The Last Chance (33 page)

He finished dressing quickly. The long night was over, and he seemed quite ordinary again. He was sane, at least for a while. Rachel walked with him to her front door and opened it. “Good night,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone. She wondered if he was schizophrenic.

“Good night,” she said, and he went away. She locked and bolted the door.

She went into the kitchen and put on the kettle. He had even known that the maid had taken these few days off and she would be all alone, without Lawrence. He had known everything. She realized that the creepy feeling she’d had all these months had been because he was watching her. And the white roses …

She shivered. She wanted most of all to call Lawrence, to tell him what had happened, but she knew it would upset and frustrate him, because he was trapped out of town with meetings all day. He would be back tomorrow. If she tried to reassure him on the phone that she was all right, that Hank hadn’t hurt her, Lawrence wouldn’t believe it. He would rush back, and she didn’t want to put him through that. She would tell him face to face so he could see she was unhurt.

She thought of calling Ellen to warn her that Hank desperately needed a psychiatrist, but she was too tired to face it. Besides, maybe Hank was home already. She took her tea into the bedroom, pulled off the bedspread he had lain on, and threw it on the floor. She could never use it again. She would get another one later. Right now she just wanted to sleep.

Maybe she wouldn’t go to the lunch. How could she possibly face Ellen today? Sleep first, and think later. Rachel was tired of always being the thoughtful one who remembered things one should do.

At eleven thirty in the morning Margot woke up. She knew it was morning because she saw the wan light coming through the slats of her shutters. But morning of which day? She was supposed to be dead. She felt so groggy that she wasn’t even depressed, just disappointed. Why hadn’t the pills worked? What was she, some kind of superwoman, doomed to live forever? But her lassitude was comfortable, as if she’d been given an enormous dose of some kind of tranquilizer. It occurred to her that she was supposed to be at a lunch with Ellen and Rachel and Nikki, and she wondered if it was today or long past. She was too tired even to call. She couldn’t make it today anyway. She rolled over on her side. She felt so comfortable … cheated, but the pain had become less. She had tried to die, and she had lived. Live to die another day. She didn’t want to think about that. This feeling of being so drugged and comfortably sleepy that the pain was somewhere far away was like a blessing. She drifted off into a soft sleep, woke, and slept again. For the first time in her life she felt important, and she didn’t know why.

The city was awake and going about its business. Workers were at their jobs, traffic clogged the streets, Christmas shoppers pushed their way through the stores, children freed from school for their holiday vacation rushed or loafed, the planned day and the unplanned already set in motion. At eleven thirty in the morning, just about the time Margot had awakened, Rachel woke up too, her conscience like an alarm clock. If she didn’t go to the lunch at least she should call one of them. But they would all be disappointed. And now she wasn’t tired at all. She had enough nervous energy to keep her going for hours. She kept wondering how she could tell Ellen. She would just have to brave it through the lunch for the sake of all of them, and then get Ellen aside afterward for a drink and tell her privately what had happened with Hank. She had to tell her. The man was dangerously disturbed.

Poor Ellen. Ellen always treated Hank so abominably, she might even have been responsible for Hank’s breakdown. But Hank had picked Ellen, hadn’t he? Yet Rachel suspected the textbooks she studied weren’t always right. Ellen and Hank had been embryos when they got married, how could either of them imagine then how it would turn out?

Rachel took a hot shower. She felt much better. In a way she was even looking forward to the lunch. She couldn’t stay home and brood, and it might be fun. She had been extravagant and gotten her three friends each a turtleneck cashmere sweater from Halston: beige for Nikki’s blondness, taupe for Ellen’s tawniness, and dark gray for Margot’s very white skin and dark hair. They would all be delighted. She was glad she had gotten the same present for each of them. She wanted the three of them to feel equally cherished. It had seemed a good idea at the time, and now it seemed even better. Ellen would have a bad shock soon enough. What a rotten thing to have happen just around Christmas.

She hurried to dress and put on her makeup. Twelve thirty was early for a lunch and she didn’t want to be late. Rachel hated to keep people waiting.

