The Girl Next Door (30 page)

He had meant to stop it. At first, when it had just been once or twice. That was a liaison, not an affair. Then after a few months. But when the summer had come, with its sudden promise of unfettered access to Stephanie, he reasoned it would keep until September. Rachael was away so much, up at the house with the kids. She was so focused on them. He gave them, all of them, every ounce of his energy and his love at the weekends. He allowed himself the ego boost and the easy release of Stephanie during the week. That 4th July weekend, Stephanie had waited for him in the city. He’d taken the Jitney, and then the cab, and found her waiting naked in bed for him, nothing else on her agenda all day except pleasuring him and being pleasured in return. She couldn’t, apparently, get enough of him. There was something so simple about that. She had never once, until now, placed any demands on him. She’d asked for nothing from him, beyond what he gave her while they were alone. In September, he told himself, in September he’d finish it. He should have done it sooner.

In the increasingly rare moments when he was honest with himself, he knew what it was that drove him, again and again, into her bed. He knew why he was doing it. Because he believed he was better than Stephanie. Smarter, and cleverer. More successful. Because, when he was with her, he didn’t have to try and be as good as she was. Because she thought he was fan‐fucking‐tastic.

He’d never wondered what was in it for her.

*

When Rachael finally came home, Mia was asleep on her shoulder. Over their daughter’s head, she flashed him a look that insisted on silence. She spoke only to the boys at first, laying Mia down gently on the sofa while she asked about the soccer, and the afternoon. Jacob asked where she’d been, and she told him she and Mia had been to the movies, and out for ice cream, and that next weekend she’d take them wherever they wanted to go – the Natural History Museum, or to the park. David hovered in the background, waiting for her opening gambit. The waiting was sickening. She put the children to bed, sending each of them down the hallway, in their pyjamas, to kiss him goodnight. Each child was a silent reproach. He heard her turn off the lights, say a last goodnight. But still she didn’t come to him.

He couldn’t stand it, in the end. He went in search of his wife in their bedroom. Rachael was in their bed, fully clothed, facing the wall, so he couldn’t see her face. The covers were pulled up high, and she was clutching them to her.

‘Rachael?’

She didn’t answer.

‘I want to explain. I want to apologize.’

Still nothing.

‘She’s someone from work…’ He didn’t know what else to say. It meant nothing, it’s over, I’m sorry. Even he knew they were all empty, pointless words – the futile foolish lexicon of the cheat – and he couldn’t bring himself to say them out loud.

She didn’t want that either, it seemed. Rachael sat up without looking at him, and held up her hand. ‘I don’t want to hear any of that.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I want you to go.’

‘Go where?’ His voice trembled.

‘I don’t care, David. Just go. I don’t want you here. I just can’t have you here now.’ There was no rage in her voice. She sounded tired.

Even through the fog of his guilt and fear he felt indignation. This was his home. His children were here.

‘I don’t want to go.’

‘That’s too bad, David.’ She narrowed her eyes at him. ‘I don’t want
any
of this. I didn’t ask for
any
of this. You don’t get to say what happens next. Did you honestly think you would? I think I’m entitled. I don’t want to see you or to have to talk to you until I’m ready. Me, not you. Can you understand that? It’s my choice.’

He wished she would rage and rail. Or cry. This controlled, quiet Rachael was frightening.

‘I’ll pack a bag.’

She got up and left the room without saying anything else. Once he’d thrown some stuff – he didn’t concentrate on what – into a holdall, he came back down the corridor to the living room. He didn’t know quite where to go. Not to friends. His friends were their friends. It was impossible. He couldn’t do that. A hotel? It seemed so surreal. Rachael was sat in silence in the twilight, her hands folded in her lap. She didn’t look at him when he came in, so he moved to stand in her line of vision. Holding his bag to his chest.

‘What will you tell the children?’

She’d thought it through, while he was packing – that chilled him. ‘That you’re on a business trip. You can call them in the morning if you want to.’

‘When shall I tell them I’ll be back?’

‘Don’t use them to try and make me commit, David. That’s low.’

‘I just want to know what to tell them. They’re bound to ask, you know they are. I want to know what’s in your head, Rachael.’

She flashed him a look of pure disdain. ‘No, you don’t, David. You really don’t. You’ve had God knows how long to get your story straight – don’t expect me to help you now.’

