After Her (34 page)

She cracks a smile through the tears.

“Can you help me to my closet?”

I don’t hesitate helping her to her feet and escorting her to the closet. Inside, there are several hundred shelves of mannequin heads, each wearing a different brunette colored wig, matching her signature auburn shade of hair. Vivian struggles out of my arms and proceeds to examine each of the wigs.

“Who should I be today?” she asks me. I linger in the doorway, arms folded as I inspect the assortment of wigs. Some are blunt bobs, one has bangs and another is wig of brunette ringlets that immediately catches my eye.

“How about some curls,” I say. “I rarely see you in curls.”

She climbs atop a small stepladder to retrieve the curly wig and stops to admire it.

“Yes,” she says. “You have a great eye. It’d be a nice change of pace to go for curls.”

I smile at her compliment, feeling like I shouldn’t react any other way. She walks ahead of me out of the closet, lingering in front of the mirror to try on the wig. After straightening it atop her head, she smiles at the result.

“This will do,” she says while turning to me for approval. “Well?”

“Perfect.”

She wanders from one end of the room to the next, grabbing her makeup box, a breezy, yellow sundress with an A-line skirt and a pair of wedge heels to finish the look. She recruits me to help with her makeup despite my lack of skill and even allows me to pick the colors she’ll wear for the day.

I'm reminded of when I was younger, playing in my mother’s makeup on early Saturday mornings. Mom would paint me in her best colors to humor me, allowing me freedom to play with every cosmetic toy she owned. I frown at the nostalgia, realizing how much I miss that quality time she and I spent together.

“What’s wrong?” Vivian asks upon noticing my frown. I set my focus on the mirror, responding to her reflection.

“I remember doing this same thing with my mom,” I say. “When I was nine years old, she let me play in her make up. We used to take turns giving each other makeovers and she’d style my hair in pigtails and let me wear her best stilettoes. It’s my favorite memory of her.”

“When was the last time you two spent that kind of time together?” she asks.

I shrug. “Um, I really don’t know. I don’t remember the last time I didn’t feel suffocated around my mother.”

“Suffocated? I was under the impression that you two were close.”

“We were…I mean, we are,” I say, but the words sound more foreign than I expected them to aloud. I laugh at myself for being so ambiguous. “I guess it’s more complicated than I thought it was.”

“Complicated, how? You love her, don’t you?” Vivian asks as I coat her lashes with mascara. 

“Of course, I love my mother,” I say. “She’s just really domineering sometimes. It’s hard to appease her when it comes to my personal life or me. Mom always has to have an opinion about me. No matter how much I try to subdue her, one way or another, she is going to tell me how she feels.”

“Hmm, that’s understandable,” says Vivian. “If you were mine, I’d keep you under lock and key too.”

“If I were
yours
?” I chuckle at her response. She remains deadpan, acting as if I'm silly for questioning her terminology.

“I was never given the privilege of motherhood,” she says. “If you were mine, I would be just like your mother.”

“You talk like children are possessions. I don’t belong to my mother.”

She glares at me briefly, offended that I’d dare to correct her. Then, she smiles to ease the newfound tension.

“Of course not,” she replies. “I don’t mean to suggest that you’re a possession, but I can relate to your mother. If I’d been given the chance to raise a child, I’d be quite obsessive over her wellbeing too. It’s something no mother can help. I understand the urge to want control of someone’s life.”

I stop to contemplate, wondering where she’s steering this conversation and whether I'm comfortable with it.

Vivian selects two tubes of lipstick from the makeup box and shows them to me for approval. “Which color? Coral or Pink?”

“Coral always looks great on you,” I say.

She doesn’t argue with my assessment. It’s nice for once having someone accept my reply without me having to feel like I must defend my opinion. After applying two coats, she puckers her lips and smiles her reflection. I touch up her cheeks with a light dusting of blush, surprising myself with how adequate it looks.

“Hmm, for a girl that claims to know nothing about makeup, you’re quite an artist,” Vivian says.

“Consider it a fluke,” I say. “You will never get this kind of accuracy out of me again.”

Vivian grips my wrist as I apply a second dusting of blush. I glance at her in the mirror, expecting an explanation.

“Never underestimate yourself,” she says. “One of the things that initially attracted me to you is the fact that you appeared much more self-assured than most other young women your age. Confidence is the key.”

“I’ve never been a cosmetic maven,” I say. “Sasha was more of an expert in that.”

“If you wore a bit more, you would have some experience.”

She swipes the applicator from my hand and turns from the mirror to face me.

