Meredith

MEREDITH

11 YEARS BEFORE

March

“Good morning,” Josh says as he appears in the kitchen doorway in a slim-fit dark gray suit. He smiles at me, looking smart, competent. I stand at the stove, already showered and dressed, making pancakes and bacon for Josh and the kids. Josh comes to me. He wraps his arms around me from behind and I get a whiff of him, of his shaving cream and his cologne. “How’d you sleep?” he asks me.

“Okay,” I say, though I didn’t sleep well. Now I’m up early, feeling anxious, wanting to know if Shelby is all right after her text last night. I keep checking my phone, but it’s quiet. It has been since shortly after three a.m. “How about you?” I ask, turning to face him. “How’d you sleep?”

“Like a baby,” he says, kissing me. His kiss isn’t rushed. It goes on far longer than the usual peck, which is all we ever have time for before we’re interrupted by kids. His kiss is tender, unhurried, and I find myself thinking how much I miss this, something as commonplace as kissing my husband. Everything else falls by the wayside. For one blissful minute, the anxiety of the last few days abates.

And then, from upstairs, I hear a toilet flush: the first sign of life. Delilah or Leo, whoever is up, will be down soon. Josh draws slowly away, still smiling.

“What do you have on tap for today?” I ask and he tells me.

“Finalizing a deal with a prospective client. Hopefully.” He and his team have been working on this pitch for some time. It would mean the world to Josh and his career to land this client.

“What time is the meeting?”

“Eleven.”

“Good luck,” I tell him. “Not that you need it.” Josh is incredibly good at what he does. He’s climbed the corporate ladder more quickly than most.

“Thanks,” he says, then asks, “Do you have a client in labor?”

“No. Why?”

“Your phone,” he says. “I heard a text come in in the middle of the night.”

“Oh.” Of course he did. I remember him drawing away, pulling the covers over his head to block the phone’s light. “Braxton-Hicks,” I lie, saying that a client thought she was in labor, but she’s not. It can be confusing, for first-time mothers. The contractions are not as intense as real contractions. They don’t come at regular intervals; they don’t progress. I often have to talk these women out of thinking they’re in labor.

It doesn’t matter, though, because it’s a lie. None of my clients is currently experiencing Braxton-Hicks contractions.

I don’t like lying to Josh. It isn’t something that happens often. In fact, it never happened, not until about six months ago when Josh started to get more apprehensive about my job. It began with a random carjacking. A young woman was stopped in town, at a red light near midnight. During the day, it’s a busy intersection. There’s a grocery store, a gym, Walgreens. But at that time of night it was vacant. Everything around was closed.

Two masked men approached the car at gunpoint. They made the woman get out of the car. They assaulted her first, before stealing her car. They left with her phone, her purse, her ID. She couldn’t call for help. She walked three miles home in the dark. They never found the people who did it to her. It left Josh scared for my safety. He’s overprotective as a result. He wishes I was a stay-at-home mom like Cassandra. We don’t need the money,Josh has said. It’s a conversation we’ve had often. He does it because he loves me. Because he doesn’t want anything bad happening to me. I get that. I love him even more for it. But I also love my job.

“Is she okay?” Josh asks, meaning my client with Braxton-Hicks.

“She’s fine. It’s unsettling,” I tell him. “The unknown. But she’s forty weeks yesterday. She’ll go into labor soon.”

“How long did she keep you up?” he asks, looking at me, sizing up my eyes. They’re tired, heavy. I’m on my third cup of coffee.

“Not long.”

“You’re a good person,” Josh says before he leaves for work. I hate how we’re always rushing off in opposite directions.

I also feel guilty for lying to Josh. But what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. I’m lying to protect him. To protect Shelby. To protect my career.

---

Through the window, Delilah sees Cassandra, Piper and Arlo leave for school. She gets upset because of it. She wants to leave, too. She wants to walk to school with Piper. But we can’t leave yet, because I can’t find one of Leo’s shoes.

“Help me look,” I tell Delilah, and she does. She finds it hidden behind the kitchen curtains. Leo won’t sit still long enough for me to put it on. By the time we make it outside, Cassandra and family are gone. They’re too far ahead to catch even if we ran.

“Don’t worry. You’ll see her at school,” I tell a pouting Delilah.

Leo and I walk Delilah the few blocks to school. We take her to the corner where parents congregate, watching as the crossing guard gets the children across the street and to the redbrick building on the other side.

Delilah makes us walk quickly to try and catch Piper before she crosses the street. She wants to walk into school with her. But by the time we arrive, Piper has already crossed the street. Even worse, she’s walking hand in hand with another little girl from school, Lily Morris. Lily Morris is in Piper and Delilah’s kindergarten class.

