Meanwhile Emily was writing press releases and controlling information. My friend hadn’t been a drug-addled mess but a responsible mother and a loving wife with an important job. Or maybe she was all those things. The currency was Emily’s collection. Her travel diary.
Maybe there had been a crime. Maybe the Russian mob was moving into fashion, and Emily got in the way. My imagination was spinning out of control. I told myself to relax.
I found a box full of photos of Emily. It seemed weird that there were no pictures of her childhood or of her life before she married Sean. Had Sean gotten rid of those snapshots? Or was there something about her past she’d wanted to erase? Sean had said she was estranged from her parents, but she’d been vague about the reasons. Wasn’t it strange that they could be married and he didn’t know? I told Davis a lot about myself. About my parents. But I’d left out one big thing: my relationship with Chris.
The only pictures in the box were of Emily and Nicky together. I remembered that Sean gave the photographs of Emily alone to the police, and we hadn’t gotten them back yet. I’d helped him edit out the pictures with Nicky because we decided that we didn’t need our little boy’s face all over the papers, or the internet.
In a back closet beside the place where the chimney ran up through the attic, I found a pale blue dress on a hanger and a pair of stylish pale blue high-heeled sandals placed neatly beneath it.
The dress swayed when I opened the door. Like a person hiding in the dark and waiting to jump out and scare me. Boo! I was scared, at first.
Was it Emily’s wedding dress? I couldn’t ask. I didn’t want Sean knowing that I was rifling through the closets in the attic. He’d told me that he wanted me to feel as if this house was my own. But I didn’t think he meant this.
I slipped the blue dress off the hanger and took it, together with the shoes, down to our bedroom. I put on Emily’s clothes. The dress was too tight, and the sandals were a bit of a squeeze, but I loosened the straps. I felt like Cinderella’s stepsister trying to stuff her feet into the glass slipper.
I looked in the mirror. I felt sinful. I felt sad.
I pretended I was Emily. I lay down on our bed with my legs draped over the end so I could watch myself in the mirror. I reached up under the filmy pale blue dress and began to masturbate. I pretended I was Emily and that Sean was watching me.
I came in about a minute. When I came, I laughed out loud. It was no surprise by now that I was a perverted person. Was I a lesbian too? I didn’t want to have sex with Emily. I just liked pretending to be her. I took her clothes back upstairs and hung them neatly in the closet where I’d found them.
In the guest room, there was a deco vanity table with a big round mirror, the sort of thing that might seem irresistible at an auction but when you got it home you wondered why you thought you needed a vanity table that a 1930s movie star would sit at to powder her nose.
In one of the drawers, I found a manila envelope full of birthday cards. Drugstore greeting cards. They were still in their envelopes, addressed to Emily Nelson (she’d never taken Sean’s name) at the addresses she’d lived in at different stages. Her college dorm at Syracuse. Her first apartment in Alphabet City in Manhattan. You could track Emily’s progress up through Dennis Nylon Inc. as you watched the addresses get more upscale. Then the cards went to East Eighty-Sixth Street—where she’d lived with Sean after Nicky was born. But when had she lived in Tucson? She never told me about that. Or maybe she was just visiting for her birthday, and her mother’s card caught up with her there.
The cards were standard stuff. Flowers. Balloons. happy birthday to my dear daughter. happy birthday to our dearest daughter.
There was nothing more personal than that, no notes or endearments. Nothing handwritten but the salutation, To Emily, and the signature, Love Mom. The handwriting, always in brown ink and with a real fountain pen, belonged to another era, when girls were graded on their penmanship. The penmanship was stellar—spidery yet assured.
In the top left-hand corner of each envelope, in the same handwriting, it said, Mr. and Mrs. Wendell Nelson. And there was an address in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
Emily’s parents’ address.
I took the envelope and put it in my dresser. I felt it was important to have the address, though I couldn’t have said why. If anyone could help me clear up the mystery of who my friend was, her mother might. I knew she suffered from dementia, but I remember hearing that she had her good days. Maybe I could visit on one of those. I would never have the nerve—or the time or freedom!—to go see her. But I liked having her address.
There was one more thing. An important thing. And that was completely by chance.
One afternoon Sean called from work and asked me to look in his top desk drawer for a piece of paper on which he’d scribbled a client’s contact information. He’d forgotten to bring his phone to the meeting with the client, and then he’d forgotten to enter the information into his contact list. And he needed the guy’s number. Right away.
I could tell he was embarrassed; he thought he’d screwed up. I kept reassuring him, saying it was nothing. People forget more important things. He’d been under a lot of stress. I didn’t say, Give yourself a break. Your wife died. But we knew what I meant. I told him I’d look for the paper and call him when I found it.
The scrap—torn from a yellow legal pad—was where he’d said it would be, along with a lot of bills and receipts, old phone chargers, and a tangle of those ID badges people wear at meetings. I was surprised by the mess. Sean is such a neat person. But no one’s perfect. And I’d seen how he could let things get out of hand when work was involved. When we first moved in together, I often had to (neatly!) clear files and stacks of paper off the dining room table so we could have dinner.
Just before I closed the drawer, I noticed a small box, covered in deep blue velvet that had gotten slightly dusty. A jewelry box. It was as if I heard a voice warning me not to open it, but that same voice made it irresistible.
I opened it. And there inside was Emily’s ring: the sapphire surrounded by diamonds.
I held it between my fingers. And then I saw her. I saw Emily. I saw the diamonds flashing in the air as we sat on her sofa and she moved her hands, talking about the books and movies she loved, about Nicky and Sean, the things she cared about. As we laughed and joked and celebrated the gift of our wonderful friendship.
On impulse, I held the ring up to my face. And it seemed to me that I could smell the cold, dark waters of the lake in Michigan, and beneath that, a faint whiff of decomposition. Of death. It was impossible that a ring could smell like that. But I was sure of it all the same.
My friend was gone. This was all that was left—this ring and our memories. I put the ring back in the velvet box, put the box back in the drawer, and slammed the drawer shut. I began to cry—harder than I’d cried since we learned that Emily was dead.
I pulled myself together. I called Sean. It was all I could do to keep from falling apart again as I read him the client’s number. Sean thanked me. I wanted to tell him I loved him, but this was not the moment. I wanted to tell him I’d found Emily’s ring, but I knew I never would.
I stopped searching the house for clues. There was nothing else I wanted or needed to know.
We settled into a routine. The boys went to school and Sean went to work. Maricela came on Wednesdays, so I didn’t have to clean. I kept busy, straightening up the boys’ rooms and collecting art supplies for making projects when they got home. Baking muffins and making model airplanes.
I tried to forget about Emily unless I could remember her in a good way. A helpful and positive way. I decided that the boys saying that they’d seen her, and Nicky smelling like her, and my own doubts—that was just part of our grief. Our refusal to believe that she was gone.