Hush Hush

by Lippman, Laura

  11:15 A.M.

  Felicia collapsed at the kitchen table with a glass of green iced tea and her laptop, overwhelmed by how much she needed to do, how little energy she had to do any of it. The house was quiet. At last. Mornings were horrible. Joey was usually up by five, six if Felicia was lucky, and just as he began to calm down, there was the chaos of Stephen and the girls leaving, which seemed to set Joey off. He was still getting up in the middle of the night, too, despite no longer needing to nurse at 2:00 and 4:00 A.M. Nine months old, sixteen pounds, and he still wasn’t sleeping through the night. Felicia had tried following the precepts of The Happiest Baby on the Block, she really had. Irony of ironies, this former personal trainer was a washout at sleep training. Felicia, who had literally made grown men cry for their own good, could not let her son cry it out for even five seconds.

  “Well, if he’s like everyone else in this family, he’ll be out of tears before he’s in kindergarten,” Alanna had said at breakfast this morning, which for her was a cup of black coffee that she never finished. It killed Felicia that an athlete of Alanna’s caliber ate so poorly, but she suspected her stepdaughter’s black coffee was an attempt to provoke her, so she ignored it.

  Alanna added: “If he makes it to kindergarten. Not all Dawes children do.”

  That was harder to ignore.

  Welcome to the Unhappiest Family on the Block. Also the only family on the block, so they were the happiest, the unhappiest, the richest, the poorest. It was the Big House in the Big Woods, a lonely fortress that felt as if it were in the middle of nowhere, although the Beltway hummed with traffic not ten minutes away. It was everything Felicia had ever wanted—a house that she had helped design—and she was miserable.

  Felicia had started agitating for a new house the moment she became pregnant. No woman wanted to live in a previous wife’s house under any circumstances, and to live in that house with a baby—no thank you. But she never expected that Stephen Dawes, champion of urban living, would choose to move his family to a custom-built house on a private lane, surrounded on three sides by a wooded state park. Trust Stephen to find a parcel of land in the middle of state parkland, yet only twenty-five minutes from downtown. Felicia had imagined something with actual neighbors, shops within walking distance. She argued that she would be in the car all the time, living in a location this remote. Stephen pointed out that she never walked anywhere in Bolton Hill.

  Fair enough. But if they had to move—and they did, for space; the Bolton Hill house was huge but had only three bedrooms—why not another city neighborhood, or at least a more traditional suburb? Stephen glided past those questions when Felicia tried to ask them. The land had been purchased, the plan was under way. He said he would buy Felicia a new car, a hybrid that got better gas mileage. And give Alanna a car, too, so she could be responsible for getting herself and her sister to school. The girls might even change schools. They were in a decent school district here, and it would save a lot of money if the girls chose to attend public school.

  The last piece of Stephen’s argument scared Felicia a little. She had never known him to lobby for anything on the grounds of cost. Not that he was foolish with money. And he had always been careful not to spoil the girls. He bought Alanna a used Subaru Outback for her first car, for example. Of course, Alanna managed to get into an accident the first month—not her fault, yet not quite not her fault, Felicia suspected—and Stephen was so horrified at the body damage done by this small collision that he replaced the totaled Subaru with a cherry-red Mercedes. Used, but still.

  The girls refused to change schools anyway, not that Felicia could blame them. Ruby had been about to start her freshman year when they moved last summer, while Alanna was a junior. It seemed hypocritical of Alanna, who had been complaining about Roland Park Country School for years, to embrace it the moment she was given a chance to transfer, but Alanna was nothing if not perverse. Ruby sided with Alanna. Ruby always did what Alanna wanted.

  And even with Alanna driving herself and Ruby to school, mornings were still hell. Stephen always said, “I’ll make sure the girls get off in time, don’t worry, just hang out with Joey.” But there were a thousand questions. Okay, a dozen. Alanna’s tracksuit? In the laundry room, on the drying rack. Ruby says she’s going to someone else’s house after school—did she tell Felicia? Can Felicia pick her up? Because Alanna has practice after school and the other girl’s mother works.

