Only Ever You (4 page)

This neighborhood of large new builds should have been priced out of their league, but the housing bubble had changed things. Someone else’s foreclosure had seemed like a lucky break for them at the time, but perhaps it was only bad karma. They’d fled the city for a fresh start, had lived out here for almost three years, but for Jill it still didn’t feel like home.

There were still several empty lots for sale on their street, weeds long since grown over the dirt because no one could afford to build anymore. The other houses built during the market frenzy all had the same overproduced feeling as theirs—cathedral-ceilinged entryways, enormous granite kitchens with wide islands, master bedroom suites with walk-in closets and jetted tubs—as if competing with your neighbors had been the whole point. Not that they knew any of their neighbors, not really. Expensive cars came and went daily, but she caught only occasional glimpses of the people inside. She knew the names of only a few. There was evidence of children, but she’d never seen any actually playing on the expensive swing sets sitting in the corners of the immaculate lots. Could one of these neighbors have been in her backyard? She shivered, feeling a chill despite the warm weather, and hurried back inside.

Upstairs Sophia sat on the floor of her bedroom doing a puzzle and wearing nothing but a pair of orange shorts. “C’mon, you,” Jill said with a sigh. “You’ve got to finish getting dressed.”

“No!”

Jill ignored her, pulling two dresses Sophia loved from the closet. “Do you want the pink one or the green one?” The advice from all the various parenting articles Jill had read said that you defused battles by offering a child choices. The experts had obviously never met a child like Sophia.

“No!” She stamped one little foot. “No dress, no dress, no dress!”

Jill winced at the piercing shriek. “You need to pick something, then, because we need to get to school.”

“No school!”

“Yes, school, and Mommy’s driving this morning, so we need to get going.” Jill pushed Sophia gently but firmly in the direction of her closet. “Choose or I’m going to.”

Ten minutes and as many tantrums later and Sophia was dressed, albeit in a long-sleeved purple shirt that clashed with the orange shorts, and with her bare feet clad in snow boots. Never mind that it was September and already seventy-five degrees outside. Jill just stuffed a T-shirt and sandals into a bag in case Sophia changed her mind once her preschool class went outside.

As Jill wrestled Sophia into her car seat in the Toyota, it occurred to her that she’d once thought of people who let their children dress like this as bad parents. Now
she
was that bad mother. Parenting sometimes felt like a constant exercise in humility.

As they drove past the next-door neighbor’s house, Jill noticed newspapers piled up on the driveway. Probably off vacationing somewhere. They were the sort of couple who had perpetual tans and spoke of their latest cruise the way others discussed what they were having for lunch.

She was racing along the winding suburban roads toward the preschool when it suddenly hit Jill: If the neighbors were gone then they couldn’t have been in her yard and neither could their golden retriever. They always boarded the dog when they were away. For just a minute, before the endless minutiae of her daily life swept it out of her mind, Jill felt that same prickly sensation at the back of her neck. Then what—or who—had knocked over their planter? And who had Sophia seen at the window?

chapter five

SEPTEMBER 2013—ONE MONTH

Finding a way into the house had been easy. Mabry Maids Cleaning Service traveled around Pittsburgh in cheery royal-blue vans emblazoned with a logo of a perky female in short-skirted maid’s uniform bending prettily at the waist with a feather duster outstretched in one hand. The sexism didn’t seem to bother any of the women who piled out of the vans in front of 102 Wakefield Drive and other houses throughout Fox Chapel, nor did the fact that they bore little resemblance to their company’s icon. They wore baggy pants and sneakers and royal-blue polo shirts with the company logo, some obviously well worn, the bright color faded from overwashing. The young ones tied their hair in too-tight ponytails and wore latex gloves to protect ten-dollar manicures. The older ones were thin and sinewy looking, or overweight with elastic-waist jeans stretched tight across ample bottoms, and some of them paused to take a smoke outside, careful to pocket the butts so they didn’t mar clients’ pristine lawns.

