Pretty Girls (13 page)

Your mother says that all we can do is be there for Pepper when she falls. Maybe she’s right. And maybe she’s right to be worried about this new man in Claire’s life. He tries too hard. He pleases too much. Is it our place to tell her? Or will she figure it out on her own? (Or will he? She has your Grandma Ginny’s wandering eye.)

It’s strange that your mother and I are only ever whole when we talk about your sisters’ lives. We are both of us too wounded to talk about our own. The open sores of our hearts fester if we are together too long. I know your mother looks at me and sees playhouses I built and touch-football games I played and homework I helped with and the millions of times I lifted you in my arms and swung you around like a doll.

Just as when I look at her I see the growing swell of her belly, the gentle look on her face when she rocked you to sleep, the panic in her eyes when your fever spiked and you had to have your tonsils out, and the vexed expression she would get when she realized that you had out-argued her.

I know that your mother belongs to another man now, that she has created a stable life for my children, that she has managed to move on, but when I kiss her, she never resists. And when I hold her, she holds me back. And when we make love, it is my name she whispers.

In that moment, we are finally able to remember all of the good things we had together instead of everything that we have lost.

FIVE

Claire was still soaking wet from her graveside confrontation with Lydia. She sat shivering in the middle of the garage holding a broken tennis racket in her hand. Her weapon of choice. It was the fourth tennis racket she had broken in as many minutes. There wasn’t a cabinet or a tool or a car in the garage that hadn’t met the hard edge of a graphite tennis racket. Bosworth Tennis Tour 96s, custom designed to Claire’s stroke. Four hundred bucks a pop.

She rolled her wrist, which was going to need ice. The hand was already showing a bruise. Her throat was raw from screaming. She stared at her reflection in the side mirror dangling from Paul’s Porsche. Her wet hair was plastered to the shape of her skull. She was wearing the same dress she’d worn to the funeral yesterday afternoon. Her waterproof mascara had finally given up the ghost. Her lipstick had long been chewed off. Her skin was sallow.

She could not remember the last time she had lost her shit like this. Even on the day she’d ended up in jail, Claire had not lost this volume of shit.

She closed her eyes and breathed in the silence of the large room. The BMW’s engine was cooling. She could hear it clicking. Her heart was giving six beats for every one click. She put her hand to her chest and wondered if it was possible for your heart to explode.

Last night, Claire had gone to bed expecting nightmares, but instead of dreaming about being chained to a concrete wall, the masked man coming for her, Claire’s brain had given her something far worse: a highlight reel of some of her most tender moments with Paul.

The time she’d twisted her ankle in St. Martin and he’d driven all over the island looking for a doctor. The time he’d scooped her up with the intention of carrying her upstairs, but because of his bad back ended up making love to her on the landing. The time she’d woken up from knee surgery to find a smiley face drawn on the bandage around her leg.

Could the man who still, almost twenty years into their marriage, left notes on her coffee cup with an actual heart with their initials inside really be the same man who’d downloaded that movie onto his computer?

Claire looked down at the broken racket. So much money, and the sad truth was that she really preferred a sixty-dollar Wilson.

Back when she and Paul were students, they always made lists when they couldn’t figure out what to do. Paul would get a ruler and draw a line down the center of the page. On one side they would list reasons they should do something, buy something, try something, and on the other side they would write the reasons not to.

Claire pulled herself up to standing. She tossed the racket onto the Porsche’s hood. Paul kept a notepad and pen on his workbench. She drew a line down the center of a blank page. Paul would’ve broken out into a sweat over that line. It veered to the left toward the bottom. The pen had skipped off the page, curling up the edge.

Claire tapped the pen on the side of the bench. She stared at the two empty columns. There were no pros and cons. This list was for questions and answers.

