The Wife Upstairs

by Rachel Hawkins

  And if I’m honest, I like being the subject of conversation.

  Emily is shoving pieces of fruit into a juicer, the motor whirring, and the resulting juice is a dark, viscous green, but I take it anyway, smiling as I sip.

  It tastes like someone dumped half a pound of ginger into grass cuttings, but this is what women like Emily and Campbell drink, so fuck me, I guess I’ll develop a taste for it.

  “Sooooo,” Emily drawls, leaning on the counter, propping her chin on her fist like she’s a teenager at a slumber party. “Tell us everything.”

  I laugh and shrug. “I mean, it’s really not that interesting. We got to talking one afternoon, he asked me for coffee, and then…” I trail off, grinning and looking demurely down at the counter.

  Always better to let people use their imaginations, rather than giving them every detail.

  Except that Campbell wants details, because of course she does.

  “So, like, what are you two now?” she asks, tapping her nails against her glass. She’s got a new ring on her index finger, a thin gold band studded with diamonds, and I try not to stare at it, try not to want it. “Like, is it serious?”

  She’s smiling when I meet her gaze, her head titled down in that conspiratorial “girl talk” pose I’ve seen her, Emily, and Caroline do a thousand times, but there’s something hard in her eyes, and a muscle ticks in her jaw.

  Careful, careful.

  For a second, I think about going the helpless ingenue route again, all, “Oh, I don’t know, we’re taking it day by day,” that whole song and dance. But there’s another part of me that doesn’t want to do that. That wants them to know I’m here to stay, so they better get used to it, and fast.

  No shrugging, then. No blushing. I look Campbell directly in the eyes as I say, “It is, yeah.”

  Emily gives a little squeal and reaches out to squeeze my arm. “This is so exciting!”

  Campbell glances over at her, and I can see her waver. If Emily throws her support behind me, then what choice does Campbell really have but to do the same?

  She must figure that out, too, because she finally smiles at me, and says, “It really is. Congratulations, Jane.”

  Now I can go back to the “aw shucks” thing. “I mean, we’re just dating,” I say. “It’s not like we’re getting married.”

  “But you’re living together, right?” Emily asks, and when I don’t immediately answer, she says, “I mean, I just assumed. If you’re walking Adele for funsies.”

  “We are,” I reply, glancing down, feigning a little embarrassment. “My apartment was on the whole other side of town, so it just made sense to move in.”

  I catch a little look between Emily and Campbell, but don’t know what it means exactly. Do they think I’m slutty for moving in with a man so fast? Do they think Eddie’s stupid for letting me?

  I don’t know, and before I can say anything else, Emily shrugs. “So you might get married one day. Seems likely.”

  I see her gaze slide over to that massive stainless-steel fridge of hers. There’s a picture there, of Emily and Campbell at some backyard barbecue thing, Bea Rochester and Blanche Ingraham standing between them.

  They’re all smiling, Emily’s arm around Bea’s waist.

  I let them see me noticing the picture, then look back at both Emily and Campbell. “You both must really miss her. And Blanche, too.”

  Emily frowns slightly, her fingers coming up to play with the little gold-and-pearl-inlay cross around her neck, and Campbell finishes the rest of her juice.

  “It’s definitely different without the two of them around,” Emily finally says, the words a little slow and halting, her frown deepening.

  “Less drama, that’s for damn sure,” Campbell adds, then looks back over at me, waving a hand. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

  I actually want her to say a whole lot more of that. What drama?

  A little of the smugness leaks out of me, deflating me as I sit at Emily’s counter. It’s a reminder that there’s a whole world here full of undercurrents and stories and connections and voids. Just when I feel like I’ve got a handle on it, some new thing pops up, some indication that I’m a newcomer here. An outsider.

  “That was actually the last time we were all together,” Emily says, walking over to the fridge. “Fourth of July. It’s so weird, but I keep thinking I’ll get a text from Blanche, or Bea will email me about the Neighborhood Beautification Committee or something.” She shakes her head. “I don’t know when I’ll get used to them not being here.”

