The Wife Upstairs

by Rachel Hawkins

  She circulates the rest of the night, and that was the mistake. She should’ve kept an eye on her mother, should’ve insisted she go on up to her room.

  And, of course, she doesn’t realize that mistake until she’s on the dais, giving a speech, thanking everyone for coming, for making Southern Manors a success. For making her a success.

  “Southern Manors is a family,” she says, her voice ringing over the sound system. “And the seed for this company started with my own family. With my mother’s antiques. My grandmother’s quilts. My father’s love of a weighty bourbon glass.”

  The crowd laughs politely, and Bea clutches the edge of the podium, thinking that her father never gave a shit what he was drinking out of so long as the alcohol kept flowing. That she’d never met her grandmother, that anything of any value in her mother’s home had been sold off before she’d even been born.

  She knows these things are lies, but they’re lies she’s been telling for so long, it doesn’t even occur to her Mama won’t go along with the act. Why wouldn’t she when it’s these very lies that keep her in booze and Neiman Marcus?

  Bea can see it playing out before it even happens, which is what makes it even worse when there’s nothing she can do to stop it. She sees her mother rise from her seat, the stagger in her step, the way she sways even when she’s standing still. Bea’s throat clenches and her heart sinks somewhere near her knees.

  “Bertha, what in god’s name are you talking about?” Mama calls, her voice ringing out over the crowd even though the words are slurred.

  A few heads turn her way, and Bea remembers that no one here, no one but Blanche knows it’s her real name.

  “Her daddy didn’t know a bourbon glass from a beer bottle,” Mama goes on cheerfully, like this is all some funny anecdote, like she’s not punching holes in everything Bea has built.

  Authenticity. It’s one of the fucking buzzwords on all their marketing materials, and here her mother is, blowing it all to shit.

  “And her Nana Frances died before—”

  It seems to happen in slow motion. Mama turning to regale her tablemates, the waiter moving forward at the same time, tray of champagne glasses lifted high. Not just any glasses, of course, but Southern Manors’ glasses, little champagne coupes shaped like peach halves, complete with glass leaves.

  The collision is almost balletic, almost. Mama stepping on the hem of her dress, the waiter attempting to both catch her and somehow hang on to his tray.

  Mama hits the ground to the sound of shattering glass, the waiter awkwardly crouched next to her, finally abandoning his tray to grip Mama’s elbow.

  And Mama is laughing.

  There’s a bloom of bright red blood on the heel of her hand, and she wipes it absentmindedly on her dress as Bea looks on, frozen.

  “Whoopsy-daisy!” Mama calls out, laughing again, her face red, and still, Bea can’t move, can’t make herself cross the ballroom to see if she’s okay or to help her to her feet.

  It’s Blanche who does that.

  Years later, Bea will remember that so vividly, the way Blanche had helped Mama to her feet, babbling about these old carpets, about new shoes, giving Mama all the excuses she could want for what’s just happened as if it isn’t painfully clear just how drunk she is.

  Only when Blanche glances over at her does Bea feel her limbs start to work again, and she makes her way over to the two of them, a rictus smile on her face as she takes her mother’s other arm.

  “Let’s get you upstairs,” she says, and her mother, still smiling and floating happily on her cloud of booze and god knows what else, lets herself be led from the room like a child.

  Later, Bea and Blanche sit in the living room of Bea’s suite. Blanche has a glass of wine, but Bea is drinking bottled water, unable to even stand the smell of alcohol right now.

  “Why didn’t you tell me it was this bad?” Blanche asks, and what can Bea say? That she didn’t know it was this bad? That’s a lie. That she didn’t want anyone else to know how bad it really was?

  That’s closer to the truth, but it feels too hard to admit, too shameful and big. Instead, she shrugs and says, “I’ve been so busy, I haven’t spent much time with her lately. I always knew she liked her evening cocktail, but this…”

  She lets her gaze go slightly vague as though she’s never contemplated a world in which her mother gets drunk and embarrasses her, as if that hadn’t been a regular part of her childhood.

