Meredith

MEREDITH

11 YEARS BEFORE

May

I haven’t forgotten about Cassandra. I’ve been busy. But all the while, she’s been on my mind. I want to be a better friend to her than I’ve been. I’ve been so busy burdening her with my needs, that I’ve forgotten about hers. Something is off with Cassandra. I have to know what it is.

On a Friday afternoon, I pick up a Bundt cake from the local bakery. After Delilah is in school and Leo with Charlotte, I walk it to Cassandra’s house. I go to her door and knock. She answers with Arlo in her arms.

“What are you doing here?” she asks. Her tone is curt.

I present the Bundt cake. “I thought we could talk. It feels like we never have the time to just talk anymore. I miss you, Cassandra,” I say.

She harrumphs, which is how I know that she’s really put out about something. “Come in,” she tells me. I step inside and out of my shoes. “You want coffee?” she asks. I tell her yes, following her into the kitchen. Cassandra wears a dress, which she almost always does. It’s long and cotton and comfortable-looking, but still a dress. She looks lovely in it. I can’t remember the last time I wore a dress.

“I’m glad you stopped by,” she says as I help myself to a chair. I watch her brew a pot of coffee one-handed, with Arlo in the other. It’s effortless. I would have dropped either Arlo or the coffee by now.

“I’ve been wanting to for a while. Things have been so busy.”

“I have something I want to show you.”

“Oh?” I ask, thinking it’s something having to do with the kids. Something having to do with Delilah, Piper, Lily and their little squabble. I hope that Delilah hasn’t done something she shouldn’t have, like give Lily Morris a mean picture.

Cassandra brings a book to the table. It’s a photo album. People don’t keep photo albums anymore. Everything is digital these days. If anything, people scrapbook. Scrapbooks are lovely. But I don’t have the time for that.

The album shows its age. The plastic photo sleeves bend. The pictures themselves look old, taken with a 35mm camera. No one has cameras anymore.

Cassandra thumbs through to a certain page. She lays the album flat when she finds it. I see enough red to know what it is. The name of my alma mater is written on almost every T-shirt and sweatshirt in the book. We lived in campus gear when we were in college.

She points to a picture. There I am. There Marty is. My cheeks go flush. I have a hard time swallowing. My saliva is suddenly thick.

Her voice quavers when she speaks, in both anger and pain. She asks, “Why wouldn’t you and Marty tell me, unless you had something to hide? I’ve known for weeks what you two were up to,” she goes on without waiting for an answer. “You thought you could get away with it.”

She doesn’t know that we dated, that we slept together. But the picture is damning enough. In it, we stand side by side. Marty’s arm is thrown around my shoulders. It’s casual, comfortable. We knew each other. We knew each other well. That we didn’t tell her and Josh looks bad.

“If I told you that nothing has happened between Marty and me, would you believe me?” I ask.

“You could try. But I wouldn’t believe you.”

I look her in the eye. She looks away. She sets Arlo in his seat, and cuts him a piece of the cake.

I tell her, “Nothing has happened between Marty and me in eighteen years.”

She looks back to me. “But something did happen between Marty and you?”

“That was a long time ago, Cassandra. We didn’t know you back then. You didn’t exist to us.”

“But you dated?”

“It was only young love.”

She looks aghast when I say this. “You loved him?”

I regret my choice of words immediately. I should have phrased it differently. I never should have said the word love.

“I thought I did. I was blinded by all those overpowering emotions that we feel when we’re eighteen. But now I know that it wasn’t love at all. Cassandra, what you and Marty have is love. That was just naivete. Infatuation. Two stupid kids.”

“Why should I believe anything you say,” she asks, “when you’ve been lying to me all this time?”

“I never lied,” I remind her.

“You’ve been keeping secrets from me, keeping me in the dark.”

Cassandra is a gorgeous woman. She’s elegant and articulate and savvy and smart. In no way would Marty want me now that he has Cassandra. But it’s hard to know these things about ourselves. Cassandra feels deceived. “We did it for your sake. For yours and Josh’s,” I say.

Cassandra sits upright. “Does Josh know?” she asks.

