The Replacement Wife (40 page)

She couldn’t stop thinking about it. Edward and Angie, Angie and Edward. Her head, her stomach, too, ached from thinking about it. She’d hoped going into the office today would distract her, but as she wrote checks, sorted receipts, and reconciled the previous month’s bank statement on QuickBooks, the green-eyed monster continued on its rampage, growling and gnashing its teeth. If she’d felt threatened by Elise, this was a million times worse. She pictured Edward and Angie in bed together. His tongue in her mouth. His naked body moving atop hers. It was all she could do not to scream. As an added torment, there was the possibility—perhaps likelihood—that Angie would one day take her place. This time next year, Angie could be living in her home, occupying her place at the table, sleeping in her bed. Raising her children. Angie, who didn’t even
like
kids, as far as she knew. Also, what did it say that she would sleep with another woman’s husband? What kind of person did that? Not the kind of person she wanted anywhere near Kyra and Zach.

She picked up the phone and punched the flashing line button. “Stephen. Good to hear from you. How have you been? How’s Carole?” It surprised her, how normal she sounded. No one would guess she was a total wreck. Not that Stephen Resler would have noticed either way. It quickly became clear he had his own problems.

“The engagement’s off,” he informed her.

The news didn’t exactly come as a shock—a prenup seldom bode well, especially when one half of the couple was a lawyer—but she made the proper noises. “Really? Stephen, I’m so sorry.”

“I did like you said,” he went on, in the same grim tone. “I told her I’d be more comfortable using my own lawyer. Carole didn’t have a problem with that, so I thought we were cool. Until we got to my lawyer’s office, and she started making all these frickin’ demands—terms, conditions, you name it. Not like she was afraid she’d get screwed in a divorce, mind you. It wasn’t even about that.” Camille could hear him breathing heavily at the other end. “It was like she was trying to get the upper hand, you know? And I could tell she was loving every minute of it. So I thought,
Christ, if this is what the next forty years are gonna look like, I’m outta here.
”

“It sounds like you did the right thing.” Camille shuddered at his description of Carole Hardy in battle mode. Had she seen that side of her, she never would have taken her on as a client.

“Yeah, I know,” he replied unhappily.

“You’re not second-guessing the decision?”

“Nah.” He sighed. “It’s just goddamn depressing, is all. My brothers, the guys I went to school with, the guys I work with, they all have wives and kids. They coach their kids’ soccer teams. They take their families on vacations. For them, Six Flags isn’t just some creepy bald dude jumping around on TV. Me? I’m forty years old, and what have I got show for myself? I’m like the guy in
Groundhog Day
—every goddamn day I wake up to the same goddamn thing.”

Camille briefly commiserated with Stephen before adopting a firmer tone. She gave him the same advice she’d given Kat Fisher, when Kat had come to her in tears (was it only yesterday? It seemed like a hundred years ago). “Listen, Stephen, this may not be what you want to hear right now, but I think it might help if you saw a therapist.” The problem wasn’t really Carole or any of the other women he’d dated, she told him. It was that he hadn’t dealt with his own, unresolved issues surrounding his divorce. “Until you take a good look at that, I don’t see how another relationship is going to work.”

He blew out a breath. “Jesus. You don’t pull any punches, do you?”

“I’m saying this as your friend.”

“You must think I’m a real head case.”

“Not at all. What I think”—she chose her words carefully—“is that you’re a really great guy who will find someone equally great someday but who right now is still licking his wounds.”

“I was taught that if you fall off a horse, you should get right back on.”

“Women aren’t horses.”

There was a long pause at the other end; then he said in a resigned voice, “What the hell, why not? It’s the one thing I
haven’t
tried, so I guess it’s worth a shot.” She could almost hear the wheels turning in his head, the same wheels with which he ran stock prices and traded vast sums of money, when he asked, “How long you figure it’ll take? We talking weeks, months, what?”

“I can’t answer that,” she said. “These things move at their own pace. Though a lot depends on your willingness.” She gave him Dr. McDermott’s number, and Stephen promised to call and make an appointment. Though, Stephen being Stephen, he managed to get in the last lick.

“You couldn’t set me up with a good-looking female shrink, at least?” he joked.

“I think that would be defeating the purpose, don’t you?” she said.