  “Maybe she needs some help,” Blanche suggests. She tilts her wineglass up to drink more, then pauses, looks at the glass, and seems to realize that discussing rehab while guzzling pinot grigio might send a mixed message.

  “I’ll go back down to Calera,” Bea finally says, setting her water bottle down on the bar with a thump. “Look after her a bit, get her back on the right path.”

  Blanche’s brow wrinkles. “Are you sure—” she starts, but Bea cuts her off with a wave of her hand.

  “I know what she needs.” No one knew her mother like Bea.

  JANUARY, SIX MONTHS AFTER BLANCHE

  Eddie didn’t come back for nearly a week after we slept together.

  I’d expected it, in a way. I knew I’d fucked up, hinting about how he could trust me, but as the days slid by, I’d started to wonder if maybe this was finally it. Maybe he was just going to let my supplies run out, let me starve to death up here.

  I couldn’t stop picturing it, my skeleton on this comfy bed with its white sheets, some new family moving in one day, finding me there. Maybe I’d become a ghost. Maybe I’d haunt this house forever, wailing away upstairs.

  When I’d sold my mother’s house, the one she died in, I’d wondered whether her spirit was still there, wandering the halls.

  But then, today, Eddie came back.

  He had supplies this time and more books, like he’d felt guilty. I tried to decide whether it was for the sex or for staying away, but I couldn’t read him.

  He just stood there for the longest time, looking at me as I sat on the bed, and I held my breath, waiting.

  And then he crossed the room, scooping me up in his arms with this hungry sound, kissing me so hard I felt my teeth press against my lips, drawing the littlest bit of blood.

  It had worked. Reminding him of what we were to each other. What we could be again. Even with my fuckup, he’d come back, and he still wanted me.

  And I wanted him. Just as much, just as badly.

  In spite of everything.

  What the fuck am I going to do with that?

  FEBRUARY, SEVEN MONTHS AFTER BLANCHE

  Eddie was different today.

  I couldn’t tell you why or how, just that something seemed off. He was rumpled again, like he hadn’t been sleeping well, and for the first time in weeks, we didn’t have sex. He just dropped off the water and food, and said he had to go.

  There was a drop of blood on his shirt. Just on the cuff. A scrape, too, there on his wrist.

  I asked him what happened, but he said it was nothing.

  He didn’t look me in the eyes, though.

  * * *

  I hate this, feeling like I’m tracking his moods like the weather. Things were good, things were working, he had started to trust me. And now he’s distant again, dropping off food, barely stopping to talk.

  He looks better each time he comes in, too. More like himself.

  Like the monster I witnessed on Smith Lake is slowly re-forming into the Eddie I fell for, the Eddie I married.

  He’s more confident in his skin now, and I wonder what has changed.

  * * *

  A girl.

  Of course, there’s a girl.

  Eddie didn’t tell me. I just know.

  Today, when he came in, he was the closest to the Eddie I met in Hawaii that I’ve seen since that terrible night. Handsome. Competent. In control.

  He couldn’t pull off that kind of turnaround by himself. I know Eddie. He is at his best when he has someone to reflect off of, someone to b
e someone for.

  I wondered who she was. Some woman from the neighborhood? Someone I knew? I try to imagine him with Emily or Campbell, with Landry Cole, but it’s almost impossible. Eddie didn’t like those women, always said they were boring compared to me.

  At night, I lie on the bed, and I try to picture her, this new woman I know Eddie has in his thrall.

  Is she younger than me? Prettier?

  Does she know what he is?

  * * *

  When Eddie came up tonight, he was a little drunk.

  That was a first.

  He brought me a bottle of wine, too.

  Okay, a small box of wine, the type that holds three glasses. No corkscrews or glass for me, I guess, but still, I hadn’t had wine in so long, and the first sip went straight to my head.

