Janey had a perfectly awful long-term memory, but one of the earliest things she could recall was Miss Lorna catching her in a silly lie about whether or not she’d snuck downstairs in the middle of the night and eaten the cookies Lorna had baked specially for a Rotary Club luncheon. Janey was four then and was old enough to know better, but her mother’s butterscotch truffle cookies were the best things she’d ever tasted. If heaven existed, the way Reverend Paul insisted over and over that it did on Sunday mornings, then it was a place filled with Lorna’s butterscotch truffle cookies. Miss Lorna gave her a talking to that caused the little girl to burst into tears and Lorna’s heart to melt. Her mother reversed course and pulled a Sweet chocolate bar out from the cupboard to give to the wailing child. From then on, when terrible things happened that were out of her control, Janey turned to chocolate. But Janey was a good daughter. She lived to please her parents, and the two of them had no reason to reprimand her again until her freshman year of high school, when Beau convinced her to borrow Reginald’s car while her parents were away at a confectioners’ conference in the Outer Banks. He’d somehow gotten the two of them tickets to a Pearl Jam concert thirty minutes outside of town. Both kids were going through a short-lived but passionate grunge phase wherein they both wished they could lose their virginity to Eddie Vedder. The problem with driving to the concert wasn’t evading the eye of the Sweet housekeeper who was keeping watch on Janey that weekend. It was the fact that they were both fourteen and two years shy of having an actual driver’s license. But she’d never been able to say no to Beau. Besides, she knew how to drive a car. Reginald had been teaching her stick shift in the chocolate factory parking lot since she was twelve. Being the responsible one, Janey had limited her consumption for the evening to one can of warm Bud Light, but Beau had managed to procure a plastic baggie filled with what he claimed were magic mushrooms, and on the way home he began singing and dancing along to the Ten album. When he began pounding on the dash and wailing, “Jeremy spoke in. Spoke in, spoke in, classsssss today,” he flung an arm out in front of Janey, pretending it was a microphone, and invited her to join him for the next song. She was already distracted by the milky fog rolling in from the swamps, and trying to quiet Beau didn’t help. So of course she didn’t see the whitetail buck before it leapt in front of the car. When it did, she slammed on the brakes and skidded into a ditch on the side of the road, narrowly avoiding the animal and hurling them both toward the dashboard. The two of them were shaken but unharmed. The car, of course, wouldn’t start, and Janey said she’d hike to the gas station down the street to call the police for help. When she’d returned Beau was nowhere to be found. He’d run off into the woods and hidden, afraid the police would arrest him for being high. The police did bring Janey into the station for driving without a license, and she shouldered the blame for the entire incident.
Reginald grounded Janey for six months after he’d screamed and yelled and cursed the fact that he had to come home from the beach a day early and missed the round robin golf tournament of leading chocolate makers from around the country. Of course, later that night Lorna came up to her room with a gallon of mint chocolate chip ice cream to tell her that even though she’d been an incredibly naughty girl, she was just happy that she was safe.
Why was she thinking about that night now? She’d always excused Beau’s leaving that night. He was high on mushrooms. He didn’t know what he was doing. But he’d still abandoned her to get into all of the trouble with her parents. He could have at least stayed and held her hand. Beau’s mother never would have found out what happened. Not that she would have cared.
Janey was having a horrible time getting to sleep anyway. No matter what she did, her FitWand would not stop announcing her vital statistics at least once an hour, urging her to move more and then systematically insulting her when she ignored it.
Wasn’t it supposed to help track your REM sleep or something? Didn’t it know it was the middle of the night?
Janey finally hid it in the freezer, afraid if she threw it out the window it would sprout legs, find its way back to her, and force her to do burpees. And on her way back to bed she grabbed a handful of Sweets from inside the cupboard.
Even with the voice silenced, she tossed and turned. Back when they were married, Michael slept on the right side of the bed and Janey slept on the left. No matter where they were in the world or whose bed they were sleeping in, they adhered to this natural order of things. Her husband had been a light sleeper, so after they kissed good night, Janey never dared to stray to his side. Even after Michael left, by force of habit, she remained on her side of the bed. Slowly, slowly, she infringed on his former territory. Now she found herself rolling about from one side of the California king to the other. She’d thought it much too large when they bought it, but now she couldn’t imagine sleeping in anything smaller. She loved this bed so much more now that she had it all to herself. She thumbed through the music on her phone until she came to Pearl Jam. When had she downloaded this? She began playing “Jeremy” softly until she finally drifted off to sleep.
