Читать книгу Little Girl Gone: The can’t-put-it-down psychological thriller - Alexandra Burt - Страница 14

The very next night – Jack again phoned me telling me he’d be late – I parked in front of his office building and kept an eye on the front desk behind the glass doors. Was Jack hiding something? A thought had grown, slowly at first and I was reluctant to listen to it, but lately the voice had become louder. I wanted to see for myself, after all, had I not asked for it? Was I not incapable as a mother and just as incapable as his wife? I couldn’t blame him, looking in the rearview mirror seeing myself, couldn’t blame him at all. Even I didn’t recognize the woman staring back at me, pale and haggard.

I sat in my car, watched the traffic lights change and cars float by, and I waited until the security guard made his rounds. I took the elevator up to the fifth floor and found all the offices dark, except Jack’s.

I couldn’t make sense of the contorted voices drifting towards me through Jack’s office door, and so I imagined what hands were doing, where tongues slithered like snakes, what pieces of clothing were draped over office chairs or bunched around ankles like turtlenecks, what the room smelled like. As I listened to the voices and the laughter, I observed myself in the glass door panel, and I was dumbfounded by the woman I had become. No longer a woman, really, but a crone, in baggy clothes and stringy hair with a chilly triumphant cackle. I knew I was helpless, for the crone’s powers were infinite.

Seconds after I began pounding the door with my fists, Jack ripped open the door, looked at me, with surprise at first, then his eyes turned into rage. I didn’t speak, just turned and ran. I reached my car, shaking, unable to think, but I managed to drive home. When I pulled into the driveway, I was surprised I had made it there.

Aashi, the sitter, was asleep on the couch in Mia’s room. A medical student from India, chronically sleep-deprived yet easy-going and patient with Mia’s colicky behavior, she smelled of cardamom and anise and her upper lip appeared darker than the rest of her face.

My hand still hovered over her shoulder when she opened her eyes.

‘Ms Paradise, she didn’t wake up at all. I fed her around ten, and she fell back asleep right away,’ she whispered and brushed a blanket of black hair from her face, her colorful bangles dancing on her wrist.

‘She must have been really tired,’ I said. ‘We spent all day at the park, all that fresh air …’ What sounded like a pleasant outing had been nothing more but a screaming baby in a stroller until she fell asleep out of sheer exhaustion.

I looked over at Mia, picture perfect in her crib, her face angelic and placid while earlier she had thrashed her hands towards my face, her mouth a gaping wound.

Aashi left and I wandered around the house, unable to settle. I found myself in front of Jack’s office. I didn’t want to snoop; the trip to his office earlier, now nothing more than a moment of lunacy – but Jack was going to demand an explanation and I had nothing to give him. Nothing but a sea of irrationality. He was going to ask questions, he’d want to know what had possessed me to do what I had done. I needed a logical reason, proof of his infidelity, proof that he couldn’t be trusted any longer. I had to find a picture, a letter, a photograph, anything that would justify my outburst.

I stood in the doorway, taking in the shelves and filing cabinets. I had no idea what I was even looking for. Jack had started paying all the bills after Mia was born, handled all the paperwork, and I was glad he did. There wasn’t another chore I could manage, especially not anything that involved deadlines. But maybe his taking over the finances was just a way of increasing control over the woman who had floundered. It was ironic that the differences that brought us together – Jack’s sense of purpose, and his attraction to my carefree attitude towards life and, as he saw it, unpredictability – were the very things that were also driving us apart. That and the fact that I was an absolute failure as a mother.

The floorboards creaked as I entered the office and a familiar aroma of leather greeted me. Like an observer I stood beside myself, watched a woman scan fake paneling between rows of books, push at conspicuous spots. I observed her as she looked around, expecting an antique oil painting to fall off the wall, an envelope yellowed by age dropping to the ground, containing some clandestine content. The woman pulled open the desk drawers. Her fingers slipped, almost snapping her nails off, as she tried to open a locked drawer. I watched her run her fingertips alongside the bottom of the desk’s surface. She pushed here and there, looked under the keyboard and mouse pad and in the desk organizer. Reality greeted her harshly: no hidden drawers, no secret compartments, just a piece of contemporary office furniture. The woman jerked back into reality when the phone rang.