“A touch of makeup has never hurt anyone.”

She dips the blush in the pink powder and does a few quick swishes across each of my cheeks. She stops to examine her handiwork then proceeds to select a rose-colored lipstick tube. Two coats of this completely paints my lips. She then gives me a thin line of brown eyeliner then plucks my eyebrows into two perfectly manicured arches. 

“There,” she announces afterwards. “You are no longer a pretty girl, Cassandra. You are a beautiful, sexy and irresistible
woman
.”

She moves aside to let me see the mirror. I stare at myself, admiring the girl staring back. It’s nothing I’ve ever seen myself look like before. The makeup ages me at least three years. My hazel eyes offset the liner. The natural peach undertones of my complexion meshes perfectly with the pink blush.

“It’s beautiful,” I say. “There is no way I will ever be able to emulate this look every day.”

“That is why you’ll be taking the makeup with you,” she says while handing me a small makeup box.

“Vivian, I don’t think—”

“Try it for a few mornings,” she interjects. “If you don’t like it then feel free to stop.”

The makeup does add something new to my face that I didn’t think anything could.

“I guess it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to look a little more feminine,” I say.

She smiles at me while combing her hands through my hair to gather it into a bun at the nape of my neck. A hungry look resides in her eyes. The look reminds me of that exact moment in the salon just after she convinced me to dye my hair. It’s the same doting look that makes me feel like her manufactured creation.

My phone buzzes from within my pocket. Vivian frowns. I retrieve the device and glance at the screen. Karen.

“I have to take this call,” I say.

“Who is it?” Vivian asks and I scramble to make up some kind of lie.

“It’s my Mom,” I say. “Speak of the devil, right?”

With my phone in hand, I slink out of the bedroom, downstairs and out of the house, away from listening ears. After closing the door behind me and stepping onto the porch, I hold the phone to my ear.

“Karen?” I whisper, still certain someone might overhear. “Sorry to whisper, but I'm outside Vivian’s house.”

“I got a ding on that Jack Carrick guy you mentioned,” she replies hesitantly. “You might want to sit down for this one.”

My hand twitches, clutching the phone. “So I was right. There is something off about him.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Jack Carrick can’t possibly be Vivian’s physician.”

“What are you talking about? I’ve seen him work. Of course he’s her doctor.”

“Cassandra, according to public records, Jack Carrick died fifteen years ago.”

My knees crumble from beneath me. I drop onto the porch. My legs feeling like goo.

“Are you sure…you looked up the right guy?” I ask. The words slip out in spastic spurts.

I sound asthmatic. 

“I’ve spent the last three nights researching everything I could find on this guy,” she says. “I’m not mistaken. Jack Carrick is dead. Whoever that is parading around with Vivian is definitely an imposter.”

I shake my head as if it will somehow disprove her words. “Vivian’s Carrick
isn’t
a doctor?”

“Not a doctor, but a damn good con-artist. The real Jack Carrick was a highly esteemed neurosurgeon born in East Berlin. The man has never even set foot on US soil. Your Jack Carrick doesn’t even have a valid birth certificate registered with the United States government. What we found were several different social security numbers on him connected to three other alias.

We reviewed the surveillance cameras for the night of the gala, found him looking suspicious.”

“There were cameras in the garden where Sasha died?” I ask. “Why haven’t you people been digging through that footage?”

“I’m sorry we’re not investigating this case the way you want us to,” she quips. “But we
did
review the footage. It was five hours of nothing useful. The Coconut Lounge security detail told us that renovations were made on the building a weekend before Vivian’s gala. One of the handy men mixed up some wires, completely fucked up the cameras. Most of the footage from that night is corrupted.”

“Then what
did
you get on Carrick from ‘five hours of nothing useful?’” I ask and I'm trying to bite back the urge to cut every thread of civility I have left.

“He looked pretty awkward next to Vivian’s other party guests. He never spoke to anyone, only interacted with Vivian. It looked suspicious but it wasn’t a crime. So we ran a screenshot of his face through our database to scope him out. His real name is Randall Reed.

46 years old, born in Seattle, Washington where he actually did acquire his medical license. Five years later, it was revoked.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Several malpractice cases were pending against him,” she says. “Guess the guy must have jumped ship and assumed a new identity.”

“Oh no, I forgot about Vivian,” I say. “I have to tell her that this guy is scamming her.”

“Don’t feel bad for Vivian just yet because I'm not done,” she says. “There’s more.”

