Slice (8 page)

N
INE

I
t was pitch dark, and getting close to nine o'clock. But still Inga hadn't returned from John Manning's house.

“Well, that's just crossing the line,” Jessie said to herself, as she turned down her sheets, surprised by how annoyed she felt. She'd finished cleaning up, gotten Abby ready for bed, tucked her in and turned off her light, and then taken her shower—and throughout that whole process, she kept expecting Inga to come in at any moment. But here it was, nearly an hour and a half after the nanny had gone next door, and she still wasn't home. That was definitely crossing the line.

It's her life
, Jessie tried telling herself.
She's not on the clock twenty-four-seven. Besides, I told her to go.

But still. An hour and a half.

What were they
doing
over there?

“It's none of my business,” Jessie tried reasoning with herself.

The problem was, Jessie had a pretty good
idea
of what they were doing, and it pissed her off. Absurdly.

Why should she care what Abby's nanny did during her time off?

It was John Manning's eyes.

He had been so compelling. He had looked at Jessie and she'd practically melted. And then Inga had walked up and he'd forgotten Jessie even existed.

Just like every man in her life.

She looked at herself in the mirror. How had she allowed herself to believe she was getting prettier? She was just as plain as ever. . . .

“Okay,” she told her reflection, transferring her annoyance with Inga to herself. “Now you are playing victim. What would all your readers think of that?”

She realized this little episode would make a great anecdote for her new book. She would write that even when we think we've stopped playing the victim card, we can still fall back. She'd describe this event—changing the names, of course—to illustrate how old patterns of self-destructive thinking can recur at any moment. Old jealousies and insecurities can resurface, and we have to recognize them for what they are, gently pushing them away before letting them take hold.

But in fact she couldn't stop thinking of John Manning's eyes.

If Heather's behavior was any indication, the celebrated author had a certain effect on women. Jessie resolved not to become one more smitten female mooning around the dark and handsome Manning. She should be glad, in fact, that Inga was over there, possibly in a passionate embrace with Manning, because that would mean Heather's affair with him—if there was, in fact, an affair—was over, or at least not very serious. And
that
would suggest that Heather and Bryan would stay together—and
that
would make Jessie's life easier.

Applying moisturizer to her face in front of Mom's old vanity mirror, Jessie recalled how upsetting Bryan's come-on had been. It had exposed the wound that she had thought had fully healed. Again, she told herself, it was all fodder for the new book. She'd write about how some wounds never really heal. The best we can do is keep them protected from greater infection. Jessie had been surprised by the surge of old feelings for Bryan—the anger, certainly, but also, deeper down, the hope.
Might he still love me? Might he come back to me, even now?

She didn't like that part of herself, the weak little woman who still lived down deep inside her. But now that she had revealed herself, Jessie had to treat her gently, and tenderly. “You don't want Bryan,” she spoke into the mirror. “He's not the kind of man you want. He's greedy and manipulative and selfish, and disrespectful of women.” What she didn't say out loud, but thought, was:
Just like Heather. So they're perfect for each other
.

“Mommy!”

Abby's voice from the next room startled her.

“What is it, honey?” Jessie called, hurrying away from the vanity and out into the hallway. The moonlight was coming through the window in her daughter's room, and Jessie could see the little girl's silhouette as she sat up in bed.

“I heard something scary,” Abby said as Jessie reached her and switched on the light.

“What did you hear, honey?”

“I heard a scream,” she said.

“A scream?”

Abby nodded. “I think it was Inga.”

There was fear in Abby's eyes, but not terror. Certainly not panic. Abby was the calmest little kid Jessie had ever known. She never threw tantrums, rarely complained of pain or discomfort, and even accepted other kids' bullying—like Piper Pierce's—with a minimum of protest. Abby wasn't easy to rattle. She was also almost impossible to fool, and never indulged in childish fantasies. If she said she'd heard Inga scream, she was being serious.

“When did you hear this, sweetie?” Jessie asked.

“A little while ago. I didn't call you right away, because I was trying not to be a crybaby.”

“Oh, honey, you can always call me. . . .” She stroked her daughter's hair. “Maybe it wasn't a scream. Laughter can sound like screaming sometime. Maybe it's just somebody in the neighborhood having fun. The night is so still, and everybody's windows are open. . . . Maybe, if it
was
Inga, Mr. Manning had just told her a joke.”

The little girl shook her head. “It wasn't laughter.”

Jessie sighed. “Okay, sweetie. You get back down under the covers and I'll go take a look. I'm sure it's nothing. Inga will be home soon from Mr. Manning's.”

“Okay, Mommy.”

Jessie pulled the sheet up and kissed Abby on the forehead. “Do you want me to leave the light on for you?”

“No, that's okay. Now that I've told you about it, it doesn't seem scary anymore.”

Jessie smiled. What a brave kid she had. “Okay, sweetie, pleasant dreams.”

“Good night, Mommy.”

Jessie switched the light back off and stepped out of Abby's room.

She was in her nightgown, a sheer, filmy pink thing, so she pulled a terrycloth robe from a hook in the bathroom and wrapped it around herself.