I backed away from the desk. The chair fell to the floor. Thud. The phone continuously nagged to be picked up.

Ring.

Ring.

Its pesky urgency was followed by a faint gurgle of an infant echoing through the house. The baby monitor on Jack’s desk with its light display indicated the volume of Mia’s cries. Six out of ten. Then the lights alternated from the middle scale of the digital display all the way to the top. The phone went silent and so did the baby monitor. I looked at the clock on the wall. It was midnight.

The phone rang again, slicing the air with urgency. I wiped the tears that were running down my neck, trailing inside my sweater.

Once again, the gurgling baby monitor turned into a whimper, the whimper into a howl and then into a full-blown bellow. The lights remained at the very top of the display window, until one last gurgle drifted off into the distance. Then there was silence. I left the study and went through the bedroom into Jack’s walk-in closet. A masterpiece of built-in shelves constructed of maple wood and hardware of brushed steel, next to mine, separated by a wall, both accessible by individual doors. Jack’s dress shirts, arranged by color, immaculately pressed, aligned on one wall, his shoes along the other. I looked up at the top row of storage shelves, reachable only with the attached rolling ladder.

Reluctantly I passed Jack’s full-length mirror in which he checked his designer suits, belts, and shoes every morning, afraid of the woman I’d encounter. I stepped closer and she stared back at me. I tried to force a winsome smile, yet her opaque eyes seemed empty, like doll’s eyes. Not one of those pretty dolls with an elaborate dress and curly hair, no, less than that, really more like a rag doll with crooked button eyes. I was unable to lift my gaze off her for she was familiar, a grotesque twin, a chilling replica of myself. When did the woman in the mirror become so powerful, so potent that I allowed her to make off with my prized possessions? My composure, my sanity, my joy, and the part of me that was a mother. The figure in the mirror was a stranger, one who looked at me with anger.

White noise on full blast. A voice escaped the subdued grain of the maple shelves, and unlike mine, it made sense.

The box, it said. Where is the box?

The box that didn’t fit with the rest of the items in the closet?

Yes, that one.

The box that was old and torn, which I noticed every time I hung up his clean clothes, he moved from the overhead storage one week to a lower shelf the next?

Yes, the old yellowed photo box with reinforced metal holes, rectangular and flat, larger than a shoebox.

Am I supposed to look for it and open it?

Yes, look for it. Then open it.

I pulled the ladder to the far corner of the shelf, its metal balls sliding along the tracks, humming like a swarm of hornets. I kicked off my shoes, and climbed up.

There it was. A quite unremarkable and ordinary cardboard box. I managed to climb down the ladder without dropping it, sat it on the floor and knelt next to it.

The box was cumbersome to open; the lid had to be lifted on both ends simultaneously. I recognized the castle logo in the lower right-hand corner: Rosenfeld, Manhattan – one of the largest wedding gown stores in New York, maybe even the country.

I parted the tissue paper. Photos with scalloped edges, tinged yellow by time, depicting people unknown to me. A little boy in a blue coat, a woman standing next to him, leaning on him, her arm around his shoulders.

A property deed. Jack had mentioned that he had flipped properties while in Law School but I didn’t know he owned a house. A deed for a brownstone on North Dandry in Brooklyn.

Before I could make sense of the deed, I came across a black pouch, heavy in my hand. I felt the shape of a gun through the velvety fabric. I removed the revolver from the pouch and cradled it in my hand. It seemed old fashioned, but I really knew next to nothing about guns. I pointed it away from me and randomly pushed the cylinder and it swung to the right. It was empty.

Below the black pouch was a concealed handgun license card, laminated, with Jack’s information. I never knew Jack owned a gun, let alone a license to carry, but it seemed logical for a lawyer to have one. Tucked in the corner was a full box with bullets. The gun I could stomach, lawyers owning guns is not unheard of, what was hard to believe was the fact that it had been there all along and I never knew.

I took a few bullets and cradled them in the palm of my hand. They were cold and made a gentle clinking sound when they touched. I stood up and filled up the chamber and engaged the cylinder.

I froze when I heard the ticking of a wristwatch. A crinkly plastic sound of a diaper demanded my attention. A whiff of baby powder and the stench of deceit, a combination that had the power to silently command me.