  Fuck, this is not going the way I’d hoped at all. I can practically feel myself scrambling for some ledge to hold on to, some way to turn this all around.

  Unfortunately, what I latch on to is, “The Neighborhood Beautification Committee?”

  Kill me now for letting those words come out of my mouth.

  Emily’s eyebrows go up a little, her eyes widening. “Oh, yeah,” she says. “We haven’t had a meeting since … well, since Bea and Blanche, because it just felt too weird without them there. But with summer coming up, we should probably plan something. Don’t you think, Cam?”

  Campbell nods, getting off the stool and carrying her glass to the sink. “Definitely. Those flower beds by the sign at the front of the neighborhood look like complete dog shit.”

  I’d just passed those flower beds yesterday, and thought to myself that they looked lovely, all colorful and a little wild. But now I agree with Campbell, giving a way too enthusiastic, “Totally!”

  There’s a beat of silence, just a little too long, and I find myself rushing into it. “I know I’m pretty new to actually living in the neighborhood, but if you need someone on that committee, I’d love to help.”

  The idea of spending time talking about flowers with the women in this neighborhood makes me want to die, but if Bea did this, then I want to do it, too. Let them get used to me. To the idea that I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.

  I can see that Campbell wants to object, probably on the basis of me just living with Eddie rather than being a homeowner myself or whatever, making up some rule that didn’t exist until right this second. I know her type, after all.

  But Emily beams at me. “That would be so fun!”

  Campbell smiles, too, but it takes longer, and when she looks at me, it feels more like she’s baring her teeth. “Super fun.”

  12

  MAY

  I had no idea you could spend over a thousand dollars on fucking solar lamps that look like gaslights.

  But here I am, loading up packages of those lights into the back of Eddie’s SUV, his credit card practically smoking in my wallet. He won’t care, I know—he told me to get “whatever it is Emily has decided she can’t live without”—but I was eating ramen and cereal for just about every meal only a few months ago, so hearing the cashier at Home Depot say, “That’ll be $1023.78,” as I checked out with nothing more than lights made my chest hurt.

  My first week on the Neighborhood Beautification Committee is obviously going really well.

  So far, we’ve had one meeting over at Emily’s house, and there were only five of us there—Emily, Campbell, Caroline, another woman named Anna-Grace who I’d never met, and me. Mostly everyone just drank white wine for an hour and made vague noises about what kinds of things might look good around the neighborhood, and it wasn’t until the last ten minutes or so that Emily suggested the fancy solar lights. “They’d brighten up that front flower bed so much, and if we got enough, we could even use them around the sidewalks!”

  Like an idiot, I’d volunteered to go get them, somehow not grasping that that also meant paying for them and lugging them back to Thornfield Estates.

  Now, as the guy in the orange apron helps me put the last bag in the car, I wish I’d waited for the weekend. This could’ve been a fun trip with Eddie, but it’s a Wednesday afternoon, so he’s at work. He’s at work a lot lately, as he’s had to manage both his contracting business and the Southern M
anors office, and he sometimes doesn’t get home until late at night.

  I’m surprised that I kind of miss him being around. I’d thought that having access to the house, the cars, and the money would assuage any loneliness I might feel, but the house is … big. And still full of Bea’s stuff because god knows I don’t have any stuff of my own to contribute. Maybe that will be the next project I tackle.

  I press the button on the key chain to lower the tailgate of the SUV, and am just turning toward the driver’s side when I hear, “Jane.”

  John is standing there in the parking lot, a plastic bag in his hand, squinting at me in the bright sunlight.

  For a second, I feel like maybe I hallucinated him, because why in the fuck would John be here, but then I remember that I purposely didn’t go to the fancier hardware stores in Mountain Brook, that I drove to this Home Depot in Vestavia because I thought it might be cheaper.

  Old habits, I guess.

  And John’s church is in Vestavia, something I should’ve remembered, but in the weeks since I’ve moved out, it’s been so easy to forget about John altogether.