I tell her, “No. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. Not that it mattered either way because there is nothing going on with Marty and me. I swear to you, Cassandra, on my life. On my children’s lives. There is nothing going on between Marty and me.”

“Did you sleep with him?” she asks.

“Cassandra. Don’t do this.”

“Did you?” she demands. We’ve both forgotten all about the coffee and cake. The cake sits beside us. Only Arlo eats it. The coffee has finished brewing. It waits for us in the pot.

“I was eighteen,” I say. It’s not the answer she’s looking for.

“So you did sleep with him, then.”

“Cassandra.”

“Answer the question, Meredith. Did you or did you not sleep with my husband?” She’s yelling now. In his high chair, Arlo gets scared. To appease him, Cassandra offers up another slice of cake. I watch him take it by the handful, shove it in until he’s covered with it. There’s cake in his hair.

“I did,” I whisper, though he wasn’t her husband then. But to remind her of that would only make her more upset.

Things go from bad to worse quickly. Cassandra already knew I’d slept with Marty before she asked. Because wedged between two pages of the photo album is a note, folded in half, that I wrote him over a decade and a half ago. I know what it is as she unfolds it and forces it into my hands. I can’t bring myself to read the note, though I know what it says. After months of dating, I’d gotten pregnant. The baby was Marty’s. I was fully intent on keeping the baby, which I explained to Marty in the note. He could be a part of the baby’s life, if he so chose, but there was no obligation.

As it turned out, he didn’t have to choose. Because two days later, I miscarried.

“What did you do with the baby?” she asks.

“We lost it at twelve weeks.”

“Shame,” she says icily.

It terrifies Cassandra, knowing how close Marty came to having a child that wasn’t hers. If I hadn’t miscarried, Marty and I may have raised the child together. We may have gotten married. The life she knows might not have existed.

“Are you still fucking my husband?” she asks coolly, and I gasp.

“Of course not,” I breathe out.

“I’m not stupid,” she says. “I know.”

“Know what?” I ask, truly confused.

“I know what you and he are up to. His late-night grocery store runs. Those ten o’clock ice cream cravings.” She puts it all in air quotes, implying she doesn’t for a minute think Marty runs off to the grocery store that late at night because he’s craving ice cream. “Do you know that sometimes he thinks I’m so dense I won’t realize how he comes home empty-handed? He doesn’t even bother picking up ice cream as part of his charade. He just goes and fucks you and comes back, and then he climbs into bed with me, nine times out of ten forgetting to put back on his ring.”

It saddens me to think of Marty sneaking out late at night to cheat on her, though I can’t say I find it shocking. Not because of anything Cassandra has done or not done, but because the Marty I knew in college was slick. He was a ladies’ man.

Maybe he hasn’t changed as much as I thought.

What shocks me is that Cassandra thinks that I, too, slip out of my house at ten o’clock some nights, leaving Josh and the kids behind, and go to meet up with Marty.

“Cassandra, if Marty is seeing another woman,” I say, “it isn’t me.”

“And why should I believe you, Meredith? Why should I believe anything you say?”

“I’ve never lied to you,” I say.

“Bullshit,” she snaps, again startling Arlo. I’ve never seen Cassandra so angry. I’ve never heard her use this language in front of her kids. I don’t blame her for being upset, especially if she believes there’s something going on between Marty and me. Still, she’s taking it to the extreme. “You have lied to me, Meredith. You’ve been lying to me since the day we met.”

“If I did, it was lying by omission and not an outright lie. There’s a difference.”

“Is there?” she asks.

I say nothing. In truth, I don’t know that there is.

“When do you plan to tell Josh?” she asks. It isn’t so much a question as it is an ultimatum.

“I’ll tell him, if that’s what you want me to do,” I say. I’ll tell him now that Cassandra knows. But I want to be able to tell him on my own terms. I don’t want Cassandra to be the one who tells him. “Please let me speak to him first, before you do.”

“I wouldn’t do that to you, Meredith,” she says. “I’m not that kind of friend.” It’s a slap in the face. She isn’t the kind of person who would hurt a friend. But I am.

I rise from the chair. I show myself to the door. She follows. At the door, I turn to face her. “I’m so sorry that we didn’t tell you,” I say in a last-ditch effort to apologize. “Marty and I thought it was for the best.”

