After I'm Gone (22 page)
He was going to need a warrant. A warrant and some luck. But, no, it wouldn’t be luck. It was never luck, no matter what anyone thought. It all went back to the things that Julie Saxony had in her purse that day, those ordinary items that had been dutifully cataloged but never considered.
He was going to need
two
warrants.
R
achel made it exactly five minutes into the party before she said something rude to Michelle. “I can’t believe you’re having a shower.” She didn’t mean to. She had resolved not to mention the shower issue at all. The words were like toads, hopping out of her mouth in spite of her. She was like someone under a curse; she couldn’t stop saying the wrong thing.
Worse, Michelle didn’t seem to realize how hateful Rachel was being. “I know we can afford whatever we need,” she said. “But Hamish’s friends wanted to do something for us.”
“Oh, no—that wasn’t what I mean. I mean—just the tradition, you know? The evil eye. Which is nonsense, of course, but Linda observed it and I guess I just assumed we—you—would as well.”
Once you’ve said something cruel, why waste it? Might as well make sure that Michelle knows how awful I can be.
Michelle only laughed. Thirty-three years old and thirty-six weeks pregnant, she was more beautiful than ever. Rachel wanted to chalk it up to her sister eating real food for the first time in her adult life, but, no, this was something else, something beyond the clichéd glow of pregnancy. It was as if love, true love, had drained Michelle of all her petulant grudges.
“Hamish may have agreed to raise our children as Jews”—the plural gave Rachel another pang, and she bit back a caution on hubris—“but he’s not superstitious. Besides, he didn’t want to paint the nursery after we brought the baby home. Even with the new eco-friendly paints, he didn’t like the idea of all those fresh chemical smells. And he was keen to do it all himself, which will be harder once the baby is here. Did you see what he did with the closet? And the changing table—he made that, from his own design, so it can be converted to a straightforward chest of drawers once we no longer need a changing table.”
Of course he did
.
Hamish the handy hand doctor. Hamish the perfect. Hamish the wonderful,
Rachel thought, feeling very much like the bad fairy at the christening. But maybe the bad fairy had a backstory. Maybe it wasn’t just a misplaced invitation that put her in a pique. Maybe the bad fairy had authentic heartache.
“I haven’t gone upstairs yet,” said Rachel, who had arrived late hoping to miss the obligatory nursery tour. “I haven’t even seen Hamish.”
“He’s in the outdoor kitchen,” Michelle said, motioning to the large fieldstone patio off the indoor kitchen, which was positively Brobdingnagian. She wasn’t being grand. Now that Michelle was entitled to put on airs, she never did. The patio was better equipped than the kitchen in Rachel’s first apartment—a gas-powered grill, an oven with two burners, a refrigerator, an ice-maker, and a wine refrigerator. Hamish presided over the grill, of course, surrounded by the friends he called mates. Rachel couldn’t help feeling that the wafting smoke was really just the heat of all that collective testosterone rising into the soft May evening.
Twenty months ago, Michelle had dented Hamish Macalister’s Jaguar in a downtown parking garage. Being Michelle, or the Michelle she was then, she had written a note that read only: “Sorry!,” a cover for any possible witnesses. She had not counted on the video cameras that captured her license plate or the dogged Scotsman who tracked her down on sheer principle, determined to make the girl glimpsed on the video do the right thing.
The strangest part of the story was not that they married eight months later but that Michelle actually paid for the work on Hamish’s car. Not even Michelle took for granted the appearance of a handsome Scottish hand surgeon on her doorstep.
Plus—a
Jaguar,
Rachel thought meanly. Michelle could assume he was rich as well. And he came with a cohort of rich friends, surgeons and entrepreneurs, weekend rugby players who had found one another in a faux Irish pub that broadcast rugby, hurling, and World Cup matches. Their wives were now Michelle’s new besties, stay-at-home moms who lived in similarly huge houses and drove similarly enormous SUVs and could afford the similarly outrageous things on Michelle’s baby registry. They also were, Rachel was realizing, extremely nice, shockingly nice. Well, why not? They were young, untested by life so far. She could not resent them or their extravagant getups, could not resent Michelle’s thirteen-thousand-square-foot house. Could not even resent Hamish, who had seemed to stride out of the pages of a romance novel and make a beeline for—Rachel had to be honest—the least-deserving of the Brewer girls.