She didn’t sleep that night, but she didn’t cry until Milena arrived the next morning at 8 a.m.

Milena had been with them since Jacob was a baby. Fifty years old, she lived across the river in Queens with her husband. Their two children, both married, lived nearby. She was fabulously calm and warm. Rachael didn’t know which of them loved her more – the children or her. She’d been a part of every trial and every triumph of the last six years. They’d hired her when Rachael was eight and a half months pregnant with Jacob. Almost as soon as they’d found her, Rachael relaxed, and went into labour, and Milena had been Jacob’s third visitor in the hospital. She remembered lying back, watching Milena pick Jacob up so easily, murmuring Polish endearments to him, and feeling herself suffused with Millie’s calm confidence. She was a little like a mother, actually. Sometimes a little more like a mother than her actual mother. It was Milena who bought her cabbage leaves when she had mastitis – twice – and got her through the agony. When Jacob had fallen in the playground in Central Park and split his forehead, it was Milena who had bundled them all into a cab, and Milena who had held Jacob down when they put the stitches in, without a local anaesthetic, because the cut was too close to his eye to numb the area. Having Milena made Rachael’s life possible. She knew she couldn’t leave the children with someone who didn’t love them. And Millie loved them. You only had to watch her with them to know that. She liked to think Millie loved her, too.

So when Milena walked in on Monday morning, at 8 a.m., just as she did almost every day of every week, when they were in the city, it was the most natural thing in the world for Rachael to burst into tears. If she was shocked, Milena gave no indication. She held her briefly, then patted her on the back and told her, not unkindly, not to cry in front of the children. She made her a cup of hot, sweet tea, and made her lie on her bed while she finished getting Jacob and Noah ready for school and preschool. Rachael curled up like a baby.

‘Mama’s not feeling well,’ she clucked.

‘Has she got tummy ache?’ Noah asked, his eyes wide. ‘Is she going to throw up?’ His voice was full of horrified delight.

Milena ruffled his hair, and tsked at him. ‘No, she isn’t. She needs peace, Noah. Come kiss her, and then she’s going to have a rest here. I will take you to school this morning.’

When she got back, she put Mia in front of her Baby Einstein DVD in the living room, and the strains of Beethoven floated down the hallway. Coming back to Rachael, with more tea, she perched on the edge of the bed, and let Rachael sob in her arms for a few moments, murmuring gentle endearments into the top of her head. She pulled Kleenex from the box on the side table, and handed them to Rachael.

‘What’s wrong, Rachael? Tell me what’s happened.’

‘Oh, Millie. The worst thing. David. He’s having an affair.’

Even as she said it, she couldn’t believe she’d become, overnight,
that
woman.

Eve

An old dog at last learning his new tricks, Ed had been on time for the scan, fetching plastic cups of water for her to drink so that she could fill her bladder. He’d held her hand as she lay on the bed, and the sonographer smeared the jelly on her. Eve looked down at the smooth, taut belly, and wondered when the stretch marks might start their march across her.

She wanted to know the sex of the baby, and Ed had relented. She wanted to enjoy imagining and daydreaming about a girl or a boy, and not just a baby. The baby didn’t co‐operate at first. The sonographer told her to get up, and walk a few times around the room. She slipped out and was gone for ages.

‘Do you think everything is all right?’

‘Of course it is. You saw it, didn’t you? The heartbeat. All those measurements she took – they were fine. She’s gone for a fag, or a coffee, or something…’

‘Promise?’ As if he could.

‘Promise.’

When she came back, and Eve lay back down, the baby rewarded their patience with a spreadeagled position. They didn’t need to be told that she was a girl.

Eve looked up at Ed, who was squeezing her hand so hard it almost hurt, and saw that there were tears in his eyes.

‘A girl. It’s a girl.’ He took her face in his hands, and kissed her hard, on the mouth. ‘You’re growing me a girl!’ He was laughing and, when he pulled back, he punched the air with his fist.

They began by agreeing not to tell anyone at all. When they came out of the doctor’s office, they went straight into one of the expensive boutiques on Madison and bought a tiny pink jacket and socks that looked like black patent Mary Janes.

By the time they got back to the subway, where he was going south and she was heading north, he’d said he might tell John, in the office, who had four girls. And the first thing Eve did when she got upstairs to the apartment, after having a pee, was pick up the phone.

‘Cath?’