Delilah is upset because she has to wait for the crossing guard to allow her to cross. But the crossing guard is letting traffic pass now; she has to wait. I feel badly for her, having to watch these other girls walk into the building without her, feeling left out. Friendships are hard. I lean down and whisper in her ear, “You’ll catch up with them in class. It will be fine, honey. You’ll see.”

Cassandra and Arlo stand at the corner. I’d go over and say hello, but Cassandra is caught up in a conversation with Lily Morris’s mother, Amber. I don’t like Amber any more than Delilah likes Lily. Lily, according to Delilah, is not nice. She’s mean. She won’t ever play with Delilah. She makes fun of the kids. She calls them things like stupid and dumb.

I watch as Piper and Lily make it inside the building. Their mothers turn away, stepping past me. I hear the word playdate as they do, and I stiffen in reply. Piper and Lily are having a playdate without Delilah. I don’t want to get caught up in kindergarten drama. But she’s my daughter. If she’s being excluded, she’ll be sad. Delilah’s happiness means everything to me.

“Hi, Cassandra,” I say. I reach out to touch her arm as she sweeps by. It’s a reflex.

Cassandra turns to me and says, “Oh, Meredith. I didn’t see you there.” I find it hard to believe. There are only a dozen parents at the corner. And even now that she has, she doesn’t stop and talk to me. She keeps walking, with Lily’s mother. I feel a stab of jealousy, of resentment. Because Amber used to be the one Cassandra and I would talk about over coffee. How she’s so overinvolved in the PTO. How she thinks school bake sales are the end-all and be-all of life. Her grandiose sense of self-importance.

The tables have turned. I’d bet my life they’re talking about me. I try not to dwell on it. I have enough friends. I don’t need Cassandra to be my friend, though I like Cassandra. I like her a lot. I’d be sad to lose her as a friend.

The only reason Cassandra has for being angry, anyway, is one too many canceled coffee dates. It’s a hazard of my job. Childbirth can’t be planned. Cassandra knows this. She’s always been tolerant, until now. It’s not like she could know about her husband, Marty, and me. Unless he told her, but he wouldn’t do that. We’d agreed to keep things secret, for Cassandra’s and Josh’s sake.

Leo and I watch Delilah walk across the street, and then we walk back to the house. We get in the car. I drive him to the babysitter’s house. I put Cassandra out of my mind for now.

I park on the street. Leo leaves his blanket in the car, though he never likes to be apart from it. He does so reluctantly, with the promise that I’ll keep it safe while he’s gone. I walk him to the front door. When the sitter Charlotte comes, Leo throws a fit. This happens, sometimes, though it’s relatively new. Somedays Leo goes willingly. But other days he doesn’t want to go to the sitter’s house. He wants to stay with me.

“Mommy has to work,” I say soothingly. I peel his arms from my leg and gently shove him into Charlotte’s open arms. It feels awful to do this, to push my crying child away. In Charlotte’s arms, his crying intensifies. My heart aches. Leo tries squirming away, coming back to me. There’s a hitch to my voice. I choke back my own tears as I say, “You’ll have fun. You’ll play with the other kids. Before you know it, Daddy will be here to pick you up, and then you’ll be having so much fun you won’t want to come home.”

It’s only lately that Leo has had stranger anxiety. Of course Charlotte is not a stranger. He’s known her for months. She’s far from a stranger. But these days Leo only wants to be with Josh or me. We talked to the pediatrician about it. She said to give it time, that, like most things in our kids’ lives, it’s a passing phase.

“He’ll be fine,” Charlotte says. “He always is after you leave.”

It’s the same thing that the pediatrician said. Saying goodbye is the hardest part. I take comfort in that as I stand alone on her front porch, watching as Charlotte carries my crying child away and closes the door. From the other side, I hear him wail.

Delilah and Leo have been coming to Charlotte’s house since Delilah started kindergarten this year. Before that, they attended a different day care. I didn’t love it. It had a clinical feel, nothing homey like this. Things got complicated, too, when Delilah started school. Then I needed a sitter who could pick her up at the end of the day, who could keep an eye on her until Josh came home. The school didn’t provide a bus. Charlotte was that sitter, parading there with all the kids to pick them up, pulling the little ones in the red wagon. Until recently, the kids have been happy with her. I think of what the pediatrician said: a passing phase. This, too, shall pass.

I turn my back to Charlotte’s house. My next stop is Shelby’s. I need to see with my own eyes if she’s okay after her texts last night.

I drive to Shelby’s home. I leave my car on the street, behind a red sedan that’s parked on the curb. I step out. I make my way to the front door and quietly knock.

Shelby peels the door slowly back. She’s still in her pajamas, from what I can tell, though the door blocks most of her body. I examine her face for signs of bruising. There are none. That said, she looks washed-out. She wears no makeup. In the coffee shop, she had makeup. Today she looks like she just rolled out of bed. I’m grateful to see her alive and seemingly unharmed. I breathe a sigh of relief. I never would have forgiven myself if something bad had happened.