But the baby? The baby that Michelle had conceived on her very first try or two? That was something else. When Michelle had announced her pregnancy at Hanukkah, Rachel had excused herself from the table at the first possible moment and locked herself in Linda’s bathroom, where she had cried for twenty minutes.
“You look gorgeous,” she told her baby sister now, grateful to find an easy compliment. Rachel had never envied Michelle’s beauty.
“You know, Bert Gelman once told me that I would come into my prime in my thirties, as Mama did. I was terribly insulted at the time, but I think he may have been right.”
Bambi still looked wonderful, Rachel thought, watching her mother beguile Michelle’s new friends. She looked better than she had in years. Leaving the house on Sudbrook Road behind had been good for her, even if she had fought with her daughters over the most random stuff, refusing to downscale as she should. She had a bit of Great-Aunt Harriet’s hoarding gene, right down to the random shoeboxes crammed with stuff. Bambi had initially resisted Hamish’s invitation to move to a small condo downtown, the “bachelor” apartment that, he insisted gallantly, he didn’t want to give up because he would lose money on a sale, virtually impossible in this market. Hamish had even redecorated his condo for Bambi. Or, more precisely, undecorated it, removing anything that was masculine and boysie-boy, leaving a plain and neutral space that Bambi could make her own. And even with all the mortgages she carried and the fact that the Sudbrook Park house had to be sold “as is,” she had a nice sum left over, more money than she had had in years, almost $100,000. That should last Bambi several years, in her new circumstances.
And then what?
Rachel asked herself, because over thirty years,
and then what
had been her question, hers alone.
Daddy has left, but our house is paid off.
And then what?
Bubbie and Zadie will help with tuition at Park
.
And then what?
The scholarships will cover almost all the costs
. And then—what?
There’s this amazing thing called an adjustable rate mortgage.
AND THEN WHAT?
Only now there was an answer: Hamish. The Brewer family’s personal Messiah had finally arrived in the guise of a six-foot-two hand surgeon who loved Michelle with a kind of gusto that the Brewer women had not seen since, well, Felix met Bambi at a high school fraternity dance in 1959. And only Bambi had seen that. Her daughters had to accept this secondhand version of events.
But don’t let him be entirely like Papa,
Rachel prayed inwardly, then felt better about herself. She did not wish her sister to be—what? A man was cuckolded. What did someone call a woman who was cheated on?
A woman
. A man who was betrayed required a special name. A woman cheated on was just a woman.
Linda clapped her hands, summoning everyone to the family room to watch Michelle open her gifts. She handed Rachel a notepad, instructing her to keep a list of each item’s giver.
Why not one of her new friends?
Rachel thought grumpily. She couldn’t help noticing that neither her husband nor Linda’s had bothered to attend, although they were both crazy about Hamish. Yet all of Hamish’s friends were here. They took sperm seriously, these men, and celebrated whenever one of their clan’s found purchase.
Lord, there seemed to be more gifts than people. Although Rachel had not traveled in the precincts of the rich for a very long time, she remembered how they did gifts. It wasn’t enough for a thing to be expensive—it had to be extraordinary, one of a kind. These women spent a lot of time shopping. They had to elevate shopping to an art, or at least a worthy cause.
“Oh, it’s adorable,” Michelle said, holding up a miniature leather bomber jacket. “Deanna, you have such exquisite taste. Rachel, did you get that? Deanna gave us the bomber jacket.”
“Uh-huh,” Rachel said, jotting it down. She wondered, as she had wondered with each gift from Hamish’s friends, what it cost. She figured the average was slightly less than her monthly car payment.
“And here’s Rachel’s gift,” Linda said now. She had been fired a few months back, right around the time she and Henry were closing on a new house, and it had been a tense time. But she had picked up a paid position on a political campaign, deputy in communications for the Democratic candidate in the governor’s race. Rachel fretted that the candidate, the current mayor, would lose and Linda would be looking for a job yet again come this fall, but Linda was surprisingly calm. She seemed to be thriving on the very changes that were supposed to be so stressful—new job, new house—whereas Rachel, whose life had changed hardly at all, was the one on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Rachel’s gift was a selection of onesies that were a little offbeat—she had designed them herself. There was
POOH
HAPPENS
(against the backdrop of a familiar bear shape, she didn’t dare use more for fear of copyright infringement);
BREWERS ART
, a tip to the family, but also a restaurant on which Michelle doted; and
I’M SMARTER THAN THE PRESIDENT.
