And When She Was Good (19 page)

“But not so discreet that you're willing to trust
your life story with him, right?” Bettina has been keeping one eye on the boy,
entranced by the television, visible through the door to the small den. Now she
closes it and comes back and stands over Heloise. She remembers their fight, all
those years ago, how comical everyone found it when Bettina lunged at her,
almost as provocative as the kissing sessions with Shelley. And certainly more
sincere. She flinches, ready to absorb a blow.

“Look, you always were a snooty bitch, thought you
were better than everyone. Because of your looks, because Val liked you best,
because you were sneaking around with those books. But what were you? You were
just another whore. Like Shelley, like me. Only I got out. I have a legitimate
life, with a legitimate kid. And you want to wreck that? I don't think so
.
Yeah, I'll go see your detective, and I will tell
him everything. Everything, Helen. Who you are, what you do.”

“I really wish you wouldn't.”

“Or maybe I'll write Val a letter, explain it all.
How about that? Man, you painted a target on me and then just went about your
life, thinking—hoping—that I was dead and it wouldn't matter. And even when you
knew where I was, you didn't have the guts to tell me what you did. For,
what?—six years you've just left me hanging. I'm surprised you didn't tell Val
where I lived, back when I tried to get a loan from you. That would have solved
everything.”

“But I didn't,” Heloise said, relieved to have this
one tiny parcel of high ground. “Precisely because I didn't want anything to
happen to you, despite the fact that you were trying to put the screws to
me.”

Bettina shakes her head. “Get out. Just get out.
Val obviously doesn't know where I am. Everyone in my life knows me as Betty
Martinez. I don't even look like my old self. First time I ever felt good about
that. I'm just another neighborhood lady. You want to make amends, you need to
be talking to someone else. A cop, a priest.”

What can Heloise say? Bettina has the ultimate
advantage of being right. Heloise has been a coward. Bettina got out, Heloise
stayed in. She didn't think Bettina's life was much to envy when their paths
crossed six years ago—older husband, problematic stepdaughter, not a lot of
money—but now it looks pretty damn sweet.

“I'm sorry,” she says. “I'm really sorry.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

2005–
O
CTOBER 28, 2011

I
t was not the best time to shop for a house, although Heloise would later comfort herself with the notion that it could have been worse, that she didn't buy at the top. Besides, in 2005 seemingly everyone believed that prices would rise forever, that a house simply could not lose value. Heloise, preapproved for a ridiculous amount of money, a sum she would never lend herself, was advised to offer above the asking price or waive an inspection to get what she wanted. The advice made her feel like a sap. She wasn't used to being at the whim of an irrational market. The commodity she provided did not experience wild price fluctuations. Demand went up slightly in overheated times such as these and slumped in recessions, but there were no giddy bubbles. Heloise envied the funeral-home business, wondered how it responded to an economy where everything was measured by percentage increases in profits. Did funeral homes have stockholders? If so, how did they appease them? Presumably with suggestive selling, suckering the bereaved with extras they didn't need, items with ridiculous markups.

Heloise didn't have such items in her inventory. A blow job was a blow job was a blow job. You couldn't paint it gold and add two thousand dollars, you couldn't—

“And this is Mother's office,” the realtor told her, pointing out the little cubbyhole off the kitchen, the one that had been pointed out in every house she had seen in the suburbs she'd selected between Baltimore and D.C. The agent opened the file drawer with a flourish.

Whose mother's?
Heloise wanted to ask.

Besides, it was a different office that intrigued Heloise in this particular house, the basement lair of a psychiatrist who had worked at home. Soundproof, with a steel door, ugly as sin. Yes, this was the place for her.

“The house is nice,” she told the realtor. “But I hate what they've done down here. I wanted to find a house with a playroom in the basement, or at least a space that could be easily converted.”

“Well, there's always the family room off the kitchen—”

“Not the same,” she said. “A shame. The rest of the house is at least inoffensive in its decor.”

“Inoffensive? It has all the latest top-line fixtures.”

“If you say so,” Heloise said with pained politeness.

The realtor, used to needy supplicants, became invested in winning Heloise over, extolling the house's virtues, falling back on the usual glossary—“marble” and “granite” and “high-end”—as if these were incantations that would cast a spell. Heloise played it cooler and cooler. She made the realtor doubt the house's desirability. It wasn't enough that others might want it. Why didn't this well-dressed, preapproved woman want it? Before the week was through, the seller accepted the original asking price for the house in Turner's Grove, which was considered a huge coup at the time.
Buying a house for the asking price.

Really, Heloise thought, something was askew.