I looked up. There was Jack, standing in the closet, Mia in his arms, squirming, arching her back. There I was, gun in hand. Just in the nick of time I hid it behind my back, slowly backing into his dress shirts.

He stared at me, his eyes blank. I kicked the box and it slid under his dress shirts, the Berber carpet allowing it to glide like a ghost to a clandestine hiding place. I needn’t have worried, Jack was focused on the usual.

‘Didn’t you hear her cry?’ Icicles around his every word. Again, I wasn’t vigilant enough. Again, I failed to be the mother I should have been.

There were words Jack never said, words Jack never used, yet I had heard him say them over and over again – flawed, unfit. A bad mother, a bad wife. I had no business being there. I had no business being at his office earlier, in his closet, his house, his life. I had no business being the mother of his child.

‘What’s this?’ I said holding up the deed in front of him. ‘All you ever talk about is money. How we can’t afford this, and how we have to save more. You are making us out to be broke. It’s always about money.’ I was surprised by the strength of my voice. Everything was wrong. Jack, Mia, the ticking clock, the gun, the photographs, the property deed. ‘How come we are struggling when you own a brownstone, Jack? Explain that to me? What’s the place worth, a million?’

‘Own? I don’t own anything. The property is heavily mortgaged. I wanted to flip it within a few months but there were problems with the permits. I’ve been carrying two mortgages. Come on now, tell me you understand real estate? The moment I’m one payment short the bank takes everything.’

‘Were you ever going to tell me?’

‘I was in over my head, okay? Is that what you want me to say? I didn’t know what I was doing? There, are you happy now?’

His posture wilted, he looked like a little boy; small, softened, less confident.

‘Jack—’

‘I’m not rich, Estelle. Not by any means. And I never said we were broke. I never used that word. All I said was we should be frugal with money. And that …’ he pointed at the papers in my hand, ‘is nothing more than a property deed to a brownstone in shambles with a huge mortgage on it. I took a risk and it didn’t pay off. Are you happy now?’

I stared at him, suddenly realizing that I knew next to nothing about him. Buying and selling houses was one thing, but taking on such a risky and expensive project, one that by his own admission failed miserably, when he didn’t even own a toolbox?

‘I’m working on it. The permits have come in, they are in the process of completing the renovations. It’s not a big deal. It’s just an investment property. You make it seem like it’s such a betrayal on my part. What did you want me to do? Tell you I’m behind on a mortgage I can’t afford? Worry you even more? You’re doing a great job at that already.’

‘I’m your wife, I think I ought to know about our finances.’

‘There wasn’t any trouble until you started with your obsessions, all those doctor visits while you were pregnant, and all those tests you insisted on, all those specialists you consulted, over nothing. Do you have any idea how much I had to pay for those tests and doctor visits that you went to without any referral? It cost me a fortune.’

‘Everything is always about money for you. I’m trying to get help for our daughter.’

‘She doesn’t need help. She doesn’t need another test, another doctor. She needs you to be her mother. So don’t make this about me. You are the one who—’

‘The one who spent all your money on needless tests.’

‘I didn’t say that. But I’m the one paying those medical bills.’ He raised his voice louder now, I could feel him dropping the façade. ‘We have perfectly adequate health insurance. But you insisted on all those specialists. And I get it, you know I get it. You were worried. But you didn’t stop there either, did you? Even after Mia was born, you continued …’

I could tell he was looking for words, looking to put a name on my madness. Am I even mad? Was there such a thing as a little bit crazy? A lick of mad? I worried about Mia. I still do. Every waking minute.

‘You’ve been feeding that dragon ever since, haven’t you?’

I chuckle. Nice analogy.

Feeding the dragon? But what about our daughter? I knew what he was going to say. But what kind—

‘You started taking a perfectly healthy baby from doctor to doctor. And that’s not normal.’

Normal? What kind of mother would I be, Jack, if I didn’t try to help my child? What kind of mother would I be?

‘There’s something wrong with her. She cries too much. Don’t you get that?’ My accusation seemed to trigger additional resentment on his part, and, as always, Mia’s excessive crying was just a figment of my imagination.

