The Life She Wants (7 page)

“We never talk at all anymore,” Riley complained. “It's like you're too busy to be bothered with me.”

“No, of course not! Well, maybe we're growing apart a little bit,” Emma said. “On account of going to different colleges. But we'll always be best friends.”

Riley, who used to talk to her best friend every day, several times a day, was lost. Jock, not one to go long without a girl, was calling and hanging around Riley a lot. He said it made perfect sense for them to be going out. “You can't tell me she's not,” he said to Riley. “I'm not sitting home until Emma decides she has time for me.”

Looking back, Riley remembered she'd felt deserted. Abandoned. Was it too much to expect her best friend to talk to her every couple of days? Twice a week? For more than three minutes? And maybe ask her about herself once in a while?

She and Jock were commiserating a lot. Jock was always around, calling her, taking her out for pizza, inviting her to join him for their high school's homecoming game and subsequent parties with old classmates. They were pals in their shared loneliness.

“Be careful of him,” Adam had said to Riley. “He's been known to take advantage of girls.”

“We're just friends,” she said.

But Riley was growing very fond of Jock. She looked forward to every call, every casual date. They stopped commiserating so much and started laughing and having fun. They met friends at pizza parlors and on the beach. One crisp fall night they drove over to the coast and had a few beers by a beach fire, just the two of them. It was amazing how much they had to talk about—Emma's name never came up. Riley was astonished to find she was feeling far less abandoned.

She was falling for him.

“I think I might be way into you, too,” he said. “Damn, I never saw this coming! I'm starting to think it probably should've been me and you from the start.”

“We have to tell her, Jock. We have to tell Emma exactly how this happened. We couldn't get her on the phone for five minutes, we started hanging out, we got closer—at first because we were both missing her. But then because we have something. I don't know...chemistry?”

He laughed. “You think Emma cares? Go ahead—leave her a message. She'll get back to you in a week or two.”

Then it went too far. Riley never meant for it to happen. At least not until she had thought it through much more carefully. Not until they came clean with Emma. She was telling herself it wasn't the worst thing in the world to spend so much time with Jock, to kiss and fondle and whisper in the dark of night, but then things got out of control and before she knew it, her shirt was pushed up, her jeans were around her knees and they'd gone all the way. Before they'd been honest with Emma.

“Oh, God, I wanted us to tell Emma before something like that happened.”

“Baby, Emma could care less.”

“But I think I'm falling in love with my best friend's boyfriend!”

“Whoa, whoa,” he said. “Riley, let's just slow down here...”

“Aren't we in love?” she asked. “All those things you were saying, that you couldn't get through this without me and I'm the best thing that's happened to you and you probably should've hit on me first...”

“Hey, shoot me for being nice, huh? Of course I care about you—who said I didn't? That was totally up to you. You were totally into it. Just don't say anything, all right? You don't have to make an announcement, for God's sake. I won't tell her. I just don't know if I'd call it love. Yet.”

“You have to break up with her. Tell her about us. You're the one who started things with me, not the other way around. Aren't you breaking up with her?” Riley asked.

“I don't think I'm going to have to,” he said. “I think she broke up with me about three months ago. She's partying her ass off in Seattle.”

“And there's no grass growing under your ass, now, is there?” she threw back at him.

Four weeks later, right before Emma came home for Christmas break, she told Jock she was pregnant. She'd taken the home test and it was positive.

“You sure it's mine?” he said. “I used a condom.”

“I haven't been with anyone else,” she informed him hotly.

“But I don't know that for sure, do I? Since I wasn't with you every minute. And like I said, I had protection.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“I don't know. I guess what anyone would do. You need a little money?”

She was so filled with shame, disappointment and rage she wanted to die, but she lifted her chin and said, “Go to hell, Jock.”

But really, when it happened, she had thought she loved him. And she struggled with that feeling, on and off, for a few years after that.

* * *

Adam left Riley in her office and got in his car. He thought he'd drive by his mother's house and ask if there was anything she needed him to do, see what her plans were for the evening. He might tell her about Emma, but he hadn't decided yet. Those dozen or so times he had gotten in touch with Emma before she got married, when she was in college and then living in New York in the city, well, he never mentioned that to his family. Or to Lyle. And it seemed as though Emma hadn't talked about it, either. But maybe it hadn't left that much of an impression on her.

What's that about? Do you have a thing for her?