The first question was: Had Paul really downloaded the movie? Claire had to assume that he had. Accidentally downloading files with viruses and spyware was Claire’s thing. Paul was too careful to accidentally download anything. And if by some off chance he had downloaded the movie by mistake, he would’ve deleted the file rather than storing it in his Work folder. And he would’ve told Claire about it, because that’s the kind of relationship they had.

Or at least it was the kind of relationship she’d thought they’d had.

She wrote the word “Accident?” in one column and “No” in the other.

Claire started tapping the pen again. Could it be that Paul had downloaded the movie for the sado-masochism, then not realized until he got to the end that it was more than that?

She shook her head. Paul was so straitlaced that he tucked his undershirt into his boxers before he went to bed at night. If someone had told her last week that her husband was into SM, after she choked down her laughter, Claire would have assumed that Paul would be a bottom. Not that he was passive in their sex life. Claire was the one more likely to just lie there. But sexual fantasies were projections of opposites. Paul was in control all of the time, so his fantasy would be to let someone else take over. Claire certainly had daydreams about being tied up and ravished by a stranger, but in the cold light of day, that sort of thing was terrifying.

And besides that, a few years ago when she’d read Paul several passages from
Fifty Shades of Grey
, they’d both giggled like teenagers.

“The biggest fantasy in that book,” Paul had said, “is that he changes for her in the end.”

Claire had never thought of herself as an expert in male behavior, but Paul had a point, and not just about men. People did not change their basic, core personalities. Their values tended to stay the same. Their personal demeanors. Their world outlook and political beliefs. One need only go to a high school reunion to verify the theory.

So, going by this, it made no sense that the man who had cried when their cat had to be put down, who refused to watch scary movies, who joked that Claire was on her own if an ax murderer ever broke into the house, would be the same man who derived sexual pleasure from watching horrible, unspeakable acts.

Claire looked down at the notepad. She wrote, “More files?” Because that was the dark thought lurking in the back of her mind. The file name had been a series of numbers, and all of the files she’d seen in the Work folder were similarly numbered. Had Paul downloaded more of these disgusting movies? Was that how he spent his time when he told Claire he’d be working late in his office?

She wasn’t a Pollyanna about these things. She knew men watched pornography. Claire herself wasn’t adverse to the soft-core sex of a pay-cable show. The thing was that their sex life had been fairly tame. They’d tried different positions or variations on a theme, but after eighteen years, they knew what worked and they stuck with the old standards. Which was likely why Claire had ended up taking Adam Quinn up on his offer last year at the company Christmas party.

Claire loved her husband, but sometimes, she craved variety.

Was Paul the same? She had never considered the possibility that she wasn’t enough for him. He had always been so smitten with her. Paul was the one who reached down to hold her hand in the car. He was the one who sat close to her at dinners and put his arm around her at movies and watched her cross the room at parties. Even in bed, he was never pleased until she was. He rarely asked Claire to use her mouth on him, and he was never an asshole about it. Back when she still had friends, they had jealously teased her about Paul’s devotion.

Had that been for show? Through all the seemingly happy years of their marriage, had Paul yearned for something more? And did he find that something more in the disgusting contents of that movie?

Claire wrote down another question: “Is it real?”

The production had an amateurish feel, but that could’ve been on purpose. Computers were capable of amazing things. If they could make it look like Michael Jackson was dancing on stage, they could make it look like a woman was being murdered.

The pen was tapping again. Claire watched it bounce between her fingers. The workbench top was bamboo. The damn thing had proven to be indestructible. She’d been half tempted to take a page from Lydia’s book and piss all over it.

Lydia.

God, what an unexpected slap in the face to see her sister after all these years. She would not be telling her mother about the meeting, mostly because Helen had enough to fret over between Paul’s murder and the burglary. Besides, the irony was not lost on Claire that less than a year after her family broke ties, Lydia had finally managed to get herself clean. Between looking for Julia and paying bail bondsmen and lawyers and rehab clinics for Lydia’s upkeep, Sam Carroll had been nearly bankrupt when he’d finally taken his life.

