These Girls (18 page)

A gentle sound caught Renee’s attention. She glanced at the row ahead of her as the noise repeated itself. Was someone actually snoring? Magazine staffers always used press conferences as handy excuses to explain their absences from the office—all you needed to do was put a Post-it on your computer with a note reading,
At a press event!
and you could escape to get a haircut, take a long lunch, or hit the gym. But using them to cover for nap time was a new one to Renee. Her eyes drifted along the snorer’s row, and she noticed one person was actually paying attention. Her dark hair was cut into a sleek, chin-length style, just like Diane’s, and she was taking notes on an iPad. An iPad with a pink case.

It
was
Diane.

How had she gotten in? Renee wondered as she felt her back stiffen. The invitation had gone to Bonnie, who still had a week left at
Gloss
before she headed to
Vogue.
Bonnie had handed the invite directly to Renee. Renee was planning to write a funny blog about the event, giving people a behind-the-scenes look at the unveiling of a new product—but could Diane be planning that, too? Maybe Diane was calling around, letting all the cosmetics companies know she was eager to attend press conferences that she could publicize online. She could be compiling a list of contacts, working events, positioning herself to take over the job . . .

She’d made a mistake, Renee realized. She’d underestimated Diane.

Twelve

“TELL ME ABOUT YOUR
relationship with your mother,” the counselor instructed, crossing one leg over the other.

“My mother?” Abby hesitated.

“What was she like, Abby?”

After a second course of raw panic had careened through her body yesterday when she’d tried to put Annabelle in the car, causing her to rush back into the house and spend the day playing with blocks and books instead of taking Annabelle to music class, Abby had phoned the counseling service at the university and made an appointment.

Could it be another premonition? She was terrified that something was going to happen to Annabelle—that she would be badly hurt. She’d even had a vague dream about someone—Abby couldn’t see the person, just the shadow—running directly into the path of a car. When Abby tried to yell a warning, she couldn’t speak. It was as if she was enclosed in glass, able to see everything but powerless to move. She heard the squeal of brakes, then a scream. She’d woken up at 4:00
A.M.
covered in a layer of sweat, and she hadn’t been able to sleep again.

Yet, once again, when she entered her own Honda without Annabelle, she felt fine.

Was this all a twisted form of guilt? she wondered. Nothing had happened between her and Bob, yet everything had changed. She’d joined him and Annabelle for another dinner, and Bob had described his childhood as they shared roasted chicken breasts and wild rice studded with almond slivers and plump, sour-sweet cranberries. His parents had split when he was eight, which meant Bob and his younger sister were stretched back and forth between their two homes. He was a high school football player, just as Abby had guessed, and the vice president of the student government association. The divorce had created a jagged break in what had been a happy childhood; it had scarred him deeply. He’d learned to cook because his dad never had anything in the house but frozen pizza, and, after a few culinary disasters, Bob had told Abby, he discovered he liked it.

Abby had talked more about Stevie, describing how Trey had said that their little brother adored cows and made a mooing sound every time he saw a picture of one. Stevie had never learned to crawl, so he simply rolled from one end of the room to another until he began to walk.

“I just wish I had one memory of him,” Abby had said while Bob nodded in understanding. “Just one thing.”

She couldn’t help contrasting their conversations to the ones she shared with Pete. Pete knew Stevie had died of a sudden illness, but he’d never asked anything about him, or tried to draw out Abby’s feelings. Their relationship was pinned on activities, not conversation, and being with Bob made her realize how superficial it felt.

She and Bob were peeling back one another’s layers, shedding their old roles and seeing each other in new ways, and the air between them always felt electric. She felt his eyes lingering
on her before he left in the mornings, and when he came home at night, she stayed to chat with him instead of heading downstairs. She found herself waiting for the sound of his old Saab convertible turning up the driveway so she could rush to the bathroom to brush her hair before his heavy tread sounded on the steps. She grew to love the gentle creak the mailbox lid made as Bob flipped it open to take out the envelopes and magazines, because that meant, in another few seconds, he’d fit his key into the front door.

