The Lost

by Cole McCade

  She didn’t like Elijah outside in this heat, but Jacob had insisted. He’d wanted to show their newborn son off like a head of prize cattle. He’d said it was the entire reason for the party, to welcome the newest addition to their family, but the real reason was the same as it had always been: kissing ass. Only Jacob called it networking, but it was the same. Slimy schmoozing and glad-handing and little wink-wink nudge-nudge implications of you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.

  After the first half-hour of politely obligatory, syrupy cooing, everyone had lost interest in the baby—and in Leigh, after Jacob was done parading her around on his arm while she recited forced greetings and pretended to remember where she’d met so-and-so at what party or gala or event. That was fine. She liked it that way. She had her own pastel cardigan in a shade of green Jacob had said went well with her hair, which had basically been an order to wear it…but she could count the things she had in common with these people on one hand, and with just the right perfectly manicured finger.

  She supposed if she were a better wife, she’d Betty Draper the shit out of this party: glide and mingle with charm and elegant poise, so that everyone could see how well Jacob had trained his wife and believe that maybe, just maybe, his dick was big enough for a juicy promotion. Jacob loved his work. It made him feel like an alpha male, when it was really nothing but playing imaginary games with very real money, and wiggling through loopholes in the law to come out golden when those games failed. These people were like mayflies, she thought as she watched them buzz and chatter around each other. Pursuing life with such deep urgency, making so much of money and cars and such trivial things, yet only waiting to be snuffed out so quickly, forgotten and unimportant.

  Elijah gurgled, and Leigh sank down into her patio chair and reached in to brush his fine dark skim of hair back from his brow—then frowned. His skin was too warm, too dry. “Hey,” she whispered, leaning over the bassinet, smiling as he grabbed at her hand with uncoordinated movements and crossed eyes, and succeeded in latching on to a finger. “You okay there?”

  His only answer was a burbling croon, and a kick of little bootied feet. The nanny had dressed him up in a cute tiny shorts suit with a ribbon at the throat and matching knit booties, but right now it looked like it was smothering him. Leigh loosened the ribbon, tugging it open around his velvet-soft, chubby neck and parting the V-neck of the shirt so he could breathe.

  “Better?” She tickled under his chin and was rewarded with the sweetest giggle, his eyes scrunching up. But he was still too warm for her comfort, and he’d be getting hungry soon. She’d nurse him herself, but her milk had dried up within two weeks of Elijah’s birth, after Jacob had hired a nanny who could wet nurse and insisted she do all the work so Leigh ‘wouldn’t strain herself.’ At this point she was starting to think strain herself was synonymous with raise her son. She couldn’t turn around without bumping into Brittany, always hovering like Elijah was her child and Leigh was just a visitor, the unreliable aunt who brought toys and smothering kisses but couldn’t be trusted with the health and well-being of a two-month-old little boy.

  And Leigh let her. She let her, and she wasn’t sure why.

  Maybe this was what being normal was all about.

  Brittany was supposed to be close by, working double duty as waitress and topping off everyone’s drinks, but when Leigh scanned the milling bodies she didn’t see the glint of sunlight off the nanny’s tawny brown hair. No sign of Jacob, either, when he should be making himself the center of attention and lapping up the false praise like a dog. Brittany was probably inside, mixing a fresh batch of drinks. Jacob…

  She was starting to care less and less where Jacob was.

  Standing, Leigh lifted Elijah from his bassinet and tugged the patio door open. With one last glance over her shoulder, she slipped into the coolly air-conditioned townhouse. She doubted anyone would notice if she disappeared. She was wallpaper, decorative but not really useful. Maybe she could slip inside, hand Elijah over to Brittany, then shut herself in the upstairs bedroom with a book or, God, even some mindless iPhone game. She’d take anything but this mind-numbing idleness and ordinary banality that masqueraded as socializing.

