All Dressed Up (13 page)

“She did. I’m
bleeding for her while I still want to stick more pins in her.
You’re her friend, you have to be there for her if I can’t manage
to. You don’t have the same historical justification as I do for
being so mad at her.”

“Oh, God,
there for her? With my schedule this summer?”

This was why
Amber and Emma were friends. They both had schedules, crammed lives
that took precedence. Sarah liked Amber, but she suspected the
Deans might easily not see her again until September.

“What is it
between you two, anyhow?” Amber asked. Her tone said that she
wanted the story lite, but made from 100% real juice.

Sarah
hesitated. “Oh, she took my doll, you know how it is,” she said,
after a moment.

“I don’t have
a sister, I have a brother. He took my dolls all the time and they
came back exploded or bald. She didn’t take your doll. She always
hints it was you who took hers.”

“Oh, yeah,
there’s that, too.”

Amber produced
a very successful thick, sarcastic silence at the other end of the
line.

“It’s
complicated,” Sarah finally said. “I can’t put it into words.
There’s family stuff. My parents. My brother.” Who is really my
nephew.

“Well, she
won’t talk to me about anything. Not really. And with work I can
barely get a spare minute to see her. Am I letting her down?”

“Maybe we’ll
never have an answer to that.”

“The way
no-one but the very private Deans will ever have an answer to who
took whose doll twenty years ago.”

“You’re making
us sound dysfunctional, Amber.”

“You wouldn’t
want to be out of the mainstream on that, would you?”

The phone rang
again seconds after Sarah had put it down. What had Amber forgotten
to say?

But this time
it was Charlie. Emma had made him and Sarah put their numbers into
each other’s cells in case they needed them for the wedding. “To
co-ordinate.”

Perhaps the
thing Sarah liked most about Charlie was the fact that he was the
only man she knew who could make Creep seem and feel inferior.

Call him Luke,
Sarah. You can handle it. You said it out loud to Emma, you can do
it in your head, too. It would be progress.

Charlie was
fitter, stronger, taller, clever-er than Luke. He wasn’t artistic
but he had always celebrated Luke’s creative streak in a “Well,
good for you, buddy!” kind of way that relegated it to the margins
of importance in comparison with real things like surgery. When
they used to meet up at Dean family functions, Luke had been
visibly uncomfortable about Charlie’s more powerful presence and
Charlie had kindly pulled back a little, played down his finishing
position in the Boston Marathon, didn’t even mention the car
purchase question, when the models he was considering cost way more
than Luke could afford.

Sarah had told
herself back then that she could never have handled a relationship
with someone as godlike as Charlie, and she still felt that way.
She loved him, but Emma was welcome to him, whether as a husband or
as a grief in her heart.

“Are you
calling from the apartment?” Sarah asked him. Calling about the
missing photo, she wondered.

“No, from the
hospital.” Which meant he didn’t know about the raid on the
apartment yet.

“Are you okay,
Charlie?”

“No. No, I’m
not.”

Oh, she really
hadn’t expected that! That he would say it so simply and sound so
stoical but at the same time so messed up. “Oh, Charlie…”

“Listen, do
you have any insights? What should I know? What does she want me to
do? I know I got too angry about her obsession with the wedding. It
was a vicious cycle. The angrier I got, the more obsessed she was,
the angrier I got. I let her down. For sure. But there’s more, it’s
not just that.”

“You were
allowed to be angry with her, Charlie. You’re still allowed.”

“Yeah, because
she’s not telling me what action to take, but beyond that…”

“It can’t
always be about action.”

“Inaction
then?”

“Space.”

He swore.
“Space.”

“Okay, alien
concept.”

“I like my
life to be filled. That’s not wrong. Emma’s the same.”

“She is. A bit
different. Right now she needs space. Charlie, I don’t want to be
the go-between. I’ll get it wrong.”

“No, of
course.” He switched to this new idea at once. Sarah could almost
hear the synapses firing, leaping from implication to implication,
testing theory upon theory. Warmly, though. This was the thing. He
wasn’t a cold person, despite his 160-point IQ. “I’ll wait, then,”
he said slowly. His voice was thick. “Let me give her the space,
play it by ear. Let her make the first move.”

