I was so confident. I could turn him around; it wasn’t that bad, blahblahblah. But somehow it surged past the place where I could control him. It started to snowball. Neave is interfering, Neave poisoned your mind against me; Neave is ruining everything. Who put that bitch in charge? Why does she think she’s got all this power?
Because she did have all that power. She co-owned Be Your Best. She was my sister. But don’t think for a second I ever said that to the man. I let it go. Now, of course, I see how dumb that was, but back then all my experience told me that I could smack unproductive ideas out of his head with a bottle of Champagne, some interesting underwear, and a little commonsense talk. I’d been telling myself this would be the same as other times. It would go away. She’s ruining nothing, I said to him. So what if you don’t like her? Lots of people don’t like her. She’s not likeable. Also, Neave Terhune is not the boss of me—and neither are you.
He started insisting that I break off from Neave and have my own business—get her out of my life. Our lives, he said. Neave, I reminded him, is my business partner, my sister. She and Annie are the ones who love me more than anybody else on Earth, including him. When those words hit the air, “including you,” I saw the truth of what I’d said. He didn’t love me best. Neave and Annie did. Janey and Snyder did. He didn’t support me. Be Your Best did. I saw that he wanted to take all these things away from me, and when I looked at him then I felt something go dark. He hated my sister. He felt nothing at all for my daughter. Ricky saw me feel it. He knew I was considering things from a new distance and I felt the whole weight of what I was to him shift.
He said he had something in mind for Neave, and I reared up and turned on him. I said bullshit you do, and he said I should buzz off about things that he knew more about than me. I felt things between us start to spin.
I had to slow this down, get control again. I said we should go away, get out of town and cool down a little. Maybe check into some little romantic joint in Vermont. I fell back on the strategies that had always given me a firm grip on him before, but “before” was gone. We were in a different place, further out than any lingerie could reach and pull us back. I was trying to find a way forward was all; my repertoire of strategies was more limited than I’d known. If I were Neave I maybe would have come up with a fresher strategy. But I’m not Neave.
He said okay. I had this sweet little inn in mind when I put on the turquoise suit with the nipped waist and snug skirt to meet him. That suit used to make me feel like I was mistress of my destiny. I knew what my ass looked like when I was walking away in that suit. From Where I Am Now I see that your destiny is a tough thing to steer, even with the help of Chanel and the right shoes, but I’d built a whole career on that kind of thinking and I wasn’t prepared to give it up that morning.
We’d stopped for a cup of coffee. We were getting back in the car. He’d twisted the conversation back to Neave, how she was probably a little dyke who poked in our business, his business. I knew then that something had to be made clear, some line in the sand had to be drawn right there. I told him to shut up. I told him if he ever bothered her, he’d never touch me again. If he so much as made a vague threat against Neave I wouldn’t waste my time complaining to him or his brother, Max—I’d get on a witness stand and I’d say whatever had to be said. I would positively take care of his ass if he stepped over that line.
Whose line? Ricky said.
The way he said it. Not just calm, but happy someplace that’d been rooted in him for a long time.
*
He stayed happy, all the way through the hard work of making me dead. He used a tire iron, and then he used saws. Maybe I shouldn’t have been, but the truth is, I was so surprised. Why are we surprised when the thing that was coming at us all along finally reaches us?
Then he put me in the water, all in different places. He’d thought about this, apparently, and was ready with a plan. Some of me was dropped off on Cape Ann, other parts went to a lonely pier in Lynn, and the last of me went off a deserted dry dock in Chelsea. Off I went, drifting, sinking, turning, rising. It’s not easy parting ways with your body. For that first little while it felt like being blind and deeply confused.
Then I was here, Where I Am Now, which you can imagine was strange, but less strange somehow because the dog was here to greet me. I was so grateful to see anything or anybody familiar, even if it was Boppit. I knew him right off.
We got more comfortable with each other. He’d try to explain things to me.
“You’re close to where you were,” he’d say. “It feels very different at first, but then if you look over your shoulder, you see it all curving behind you. And ahead. Only the thinnest little film of something in between you and that other place. There’s not so much distance between as people think. Twist around here and take a look.”
I did, and there right in front of me was Annie, following Jane up a flight of stairs, chattering, looking preoccupied, serious but not unhappy. I felt a wave of relief. Then Annie vanished and I saw Neavie. She was lying on a little bunk in a boat, a pile of Mars Bars wrappers at her elbow, an open magazine in front of her. Something had dribbled down her blouse and her hair looked like a hedgerow. It was as bad as Boppit had tried to make it.
“Oh my God!”
“You aren’t kidding.” He nodded. “And she’s been raging around, scaring your staff, insulting your vendors, disappearing from work and not telling anybody where she’s going.”
“She’s got good reasons to act like that.”
“We all do, sugar. You have to step over it. She’s got to order the panda-bear incentives for the Christmas gift orders, nail down the conference trainer schedules. Neave’s been letting things slide with only weeks to go before the company’s sales conference. Some of the staff think the ship is going down and they’re taking four-hour lunches and looking for other jobs. She needs some help. I’m going to get you to her so you can help her.”
“The conference…” I murmured. Suddenly I was in Neave’s head. I could see a pink platter being struck out of Janey’s hands, lemon cake and pale icing sprayed in an arc on the stairs behind her. “What’s happening?” I whispered.
“You’re seeing something Ricky’s already done from inside Neave. You’re sliding around.”
“Ricky…”
“Yes. He has her in his sights; worse, he’s in her head. You don’t necessarily have to be dead to get inside somebody’s head, Lilly. We have to do something about that blouse. And the purse: look at that ink-stained baggy old thing. Good lord above. They’re horrible. A monkey would have made better choices.”
“So what?”
“Lilly, these are our jobs: Keep Neave from driving the business into the dirt. Keep Ricky away from Neave.”
“How do we do that?”