His papers are a mess but she finds what she needs, and by the time seventh grade is over, Bertha has an acceptance letter and a complete free ride to Ivy Ridge until she graduates so long as she maintains a high GPA.
It’s the hardest her father ever hits her, the night he learns what she’s done. Later, she’ll lie in her bed, tongue probing the throbbing place in her mouth where her teeth feel loose, but the pain is nothing. The pain is worth it because she’s built herself a life raft away from the sinking ship of her family.
It’s really what starts it all, changes everything—Ivy Ridge introduces her to a new life, introduces her to Blanche, but more importantly, it introduces her to a new version of herself. The one she didn’t know was there, the one who can make things happen.
The first day is so hot she can feel sweat pooling in her bra, slipping in a slimy trail down her back. Already, she can smell the powdery scent of her deodorant, and she suddenly has the horrible image of wet, yellowed spots under the arms of her brand-new white blouse.
She wants to check, but then what if someone sees her? And then she’s not only carrying the heavy weight of being named Bertha, she’s also the Bertha Who Looks at Her Own Armpits.
No, better to be sweaty than to be that freak.
The campus is gorgeous: brick buildings, violently green lawn, and even though her room isn’t quite as fancy—lots of linoleum, plain twin beds with scarred wooden frames—it still feels like paradise, being away from home, being away from them, and she never wants to leave.
She meets Blanche that first day. They’re not roommates—that comes later—but they live in the same dorm building, and Blanche has assigned herself as the unofficial greeter.
Blanche has the softest hair, and it falls down her back in a perfect smooth and shiny river, the color of coffee. Bertha’s own hair is brown, too, but not this kind of brown, not this deep shade that makes you want to reach out and touch it.
“Bertha?” she asks, wrinkling her nose, and Bertha feels herself curl inward, shoulders rolling in, spine folding. It’s a pose she’s taken a thousand times. If she could just shrink into herself enough, her parents wouldn’t notice her at all.
But Blanche puts a hand on her shoulder, keeping her from cringing. “No,” she says. “That’s not gonna fly. Don’t you have a nickname?”
Bertha has never had a nickname because she’s never had the kind of friends in her life who would give her one, and her parents barely call her anything at all.
Blanche smiles, teeth blindingly white in her tan face. “Bea,” she proclaims. “That sounds better.”
Bea.
It does sound better. It fits.
Bea. She sits up a little straighter, tries tucking her hair behind her ear with the same casual gesture she’d seen Blanche use earlier.
“Perfect.”
And it is.
That spring break, Blanche invites Bea to her family’s house in Orange Beach. Bea had actually never been to the beach before, but as soon as she sinks her toes into the sugar-white sands, she is in love, and this is the only place she ever wants to be, wind in her hair, salt water brushing her ankles.
Blanche laughs at her, wrapping an arm around Bea’s waist. “Okay, it’s pretty here, but it’s just Orange Beach,” she says, and suddenly Bea worries that she’s been too effusive, gushing too much. Country come to town and all that.
But then Blanche splashes her and dashes off into the surf, leaving Bea standing alone.
* * *
Her father dies her junior year.
She doesn’t go back for the funeral.
Later, there’s a voice mail from her mother, and it’s the most lucid she’s ever sounded. Bea had braced herself for screaming, for slurred recriminations, but instead, her mother is kind. Sweet, even. Calls her “Bertha-Bear,” a nickname Bea hates, but hasn’t heard since she was a little girl. Wants her to come home for the summer. Wants to try to fix things now that Daddy is gone.
And she’s shockingly tempted.
It’s Blanche, though, who reminds her she doesn’t owe Mama anything.
Bea hasn’t told Blanche everything about her past, not wanting her friend to know just how shameful it all is, how dark. But Blanche isn’t stupid, and Bea knows she’s picked up some things. “You don’t have to go,” she tells Bea, and Bea sits on her bed, absentmindedly pulling at the loose plastic on her phone case.
“I have to go somewhere for the summer,” Bea replies, and Blanche smiles, plucking the phone out of Bea’s hand.