  Stephen was evolved enough that he usually remembered to say: The other girl’s mother has a job, or works outside the home. Usually. But he spoke the words as if they were foreign-language phrases he didn’t quite understand. What had he said when Joey was born? Why not take some time off? Felicia wondered now if it was because he wanted to save the money that child care would have cost, or if he feared what it would mean to his own day-to-day life if Felicia were working.

  Still, it was hard to imagine how she could have kept her job after Joey was born. A personal trainer at Felicia’s level worked long and odd hours. Her day often began as early as 5:00 A.M. and could run as late as 9:00 or 10:00 P.M. The kinds of people Felicia trained didn’t go to the gym between nine and five, or even between eight and six, although one or two might try to squeeze a session in during lunch. Her clients worked out in the predawn hours or straggled into the gym at night, having done whatever they needed to do to make the kind of money that made it possible to hire Felicia. In just seven years, she had gone from being a fresh-out-of-college corporate gym trainer to owning her own company, the kind of trainer who ended up on various Best of Baltimore lists. It didn’t hurt that she was sleek and blond and blue-eyed, the epitome of what people think a female trainer should be. Although when Stephen hired her, three years ago, he claimed he had not seen her photograph, simply instructed his assistant to find the city’s best trainer.

  Stephen was usually her last appointment of the night, paying for his sessions in advance on the theory that doing so would force him to come no matter how his workday had treated him. “I’m a washout,” he said. “I used to row, but—” He didn’t finish the sentence. Presumably, he assumed that Felicia knew how it had ended, why he avoided the boathouse. But in 2002, Felicia had been in college, and she didn’t remember the story at all. It had sounded vaguely familiar when someone filled her in, and she had pretended she’d known all along; who wants to be the kind of twenty-something who doesn’t pay attention to such a horrific story? Her ignorance spoke of self-involvement, an insularity beyond Alanna’s. Felicia rationalized that it had been a Baltimore thing, and she was a Western Maryland girl. Her hometown of Cumberland was a world away, more likely to hear the news out of Pittsburgh. At any rate, the only things that Felicia knew about Stephen Dawes when he started working out with her were that he had a lot of money and he was in crappy shape. “I’m a single parent,” he would say. “I need to be around for my kids.” Then, with a truly charming, bashful grin: “I also might start dating again.”

  His body snapped back fast, former rower that he was. He supplemented his sessions with Felicia by running in the mornings, going to the occasional yoga class. The pale, saggy client who first came to see her was transformed within months into a trim man with healthy color. He was losing his hair, but in that charmingly wolfish way, in which a widow’s peak remained while the hair on either side receded. The woman that Felicia trained before Stephen began asking her lots of questions about him, lingering to stretch. Felicia did not encourage her dawdling.

  To be a personal trainer required one to be impersonal about people’s bodies. One had to be like a doctor; not that there weren’t bad doctors. (Felicia had been felt up by her ENT guy when she was just twenty-three.) Personal relationships were rare, at least among the elite trainers. They weren’t good for business. She had a friend who had ended up in bed with a male client. “I went from getting eighty dollars an hour to boss him around and stretch him a little to getting zero dollars an hour to do everything he wanted,” she quipped.

/>   But as Stephen gradually unburdened himself to Felicia, she had found herself falling in love with him. And it was hard not to be proud of him as her creation, to look at the new and improved Stephen as hers. She had to hold her jealousy in check when he discussed his attempts to reenter the dating pool. Why should some other woman enjoy what Felicia had made? He talked about the ups and downs of dating under the judgmental gaze of his daughters. They disliked everyone automatically. He had tried to involve them in his social life, had asked if they wanted to go over his Match.com selections. They said they couldn’t think of anything they wanted to do less.

  This went on for three months or so. Stephen dating, telling Felicia about his dates, usually in a comic fashion. Felicia, who had moved out of her boyfriend’s house a month or so before Stephen began training with her, returned to her ex after he made an earnest pitch. It didn’t work the second time, either. She ended up back on her own, living in a crappy little studio, the best she could do in Baltimore’s tight rental market.

