all just reminded me that I’d been taking too much for too long.

  After returning his phone to the nightstand, I went down to the kitchen, no longer giving a damn if I disturbed his precious sleep or not. I needed to relax. To him that would have meant that I should take one of the sedatives prescribed for me and just shut up, but after months of ever-increasing numbness on the pills, I’d realized that I was becoming Rip Van Winkle, which felt awfully close to becoming Judy Garland. I didn’t want that.

  That’s when I started making herbal teas. I’d gotten a book on them from the Internet, an introduction to growing, drying, and infusing herbs. It was pretty elementary, but I found that my own chamomile tea was far better, and stronger, than the stuff I bought from the grocery store aisle under the General Foods International Coffees.

  So I’d gotten pretty good at making my own infusions, if I do say so myself. Kava, vervain, and chamomile to relax. I know most people like to put a hint of lavender in, too, but that was too perfumy for me, so I kept it mild.

  Was it as quick as the pills? No. But that was good, because if it worked as quickly as the pills did, it probably would have been just as problematic. I didn’t have room for more problems in my life.

  So I heated the water on the stove and put the dried leaves into the silk tea bag. I added extra kava, as that was the most relaxing of the ingredients; then, in a moment that might have been ill advised, I got out the Corsair vanilla bean vodka.

  I was inventing an elixir, I told myself. Vodka Kavas. The perfect nightcap.

  As soon as the water started to boil, I poured it over the tea leaves, then let it steep for three minutes, taking a shot of vodka straight as I waited. Why not? It had been a bad night. No one could tell me I wasn’t entitled to a quick shot of help.

  As soon as the tea was ready, I removed the bag, dropped a few pieces of rock sugar in, and added a generous dollop of the vodka.

  It was fantastic.

  Or maybe it was just needed. Hard to say at that particular point. It was probably both, to be honest. At any rate, it warmed my soul going down, and eased my mind once it hit.

  Maybe it eased my mind a little too much, because soon I started to get a little wobbly in my anger. And by “wobbly” I mean “irrational,” and by “irrational” I mean I decided it would perhaps not be a terrible idea to make a tea to poison my husband.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Prinny

  The truth was, she hated being called Prinny.

  “Lillian” was so much more dignified. And that’s what she wanted, to be dignified, rather than Daddy’s Little Princess, aka Prinny. Even her “halo of golden curls,” as her parents had referred to her hair, made her look like a child’s imagining of a fairy-tale princess. Sounds like a silly thing to complain about until you realize no one takes you seriously. Prinny. It wasn’t a name that could be taken seriously. And yet Lillian might as well not have been her name, since no one had ever called her that.

  Even her classmates had ended up calling her Prinny, so the label her father had, with good and loving intentions, put on her as a child had now stuck with her almost thirty years into life. It had long since stopped conjuring a fairy tale and had more recently, she felt, made her sound like a little old spinster from Gone with the Wind.

  Not that she didn’t appreciate the fact that her father had cared so much; she did. He was all she’d had. Until she’d lost him. Now she had only an adversarial stepbrother and a kind but meek sister-in-law with whom she was barely in touch.

  Prinny’s mother had died when she was only six years old, so she didn’t really remember her very well—in fact, sometimes she wondered if her “memories” were memories at all or if they were just her own psychic intuition of what her mother
had been like—but the one thing that everyone always said about Ingrid Tiesman was that she was the picture of dignity and sophistication.

  It was hard for someone who had been basically called a baby all her life to live up to that.

  Yet Prinny had loved her father hugely, so she never wanted to ask him not to use the affectionate term for her that was so special that even his tone softened when he said it in a way she never heard it change at any other time.

  “Where’s my Prinny?” he’d ask when he came in at the end of a long day at work. Given the speed with which the maid would also bring him a Scotch on the rocks, in her earlier days, Prinny had never been quite sure whether his Prinny was her or the drink. But soon enough she realized, after he’d downed the first and asked for “another rocks,” which would appear as promptly as if it had already been ready and waiting to go, that she was the Prinny and the drink was … well, the drink was his binkie.