‘There’s nothing wrong with her, nothing. The fact that you can’t handle a baby doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with her. You’ve been taking Mia from doctor to doctor and they all tell you the same thing. A colic, she’ll grow out of it. You can’t continue to insist on all these tests that make no sense. I’ve been allowing you to do this for the longest time but I need you to stop this madness.’

Jack stared at me for a long time. Then he took a step back. His voice was calm but his neck was covered in blotches.

‘I don’t know what to do but I can’t allow you to go on like this.’

Jack’s mind was not prepared to wrap itself around such an unwelcome emotion; he didn’t know what to do. He had been trying to put me back together but now he realized he was finally out of options. You shatter into a couple of pieces, Jack can put you back together again. But when I shattered, the pieces were too many to count. It wasn’t even a matter of how many, but how much. Like sand. Uncountable.

His decision to get married because I was pregnant had backfired on him. Not only was I not keeping up my end of the bargain, but at the same time I kept him from fulfilling his. There was work to be done, lots of work. An infinite workload of case files, preparing witnesses, and interviews. And even though he was exhausted, I knew that the pressures of his job felt perversely comfortable to him compared to what awaited him at home every night. I threw my head back and burst into an overly animated gesture of joy.

‘This whole marriage was a mistake. Come on, Jack, this is your way out.’

Jack walked towards me as if to grab me. ‘Just listen to yourself … you’re irrational. You follow me to work, you come to my office, embarrass me? That’s not rational. I don’t know what’s going on, but you need help.’

I just stared at him as I watched him pause just long enough to shake his head.

Then his voice turned to ice. ‘I find you here, in my closet, while Mia is screaming her head off. Does that strike you as rational?’

Mia stirred, her little hands reaching for something invisible, sounds of distress escaping her lips. Jack’s eyes were darting left and right. When he finally spoke, his voice was down to a whisper.

‘You’re irrational and I no longer trust you with my daughter. This stops tonight.’ He kept switching Mia from one arm to the other while she was growing visibly upset. Tears started to well up in her eyes and short of a bottle nothing was going to calm her down. ‘Estelle, this can’t go on any longer. Why can’t you just—’

‘Just what? Be normal? Is that what you want me to be? Normal?’

He stood there, didn’t say a word. A normal woman is all he wanted. And I was everything but. Cha ching, you lose, Jack.

‘You need to get help,’ he said. ‘I’m taking tomorrow off and we’ll go see somebody. You need professional help.’

I stood there, waiting until he left the closet, cautious not to turn my back on him. I went to the kitchen and, while the bottle warmed in the microwave, I slid the gun into the back of the junk drawer.

I fed Mia, put her in her crib, and went into the study where Jack was perched over a case file. He looked as if nothing had happened at all. When he saw me, his demeanor changed. He looked agitated.

I sat in a chair in front of his desk and crossed my legs. I managed a smile and hoped my face didn’t seem too contorted. I wanted to appease him, to seem as rational as possible.

‘There’s something we need to talk about,’ Jack said.

I took in a deep breath, then I exhaled. ‘This is when you’re going to tell me about your girlfriend, the one from your office earlier?’

‘There’s no girlfriend. I … I wanted to tell you when the moment was right, but hell, no moment is right lately.’ He paused for a second. ‘The woman at my office was Victoria Littlefield.’

The name sounded familiar but I couldn’t quite place it.

‘She’s from the DA’s office and we were discussing a position.’ He got up, stepped closer and lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘Until you barged in like a maniac that is. I can’t even blame her that she didn’t offer me the job once she found out I have a lunatic for a wife. This job is all I ever wanted. Ten years from now I could be DA. But that doesn’t matter anymore now, does it?’

His eyes communicated what he didn’t say out loud. That the way I acted earlier was the wrecking ball that tore a gaping hole into the walls of our already fragile marriage. And his career. Jack wasn’t an adulterer, affairs are messy and unpredictable, no, Jack wanted to become DA and I had busted yet another dream of his; no happy family, no career.

‘You’ve no idea what I’ve been going through,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I drive an hour out of my way just to get gas. That hour in the car, by myself, is the closest I’ve come to normality in months.’

I held back the tears. He was a trapped man. A man trapped by a woman who didn’t measure up.