  Eddie sat on the bed next to me, his hand on my thigh, but he didn’t make any move to take it further than that, even though I wanted him to.

  I hated myself for it, but I still wanted him to.

  “You’re seeing someone, aren’t you?” I asked.

  I was drunk enough to say it.

  He was drunk enough to answer.

  “I am.”

  I’d been expecting that, but it still slammed into me, the words causing physical pain.

  I felt like I couldn’t breathe.

  “Who?” I asked, and his eyes clouded over a little as he looked away, his hand sliding from my leg.

  “No one you know.”

  That was all he would say.

  He left right after that, brushing a kiss against my temple, and now I’m lying here, tears soaking my pillow.

  They should be tears of fear. If Eddie has met someone, how much longer is he going to keep me in here? Surely, I’m a huge liability to him now.

  But I’m not afraid.

  I’m … angry.

  Hurt.

  Jealous.

  * * *

  Her name is Jane.

  I got Eddie to tell me that much.

  Today when he came in, I had just gotten out of the shower. That wasn’t intentional—I never know when he’ll show up, after all—but it still worked in my favor.

  As soon as he saw me, standing there in a towel, his eyes went dark, hungry, and it was the easiest thing in the world to let the towel drop to the floor, to open my arms to him.

  Afterward, he was like he always is after sex—looser, more vulnerable.

  Easier.

  “What she’s like?” I asked, and almost without thinking, he replied, “Jane?”

  Jane.

  Her name is Jane. A simple one. A plain one. Is she a simple, plain girl?

  “She’s…” He trailed off, and I saw the guilt flicker across his face as he summoned her up in his mind even as he lay here in my bed.

  “She’s nothing like you,” he finally said, and I wondered how he meant that.

  But mostly, I wondered about her.

  Was she downstairs in my house even now? Did she think about me, Eddie’s poor dead wife?

  Did she hate me?

  I would hate me if I were someone else.

  * * *

  APRIL, NINE MONTHS AFTER BLANCHE

  It was stupid, the thing with the bed. I just wondered if she’d be able to hear it, Jane, somewhere below. I needed her to know that all of this—the house, the husband—are still mine.

  Eddie asked me about it when he came up later. “Were you making noise up here?”

  I spread my hands wide, inviting him to take in the room, to take in me. “How could I?” I asked, and he shook his head.

  “Right,” he said, and turned to go.

  I took his hand.

  He didn’t leave.

  * * *

  MAY, TEN MONTHS AFTER BLANCHE

  The days are relentlessly ticking by and I feel sanity slipping from me again. How has it been so many months since Blanche and I disappeared? And why am I still up here?

  Sometimes it feels like I have my husband back. Some mornings I wake up convinced that this is the day that he’s going to tell me it’s all over, that I can come out of hiding now—until I remember her.

  I know a lot about Jane now. She was a foster kid, she lived in Arizona. Eddie met her because she was walking dogs in the neighborhood, but she lived in Center Point with some creep. She has brown hair, like me, but a few shades lighter. Apparently, she’s funny.

  And she’s twenty-three.

  Twenty-three.

  There was a softness in Eddie’s face when he talked about her. It wasn’t a look I was familiar with. Eddie had looked at me with hunger, with anger, with admiration, but never softness.

  What does that mean? Does he love her?

  Does he still love me?

  Because I think I still love him. In spite of it all.

  * * *

  JUNE, ELEVEN MONTHS AFTER BLANCHE

  I fucked up again.

  Eddie came in today. He kissed me, he took me to the bed, he fucked me, and after it was over, I thought about him going back downstairs, back to Jane, and I said the thing that has been sitting inside me for weeks now.

  “So is it hard, having a new girlfriend when you have a wife upstairs?”

  He’d been getting dressed, and I saw the muscles in his back tense.

  I shouldn’t have said it.

  I’d had to say it.