“Come home with me, then. We have the space, and it’ll be fun!”
It’s amazing to Bea that Blanche can make that offer, that she doesn’t see it as the huge thing that it so clearly is. For Blanche, it’s that easy. She can take Bea under her wing for an entire summer, and no one will mind, no one will think Bea takes up too much space.
So Bea says yes, and it’s the best summer of her life.
Later, when her mother leaves her a voice mail, drunk and screeching about ungrateful daughters, Bea knows she made the right choice.
And if she hadn’t known it then, she would have at the end of the summer, sitting on Blanche’s massive canopy bed, the one with the lace trim and the pillows in all different shades of green.
Blanche is smiling as she fastens the necklace around Bea’s neck. It’s a sterling silver initial, a B on a delicate chain, and Blanche holds up her own identical charm to Bea’s face.
“We match,” she says, and Bea doesn’t know why she suddenly feels like crying.
They’re together their entire high school career, Bea and Blanche, Blanche and Bea.
Even “the Bs” occasionally. Bea loves that.
She sometimes thinks Blanche doesn’t.
* * *
Bea’s acceptance letter comes just a few days after Blanche’s, and she’s so excited that she can’t help but leap off her bed as soon as Blanche comes in after class, squealing, “I got in!”
Blanche smiles at her, but her expression is a little confused and she asks, “Got in where?”
Bea laughs, nudging Blanche’s shoulder. “Um, Birmingham-Southern, obvi,” she says, and it actually takes her a moment to realize that Blanche’s smile has slipped.
“Oh, wow,” Blanche says, but it’s faint, and suddenly Bea knows she’s made a mistake, fucked this up somehow, but she’s not sure how.
“I thought you’d be excited,” she says. “I mean, it’s not like we have to room together there, too.”
Bea laughs to show how stupid that idea would be even though it’s exactly what she’d been thinking they’d do.
Blanche laughs, too, but just like her smile, it’s not real, and when she sits down on the edge of her bed, she says, “I guess I just thought you’d want to go to Randolph-Macon since you got in. And, like, hardly anyone here did. I didn’t.”
Which had been exactly why Bea didn’t want to go to Randolph-Macon. She’d applied because Blanche had, but she hadn’t thought she’d get in, and when she had and Blanche hadn’t, Bea had dismissed it altogether.
But now she stares at Blanche and says, “So … you want me to go to Randolph-Macon?”
Sighing, Blanche starts brushing her hair. It’s shorter now, just below her earlobes, and she’s lightened it. It doesn’t suit her as well as her dark hair did, but Bea had told her she loved it anyway.
“I just think maybe we should each have our own … things, you know?” Blanche says, and then she meets Bea’s eyes in the mirror. “We can’t be ‘the Bs’ forever.”
For the first time, Bea realizes that Blanche isn’t wearing her B necklace. Probably hasn’t worn it in weeks, and Bea just hasn’t noticed.
She feels her own pendant practically burning against her skin.
“Right,” she says with a little laugh. “You’re right. That would be stupid.”
Blanche is clearly relieved, her smile brightening into something genuine as she puts her brush down and turns around.
&nb
sp; “I knew you’d get it,” she says.
So Blanche goes off to Birmingham-Southern, and Bea heads to Randolph-Macon, and they keep up on Facebook, through texts, but Bea doesn’t go back to Birmingham. She gets an internship with an interior design firm her junior year, and then she’s in Atlanta, and just two years after college, thanks to the contacts she’s made, she’s launching Southern Manors.
She doesn’t see Blanche again until they’re twenty-six, and finally, finally, Bea makes the trek back to Alabama, not even bothering to let her mother know she’s there.
There’s a mini-reunion in Five Points, some bar that’s too loud, the drinks too expensive, but it’s fun, being back in Birmingham, seeing the Ivy Ridge girls again. Seeing Blanche.
Whatever weirdness there’s been between the two of them vanishes the second they see each other, Blanche squealing and throwing her arms out to hug Bea.