  In the end it was his poison. But that’s an old story. Who hasn’t heard it or told it or both? She lost her mother when she was six, she lost her father at twenty-six, and somehow, in the twenty years between, she’d never quite learned how to be a grown-up.

  People thought she didn’t know that, but she did. There was always a vague panic humming like a bad subwoofer under the weight of Led Zeppelin, telling her that the time was coming when it was all going to blow up in her face. She didn’t have it in her to handle the weight of a real, adult life.

  Her mother had died at the age of twenty-six. Prinny had passed that landmark with the full expectation that something magical would happen and she would suddenly understand all the little things she needed to about getting by, day to day, on her own and handling things like insurance, business, all the things her dad had always handled for her.

  Instead, her father’s liver finally cried uncle and he died, leaving her alone in the world, with an estate executor who was in charge of pulling all the financial strings in her life, and an older stepbrother, Leif, who, in the three years since, had been hell-bent on taking over her portion of their shared inheritance so she would stop “squandering” it.

  All of life was a game of Leif Says now. Fortunately, Alex McConnell—the executor of her father’s estate—didn’t seem daunted by Leif, even as the battle waged on and on, because Prinny sure was.

  Prinny was also pretty daunted by Alex McConnell, though she could never admit it to a soul. He was married; the picture on his desk of him and his beautiful wife posed in a typical beachy vacation spot proved that Prinny could never stand a chance with a guy like him. There were types, and he was a gorgeous, smart, successful, married type. And though Prinny had never met her, she knew the wife was the sort of gorgeous, pouty woman who always got her way, and whom a man would chase around the globe forever, just for the favor of her smile.

  Prinny would never be that woman.

  But she was in love with that man, and she had to settle for her time with him being business related. In fact, she had to settle for her life being business-centric. She needed to succeed on her own; she needed to be self-sufficient. She wanted to understand her finances, her investments, and everything she’d need to keep her going, even if she was alone forever (as she feared she might be).

  She needed absolute financial independence.

  That was the only thing that would give her complete control; the only lifestyle that didn’t care if she was a little insecure and a little round in the hip and a little flakey, and very shy with men.

  She would have said especially men like Alex, but there was one who was even worse for her nerves, though he offered none of the fun that her interactions with Alex did: Leif. Somewhere deep inside she was terrified of Leif, even though one of the only things she remembered well was her mother reassuring her that Leif was more scared of her than she could ever be of him.

  Didn’t matter. Leif was powerful, and he was doing everything he could to sabotage her inheritance and, it seemed, her very life.

  That’s why she’d opened Cosmos. She needed to have a legitimate business, legitimate expenses, a storefront, all those things, so that Leif couldn’t accuse her of being incompetent. Anyway, that’s what Alex had advised her.

  He hadn’t exactly advised her to open a metaphysical shop, however. In fact, when she’d told him that was what she intended to do, she sensed some backpedaling on his part, and the fact that at least several times a week drunks stumbled in, thinking it was a bar, didn’t help her case much.

  But still … it was what she was born to do, she knew it.

  When she was around eleven years old, her favorite nanny, Marie (whom she liked to think of as Mary, as in Poppins, despite her Jamaican sun-dark skin, with a note of mahogany Prinny always puzzled over), had taken her up to the broad-beamed walk-in attic of the house and showed her something that would change her life.

  As soon as she opened the door, Marie had put a finger to her lips, shhhh, even though they were the only two home. “You do not tell anyone a word that I show you this,” she said, her accent—which Prinny could still not identify to this day, especially since she had only her childhood memory to rely on—thick and mysterious.

  Prinny had nodded eagerly, doing the sign of cross my heart and hope to die, though she always crossed her fingers during the second part of that, since, apparently, it was incredibly easy to die unexpectedly. Even her mom had done it!

  Don’t think that way, the Voice said in her mind. Life is magical, wonderful, and meant to be lived fully.