Nikki had been on the phone in her apartment all morning. She called her secretary to say she wouldn’t be in until after lunch, got everything straightened out with the department store credit departments, called the credit-card companies, put it all in writing to confirm it, and cursed the bureaucracy that had changed the little country store where they knew everybody into a vast network of computers and numbers where anyone could be anyone. Her shoulder and leg still hurt. She stopped off at the super’s apartment on her way out to deliver his new set of keys, and he said he was going to have the lock on her mailbox changed that morning and would give her the new key when she came home. It had never occurred to her that the boys who had mugged her even had the key to her mailbox. Well, then they had the key to the front door of the building too, didn’t they? The super sighed. Yes, he knew that, and he was having the lock changed. He had to give all the tenants new keys, which was going to be a nuisance, because they all came home at different times and would be furious when they couldn’t get in, not to mention the ones who had gone to Florida for the winter.

“Why don’t we just dig a moat and put in a drawbridge?” Nikki said. “Those people had the right idea in the Middle Ages. One drawbridge, no keys.”

“With alligators in the water,” the super said. He laughed, pleased to see she was bearing up well after her shock of the night before.

She went to the bank to replace her spending money for lunch, and then she decided to walk to Tiffany’s. The streets seemed so safe in the sunlight. People were walking their dogs, carrying groceries … Where the hell had they been last night when she needed them?

Tiffany’s looked nice and empty until she got to the second floor. It was jammed. You would think things were cheap here! The little silver gifts were on display on a long velvet mat on one of the counters, with numbers on them, and you waited on line until it was your turn and then told the salesperson which number you wanted and were presented with a neatly tied blue box with a number on
it
. Nikki thought that all the people who received silver Christmas presents from Tiffany’s at Christmas would be surprised if they saw the assembly line they came from. She tried to look over the heads of the mob that surrounded the counter to inspect the key rings, silver pencils, calendar holders, swizzle sticks, more key rings, thimbles, pillboxes, rulers … She looked at her watch. She would be here all day if she waited. If she didn’t hurry she’d be late to the lunch. She wandered down the aisles of more expensive presents. It wasn’t empty there, but at least it wasn’t so crowded.

She saw just what she wanted in the showcase. Little silver mice. They were more than she had planned to spend, more than she really could afford right now. But they were so sweet. She’d write on the cards: “From the country mouse to the city mouse.” Then they would all laugh and tell her she wasn’t a country mouse any more, she was one of them.

Nikki finally got a salesperson and bought three silver mice, had them gift-wrapped, and charged them. She wrote the three cards and sealed them in their tiny white envelopes. All of it went into a tiny paper shopping bag. She stuffed that into her tote bag. No reason to entice any other muggers with her expensive loot. She whistled a Christmas carol while she waited for the elevator, glad she’d spent the extra money to get something really nice for her friends. The clock above the elevator said twelve twenty-five and she knew she’d be late—but, so what?

Rachel got out of her taxi on Fifth Avenue and walked west to Rockefeller Center. The huge tree was up, overlooking the ice skaters below. Tourists were gawking at it, dragging their children; tourists were everywhere. The flags of all the different nations set around the skating rink snapped in the wind. She leaned over the wide wall for a moment, watching the skaters, listening to the music they were moving to. Little kids you’d think were too young to skate so well, old people you wouldn’t think had the energy. Every year she always thought briefly that she should take up ice skating, and every year she found reasons to avoid it. This winter she had a good excuse; she had to go to classes and study. There were so many things she wanted to do, and she was going to do them too! There was no reason why she couldn’t. One at a time, and she would have them all.

She left the enticing view of the skaters and walked across the street to Rockefeller Center. It was exactly twelve thirty. She looked around to see if Nikki or Ellen or Margot might be coming along, but she didn’t see them. The street was full of people. Offices were letting out for lunch. Men and women, singly or in groups, hurrying to get somewhere or chatting casually about where they should go. She didn’t notice the woman with the shopping bag coming toward her because she was so ordinary-looking.