  Brittany wasn’t in the kitchen. Wasn’t in Elijah’s room, either. When Leigh knocked at the adjoining room set aside for the live-in help, there came no answer; the door swung loosely on its hinges. She frowned and settled Elijah in his crib. Maybe Brittany had run out to the store. Fuck it. Leigh’s learned helplessness hadn’t run so deep that she couldn’t warm a bottle of formula to hold him over until he could have the real thing, and it was about time she got to do something for her own damned son without seeing that ingratiating, patronizing smile while Brittany took the diapers or toys or bottles from her hand as if she couldn’t even be trusted to hold them.

  She left Elijah batting at his mobile of pink and blue plastic stars, and headed back to the kitchen. Retrieving a bottle of liquid formula from the fridge, she read the directions on the back. Wash hands properly before handling formula; heat bottle in warm water for fifteen minutes. Got it. Easy enough. She soaped and rinsed her hands in the sink, fished a clean bottle from the cabinet, and screwed the tops off both the bottle and the formula.

  Then stopped, when she heard a giggle from upstairs.

  Her hands curled against the bottle, the Gerber logo digging into her palm. There it was again. Brittany’s voice, giggling her snide little titter. Saying something indistinct, followed by a male voice, garbled until it sounded like Charlie Brown’s teacher upstairs, but the cadence was familiar enough. Leigh stilled. The heavy thumping behind her ribs couldn’t be her heart; her heart wasn’t in the center of her chest, wasn’t this angry fist pounding against her sternum and threatening to crack it. Again that giggle—such a girlish little giggle, flirtatious and coy and familiar because she’d heard it a thousand times before but had told herself it was just another barely-legal girl being a barely-legal girl, like she’d once been.

  She wasn’t sure how she’d come to the foot of the stairs. She’d been standing in the kitchen just a moment ago. The empty bottle was still clutched in her hand, but now she was at the foot of the spiral stairs and staring upward with no recollection of how she’d gotten there. Numb, she listened as the sounds filtered down from above: Jacob’s voice. The soft smack of kissing lips. A little hitch of sound, a gasp, all those calculated noises designed to make a man feel like he was everything, too much, and she just couldn’t contain herself.

  Don’t look, she told herself.

  She wasn’t supposed to look. She knew that. She was supposed to look the other way the way her mother had looked the other way. Bottle it all up and never see anything that might force her to accept it was real. Those were the rules. As long as she didn’t look then it wasn’t happening, and she could go drink her feelings and try to buy happiness in tennis bracelets and evening gowns and diamond earrings while every emotion in her soul shriveled and died.

  Don’t. Look.

  But her hand was on the stair rail, her foot on the top step. Then another step. Another, because she had to look, because she had to know, because she never did what was expected of her. When she got upstairs she’d find anything other than the pictures her mind was painting, of Brittany’s arms around her husband’s neck and that possessive leer on his lips while he nuzzled her neck and called her baby girl. Women’s names didn’t matter as long as he could spread their legs and whisper yeah, baby girl, take it, take it.

  Later she would call herself a fool, for not seeing it before. The knowing glances. The long lunches Brittany took while Jacob was at work. The weekend mornings when Leigh woke and her husband’s side of the bed was already cold while, downstairs, she heard the soft intimate murmur of voices, the rattle of dishes, and Elijah’s sleepy, hungry whimpers. The nuclear family that consisted of everyone but the egg carrier, who’d stopped being useful as soon as she’d spat out a son.

  But in the now, in this moment, she
called herself paranoid. Asked herself, too, why she even cared. She didn’t love him. She never had. She shouldn’t care what he did, save that it was so fucking unfair that he got to do everything he wanted while keeping a stranglehold on her leash.

  Her foot creaked on the top step. She’d thought that would make the noise stop, would bring those voices to a halt, but they didn’t even hear her because she didn’t matter. Not when she knew that rhythmic slap-slap-slap, and knew someone was saying peek-a-boo between Jacob’s thighs; every moan past Brittany’s lips was a hello to that horrible wrinkled thing that was good for nothing.

  Except it had given her Elijah, the one pure thing she could love when she hated herself more and more with every masochistic step toward the bedroom door.

  Hand on the door. Don’t open it. But she was outside her own body, had been from the moment she’d heard that giggle—detached and floating like her head was a balloon held on by the thinnest string, waiting to drift away. Her body moved on its own, and pushed the door open on a bedroom illuminated in sunshafts of gold falling across the sheets in beautiful patterns that turned the hideous animal thing before her into the most grotesque work of art she’d ever seen.