Come morning Janey was so groggy she almost considered not showing up to The Workout that day, but the draw to see Stella again was strong. She’d done a little bit of Google stalking to find the shaman, and it proved harder than she’d originally suspected. How many professional shamans lived in Manhattan anyway? According to her phone there were thirty-seven—men, women, old, young. Stella was in good company. One shaman was the former CFO of Coach, another the child star of a hit eighties sitcom that did very well in syndication. It wasn’t even that hard to become a shaman. There were six-week online shaman certification programs and shaman retreats to places like Peru, Brazil, Argentina, and St. Barts.
She went back and forth on the idea of staying in bed for another ten minutes and then decided that something about the bewitching stranger was more captivating than a lie-in.
She treated herself to an Uber downtown, whizzing quickly through the predawn empty streets at five-thirty in the morning. It was the one hour where the city grew quiet. The late-late-night crowd had finally stumbled into someone’s bed, and run-of-the-mill early risers wouldn’t be up and out for another fifteen minutes. Bleary-eyed, Janey stared at the metal buttons on a doorbell outside a nondescript building on Pearl Street, looking for The Workout studio.
Janey glanced over her shoulder. Surely someone else would be by soon who would have a better idea of what bell to ring, where to go.
Just as Janey was about to give up, her finger poised above her phone to order another Uber back uptown, three tall and slender women wrapped in near-identical black cashmere coats stepped out of a sleek town car. Janey was sure that she recognized one of them. Was that Miranda? It had to be. She had that characteristic gap between her two front teeth and her eyes were an unnaturally light shade of grey.
“Miranda Mills?” Janey said with confidence. “How are you? It’s me, Janey Sweet.”
Miranda Mills began her career as a model in the late nineties and had evolved from heroin chic to homegrown glamour girl to wonder mom to the first plus-sized model to appear on the cover of one of the major fashion magazines. Janey remembered that Miranda had been a size 22, but now she appeared to have shrunk back to a size that would be startling anywhere but New York City.
“Janey! Hi! Oh my gosh. It’s been ages. I don’t think I’ve seen you since I dropped all the weight. I must look like a completely different human now.” If Janey was being honest, Miranda looked like a human covered over in another human. He skin seemed permanently detached from her face and neck, having expanded and contracted so many times it had finally given up.
“You look great,” Janey said as the two women exchanged obligatory dual-cheek kisses and a mannered hug. Miranda’s shoulder felt frail beneath Janey’s arms.
“You’re here for The Workout, right? How did you meet Sara Strong?”
The name Sara Strong was definitely familiar. Had she read about her in the SweatGood newsletter?
“Around.”
Miranda nodded, indicating she also knew Sara Strong from “around.”
Janey remembered Stella telling her that the location for this exercise class often changed.
“I’ve been in Shanghai for work for the past few weeks waiting for samples to come in,” she lied. “This is a new location, right?”
Now it was Miranda’s turn to nod. “Brand-new. I’ve only just started coming myself. Before this, though, Sara was hosting it in Kate Wells’s apartment. It was so hush-hush, the two of them were like best friends, you know?”
Kate Wells was that actress everyone loved to hate. She’d grown up in New York City, the daughter of a movie producer and actress, had attended the poshest private schools, and then moved to Hollywood at age eighteen and won her first Academy Award at age twenty-three. She was blond and beautiful and married to a rock star. Several years ago she began blogging about her very perfect life on her website, Lovely, which she treated like her personal diary, complete with copious amounts of xoxoxos. The site was famous for blog posts about four-hundred-dollar flip-flops, breast-feeding five-year-olds, and how you simply cannot trust your well-tipped concierge’s recommendations when you are vacationing in Milan/London/Paris. She’d recently made headlines when she announced she was giving up acting to focus full time on Lovely.
“The universe is telling me I need to focus on this twenty-four seven right now, and I can’t tell the universe no,” she’d laughed to Matt Lauer on the Today show a few weeks earlier.