When the woman was right in front of her Rachel moved away, to get to the building, still paying no attention to any detail of this wan, bland-looking stranger, neat and plain, one of a million anonymous faces on the streets of New York. She felt a pressure on her arm through her sleeve, not a pain but a pushing. She looked down. There was blood on her coat sleeve and it was coming from her arm. She looked at the woman then in disbelief, searching the face she had never seen before, looking for the first time at the shining knife the woman had taken from the shopping bag and was holding in her hand.

The madwoman looked back at her, and for one fatal moment they were both madwomen, the tall, beautiful one filled with a confusing primordial guilt she could not understand, and the smaller, plain one lost in feelings one can only begin to comprehend.

“Do you know me?” Rachel asked. “Do you
know
me?”

And then the woman stabbed her through her open coat, the knife blade going into her heart, and Rachel was dead.

Epilogue: December 1975

Margot, Ellen, and Nikki sat together at Rachel’s funeral. The coffin was closed. Lawrence’s best friend, a man who had known Rachel for over ten years, made a lovely speech. Margot thought in passing that she had never been to a funeral where a woman delivered the eulogy, and she wondered why not. No one had even asked Nikki, who had been Rachel’s best friend, even though Margot knew Nikki wouldn’t have been up to the pain of it. Still, had Lawrence thought Nikki would have collapsed, or had he simply thought she hadn’t known Rachel long enough? What was long enough in friendship? Margot knew that Rachel had been one of her own only friends in the world. How ironic that she, who had tried to die, had lived, and that Rachel, who had loved life so much, was dead. She looked at the coffin, trying not to imagine Rachel inside it, and realized for the first time that death was forever. When she had taken all those pills she had not thought of it that way, she had simply thought of ending what she could not bear. There was a difference.

The night of the day that Rachel was murdered, when no one could get Margot on the phone and she had not appeared at the studio for work, Nikki had come to her apartment and leaned on the bell until Margot had dragged herself out of bed to see who it was. Nikki’s way of coping with grief was the opposite of Margot’s; she became hyperactive. She took one look at Margot, the empty pill bottles, the filthy apartment, and she knew. She called the studio and made up a lie about Margot having pneumonia. Then she told Margot about Rachel. It was not a brutal thing to do, it was Nikki’s way of jolting Margot out of her self-absorbed isolation, and it worked.

It was Nikki who had found Rachel’s body, surrounded by people, police cars, an ambulance. She had phoned Lawrence’s office to find him; she had discovered from calling Jill that Ellen was in the hospital. She had rescued Margot. From the time she found Margot until almost now Nikki had not left her alone, even to sleep. She had sent her cleaning woman to clean Margot’s apartment, paying her herself, and had made Margot sleep on the couch in her apartment. She had prepared simple, soft foods, the kind Margot remembered as security foods from her childhood whenever she had been sick, and she had almost fed her. Nikki’s two daughters had appeared. Lynn had her boyfriend in tow and all the new magazines for the convalescent, and Dorothy, who was studying to be a psychiatric social worker, had supplied Nikki with the names of several good psychiatrists. Nikki had given Margot the list.

“The rest is up to you,” Nikki said. “But I think this is better than pills. Do you know how lucky you are that doctor gave you Dalmane? It’s so safe, I’ve heard of someone who took a hundred and lived. That doctor must have suspected you were up to no good. I just wish you’d confided in me before it got that far.”

At first Margot was not sure if she was Nikki’s project, her therapy for her grief over Rachel, or if Nikki really cared. But then she realized that Nikki did care. “People can’t help you if you hide from them,” Nikki said. It was true. You had to reach out. But reaching out was one thing Margot was lousy at, she knew that. It wasn’t something she could change by herself.

She carried the list of psychiatrists in her handbag and had it with her even now. She knew Rachel would have told her the same thing. Rachel had tried to help her, had called, had kept inviting her to come over, and Margot had finally hidden from her and lied. No one could help her if no one knew.…

Why had it been Rachel instead of her? But it wasn’t an “instead of” proposition. That had always been one of her problems, Margot realized, that she had been so overwhelmed by mysterious guilt that she had thought everything was either-or. If she had died that night it wouldn’t have saved Rachel. None of the things she had chosen to do in her life had automatically blocked out the other choices. It was just that she had believed they did.