Oh, yeah.
He had since she was about fifteen. That summer she'd gone from fourteen to fifteen—man, that was the pivotal summer in a young woman's life—and Emma had gone from the little sister to a woman of interest.

I see the way you're looking at Emma,
his mother had said.
Do not touch that girl, do you hear me? She's like a daughter to me, like a sister to you and Riley and you're eighteen. She is off-limits. At least until you're both adults. This is non-negotiable. Her evil stepmother would love to throw you in jail!

But not long after she passed her eighteenth birthday, she was gone to Seattle. Soon after that Riley was expecting Jock's baby. There was a significant part of Adam's heart that was very happy Jock was no longer Emma's guy, but he was smart enough to know that until Emma recovered from her broken heart, he'd better not step forward.

The next six years were a blur. Emma didn't return to Santa Rosa except for very brief visits and he didn't see her. He worked two jobs and went to school, his grandparents both died, he was helping his mother and Riley as much as he could. He grew very attached to Maddie, and Emma moved to New York. He always thought, one of these days...

While he was thinking that, she got married. And not to just anybody, but some internationally known millionaire.

All that had changed. And she was back.

Chapter Five

Emma didn't qualify for unemployment, as hers had been a part-time job. She did qualify for food stamps, which weren't called food stamps anymore. Although she had applied online, she had to invest four hours in the county welfare office, completed forms in hand. It was now a debit card that would come in the mail. Soon, they said—in about thirty days. If things went well. After her application was approved.

She judged herself against the great throng of people gathered in the county welfare office. She'd heard her husband rant about how many undeserving and entitled people took advantage of the welfare system, got all this free money without hardly trying. She felt like one of them and wondered if she deserved help. Probably not. She'd been married to him, after all. She also wondered where all that free money was and where those people who worked the system were. She'd always had visions of slick con men sauntering in and with the flick of a form, walking out with money or some other assistance. Most of the people in the office were women, more than half with small children hanging on their legs or sitting on their laps. At least half were Hispanic but as she'd read in the guidelines, they had to be documented to qualify. None looked like the type she expected. And no one looked at ease or comfortable about being there. As for Emma, she felt a little ill. Demoralized and ashamed, like further proof she'd done something wrong. But she looked better than anyone in the place. She still had some good clothes, expensive shoes and a couple of nice handbags, unlike everyone else there.

Her clothes didn't fit so well these days. It hadn't taken long for the extra pounds she'd gained from Burger Hell to fall off. Job searching, the stress of it and the sheer calisthenics of tromping all over hell and gone ate up a lot of calories. Not to mention the worry that she'd never be able to support herself again.

There seemed to be a lot of hair in her hairbrush these days. Was she losing her hair? She'd been grinding her teeth at night for a couple of years and she dreamed about losing her teeth. Awake, she worried about falling apart one batch of cells at a time.

She wondered what Rosemary, Anna and Lauren thought she was doing right now. How did they not have the slightest concern that she might be struggling? None of them reached out or asked her how she was getting by. When she'd been comfortable, before Richard's investigation began, they were always front and center, her
family
. They'd wrangled first class trips to New York on Richard's dime and just to save himself the annoyance of having them about, he'd put them up in a suite at the Plaza Athenee. It quickly became expected. Rosemary, the woman who couldn't even have been bothered to take her shopping when she was a girl, called and in her sweetest voice would say, “It's time for our annual trip to the city, dear. Will you book it for us?” And Emma had given them such generous, beautiful birthday and holiday gifts. They never even thanked her. They thought it was nothing to her. They probably thought one of her servants bought and shipped them.

The only jobs she seemed to qualify for were laborer's positions. Waitressing paid far less than minimum wage because of the tips, which waitstaff were obligated to report to the IRS. In the end she did better for herself by not mentioning her degree; she said she was educated through high school. Stealing a little bit from Riley, she said she'd cleaned houses for work and the only reference she had was Adam Kerrigan because she hadn't lived around here since high school.

So she took a job on the housekeeping staff of a hospital in Petaluma. After four days of training she began on the day shift, punching in at 7:00 a.m.

