HER: A Psychological Thriller

by Britney King

  I wouldn’t know.

  We don’t talk much; we do what Ann tells me is her favorite hobby: we people watch. She says it’s why she went into her field. Which makes sense. She tells me she’s glad we met. She needs a friend she can be perfectly comfortable in silence with. It’s rare, she assures me. She says most people can’t shut up long enough to actually have a thought, and I can’t help but smile. It’s nice to have finally found something precious and rare.

  The silence doesn’t last long, because Ann’s phone rings. She doesn’t answer with a hello nor does she offer pleasantries. She asks how she can help. There are no take-backs on this, she says calmly into the receiver. I listen as she coaxes the caller’s address. She teases it out, choosing her words carefully before finally letting out a long sigh. “This is your third call this week. At some point, Kelsey, you have to ask yourself if you’re really serious—if you really have it within you to go through with it at all.”

  I can’t hear the other end of the conversation, obviously. “Remember,” Ann says before hanging up, her face impassive, “death is final.”

  After she ends the call she looks over at me and apologizes. Ann tells me about the suicide hotline she operates. It’s a very busy time of year—the busiest, she says—on account of the holidays and the weather. Sometimes when they are short on volunteers, she has to forward the calls to her cell phone. The alternative, she says, is people die.

  “I BET THAT’S HER,” Ann exclaims, peering over the rim of her cup, which is interesting because I hadn’t realized we were waiting on anyone. There’s a part of me that is disappointed. I was under the impression we were sitting in the car because Ann says it is more private that way. You never know who is listening, she says. She’s sick of taking selfies. She likes her privacy. And, she can’t leave the hotline unmanned for too long.

  “Here.” When I look over, she is forcing a switchblade in my direction.

  “What’s this?”

  Ann points to a tall woman wearing a skirt with boots and a ponytail. “You see that BMW she got out of?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I want you to stab her.”

  “What?”

  She laughs. “I’m kidding. You don’t have to stab her.” Her eyes search mine. “Well, not unless you want to.”

  “Yeah, no. I don’t.”

  “Fine,” she sighs. “Go for the rear tires instead.”

  “I can’t do that,” I declare vigorously. “It’s illegal.”

  “Could you if that woman were fucking your husband?”

  “No,” I tell her, but then I picture Ethan with someone else and I’m forced to admit, “I don’t know.”

  “You do know, Sadie. You do.” Ann motions with the nod of her head. “Now don’t dilly-dally—she won’t be in there long—trust me, as soon as she finds out there’s no one waiting for her, she’ll be out the door.”

  “Ann, I can’t.”

  “You know…I get calls every day—multiple times a day—from women just like Kelsey. Lives are destroyed by women just like that one, Sadie. Kelsey wants to die but part of her already has. Sometimes,” she says, “It’s all we can do to even the score.”

  I take a deep breath in and mull over what she’s just said. “I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I can’t.”

  Ann studies my face very carefully. Then she does that thing with her eyes she does when she gets angry. “Fine,” she tells me before she snatches the knife from my hand, very deftly I might add, like she’s practiced at it. “I want you to listen, Sadie,” she says. “Are you listening?”

  The blade glistens in the sunlight. I’m all ears.

  “I want you to hop in the driver’s seat, put the car in gear, and watch me.”

  And watch her, I do. I’ve never seen anything so efficient in all my life. Sweat beads at my hairline. My heart races. My throat goes dry. I forget to breathe, until I realize I might be suffocating. I’ve never felt so alive.

  I expect that people will notice what Ann is doing. The coffee shop is a busy place.

  I am wrong. Everyone is too busy staring at their phones, too preoccupied with feeding their afternoon addictions, to notice what is happening right under their nose.

  She goes around to the passenger side of the woman’s car. I’m thinking, who will believe me that this happened? Maybe we are going to jail. Maybe we are Thelma and Louise. We are not Thelma and Louise. The coffee shop probably has cameras. Everyone does these days. I’m an accomplice.

  I don’t even notice I’m digging my nails into my palm, not until I see Ann walking briskly back to the car. She opens the passenger door and climbs in and orders me to drive.

  When I’m pretty sure we’re in the clear, I ask if she does this often.

  “Only when I need to feel something.”

  I wait for her to expand on that but she doesn’t. She tells me to hold my thoughts. She has to text the woman with the boots.

  “This, Sadie,” she says, “This is one way to know you’re alive.”

  I wonder what other ways there might be.

  “God!” she exclaims as she brushes her bangs out of her eyes. “Doesn’t it feel good?”

  It does feel good, I admit. Watching Ann do the kind of terrible things I thought she might be capable of feels very good indeed. It feels like the kind of rush I haven’t felt in a very long time. “Who was she?”

  She shrugs. “Hell if I know.” Her voice is expressive, almost giddy. The exasperation from earlier is gone. “Sometimes I just like to pretend I’m someone else,” she says. “You know?”

  I don’t think I do. But I’m learning.

  “I found her on one of those dating apps that married people use to get some on the side. We’ve been chatting for two days now. You should see the stuff she told me, Sadie. You wouldn’t believe it.”

