Even as a little girl, I was always hiding and spying. Crouching under the windows, lying in the grass, I waited for the grown-ups to do something dirtier and more private than make coffee or look in the refrigerator or (in my dad’s case) sneak a cigarette on the porch. I saw where Mother hid the liquor bottles and how often she had to get the big dictionary from the bookshelf. What was the word she needed to look up? Her bottle was behind the book. I saw my mother drink so much that it no longer seemed secret but just like something she did. I didn’t blame her. The poor woman was married to Dad, a popular gynecologist and exotic orchid breeder who named his new bioengineered orchid strains after his “favorite patients.”
Only rarely did I break the spy code of watchfulness and silence. Drunk Mother sounded so stupid! I put water in her gin bottle. I watched from the window as she drank straight from the bottle, though she would have killed me if she caught me drinking milk from the carton. After the first swallow, she looked puzzled, as if trying to remember how it was supposed to taste. Then she finished off the bottle and put it in a paper bag and took it outside to put in the trash at the end of the driveway.
When I was in junior high, I began to take sips of her gin, then larger and larger swallows. She never noticed, or never said. My parents could have been cardboard cutouts for all their lively interest in me. Working at Dennis Nylon, you hear a lot of people, after a few drinks, talking about how unparented they feel. Every time I hear that word, I think: You should meet my unparents. Though that would be unlikely now. Father’s been dead eight years, and Mother is in no shape for a conversation about the mistakes she made as a parent.
Everyone has a hellish childhood, everyone still thinks it was supposed to have been heaven. That everyone else’s childhood was pure paradise. That’s the message we get from movies and TV. When you’re little, you think your family is the only one that isn’t as happy and cool as the ones in the sitcoms. The irony is that I would never let Nicky watch the modern versions of those mind-rotting television shows, yet his life (comfy upper-middle-class suburbs with a loving mom and dad) is closer to TV life than Sean’s and mine were, and we actually did watch those shows.
I want Nicky to be happy. It’s the one thing, the only thing, that I know I want.
When you grow up, you find out that you weren’t the only unhappy child, which is nice. Nice if you’re the kind of person who is cheered up to find out that someone had the same bad luck you did. Stephanie likes to think that everybody is walking the same rocky road. Even though she talks about how you can never know another person, she thinks you can. She likes thinking that another person is suffering exactly as much as (or worse than) she is. If you have a problem with your kid, it’s supposed to help to know that other mothers have the same problem. If your best friend disappears, it’s supposed to comfort you to learn about all the women out there whose best friends have vanished.
That’s a pretty small demographic, waiting for the call from Investigative Reports, waiting to tell the reporter how sure they are that the husband did it.
During the day, Stephanie sits in her little office corner of the sunporch—my sunporch—where she’s put an old-fashioned rolltop desk the size of a tank and a round braided rug. Very homey, very corny. Mommy blogger paradise. But she seems to have stopped blogging.
Total strangers felt sorry for Stephanie when she lost me. Her best friend. They posted love and hugs and emoticon hearts and frowny faces.
From the day I disappeared, I was high on the self-restraint it took not to completely mess with Stephanie’s head. It was like having my brain in bondage. I’ve just dipped my toe into torturing Stephanie, and it’s mildly entertaining. But it’s painful too. At the end of the day, at any time of day, that’s my house, my husband, my son.
It makes me think less of Sean that he could stand to be with a person like that. Even if he’s using her to get over his grief about me. In theory I could give him another chance. Let him know I’m not dead. See how fast he drops Stephanie. That would be entertaining to watch.
But he’s already failed a test, two tests. I’m not going to give him a chance to retake the exam.
The point was that Stephanie isn’t that smart. That was what we needed. That was why I chose her.
I never told Stephanie about Mother’s drinking. It wasn’t anything I wanted anyone knowing, though Sean knew because his mom liked her big glass of sweet disgusting sherry, so Sean and I had that in common.
That was pretty much all Sean knew about me. I was careful with information. Controlling information is what I do, what I did, for a living. That’s why Dennis paid me. Before most people caught on to disinformation, I could make Dennis’s court-ordered stint at a boot camp desert rehab in Tucson look and sound like a wild two-week sex and drugs orgy in Marrakesh. I could make something seem like something else. I could make the failing Batgirl look the hippest thing on the planet.
I only told Sean the things that made him feel the same as me, nothing that would have made him feel different from me. Which meant leaving out some fairly basic things. God, how Stephanie used to go on about secrets. I’d listen to her, or half listen to her, and I’d think: We have to have secrets. We need them to live in the world. I have plenty. More than my share. You have no idea.
Spying on my mother, I learned: We don’t know we’re being watched. We like to imagine we’re alert. We fool ourselves into thinking we have something in common with creatures that can survive in the wild. But we’ve lost that instinct, that sixth sense. We couldn’t survive for one day in the wild—if the wild was full of predators.
It only takes one predator. And for the moment, that’s me.
Unless we see or hear something, the woods behind our house could be crawling with snipers. A pervert could live across the courtyard behind our apartment, binoculars smashed into his eyes, praying to the pervert god that we’ll take our clothes off.
There was a guy like that across the alley from my first New York City apartment, around the time I started working at Dennis Nylon.
I caught the guy. Big sloppy gut, wife-beater T-shirt. Superspy binoculars. Pants around his knees. I gave him the finger across the alley. He gave me the finger back. He put down his binoculars. His eyes never left my eyes.
I couldn’t deal with it. I moved. I lost my security deposit.
I got a nicer apartment.
I asked Dennis for a raise, and I got it. He loved being so powerful that he could throw me a handful of spare change and rescue me from a pervert.
Now I’m the neighborhood pervert. Stephanie needs to be rescued. From me.
There’s a movie I love. Peeping Tom. It’s British. It’s about a psychopathic serial killer who films himself in the act of killing women. He has a camera attached to the end of spear on which he impales pretty girls so he can film the terror on their faces. A real artist, a real obsessive.
It’s Dennis Nylon’s favorite film. So we had that in common.
It was one of those movies that ruin a director’s career. Everyone finds out how sick the guy is, and no one will work with him. Especially when the film loses money. Peeping Tom was too far out for 1960. Even now, it would be. But not for me, not for Dennis.
I was surprised that Sean hadn’t seen it, being British and for a while on the fringe of an arty crowd. Didn’t his friends watch films like that? There was no one I could ask, no one he still knew from those days. His cool university friends hadn’t gone into banking, and by the time we met, he no longer saw them. I knew I could have him, if I wanted, by making him think that he could still be the coolest kid if he was with me.
Sean could make deals, make money, do business, but he’d never had a real love affair. I showed him what passion was. I made him think he couldn’t live without me. He was so easy to reprogram, to convince that he was in control. That was part of his appeal. It was a bonus thrown in that he was a good lover: patient, creative, and hot. That counted for more than it should have, or would have if it had been more common in the male population. So many men make love like there’s a taxi with the meter running waiting outside in the street.
I could make Sean into whatever I wanted him to be. All I had to do was figure out what I wanted him to be.