  Dimly she thought, I never realized just how ugly sex really is. Awkward and ungainly, with his lips flapping, spittle flying, and her tight little cheerleader’s tummy scrunching into wrinkled rolls while they jerked and jittered and rutted and reeled clumsily back and forth. Brittany spraddled on her hands and knees, with the freckles over her shoulders gleaming pretty on her over-tanned skin while her stretched lips pulled into a blank, slack grimace that Leigh thought was supposed to be pleasure. Jacob’s belly rested on her back, and his fly flopped in rhythm with his clacking belt buckle. The carotid artery in his throat throbbed as he grunted and strained and huffed and puffed like the Big Bad Wolf with a bad case of asthma.

  To them, they were probably beautiful. Lost. Because in the moment, when it felt just right, everything was perfect and it didn’t matter if you looked like shaved monkeys groping at each other when inside, you were transcendent and rising higher, higher with every moment. Leigh watched them, so unaware of her standing there in the doorway, so wrapped up in each other that the sky could have fallen and they’d just keep slapping their bodies together with that wet meaty smack.

  And Leigh laughed.

  It didn’t sound like her voice. It sounded like the voice of a little girl gone mad and ready to jump off a cliff; it sounded like the voice of a shrieking lunatic, bouncing off the padded walls and giggling with deranged, sweet-whispered glee. It was the voice of the thing that had control of her body right now, while Leigh—the real Leigh, the scared Leigh, the stunned Leigh, the hurt Leigh—hid behind the joker’s mask of that crazed little girl’s smile and laughed and laughed and laughed.

  Jacob and Brittany broke apart with stunned cries; Brittany scrambled for the sheet and pulled it up to cover herself, cover her wet sticky cunt dripping with the things Jacob had done to her and drooling like a dull stupid mouth. Jacob staggered to his feet, fumbling with his slacks.

  “Clarissa—”

  He started toward her. She jerked back, flinching, retreating from the doorway. “Don’t you fucking come near me.”

  Brittany whimpered. “Mrs. van Zandt, I’m so—”

  “Sorry?” Leigh snarled, even as that lunatic grin cut deeper and deeper into her face until it felt frozen that way. “You’re going to say you’re sorry, right? Say you’re sorry. Say you’re fucking sorry!”

  But the girl only trembled and stared, her eyes wide and stark, her skin paling.

  “I…I…”

  Jacob spread his hands and took another step closer. The great fucking negotiator, with that steady soothing voice like he was going to tame the goddamned lioness roaring in her heart and clawing in her gut. “Now calm down, baby girl. I know what this looks like—”

  “You stay the fuck back. Don’t you fucking touch me.” She squirmed away from his reaching hands, flattening herself against the wall, but he tried to cage her, pressing in. She threw the empty bottle at him. “I said don’t touch me!” she screamed, then shoved him and darted down the stairs with his voice chasing her: half plea, half growl.

  “Clarissa!”

  She didn’t stop. She ran; she ran like an ill wind blowing, caught up in her own tempest and ready to burst out onto that patio and scream until the music came to a halt and everyone stared and saw her for what she really was: this Raggedy Ann doll with nothing inside but soft pulp and no substance, and stuffing all made of bitter dirty lies.

  She’d given up every last bit of brightness inside her, made a deal with the devil, so she could keep the promise her mother and her social station and the pressures of life had made for her, and for what? For what, when the moment she’d turned her back he was on the fucking nanny as if nothing Leigh had given up had ever mattered?

  Jacob’s steps on the stairs. No—no, she wasn’t going to let him talk this away in that way he had, that smoothed everything out like waves washing away sand castles one word at a time. She wasn’t going to listen when his voice was needles in her ears, and all she heard was baby girl, baby girl, grunting while he stuck that fat ugly cock into Brittany. She stumbled away, crashed into the display case against the wall, and grabbed at the glass-walled door to right herself. The ornamental knives and antique guns inside clattered, several falling off their pegs to the velvet-lined shelves.