“What are you doing here?” Shelby asks. She’s unable to hide the surprise. I’m the last person in the world she expected to see. Her voice is quiet. It’s little more than a whisper.

I’m relieved that there are no visible bruises. But I’ve heard that abusive spouses can be masters at hiding their handiwork. There may be bruises that I can’t see or, if her husband is abusing her, it could be emotional rather than physical.

I’m not only worried for Shelby’s sake. I’m worried for her unborn baby. A kick or a punch to her gut could easily end its life. I looked up photos of Mr. Tebow online. He’s a large man. He looks mean.

I say, “You didn’t text back last night, Shelby. I was worried.”

Shelby looks vacant. Either she doesn’t know what to say, or she doesn’t know what I mean. Her hair is mussed up, thrown into a sloppy ponytail. Her roots are shades darker than the rest of her hair.

She says nothing apropos of what I’ve said.

Instead, “How did you know where I live?” It’s accusatory, almost. As if she thinks I’ve crossed a line. As if she thinks I’m stalking her.

“It’s on the contract, Shelby,” I say. I can hear the patience in my voice start to wane. “You wrote your address on the contract.”

“I did?” she asks.

“You did.”

“Oh,” she says. “Right. I did. I just didn’t think that you’d show up at my door.”

I tell her, “I don’t usually show up at my clients’ homes. This is a first for me. But I was worried,” I say again. “After your texts last night, I came to make sure everything was fine.”

I hear a man’s voice in the background. It startles me. My insides tighten. I see the shadow of him loom at the top of the stairs. I swallow against a bulge in my throat. That must be him, her husband, Jason. I hadn’t expected him to be home.

He calls for her, asks her to grab him a drink on her way up. The gap in the door gets smaller. Shelby is inching the door closed, inadvertent or not.

His tone is brusque, but not necessarily mean. Hey, Shel? Bring me something to drink, would you?

“I’ll be there in a minute,” she calls up the stairs. She looks to me, says anxiously, “I have to go.” She fully intends to close the door in my face. Before she can, my foot inches forward. It happens unintentionally, before I can think it through. My foot fills the door’s narrowing crack so that she can’t close it when she tries.

“What are you doing?” Shelby asks, surprised. She looks down at my wedged foot. Her voice stays quiet, words hissed. She doesn’t want him to know that I am here.

I say flatly, “You didn’t tell me if you’re all right.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” she asks, her tone immature. Shelby is in her early twenties. I thought I’d reached adulthood when I was that age. Now, over a decade later, I realize that at twenty-three or twenty-four, I didn’t know much of anything. I still had so much growing up to do, so much to figure out about how the world worked.

“Because of your text messages, Shelby. You told me you were scared of your husband.”

“Oh. That,” she says. “I shouldn’t have sent that.” She runs her hands through her hair, pulls the rubber band out. Her hair falls around her shoulders. She shakes it out. “We had a stupid fight, that’s all. I fired off some stupid text. I didn’t mean it.”

“Then why did you say it?” I ask, not sure if I believe her.

“I was mad,” she says.

“You said you were scared.”

“He was yelling at me.”

“About what?” I ask, not sure that she’ll tell me.

“It was stupid,” she says. I say nothing. I wait, seeing if she’ll continue, and she does. “I spend too much money. He said I have crap for brains because I went and bought some new maternity shirts and got one of those prenatal massages. He says we’re broke and I can’t be wasting money like that, but he has no idea what it’s like to be carrying around a baby all the time. He doesn’t give a shit that I’ve outgrown my clothes.”

“Did he hurt you, Shelby?” I ask.

“He was really pissed off,” she says.

I ask again. “Did he hurt you?”

“Do I look hurt to you?”

She doesn’t. I don’t know what to think. Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t.

“You coming, Shel?” he calls again, more brusquely this time, losing patience. “I haven’t got all day to wait.”

“It’s really nice of you to come check on me, Meredith,” she says. The rest of her words come quickly out, tumbling like a waterfall. “No one does kind things like this for me.”

I lean in and whisper, talking fast, “Did he hurt you? You can tell me if he did. I can help.” I don’t know what I’d do to help other than go to the police. But I’d do that for her. She doesn’t answer. “You can talk to me.” I breathe the words through the doorway, withdrawing my foot to reach in and set my hand on hers. Her hand is cold. “I’m here for you,” I say.

The grin on her face is very Stepford wives. “You’re sweet, Meredith. Really sweet. I’m glad I found you,” she says. She drops my hand. She goes again to close the door. She still hasn’t told me if she’s all right.

I try to stop her. Before I can, the door is shut.