She hadn't heard a thing. She'd been too wrapped up in her own thoughts, Jessie supposed as she headed down the stairs. She had her own idea about what Abby might have heard. She suspected it had been neither a scream nor laughter—or rather, she suspected it had been a combination of both. What Abby had likely heard was Inga and John Manning carrying on, their crescendo of passion floating out from the open windows through the still night and reaching the ears of the five-year-old girl.

Jessie was back to thinking that the nanny had crossed the line as she pushed open the screen door and stepped out into the dark night.

T
EN

“
D
id you hear something a little while ago?” Monica asked Todd as she got into bed.

“No,” he mumbled, reading the stocks on his BlackBerry.

“It sounded like a scream.”

“Probably a bird.”

“It was no bird.” Monica shuddered, pulling the sheet up around her. “It was creepy. I was brushing my teeth in the bathroom and I heard it from the window.”

“Then maybe a cat. You know how cats in heat sound.”

Monica pouted. She knew very well how a cat in heat sounded, but she wasn't sure Todd did, with the way he'd been utterly clueless to her attempts to get him to make love to her lately. “It wasn't a cat either,” she said. Todd just grunted.

Monica was still stewing about the party, about all the little dynamics of tension she'd spotted bubbling under the surface. She knew Todd still resented Bryan for jumping ship and leaving their company and heading over to one of their biggest rivals. She knew that Bryan and Heather were unhappy—that was plainly obvious in the way they looked at and spoke to each other—and she suspected Bryan had made a pass at Jessie, because her sister had bolted up from the picnic table at one point and stalked inside. Monica was very grateful that her own marriage was as solid as it was, and that her sister's return would not cause the same kind of temptation for Todd.

Of course, Todd's lack of interest in sex lately did trouble her. Mostly Monica tried not to think about it, but sometimes it became unavoidable, as it had just now with Todd's comment about a cat in heat. That had made Monica think about the lack of heat in her own relationship. But still, she didn't think there was a problem in their marriage. It was just that Todd was consumed with work. The economic downtown had meant the banks were recalculating everything. Todd was constantly figuring and refiguring and sometimes sat up late at night on the computer, telling her to go on to bed without him. Monica often found him slumped over in his chair in the morning.

“Honey,” Aunt Paulette had said to her, “maybe he's . . . maybe he's avoiding something.”

“Avoiding something?” Monica had asked.

“Sounds to me like he's losing interest in intimacy.”

“That's crazy!”

“Don't be angry, honey. I'm just getting a vibe that he's using work to avoid being close. . . . Maybe you ought to see a counselor.”

That had really enraged Monica. Her nutty old aunt's “vibe” was wrong. Todd was trying to make sure he didn't lose his job. He was trying to guarantee their income stayed high because soon, very soon, Monica wanted to have a baby—

She thought the hardest part of today hadn't been Bryan or Heather or anything else. It had been watching Jessie and Abby together. How badly Monica wanted a child. Bearing Todd a son or a daughter would really bond them together. But they'd been trying for more than six years now. They'd seen all sorts of specialists and Monica had tried all sorts of fertility drugs, but nothing had helped. Doctors had determined the problem was with her, not Todd; it wasn't that she was completely infertile, just that it was very, very difficult for her to get pregnant. For a while, to increase their odds, they had been having sex all of the time, practically nonstop, in fact—on the kitchen table, outside in the yard—hoping one of those times would be the charm. But in last few years all that frantic sexual activity had dwindled off, and by now they'd stopped talking about having a baby altogether. Adoption was out of the picture; Todd insisted he wanted a kid who carried on his genes. And Monica wanted so desperately to give it to him.

She was being punished.

There were times she truly felt that way. If she believed in fate and karma and all that craziness Mom used to talk about, she might even be convinced of the fact. Monica lived with a secret, something she'd never confided to anyone, something she kept down deep in the darkness of her mind and tried not to remember. In her junior year of high school, she'd deliberately gotten Todd—her sister's boyfriend—drunk, and then had sex with him in the back of his car. Jessie had been home with the flu; Monica and Todd had gone out with a bunch of other friends, one of whom had snuck out a couple of bottles of Jack Daniel's from his father's liquor cabinet. Monica kept pushing Todd to take another swig of the whisky, daring him to drink it all.

She'd had a crush on him for months; she'd hated the fact that Jessie had won him and she hadn't. Monica was very bitter that Jessie always seemed to get whatever she wanted. The teachers at school all thought Jessie was so smart and so clever; their friends all preferred Jessie to her, since Jessie was funny and warm and always offered such good advice to problems. Mom certainly favored Jessie—they were like two peas in a pod—and even though Dad always said Monica was “just like” him, Monica suspected that even Dad, deep down, had a respect for Jessie that he didn't have for her. So, for as long as Monica could remember, she'd envied her sister.

Stealing her boyfriend, she'd reasoned, would balance things out.