I brace myself as if I'm about to take flight. Sweaty palms. Furrowed brow. I swallow hard.

“I had to pull some major strings, but I managed to obtain a subpoena for Vivian’s medical records,” she says. “Upon finding out that this Reed guy was impersonating a doctor, I knew I had to check up on all of his past and present patients’ health records. God only knows how many of these people he could have misdiagnosed.”

“And?” I say.

“Vivian does not nor has she ever had lung cancer,” she says. “The woman has two healthy functioning lungs. So healthy that the most she’s ever had was a common cold.”

“But…she had symptoms,” I say, wanting to rationalize this. “She was coughing fucking blood! How could she have faked any of that?”

“That’s something you’ll have to ask the ‘queen’ herself. The medical records don’t lie.

I had them authenticated. I’ve read every word on these documents. Vivian lied to you. She’s lied to the entire community.”

I remain where I am, on my knees in a disheveled state of utter disbelief. I’ve never fooled myself into thinking that I knew Vivian. She was always on the peripheral of logic when it came to me, just a little too beyond my reach. I never knew what hid behind those eyes or what made her tick. Even so, I felt sorry her. I just never thought she was capable of a lie like
this
. This is my unravelling.

“Cassandra?” Karen calls when I don’t answer. “Cassandra did we get disconnected?”

I try rethreading my thoughts, wondering how I’d missed it. Then it hits me, hard and fast like a blow to my chest. She and Carrick weren’t just talking that day at the hospital. They were conspiring.

When I asked for an explanation, Vivian changed the subject. She
always
changed the subject. She was always so nonchalant about the topic of her “illness,” always
too
carefree. It should have been obvious. How did I let that woman deceive me?

“Hello?” Karen says again.

“I have to go, Karen.”

“What?”

“Vivian and I need to have a talk,” I say.

36

I march back into the house. Head up. Chest out.

Up the stairs then down the main hall, I find Vivian still in her bedroom sitting in front of her mirror, adjusting her wig. She doesn’t look at me, doesn’t even notice my presence until I'm behind her, glaring at her. 

“Did you and your mother catch up?” she asks while applying a coat of lipstick. 

“Yeah, we had an interesting conversation. We discussed you.”

She turns toward me in her chair. “You and your mother discussed
me
?”

“How long have you been faking cancer?” I blurt.

She doesn’t react. Nothing on her face exposes anything. She simply shrugs. “Is that what this is about?”

When I hear the nonchalance in her voice, when I see how little this affects her, how little she cares—a fire stirs in me. Small, but deadly. Like a dormant disease festering in my gut. I grow angrier by the second.

“What do you—” I draw back my words, gritting my teeth. Fists clenched at my sides. “What kind of person fakes cancer?!”

“The kind of person with a thirty-million dollar life insurance policy,” she replies, but it makes no sense.

“You did this for money? You’re already rich!”

“No,” she says. “Adrian is rich. I’m just the idiot woman that agreed to a pre-nup before we got married.”

“Pre-nup?” And now it makes sense. Adrian always responded to the subject of Vivian with a wry demeanor as if he knew something that I wasn’t aware of. The entire time,
I
was the joke. Vivian wanted it like that. She kept me out of the loop to keep me under her thumb.

“Every promise that came out of your mouth, every single word was really coming out of your ass,” I say.

“Congratulations,” she replies with faux applause. “You caught me. I lied to you.”

A vein pulses in my forehead, threatening to burst.

“I have to get out of here,” I say. “I have to get away from you.”

I charge toward the door. Vivian grips my forearm.

“Cassandra, wait.”

“
No!
” I say, spitting the word. “You’re a goddamn sociopath.”

She doesn’t release my wrist. I proceed to pry her fingers from around it. One by one.

“If you’ll let me explain—”

“What was the point of this?” I say. “You have successfully faked cancer. Everyone felt sorry for you, including me. Now what?”

“Phase two,” she says and I tense up. “Now, we commence phase two.” Vivian proceeds to touch-up her lipstick. She puckers her lips, rubbing them together then blotting the color with her thumb. Business as usual.

“What are you talking about?”

“For our entire marriage, I let Adrian have his fun,” she says. “He had as many women as he wanted. He got to drink all the booze his stupid little stomach could handle. Now it’s time for me to have some fun for once.”

“This is what you call fun?” I retort. “Lying. Cheating. Scheming.”

“No,” she says. “This isn’t the fun part. Not yet. This is the profitable part.”

“What?” I ask.