  When I look over, Ann is staring at her phone. She glances up and laughs. “I just texted her my apologies. Told her I got caught up at work.”

  I wait for her to offer more. But the next time I look over, she is staring straight ahead, smiling manically. “God, Sadie. Some people are so gullible. Bet you anything she was planning our future—and we hadn’t even met. That’s how desperate people are. They’ll believe anything you tell them. She thought I was a plumber named Rob. I wasn’t even original—I didn’t have to be. I mean…how boring is that? You can just say whatever…it’s literally that easy.”

  Plumbing is actually a very intricate profession. But I don’t think Ann wants to hear this.

  “Oh, and Sadie,” she says, as she adjusts her seatbelt, “I’m investing a lot of emotional energy in you—in this friendship.” She motions between the two of us. “It’s important you understand—I’m very careful about who I spend time with. Back there, that was your one free pass. If you can’t hang,” she tells me, “You can’t hang. Better I know sooner rather than later.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  SADIE

  On the drive home, Ann wants me to tell her about my childhood. This isn’t all that surprising; she’s a therapist, and they always start there. I’ve always felt it’s sort of a waste of time. Life is in the now. The past is the past. Ann says I’m right. But she says self-awareness is important. History has a way of repeating itself.

  She couldn’t be less wrong about that. We pass the gym, and she goes on talking about psychology and overcoming trauma. But I’m not listening. I’m too busy living it. The gym reminds me of the final straw before the final straw with Ethan. It came only days after that perfect day on the beach where my husband and I kept our eyes on the sky, where he tethered me to the earth.

  “I’m starting yoga soon,” I say to Ann. It’s not the truth. But it could be. I want her to know I can hang. I want her to know that she is right to invest what she calls “emotional energy” on me.

  “Yoga is amazing.”

  I smile because Ethan thought that too. He’d gifted me the gym membership. Someone at his office was into yoga, and he though
t I ought to be too. It was just a suggestion, he said, when I was less than thrilled. But it was more than that. The gym was a simple gift that wasn’t a gift at all. It was a sign.

  It was a sign that he wanted to take the little game we had been playing to the next level. And I was livid. He couldn’t understand why.

  So I shifted my strategy. I figured two could play at his game. After all, why use words to get your point across when you can just as easily do it passive aggressively, disguised as a gift?

  It’s not like I didn’t know he wanted me to lose the weight. He didn’t have to say it with words or with a gym membership. I knew he wanted me to stop being depressed, as though it were that simple. I knew he wanted me to find something that fulfilled me.

  Just not a job, apparently.

  Ethan said he wanted me to be happy. But what he really wanted was to have me around to meet his needs.

  That’s what a wife is supposed to do, after all.

  I’m still not exactly sure what a husband is supposed to do.

  Suggest quick fixes, I suppose.

  Part of strategy was giving him the silent treatment, his least favorite form of punishment. For days, he apologized profusely. He hadn’t meant for the gym membership to be such a big deal. He tried to make up with sex. As usual, finally, in the end, we played by his rules. As usual, it was over before it started.

  It wasn’t until later, after we lay on the couch, my head on his chest, that I realized maybe he was right. Maybe there was no reason to be so unhappy. Maybe it was time to take things to the next level. After all, most women would kill for the kind of life I have. Ethan might have said that once or twice. I know my mother would have. And now, here I am with Ann, and she’s asking about her. Talk about coming full circle.

  “If you want to understand the relationships in your life,” she says, “You have to start with your parents…”

  “I hardly knew them. My mother worked three jobs.”

  “And your father?”

  “Hardly worked at all. But he wasn’t around much.”

  “What did your mother do for a living?”

  “She owned a cleaning business—very successful,” I say. It isn’t totally a lie. I leave a few things out.

  During the week my mother cleaned houses. She washed other people’s dishes, handled other people’s dirty laundry. It was her own she didn’t handle so well.

  “What about weekends? What did you do for fun, growing up?”

  Fun wasn’t really in my vocabulary as a child. “I read.”

  “Ah, so you were a bit like me.”

  No, I was nothing like you. “The classics were my favorite. I suppose because they were easy to come by.”

  “It must have been hard being raised by a single mom.”

  You have no idea. “Not really. She was a hard worker. She did the best she could,” I tell her. She seems satisfied because none of it is lies. On weekends my mother worked at a dry cleaners. Whatever it took, she said, to keep a roof over our heads. But weeknights were different. Weeknights were all hers, so to speak. That’s when I was to make myself scarce. That’s when she entertained men. Serving others with household matters offered up a steady clientele at our doorstep. My mother worked herself to death, but I don’t think it was the work that killed her.

  “She died when you were young?”

  My fingers loosen on the steering wheel. “I was thirteen…how’d you know?”

  “It’s my job. You can usually tell. You have that air about you.”

  “Oh.”

  “How’d she die?”

  “Cancer,” I say, and this isn’t exactly a lie either. My mother did have something eating at her. Something she was powerless to stop from growing. The first time she attempted to end things, I was five. I walked home from kindergarten to find her bleeding out on the bathroom floor.