  Marie closed the door behind them and took Prinny’s hand, leading her into the thick, hot, dusty air, to a trunk that was only slightly illuminated by the high vent at the peak of the roof. It was August in D.C., which was about as hot as hell or anyplace like it could get. Prinny had trouble breathing, but she knew she had to be silent; she couldn’t let out the cough that was trying so desperately to escape.

  “I found this by accident,” Marie said, then added, as if she’d been questioned, “I was up here looking for a fan for your room, and I found it accidentally, but I think you should know.”

  Even at that young age, something trembled through Prinny. What had she found? What could it possibly be? Was it a body? Was it about to be—her own? She’d been reading Nancy Drew books like a fiend at that point, and it was all too easy for her to believe that people weren’t who they said they were. Ever.

  She hung back, ready to turn and run, but Marie felt the resistance and turned to face her. “Oh, child,” she said, that indeterminate accent somehow thickening and softening all at the same time, “this has to do with your mama, so you know it’s a good thing.”

  In her mind, Prinny saw colors. Lots of colors, pictures, cards, and … rocks?

  Prinny looked into Marie’s eyes, trying to scrutinize, with all the wisdom and experience an eleven-year-old could possibly muster, the truth of her intentions. Her eyes were so kind, Prinny thought she couldn’t possibly be lying.

  And Marie had never, ever been mean to Prinny, never raised her voice, much less a hand, and she’d been with her longer than any of the others, more than a year now. She’d even made sure to put pictures of Prinny’s mother here and there, even though Prinny’s dad kept taking them down, because she insisted it was important that Prinny feel her mother’s presence in the house.

  Prinny never told anyone that she did. Constantly. Sometimes she even saw her mother. But even at that age, she knew she couldn’t say that without scaring people.

  So Prinny went with Marie into the thick stale air, and watched as she opened the trunk. “This, child, is what we call a treasure chest.” She sat down on the floor and patted the dusty wood next to her.

  “What is it?”

  “Your mama’s things.”

  “You mean like clothes and shoes?” Prinny tried to work out how there could be more when the people had come and taken away rack after rack of clothes that smelled of her mother’s familiar Jean Patou Joy perfume, “for charity,” as her dad an
d Leif had said.

  Yet for a moment, Prinny’s heart leaped at the idea of smelling that delicious, comforting scent one more time, of perhaps wrapping herself in one of her mother’s garments, untouched since Mama herself had carefully put it away. She wanted to try on the strappy, high-heeled shoes and see if they fit yet.

  In fact, she was diving fully into a fantasy of clopping around the attic in her mother’s shoes, looking for a mirror (there had to be one up here; wasn’t there a mirror, cracked or otherwise, in every spooky attic?) when Marie handed her a box.

  Prinny took it uncertainly. It was a small box. Not a shoe box. Too small, even, for a filmy scarf to fit in it. “What’s this?”

  Your legacy. Your history. Your gift.

  “Cards,” Marie said reverently. “Cards that tell the future!”

  Suddenly the box felt like it was trembling, and Prinny dropped it, though it was probably her hand that had trembled. It was now. “Did they tell Mama she was going to die?” She knew they had. She just knew it.

  Marie appeared to consider. “Maybe. I don’t know what your mama learned from them.”

  Prinny suddenly felt scared. “Why are you showing me this?”

  “Oh, child.” Marie moved toward her and put a meaty arm around Prinny’s narrow, bony shoulder, pulling her into her ample bosom. “Because these are the tools of magic. This is a gift your mama has left for you, and finally we have found it.”

  “Magic?” Witches sprang to mind. Of course. “Magic” was not a bad word in Prinny’s mind. Not at all. Magic was something she wanted to believe in. No, she needed to believe in it. It was her only way to connect to her mother and to the happy life she felt had already eluded her.

  “Come look.” Marie started taking things gently out of the box. “Look at this bag of pretty stones she collected.” She handed it over to Prinny.

  It was a mesh bag, about the size of a paper lunch bag, at least half full of pretty stones, some cut, some smooth, some sparkling in the dim light, and others dull, receding like little rock shadows at the ocean’s edge. “What are they for?”