She made a decision, an easy one. She wasn't about to tell anyone her story. She'd like to at least pay her bills for a while. She kept it simple. She had been married to a man named Rick—no one had ever called Richard
Rick
—they didn't have children, he died of a brain injury. Hospital people took that to mean stroke or aneurysm, not a bullet. She never mentioned New York; she said they'd lived in Ohio. On the line that asked for her last address, she made up a completely fictitious address in Akron. She decided to come back to California where she grew up, where she had a few friends and some sparse family. It was a little dicey when people asked, in a friendly way, “Who are your friends? Who do you hang around with?” At which point Emma began to have secret, imaginary friends. “Oh, my girlfriend Mary Ann who I went to school with and a cousin, Jennifer, who's married with two kids. Then there's Ruth, my favorite aunt who's only four years older—I'm close to them.”

The women on the housekeeping staff she worked with were exceptionally friendly, reaching out to her, warning her about the supervisor who was a dragon lady named Glynnis Carlson. Glynnis was short, wore a forty-year-old hairstyle with one silver slash in front, came upon them like an unexpected storm and without even raising her voice threatened their very lives for having a cell phone out, for disposing of soiled linens wrong, for leaving streaks on the floor or porcelain, letting their carts get overladen or worse, understocked. And that was nothing compared to the way she berated people who weren't keeping up with their assigned area, which was very hard because nurses and aides were constantly summoning housekeeping. They didn't help with cleaning up beds or patients, of course, but anything that hit the floor was passed on to the housekeeping staff. There were a lot of messes that hospital staff didn't handle. The horrid ones.

“Be glad you're not in the ER or the operating room. Wear a mask and never work without gloves, just change them out,” advised Barbara, one of the cleaning staff who had been around for years. “Wrap as much mess as possible in the linens, careful not to get any plastics or papers in them, get them down the chute fast as you can. Let it be laundry's problem. They transfer it all with big sticks and hooks.”

There was a lot of that in a hospital. The doctors passed it off to the nurses, who passed it to the orderlies and aides, who passed it to housekeeping, who passed it to laundry.

It was hard, ugly work, but steady and among decent people. Emma had never been shy of hard work and she was growing confident and a little bit happy. She had work. She had just enough money and didn't require much to live on. Life in her tiny bungalow was compact and uncomplicated. Not only were her coworkers nice to her but the patients and their visitors were also pleasant, and under the direst of circumstances—illness. Cleaners weren't allowed to have traffic with patients—they weren't trained for that. But there was nothing preventing them from being cordial, going for an extra water jug for flowers, calling nurses when they saw a problem. “Just don't touch them,” the dragon lady said. “Not even if one of them falls. Switch on the emergency light and stand by.”

“Not even if they fall?” Emma asked, aghast.

“All you need is to help someone off the floor and break their neck or something. You'll lose your job and the hospital will get sued. You never move an accident victim. You let the professionals do that.”

“Makes sense, when you put it that way,” she said.

“Think of them all as accident victims,” Glynnis said. “Just get their bathrooms clean.”

But despite these terrifying warnings, Emma warmed to the patients, particularly the elderly. Little old people were so vulnerable when ill and she found she couldn't turn away. The old women loved her and the old men loved her more, and she just couldn't stop herself from offering the occasional sip of water to someone who was struggling with the tray table or a glass. It pleased her to hand a wet washcloth to someone who needed it. She even stayed late and read to an eighty-five-year-old blind woman, though she was careful to ask the dragon lady for permission first.

“I'm not allowed to help you to the lavatory,” she told the woman. “I'm so sorry. But I'll get the nurse.”

“I hate the nurse. I'd rather it be you.”

“Oh, I'd be happy to, but the housekeeping staff has been threatened with dire consequences if we break the rules, even just slightly. I'm not trained in patient care. Let me get that nurse and I'll stay with you until she comes.”

She started thinking about possibly training as a nurse's aide.

She had three very blissful weeks in her hospital job, though it was the hardest work she'd ever done. She didn't care; she went on break with coworkers, she ate lunch with her new friends, heard about their marriages, their kids, their aging parents, their car problems and vacation plans.

Emma began to have fantasies of a normal life. It wouldn't be a rich life for sure, but at this point a rich life only represented disaster and danger to her. She was looking for stability, nothing more. She had her food debit card, she handed out Halloween candy with Penny, the leaves finished turning, November came in wet and cold. She got together for wine with Lyle and Ethan, who was almost starting to believe she wasn't a bad person. She spoke to Adam on the phone a couple of times when he called to see how she was doing. She had a light dinner with Penny on TV trays, watching
Madam Secretary
with her, just like normal people. Penny invited her to join her with her girlfriends Susan, Marilyn and Dorothy for a potluck one evening and to her delighted surprise, these old girls liked martinis! Susan's son was the chauffeur for Susan, Marilyn and Dorothy. “I told him I was completely capable,” Susan said. “But it's just as well he wants to drive us. That way we can have two!”