‘I know you do more, you have more responsibility with Mia, but I get up in the middle of the night and feed her and I still go to work the next day. And it’s not like I’m just shuffling paperwork. I can’t come home every time you call. I’ve been working my entire career for this job and you …’ He paused, deflated. ‘It stops tonight. Tomorrow you’re going to see a doctor.’

When I arrived at the clinic, I was late. Jack was waiting by the door, looking impeccable in his suit, dark gray, Hugo Boss – his favorite – stylish and simple, he wore it, as usual, with a white shirt and a gray tie.

When he spotted me, he looked tired. And irritated. I could tell by the way he raised an eyebrow as I walked up. His forehead was deeply wrinkled, furrows I hadn’t noticed before.

‘Sorry I’m late.’ I raised my face and he lightly brushed his lips across my cheek. I felt guilty. After all, Jack’s time was precious.

Jack was all business during our appointment. His lint-free suit, his starched shirt, all signs that he’d made a success of his life. He told the doctor how I was obsessing over ‘minute details’ and how I didn’t want to ‘accept colic as a diagnosis’ and how he’d been able to ‘hold things together’ all by himself.

I watched him steal a glance at me while he spoke, probably wondering how we arrived at this implausible moment when all he’d ever done was ‘provide and support.’ He was the perfect husband and father yet here I was, frazzled and sunken in.

At the end of our appointment I realized the doctor wasn’t a psychiatrist or therapist, just a family practitioner. Because specialists cost money, and Dr Wells is capable of prescribing an antidepressant.

Dr Wells took one look at me, got out his prescription pad and scribbled on it. ‘If nothing’s happening we’ll just adjust the dosage.’ Then he told me to come back after a month so I could tell him all about the improvement. ‘Once the baby sleeps through the night, life will be different. Some new mothers need adjusting. Give it some time.’

You poor sap, a bit of time and a good night’s sleep is what I need?

‘Right,’ I said, smiled, and cradled my purse. It was heavy. Inside was Jack’s gun, vibrating joyously.

On our way home, in the car, Jack seemed appeased. In his world you solved a problem by coming up with a remedy and the fact that the bottle of pills in my purse would make everything okay was just the way he knew the world to be. An orange bottle with three refills and his life was back to normal.

‘Tell me you’re going to be okay.’ His voice was soft, fragile almost.

He sounded caring but I knew Jack, he never remained concerned for long. He was pragmatic to a fault and this was all alien to him.

‘Please take the medication and just get on with it.’

‘It?’ That’s more like him. Just get on with it.

‘Life, get on with life. Take the baby out, meet other moms in parks, I don’t know, whatever moms do.’

I was tired of him selling me his logic like a snake oil salesman offering a cure for ulcers. It was laughable. Mingle with other moms and a pill a day will take my sorrows away.

‘It’s not complicated if you really think about it.’ He put his arm around me, pulling me towards him. ‘You overanalyze everything, that’s what your problem is. It’s not about being perfect. It’s about changing a diaper, warming up a bottle.’

His embrace felt staged. I looked out the car window, focusing on a tree almost as tall as the building behind it. I wondered if the roots of a tree were really as deep as a tree was high. It seemed impossible almost, a secret part of the city, invisible to its inhabitants. Once you knew it was there, it seemed terrifying.

The pills gave me strange dreams. I hardly slept at all and I was so tired I couldn’t care less about anything else but pretending to be okay. When I told Jack I wanted to stop the medication, he frowned.

‘But they make my hair fall out,’ I complained.

He glanced at my hairline. Are you sure? his eyes seemed to say as if I was attempting to fit a round shape in a square hole.

‘Those are not side effects according to this,’ Jack said and flipped over the medication flier. ‘Dry mouth, skin rash, nausea, vomiting, and shallow breathing. Hair loss is not one of them. Maybe you should take some vitamins.’

‘What about numb hands and feet?’

‘Go to a gym, one that has childcare. Maybe you’re not moving enough.’

What about the fact that I’m just pretending to be okay? I wanted to ask. What about being a con? Is that a side effect?

Other than that I just cared less. Cared less about not caring, my body in the grasp of nausea and dizziness from the pills. Mia and I muddled through. There were days I felt better followed by days that were worse. Everything seemed lulled and life had lost its edge. Mia grew and gained weight, yet the crying never stopped.

Jack seemed to be in a better mood and I continued the medication. About a month or so later, Jack came home early from work. He was cheery and handed me a box of Chinese takeout.