Was she worried her feelings for Bob—feelings he seemed to return—would destroy Annabelle’s family? Or maybe something murkier was going on in her subconscious.

“My mom and I aren’t close,” Abby finally said to the counselor. She gave a half laugh. “That’s an understatement, I guess. We don’t talk all that much.”

The counselor nodded and waited. She was a heavyset woman with clear blue eyes and a round face that projected calm compassion. She was one of the only people Abby had ever met who didn’t fidget; her pen stayed still in her hand, her feet were planted on the carpeted floor, and her eyes remained fixed on Abby. She reminded Abby of a chameleon, one who appeared motionless but didn’t miss anything. A sympathetic-looking chameleon; the woman’s mouth was turned up just slightly at the corners, and the expression in her eyes was encouraging.

“We look alike, everyone says,” Abby said. She racked her brains to come up with something else to say about her mother. “She’s, um, a human resources administrator at a small company in Silver Spring. My dad’s a government lawyer.”

“Why do you think you and your mother aren’t close?”

“She doesn’t . . .” Abby’s voice trailed off. “She loves me, of course. She made me dinner every night when I was growing up. I always had clean clothes and stuff. She just . . . she isn’t . . .”

Abby swallowed hard and tried to organize her thoughts. How to convey the lifetime of unease, as if she were always tiptoeing across a freshly waxed floor in slippery socks; the sense that her mother sometimes wished Abby would just go away—that she didn’t wish Abby any harm but wanted her simply to disappear. Her mother went about parenting the way Abby suspected some factory workers worked through their shifts. She met all the requirements without absorbing a bit of joy from them, her eye on the clock as she anticipated her release. Another meal to cook, another school conference to attend, another winter coat to buy . . . Nothing she did for Abby seemed to bring her the slightest bit of happiness.

“She loves you,” the counselor repeated, not prejudicing the words with any inflection.

“I don’t know,” Abby whispered.

Something inside of her cracked open, releasing slow tears down her cheeks. “I picked her flowers once from this field on the way home from school. I was about eight or nine. I cut my thumb on a thorn, I remember that part. I sucked my thumb until it stopped bleeding because I didn’t want to spoil the surprise by asking for a Band-Aid. I handed them to her, and she just kind of stood there. She didn’t . . . hug me. Sometimes I would see my friends with their parents, and I always noticed the parents who hugged. I remember my best friend’s mom would say ‘I love you’ every time we left the house—even if we were coming back in an hour. My mom never really . . . touched me.”

“Is she a cold person?” the counselor asked.

Abby shrugged. “I guess. But not as much with my brother, Trey. He can get her to smile sometimes; she’s looser with him.”

Her voice grew smaller. This was her biggest shame, the one she’d carried around for her entire life. “It’s mostly just me.”

Abby thought back to the time Trey had learned to drive;
both of her parents took him out to practice, and her mother drove him to take the test for his license. But when it was Abby’s turn, her parents kept putting her off—they were too tired, or had to work late. Trey was the one who finally brought Abby to a big, empty parking lot and taught her how to work the car’s gears and pedals.

Now the counselor moved a box of tissues closer to Abby and spoke at length, perhaps suspecting that wrenching free the confession had taken all Abby had. “Sometimes people treat children differently. It could be that your mom’s own mother didn’t act lovingly to her, and your mother unwittingly passed down that legacy to you. She might not even be aware of it. She might see herself in you at that age, and be unconsciously compelled to repeat that pattern.”

Abby nodded, but she didn’t believe it. It didn’t ring true; her grandmother had died of cancer when Abby was in the second grade, but Abby remembered a warm lap, the smell of sugar cookies, and a thin, soft voice telling Abby she was pretty and good.

“Some women also feel jealous of their daughters, especially as they age and their daughters hit puberty. They feel robbed of their own youth,” the counselor continued. “What was your relationship like with your father growing up?”