The last brought a few gasps in this crowd.
Michelle smiled, but it was a puzzled smile: “I don’t remember putting these on the registry. Are they from that little store in your neighborhood?”
“I made them,” Rachel said. Her voice cracked hoarsely, like an adolescent boy’s. “They’re one of a kind. You know I’ve been dabbling in silk-screening.”
The new Michelle rallied beautifully. (The old one would have pouted at the idea of someone ignoring her stated desires.) “Of course they are—just like you! How proud I’ll be when Hamish III wears them.”
Bambi winced at that. Rachel knew what she was thinking. She could tolerate the nursery, this party—but naming a child after a living relative. That was too far. Not only someone living, but a Hamish yet, a Hamish who would be one-half Russian Jew, one-quarter Scot, and one-quarter Iranian.
And although the odds seemed stacked in favor of a dark-haired, olive-complected child, Rachel couldn’t help rooting for a boy who would look like Hamish’s father, whom she had met at the wedding last summer. He had pale gingery hair and a face that looked like a certain kind of Keebler cookie—Pecan Sandies—and slightly bowed legs below his kilt. He was a refreshing presence in a wedding party that otherwise ran to intimidating beauty, if one didn’t count Linda and Rachel—and Michelle didn’t. Bree Deloit, the wife of Hamish’s best friend, was Michelle’s maid of honor, as if Michelle had known her all her life. “But I couldn’t choose between my sisters,” Michelle said when Bambi confronted her. “This keeps everyone’s feelings from being hurt.” At least she seemed to be sincere. The old Michelle would have smiled a little smile, making sure that everyone knew she was stirring the pot.
So why did Rachel miss the old Michelle? Why did she long for the petulant, peevish, nasty sister in place of this sugar-sweet one? It couldn’t just be the fact of the baby.
Except it was. Rachel could overlook everything else that had fallen into Michelle’s undeserving lap. Her meet-cute moment with Hamish. Hamish’s prince charmingness, his willingness to submerge himself into the insanity that was the Brewer family.
But for Michelle to be pregnant at age thirty-three, when Rachel had been trying to have a baby with Joshua for a decade, since she was only thirty-four—that hurt. That hurt quite a bit. And while New Michelle might be a better mother than Old Michelle could ever have been, neither version of Michelle could love a child as Rachel could. No one deserved a child more than Rachel.
She fled to the bathroom, probably not quickly enough. Both Bambi and Linda knew the telltale signs of Rachel on the verge of tears. Michelle didn’t notice. She was the center of attention. She hadn’t changed
that
much.
Only maybe she had. Ten minutes later, she waddled into the bath—not the downstairs powder room, where most guests would have gone, but the one attached to the master suite, an overly marbled retreat that Rachel secretly thought tacky—and said “Oh!” as if she didn’t expect to find Rachel there. Then, sitting on the toilet after yanking down her pants: “I have to pee all the time now. I wet myself at Superfresh yesterday.”
“A sneeze?”
“Not even. It just gave way. It was like”—Michelle thought—“like a flat roof collapsing after water had been pooling on it for a really long time.”
“Sounds lovely.”
“Oh, it was. I’ll probably never shop there again. Actually, I don’t. I usually go to Whole Foods, but Hamish went Scottish after he saw the prices last time.”
It was one of Hamish’s tics that he was wonderfully extravagant—until he wasn’t. He himself described his pulling back as “going Scottish.” There was not, as far as Rachel knew, a complementary Iranian strain, although it was his mother whom Hamish resembled physically. She was gorgeous, so gorgeous that it seemed as if Hamish Senior couldn’t quite believe his good luck. Hamish’s mother looked if she couldn’t believe it, either.
Or maybe Rachel was just projecting. She had never quite recovered from her first mother-in-law, and Hamish’s mother had that same queenly demeanor. She would have been a formidable opponent if they lived close by. But Michelle’s luck held—her mother-in-law lived in London.
Michelle pulled up her pants. “I’m sorry. I know this is hard for you.”
That was so unexpected that Rachel began to cry in earnest. “I don’t envy you anything—”
“No, you don’t. And I’ve envied you so much. You have no idea, Rachel.”
“You mean Linda and me.”