“It’s Jessie,” she says.
“Jessie?” he asks, the tone of his voice equally confused. As if he doesn’t know who I am, which of course he does. I’ve been cleaning their home for years. Every Tuesday.
“It’s Wednesday,” Mrs. Pugh tells me. “You’re not early, Jessie,” she says. And I can’t make out that expression on her face, but I can see that she’s not happy. “You’re a day late. You were supposed to be here yesterday,” she tells me, and it startles me, this sudden revelation that today is Wednesday. That it’s not Tuesday after all, in which case my whole week’s been mixed-up. I wonder what else I missed. I feel groundless all of a sudden, standing high on a ledge with nothing to hang on to.
My apology is effusive. “I’m sorry,” I sputter. “I’m so, so sorry,” as I try and make my way past Mrs. Pugh and into their home to clean it now, but she stands in my way and says not to bother. “We had friends over last night, Jessie. Parents from the preschool. We needed the home cleaned,” she says as she tugs tighter on the cord of the robe to keep whatever’s inside concealed.
“I had to find someone else to clean it,” she says as she stares at me, not into my eyes, but somewhere beneath. She raises a finger, points at my chest so that I look down but see nothing. She says, “Jessie, your...” but then her voice drifts off. She reconsiders. Puts her hand down and says instead, “I tried calling you. You didn’t answer.”
“I’m so sorry,” I say again. “I could rake the leaves,” I suggest, though the number of leaves on their lawn is negligible. It’s too early in the season for many leaves to be falling. But I say it so that I’ll have something, anything to do. “Mow the lawn?” I ask, hearing how desperate I sound, but she shakes her head and tells me, “We have a service. They take care of the yard work.”
“Of course,” I say, feeling stupid. I back away, not bothering to turn and look where I’m going, missing the one concrete step that separates the front stoop from the walkway. One step, a ten-inch rise. I drop straight down, landing gracelessly somehow or other on the balls of my feet, whacking my teeth together in the process. I don’t fall, but the mop slips from my hands, its clang echoing up and down the street.
I turn to leave, tripping over the mop as I do, and only then does Mrs. Pugh take pity on me. “Our company,” she begins, “last night. Six kids and twelve adults can make quite the mess.”
She opens the door wider and invites me inside. My thanks is as over-the-top as my apology. It has nothing to do with money, but everything to do with time. Everything to do with keeping myself occupied.
I wipe down the kitchen countertops and cabinets; I wash the floors. In the bathroom, I scrub like the devil, taking out all my anxiety on the subway tiles. It doesn’t help.
As I move from the bathroom to Mr. and Mrs. Pugh’s bedroom, I catch sight of a computer sitting on a writing desk and it gives me an idea. The desk is minimalist, as is the computer. A sleek silver laptop that prompts me for a password as I lift it open and press the return key, holding my breath to listen for the sound of footsteps sweeping down the hall. It doesn’t take a genius to figure this one out. Taped there to the desk is the password, as well as the password for every one of Mr. and Mrs. Pugh’s financial accounts. Their credit cards, their bank accounts. Their Vanguard funds. I type the code and easily get in. I could probably appropriate a few hundred thousand from them if I wanted to. But that’s not what I’m here to do.
Mr. Pugh has gone off to work and so for now it’s only Mrs. Pugh and me. Mrs. Pugh, who sat in the sunroom drinking her coffee and reading a book when I excused myself to clean. I pray she stays put, that she doesn’t come wandering into her bedroom and catch me meddling with her things.
I pull up a search engine and type my own name into it. Jessica Sloane. I’m not sure what I expect to find. Or rather what I expect to find is nothing. But instead I find an interior designer with my name, one that takes up the first two pages of results. Around page three I find a doctor named Jessica Sloane. Even farther down the page, a Pilates instructor. A Tumblr account for a fourth woman of the same name.
But me specifically, I’m nowhere there. Though it’s not like I’d have a reason to be on the internet. I’ve done nothing noteworthy with my life; I don’t have social media; I’ve never been on the news. For the last twenty years, Mom and I have lived as sequestered a life as we could. Like nuns, except that we didn’t pray. We just kept to ourselves.
I click on the tab for images. Hundreds of photographs load before my eyes. Hundreds of photographs of rooms the interior designer Jessica Sloane has designed. They’re dramatic and fussy and not at all my style. There are photographs of her too. Her and Jessica Sloane, MD, all decked out in a white lab coat with a stethoscope slung around her neck, smiling. Trying hard to look empathetic and intelligent all at the same time. I click the news tab at the top of the page, finding articles about them too.
I pause then, hands frozen above the keyboard, hearing a noise from down the hall. The house is long and narrow, each of the rooms small. I listen, hearing water streaming from the kitchen faucet, the coffee maker warming up to brew another pot. Mrs. Pugh is making herself more coffee.
Only when Mrs. Pugh’s gentle footfalls drift away do I return to the screen.
On a whim, I insert my middle name, certain the search will come back empty. But instead it narrows the results down to a manageable thirty-two, which is not at all what I was expecting, and at first I think the computer is wrong.
It’s the top hit on the page that catches my eye, a newspaper clipping dated seventeen years ago. The headline reads Hit-and-Run Driver Kills Girl, Age Three.
It takes my breath away. My eyes can’t believe what they see. The words. The picture. The caption beneath the image that reads, in italics, Jessica Jane Sloane.
That’s me.
My hands clutch the edge of the desktop, squeezing hard, white-knuckled from the grip.
I go on to read an article that describes a child walking into traffic and being struck by a car. The car sped on, it says, leaving the girl for dead in the street. According to witness accounts, the car was going too fast, driving erratically. Assumptions were made that the driver was drunk, though no one got a good look at him or her, nor did anyone catch a glimpse of the license plate number. There were discrepancies as to the color of the car, which went to prove the unreliability of eyewitness accounts. They couldn’t be trusted. The girl, Jessica Jane Sloane, was carted to the local hospital via ambulance, and there she died.
I click back on the images tab and spy a photograph of little Jessica Sloane in a purple bathing suit. In it, she’s happy. She’s three years old.
My head spins. My fingers go numb. They lose feeling completely as I stare at the little girl’s face and think, Who is this girl and what’s she got to do with me?
eden
March 29, 1997 Egg Harbor
They say that vodka has no smell to it, and yet it was clear as day to me, the smell of it on Aaron’s breath as he dropped into bed beside me tonight, the clock trumpeting 1:13 in the morning. Over the last few weeks, I’d noticed a gradual shift in his work schedule, each night him coming home later than ever before.
At first he said nothing, just stared blankly at me when I asked if he’d had something to drink. He didn’t say yes, but he didn’t say no either, and it seemed reasonable enough to assume he had been drinking, though he need not say one way or the other because I could smell it on his breath.