  Now I ignore him, but I’m flustered, and when I press the button to unlock the car, I hit the alarm instead, the shrill beeping seeming louder than it actually is.

  “Fuck,” I mutter, trying to hit whatever button will make it stop, but then as soon as I find it, John is right there, so close to me that I can smell his cheap deodorant, probably something called “Mountain Lynx,” or “Fresh Iceberg.”

  “I’m actually glad I bumped into you,” he says, and I move back, my shoulder blade hitting the side mirror of the SUV.

  “Well, I’m having the opposite reaction to bumping into you,” I reply, “so I’m—”

  “Someone called the apartment looking for you.”

  I freeze, a numbness starting in my fingertips, spreading up my arms. Which is stupid because it could be anyone. Maybe Roasted wanted to offer me my old job back. I had written down the apartment’s landline as a contact, hadn’t I? And I’d applied for tons of jobs when I first moved here. That had been a long time ago, but still, people could be looking through old applications. There were a million people it could be. It didn’t have to be them.

  But some primal part of me knows.

  “Okay?” I say, but there’s no real bite to it and definitely none of the casual “I-don’t-give-a-fuck,” I was trying to convey. I feel trapped and scared.

  I am trapped and scared.

  “Apparently they were calling from Phoenix.”

  My heart is heavy in my chest now, thudding too fast, too hard. The numbness has spread up to my face, and I’m suddenly afraid my mouth won’t work.

  “They were trying to track down anyone who might know a woman named Helen Burns.”

  John’s tongue flicks out as he licks his lips, and I hate that I can’t control my reaction to this, hate that he’s seeing how freaked out I am. I hate giving him this moment.

  But that name.

  Turning away, I fumble for the door, not bothering with the key fob now, just wanting to unlock my car (Eddie’s car, it’s Eddie’s, none of this is yours) and get away from John.

  “I don’t know anybody by that name,” he goes on, stepping so close that he catches the back of my shoe with the tip of his sneaker, the rubber scraping my ankle.

  “But the way the guy was talking, it sure did sound like you. Said Helen would be in her early twenties now. Short, brown hair, brown eyes. A scar on her right arm.”

  I turn around then, trapped between him and the car, the metal and glass hot against my back. “What did you tell him?”

  John smiles then. He doesn’t look as weaselly and pathetic as he did that day with Eddie. There are no stains on his clothes, and his hair has been combed, and I suddenly have this awful feeling that he didn’t just run into me by chance—that he’s been following me, tracking me all the way to Vestavia, because he wanted to have this confrontation, wanted to be sure it would go the way he wanted.

  The thought of it is somehow worse than any of the creepy shit he did when I lived with him.

  He’s not supposed to exist in this new life. He, and everything that happened in Phoenix, is supposed to be behind me, forever.

  John makes me wait for his answer a few beats too long, seconds in which I feel my stomach sink and my heart race, and I hate him, I hate him, I hate him.

  Then he shrugs. “Told him he had the wrong guy. I don’t know anyone by that name or fitting that description.”

  The relief that floods through me is so sweet it almost hurts, but right on the heels of that is the knowledge that I now owe John Rivers something, and the sweetness curdles in my mouth.

  “Of course, he didn’t really believe me,” John goes on, shoving his hands in his pockets and rocking back on his heels. The fucker is loving this.

  “He gave me his number, told me to call him if anything jogged my memory.”

  Looking down at me, he grins. “And you know, running into you today has jogged—”

  “What do you want?”

  A little of the light dims from his eyes. He wanted to draw this out longer, probably. Wanted to watch me wiggle on the hook. Eddie humiliated him in front of me, and now it’s my turn to suffer, fine. I just want to get out of this giving him the least amount of satisfaction possible.

  “Is it the rent?” I go on, reaching into my purse. There’s a wad of cash stuck in there—my money, not Eddie’s. Left over from dog-walking and pawning stolen shit, money I kept in the bottom of my bag and had planned on keeping forever because I wanted it to remind me of what I’d left behind, because I’d wanted to be the kind of woman who could just have two hundred dollars in a purse and never think about it, never even need to spend it.