  On February 15 two years ago, she met Stephen for a training session in the gym of a new high-rise he had built in Locust Point. She didn’t usually travel to him, but he said he wanted to use the gym there a couple of times, get a feel for it before the big sales push.

  “Did you have a good Valentine’s Day?” he asked as he warmed up on the treadmill.

  She shrugged. Felicia didn’t tell her clients anywhere near as much as they told her.

  “It’s a stupid day,” he said. “So overloaded with expectations. Did you know that florists do a brisk business on the fifteenth? All these guys in the doghouse. But the good news is, the price of roses drops. Tells you everything you need to know about the Valentine’s Day economy.”

  “I don’t even like roses. I like peonies.”

  “You told me that once.”

  She had? She didn’t remember that.

  “You know what I want to do tonight? I mean, I know you’re supposed to call the shots, but remember when you had me run up and down the stairs, how much I complained. What if we race? To the top?”

  “To the top?” The building was thirteen stories. Stephen had told her once that Baltimore, unlike New York, called the thirteenth floor the thirteenth floor, and he loved his hometown for that. He had named this tower 13 Stories; its address was 1313 Locust Point. When you’ve been as unlucky as I have, Stephen told her once, nothing really scares you anymore. Nothing silly, at any rate.

  “Scared?”

  “Of course not.”

  Even for someone as fit as Felicia had been—and she had been in her prime that night—a race up twelve flights of stairs was taxing. Plus, she felt the pressure to win. It would be embarrassing to be bested by a client.

  But she also wanted to win because Stephen was Stephen and this was the only advantage she had over him, being more fit. It was awful enough to have feelings for him. She couldn’t lose the race, too.

  He fell back by the third flight or so and, by the time Felicia reached the tenth flight, she couldn’t even hear his footfalls over her own rasping breath, the blood pounding in her ears. It never occurred to her that he had slipped out of the stairwell on the third floor and taken the elevator.

  When she burst through the door onto the roof, cold and startlingly bright, Stephen was waiting there. With a bouquet of peonies. In the solarium of the penthouse apartment behind him, a table was set with a white cloth, and a bottle of champagne could be seen in an ice bucket.

  “February fourteenth is for suckers,” he said. “Let everyone else have it. We can have February fifteenth. That is, if you’ll consider going out with me.”

  They had married on that date a year later, and Joey had been born four months after that. Since then, Felicia’s only client had been Felicia. She had managed, in the tiny pockets of time available to her, to rebuild her body to what it had once been. But she had sold her business. When, if, she went back to work, she would have to start all over, building a client list, regaining her reputation. Now Stephen worked out with the male trainer who had taken over Felicia’s business. And she had gone from living in a studio apartment to a haunted house in Bolton Hill to this large and—just say it—scary, spooky house in the woods, where she spent entire days in which she spoke to no one but grocery clerks and the disembodied voice that took her order at the drive-through Starbucks on Nursery Lane, a big highlight of her day. When Joey was fussy, she put him in his car seat, got a chai tea at the drive-through, and drove around the industrial landscape near the airport, listening to what Stephen called girl music. “You have the musical taste of a teenager,” he told her.

  Not that the two teenagers in the house would have anything to do with her. Alanna and Ruby were cagey enough not to be outright rude to her. Stephen would have jumped on bad behavior. They were even loving to Joey, especially Ruby. But they acted as if Felicia didn’t exist. No, as if she were—a fart, and they were ignoring her out of kindness, the way a trainer attempts to do in all but the most extreme cases of flatulence.

  Stephen, in fact, had let go with the most amazing fart, in terms of sound, when Felicia was stretching him out one night. It couldn’t be ignored. After a split second, he had laughed at himself, and she had joined in. She sometimes thought that was the moment she started falling in love with him. When he farted in her face.

  Maybe that wasn’t the best basis on which to begin a relationship.

  But, no, be fair: The relationship had begun with a bouquet of peonies, underneath a cold February sky hard with stars. Later, she would hear the story—although not from Stephen—about how he had proposed to his first wife, the ring dangling from the tree, the friends and family hidden inside the boathouse. Stephen’s mother, Glenda, had told Felicia that story, saying dryly: “Stephen always did like to make a production of things.” What was her point? That Felicia wasn’t so special? Or that a beautiful beginning was no protection against a bad ending? Felicia thought the real issue was that Stephen’s mother, a widow since he was small, didn’t want to share her son with anyone. Glenda Dawes had nothing good to say about Melisandre, and she had given Stephen an earful when she found out he was going to let the girls decide if they should be filmed with her.