“I think so.
There’s one thing…” She told him about the apartment raid, and
taking the photo. “Sorry, I didn’t want you to notice and think it
was her and conclude something that – ”

“Okay. Yeah,
no. That’s okay. I have to go. I have surgery.”

“Call anytime,
but yeah, the more I think about it… I just don’t want to be the
one to interpret.”

“No. No, I
understand. Take care, Sarah.”

But the phone
buzzed again in her hand before she’d even put it away.

“Sarah?”
Luke’s voice.

Third time
unlucky.

It gave her a
sick, paralyzed, dizzy feeling.

Still. Damn
it.

Was there any
hope that this would ever change?

It took her
several seconds to calm down enough to tune in to what he was
saying. “…think I might have left it in the glove compartment of
your car, and I wanted to say it was good seeing you on
Saturday.”

“Left what?”
she said.

“The DVD.
Like, in February.”

Oh, yes, she
remembered that. She’d found it and mailed it back to him, at his
parents’ address in Boston, several weeks ago. She told him so.

“I haven’t
seen them. I’ll have to call them and see if they got it. Thanks,
Sarah.”

“Is this why
you called?” Stupid, stupid, stupid. Wobble in her voice and
everything.

“Listen, I
can’t stand it when people pretend they’re calling purely to see
how you’re doing and take ten minutes to work around to the request
or the favor. I thought it was better to get the favor out of the
way upfront. I thought it would be easier now that we’d cracked
that first piece of ice at the Craigmore. How’re you doing?” His
voice had dropped a little, slowed. “We didn’t get a chance to
talk. I’m back in the city, are you still at the lake?” He sounded
as if they still belonged to each other, but his was the kind of
voice that could do this, could turn intimate without him intending
or knowing.

“I’m in
Jersey, but I’m going back up this afternoon,” she said. Good.
Steady.

“’cuz I was
going to suggest coffee, but maybe not.”

“Not,
Luke.”

“Sure. Sure.”
He barely cared.

When she’d put
the phone in her purse she didn’t cry or yell or anything. She was
so, so good! She went upstairs to the winter clothing trunk in her
room, took out the Bergdorf Goodman dress that was still in the
thick, protective paper of its lavender shopping bag and just got
in the car with the dress and her overnight bag and drove
north.

She didn’t
know if she’d just gone back to square one, or if maybe she’d made
some progress toward getting over Luke at last, in bringing the
dress out into the light, in resolving to wear it this summer and
love it.

But she
thought about him the whole drive up.

Lainie made
sure to be home by six because Sarah had said she would be there
around then for Emma’s dress. She was afraid she might find a car
already in the drive, waiting for her, but no. She went directly to
the attic to bring the dress down so it would be ready, and when
she held the dress and bag against her body, she found they were
both soaking wet all down the front.

Was it the
rain? Was there a leak in her roof? She looked up, examined the
thick beam just above her head and found some tell-tale damp. There
was water pooled on the floor. She pulled the fabric through the
open bag front and brought it to her nose, and the damp smelled
gamey, with an after-taste of sappy wood. Oh God, oh God, and Angie
had warned her.

The doorbell
sounded and her still-pounding heart jumped, giving her a burst of
nausea. She had to take several jerky breaths before she realized
it would be Sarah, come for the dress. She hurried down the two
flights of stairs with it in her arms.

“God, Lainie,
what’s wrong?”

“The dress – ”
Charlie’s mom could hardly speak,. “ – is soaking wet.”

“Wet?”

“Damp. More
than damp. Feel! There’s water all down it and I don’t understand
how. I had it in the attic, it has to be from the rain this
morning, the beam overhead was wet, but I didn’t think the roof
leaked that bad, not in that spot, I didn’t even think the rain was
that heavy, and it’s run all down into the bottom of the garment
bag and it’s sodden and I don’t dare to look.”

“Calm down,
Lainie. Get your breath. It’s okay.” Sarah managed to kick the door
shut behind her. She took the dress and lifted the bottom of the
bag. Lainie was right, it was sodden. Water dripped out when she
squeezed.

“If it’s
damaged…” Lainie said. “If it’s gotten stained…”

“Oh, isn’t
this just what would happen?”