  The guns.

  Leigh grappled the case open and fumbled for a revolver, a Colt with a mother-of-pearl handle, and flipped the chamber open. Three rounds. She didn’t even know if it would fire, but she didn’t care. She whirled, finger on the trigger, and pointed the gun at Jacob just as he hit the bottom step with Brittany trailing after him, wrapped up in a sheet like the Greek goddess of whores.

  “Wait,” Jacob panted. “Just wait, we can—whoa.”

  His hands came up to either side of his head. Brittany stumbled and clutched the stair rail, babbling. “Oh God. Oh God, oh God, oh God…”

  “Shut up. Just shut up.” Leigh swung the trembling barrel of the revolver between her husband and the fucking nanny, then back to him. Something inside her snapped, cracking her numbness to pieces until her tears bled out and filled her up and ran over. Jacob’s face was just a hazy smudge, and she could almost pretend the remorse in his watercolor eyes was real. “Jacob…”

  “I’m sorry,” he gasped, then backed up sharply as she advanced with the gun, forcing him to retreat up the stairs, talking all the way with his fucking explanations. “It was just a slip of judgment, I never meant to hurt you—”

  “But you did!”

  She thumbed the safety with a satisfying click that felt like power, switching on inside her and flooding her with the vicious anger of wounded pride. Especially when that one sound had the strength to send both Jacob and Brittany scrambling back, nearly falling over each other to run up the stairs. Leigh followed, mounting the steps. Jacob had the sense to grab for the door and try to close it in her face, but she shoved her shoulder against it, wedged her foot in, shoved the gun against his nose until his face mashed like a squashed berry and he fell back, reeling against Brittany and clutching at her.

  “Sit. Down.” Leigh gulped around her tears, breaths that tasted so crisp, so wet, details too stark and clear, carving them into her so she’d never forget them even when she wanted to. Jacob and Brittany thunked down onto the bed, staring at her with fear-frozen faces, clinging to each other like they belonged together and she was the intruder. Her finger trembled on the trigger. “You made a fucking promise to me,” she hissed. “That little boy down there is a fucking promise, and you broke it. Did you promise her, too? Will she go home tonight and cry because you called her just a fucking slip of judgment when you’d told her she was your baby girl?”

  Jacob shook his head so quickly his cheeks jiggled. “Just put the gun down. Put the gun down and we can talk.”

  “Shut up!
” Leigh screamed, as her finger tightened on the trigger.

  Everything happened at once. Jacob dove for the rumpled mattress. The wall above the headboard exploded in a puff of pulverized sheetrock to leave a jagged, smoking hole that seemed to appear before the cracking retort of the gunshot even sounded, bouncing off the walls and ringing inside her head and vibrating up her arm in a twanging ache. Downstairs, Elijah burst into high wailing sobs, while several people outside screamed.

  And Brittany fainted, her eyes rolling back as she tumbled from the bed into a heap of breasts and knobbled knees and red-knuckled fingers on the floor.

  “Brittany!” Jacob’s voice split the near-reverent stillness that followed the gunshot, and he lunged from the bed to the floor. Leigh watched numbly. She couldn’t believe she’d just done that. Pulled the trigger.

  And she wanted to do it again, right in the middle of Jacob’s pathetic blubbering face, with a need that ate around the edges of her heart to leave them ragged.

  Whimpering, Jacob patted over Brittany’s body, mumbling incoherent things, clearly searching for a wound. Every whuffling noise past his lips eroded at Leigh’s hurt, her betrayal, to leave just a little more room for contempt to flood in. Her face was cracking open again, that grin pulling at her cheeks and carving a canyon of pure spite across her lips, a channel cut deep enough to catch the tears still spilling down her face.

  “Oh, stop,” she sneered, and swung the revolver toward Jacob again. “You didn’t think I’d kill her, did you? I don’t blame her. She’s just like every other woman who gets suckered in by men like you.” She narrowed her eyes, sighting down the barrel at her fucking husband. “She’s just like me. Thinking if she just did everything right, it would be okay and she’d finally find some room for herself in all the fucking space you take up.”