I noticed something familiar. It took me a while to realize what it was, to identify a memory that was already beginning to fade.
I nuzzled Nicky’s skin and hair. I smelled Emily’s perfume.
Sean was spending that night at his house, working. I was supposed to keep the boys overnight, but I called and said I wanted to come over. Sean heard the urgency in my voice. Without asking what was wrong, he told me to put the boys in the car and text him when I was outside his house. I carried the boys, still in their pajamas, into my car. When I reached Sean’s house, he came out and helped me carry them to their rooms.
I told him that I had smelled Emily’s perfume on Nicky, and that this time Nicky had insisted that he’d seen his mom. That she’d touched him.
Sean looked weary. His face got dark, and his tone was curt and even angry as he said, “Stephanie, please cut the Twilight Zone crap.” He had never talked to me that way before, and for the first time it occurred to me that Emily could win this one. Until then I hadn’t even known that it was a contest. But it was. He would always love Emily—love her memory—more than he loved me. Like Nicky, Sean would never get over her loss.
He said, “Stephanie, you’re losing it. Emily is dead. No one wants that to be true, but it is true. It wasn’t supposed to happen. But it has.”
I had a vague memory of him saying that before: It wasn’t supposed to happen. And again I wondered, What was supposed to happen?
Sean said, “We need to help Nicky accept that, not indulge him in his painful, destructive fantasies.”
I knew he was right. But the smell of Emily’s perfume had unnerved me. Maybe I was wishful thinking, wanting to believe she was still alive. Though I did realize that, if she were, I’d have some serious explaining to do. I told myself: Get a grip. We’re all grieving, and grief makes people imagine and do crazy things . . .
Sean sighed deeply. Then he got up and took my hand and led me upstairs to the back bathroom on the second floor where, in the linen closet, way up on a shelf, was an atomizer of Emily’s perfume.
He sprayed it into the air.
It was eerie. Lilacs and lilies. Italian nuns. It brought Emily back to us, just for a moment. Emily was there with us in the room.
He said, “I keep a bottle back here. Somehow Nicky found out. And he got the stepladder and dragged it over to the shelf and reached the perfume bottle and sprayed it in his hair. Poor little guy. I suppose it made him feel closer to his mom.”
Part of me knew that it didn’t make sense. Nicky hadn’t been home for two days, and it was only tonight that I smelled Emily’s scent on his hair. But I wanted a logical explanation. I wanted to believe Sean. And besides, there was no other explanation. I’d seen the autopsy report and the urn that contained my friend’s ashes.
With Emily’s perfume, with her sweet scent of lilacs and lilies hanging thickly in the air, Sean and I made love. It was shameful, how turned on we were. But maybe it wasn’t all that surprising. Maybe we were just trying to prove something to ourselves and to each other.
Our beloved Emily was dead.
But we were still alive.
One night, I was at my house with Miles eating dinner: pasta with fresh tomato sauce, the kind of delicious vegetarian meal we used to have when it was just the two of us. It was a relief, in a way. A relief and a pleasure.
I was feeling peaceful, so that it was doubly shocking when Miles said, “Hey, guess what, Mom. I saw Nicky’s mother today. She was heading into the woods behind the school when we went outside for recess. It was like she was waiting till we came out. And then she ran away because she didn’t want anyone else seeing her. She was moving fast. But it was her.”
Is it possible for your heart to stop beating while the rest of you goes on living? It must be. My heart stalled in my chest.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, Mom.”
“Sure sure?” I asked, trying to stay calm.
“Sure sure,” Miles said.
There was a book we used to read. One of the moms who follows my blog recommended it when I blogged about that time when Miles was always hiding. And scaring me senseless.
The book is called Where Is Buster Bunny? The bunny keeps hiding from his mom and frightening her, though the kids can find him in the illustrations. And the mother rabbit is very worried because she has no idea where he is. Anyway, at the end, the little bunny promises that he’ll never hide again:
“Do you promise with your little pink nose?” his mother asked.
“Yes,” said Buster Bunny.
“Do you promise with every one of your cute little toes?”
“Yes,” said Buster Bunny, and he never hid from his mother again.
It had become a game that Miles and I played whenever I wanted him to promise me something. Now I asked him:
“Was it really Emily? Do you promise with your little pink nose?”
“Yes,” said my son.
“Do you promise with every one of your cute little toes?”
“It was her. I promise,” said Miles.
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Stephanie's Blog
Another Simple Favor
Hi, moms!
This is going to be a quick one. Can any of you moms remember the name of a French movie I’m pretty sure I saw in college about a sadistic high school principal and his sexy mistress (Simone Signoret?) who conspire to scare his rich, fragile wife to death by making her think she has murdered him and then making it seem like he’s come back from the dead?
I can’t believe I would have made this story up. Do let me know.
Thanks!
Love, Stephanie
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Stephanie's Blog
Another Simple Favor (continued)
Diabolique!
Thanks, moms, for the answer, which came back within seconds! I cannot believe how attentive you are, how this proves that there are moms reading this right now, and that if I need help—just a memory jog, in this case—they don’t hesitate for a second.
Diabolique.
I was able to stream the film within minutes of posting my question.
What an amazing moment this is! You want something, but you don’t know exactly what you want, and you put it out there into cyberspace, and you figure out what you want. And you get it.
If only real life were like this blog.
I’m undecided about whether to recommend this film to you moms. The mom who emailed me the name said the reason she remembered the title is that the film scared her more than anything she has ever seen. She would never watch it again, and she strongly suggests that I not make other moms live with the memory of it, as she has.
If we’re the type who thinks that Patricia Highsmith’s (just typing the name makes me miss Emily!) novels are creepy, this might not be for us. But I was engrossed because the plot is so twisty and because Simone Signoret is so outrageous playing the hot high school teacher/sinister-babe mistress.
The film begins at the school where lots of gawky French boys in short pants are running around yelling. The principal is a control freak. Everyone is scared of him, and he messes with everyone just because he can.
Simone Signoret is wearing dark sunglasses to hide the bruises she got from the principal, her violent lover. He also abuses his wife but only psychologically, because the wife’s money supports the school. The wife’s got a heart condition, so the guy makes her so unhappy that she thinks she’s going to die of misery and humiliation.
Films like this always make me realize how, despite the mistakes I’ve made and the bad things I’ve done, I’ve been lucky in my choice of men. Because (as so many moms have discovered) it’s so easy to get involved with a person you think is a nice guy. You have a child with him. And one day he turns . . .
The wife and the mistress both hate the principal so much they decide to kill him. They feed him drugged whiskey. Then they put his body in a basket and dump it in the school swimming pool.
The plan is to make it look like an accident. It was never going to work, but that turns out not to matter. When they drain the pool, there’s no body.