“William is such a nice boy,” Penny said of Susan's son.

“That
boy
is fifty-nine years old,” Susan said. “Before long I'll be chauffeuring him!”

At two weeks until Thanksgiving, Emma had more than one offer for the holiday feast. Lyle and Ethan were going to Ethan's sister's house and had graciously included her. She might've gone but for the fact that Penny and a couple of her widowed girlfriends who were sharing the feast also invited her—and they were to dine at Penny's little house. She dearly wanted to join them.

“Being one of the new kids at the hospital, I'm sure I'll have to work that day,” Emma said.

“We took that into consideration,” Penny told her. “We'll be ready at about four—that should give you time to get home, shower, come over for some pre-turkey poo-poos and wine.”

“Let me pick up the wine,” she said.

“You're absolutely welcome to.”

“And I'll visit Lyle's shop and see if he'll give me a break on a centerpiece,” she added.

“Try your best, darling, but be warned—he's going to gouge you! I've been looking for a discount for years. I guess I can't complain,” she said with a smile. “He gave me you.”

Emma was having a life. She had friendly acquaintances at work, a paycheck large enough to cover her most immediate expenses, friends apart from the hospital, two invitations for a holiday dinner, a comfortable place to live. It didn't even bother her that her own family hadn't so much as called to check on her much less ask her to join them for Thanksgiving dinner. In fact, she was relieved.

Just as she was beginning to relax, something weird happened. One of the older nurse's aides was glowering at Emma for no apparent reason. Clarice seemed angry about something. Angry or on edge. Some others seemed to be following suit. It appeared to be an unhappy day on the ward. There was a static in the air and Emma knew something was wrong. There had been a couple of emergencies; maybe that was setting everyone on edge.

The static turned to an electric crackle. Emma tried not to notice but she was beginning to feel paranoid by the behavior around her.

It didn't last long. It was two in the afternoon, about an hour until shift change. A patient had been discharged and the room was ready for a terminal cleaning. Emma got her cart, mop, linens, gloves and went to the room. Standing there beside the now empty bed in a room with no other patients was Clarice.

“How much do you have stashed away?” she asked, her voice hard.

“What?”

“You heard me. How much do you have stashed away? Enough to take care of my elderly mother? Because Hugh and I can't afford her and she has to live with us now since her entire savings was stolen.”

“What are you talking about?” Emma asked, fearing she knew.

“I know who you are, Mrs. Compton. We all know who you are. My mother's name is Roberta Sinclair and you took everything she had and I think you can find a way to get it back.”

Oh, no! Even though she'd been over every possible scenario, now Emma didn't know what to say. She just shook her head. “There's nothing,” she said. “I have nothing.”

“You have assets in your name,” Clarice insisted.

Emma shook her head again. “There's nothing in my name. Everything was in Richard's name and the few things that weren't, I surrendered. All our possessions were auctioned—I surrendered those, as well. Do you honestly think I'd be scrubbing floors in a hospital if I had anything?”

“For a while, yes,” she said. “You'll lie low for a while, then when the talk has died off, you'll tap into your hidden money. I read the book!”

“The books are wrong! The internet is wrong! Everything is gone—my wedding ring, my wedding gown, wedding gifts—I gave it all back. I'm not lying low—I'm using my legal name. I haven't even colored my hair! I didn't know what was going on, Clarice. I had nothing to do with Richard's business.”

“What about offshore money? One of the books says he was about to give the SEC account numbers when—”

“Gone. He was trying to negotiate a smaller sentence, but... There's nothing that I know of, nothing left to me, I swear.”

“The book says you retained 1.4 million and a lot of valuable property...”

She was getting dizzy, shaking her head. “I kept a few thousand so I could drive back here and rent a small space. The US Marshals sold everything at auction. Everything. I kept some sheets and towels, a few dishes and pots. I gave most of my clothing to women's shelters. There's nothing. Do you think I want to be tied to that hideous crime? I was told that investors got roughly thirty-two cents on the dollar. I couldn't do anything more.”