  She was sorry, she said days later when I visited her in the hospital. We didn’t have family, and I assume as usual, my father was nowhere to be found. Thankfully, one of her housekeeping clients was kind enough to take me in.

  Ann clears her throat. “Was it quick at least?”

  “Not really.”

  At first, or rather that first time, it wasn’t so bad. I got to sleep in her client’s daughter’s room while she was away at horse camp. Her bed wasn’t a pallet on the floor like mine. She had a pink, frilly comforter and books. So many books. I could have any of them I wanted, her father said. They were relics, he told me. Classics, but also, his daughter only cared about boys.

  “I’m sorry, Sadie,” Ann says. “That must have been hard.”

  The second time was hard. I didn’t get to go to the nice people’s house. By then my mother had burned that bridge too. Nothing lasts forever, she’d said, when the woman got wise and fired her, and the books stopped coming. That time, I was eleven, and she hadn’t slit her wrists. I was grateful that at least there wasn’t the blood or the sight of her open flesh. That time, she sat in the garage with the car running. Only she ran out of gas before it killed her.

  “It could have been worse,” I say, glancing over at Ann. “She was brave. She died peacefully.”

  My mother was still sitting in the car by the time I’d trekked all the way home from school in the rain. She said she hadn’t had enough gas to pick me up but we both knew it was a lie. She’d been weeping for days. She loved him, she swore. He discarded her. He used her, just like the rest of them. He’d never intended to leave his wife. I’d heard it all before. And so on it went.

  “No, Sadie,” Ann says taking my hand. “It was you who was brave.”

  I don’t pull away, because her hand is soft and warm and she has a point.

  For a while after the garage incident, I skipped school to go to work with my mother. In truth, I wanted to keep an eye on her in case she tried anything again. But there was the other issue as well. She was too sad to clean, and we desperately needed the money, so I did it for her. Thankfully, this only lasted a few weeks.

  By then, she had a new client, and she was in love again.

  The upswing lasted until I was thirteen.

  That time, the car didn’t run out of gas. It kept running, and it was still running when I arrived home.

  Ann squeezes my hand. “So your father raised you then?”

  “Something like that,” I say, and she smiles. Me too, because she leaves it at that, which is better than having to tell the truth. I went straight into foster care. Four months and one black eye later, I disappeared into the night.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  SADIE

  Ann asks about my parents. But she forgets to ask about the most significant relationship of my life, which would make a lot more sense. If she is looking for insight as to who I am, she should have started there.

  It wasn’t long after the fight over my weight gain that Ethan started disappearing into the night too. Work was chaotic and stressful, he said. He began coming home later and later. There were major projects, he was climbing the ladder, and it was never quite the right time to slow down.

  On weekends he started going to meet-ups with other people he said were interested in bettering themselves. He started mentoring youth through a program at work. He said it made him feel alive. He said he felt young again. Once or twice, he invited me to tag along. By that point, I had become just bitter enough not to take him up on the offer.

  Instead, I busied myself by watching the neighbors. I guessed at their problems—at how many of them were just as unhappy and bored as I was. Sometimes I guessed right.

  I told my husband about the woman next door that flew into rages and hit her husband. I told him that the family down the street was hiding something. Something big. I learned who was having financial problems and who was relying on substances other than food, trashy TV, and voyeurism to get them through the day. I made it a point to share these things with Ethan just so he could see I wasn’t really that bad.

  Sure, we weren’t as happy as we
could be. And sure, we hardly spent any time together anymore. But isn’t that what happens in a marriage? You settle in. The newlywed phase fades, and real life begins.

  The truth is, I wasn’t sure. I watched the neighbors to find out.

  All the while, I continued reporting back to him. Until he started calling it my little obsession. He was playful about it at first. But once, I overheard him on the phone with his mother talking about “my little obsession” and I confronted him about it.

  He said I was paranoid. He tossed out words like schizophrenia and obsessive compulsive disorder. He accused me of forgetting things, normal things, like grocery shopping and his mother’s birthday. He accused me of not wanting to leave the house for fear I might miss something. That part, I’ll admit was true. I hate his mother, and as for groceries, I figured what’s the point, if only one of us is around to eat them?

  But that night, the night that things got really bad, the night they took a turn for the worse, along with his accusations, he threw in an ultimatum. The final straw. Either I get happy—either I go to the gym—or we call it quits and go our separate ways.

  I hadn’t expected him to take such a strong stance. The truth is, I hadn’t realized my appearance was that important to him. He said he hadn’t realized it might become so unimportant to me. Before that night, I thought I had time. I thought everything would work itself out. I should have known better.

  That was the night he gave me the book—Ann’s book. He’d met her husband. They were renovating the house down the street. What are the odds, he wanted to know. How lucky we were, he said. He’d heard good things about the book from someone at his self-help meet-up. The book would help me, he said. No matter what happened between us, he said, he just wanted me to be happy. He said we could still be friends. He said it as though we were children, not grown people with a mortgage and plans for the future.