After she’d hung up, she turned to Dara. “That’s the second one this week I’ve had to cut loose. I must be losing my touch.” She filled her partner in on yesterday’s come-to-Jesus with Kat Fisher.

“Don’t worry; they’ll be back. They always come back.” Dara sounded as if she wasn’t sure that was such a good thing.

Dara was in full glam mode today: blood-red lipstick, a fitted calf-length skirt in chocolate suede with a slit up one thigh, her black stiletto Prada boots, and a filmy floral-print blouse with a plunging neckline. Probably she had a hot date lined up for later on. Dara always had at least one guy on the hook at any given time, with several hopefuls waiting in the wings.

If I could distill what she’s got and give it to my clients, I’d have a one hundred percent success rate,
Camille thought. She recalled a story Dara had told about when she was in high school. Dara had been consoling a friend of hers who was heartbroken over having been rejected by a boy she liked, and the friend blurted, “If I’m so hot, how come
you’re
the one who gets all the guys?” Most girls that age would’ve been deeply offended by such a remark, but Dara had shrugged and said, “Maybe it’s because they know I don’t need them to feel better about myself.”

Camille sighed. “Still. I can’t help feeling I failed them somehow.”

“There’s only so much you can do,” Dara reminded her. “You can line up all the parts, but you can’t set the wheels in motion. The rest is up to fate, destiny, whatever you want to call it.”

Camille’s thoughts returned to Edward. When they were first married, she used to think she’d already been through the worst, with her mother dying. Nothing could ever be that bad again, she’d believed. Life as she knew it would continue to hum along, with only minor bumps and obstacles along the way. The children would grow up and get married and have children of their own, and she and Edward would grow old together. But getting cancer had changed all that. It had changed
her
. Her former self couldn’t have conceived of a plan that would drive her husband into the arms of another woman. Cancer hadn’t just robbed her of a future; it had hijacked her identity. What made it so insidious was that she couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment the hijacking had taken place.

Back when she used to counsel couples, a shocking number of wives had confessed, in their one-on-one sessions, to having widow fantasies. One woman had confided, about her husband of twenty-two years and the father of their four children, “Every morning, I wake up next to him and think,
My life would be so much easier without this person
.” Camille had never had such thoughts about Edward. There were times they disagreed or got on each other’s nerves, like all couples, but even when the disagreements grew heated, she never regretted marrying him. And yet, while a war was being waged in her body, a stealth attack had taken place from without. An enemy had slipped in on silent ninja feet to capture her, leaving a doppelgänger in her place: not a loving wife but one who’d pushed her husband away when she’d needed him most, and when he’d needed her.

Abruptly, she stood up. Too abruptly. The blood drained from her head, and she grew dizzy. She dropped back into her chair and put her head between her knees. When she finally straightened, the room swam back into focus. She looked up to find Dara standing over her wearing a worried look.

“Camille, are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” Camille spoke briskly. “Too much coffee on an empty stomach.”

“You look a little pale. Do you need to lie down?”

Camille glanced at her watch, then shook her head. “Later. I’m meeting Holly at her Lamaze class in half an hour, and I have a doctor’s appointment after that.” When Dara continued to hover, she said, “I’ll put my feet up after that. I promise. Okay? Am I excused now?”

Camille fetched her coat from the closet—the weather had turned brisk earlier in the week, slipping from Indian summer into fall seemingly overnight—and put it on. She was heading for the door when Dara remarked, “Just think—next time I see your sister, she’ll be a mom. Wow. I still can’t believe it. That’s like, I don’t know, George Clooney getting married or something.”

Camille paused and smiled. “I don’t think she’s quite grasped it, either.” For Holly, having a baby was just another fun adventure. A tiny person for her to cuddle and dress up in cute clothes and push around in her nifty new Bugaboo stroller. “She has no idea what she’s in for.”

“What’s with the boyfriend? He still in the picture?”

“As far as I know.” She’d only seen Curtis a couple of times since they’d been introduced, and at no point had either he or Holly indicated how serious, or not, their relationship was. They were affectionate toward each other, nothing more, and if Holly had more of a glow about her these days, it could just as easily be due to pregnancy hormones. “He seems excited about the baby.” That much she could safely report.

“Do they plan on shacking up together?”