“I seek some financial compensation that will only be lucrative if I'm dead,” she says. “Isn’t that ironic? I'm worth more to Adrian dead than I am alive.” She laughs. I don’t.

“Vivian, I don’t—”

“You see, I'm worth a hell of a lot of money. The only problem is that I can’t touch it until after I've been declared legally dead. This is where you come in. This is where you help me get what is rightfully mine after twenty years of being married to a man who didn’t give a damn about me.”

“I-I don’t understand,” I say.

“You should sit.” She turns toward the door, cupping her hands over her mouth to call, “Amelia!”

Amelia saunters in, carrying a tray of drinks. She sits the tray atop Vivian’s dresser, but doesn’t leave the room. Instead, she watches. I feel her in the corner staring at me, her left eye still swollen to the size of a grape.

“Care for something to drink?” Vivian asks me. She gestures at me with the glass. In a fit, I smack it out of her hand, forcing Amelia to retrieve the broken pieces from the floor on her hands and knees.

“Cassandra let’s not be difficult,” says Vivian, patronizingly.

“What do you want, Vivian?” I ask, refusing to sit down, refusing to get too relaxed around this woman.

She saunters across the bedroom to her closet. Amelia holds her position in the corner, eyes shifting surreptitiously to me. I expect her to speak. Her lips part, but she says nothing. We exchange these secret stares with Vivian’s back to us.

While rummaging through her clothes, Vivian flicks an occasional glance at us over her shoulder. “When Adrian had the nerve to force me into a pre-nup, I was admittedly distraught,” she says. “But I knew that to get what I wanted, I’d need a plan. The insurance money is ideal. Thirty million dollars will be wired into an off shore account two weeks after I'm proclaimed dead. Carrick will take care of that proclamation and make sure the death certificate is printed. The account is in your name. It’s also an account that Adrian knows nothing about.”

“You put this in
my
name?” I ask, now suddenly soaked in sweat. “Why?”

Vivian removes a pencil skirt from its hanger and holds it up to her body to examine it in the mirror. “I need somewhere reliable to put the money until the time is right. I certainly can’t place the money in
my
bank account,” she laughs. “I’m supposed to be dead, remember?”

“Why not Carrick’s account?”

She tosses the skirt to the floor, once more forcing Amelia to tend to the mess. Poor Amelia might as well be a rug as far as Vivian is concerned. With each article of clothing Vivian decides to throw to the floor, Amelia scrambled dutifully to gather the mess. She glances at me and those eyes beg for mercy. Vivian resumes perusing her wardrobe, tossing and dismissing the outfits that dissatisfy her.

“Carrick isn’t a viable option,” she says after finally choosing a strapless red dress to wear. Amelia and I watch Vivian undress. She removes her robe then undergarments and it’s like she doesn’t care that she’s naked in front of us. But Vivian has never had a problem with modesty before.

“Carrick’s past isn’t clean enough for this kind of job,” she says while slipping into the dress. She spins toward Amelia who zips the dress from behind, then toward me with her hands on her hips. “I needed someone who had no connection to either Adrian or me,” she says. “No criminal record and a clean slate. So I chose you, the unsuspecting college student who needed the money more than anyone else. I thought you’d jump at the chance. If you hadn’t been so damn stubborn, this could’ve gone a lot smoother.”

“You figured that because I'm broke that I’d help you defraud your insurance company? Are you insane?” I say and I can’t help, but laugh. “You want me to risk possible prison time so that you can steal Adrian’s money?”

“That money is rightfully mine!” she snarls.

“Yeah, but not legally,” I say. “Adrian may have done a lot of horrible things to you, but he doesn’t deserve
this
.”

“You don’t understand,” she says. “Twenty years of that man and he has treated me like shit! Then he had the nerve to make me sign a pre-nup? I have paid my dues. He has turned me into the person I swore I’d never be—my mother, the pathetic little
cuckol
d
.
Adrian owes me. Whether he knows it or not, he owes me.”

“Vivian, this is extreme.”

“This is what has to be done,” she says. “I deserve this and no one is taking it away.”

I plop atop the edge of her bed, speechless…at first.

“You and Randall have been planning for years, haven’t you?” I say.

She’s silent. Finally exposing a crack in her armor.

“Yeah,” I say. “I know his real name and that his medical license was revoked and that he’s been impersonating an actual doctor for the past fifteen years. Did he also teach you how to fake cancer? Tell you what to say, how to act and what to do to fool people into thinking that you were dying?”

“How much did he tell you?” she asks. 