Turner's Grove came by its prosaic name honestly. Ezekiel Turner had owned acres and acres of fruit trees in what was now the center of a sprawling subdivision in Anne Arundel County, where Helen—reinvented as Heloise—decided to buy. Location, location, location. It was thirty-five minutes from downtown Baltimore, forty from D.C., and not even fifteen from Annapolis. The houses, while expensive, were not quite as pricey as one might expect, because only a small stretch of Turner's Grove had water access. Water, the bay and its rivers, was what drew most well-to-do people to this particular county. Heloise considered the lack of water a plus. Didn't people know that drowning was a greater risk to children, that a pool in the backyard was more dangerous than a gun in the home? Hadn't anyone else read this new book
Freakonomics
? She rejected several houses in the neighborhood she wanted because they all had pools.

But the best thing about Turner's Grove was the size of the lots, at least a half acre, which the original housing covenants decreed must never be subdivided. It was the most private place she found in her search, which wasn't saying much. She could still see the silhouettes of three different neighbor families at night.

She hadn't even reached moving day—the daily rental truck disgorging a pitiful amount of furniture, not enough to fill even a third of the house—before those neighbors, and others farther afield, started to speculate about this single mother with the big house.

The initial gossip about Heloise was spread by the realtor, a top-heavy woman with a penchant for grudges. Not that she had much gossip to spread, but when had that ever stopped anyone? A single woman, she told her friends, who told their friends. Widowed, apparently, although given her profession—lobbyist, and one had to be a lawyer to be a lobbyist, no? (no)—maybe she was that rare woman who had done very well by her divorce. Hamilton Point, the neighborhood Heloise had chosen, was the best in Turner's Grove, no spec houses here, all custom-built creations.

Why does a woman with one child need so much space?
the realtor asked everyone she met. And so cool, almost snobbish. The realtor was less forthcoming with the information that Heloise had gotten a relative deal on the property.

Stranger still—the gossip moved on to a second generation, based on what the neighbors had observed about this oddly private creature—she managed to do things that even stay-at-home mothers struggled with. There she was, in the drop-off lane every morning and in the pickup lane more afternoons than not. She drove Scott to T-ball, never missed field day or a school concert. If baked goods were required, she offered store-bought ones from gourmet bakeries. What kind of job was that, which allowed one to be present
and
garbed in Prada? She was more like a man than a mother, and it was true she tended to gravitate to the part of the field where the fathers gathered, still in their work clothes. She looked less out of place among them. Her dead husband must have had quite a life-insurance policy. The women eyed their still-living husbands with something akin to resentment, wondering how their lives might change for the better if their men would suddenly disappear and be replaced by an enormous chunk of cash. How had he died? A car crash? With a semitrailer? There must have been some deep pockets involved, a corporate entity held responsible for the errant driver.

The talk swirled around and around, feasting on itself, with no help from Heloise. It was like birds pecking at one another long after the last crumb was gone. Still Heloise refused to make friends, despite knowing that her reserve was fueling the gossip. Too dangerous. Every person added to her life was a liability. She drove Scott to and from playdates, let him have friends to the house, but she never volunteered to do anything with other parents and limited sleepovers to a few times a year. On the sidelines at soccer practice, she never said,
Oh, I'll take the kids to Pizza Hut,
and she seemed nervous when Scott wanted to go off with a group. She kept to herself. What could be more suspicious than a woman who didn't desire their company?

Over the years Heloise changed a few things. When Lonnie became problematic as a baby-sitter—the poor thing had fallen asleep with a pan blazing on the stove, and who knows what might have happened if Scott hadn't wandered into the kitchen for a glass of water?—Heloise let her go and hired Audrey, whom she introduced as her au pair. (Audrey's odd speech made it plausible that English was her second language.) Au pairs were not a luxury the way full-time nannies were, so no one envied her Audrey. Besides, the women gossiped, they wouldn't want someone with such poor language skills to care for
their
children.

The thing that finally normalized Heloise in the other women's eyes was her half sister Meghan, who moved into a nearby subdivision a year later, a coincidence that Heloise bemoaned yet managed to survive. Meghan's family didn't stay long; she found herself genuinely widowed, and she cashed in her chips—her term—and moved to Florida, where the money went further now that the bust was on. But the mere existence of a bona fide relative somehow persuaded the other families that Heloise was authentic, hiding nothing. Funny, because Meghan was quite the most disreputable asset that Heloise could have summoned, given that they had the same father and were only six months apart. But no one did the math. No one ever does the math, in Heloise's experience. In reality, people probably gossiped less about her than she imagined.