“If they are, I haven’t heard anything about it.” Curtis and Holly both seemed content with the current arrangement. “Between you and me, I’m not holding my breath,” she added as she pushed her way out the door.

HOLLY’S LAMAZE CLASS
met on Thursdays, between the hours of one and two p.m., in a Pilates studio on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights, one flight up from a Vietnamese restaurant. The steamy fragrance of
pho
trailed Camille as she ascended the staircase. She arrived to find Holly seated cross-legged on a mat on the floor, her eyes closed as if in meditation. She was surrounded by a dozen other women, in similar poses and various stages of pregnancy, and their coaches—husbands for the most part, with some moms and sisters and best friends sprinkled in. One woman, a heavyset blonde named Barb, had her lesbian partner.

Camille lowered herself onto the mat Holly had thoughtfully placed alongside hers. “You look like a fat, contented Buddha,” she said.

Holly opened her eyes and smiled. “More like a fat, contented cow.”

“How’s Junior?”

“Busy doing gymnastics at the moment.” Holly lifted her gauzy Indian-print tunic to show the walnut-size bump on her belly, just above her navel. Camille placed her hand over it and felt it move. She smiled, remembering when she’d been pregnant and thrilling to the feel of the baby moving inside her, wondering if it was an elbow or a knee that was poking at her.

“Is he always this active?”

Holly grinned. “Only when he’s showing off for his aunt.”

“Well, if he’s anything like you were, you’d better put the number for FEMA on speed dial.”

Holly giggled. “I wasn’t
that
bad.”

“Oh? Remember when you thought it’d be fun to swing from the living room curtain rod?” Camille, who’d been playing in her room at the time, would never forget the loud thump, followed by a piercing wail that had brought her and her mom running. They’d found the curtains in a heap on the floor, Holly tangled up in them screaming and thrashing like a piglet in a sack.

“I was five!” Holly said.

“More like five kinds of trouble. Who got Joey Persky to swallow a mothball by telling him it was a magic pill that would make him invisible?” Joey had lived next door to them growing up.

“I didn’t know he’d have to have his stomach pumped!”

“Neither did Joey, apparently.”

Holly was giggling uncontrollably now. “Stop, or I’ll pee my pants.”

Several of the other women glanced their way and smiled. They were used to seeing the two sisters with their heads together, giggling over some private joke. Only with Holly could Camille temporarily forget her woes. Today, she needed that more than ever.

The instructor, a perky blond woman named Natalie who had three children of her own, called the class to attention. “Everyone, I have an announcement! Sarah Tsao had her baby. A boy, nine pounds, two ounces. No complications, I’m happy to report.” There was a round of applause, and one of the other women, a petite redhead who looked to be about six months along, muttered, “Nine pounds? Oof. They’d have to knock me out.” Her burly firefighter husband looked a little pale.

Camille recalled giving birth to Kyra. Edward had alternately soothed and coaxed her on, holding tightly to her hand as she’d borne down with what little strength she had left after fourteen hours of labor. “You can do this,” he’d urged, just as he had years later when she’d been battling cancer. When had he stopped holding her hand?
When you let go of his,
a voice whispered in her head.

Natalie, the instructor, launched into a discussion of last week’s homework assignment, which had been to do a food diary recording everything the mothers-to-be consumed over a seven-day period. When talk turned to the nutritional benefits, or lack thereof, of nachos and fries, Holly leaned in to whisper, “Remember when you used tell me if I ate junk food it’d stunt my growth?”

“Okay, so I was wrong about that,” Camille conceded. Holly had several inches on her.

“You also said it’d lower my IQ.”

“Well, I was right about that.”

“Ha! I’m
way
smarter than you.”

“So smart you forgot to use birth control.”

Holly grinned at her. “Smartest dumb move I ever made.”

After the discussion period, they practiced the breathing exercises. Half the expecting moms were opting for natural childbirth, while the others, veterans for the most part, were going for the epidural. Heidi Jenkins, a stay-at-home mom seven months pregnant with her second child, had put it best: “When I go to the dentist for a root canal, I’m not expected to grin and bear it,” she reasoned. Holly was of the belief that, if the hippie chicks who’d given birth at Woodstock, in the medical aid station tents, could breeze through it without missing a guitar lick, she should be able to manage just fine.
You have no idea,
thought Camille for the umpteenth time.