For that sin alone, Claire should’ve cut off her sister, but then she’d accused Paul of trying to rape her, and that had been the final straw.

Did Paul hurt you?
Lydia had asked, standing less than ten yards from Paul’s grave.
Is that what this is about?

Claire knew what the “this” was. It was doubt. She was doubting her husband because of what she’d found on his computer. Her mind had made the leap from Paul watching violence to actually committing it, which was a stupid connection because millions of young men played violent video games but only a handful went on spree killings.

Then again, Paul had once told her that there was no such thing as coincidence. “The Law of Truly Large Numbers provides that given a large enough sample size, any outrageous thing can happen.”

Claire looked down at the three items on her list:

Accident?

More files?

Is it real?

At the moment, only one of those outrageous questions could be answered.

Claire went up the stairs before she could stop herself. She keyed in the code to open the door to Paul’s office. Agent Nolan had made a comment about all the codes needed for the house, but Paul had made it easy for Claire by making all the door codes a variation on their birthdays.

The office looked the same as it had been the day before. Claire sat down at the desk. She hesitated as she reached out to tap the keyboard. This was a red pill/blue pill moment. Did she really want to know if there were more files? Paul was dead now. What was the point?

She tapped the keyboard. The point was that she had to know.

Claire’s hand was surprisingly steady as she moved the mouse to the dock and clicked on the Work folder.

The rainbow wheel spun, but instead of a list of files, a white box popped up.

CONNECT TO GLADIATOR?

There was a YES and NO button underneath. Claire wondered why she hadn’t been prompted to log in the day before. She had a vague recollection of clicking CLOSE on several messages yesterday when Agent Nolan was creeping his way up the stairs. Apparently, one of the things she’d closed was the connection to whatever this Gladiator was.

She leaned her elbows on the desk and stared at the words. Was this a sign that she should stop? Paul had trusted her completely—too completely, going by her affairs, because of course Adam Quinn wasn’t the first. Or the last, since she was being brutally honest; there was a reason Tim the bartender was estranged from his wife.

She tried to summon yesterday’s crushing guilt, but the remorse had been sanded down by the rough images she’d found on her husband’s computer.

“Gladiator,” Claire said. She didn’t know why the word sounded familiar.

She rolled the mouse over and clicked on the YES button.

The screen changed. A new message popped up: PASSWORD?

“Fuck.” How much harder was this going to get? She tapped her finger on the mouse as she stared at the prompt.

All of the system passwords were a combination of mnemonics and dates. She typed in YALAPC111176, which stood for “You Are Looking At Paul’s Computer,” followed by his birthday.

A black triangle with an exclamation point in the center told her that the password was incorrect.

Claire tried a few more variations, using her birthday, their wedding anniversary, the date they first met in the computer lab, the date they first went out, which was also the same day they’d first had sex because Claire never played hard to get when she’d made up her mind.

Nothing worked.

She looked around Paul’s office, wondering if she was missing something.

“You Are Looking At The Chair Where Paul Reads,” she tried. “You Are Looking At The Couch Where Paul Naps.” Nothing. “You Are Looking At The Computer Where Paul Jerks Off.”

Claire slumped back in the chair. Directly across from Paul’s desk was the painting she had given him for their third wedding anniversary. Claire had painted it herself from a photograph of his childhood home. Paul’s mother had taken the picture standing in their back yard. The picnic table was set with birthday decorations. Claire wasn’t good with faces, so a tiny blob represented a young Paul sitting at the table.

He’d told her that the farmer who’d bought the Scott land had torn down the house and all the surrounding structures. Claire couldn’t blame the man. The house had a home-built look to it, the wooden paneling ran up and down instead of left to right. The barn in the back yard loomed like the
Amityville Horror
house. It cast such a dark shadow over the picnic table and old well house that Claire had been forced to guess the colors. Paul had told her she’d gotten them exactly right, though she was fairly certain the little structure over the well should’ve been green instead of black.