Her hair is shorter, almost severe, but it’s pretty with her slightly elfin features, and Bea has a brief moment of wondering if she should try something similar. But no, what looks good on Blanche won’t always look good on Bea, and besides, Bea is looking pretty good herself these days as Blanche immediately points out with a shrieked, “You bitch, look at you!”
The other girls also want to know what Bea’s secret is, how she looks so great, who cuts her hair, all of that. The truth is so simple, though.
She’s rich now.
When they’d known her at Ivy, she was lacking their patina of wealth and class, so of course she seems different to them now, of course she now looks prettier and better.
But Blanche is the real star of the show because she’s getting married.
Blanche’s engagement ring is huge, an emerald-cut diamond on a platinum band, and Bea has seen pictures of Blanche’s fiancé on social media. He’s blond and tall, and reminds Bea of the boys she’d met going to parties at Hampden-Sydney, the boys’ college near Randolph-Macon. He looks older than twenty-eight and has probably looked like that since he was a teenager, earlier even. There’s a certain type of boy who seems to be born with a golf club in his hand, and that’s Tripp Ingraham.
“Richard Ingraham the Third,” Blanche tells them, and Bea hides a smile behind her drink because of course Blanche is marrying a “the third,” who’s called Tripp.
The wedding is in the spring, and they’re building a house, a big one, in a new neighborhood called Thornfield Estates.
Bea looks it up.
There’s nothing to it, really. It’s mostly a bunch of drawings of what it will look like one day, all manicured lawns and houses that are ostentatiously huge, but built like older, more modest houses. No white stucco here, just brick and tasteful navy shutters.
Houses start in the seven figures, but Bea is rich now, and why not settle in Birmingham again? Her business can be run from anywhere, and while she likes Atlanta, she hasn’t really made a life there.
But buying a house that big in a neighborhood clearly meant for families feels silly and … obvious.
So she gets a town house in Mountain Brook, then an office in Homewood, and Southern Manors keeps growing even as she helps Blanche with her wedding plans.
“It’s so good to have you back,” Blanche says one night as they sit in Blanche and Tripp’s living room, a bottle of white wine on the coffee table in front of them, their shoes off, bridal magazines all around them. “I’ve missed you.”
Bea knows that she means it, and smiling, she reaches into her purse. “I’m glad you said that.”
The necklace is silver, a little bee dangling from the chain, and Blanche laughs delightedly, clapping her hands. “Omigod,” she says all in a rush. “The cutest!”
This time, Bea puts the necklace on Blanche, and later, when she asks if she can donate Southern Manors’ décor for the reception, Blanche says yes easily, just like Bea had known she would.
It’s good exposure for the company, which already does great business, but that’s not enough for Bea. She wants it to matter here, in Birmingham.
She wants it to matter to Blanche.
And it does, in the end, but not in the way Bea had wanted.
The night of the benefit, of Bea’s biggest triumph, Blanche rides with Bea and her mother in the car on the way over, and when they first get into the ballroom, once they’ve shown Bea’s mother to her table, Blanche looks around at everything Bea has made.
“You know, I never realized how much of this stuff looks like it came straight from my house,” Blanche says.
She’s smiling when she says it, her fingers going to the little bee around her neck, but Bea sees her eyes.
Sees what she’s thinking.
“Does it?” Bea says. “I never noticed.”
PART IX
JANE
29
It must be the stupidest thing I’ve ever done, going to Tripp Ingraham’s house. And that’s really saying something for me.
He’s been charged with murder. I am willingly going to an accused murderer’s house.
I say that to myself over and over again as I jog down the street, trying to look like it’s just a regular day, just regular Jane out for her morning run, certainly not about to do something so shit-stupid she might die.
His texts kept me up all night last night, and I can’t explain it, but I need to hear what he says.
Because something in me tells me he’s telling the truth.
Tripp is so many ugly things—a drunk, a lech, a Republican—but murderer still doesn’t fit on him. I’ve known violent men. I’ve been around too many of them, and I learned how to sniff them out early. I had to.
Tripp just … doesn’t smell right.