“How did you do it?” I ask. “How did you fake it? The bedsores, the incontinence, the blood…how did you do it? And why cancer? Of all the ways to fake your death, why pick the most devastating way?”

“Why cancer?” she repeats. “Well, I couldn’t just fake some garden-variety car accident to convince the insurance company I was dead. It’s too overdone and too easy to disprove. I needed a paper trail, a long string of medical evidence to prove that my “death” wasn’t just suspicious coincidence. To them, I'm a terminal cancer patient who’s been “dying” for months. No need for them to suspect me of foul play.”

She lifts her skirt, exposing the familiar varicose veins streaking her inner thighs. “I hired an amazing tattoo artist,” she says. “He was very good at producing some realistic body art. I told him to make these look real. What do you think? Don’t they look beautiful?”

I don’t reply. She continues, “I have Amelia to thank for the ‘bedsores.’ A couple knife wounds did the trick. Hurt like hell. I even lost forty pounds to make myself look frail, weaker.

It took five years of research to emulate the perfect cancer patient. I toured local hospitals and sat in with the terminally ill to watch them and to take notes. Everyone thought it was for charity. They thought I was so selfless to devote my time to those people. So when the time was right and I announced my ‘diagnosis,’ everything was perfect.”

“Those pictures,” I say as I remember my research. “The ones I saw of you with those kids in the cancer ward, they were all apart your agenda. You used those kids’ illnesses to authenticate your charade.”

Amelia glances at me, red in the face, the shame coloring her cheeks like canvases.

“
You
helped her do this?” I snarl. “What are you—like her henchman or something?”

She doesn’t answer.

“Amelia does as she’s told,” says Vivian while stroking the girl’s bruised cheek. Her hand grips the back of Amelia’s neck, yanking her closer so Vivian can kiss the top of her head. “And she’s been such a good girl. What about you Cassandra? Will you be a good girl too?”

She moves toward me. I flinch away and scoot toward the opposite end of the mattress, unable to stand.

“I need you, Cassandra,” Vivian says after kneeling in front of me, cupping my hands inside hers. “We have to stick together.”

I pull away, jerking out of her grasp.

“This has nothing to do with me,” I say. “I'm not helping you do this.”

“I made you the sole beneficiary of my will,” she reminds me. “You’ve publically attacked me. Everyone at the banquet hall witnessed it. You’re having an affair with my husband...or at least that’s what I made them think. Money and lust are two of the most common motives for murder. The police will automatically suspect you if I mysteriously disappear.”

“So it’s not just Adrian you’re scapegoating. It’s me too.”

A familiar darkness clouds her eyes as she stares at me through her bangs, expressionless.

“Work
with
me or I’ll make damn sure that you can’t work against me,” she says. “Your choice.”

As she speaks, I realize that it was all planned. From the moment she met me at
Frank’s
, I was her scapegoat.
You weren’t chosen at random, Cassandra,
she’d said.
You’ve been a subject of interest for a while...

Faking cancer was to lure me in. Adrian was right:
Nothing Vivian does comes without an ulterior motive…

“Cassandra, I intend to protect you from the public backlash. All you have to do is stick to the original plan. Marry Adrian. I’ll ‘die’ from my cancer, as planned. Carrick will take care of the technical aspects. The insurance money will be deposited into the designated account that we’ll split. We can both be
very
wealthy women.”

Vivian stands, but before she can turn, Amelia lurches forward and plunges a syringe needle into Vivian’s neck. I flinch backward. Vivian’s body crumbles onto the bed. Amelia stands over her, shoulders quivering.
Mission accomplished.

“Move!” she tell me. “You have to move now. That stuff won’t last long.”

She grabs my arm, pulling me toward the door. Once outside, her grips loosens.

“What’d you do to her?” I ask.

“Injected her with
succinylcholine, a powerful neuromuscular paralytic 
drug,” she says. “It won’t last long—ten minutes—tops. You need to go home.”

“Amelia, how are you—”

“Just go home,” she urges. “Don’t come back to this house. Cassandra, I mean it.”

“Come with me,” I say.

“Someone has to stay with Vivian. Make sure she doesn’t hurt any of the others. I’ll call Adrian and tell him to come home. When she’s in her manic state, he’s the only one who can talk her down. You. Go. Home.”

Each of her word stab into me, warning me, pleading:
just do what she fucking says, Cassandra!
I start down the hall, leaving Amelia behind to fend for herself. I flee from the house, door slamming behind me. Across the lawn, through a flowerbed of gardenias, I sprint.