  And then he looked at me and said, “Is that really a problem you want me to focus on, Bea? Do you really want me to think about how I might solve it?”

  He left right after that.

  FUCK.

  * * *

  Still no sign of him. It’s been days. Is he just leaving me to die? That would certainly be an easy solution to his “problem.”

  For him.

  Not so easy for me.

  I’ve got my little hoard of food and water, some of it hidden under the bed, and I’ve started counting it obsessively, even though I know the counting is bad, and I shouldn’t.

  But I don’t know what else to do. It’s the only thing I feel in control of right now.

  * * *

  He came back today. Four days he left me on my own. I was so grateful to see him that I threw myself into his arms, breathing him in, and I felt his arms tighten around me, heard him murmur my name against my hair.

  He’d missed me, too. But will it be enough?

  * * *

  JULY, A YEAR AFTER BLANCHE

  This is my last entry. Eddie is in the shower, and I have to hurry.

  Jane, I know you’ll find this. Eddie cares about you, respects you, and that means you’re smart. I’m putting this book in the pocket of his blazer. It’s too warm for him to put it back on when he goes downstairs, so I’m hoping he won’t even feel that it’s there.

  Regardless, I have to risk it. For myself, and for you, Jane. Please. Please find this. Please find me. I can’t survive here any longer.

  I’m upstairs. You have to walk to the end of the hall and go through a closet. I don’t know the code to the door, but I think it might be the same as the code to the lake house, my birthday. Eddie isn’t good with numbers.

  Jane, I am begging you.

  Save me. Save yourself.

  Please.

  Her childhood was so absurdly Southern gothic she sometimes thinks she must’ve made it up.

  But no, she actually made her past blander and more boring, a pastel replica of Blanche’s childhood. That was really for the best, though. No one wanted to know about the Too Big House in the middle of West Alabama. The dad who drank too much, whose fists were fast even when he was drunk. The mom who’d checked out on vodka and Klonopin so early in Bea’s childhood that she couldn’t remember her mother ever playing with or reading to her.

  She hadn’t been Bea then, of course. Back then, she was still Bertha. Bertha Lydia Mason. Bertha had been her dad’s mother, Lydia her mother’s, and she’d always thought they could’ve at least done her the courtesy of reversing the names. Being a Lydia would not have been as bad
as being a Bertha.

  But that was hardly the worst thing her parents did.

  She doesn’t remember the first time her father hit her. It’s as ingrained a part of her childhood as the canopy bed in her room, the place in her bathroom where the wallpaper never laid flat. Just there, like background noise. When he was drunk, when he was angry, sometimes, she thought, just when he was bored.

  There had been money in her family at some point, close enough that her father remembered growing up with it and keenly felt the lack of it. It was money that had built the house, sometime in the twenties, but by Blanche’s childhood, the house was practically sinking into the red Alabama dirt around it. There was no money for things like repairing the roof, and when a leak started, when the ceiling literally began to rot away in an upstairs bedroom, Bertha’s parents just closed that door and pretended it wasn’t happening.

  Bertha learns to do that, too. It’s easier, closing a door, creating a new reality.

  She goes to the local public school because there isn’t anything else in her tiny town. Not just a public school, a county school, which, for a reason she never really understands, bothers her father more than a city school would.

  Her mother had gone to boarding school near Birmingham. Ivy Ridge. She talks about it a lot, makes it seem like a paradise on earth, full of pretty girls in plaid skirts, redbrick buildings, tall, old trees.

  Bertha looks it up on the computers at school, and it is even more beautiful than her mother had made it seem.

  It is the easiest thing in the world to fill out an application.

  Harder to get financial aid since her parents are supposed to apply for that, and they need tax returns and all sorts of other adult things Bertha doesn’t really know anything about. But she’s smart and resourceful, and one night after her father is passed out in what her mother still insists on calling the parlor, Bertha sneaks into his desk.