Monica had hoped that having sex with Todd—something she knew Jessie refused him—would win him over. But it hadn't. The morning after, he'd told her it had been a mistake, that he still cared about Jessie. That was when the plot hatched in Monica's mind. A couple of weeks later, she informed Todd that she had missed her period. It was a lie. But the fear that she might be pregnant with his child brought them into conspiracy together. Todd accompanied her to Planned Parenthood, where she had the pregnancy test. She insisted he wait for her outside. When she came out, Monica lied again and told him that the test had shown that she was indeed pregnant. Todd vowed to stick by her. He broke up with Jessie, though until he and Monica could decide what to do, he didn't give her the full reason. He just said he wanted to be with Monica.

Jessie, of course, was devastated. Monica even found herself feeling a little bad for her sister. But not too much.

Meanwhile, Monica and Todd discussed their options. An abortion? Monica wasn't sure she could go through with it. Todd, who'd been brought up Catholic, said he thought it would be murdering his child. Giving the baby up for adoption? Then they'd still have to deal with the scandal, while losing their child forever. How convincingly Monica had cried in Todd's arms. How tenderly he had consoled her. And in the course of it, they'd fallen deeply in love.

Or at least, Monica liked to believe that they had.

Most of the time, she had no trouble believing that Todd loved her. But occasionally those pesky little doubts crept up in her mind. She'd gotten quite proficient at shooing them away.

She knew that Todd's feelings for Jessie had been strong. Although he'd vowed to stay by Monica's side, Todd kept hoping Jessie would forgive him, and Monica feared they'd get back together. So she had quickly lied again, telling Todd that she'd already broken the news to Jessie and that Jessie had insisted they stay together for the sake of the baby. The only request Jessie had made—or so Monica had lied—was that Todd never,
ever
bring up the subject with her. It would break her heart all over again—or so Monica insisted Jessie had told her. So Todd reluctantly agreed never to bring up the issue with Jessie. After that, the two of them pretty much ceased all communication, and Monica breathed a sigh of relief.

Then, just at the moment when Monica should have started showing her pregnancy—the moment she and Todd planned to break the news to their families—Monica suddenly had a “miscarriage.” At least, that was what she informed Todd. It generated a new round of tears and intense emotion, further bonding him to her. With Jessie avoiding him and Todd afraid to approach her, there was no chance of a reconciliation. Monica had won. Todd was hers.

Many times during the ensuing years Todd had commented on the fact that Monica had gotten pregnant so easily when she was sixteen years old, on their very first try. But after that, every time they would try for real, her body failed to respond. Todd wondered if the “miscarriage” had left her unable to conceive. Doctors thought that unlikely. And all the while, Monica stayed mum about the deception that had brought them together, sometimes even swearing her doctors to silence when they discovered there had never, in fact, been a pregnancy all those years ago.

Yes, indeed, if she believed in karma, Monica might have reckoned that her teenage treachery against Todd and Jessie was catching up with her. But she didn't believe in karma. And she hadn't given up hope that one day she'd truly be pregnant with Todd's child.

If only he still wanted to make love to her . . .

“Monica!”

She was startled out of her reverie from a voice, coming from outside.

It was Jessie.

“What the fuck?” Monica said, swinging her legs out of bed. “What is Jessie doing outside?”

She flew to the window, looking down into the dark. Jessie stood below on the grass, wrapped in a white terrycloth robe, looking up toward her sister's bedroom.

“What's going on?” Monica called down.

“Did you hear anything? Something that sounded like a scream?”

Monica hesitated. “Actually I did,” she admitted. “A little while ago.”

“Yeah, Abby heard it, too. And Inga isn't home.”

“Where is she?”

“She went over to John Manning's house to get some books.”

Monica smirked. “They seemed rather tight at the party earlier.”

“It's been two hours since Inga went over there,” Jessie said. “She said she'd be right back. I'm going over to check.”

Suddenly Monica felt Todd behind her. “Jessie,” he said, calling over Monica's shoulder. “I don't want you going over to Manning's house alone.”

“It's okay,” Jessie called back. “It's just through the trees.”

“No,” Todd said firmly. “I'll be right down. I'll go over with you.”

Monica spun around to watch him as he pulled on his jeans and slipped a sweatshirt over his head. “What's with the Sir Galahad routine?” she asked him snidely. “You're always saying Jessie is a pain in the ass—”

“I'm not letting her go over in the pitch darkness to the house of a man who may have killed his wife.”

“Oh, please, you don't really believe he killed—”

Todd snapped his head up to look at her. “Lots of people think he pushed Millie off that deck. There was no reason for her to fall. There was a nearly shoulder-high railing. You don't fall off a deck with a shoulder-high railing.”

“The police declared him innocent.”

“No. They just said there was no evidence. There's a difference.”

Monica frowned. “Well, I just think you're overreacting. Even if he killed his wife, I doubt Jessie's in any danger just walking over there and ringing his bell. He's probably in there fucking that German girl. You could see he wanted to at the party.”

But then again, Monica thought, maybe Todd didn't notice such things anymore.

“I'll be right down,” he called through the window to Jessie. “Wait for me.”

Monica watched as he hurried out of the room. She snorted in annoyance and got back into bed.