  A lusty cry on the monitor—the morning nap was over. Felicia hadn’t accomplished a single thing. Joey was her accomplishment, she supposed. If she had once been proud of Stephen’s body, she now felt that way about Joey a hundred times over. She had formed him, cell by cell. Her pregnancy had been an ecstatic time, so joyful that she considered being a surrogate. But now that Joey was on the outside of her—

  A louder, more insistent cry rising to a wail. You couldn’t say “Just a minute” to a baby, and even if you could, Joey would never hear Felicia in this vast, sprawling house. He didn’t yet understand that she was a separate person, independent of him. She was his, he was hers. Maybe he would give her peonies one day. Lord knows, it had been a while since Stephen had. Last month, February 15 had come and gone without any acknowledgment from him. Felicia had ended up putting away the card and gift she had bought for him, not wanting to be caught out in her yearning. Turned out February 15 was for suckers, too.

  12:30 P.M.

  Alanna had cut school lots of times, but usually with friends and in the most benign and banal way possible. Going to Eddie’s for sandwiches, sneaking out to someone’s house for a smoke. Benign and banal was Alanna’s phrase for what they did. B-and-b, she said, how utterly b-and-b, and her friends laughed. Alanna had a lot of friends, yet no idea why they wanted to be her friends. She assumed it was because they were scared of her. Why were they scared of her? Because she was brittle and smart and because boys liked her so much that it was worth putting up with all her shit. Why did boys like her? Because she was pretty and she scared them, too.

  Alanna scared almost everyone in her life, except Ruby and Joey, who was too young to notice her sarcasm. Alanna was the first person for whom Joey had smiled. He patted her cheeks with his m
essy, gooey baby hands, drooled on her, even spit up on her. She liked that. Other people were always on eggshells around Alanna. When she competed in cross-country, Alanna ran the way she imagined people walked around her. She rose up on her toes as if the ground beneath her were fragile, a thin crust that could give way at any time. Running in this fashion, she won more often than not. Alanna needed to win because athletics were going to get her into a decent college. But Alanna also needed to run, get away. She hated leaving Ruby behind, but her sister should be okay without her. Perhaps even relieved, a little bit. Besides, if Alanna made a reasonable choice, a school in proximity to a school that would suit Ruby, then her sister could follow in two years. Alanna was looking at Division I schools in California, Michigan, and Minnesota. Unfortunately, Ruby kept dropping hints about St. John’s in Annapolis, Georgetown in D.C. Not far enough, in Alanna’s view. They needed to find a place where the name Dawes could sink, ordinary and thick as it sounded, where the sisters could start over. Where people would not be scared of Alanna. Where she would no longer need them to be scared of her.

  Because, in the end, it wasn’t about the sarcasm or her success with boys or her looks. The real reason that people were scared of Alanna was because they kept waiting for the switch to flip and for Alanna to go as crazy as her mother.

  She looked exactly like her, except for the hair. Alanna had smooth, straight hair, while Ruby had the wild, snaky curls—only flat brown instead of their mother’s caramel color—and no one could tame them. Perhaps their mother could have helped Ruby with her hair. When Ruby was small, someone had known how to do it, although that might have been Elyse. In early photographs, Ruby’s hair was, if not as smooth as Alanna’s, then at least presentable. But no one since then—no nanny, no caretaker, no relative, certainly not their father and not Felicia, never Felicia, because Ruby wouldn’t allow Felicia to touch her hair—had been able to solve the problem of Ruby’s curls. Sometimes Alanna thought that the curls fed Ruby’s formidable brain or vice versa. It was as if there was electricity in there, almost making her hair stand on end. Some brats in Ruby’s class, back in middle school, had tried to introduce Medusa as a nickname for her, but Alanna had put an end to that, fast.