“A little better, I guess. He’s very quiet,” Abby said. “He reads a lot. Like with my mom, he comes more alive around Trey. They cheered for him at all his football games. I remember being surprised at how animated they got; I didn’t think they
could
get that way. I don’t get the sense that my dad wished I would go away or anything. It’s not as bad as with my mom. But he didn’t seem to think I was anything special, either.”

“Tell me about Trey,” the counselor said, and Abby smiled for the first time since she’d sat in the chair.

“He’s my best friend,” she said. “Trey looked out for me when
we were younger. He still does, I guess. He came and picked me up at a party once when my ride home was too drunk to drive, and he told me where to kick boys if I ever needed to defend myself, and he . . . I guess he kind of ran interference for me with our parents. At dinner, they’d ask him about his latest game or whatever, and he’d always try to turn the conversation to me. He’d ask me about the photography class I liked or the kids I babysat for. It was like he was trying to draw me into the family. Make sure I got noticed.”

Abby’s head began to ache. Exhaustion overwhelmed her. She wanted to lean back against the cushions of this soft chair and let her eyes fall shut. She’d never thought about the inner workings of her family, never seen them so clearly laid out, like parts of a dissected animal at the butcher shop. Her family just
was
a certain way; Abby had never analyzed the motives behind their habits and rhythms.

The counselor was writing something on her pad of paper. “As for the panic attacks, you can go to your doctor and ask for a prescription for a few pills of Valium,” she said. “But you can’t take them if you’re going to be driving. They’ll make you woozy.”

Abby nodded, even though that defeated the whole purpose.

“In the meantime, try baby steps. You said it’s only the car that causes panic in you. Try to get near it when you can. Let the baby play on the front lawn near the car. See if you can work up to climbing in it. You don’t have to start it, just try to push back against your boundaries so they don’t close you in.”

The thought of it made Abby’s heart race, but she nodded again. “Can you come back next week?” the counselor asked. “Same time?”

“Sure,” Abby said. She accepted the little white appointment card, tucked it into her wallet, stood up and headed out to her car. When she got in, she rested her head against the steering
wheel for a long moment, taking deep breaths. Living in a family in which feelings weren’t discussed made introspection taboo. But the memories were rushing back now, one on top of the other, like the pounding waves that had once trapped Abby at the ocean, dunking her ten-year-old self again and again, stealing her breath and filling her nose and throat with salt water until Trey caught her and pulled her to shore.

From the outside, her family had looked perfect: They had a pretty brick house with green shrubs in the front yard, and a pair of calico cats that curled up in any available lap. Her father liked to bake homemade bread, so the house was usually filled with wonderful smells. But there was an undercurrent you couldn’t see, like carbon monoxide creeping through the rooms and poisoning everyone.

Her mother hadn’t loved Abby. She didn’t even want Abby around.

Abby had always known it, secretly, in her heart. This was just the first time she’d spoken the words aloud.

Thirteen

THE ASTROLOGER WHO WROTE
Gloss
’s column apparently loved old-fashioned words every bit as much as she did clichés. Usually, that wasn’t a big problem—or at least not the biggest problem in the scheme of things. But not this month.

Renee had been on the phone with her for almost half an hour, and she’d saved this particular edit for last.

“I just think we could probably come up with a better word,” Renee was saying. She nibbled on the eraser of her pencil. “Maybe . . .
blunder.
Or how about
blooper
?”

“What’s wrong with the word I used?” the astrologer demanded. In the background a couple of her dogs yipped in righteous indignation.

“It’s, um, actually a slang word for something else,” Renee said. “So when you write, ‘Be on the lookout for a big boner, Scorpios!’ your readers might think it means . . . um . . .”

“What?”

“A boner is a male erection,” Renee said softly. But apparently not softly enough to avoid being overheard by the staffers in nearby cubicles, judging from the heads that suddenly appeared over the tops of partitions.

“What was that?” the astrologer said. “Speak up!”

“An erection!” Renee almost shouted. “E-reck-shun!”

By now a few people were convulsing with laughter around her desk. Renee covered the mouthpiece. “Helpful,” she hissed at them.

“How about we put in ‘boneheaded mistakes’?” Renee asked. “Could I make that edit?”