  I take it out now, and shove it into John’s hand. “There. It’s actually more than I would’ve owed for my two weeks’ notice, so we’re good.”

  John stares at the wrinkled bills, blinking, and then looks back at me. I don’t know what he’d wanted or expected out of all this.

  Maybe he didn’t even know.

  But the money wasn’t quite it, and I can feel him struggling to gain control of the situation again even as he stuffs the cash in his pocket. “Thanks,” he finally says, and then another smile.

  “And what do you know, just like that, my memory has gone blank again.” He taps the side of his head with one finger. “Funny thing, memory. Comes and goes, I guess.”

  He probably practiced that fucking line in front of a mirror, and normally, I’d call him out, but now I just get in the car, my hands shaking as I slide the key into the ignition.

  When I look in the rearview mirror, I see John walking away toward his own car, and I wait until he’s out of sight to lower my head to the steering wheel, taking deep breaths through my nose.

  John never knew about Phoenix. Or Helen. All that shit was years before I met him at the group home, so when things had gotten bad, when I’d had nowhere else to go, John had seemed safe.

  Or safe enough.

  But I should’ve remembered that no place was ever safe, no person was ever safe.

  Except Eddie, I remind myself. Eddie is safe. Thornfield Estates is safe. You’re safe now.

  But I check my rearview mirror the whole drive home.

  13

  “Girl, if I eat another cheese straw, I am going to “die.”

  Emily takes another cheese straw as she passes me the plate, so I’m not sure her death is all that imminent, but I give her a sympathetic smile. “Same,” I say before tacking on a “girl,” about a beat too late.

  Luckily, Emily doesn’t seem to notice. We’re sitting on the floor in her living room: me, her, Campbell, Anna-Grace, and Landry. I still don’t know their last names or even what streets they live on, but both Anna-Grace and Landry look a lot like the women I already know here in Thornfield Estates. Pretty, thin, good teeth, good jewelry, and a casual way of wearing clothes that I will never be able to mimic. The o
nly thing that sets them apart is that they are both pregnant, Landry slightly further along, her belly rounded underneath her light blue top, Anna-Grace looking like she maybe just ate an extra piece of pizza at lunch. Earlier, I’d heard her tell Emily that they’d already decided to call the baby “Hilliard,” whether it was a girl or a boy, so I shoot her bump a sympathetic glance as I sit on the floor.

  At the last meeting, my first one, I’d worn a Lilly Pulitzer dress and ended up having to perch awkwardly on the couch while the rest of them sprawled gracefully on the hardwood in leggings and drapey tops, their feet bare. I’d expected something a little more formal and fancy, hence the dress, but once again, I’d somehow gotten it wrong.

  Today, however, I am dressed nearly identically to Emily. Both of us are in neutral shades, Emily a sort of sand color, me in an eggshell cream that I know makes me look sallow, but Anna-Grace and Landry aren’t looking at me like I’m a gate-crasher this time, so I guess that’s an improvement.

  Or maybe I somehow proved my worth by buying all those solar lights and not being so gauche as to turn in a receipt.

  In any case, I’m on the floor, too, now, sitting next to Emily on one side of the giant upholstered ottoman she uses as a coffee table. There’s a big wooden tray on it today holding a bucket of ice where our white wine currently sweats, and I think all of it—the ottoman, the tray, the wine bucket, the painted glasses we’re all drinking out of—came from Southern Manors.

  I almost ask, but the last thing I want to do is raise the specter of Bea here and now. No one had said anything at that first meeting, thank god, and I wasn’t about to give them an opportunity to do a little compare and contrast where the two of us were involved.

  “So,” Campbell says, pulling out the monogrammed binder she’d brought last week. “Sweet Jane here got us the new solar lights like a rock star, thank you, Jaaaaaane.”

  I raise my wineglass, smiling at all of them. “No problem!” No problem at all except my ex-roommate threatening me in a Home Depot parking lot, and over a thousand dollars racked up on Eddie’s credit card for something as stupid as lights.