She reached up to drag herself from her feet, and as she pulled at one of the hangers for support, she knew exactly what would happen. She knew that she’d caught a piece of dress by accident. Between her fingers. She knew it would rip with a satisfying sound, fabric rent from itself. But she was in motion already. She could only watch, as if from another body wholly unassociated with the errant hand. She watched her fist close around the dress, rip it cleanly as she brought herself up off the ground.
Good, she thought. Something, at least, in this room. Something would be damaged when she left.
Downstairs, the doorbell rang.
THIRTY-FIVE
When you were granted entrance to Brad and Alexandra Barker’s home, after you’d been questioned and verified at the guard gate, you drove for a while before you could even see the house. Mina had been here only a handful of times—the Barkers were, surprisingly, not much for entertaining on a grand scale, and they’d only once or twice hosted the sorts of parties you’d expect from them.
This house always sent unkind thoughts scrabbling at the corners of Mina’s mind. It wasn’t jealousy, exactly. But ten years ago, when Alexandra bought this house just north of the Merritt and set about renovating it, she seemed determined to show them all how pathetically they’d failed at their own objectives. The house was a parody of their lives, and somehow this reflected poorly on them rather than her.
And of course you drove by it all on your way in, it had been designed this way. A low hedge bordered the driveway on both sides, low enough not to obstruct your view of anything. The tennis court, then the putting greens. Rising like a bubble in the distance, across a vast lawn, the glinting dome that enclosed the swimming pool. Which you could access through an underground passageway, by the way, so when it rained Alexandra could swim beneath the raindrop-spattered glass without even having to dart through the rain itself to get there.
What Mina hated about this house was that it was a house her own mother would absolutely love. And out of sheer joy, not even lurid curiosity.
Her mother had never seen one single point of pause with anything about the life Tom had established for them out here. It had taken Mina longer to acclimate; that whole first year in the house, pregnant with Jaime and waiting for her life to begin, there were so many times she’d held her breath so that she wouldn’t cry. Like holding in a sneeze. By the time you notice yourself changing, Mina thought, you’re already fully ensconced in your final position.
She coasted to a stop at the front entrance.
Alexandra’s e-mail had referred to a vague “afternoon with the girls, just a handful of us.” It had been a stressful few months, the e-mail also said. We thought it might be nice, just to have a relaxing afternoon in private.
It was that final qualification that had Mina on edge. This woman was far from one of her closest friends; they were cordial acquaintances at best. And it would be an unforced error, after that trip to Saks back in October, for Alexandra to corner Mina in hopes of getting some good gossip on Isabel. She’d tried that already, and she’d failed. She’d know better than to overextend.
“Mina, you’re here! Fantastic.” Alexandra answered the door herself, which was the first indication that Mina had perhaps been on the right track when she’d selected a bottle of Perrier Jouet to bring along, something nice rather than opulent. She had taken the code words—“relaxed,” “low key,” “in private”—as clues. Mina almost wanted to offer, as her RSVP card, that she’d snagged this particular bottle on sale at the Trader Joe’s in Stamford.
“Always a treat to come over,” she said instead, as if they did this all the time. She brandished the bottle of champagne before her, holding it high in the air between them.
Alexandra grabbed it and made a great show of examining the label, as if the flowers appliquéd all over the goddamn bottle weren’t decent clues.
“Oh,” she said. “Nice. Very nice.” She winked with her entire face before spinning and beckoning Mina back into the house.
They walked through the main hall before reaching a back parlor that looked out across the grounds. Mina would have assumed it was Alexandra’s office except there were no desks, no bookshelves, just artful groupings of stiff chairs and small cherrywood tables and ottomans. There must have been ten women in the room already.
“You know everyone,” Alexandra said, not asking a question, and she handed the bottle absently to a young woman in a black shift and a severe ponytail who had at some point started following them.
“Could you take care of this, Celine?” The woman—girl, really—nodded and withdrew. Another young woman, this one with darker skin and wearing another black dress that was something decidedly closer to a uniform, stood at a wet bar in one corner of the room.
“Go get a drink!” Alexandra urged. “And just grab a spot anywhere. We’re about ready to start.”
Ready to start what? Ready to commence their afternoon of insincere small talk? Mina saw Suzanne Welsh sitting in one chair cluster with a champagne flute in her hand. There were no women from Weiss.
“You have anything other than champagne?” she asked the maid who’d been posted to the bar. She knew they weren’t supposed to use that word to one another, but it always gave her perverse pleasure to refer to them as maids, at least inside her own head. It was honest, wasn’t it? Tom didn’t like it, though, either.
“Clear liquids only,” the girl replied, her voice light and somehow sounding like a compliment. “I can offer you champagne, white wine, or perhaps a vodka.”
Clear, of course. What on earth must this girl think of them, of this party, of this room? Mina felt her usual twinge of shame, her longing to tell the staff where she’d grown up, that she was really on their side. But you aren’t, she told herself, you’ve never in your life met a maid who’d consider you now to have a single thing in common with her. She was always having to reteach herself this lesson.
“Can I get you anything?” the girl prompted.
Mina allowed herself to sail away, just for a moment, on the idea that she might start gulping down a straight vodka so early, with so much of this left to wade through.
“White wine,” she said. “Thank you so much.”
A little boy wandered in suddenly, another just behind him, a basketball in his hand. This was Alexandra’s youngest, she realized—she’d forgotten they had a son. It wasn’t clear what he wanted. Maybe just to be around the women; Mina remembered well the allure of adults of the opposite sex, the way their talk seemed constantly to flash signals somewhere above your head. The elusive promise that if only you could unlock what the fathers were talking about, then you might have a fighting chance with the boys your own age.