It was a Saturday in August. Sean had to work in the city. Stephanie and I decided to take the kids to the county fair. I told myself it could be fun: the heirloom chickens and prize-winning pigs, the blue-ribbon bottles of pickles. The boys would like the farm animals and the cotton candy and the carousel.
But the day was extremely hot. The fairgrounds were dusty and airless. The roiling vats of frying onion blooms and (new this year) deep-fried Oreos hung in the air, an oily, sweaty mist. For a few minutes I thought I was going to faint or vomit.
As the boys ran ahead of us, never out of sight, Stephanie and I wondered: What mother in her right mind would let her kid ride that creaky, ancient roller coaster? I would have loved to ride it, but I didn’t feel I could say that.
The one ride that the boys were old enough to go on by themselves, and that they didn’t think was insultingly babyish, was a ring of little cars made to look like submarines. Attached to a central pole by rods, the mini-subs turned slowly, rising slightly in the air and gently dipping toward the pool of water beneath them. A toddler ride.
It looked completely safe, but still I was surprised that overprotective, neurotic Stephanie let Miles go on it. She and I leaned on the fence that encircled the ride and watched our boys turn and dip. I wondered if she remembered Strangers on a Train. I’d made her watch it with me. She’d been very disturbed by the carousel scene. I don’t think she ever finished the book, though she pretended she did.
Stephanie said, “Look at Miles. Look when he comes closer.”
“What about him?”
“Take a good look. Do you remember I showed you those pictures of my brother, Chris?”
“Of course.” I recalled a dark, handsome, muscular guy in a white T-shirt and jeans. Shy in front of the camera, slightly shifty. I could see why she’d been drawn to him because I’d also seen photos of her husband, Davis, and the brother was way more attractive. I remember her showing me his picture along with her parents’ wedding photo and pointing out the resemblance between her dad and her half brother. Between her mom and her.
Then Stephanie said, “I need to tell you something I’ve never told anyone ever.”
She’d started a lot of conversations that way. Some of her stories had been intense—her affair with her brother—while other “secrets” seemed so insignificant that I instantly forgot them.
Miles and Nicky passed in their little submarines. They smiled and waved, and we smiled and waved back.
I was thinking about the scene in the Hitchcock film. The merry-go-round spins faster and faster, further and further out of control as Farley Granger and Robert Walker struggle to the death. The only person who knows how to stop it is a little old man who crawls under the carousel. Watching him put himself in danger is far scarier and more suspenseful than the fight.
What would we do if Miles and Nicky were spinning faster and faster? Who would crawl under the merry-go-round to save our boys? The girl who took tickets was texting someone. I realized that I was having the kind of thought that Stephanie would have. You’re Emily, I reminded myself. Not her.
I went around to Stephanie’s other side and switched on the fancy tape recorder I’d started carrying in my pocket for moments like the one that was about to happen.
The submarine ride was playing disco classics but not very loud. The ticket girl was keeping the music down in case she got a phone call.
Stephanie said, “I’m pretty sure that my half brother, Chris, was Miles’s father.”
“Hi, honey,” she called out to Miles, and I waved at Nicky.
“Why do you think so?” I asked, trying to sound calm. “Stephanie, are you sure or not?”
“I’m sure. Davis was away for a while. On a site in Texas. Chris came over. Miles looks just like Chris. He doesn’t look like Davis at all. Davis’s mom says she can’t see one single gene from her side of the family in her grandson.”
I’d known she was going to say that. I’d been expecting it for a long time. Still, it was shocking to hear her admit it.
“Miles looks like you,” I said.
“Do you think people suspect?”
“Of course not.” No one was going to figure it out. Surely not Miles’s teachers. Maybe Miles himself, later, when he asked to see pictures of his father and his uncle.
No one except your dead husband, I thought. But I wasn’t going to say that.
“Emily, you know me so well. I love you so much. It feels so good to tell someone, not to have to keep it bottled up inside. Am I a terrible person?”
As their submarines came around again, Miles and Nicky seemed to have slipped into a trance.
“The boys are great,” I said, as if in answer to Stephanie’s question. She would think it was the answer.
The kids had two, maybe three more times around before the ride ended. Under pressure now, Stephanie spoke rapidly. “I can’t bring Miles to the doctor without feeling like a liar and a fraud. When they ask for the medical history of his father’s side of the family, I pretend they’re talking about Davis. Obviously, I don’t mention that his dad is my half brother.”
The ride slowed and stopped. The boys got off. They wanted to talk about the fun ride. It was hardly the moment to press Stephanie further on the subject of her son’s father.
I couldn’t believe that anyone would confess something like that. That kind of information gives someone so much power over you. Power to use however they want. Stephanie always said that you can never truly know anyone else. But she thought she knew me—and that I could be trusted. That was her mistake. She chose to forget that what I did for a living was to control information. To bend and use it in the most helpful way.
A few days later, in bed, I played Sean the recording of what Stephanie told me at the fair.
He said, “No wonder she always looks as if she’s afraid of getting arrested.”
Did a statement like that suggest that my husband found her attractive? I think not. I thought not. Another joke on me.
*
There was one thing I hadn’t worked out: how to make it seem as if I was really dead so we didn’t have to wait forever to collect the insurance money.
A solution presented itself. It landed in my lap—and I knew that it was time to move. At least Sean was smart enough not to ask what that solution was. He was better off not knowing.
Would everything have worked out differently if he’d trusted me when I said “Whatever happens, don’t believe I’m really dead”? Maybe he wouldn’t have slept with Stephanie. I wouldn’t have wound up spying on them from the forest behind my own home.
Stephanie doesn’t look at Sean as if she’s scared of being arrested. She should feel guilty—guiltier than she’s ever felt about anything. She looks at my husband as if he’s a god, the lord of the manor who sneaks down to the kitchen to make out with the besotted cook.
One thing that made me choose Stephanie as our fish was how obsessively she blogged about trying to feed her son healthy food. It was almost unendurable to hear her talk about it, but if I was going to leave Nicky with her, I liked it that she wouldn’t be letting him live on candy-colored cereal and french fries and junk food burgers.
I didn’t expect the rage that surges through me when I watch her in my kitchen. When I see how happy, how (Stephanie’s word) fulfilled she looks.
Like a calming prayer, I repeat to myself: She is feeding my child. It would upset me more to dwell on what she is doing for my husband.
Does Stephanie know that Sean knows who Miles’s father is? I doubt it. She believes that she’s making Sean happier, making Nicky less miserable, filling in for her dead best friend. She’s being a Good Samaritan. She imagines I would thank her if I knew. If I were alive.