I hurry up his driveway, praying to god that no one catches a glimpse of me. His bushes are overgrown, dead leaves and flower petals strewn along the walk at the front of the house, and if I’d thought his place seemed dark and sad before, it’s nothing compared to how it feels now.
After ringing the doorbell, I wait for so long that I think he’s not going to answer, and I’m uncomfortably aware that anyone could come by and see me standing there. This neighborhood seemed to have eyes everywhere, and Tripp is not supposed to have visitors, not without it being cleared through the police first.
Like I was going to do that.
Just as I’m about to turn away, the door opens.
Tripp stares at me, wearing a plaid bathrobe tied loosely at the waist and a pair of matching pajama pants. His skin has gone grayish, his eyes nearly swallowed up by the hollows around them. Tripp looked rough before, but now, he looks half-dead, and I almost feel sorry for him.
“You came,” he says, his voice low and flat. “I honestly didn’t think you would. Don’t just stand there. Come in.”
He ushers me inside, and I’m hit with the smell immediately. Old food, garbage that hasn’t been taken out, and booze.
So much booze.
“Sorry I didn’t clean up,” he says, gesturing for me to head into the living room, but I shake my head, folding my arms over my chest.
“Whatever you have to say to me, go ahead and say it here. Say it fast.”
He lowers his gaze back to mine, the corner of his mouth lifting slightly, and there it is again—a shadow version of that Tripp, sure, washed out and barely there, but still.
“Don’t want to spend too much time in the murderer’s lair. I get it.”
I’d tell him not to be a dick, but that’s like telling him not to breathe, so instead, I just glare at him, waiting, and eventually he sighs.
* * *
“You must’ve felt like you won the goddamn lottery when you met Eddie Rochester,” he muses. “Rich, good-looking, charming as hell. But let me tell you something, Jane.”
He leans in close, and I catch the ripe odor of him, the stink of unwashed skin and unbrushed teeth. “He’s poison. His wife was poison, too, so at least they were well-matched in that.”
Another smirk. “If I were you, I’d leave here, get whateve
r shit you can out of the house, and hit the road. Leave Eddie, Birmingham, all of it.” He waves one hand, sagging back against the door. “Sure as fuck wish I’d listened when Blanche said we should move.”
“Blanche wanted to move?” I ask incredulously, and he nods.
“Yeah. Two weeks before she died. Started talking about how she needed to be somewhere else, that she felt like Bea was suffocating her. Wasn’t enough that Bea took her whole goddamn life, you know? She had to be right up under us all the time, too. And Eddie. Fucker was always over at the house, seemed like.”
“But you said you didn’t really think anything was happening there.”
“Still didn’t mean I liked it. Bea didn’t like it, either. It’s why she invited Blanche to the lake that weekend. To ‘hash it out.’ I asked Blanche what that meant, and she said they were at … I don’t know. Like a crossroads or something. That she wasn’t sure they could still be friends. And I thought maybe it was about…”
His throat moves, but he doesn’t say anything, and when he reaches up to rub his unshaven jaw, I see his hands are shaking slightly.
“Things had been fucked up for a while,” he finally says. “Between Blanche and Bea, between Bea and Eddie, me and Blanche. It was all just toxic by that point. Which is why I was confused as fuck when Bea called me and asked me to come up.”
My blood turns cold. “What?”
Sighing, Tripp scrubs a hand over his face. “That weekend,” he says, sounding tired. “Bea called me that Friday night, said she thought Blanche needed me. So I got in the car, drove up to the lake, and yes, we all had a lot to drink, but I passed out in the house. I was never on that goddamn boat. I woke up the next morning in the guest bedroom, feeling like someone had jammed a railroad spike through my skull, and neither Bea nor Blanche were there. I assumed they’d taken the boat out early, and I left. Drove back home.”
His voice cracks and he takes a second to clear his throat, rubbing his face again. “I didn’t know. I went home that morning, and I watched fucking golf on TV, and all that time, they were both … they were already dead. They were … rotting in that water…”
The Wife Upstairs Page 20