“To me?”

“To Emma!
She’s always at the center of the whirlpool.”

“Oh thank
goodness, I thought you meant to me. Things like this happening to
me. They do, you see.”

“No, they
happen to me!”

They looked at
each other, sharing dread and a feeling like schoolchildren in
trouble, a terrible need to giggle. And suddenly they became
friends over this ludicrous disaster. Conspirators and friends.
Ganged up against Emma, even while trying to work out how to least
upset her. Irreverent, defiant and terrified all at the same
time.

“Now, let’s
calm ourselves down, before we panic,” Lainie said.

“We’ve
panicked already, haven’t we?”

“Not yet.
First we need to take a closer look. We need to know exactly what
we’re dealing with before we tell her.”

“Oh God…”

They pulled
off the bag, and found the hem of the dress soaked six inches deep
with a faint yellow edge of stain. They both stared at it, willed
the stain away, didn’t believe something so jinxed and inept could
really have happened.

Sarah asked,
“Will it come out?” Lainie was Mom’s age. By the time a woman
reaches the menopause, she knows which stains will come out, right?
There has to have been some kind of growth, some kind of life
learning.

“We’ll have to
send it to a cleaner, but we’ll have to tell Emma first. We can’t
wait to see if it’s going to come clean.”

“I’ll do it,”
Sarah said. “I’ll tell her. God, it’ll be horrible.”

“So let me.”
Lainie hung the hook of the hanger on one of the curved golden
stems of her ceiling chandelier. The dress swung gently for a few
moments. Ballerina. Angel. Suicide.

“No, she’s
already mad at me,” Sarah said.

“I’m the
mother-in-law, we’re not supposed to be close. You’re her
sister.”

“So our
relationship can hopefully withstand the fact that we’ve been angry
with each other for, like, a third of our lives.”

“How… I mean,
how is she?” Lainie asked. “Really? I don’t just mean – ”

“I know, you
mean her whole self. Behind the wall.”

“The
wall?”

“Behind the
wall, she’s a mess.”

“So the wall’s
not just in my head?” Lainie ran her hand almost wistfully down the
side of the dress, where it wasn’t so wet, setting it swinging
again.

“No, it’s not.
The wall is… ever-present. It’s her – ” She grabbed a word from
biology class, belonging to cockroaches and beetles. “ – her
exo-skeleton. Her force field. Her spray-on tan.” None of those
words were exactly right on their own. In combination, though, they
were close. “Some people don’t see it, because she can do a pretty
good imitation with her friends. Mom always thinks the wall is only
in place for her, but no, it’s there for everyone.”

“For Charlie,
even?”

“I’d be
surprised, Lainie, if she ever totally let it down, even for
him.”

“Is that why I
never felt close to her?”

“It’s why the
wedding is off. He called me and I told him she needed some time.
Space.”

“He hates that
word.”

“So I learned.
But it’s not my story to talk about.”

“No. No, I can
see that.”

They slumped
side by side on the couch like teenagers and talked around it,
honest in what they said but careful about what they kept to
themselves. You wanted a woman like Lainie for your mother-in-law,
the kind who would always support her son’s choice. Emma was crazy
not to let this woman close to her, but maybe she couldn’t help
herself.

“I want to
love your sister,” Lainie said. “In the abstract I love her, but
God I was always going to be the perfect mother-in-law, because
when you’re a single mother and you only have the one child you
just have to be. You either love an extra person or you lose the
only person you have. And now I’m blowing it, I’m not perfect. So
far I only love her…” She took a breath. “Can I say this? The only
reason I love her is because she loves him.”

“Well, which
is a good reason, a good starting point.”

“And because I
think she chose him for the right attributes. He’s not easy,
sometimes. He’s too smart and too athletic and too perceptive. He
has too many reasons to think well of himself and it sets him
apart, but he’s so clever he can even bridge that, be a regular guy
when he wants to – you should see him with his cousin Ben, who is
as regular as they come – and that in itself is scary to me. To a
lot of people. You need to see past certain things. I mean, anyone
needs to. Everyone has to. But he’s worth it, he has the right
heart, and Emma could see it and I loved her for that. They’ve both
lost their way, I’m not going to blame just her.”