“Marty and I, Marty and I,” she parrots, her anger tangible. She’s red in the face, her poise and aplomb gone. She believes that Marty is cheating on her with me. That if or when he sneaks out of his house late at night to rendezvous with some woman, that woman is me. It’s not, of course. My marriage means everything to me. Josh means everything to me. I would never do something like that to him, or to Cassandra for that matter. I’m not that kind of woman.

There’s nothing that I can say to make her believe me. It’s best that I just leave.

As I step through the door frame, Cassandra barks out, “I hope you rot in hell, Meredith. I hope you both rot in hell.”

I can’t help but notice how her word choice is a carbon copy of the threatening texts I’ve been receiving. The language of the texts returns to me. I know what you did. I hope you die. You’ll never get away with it, bitch. I hope you rot in hell, Meredith.

Cassandra has been the one sending me these texts.

I wheel around to face her. “It was you,” I say, more shocked than anything. There’s a tremor in my voice. “You’re the one who’s been sending me those awful texts. You’re the one who’s been trying to scare the shit out of me.”

“Did it work?” she asks, satisfied in herself because she can see that it has.

“Were you following me?” I ask, aghast, thinking of the time a text arrived just as I was leaving the hospital, as if the sender knew I was on my way home and alone.

“If I was,” she asks, “would it be anywhere as awful as what you’ve done? As what you’re still doing?”

I consider the threatening, hateful wording of the texts. Was she hyperbolizing only or does she want me dead? Do I have a reason to be scared for my safety, for my life?

“I’ve done nothing,” I say, trying to justify again how Marty and I withheld the information about our past for her sake. For Josh’s. We didn’t do it to hurt anyone. But I barely get the words out before the door slams closed, a dead bolt slipping into place on the other side.

When I tire of making excuses, I snap at her, “Because Mommy said so,” feeling guilty for losing my patience with Delilah. It’s not her fault. It’s mine. I can’t go outside and face Cassandra, but I also can’t trust her to watch my child.

The next day they have Lily Morris over to play. Cassandra must purposefully send the girls into the front yard to rub it in Delilah’s face. She sits in the front window and cries, heartbroken that she hasn’t been invited, not that I would have allowed her to go even if she was. Piper and Lily dance around the front yard, laughing, holding hands. I’m appalled that Cassandra would stoop so low as to hurt my child in an effort to get back at me.

In the coming days, Leo continues to cry every time I leave him with Charlotte. He clings to me and begs, “No, Mommy. No.” I feel awful making him go. I think about calling in sick to work, staying home with Leo. But doing so would only be a disservice to him, because the days he has to go would then be ten times worse.

I make deals with Leo. I bargain with him. “If you don’t cry all week, Mommy and Leo will do something special on the weekend. Just you and me.” I tell him we’ll go to the children’s museum together, or to the children’s garden at the arboretum if the weather cooperates. His pick.

The mommy guilt is getting to me. I spend time thinking about quitting the yoga studio, about taking on fewer clients, if any clients at all. For as much as I love being a doula, I’ve been having misgivings ever since the Tebow baby was born. I think of Jason and Shelby often. I haven’t stayed in touch well enough. It’s hard to do. The baby has suffered irreparable damage. I don’t know to what extent. I’ve started to second-guess the way I handled things in the labor and delivery room. I didn’t do everything in my power to protect Shelby. I could have done more. I could have physically put myself between Dr. Feingold and my client.

I call Jeanette. I tell her what happened. We talk it through.

As a midwife, Jeanette is one of the few people I know familiar with my line of work.

“Maybe it’s time,” I tell her, “that I set my work aside and focus on my own family for a change.”

She tells me the same thing I told Shelby. “You have to do what’s best for your family. But, Meredith,” she says, “you handled Dr. Feingold exactly as I would have. Don’t ever let yourself think you’re not a good doula, or that you didn’t do everything you could for that woman. You’re only human.”

All the time, I find myself staring out the window at Marty and Cassandra’s house. I think that if Cassandra had the cunningness to buy a burner phone, to follow me around town and send intimidating texts, she’s capable of much worse. Are the texts only empty threats? Or do I have a reason to fear for my family and my safety?