No, Turner's Grove was altogether satisfactory. Life went on, which is the one thing it can be counted on to do. Scott entered kindergarten, Scott went to grade school, Scott went to middle school. He was happy and productive, a good student, the kind of boy whose manners drew compliments from teachers and strangers, yet other boys didn't find him prissy. Heloise assumed that the shoe of adolescence would drop eventually, that he would become querulous and difficult. But with his twelfth birthday looming, he remained her dream child.

Or so she thinks until the Friday afternoon she returns from a midday appointment and finds her office door unlocked, which it never, ever is. Audrey is so paranoid about Heloise's rules on this that she locks herself inside the office when she's working there alone.

Unlocked, but undisturbed. The filing cabinets are locked, the desk is as clean as ever. Still, she can't help remembering that open letter upstairs, the one from her mother. Is Scott becoming a sneak?

She boots up the computer and has typed nothing more than
“P”
when the obliging Google box offers her list upon list of pornographic sites. Party girls. Poontang. On and on and on. She clicks through to one site. It makes her sad, as most pornography does, because of the low production values, its tendency to make sex look ugly.

Eleven and looking at porn on a computer. Was he precocious? Should she be proud? Scott has known where babies come from since he was seven. He also has known the alleged story of where he came from, the lovely redheaded father killed in a car accident before his son appeared in the world. But he has never asked her about sex in any other context but procreation. If he had, she would have talked to him about it. She would have told him it felt good but that it was complicated. She had planned to tell him that sex is a promise you make with your body, that it must involve mutual respect, that it is powerful, more powerful than most people want to recognize. That people (men usually) have died for it, that women use it to get what they want. Sex is like a gun. If you know what you're doing, you'll be safe, but if you don't take precautions—oh, yes, there is so much information about sex in her head, but her son (tellingly?) has never asked his mother for any facts beyond the basics.

L
ater that afternoon she picks him up at school and announces that they are going for a treat, which is not out of the ordinary on a Friday. They drive to an ice-cream stand next to a farm with a pen of tame ponies. Scott had once delighted in this place, but he seems jaded now. How you going to keep him down on the farm? Who wants ponies once he's discovered poontang?

“Scott,” she begins, sipping her strawberry shake, “were you in my office today?”

“I'm not supposed to go in your office,” he says, licking the edge of his cone.

“Yes.” He's slicing the onion pretty thin. “But
did
you?”

He meets her eye and says with sincerity, “No! If you tell me not to do something, I don't do it.”

The no—emphatic, almost shocked—might have won the discussion for him. But he's gone slightly too far. Heloise looks into her son's foxy brown eyes and is reminded of—not Val but herself. Because she's the liar. She's been lying so long, about so many things, that the lies don't register anymore. And somehow Scott realizes this, even if he doesn't know he realizes it. Everything she has done has been for him, but how does she explain that? How does she explain that she lied to protect herself, then lied to protect him? Bettina was right: She is a coward.

Her mother's voice chimes in:
And if you're lucky, you'll never have to ask your child for forgiveness.

“Scott, I know you were. I also know you looked at a letter that was in my upstairs desk.”

“I needed paper clips. I'm allowed to go into your upstairs desk.”

She almost wants to stop to school him a little in effective lying.
Admit nothing.

“And you saw the letter?”

“I saw a letter addressed to Helen Lewis. I don't know who that is.”

“That was my name, once. I changed it legally.”

“Why?”

It feels awful to lie when she's trying to teach her son the value of honesty. She manages a semitruth. “It sounded grander. I wanted an impressive name, a memorable one, for my business.”

“And who's B. Lewis? That's what was in the return address.”

“Did you open the letter?”

“No.”

This has the ring of truth.

“A relative. Someone I'm not close to, back in Pennsylvania.”

“An aunt, like Aunt Meghan?”

“Something like that.” A grandmother is something like an aunt, no? “Scott, are there . . . things you need to ask me?”

He looks down at his cone. “Why aren't there any photos of my dad?”

A lie is at the ready.
When I moved after your father's death, a lot of things got lost.
A lie has always been at the ready for Heloise, even when she was Helen.

“Your father wasn't much for photos,” she says. That's true. She suddenly thinks about the Polaroid, the one of Shelley and Bettina, making out for the men's amusement, a silly thing she refused to do and that Val never forced on her. She always thought he respected her for having some dignity. Polaroids were almost campy by the nineties, but Val had never been an early adopter, except when it came to his television, which was always the biggest, the newest, with bells and whistles that he learned to master through trial and error, being incapable then of reading an instruction booklet. On a boring night, he would bring out the camera, ask girls to pose for him, make the guys do stupid shit, too.