‘Your favorite,’ he said.

‘I think you’ve been doing a lot better,’ he said. ‘Don’t you think so,’ he asked, but didn’t wait for my response. He spoke of money and our credit, and that the high mortgage payments of the brownstone weren’t going away anytime soon. And no one really knew how long it’d take to find a buyer with the market the way it was. He couldn’t be in that amount of debt and have a possible foreclosure hanging over his head and expect to get a DA job. But that he’d come up with a plan.

‘A plan,’ I said, ‘what kind of plan?’

‘We’ve run out of options. I had to make a decision.’ His words flew by, hardly reached me. ‘Here’s the deal,’ he said, ‘the economy is in a shambles, huge salaries for associates at big law firms are no longer, but there’s money to be made in foreign exchange deals, equity and debt. There’s a company in Chicago.’

‘We’re moving?’ I asked.

‘Kind of. The brownstone is part of my plan. Renters won’t put up with the noise of the construction. With the money I make in Chicago we can pay the mortgage, finish the renovations and in a year at the most we’ll be able to either sell it or rent it out.’

There was so much energy in his voice. Plans were his thing. The coordinated and organized formation of solutions. I had also been part of the plan once, before I changed. Now it was all about getting out of debt and everything else would just fall into place. I had my pills and I was getting on with it. He looked at me with his eyes blazing as if he’d just solved all our problems. He was smart, I knew that, I loved that about him, but he was also shrewd. Driven. He was hardwired to get what he wanted, and whatever Jack wanted, Jack was going to get.

‘I’ve accepted a job with Walter Ashcroft, a legal staffing firm in Chicago,’ he said. ‘I’ll be moving to Chicago. And I’ve arranged for you to stay in the brownstone in Brooklyn.’

Jack wasn’t a bad man. I was neither seeing him with rose-colored glasses nor was I overly critical. We used to be gentle with each other. We both had good intentions. We had hope, no, more than hope, faith even. Tender moments when unpacking groceries, putting up the Christmas tree, spending a Sunday afternoon on a blanket in the park. And now he was moving me into a brownstone in Brooklyn, one that was, according to him, under renovation but quite habitable. I needed him to be there but I didn’t know how to ask for that.

Two months later I was in my car on the way to North Dandry while Jack was at the airport waiting for his flight to Chicago.

‘I can’t say I like it but I don’t see any other way right now,’ he said when I called him from the car on my way to the brownstone. ‘The project manager is living in the upper apartment while he’s supervising the construction on the other two units. His name is Lieberman. If you need anything and I’m not available, call him. You won’t have to lift a finger. The movers will unload and unpack. It’ll be the easiest move you’ve ever made.’

‘I don’t need anyone to check up on me, Jack.’

‘I’m just saying if you need anything, call him. I’ll be gone for three weeks, four tops, after that I’ll come home for a weekend. I told you that last week, remember?’

Was he trying to tell me that I was senile?

‘I’ll fly home as often as possible, I promise, depending on the workload.’

I heard muffled voices and the sound of him switching his cell from one ear to the other, then a metal detector alerting and a voice telling someone to step aside. I imagined Jack, his arms raised, the handheld metal detector following the contours of his body.

‘I’m at the gate. Take your meds, okay?’

‘Sure.’ I knew Jack had been counting the pills and only stopped after I had phoned in the refills. The truth was I could no longer remember how it felt to be normal and I wanted to believe that I would get better, eventually. It could take weeks or months, the doctor had told me, and I didn’t see any alternative. And so I appeased everybody and told myself any day now it would all be better.

I swerved to the right and hit the curb. It took me only a few seconds and the car was back under control.

‘Bye, I’ll call you, okay?’

I didn’t answer, hung up the phone and threw it on the passenger seat. I had always been a careful and defensive driver, I didn’t even recognize myself anymore. I was acting like a lunatic. If I looked in the rearview mirror and saw a foil beanie on my head, I wouldn’t be surprised.

I spotted the North Dandry sign and pulled up to the curb. I killed the engine and looked at the brownstone. In the back Mia’s contorted body was hanging over the side of the seat, her head turned at an odd angle. She had fallen asleep. And I had failed to buckle her seatbelt.