‘Sis? How are you?’

‘It’s a girl! We had a scan this morning. The baby’s a girl!’

‘That’s wonderful!’

‘I know. Do you know, I think I wanted a girl all along. I just didn’t say so, because Ed already had, and that would have felt unfair on a boy, if we’d both said it.’

‘They can’t hear in there, you know.’

‘They can actually. You’re supposed to play them Bach and read them the classics and not fight and swear and things.’

‘Excuse me. My two listened to a lot of Pink Floyd. I read them bits from
Okay
, and Geoff and I had our very best rows when we were trying to build flat‐pack nursery furniture. How I must have damaged them.’

‘Yes, well, it explains a lot, now that you mention it…’

‘Up yours.’

They both laughed. ‘You know what I mean. I didn’t want to say out loud that I wanted a girl. Now I can, though. Because she is!’

‘And Ed was pleased?’

‘He cried. Actually got wet‐eyed. Right there in the room, in front of the sonographer. I think it suddenly got very real for him, when he heard that.’

‘Ah, bless him.’

‘I wouldn’t go that far.’

‘How is he? Still working the crazy hours?’

‘Pretty much. I’ve given him the rest of the pregnancy. Then things have to change.’

‘Does he know that?’

‘No. I mean, he makes promises until he’s blue in the face. But no, I haven’t issued any ultimatums. It’s not my forte.’

‘You’d better get better at it, otherwise he’ll carry on.’

‘I know.’

‘Is he working because he has to, or because he wants to?’

‘Bit of both, I think. I mean, I think the long hours are part of the culture. England wasn’t any different, really. But I think he’s having a ball, too. I think he loves it.’

‘And you don’t want to piss on his bonfire?’

‘No. I will, mind you, once she’s here. I’m not going to be a single parent.’

‘Good for you! So… everything else all right, with her, I mean?’

‘Yeah. Think so. They had this amazing machine – it took a 3D picture of her. You can see the profile, and everything. It’s extraordinary.’

‘Fancy.’

‘I’ll see if I can scan it and send it to you.’

‘Polly is obsessed. She’d love that.’

‘Bless her.’

‘She’s got a list of names for you. Don’t hold your breath. I know Britney is on it, and Hannah.’

‘Nothing wrong with Hannah.’

‘There is if you have to have Montana as a middle name. You got any ideas?’

‘Lots. I want something cool. Ed wants classic. So there are two lists, basically.’

‘Tell him he can name your boys.’

‘Don’t think he’ll go for that.’

‘Oh, Eve – it’s so exciting. I wish you were here, or I was there. I feel like I’m missing out. My first niece. I’m missing it all.’

‘We’ll be home for Christmas, Cath. And you’ll come out when she’s born, won’t you?’

‘Try keeping me away.’

‘Why don’t you bring Polly?’

‘I don’t think I’d get away with leaving her behind.’

‘And then we’ll come home in the summer.’

‘It’s not the same.’

‘I know. I miss you, too, sis.’

‘You tell that husband of yours to take care of you. No heavy furniture, all that stuff.’

‘I’ll let him.’

‘Tell him I’ll kick his arse if he doesn’t look after you properly. I know where he lives.’

‘I’ll tell him.’

Kim

Jason was home, and she’d cooked dinner. She’d been really trying, lately. She’d felt a shift, after 4th July – felt that she’d pushed Jason as close to the edge as she’d ever seen him, being nasty to Rachael at the party. Words exchanged that night, never used before, still burned in her ears and her heart. She had been frightened by it. It seemed almost like he’d given up on her. He’d been so quiet, the weekends through August. So cautious and deliberate when he spoke to her, which wasn’t often. He’d been friendly, without being warm. There’d been no intimacy between them, during the days or at night.

He’d concentrated all his efforts on Avery, and she’d responded, which was unfamiliar to Kim, who was more used to using Avery as, if not a weapon, then as armour against him. Avery was hers, after all. But that had changed, too, during the late summer. Avery actually wanted her father, this new dad, who took a real interest in her, and wanted to have fun all day. She wanted to go exploring in rock pools with him, and to sit on his shoulders in the surf and squeal with delight as the waves broke on his head and splashed her. For once, Kim was the outsider. She didn’t like how that felt, and she’d come back to the city with a new, firmer resolve to try harder to include him, or, bizarrely, to include herself.