Three women to a van, but sometimes that number climbed to four if the house was especially large. They took two to three hours inside each property, sometimes a little longer. Bea had staked out the neighborhood and created a careful record of days and times. The Mabry Maids visited 102 Wakefield Drive and two of its neighbors on Tuesday mornings usually by eight a.m. They were usually done at 102 by ten thirty
A.M.
and off the street before three
P.M.
, moving from Wakefield to another street and then another before they were done for the day and heading back to a parking lot behind an old brick warehouse in the Strip District, where Mabry Maids maintained an office.

A short bald man with skin the color and texture of day-old porridge sat at the front desk watching TV on a small color set with a large cable box attached to it. He’d reluctantly turned down a court show and scowled up at Bea through dirty Coke-bottle glasses when she asked for an application. The place had smelled like male BO and microwave popcorn.

“We ain’t hiring nobody new right now,” he said, wiping his hands across the front of a dirty blue coverall before pulling an application form out of a scarred metal filing cabinet behind his desk. “You can fill this out, but don’t expect no calls unless something happens to one of my girls.”

At the end of each shift, once the Mabry Maids van had returned to the warehouse lot, the cleaning women split up, each heading off in different directions across the cracked asphalt. One woman got into a rusting Volkswagen bug and drove it to a small day-care center with dingy plastic toys fading in the fenced dirt patch that passed for a yard. She was out. The second woman seemed more promising, smoking menthols alone at a bus stop, but just as Bea approached, a Chevy truck roared up with a heavily bearded man in a flannel shirt behind the wheel and the woman tossed her cigarette, climbing into the cab with a big smile. That left number three, who turned out to be Donna, thirty-year-old childless divorcée and budding alcoholic. Bea learned all this at Vann’s, a Lawrenceville fixture that was little more than a dark, nicotine-soaked shotgun row house with a bar running down one side of the twelve-foot space and small tables and chairs down the other.

Donna ordered a beer, followed by two more, every night except Thursdays and Fridays, when she celebrated the impending weekend with a string of White Russians. She believed because she didn’t mix her alcohol she was not a heavy drinker. How many people like that had Bea seen over her years of nursing? Men and women suffering from ruined livers and pancreatitis? Donna was young enough not to exhibit the “tells”—veiny nose and slight hand tremors—but they were definitely in her future. Bea had provided a free-of-charge wake-up call.

The previous Friday evening, Bea followed her into Vann’s and took a seat at the end of the bar, well away from Donna’s small table. It was just after five p.m., but the bar was steadily filling up, men and women pressing against one another as they ordered drinks, the men in tight-fitting T-shirts and jeans, the women wearing skimpy skirts or skinny jeans in a rainbow of colors. Donna had changed into a dress, a tight black jersey number that clashed with her skin tone, but set off the bleached blonde hair that she’d freed from a ponytail to back-comb and spray into something resembling a lion’s mane.

An Indian summer. It was still so hot outside that the short walk from overly air-conditioned cars into the barely air-conditioned bar left patrons mopping at brows and plucking at necklines. Bea’s hands were clammy against her glass. She’d made sure to arrive at the place ahead of Donna, securing a stool at the end of the bar. From this vantage point she could watch her in the smoked-glass mirror that ran the length of the room.

The bartender, a beefy young woman with a tattoo of orange flames jutting from the cleavage of her tank top, barely glanced at Bea when she placed her order. Vann’s wasn’t a place where everybody knew your name. Bea sipped her drink and studied the mirror.

When Donna began her second White Russian, Bea slid her hand into her purse and pulled out the small syringe carrying a high dose of Rohypnol, hiding it in her palm and quickly depressing the plunger into her own White Russian. The lights were low enough that no one noticed. No one had noticed her taking it from the hospital either. One middle-aged nurse in scrubs was the same as another. She watched the mirror, waiting until Donna stood up and made her way through the crowded room toward the even skinnier passageway that led to the restrooms in the back. The floor felt sticky under Bea’s feet, but she moved rapidly through the noisy crowd after her, drink held high to protect it. The music faded as she pushed into the ladies’ room. Donna was in a stall, but she always placed her drink on the little ledge above the sink. Bea switched drinks and headed into the second stall with drink in hand, almost colliding with Donna, who’d emerged tugging her dress down around fleshy thighs.

Bea waited in the restroom for two minutes, then made her way back out to the bar. Her seat had been taken so she stood and watched in the mirror as Donna sipped her drink. It was a hot night and she was always thirsty—it didn’t take long for her to finish. Bea stayed until she saw the woman swaying from the drug’s effects, waiting until Donna fell over, commanding everybody’s attention in a way she’d never managed when she was conscious. Bea slipped unnoticed out of the noisy, hot bar onto the humid, quiet street; she sat in the parking lot until she heard the wail of approaching sirens.

*   *   *

The following Tuesday morning as the Mabry Maids climbed into their van, Bea approached wearing the blue uniform shirt and the same black wig she’d worn to apply for the job. “I’m Linda, Donna’s replacement—she’s in the hospital,” she said to Rose, the woman in charge, who looked nothing like the flower and greeted her with a curt nod. Mr. Magoo at the office had conveniently waived the background check when he came up shorthanded. It had been enough that Bea had scribbled in the name of a Florida cleaning company on her fake résumé, listing Frank’s cell phone number in case Mabry Maids called for a reference.

The younger woman in their trio, Liz, slipped on headphones once they were on the road, and Rose drove in silence, calloused hands knotted on the wheel. Bea slouched in the backseat and looked out the window, resisting the urge to fiddle with her wig. It looked like real hair, but it was best not to call attention to it. Her chest tightened when Rose pulled off Route 28 onto Fox Chapel Road. As they turned onto Wakefield Drive, Bea sat up, heart rate increasing like a moth fluttering.

The Lassiter house was so large, so luxurious. She’d driven past many times, each time struck again by its size. It was a neighborhood of massive homes, newer construction, and Bea knew that all of them would have the same soaring entranceways and vast kitchens that Frank laughed about. He’d done construction on homes like these during the good years. Sometimes he had described them to her at night, when they were sitting out on the screened-in porch off the back of their two-bedroom ranch in Tampa. “What do they want all that space for in the hallway? So everybody can sit there staring up at the ceiling?” He’d talk about how nobody who owned these homes did any housework. They’d hire cleaning crews and lawn crews and painters and plumbers and any service person they could think of to avoid doing any honest labor.

The family car was backing out of the Lassiter driveway as the van pulled up to the house. Bea averted her eyes as the Toyota sped past. Not that Jill would recognize her; only the child had seen Bea’s face. Still, she had to be more careful. If she hadn’t knocked over the planter that morning, trying to get a better look through the French doors, she wouldn’t have been forced to dive for the cover of the bushes along the side of the house. It was lucky that the neighbors on that side were away or someone else might have spotted her.

It felt strange walking up to the house in broad daylight. Bea had to resist the urge to look over her shoulder and see if anyone was watching. Rose took a ring of keys from her pocket and used one to open the front door. Bea caught only a glimpse before the keys went back in Rose’s pocket. She wasn’t sure how, but she had to get the key to make a copy. No security system beeped as they trooped past the door; it appeared the Lassiters didn’t have one. There was one problem solved. Before Rose could assign her a task, Bea immediately volunteered to clean upstairs.

*   *   *

The preschool drop-off had become one of Jill’s responsibilities. “Just for a few weeks,” David said, while he got through this difficult case. Jill couldn’t say no, especially since the only other option was asking David’s mother. “I know she’d be happy for the one-on-one time with Sophia,” David had suggested, pulling out his phone.

“No, that’s okay, I’ll do it.”

“You’re busy, too, and she loves to help out. Why not ask her?”

The last thing Jill wanted to have to deal with in the morning was her mother-in-law. “She doesn’t know how to use the car seat.”

“I’m sure we could teach her.”

“She doesn’t want to learn; she thinks they’re unnecessary. Don’t you remember the last time she took Sophia out? She didn’t even have the straps tightened.”

“It’s not that long a trip to preschool.”

“She could still have an accident,” Jill said, pretending she didn’t see David shaking his head in frustration. “I can take Sophie; it’s no problem.”

And it wouldn’t have been a problem, they were out the door more or less on time, except Jill had made it a mile down the road toward preschool when Sophia cried, “I forgot Blinky!”